Baseball Sportswriters: Can't Live Without Them, Unfortunately
By Mike SanClemente - Managing Editor
04/03/2005
They're an easy target, I know. But it's still entertaining to poke fun at them, especially since if you are as rabid a baseball fan as I expect you to be (I mean, you ARE reading this site, right?), then you can’t avoid reading their columns.
I live in the Bay Area, a true sports Mecca. We have two NFL teams, (49ers and Raiders), one NHL team (San Jose Sharks), an NBA franchise (the perennially lottery-bound Golden State Warriors), and two usually excellent MLB clubs (A's and Giants). You might guess that 6 pro teams would attract top talent at all levels of media, and largely this appears to be the case.
Jon Miller leads a very good TV/radio broadcast crew for the Giants, which also includes Mike Krukow, and the A’s have a good team as well, which includes Ray Fosse.
The San Francisco Chronicle is the top newspaper in the area. I have a high standard for newspaper coverage, having grown up reading the Boston Globe. When Bud Collins, Dan Shaughnessy, Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Lesley Visser, Bob Ryan and Will McDonough are frequent contributors (as they were during parts of the 1970's and '80's for the Globe) you know you're reading a top-notch newspaper. To wit:
- Collins provides color on nationally broadcast tennis matches,
- Shaughnessy's main work is his book "curse of the Bambino,"
- Gammons needs no explanation,
- Montville writes for Sports Illustrated from time to time,
- Visser is the former Armen Kateyian / sideline correspondent at football games (and Dick Stockton’s wife, a story for yet another day),
- Ryan isn't yet nationally-known except for his ill-begotten Jason Kidd comment, and
- McDonough was the NFL's answer to Gammons before his death in 2003. McDonough’s son is Sean McDonough, the "tell it like it is" play-by-play man for the Red Sox as well as ESPN. A good read on the elder McDonough can be found at http://www.americansportscasters.com/mcdonough.html (paste this into your browser if the link doesn’t activate).
The San Francisco Chronicle has an outstanding NFL columnist, Ira Miller, the best writer in the entire sports section. Nationally known Scott Ostler, who writes twice monthly for NBCSports.com, offers up very good daily opinion columns, though he rarely discusses the A's, preferring the Giants and other national stories. Susan Slusser covers baseball and does it fairly well.
Then there is everyone else.
I won't go into all the emails I've sent over the years to the other baseball writers like Bruce Jenkins, John Shea, and Glenn Dickey (there have been several emails, in response to inane comments each of them has made). Instead I'll focus on what I saw briefly in print today.
Item 1: Ostler's article entitled "Giants: Believe It - Better Without Barry" was interesting for no other reason than the only times he mentioned the Giants' chances this year, he clearly states that the Giants will NOT be better without Bonds. I'm not sure how the headline got past the editors, but sportswriters should never let logic get in the way of a good headline, I suppose. Ostler is normally anti-Bonds, so on this one, no one is really sure where he stands.
Item #2: The only game on Opening Night was Sox/Yanks. (I can't wait for future seasons, when Selig will surely add Opening Morning, Opening Noon, and Opening Dusk to the existing Opening Night and Opening Day). If the Sox had won, the caption would have read, "Red Sox continue mastery of Yankees," as the win would have marked Boston's 5th straight win against New York dating back to October.
Instead, the Yankees won, so the caption essentially read, "Yankees continue mastery of Red Sox."
Boy, that was a difficult one, eh?
Making matters worse, the text went on to state that’s OK, Red Sox fans can “take solace” in the fact that the Jimmy Fallon / Drew Barrymore Red Sox movie “Fever Pitch” will be premiering shortly. Ah, yes, after a scintillating 8-game playoff winning streak to bring the town a championship for the first time since 1918, a loss in game 1 of a one hundred sixty two game season will cause sadness in all Sox fans – sadness that only a Jimmy Fallon movie can console.
I’m not so good with math, but 1 game out of 162 is 0.6% of the season. Not much, but I guess you still need a headline.
There is only one logical way to conclude an article on this day, which is to wonder why, every single season, the most important college basketball game of the year always comes the same day as Opening Day for baseball. You'd think at least once every so often, the NCAA basketball's version of their liturgical calendar would not overlap directly with MLB's Opening Day. However, since I first noticed this puzzling phenomenon back about 10 years ago, I don't believe there's been a season when they two events have not coincided.