A Sportswriting Rough Draft
Posted: March 24th, 2009 | Filed under: Media, Pop Culture | 53 Comments »
The following is a little essay that I began typing and, for reasons unknown, did not stop. It has a few thoughts about the sportswriting business. It’s incomplete and I want to be clear right up front that I’m not entirely sure how I feel about any of it. This is just a stream of consciousness thing. But I thought I would post it just the same … maybe we can get a conversation started.
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Most media people today, especially the younger ones, sincerely believe the ethical standards today are much higher than they once were, and have been taught that in many journalism classes. I want to be on record disputing that view. Different? Certainly. Higher? By what measure? Lower? In many respects. One thing I can report as a fact, from personal experience: We were definitely less pretentious about it then.
– Leonard Koppett, “The Rise and Fall of the Press Box.”
Curt Schilling announced his retirement on Monday, which has kicked off numerous discussions about his bloody sock game, his post-season brilliance, his Hall of Fame candidacy, and so on. I have thoughts about all these things and then some: Curt Schilling has always been one of the more fascinating characters in the game for me, and not only because he sent me a thank you email about eight hours after he won Game 1 of the 2001 World Series.
But, as is probably obvious, I have been thinking a lot about newspapers lately, the ever-changing media landscape, and so the first thing I thought about when Schilling retired was the now semi-famous clause in his contract that would have earned him one million dollars* for receiving even a single third-place Cy Young Award vote.
*
The Schilling Clause created a bit of stir for a while — many people (myself included) felt that the clause created a new and troubling ethical line. Many newspapers already had real problems with their writers voting on baseball awards because of the overriding feeling that that a journalist’s mission is to report the news, not make the news. And there are money implications too: Players who win the MVP awards and Cy Young Awards get large bonuses for it, and many in the journalism business are bothered by that.
The Schilling Clause took it all to another level. At least before, there was the comfort of crowds — one voter could not DECIDE who won the MVP award or Cy Young Award, could not singlehandedly make a pile of money change hands. He/she could only be a part of the larger process.
With this new kind of bonus, though, suddenly one voter could trigger a huge bonus with a fairly trivial third-place vote. It opened up a whole new ethical wasteland, and all sorts of handwringing and negotiation followed.
I came out pretty strong on the Schilling Clause, and I don’t disagree with what I wrote back then. But I must admit that the trials of newspapers the last 18 months or so has made me think a lot about the way American newspapers cover sports in the 21st Century. What I have been thinking about is probably summed up in a single, simple question: Have newspapers tried too hard to make sports reporting like news reporting?
A very brief history is probably in order: There was a time in the not-so-distant-past when sportswriting was nothing at all like news reporting. It was, as famed sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said, the “Toy Department” of a newspaper. More than that, sportswriting was very much tied together with the sports themselves. Promoters would get a little publicity by throwing a few bucks at sportswriters, who were barely making enough money to survive at their papers. Baseball teams would pay for the travel of baseball writers (and many baseball writers made a few extra bucks serving as official scorers). Horse racing writers would supplement their meager salaries by using insider tips at the track. Sports columnists were often movers and shakers who worked behind the scenes to get things done — in Kansas City, for instance, Joe McGuff played a prominent political role in bringing the Royals to town, in San Diego the old baseball stadium was named for sports editor Jack Murphy. And sportswriters did indeed get free tickets; people still believe we do.*
*To clarify: I mean free tickets for others. Sportswriters do still get free access to games.
There was, looking back, a pleasing rhythm to those days. Sportswriters got better access (and most of them were careful not to “abuse” that access), teams and promoters were relatively pleased by the publicity, athletes and writers generally tolerated each other, and fans got sports stories of varying quality (some of the best- and worst-written sportswriting comes from that time) and the overall impression that their heroes drank milk, their baseball managers said witty things in broken English, and the fans shouted “hurrah!” in the stands.
To a sportswriter raised in today’s world — and I’m being bluntly honest here — a lot of that is mortifying … a past we would rather forget. Sportswriters have been raised to believe that we are entirely separate from the teams we cover. Koppett is right. I will quote quite a bit from the fascinating essay in the back of the late Leonard Koppett’s book, an essay called: “Ethics and Responsibilities.”
He wrote: “… an underlying general agreement was reached. The ‘adversary relationship’ between reporter and subject must be demanded, made clear and flaunted. The time-honored practice of simply running a press release (on some routine announcement, like appointment of a business executive) became taboo; it had to be reworded. And any official pronouncement by a manager, coach or club official ought to be regarded with suspicion by any ‘tough’ reporter.”
That’s right. Koppett lived through the changes, which he believed came out of the Watergate ‘70s, when newspapers started worrying not only about conflict of interest but also the APPEARANCE of conflict of interest. Sportswriters were expected to live up to the same ethical standards as reporters covering city government or the local school board. There was to be no more graft. And, by extension, sportswriters were expected (within reason) to do their jobs with the same distance and skepticism as reporters covering city government and the local school board. That was the day athletes stopped drinking milk.
You could ask me how I feel about all this, but the truth is it is a bit like asking me how I feel about gravity. It is all I know. I remember being 21 years old, green as Kermit, and going to something called the “SAC-8 Rouser” as a “reporter” for The Charlotte Observer. The SAC-8 was the “South Atlantic Conference,” and it included small colleges like Catawba, Lenoir-Rhyne, Elon, Mars Hill and so on. And the rouser was a media gathering designed to give the conference a bit of publicity. I remember all the coaches were there, and I got to interview them, and then, at the end, rather unexpectedly, there was a raffle. I remember that early on in the raffle, I won a rather nice cooler. I thought that was pretty cool to be honest: I NEVER win raffles. So, I had my cooler, and I felt good, and then all of a sudden they were auctioning off the big prize (which I recall was something like a free three-day golf vacation or something like that) and, lo and behold, I won again.
I was quite shocked. I remember going back to my editor at The Charlotte Observer and saying to him that I had won TWO prizes from a raffle I had not even entered, and that one of those prizes was a nice golf package. He smiled and told me I couldn’t take those prizes.
Me: Why not?
Him: Why do you think you won?
Me: Um, because I’m lucky?
Him: Or maybe it’s because you work for The Charlotte Observer, which is the biggest newspaper in the Carolinas, and they want more coverage?
Me: Or maybe because I’m lucky?
The cooler went to charity. The golf vacation was returned. The lesson was learned.
That was more than 20 years ago, and the lesson of that day has been pummeled into me so thoroughly, so intently, so entirely that I honestly cannot see straight on the subject. I have never believed anything except that sportswriters must stay separate, that we must keep a healthy distance, that we must report on sports using the same tools and techniques and strategies that every journalist is taught at a very young age: Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, ask the five questions, follow the money, challenge authority, get both sides, fight for the little guy, eliminate bias (to the best of your ability), dig a little deeper, report what you know, get it right. I honestly did not ever consider there was another side to the argument.
This is progress. And, as with all progress, there are some very obvious things that the sports pages do better now than ever before. There are more stories broken now than ever before. There is more intense analysis now than ever before. The box scores are so much more complete now than ever before. And I know that there are many Web sites today that mock sportswriters’ cliches and bizarre thought processes, but believe me when I tell you that if you go back and read newspapers from around the country in 1975, or 1955, or 1935 … you will find stuff that would have made the Fire Joe Morgan writers’ heads explode. There has always been good and bad sportswriting, of course, but all you have to do is go back and read some of the racially charged, sexually charged, cliche-ridden half truths of a different America* and you will admit that sportswriting doesn’t come close to hitting the lows that it once hit. Sportswriting — and I think this is unquestionable — is more professional than ever before.
*I always loved Frank Deford’s description of Boston sportswriting when he was writing about the Celtics in the 1960s: “One step up from illiteracy, one decibel down from shouting.”
But that’s a charged word: Professional. Here again, I quote Leonard Koppett (and it should be noted that Koppett — a sportswriter for about 60 years — finished this essay just before he died in 2003):
“Athletes and promoters are not government officials dispensing tax dollars, patronage and punishment, backed up by the judicial and coercive powers of the state. It’s entertainment of a totally voluntary type for participant and follower. The admirable American journalistic tradition of ‘watchdog’ applies to government and other socially powerful entities, not blindly to accounts of ball games, movie reviews, comics and (need it be said?) the content of advertisements. There has to be a sense of proportion about any kind of blanket rule. Ethics depend on conscience, not formula.”
And you know, that makes some sense to me. This is not to say that we should go back to the days when teams paid for sportswriters to travel with them*, but I will admit that maybe our newspapers and us sportswriters, in some ways, have lost some of the point. I think about Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, and what makes him so popular. Bill is a talented guy. He’s a very funny writer. He has a real knack for connecting and seeing things in a fresh way and he still makes the best Shawshank Redemption references in the business.
*Though, in many ways, we ARE going back to those days as team sites become more prominent.
But the other thing Bill has done is break down those walls that have built up. He’s a fan. And he writes with the passion of a fan. That’s not to say that Bill is everyone’s style — nobody is everyone’s style — but it seems to me that his writing speaks to a lot of people who grew tired of the distance that has widened between sportswriting and sports. The distance is not all our doing … it is not even MOSTLY our doing. Money has changed the game. Television has changed the game. Money has changed the game. Talk radio has changed the game. The Internet has changed the game. Money has changed the game. And a million other things. Also, money.
But I believe too that sportswriting has shifted on its own. There is still great, great sportswriting being done in newspapers, I believe this with all my heart. But that professional thing — maybe in places, there is a lack of joy. Maybe in places, there is an honorable distance. Maybe in places, the professional skepticism that we have built up through the years turns our coverage of games into hard-nosed city hall reporting. And last I checked, nobody wears jerseys that say “City Hall” on them.
I don’t know: It’s just something I have been thinking a lot about. No, I don’t believe newspapers should go back to the days when teams paid sportswriters to travel to games. No, I don’t think sportswriters should take free golf vacations in exchange for a little more coverage. No I don’t believe sportswriters should stop trying to get closer to what’s real — it’s more important now than ever. But, in the fight for survival, I’m not sure that we should be spending a lot of energy worrying about the blurry ethical lines of contract bonuses for Cy Young votes. Yes, sports are big business. But there is a lesson in the grand history of sportswriting that might be worth remembering: Sports are games too.
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Could not agree more. Sports are fun. Sports are entertainment. But sports are sports, and they don’t need to be made into more than what they are. Simmons hits a chord with me as a fan. As someone watching the games at home and sharing in that with others (although I’m not with Kimmel, Carrola, and Don Draper…). I’m young, but it seems like that’s what sportswriting was like before we were watching every game live. A sportswriter was relating what they saw in the game as if we were sitting on a porch in the afternoon. I’m a rambler.
Great job, Joe. Simmons should have you on the podcast. He and his year of Kansas City theory.
I can’t imagine a better time for sportswriting as a consumer. Any type of writing you want is out there at your fingertips. I spend at least an hour every day (usually closer to 2 or 3 hours) reading articles from all over the country I throughly enjoy.
In fact, I bet so much good sportswriting is available that it actually puts a slight dent into the GDP. If anything, it’s become too much of a distraction.
This is the beauty of the internet – whatever people want is available, whether it’s the absolute latest updates, nitty-gritty analysis, purple prose, witty off-hand remarks, pop culture references, fanatical passion, tempered passion, passionate hatred, criticism of all of the above – it’s all around in articles, blogs, etc. In the end, the elements that people enjoy the most in their sportswriting will survive, while the rest will fade into their own niches. What I suspect will happen, though, is that more than ever, talented writing will find its outlet and will be read (of course, the next question is whether it will make money…).
Good thoughts, Joe. Along those lines, my thoughts ramble out as something like this: I believe there’s a reason barbecue tastes so good. It’s because we cook it on charcoal, which isn’t exactly clean. In fact, it’s downright dirty. Sure, you could have a nice clean burger from your oven or stovetop, but it doesn’t taste the same. Even a burger on a propane grill doesn’t have that same “oomph”. Why is that? I believe it’s because a little of the right kind of dirt adds a lot of flavor. Drop the patty on the ground and it’s time to throw it away and get a new one. Too dirty to save at that point, and the wrong kind of dirt, to boot. But too clean is just as bad in many respects. And this is what I see has happened to sportswriting: It’s become antiseptic. It’s good, it’s healthy, it’s all there in black and white, I get my recommended daily allowance from it, but does it taste right? Is it everything it could be? Or does it read like a Joe Friday police report disguised as a recap?
I’m not even going to pretend to know what the “right” amount of dirt is in the sportswriting world. I’ve never been a writer, and couldn’t do it if I tried. I have no idea where the line needs to be drawn. But every entity needs its probiotics, it’s “good dirt” in order to function at peak performance. Clean out absolutely everything, and it starts to fail. When certain rules and conventions are followed simply because they are rules and conventions, who really benefits? Anyone?
We like our sports dirty. Artificial turf sucks, because there’s no mud on the uniforms. The ball bounces too predictably. Outdoor sports played indoors just don’t feel right. There’s no wind to throw off the line of a pass, no sun to get in an outfielder’s eyes. It’s too perfect, if you will. In the effort to clean up any hint of conflict of interest, all the grunge has been removed from the writing, but unfortunately so has a lot of the flavor. Oddly, I don’t feel the same way about news or political reporting. I feel the bias there is not only unfortunately accepted but expected. Perhaps somewhere between the “lie to my face” of political reporting and the “can’t say that, someone might think I’ve got a conflict of interest” of sports reporting might be the proper location. I think we have it completely backward, to be honest. In news, just tell me what happened and let me figure out why it happened and what it means for myself. Keep it antiseptic. Leave your opinion as a writer out of it. In sports, tell me why it happened. Tell me what it means. Tell me why I should care. MAKE me care. I’ve seen base hits before. Tell me why this one was different.
But as I said before, I’m not even going to pretend to know exactly where that line is. I only know I feel sportswriting is far too “clean” these days, and it lacks something because of it.
So let me get this straight….The KC Star pays for your ticket to enter the stadium in KC (or anywhere else, actually) so that you can report on a Royals or Chiefs game? When did this practice begin?
Okay, I can see you (yes, even you, Joe) maybe needing a ticket along with your valid press pass at the big events like an All-Star game, World Series or Super Bowl. But do you really need to show a ticket at the press gate at a Royals game?
Joe – I’m glad you like Bill Simmons. He’s sort of a guilty pleasure for me… I don’t like the teams that he likes (anything from Boston area) but his references to the most silly pop culture and/or everyday occurences are so often wonderfully hilariously spot on that I always have to check out his Sports Guy stuff on the net. I do however refuse to ever buy ESPN Magazine… I do have my standards after all.
Hey, Jokelohoma (nice moniker…) – Don’t sell yourself short. You think and write better than most of the hacks coming out of our best Journalism schools, if there actually are such places in this age of over the top political correctness and shameful bias.
Sorry to have three posts in a row here but I just saw on DrudgeReport site that now Congress is really serious about propping up these failing newspapers. I think that idea is horribly wrong. Joe, I’m sorry so many wonderful friends and talented writers and reporters are losing their jobs but if we allow our government to start basically owning these major newspapers we may as well just admit that our Democratic Republic is OVER.
I think there’s room in the ever expanding realm of modern media for both kinds of reporting, hard and soft. Indeed, I think there is a need for both. The checks and balances of the modern world demand it. I would even go so far as to say that there are three voices that sports reporting need voiced: the herald bringing forth the words from the few to the many, the seeker of the truth willing to dig through the unpleasant to bring to light the important things that the few will try to hide, and the voice of reason, which is the one I think has been lacking to a certain degree these days. There haven’t been many children saying that the emperor is naked, why do you all say nothing? To put it another way, the day to day coverage is integral, and impossible to come by if you are outing the shortstop for lying about his age. But I also think it’s vital to ask new questions that there aren’t yet answers for, and to connect the dots between the answers when they do come up, much more so than it is for everyone to make predictions about everything before it happens (are we all gamblers?) and to hear about what Terrell Owens had for breakfast or if A-Rod is wearing sneakers of loafers today. I remember when Freddy Sanchez won the batting title for the Pirates, and hearing and reading so many reporters lamenting on the lack of coverage of this remarkable story; a club-footed non-prospect on a team with the 2nd worst record in the league coming from nowhere to beat out the likes of Pujols and Cabrera, and all I could think was, “so write about it then!!”, and maybe more people would want to read about A-Rod’s shoes. But I like to think that when people are offered more than just McDonald’s and Burger King, enough of them will choose something a little more challenging that it will stick around for awhile. Maybe I’m hoping for the dare to be great situation seekers, or maybe I’m just up past my bedtime, but it’s not just politicians who need to lead, not to find out where their people are going so they can lead them, it’s all those who have a voice, and it’s about using that voice to fill the world with as wide an array of information as the world possesses, not just putting out there what you already know people want to hear just so they’ll keep listening.
[...] A Sportswriting Rough Draft ? Joe Posnanski By Joe Posnanski The time-honored practice of simply running a press release (on some routine announcement, like appointment of a business executive) became taboo; it had to be reworded. And any official pronouncement by a manager, coach or club official ought to …. But, in the fight for survival, I?m not sure that we should be spending a lot of energy worrying about the blurry ethical lines of contract bonuses for Cy Young votes. Yes, sports are big business. But sports are games too. … Joe Posnanski – http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/ & [...]
As someone who played a little bit of college ball there is something so wrong about the notion that baseball is entertainment. Maybe it is that I played at Barton County in Great Bend Kansas and no one can be entertained there by anything. There is a depth to baseball that I don’t think other sports have. You cannot help but listen to a game on the radio, which real fans still love to do, and hear some anecdote about the past. The call will mention ol so and so who stole 19 bases in a minor league game with a broken toe in 1910, and suddenly, you are immersed in the depths of American History. Not only are you being tricked into a history lesson that doesn’t actually taste like medicine but you begin to realize just how much the last century and a half has been fastened together by the sport, it as much as anything is the tie that binds. In my minds eye I see FDR awkwardly throwing out the first pitch from the stands, obvious to all that he had never played the sport before (he was from the time baseball players were seen as brawlers. In the early few decades of the last century it was considered uncouth for women to even go to games. Certainly FDRoosevelt was from a well-bred family and thus, far too refined for the game), then I see G.W.Bush standing in the loneliest place in the world, on the mound in Yankee Stadium a week or so after 9-11, and he on the other hand looked rather fluent in the ways of our little game.
There is more to the thing than jolly kicks and good times. There is more to the thing than news and figures, too, though baseball is certainly framed by kicks and figures. There is a subculture to the baseball man that I just don’t see anywhere else in America today or in the past. Describing that culture is something all too etherial but I do know if you can sit in your living room furnished with digital cable and a flat screen HD tv, off, with a copy of Bill James’ Historical Baseball Abstract cracked, listening to a game happening somewhere amongst the radio waves and feel utterly connected to each and every person who’ve ever done the same, you’re in the club. There is nothing better than driving down a dark highway somewhere far from home picking through stations on the AM side of the dial only to run across some Div. III school, or a Juco (in parts of the country other than KC the term JUCO means Junior College, here though it means Johnson County) game, and actually get into the action, you’re in the club.
I don’t mind writers being a little in the bag of the teams at all, afterall, proximity doesn’t preclude posterity. I don’t mind the closeness because I want to be reminded of the texture of the game that doesn’t come through in a box score, just as much as I want to pick up a copy of the PoDunk Boonie’s Times and see how Paul Bunyon’s son John Doe Bunyan played the night before at 1st base, and if the PoDunk Freight Train won. There is a fine line between being connected and used, and it is a dangerous line to navigate, because if you are on either side and only looking for the jolly kicks of the game, or for the black and white, journalism sound version with a boiled down box score, then you’re missing the point. Sorta like cable, you can try and connect yourself at any point of the wall but you only succeed by getting joined to that one narrow vein. But when you do, worlds open up.
Excellent post, Mr. Posnanski, and excellent comments above. To add my two cents, the Internet has widened the scope which unfortunately threatens the viability of newspapers. Every week we read about another paper’s demise. My mom works for a paper down in Florida and we know first hand what happens when layoffs occur. So it’s tough all around. But it is an evolutionary process. Blacksmithing used to be a business that every town knew about. There were two blacksmiths in every small town in America. But manufacturing put an end to that industry and that’s the way evolution works.
All that said, there has to be a balance. Sports is about games. Agreed. But it is also about big business and government interference and the tentacles of sports reach everywhere. As much as I hate the steroid scandal and wish it would go away, it is absolutely important that professionals approach the story with integrity and access. At the same time, there is room for Simmons and Michael Silver and others who approach the game from a fan’s perspective.
Rob Neyer made an interesting comment concerning bloggers (last week I believe) and he seemed to believe that the difference was access and the ability to check facts. Access does seem to be the dividing line of professional and amateur. We bloggers (at least most of us) do not have access and though we may write thousands of words a week, we cannot pass the litmus test that Koppett points to.
Bloggers have their place and many are very, very good. But access and the responsibility to use that access correctly are as much needed as ever. Because we need fan sites and we need team sites. But we also need the truth.
How do you fight for the little guy and eliminate bias at the same time? That’s just plain dumb.
Otherwise , good post.
Joe – I think you’re close on this one, but what’s missing is that the vast majority of bloggers that call themselves sportswriters haven’t learned the sports-cooler lesson.
Maybe because the vast majority of them don’t know Walter Lippmann from Walter Johnson, or perhaps because they’ve never set foot in a Journalism school, much less a Journalism class.
But I fear you’re right: with more and more team sites becoming the primary source of team news and information, the pendulum has swung back to the pre-SI days.
And the bloggers have become the new boys on the bus.
Joe,
I have a LOT of thoughts about this post as a former sports writer/editor, but the thing I feel is most important to note is this:
You quoted Koppett thusly: “Athletes and promoters are not government officials dispensing tax dollars, patronage and punishment, backed up by the judicial and coercive powers of the state. It’s entertainment of a totally voluntary type for participant and follower.”
Well, that’s just plain wrong. Professional sports in America today is very much linked to government and tax dollars in the form of multi-million dollar stadiums financed by the public and tax breaks for teams and on and on and etc.
If the business of sports WAS absolutely “voluntary” for everyone, then I’d have a lot more regard for your argument. But IT IS NOT. There isn’t a single professional sports team anywhere in America that operates as a purely private enterprise.
That fact goes, of course, for literally every business in America, but to acknowledge said fact and to suggest that the public should have at least some say in the practice of the businesses in question is grounds for being labeled a socialist or Marxist or communist. The current financial crisis should be evidence enough of that.
To keep the focus on sports, however: The point is that American professional sports is a BUSINESS, and should be covered as such by journalists. That doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that there is no dividing line between NEWS stories and FEATURE stories. That line has been comfortably adhered to in every facet of journalism for as long as journalism has existed. There are hard news stories on the front page, and then there are features. There are hard news stories on the entertainment pages, and there are features. Sports should be no different.
My editor at the sports section of the Columbia Missourian always said, “bring me a story.”
Given, that’s not exactly sage advice from a newspaper man, and I never really liked the pompous bastard, but he was right. Good sportswriting has absolutely nothing to do with sports. Sportswriting is about people. Joe understands that, and his critics call him soft and fluffy and saccharine, and some people just can’t stand his nearly limitless optimism, but he’s the best in the business because he has this whole thing in perspective.
What do we gain from cynicism in the sports media? Honestly, what have we gained from this sanitized, adversarial approach to how we cover sports? We know more about players’ personal lives than we ever should. We seem to care, for some reason, whether or not they are faithful to their wives or honest on their taxes. We try to apply some ridiculous standard of behavior to private individuals with the same rights as the rest of us average anonymous Americans, simply because we lack the ability to raise our own children.
Yes, athletes are public figures who make ridiculous sums of money. Yes, on balance, they are overpaid and underworked. And yes, professional sports have a tangible effect on the communities they call home. But can’t we let the real reporters cover that crap?
Well…great post, as always.
Bill Simmons, I think, has had a couple important insights.
One, good sportswriters should make it more fun to follow sports.
Two, being a sports fan is mostly about watching TV. It’s almost impossible to write from the fan’s perspective if you’re at the ballpark every day. Simmons was able to turn an apparent obstacle – total lack of access to major events – into his greatest asset.
Simmons, in my opinion, is generally not hysterically funny and outside of the NBA he’s not terribly knowledgable….yet he’s been a must-read for me for years because he’s carved out this unique niche.
It doesn’t hurt that he was writing about Boston when Boston was just exploding with great stories and winning teams. I’ve always said that if he had been the Kansas City Sports Guy in 1999 we wouldn’t have ever heard of him.
Joe,
I think you’ve missed what fans probably consider most egregious about the Schilling contract stipulation. It has little to do with sportswriters “making” the news. In many ways, sportswriters do dictate the news whether they want to or not, by choosing what and how they report, whether its feigning ignorance in the aftershock of the steroids era or only covering the “four major” tournaments in sports like golf and tennis. Are these tournaments covered because they’re major (defined by the sport), or major because they’re covered (defined by the media). It’s probably a little of both.
The problem with the Schilling contract is of the Kantian genre -> What if every pitcher signed a contract with such a stipulation? Well, then every writer might want to throw a third place vote to their friend, and third-place voting loses its meaning. So then baseball eliminates third-place voting, the trend continues for second and first place voting, and the idea of the award itself loses its meaning. It’s no longer an award but a bonus, and it’s no longer defining (or even trying to define) the best pitcher of a year. It’s less about writers making the news, but the potential for the award to be devalued entirely, as I see it.
The problem is that you seem to be advocating a gray area, Joe. And I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m only saying that encourages sportswriters to use their judgment, and that the universal set of sportswriters — like the universal set of any group — is not to be trusted. There’d be a big spectrum, and many would be in a clearly acceptable range, but others would be too harsh for some of us, and still others would be too fanboy for still others of us.
The move toward greater objectivity in the sports section was a good one. It’s just that the U.S. is a culture of extreme acceleration. In 10 more years, we’ll be bemoaning how our 3-year-olds are ’sexting.’ Had the movement toward objectivity stopped somewhere in the ‘objective’ range, we’d have been OK. But the Shaughnessys had to go and ruin everything, and even back in college in the early ’90s, new writers were intent on making a name for themselves by out-Shaughnessying Shaughnessy.
Joe, I just don’t know what I read with my spare time before your blog was around. Thank you.
rdriley, I completly disagree with your premise. Sports are not politics. The outcome of a game goes not determine if roads will be built, or police officers fired, or schools built, etc etc. Sports are a GAME!
Arrogant reports like Rob Parker come out and insult a coach, his son in law, and his daughter because it is “news”. It’s no secret that he hired his son in law as DC. No hard hitting reporting there, just an arrogant sports reporter who thinks his job is WAY more important than it is.
Sports are sports, and news is news. People (or at least me) follow sports as an escape, as entertainment. I won’t read anything that tries to make sports news.
rdriley up above hit the main point I felt bore noting; as a former freelancer, and a rabid-but-conflicted Met fan, I want to second that point vociferously. If teams enthusiastically frame their product as a civic institution in order to move season tickets or float municipal bonds for stadium financing– the latter being a wholly INvoluntary entertainment expenditure for the non-”participant”, non-”follower” taxpayer– then they should be examined adversarially, and with no quarter.
In addition, though– I think you have it entirely wrong about the appeal of bloggers/commentators like Simmons; if anything, if his readership– and I’m occasionally part of it– likes him for anything beyond his gift at drawing strange and funny connections, they latch onto him and others like him because of his LACK of access and closeness to the actual players, a perceived independence from the “establishment” (even as he draws a paycheck from the WWL). I think this may be more of a matter of perception– or something ineffable his style and self-presentation seem to conjure– considering the amount of access his celebrity/employer afford him, but still…
Tampa Mike writes: “Sports are not politics. The outcome of a game goes not determine if roads will be built, or police officers fired, or schools built, etc etc. Sports are a GAME!”
When the City and State of New York spend upwards of $1 billion to build stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets, when the City of Miami and the State of Florida agree to use over $400 million to build a stadium for the Marlins, you damn betcha that has an effect on building roads and schools, on providing police and fire protection, on the taxes people pay and on the public services they receive. If sports were “Only a Game” (to steal the name of NPR’s Saturday morning sports show), then the world might be a better place. But sports are now, and have been for a long time, a business. And one of the strategies, for a long time, of the people who run (amateur and professional) sports has been to try to push the costs off on other people while keeping all the revenues for themselves.
Money changes everything and I get the argument that sports are much more than a game now. I can even agree that they are a business. But I can not go along with the notion that sports is governement which a few commenters seem to be advancing.
The fact that politicians pony up huge money for stadiums etc, while true, seems like a poor reason to do a Watergate number on a decision to punt in the fourth quarter.
By all means question the decision to pay the money, question Jerry Jones for having the gall to ask for the money, but there’s a line between that stuff and what happens on the field.
“By all means question the decision to pay the money, question Jerry Jones for having the gall to ask for the money, but there’s a line between that stuff and what happens on the field.”
Exactly. Hennepin County is providing a chunk of money for the new Twins’ stadium, some of which was at one point mine. While I think that gives me the right to know quit a bit about the stadium construction process and how the team is run, I don’t think it gives me the right to know who Joe Mauer is sleeping with.
Calloway Dan #23: I’m no fan of Jerry Jones and his Cowboys but I will give him just a little bit of credit in that he is spending a TON of HIS OWN $$$,$$$,$$$ on that monstrosity (sp?) going up in Dallas or whatever suburb to Big D it’s being built. Should he have paid for it entirely from his own pocket? You can argue that but let’s be realistic. That’s just not how things are done nowadays. Most of us regular guys problem with sports is that these new stadiums/arenas are now built so much with the millionaire fan or corporation in mind and the regular sports fan is almost completely ignored – except that he gets to stand at the urinal and now watch whatever on his own flat screen TV. (Well, it’s his own at least while he’s doing his business at the urinal! – Funny, a decade or longer ago reading a newspaper, usually the Sports section front page, while standing at a public urinal seemed innovative.) That is why seeing a ballgame at Wrigley Field is so wonderful. No sensory overload from humongous video boards, blaring advertisements coming from the speaker system built to break eardrums, etc.
Yes, I’m off topic here but had to chime in. I await the day when so many true fans of a sport turn off their TV’s and/or quit visiting the stadium regularly so that management (including major universities), athletes and the advertising agencies realize that the worm has turned. Maybe this nasty economy will bring this about, but I doubt it. Loving and following sports is like an addiction. So many of us (me included) need it in order to enjoy are days, seasons, and lives. It’s kind of sick, actually…
rdriley (#14) is right, but doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Sports is not just big business; sports is HUGE business.
Sports takes our tax dollars. Sports is for profit commerce that it often tax exempt. Sports is often a monopoly.
Sports determines a lot of other things in entertainment, by their scheduling of games and championships.
Sports sells newspapers.
Sports is full of public figures, including many of the most famous people in America.
Sports can help to determine morality, from Jackie Robinson to attitudes towards (or against) homsexualy, and much much more.
Sports contributes to the generational poverty of minorities in many parts of America.
Sports figures often get special treatment from local police, making them above the law in many case.
Sports can cause public mayhem and riots. Sports can cause children to skip school.
Sports lead to corruption in our public and private educational insitutions, the corruption of education.
************************
I love sports. I watch sports — though less as I get older. I read about sports. I talk about sports. Occassionally, I even write about sports.
But let’s be clear about this. Sport is a major institution in this country, not just professional sports. It probably reaches into every other major institution in America, too.
It should be covered and diligently and as carefully as any of those others, though probably should be covered less than many of othem.
I was going to makebasically the same comment Don Coffin just made. Sports are not politics, but as long as governments fund sports — whether that’s building stadiums as gifts for pro franchises or using your tax dollars to fund athletics at public universities and high schools — sports are not exactly NOT politics either.
Let sportswriting reflect the fun that is still there in the games, but we’re not so innocent anymore. When Joe says sports are “entertainment of a totally voluntary type for participant and follower,” I think he’s off-base. I can’t voluntarily withhold some of my taxes if I don’t follow sports.
@ CALLMEACAB #10
You realize FDR had polio? Paralyzed from the waist down. In private he used a wheel chair, in public he used leg braces and a cane. That’s probably the better reason as to why he looked to be throwing “awkwardly”. He helped found the March of Dimes, hence one of the reasons his picture is on the dime.
CALLMEACAB wrote:
“FDR awkwardly throwing out the first pitch from the stands, obvious to all that he had never played the sport before (he was from the time baseball players were seen as brawlers. In the early few decades of the last century it was considered uncouth for women to even go to games. Certainly FDRoosevelt was from a well-bred family and thus, far too refined for the game),”
Maybe I was precocious, but growing up in LA it never escaped my attention that sports was a business. For a five year stretch, if Sandy Koufax pitched more than 223 innings in the season (okay, the three years out of five he did so, he actually pitched more than 300 innings) the Dodgers were in the World Series. If Koufax didn’t the Dodgers weren’t in the World Series. World Series tickets were (IIRC) around $25.00. The Dodgers had at least two games of at least 50,000 tickets, so making the World Series was worth $2,500,000 extra to the team before adding in concessions, parking, television, and radio. And Koufax had the utter gall, the utter temerity, to want 5% of the extra profit the Dodgers made from being in the Series as his salary (which does not include anything extra for the 10,000 or so more fans that showed up to every game he pitched). The Dodgers forced a nasty holdout, and did what they could to make Koufax seem greedy.
So even as a ten year old, I knew that baseball was a business run by teams to make money. And I could see the enormous profits made by the O’Malleys that drastically outweighed what the players got, and I guess my anti-management views were cemented by Koufax and Drysdale. We might give the Dodgers credit for social consciences, but the Dodgers didn’t sign Jackie Robinson because it was the right thing to do; they signed him to make more money. That it was the right thing to do was secondary.
So I’m completely with Joe here. Yes, some teams in some leagues do lose money. But usually losing money comes from losing games, and all too frequently losing games from low payroll. The Yankees had the biggest revenue in baseball last year without making the playoffs, and the revenue came from paying to have a lot of star players and building a team worth watching (on television and on the field) even if they missed the playoffs.
It *is* up to journalists to refrain from facilitating the greed. The public has a right to know that the team that’s asking for a gazillion tax dollars for a new park made its owner a gazillion dollars the year before. Or we have the right to know that the team barely broke even, while also losing 100 games. Bad teams drive down costs, but also drive down revenues and public interest in paying for new facilities. It’s the good teams that have an easier time getting John Q. Taxpayer to open his wallet.
As for Curt Schilling, won’t bother me either way about the HOF for him. But no GM should ever allow a large bonus to be driven by a single vote unless is more than willing to see votes suborned by an under the table split. I know that were I Curt Schilling, I’d have found a writer (arguably in my home town, where some homerism would be expected) who would throw the #3 vote my way for $200,000 cash or so (after taxes, that’s less than half) and were I a writer, being offered probably more than my entire life’s savings to pick Schilling #3 instead of #6, I’d have a hard time saying no. So the GM should never have agreed to the clause unless he *thought* he was agreeing to #3 overall, not one #3 vote. In which case Schilling’s agent won that negotiation.
While sports writing may be much better today that it was 30 years ago, I can’t help but feel that’s not saying a whole lot. Put against a terribly low standard, anything will look good.
The problem with sports writing today is that the large majority of it is just plain LAZY. There are excellent sportswriters out there, don’t get me wrong. And I’m sure that some minor errors are just results of misprints/typos or a deadline.
But there is an overwhelming glut of sports “writers” who are terrible literary hacks who can’t be bothered to look up even the slightest detail for the drivel they’re writing. FJM was always excellent at pointing out these lazy SOBs, and they wrote like 900,000 posts in three years.
And then, ofcourse, when confronted with their laziness, these sports “writers” will get all huffy and defensive and bleat from the highest tower about how wonderful they are and how people in their mom’s basements don’t know anything about baseball/football/basketball/whateverball.
Why do we still need these jokers? Why would I pay a sports “writer” to tell me something that some schlep in his mom’s basement has already told me, in a far funnier way, and probably with far more insight?
(This is primarily why I still like Simmons. (other thant he fact we’re the same age and he watched and thought the same things I did). He’s not as funny as he used to be (mostly because he’s become a Boston prima donna and irritates the crap out of everyone with his stupid homerism), but he’s probably got the largest audience in the US, and he takes his time to look shit up, AND he will admit it when he’s wrong.)
Again, I’m not painting every sports writer into the same corner. There are EXCELLENT writers out there, whose work I would gladly pay for. But they’re a small minority. Are the bad sports writers of today better than the ones from 30 years ago? Probably. Does it really
matter?
I’m sure today’s garbage smells better than the garbage from 30 years ago, too, but it’s still garbage.
Does anyone think we’d get anything like Grantland Rice’s epic intro from today’s media machine or the interweb?
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”
Even if a modern newspaperman would have crafted the above… would it make it past the editor?
No.
Maybe a capable sportswriter should try the above once in a while. From the looks of my hometown paper, I wonder on many occasions if there is even an editor alive back at the office minding the store.
[...] journalism, and it could even be argued that he may be the single most universally respected. He posted a piece on his blog yesterday that’s too indecisive to be a tome of any sort, but he asks the sort of questions about [...]
Well said Creston, except for the part about it being better than it was 30 years ago. I’m not even sure that’s wrong, but I know right now it’s not good. One only has to read a single writer consistently to see the poor quality rear itself over and over again. Here in Boston, where some people seem to think there is a glut of excellent and talented writers, the same writers make the same mistakes and same tired references over and over and over again.
Sportswriting has become what’s easiest for the writer. Find a quick anonymous source to back up your otherwise baseless theory, print a few birthdays and stats that someone emailed you and call it a Sunday Baseball Notes column.
They print nice things and carry on about the players and coaches who are generous with their time and carry shivs for the smart players and coaches who realize that the media are no longer necessary. As Joe said above, gone are the days where the teams really needed the writers to help them sell their product. With the internet, local cable contracts and instant access, the Boston Globe needs stories about the Red Sox and Patriots a lot more than Bill Belichick or Manny Ramirez need to be best buddies with some schlub just because he happens to have a press pass. The world is different now, probably closer to the way it should be.
Sportswriting, like all writing should be about information. Most people don’t (and shouldn’t) care what some writer ESPN labels as an “expert” or some paper labels as a columnist thinks about a specific player, or contract or moment. What we care about is that they tell us what happened in a way that makes us want to see this moment we never witnessed or learn more about the individuals involved in the moment. Too often today though, the writers are positioned as experts in all things sports when most of them couldn’t name the starting lineups of half the teams in whatever league they cover. They’re not experts, they’re mouthpieces for themselves and themselves alone. They know less than the fans, certainly less than the individuals they cover and want the world to think otherwise. They forget that they are not men and women of accomplishment, but that they are there simply to chronicle the accomplishments of the accomplished.
The world has changed indeed.
A few years ago, my city hosted the All-Star Game. Because I was the beat guy at the paper of record, some people from an extension of an MLB office asked me to write a bunch of stories for the game program. They offered a pretty generous sum and it wasn’t going to require a lot of work on my end. I mentioned it to my editors and was told that I would not be permitted to accept a check from an entity that I covered.
This bothered me on many fronts, so I went back with examples of programs from previous seasons that featured prominent writers from prominent papers, all of whom were identified in what amounted to a free ad for the publication.
The answer didn’t change. It was “Take a hike, son.”
The day I got the final “NO” and glumly called a scribe from another paper to tell him about the gig. While he giddily went about collecting the easy paycheck, my paper put out a press release announcing that it was the title sponsor of All Star FanFest.
Apparently, it was important for the lowly writer to have ethics. The corporate entity, however, was permitted to bend a rule in the name of profit.
That, in a nutshell, sums up most papers’ approach to ethics. They don’t want their writers to accept a bobblehead. But, it’s OK for the publisher/editor/managing editor to sit in the owner’s private box.
Governments spending money on sports stadiums is an issue that should be explored and investigated by the news reporters. The kids in the toy store aren’t the ones who need to give us that news. It’s too important, and actually has almost nothing to do with sports.
A sportswriter will likely have incentive to want a new stadium built– a new stadium is sports news, and generates loads of story ideas. If Boston is thinking about spending billions on a new sports stadium, Dan Shaughnessy is basically the last writer on earth I want to get that story from, or read a column from, for many reasons.
Sportswriters want to be taken seriously as journalists, so they want sports to be considered important. But the games themselves are not important to society. (They get to be too important to some individuals like me, but that doesn’t change things.) A city blowing hundreds of millions on a stadium is very important, but it’s not a sports story. If they were spending that money on a concert arena instead, would the local rock critic be the one you should get the story from? If you love music and want to hear about some of the bands that might play in the new building, then sure, you’d be interested in that aspect of it.
But if you want to find out if this expenditure is a good idea for the city, you’d be better off reading a business or political reporter’s take on it.
Jim Caple weighs in: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=caple/090325&sportCat=mlb
RE: Mark W. Comment #7
You said: “I’m sorry so many wonderful friends and talented writers and reporters are losing their jobs but if we allow our government to start basically owning these major newspapers we may as well just admit that our Democratic Republic is OVER.”
I hate to break it to you, but the government has long funded two of the best journalism outlets operating today: PBS and NPR. Why do you think W wanted them shut down so badly?
The Federal Government barely provides any money for PBS or NPR, the majority of funding for both PBS and NPR comes from private individuals, companies or foundations and most of the best programming on public TV/radio comes from places with 0 federal government support.
“They don’t want their writers to accept a bobblehead. But, it’s OK for the publisher/editor/managing editor to sit in the owner’s private box.”
They don’t have any ethics to begin with. That’s how they got those jobs.
Thanks, Joe, as always, for writing.
I have been increasingly frustrated with newspapers because I learn less and less from them.
As many of your readers know, Peter Gammons wrote a great Sunday notes column for the Boston Globe. For many years, it provided wonderful insights in the game and rumors that, if not always proven true, seem tantalizingly possible. I learned something I did not know before every week, and I only had to know enough to filter out Gammons’s tendency to play a few favorites to feel like the information was fairly sound. Today, there is no single report that provides as much information to me as regularly as the old Gammons column.
In part, that is because I can get information from a dozen web sources and do not need to wait until Sunday. Even though reporters still may have exclusive access to some things, the reporter no longer is the exclusive source for much information, which makes it harder for the sportswriter to establish his or her value to me.
In part, it is because (I hope) that I know more now than then. A reporter that writes to the lowest common denominator bores me. I want something added to what I saw on DirecTV the night before. A quote from a player is nice, but not if it is a Bull Durham robo-quote. I would rather an actual insight, even if the reporter has to provide it from his or her own observations instead of trying to find a player or manager to say something insightful.
And that is what in particular in Joe’s column that struck a chord. I am looking for new information or insight in a report; I don’t care if it is a quote or a stat – just something I might not have known or felt or thought of before I read the piece. Given that is what I want, I worry that reporters are way too focused on a formulaic approach of quotes or a rote recitation of the game to provide insight or information to fans who watch nearly as many games as the reporters.
I am not sure why this is. I think it is the appearance of objectivity that Joe sees as the moral of the raffle story manifesting itself in the writing. Quotes are, assuming they are transcribed correctly, undoubtedly objective. But quotes often are not particularly insightful. (That is not a player’s fault; it is not a player’s job to inform, just to play well.) And though I prefer objective over having to strip out six or seven biases (here’s looking at you, Shaughnessey), what I really want is to learn something – and I don’t learn very much from players’ quotes most of the time.
There is still much good work in the newspapers. One of my favorite sports writers today is Dave Shenin in the Washington Post. On Sundays, he take a baseball stat or theory and analyzes it. It’s not Bill James – which is a high standard – but it is very good, and I appreciate the thought and effort. And, for now, it has been enough to keep my subscription. Well, that and the coupons and the comics.
Thanks Broocks #40 for setting Ghb5 #39 straight on the NPR/PBS funding. Moreover, the last I looked “W” is in Crawford tending to his honey-do list and NPR and PBS are still on the air – although I would hasten to say that I don’t consider either entity to be among “the best journalism outlets operating today”!
However, since you (#39) brought up the subject, isn’t it Pelosi, Reid and some of their sheep-like Dem Congress folks who have been threatening to pass the “Fairness Doctrine”? (Don’t you love it when a term or name depicts nearly the exact opposite of its purpose or substance? Sort of like George Carlin’s “Jumbo Shrimp” or “transparency in government”!)
Good night…
A quick note–responding about sportswriting is much better if people can write well themselves.
Paragraphs with topic sentences are good things. They are efficient and recognize that a writer should work with the reader.
Short, well-reasoned responses are generally better than long rambles. Again, such responses view the process as communication instead of venting.
Joe gives reasons for his thoughts and beliefs; should we not do the same?
“Horse racing writers would supplement their meager salaries by using insider tips at the track.”
This has to have been put there to inject a little humour into the piece.
I don’t see anything at all wrong with sports journalism remaining the “Toy Section” of newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. Toy sections are fun. They make you feel good. They give you escape.
I think we can have a much less-racist, less-sexist, less-homophobic sports section without suddenly having to deal with a separatism that makes sports this serious thing. It’s not.
I actually believe you should have been allowed to take the golf vacation and given a small time college conference a little more space in the paper. Fun for both of you.
“*Though, in many ways, we ARE going back to those days as team sites become more prominent.”
I have stopped reading articles on mlb.com because it became clear to me long ago that it was merely propaganda. Even the blogs they choose to quote appear suspicious to me. It seems the whole point is merely to stimulate interest, which given that mlb is a business, makes sense but it shouldn’t be confused with journalism.
Stephen King is my all beef hot dog. Neil Gaiman is my filet mignon.
Atlantic City is my all beef hot dog. Las Vegas is my filet mignon.
A clean taxi is my all beef hot dog. A stretch limo (with plenty of cold ones) is my filet mignon.
A meaningless September game is my all beef hot dog. A do-or-die October game is my filet mignon.
Bill Simmons is my all beef hot dog. You, Mr. Posnanski, are my filet mignon.
I understand the gray areas that you’re addressing.
I also understand your own ambivalence.
But I think that young sports journalists need to be trained to think more seriously than they instinctively do.
Seems to me young sports journalists were driven to their interests because of their fan orientation. And many now see Simmons as a model.
That orientation unsculpted will lead to rah-rah sports writing, and not thoughtful reporting. It won’t push young sports journalists to wonder about public financing of stadiums, about academic fraud in colleges, about non-compliance with Title IX and about the lack of black college football coaches.
At your level – which is among the highest in the craft – I might trust the blurring of the ethical lines and the ability to discern between fandom and journalism.
(And I appreciate jaymarkm’s comments above. We can read and enjoy both Simmons and Posnanski on the same day, the same way we can read a trashy novel and Steinbeck.)
But at the level of a 22-year-old just coming into his or her first journalism job, I’d worry they won’t even consider ethical issues and viewing the coverage of a sports team – a sports business – like city hall. Often teams and city hall are partners. Readers/users need those dots connected. That’s also our jobs as sports journalists.
For those of us who often wonder about the changing face of sports journalism in our new landscape, this is a provocative and helpful piece. But it is, as you write, a first draft.
Keep at it!
I could have used this when I was teaching a class in sports and media with an emphasis on ethics! Well done! Thank you.
I would love for sports journalists (pro and amateur) to start tagging articles as fact, opinion and rumor because the lines are so blurred now that smart athletes are just going to stop speaking to the press all together…blogs and what not, allow anyone to act as journalist and as such the dirt and dishing thrown out with no regard to ethics is ruining the once noble job of sports journalists who used words to paint a picture of the moment for history sake. sports journalists need to get back to reporting the news not making the news.
[...] It’s interesting to consider; my position is no, not necessarily. To give one example, Joe Posnanski questioned whether journalistic ethics should be pursued as rigorously in the sports world as they should be [...]
[...] Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski streams his conscience on the current state of sports journalism, grappling with the reasons the profession has changed during the past 50-plus years. Are sports [...]