Hal’s Moons
Posted: August 7th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball, Media | 26 Comments »
When I first became a sports columnist in Cincinnati — guess that was 1994, the strike year — one of the first terms I was introduced to was: “Hal’s moons.” The whole Cincinnati sportswriting scene was actually a beautiful collection of endlessly repeated gags and inside jokes and nicknames. I remember for a long time we kept playing around with the concept of the “L” — the “L” standing for “Loss.” At the time the Bengals were a losing bunch, and they had a coach named Dave Shula who was very nice and the son of a legend and preposterously in over his head. So we started coming up with L gags for Dave Shula.
“Who is Dave Shula’s favorite singer?”
Ella Fitzgerald.
“No, really, who is Dave Shula’s favorite singer?”
LL Cool J.
“He does Dave Shula get around Chicago?”
He takes the El.
Where does Dave Shula get his clothes?
L.L. Bean.
And so on. Of course it was stupid. But hey, when you are writing about the Bengals you have to find a way to pass the time.
Anyway … Hal’s Moons. I arrived in Cincinnati during the baseball season, and I went out to a game and saw Hal McCoy — the legendary baseball writer for the Dayton Daily News. There have been numerous legendary baseball writers who have covered the Reds … Hal was the natural extension of those men. He wrote game stories with grace and a dry wit, and, more, he seemed perfectly at home in the clubhouse and around the game. It has always seemed to me that there’s a certain nimbleness and presence that the older baseball writers have around the game that is hard for people of my generation to replicate. This isn’t specifically about the job they do but HOW they do the job they do. Some of the veteran writers — people like Hal, Dick Kaegel, Rick Hummel, Tracy Ringolsby, Peter Gammons, on and on — players seem to come up to them to volunteer scoops. General managers seem to go up to them for information. Batting practice seems to revolve around them. Stories seem to float their way … and it never looks forced. Remember that scene in “The Hustler” where Minnesota Fats is working the pool table, and Fast Eddie was saying “Look at that Fat Man move. Like a dancer!” As a young kid — and I was only 27 then — I used to like just watching to see how Hal moved around the field.
I wasn’t the only one either. After a while, I noticed that quite a few writers didn’t just like watching Hal move. They actually would move with him. They were ALWAYS around him. Hal would go to this corner of the clubhouse … they would go to that corner of the clubhouse. Hal would go behind the batting cage. They would go behind the batting cage.
“You know who those guys are?” our baseball writer said to me once.
“No.”
“Hal’s moons. They orbit around him.”
I think of Hal’s moons today after reading this sad bit of news: After 37 years, Hal McCoy will no longer cover the Cincinnati Reds for the Dayton Daily News. The lead to his blog post — “The hammer fell today and it hurts like hell.” — more or less tells the tale.
And yet … it doesn’t tell the tale. Because you might imagine there being some bitterness in his announcement. And there isn’t. He is sad, but not angry. After all, you may have heard: Newspapers are hurting. Well, just about all media outlets are hurting. And because newspapers are hurting, some painful and awful decisions are being made. Excellent and loyal journalists are being fired. Coverage is being slashed. Newspapers are thinning out. We all know what’s happening here.
And so the Dayton Daily News made the painful and awful decision to stop covering the Cincinnati Reds home and road. Beyond Hal — we’ll get back to him in a minute — this is almost unimaginable. Dayton is less than an hour drive from downtown Cincinnati.
More, Dayton long has been the very center of baseball coverage in America. No paper in the country has had more legendary baseball writers. For 54 years, Si Burick — the son of a rabbi — was the sports editor and baseball-centric writer. He wrote about the Reds when Hall of Famers Chick Hafey and Ernie Lombardi played for the team and still wrote about them more than a half century later when a young kid named Eric Davis was called up. Ritter Collett was also in Dayton — he covered every World Series from the end of World War II until the Reds won their last in 1990. Both of them are Spink Award Winners — that the Hall of Fame lifetime achievement award for Baseball Writers. Then, Hal (of course) is a Spink Award Winner too. Three Hall of Famers from one fairly small paper. And Harry Salsinger — another Spink Award Winner in the Hall of Fame — started his career in Dayton.
If Miami of Ohio claims to be the Cradle of Coaches, then Dayton is the Cradle of Baseball Writers.
Now, the Daily News cannot afford to cover the Reds. Time moves faster than we can keep up.
Stone by stone
Clay on top of clay
We lose what’s known
The howls of yesterday.
This isn’t meant as a farewell for my friend Hal. He can still write one hell of game story … and one hell of a blog too. I suspect that he will not go out to pasture as he says in the post; someone will ask him to write about the Reds and I hope he will write about the Reds for a long time yet. A few years ago, Hal lost much of his eyesight — he is legally blind. But when it comes to this crazy game we love, he still can see a whole lot better than most.
So, no, this is not good bye. Instead, maybe, this is just a momentary pause to think about how the world is changing around us. Maybe we can stop to appreciate a man who has written wonderfully about baseball since the days when Pete Rose was young, a man who started writing sports stories on a typewriter and announced his retirement on his own blog. Maybe we can take a moment and think about Hal’s moons. I never blamed those kids for following Hal McCoy around. The man always had gravity.
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I was waiting for your take on Hal. Nicely done, Joe.
It’s not fair that the chopping block is falling on the stuff people actually enjoy reading.
Start him up a blog!!
Hal’s got a blog. He scooped his firing in it by four hours.
“More, Dayton…”
That’s awesome. Well done.
It seems that the ‘businesspeople’ (a word that sticks in the throat) who run newspapers today don’t understand why folks actually read the damned things.
I live in D.C., and in the LAST YEAR, the Post’s paper edition sports page has shrunk to, at most, 8 pages total on a weekday. The O’s coverage has essentially been scrapped; the Post no longer has a B’more beat writer. The Nats get covered, for whatever that’s worth, and then . . . baseball? There are box scores.
I am a home subscriber. My whole life as a newspaper reader (I am basically Poz’s contemporary, and I grew up reading the ‘paper), I have started with the sports page. In the ‘golden years’ of the 1980s, the sports page, even in my small hometown newspaper, was a daily treasure. Now, my big city sports page . . . I read it in 10 minutes. Then what? Politics? ‘Style’? NO THANKS.
Again. I am a home subscriber. But how long does one pay for . . . eight pages of sports page? Not much longer.
OUTSTANDING post about the great Hal McCoy. Working in Dayton–baseball writer cradle or not–made it hard for him to get the national notice that others did, even though he was every bit their equal (if not superior). I hope like heck you’re right, Joe, and he gets to cover the team for someplace else. The state of newspapers is sad; sad too is the fact that every second comment at the Dayton Daily News site today is a reaction saying “Cancel my subscription!” That’s exactly the problem, though! They need loyal readers willing to financially support expenses like what it took to fly Hal around for a baseball season. Sad times.
I’ve lived in Cincinnati all of my life and most of my baseball reading from my teen years until turning 40 later this year has been from Hal and the Dayton Daily News. I found that rather odd because Cincinnati up until just a couple of years ago was a two paper city and I was going 40 miles north to get my Reds information.
Home and road? They can’t afford to send someone all the way to CINCINNATI to cover the team? Now that’s absurd.
Of course, I guarantee the execs haven’t cut their salaries yet, nor will they ever. Reminds me of the scene in “Broadcast News” where the producer offhandedly says to the anchorman played by Jack Nicholson, “We could make it less brutal if you’d knock a million off your salary” … then backtracks.
Comedian Mike Birbiglia has as one of his stories the time when he was asked to tell jokes at the Hall of Fame Induction banquet*, and part of his bad experience involved a blind baseball writer. Could we assume that this was Hal McCoy?
*It’s really a funny bit that also involves Dennis Eckersley. They show the special on Comedy Central every so often: “My Secret Public Journal”.
Sad to hear that he’s retiring, though. The great sportswriters are falling away bit by bit, and it’s an interesting flip-side to your posts about achieving your dream job (not that it’s a bad thing).
P.S. Before I post, I did a search and actually came up with a confirmation from Hal himself on the Birbiglia story: http://www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/cincinnatireds/entries/2008/09/19/post_1.html
Good sport.
you’ll be happy to know those gags never die… i’m not sure why it’s different in the cincinnati market than anywhere else, cheif, it just is
i’m honored to have been a moon at some point, but learned enough to find my own orbit
i used to email Hal all the time. we’d talk about the game then the cities he was in. I’d recommend a restaurant, he’d tell me he’d been going there for years. I loved getting emails back from Hal, he always replied. I’m going to miss Hal, but hopefully he will find a blog or website to be a part of so that he can continue to lay his little homey witticisms on all of us for years to come. Hal’s the man!
I never had the occasion to read Hal’s work, but after scanning the comments to his retirement post, I gotta tell ya… any guy who could make such a blog post and have fourteen hours and probably a hundred comments pass before some asocial loser got around to defecating on his own keyboard? He had to be a treasure.
In fact, down here in Georgetown, Ky., we were telling some pretty good gags tonight. Me and Butchie Hobson and Jack Brennan and P.J. Combs and a couple Enquirer guys. A whole bunch of “Sarges” and “Chiefs” and “Chefs” were bandied about. Talking about how we were trying not to be so weak. It’s a Cincinnati scribe thing. Never seen anything like it.
Whenever someone says their venture is a business, as if being a”buisness” is the end all be all of existence, to justify why it has to has to partake in some sort of anti social conduct, run like the wind as they are trying to pick your pocket to make their all sacred ” profit” .
A clarification from Hal’s blog:
“I was NOT fired, as one local television outlet screamed on the air last night. Where they got that idea I can’t say. Not from me. Now I know how it is on the other side of the media to be misrepresented. I was not pink-slipped, shown the door, given the boot or 86ed.
Also, I was NOT forced into retirement. I did not have to accept the buyout, which is a generous one year’s salary – one year’s pay for doing nothing, of which I’ve always been extremely competent at doing.
It is MY choice to retire and my choice to take the buyout. I was not forced, coerced or threatened.
Did I want to continue covering the Cincinnati Reds and major-league baseball? Absolutely. Positively. Definitely. But these are hard economic times and the newspaper is unable to do that at this time.”
Wonderful.
Completely off-topic but Joe, you might have a new pitcher to follow – Max Scherzer of the DBacks is a confirmed stat-head: http://www.azcentral.com/sports/diamondbacks/articles/2009/08/06/20090806spt-dbxmain.html
Maybe not to the level of Banny, but he is a converted believer in BABIP which puts him miles ahead of most major leaguers. . . .
No, seriously, Dave Shula’s favorite singer?
Elton John
I’m not from Cincinnati – heck, I’ve never even been to Cincinnati, but even I was struck by the news. Best wishes to Mr. McCoy in his retirement.
And I know that Joe Posnanski will one day join Burick, Collett, Salsinger, and McCoy as JT Spink Award winners who got their start in the Southern Ohio area.
I thank the guy who had your link on Hal’s blog. Great article. Hal is a treasure we will all miss. We in Dayton loved him and looks like the rest of the country did too.
“No, really, who is Dave Shula’s favorite singler?”
should be singer
I like singler, I would guess his favorite was WiLLie WiLson.
And so the newspaper business continues it’s slow cycle into non-existence.
Does it matter? As Joe himself pointed out, that paper had three different great writers. Another great writer(s) will appear on the scene. Maybe in a paper that continues on. Maybe on line. Maybe in some media we don’t even know about yet.
Is it sad when great people leave a job where we all get to enjoy them, absolutely. But ripping on the “suits” and their decsions gets us no where in this discussion. It won’t help us figure out how to save newspapers (or something like them), it won’t help us figure out how to keep the words of great writers in front of us, it won’t really help anything at all.
The Star Tribune here in MN gets worse and worse every year. Less stories per page. Less actual news, and more fluff and titilation every year. Less writiers who just know how to write well. I don’t know what the answer is, for an industry that was stupid enough to give away its content for free. I wish I did. I wish they did.
But right now, we are in a time of change in the media, and we are going to lose some good writers. It’s just kind of sad, and I hope that news media outlets figure something out soon.
Number Three (#5) ?? – Although I am pleased to not have to live in an east coast mega-metropolis, I’d love if my sickly daily fish-wrap included 8, EIGHT! pages of sports. Occasionally we are fortunate to peruse 1/2 of that and it’s rather poorly written, too!
Dave Shula’s least favorite Holiday ?
Why Noel of course…
I wish they had just fired Dayton instead. Not the city though.