This may be the most difficult column I have ever written. It is an obituary, and I have never liked writing obituaries. But this is worse because of the subject of the obituary. This is not an obituary of a person, a family member, a relative, a close friend. In this column, I lament the demise of The New York Times’ baseball coverage, something of which I was part for 39 years.
The Times, in its fashion, still covers the home teams, the Yankees and the Mets, but the newspaper has relegated the rest of baseball to a sentence or two in a part of the sports section that used to be called “briefs.” Given what baseball reporting has appeared, that term is an understatement. Or an exaggeration.
While the Times gives minuscule attention to on-field coverage, its coverage of off-field events is non-existent. If the Times runs a news report at all, it usually cites another publication, such as USA Today or the Daily News or the Associated Press, that reported it first.
Based on what I have learned, the other three major sports will suffer the same treatment as baseball has.
“It’s not just baseball,” a member of the sports staff told me. “We’re not singling out baseball. It just happened to fall during the baseball season. It will be the same with football, basketball and hockey.”
The staff member didn’t add soccer to the list of decreasing coverage. Soccer has become king at the Times.
The Times sports editor, Jason Stallman, and the deputy sports editor/baseball editor, Jay Schreiber, don’t like to talk about their section’s dramatic transformation, at least not to me because they don’t like my criticism of their developments.
However, I gained some insight into what’s going on at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan in conversations with and e-mail from current and former members of the Times sports department.
I will identify none of them to preserve their present job security or their future relationship with their former employer, which is ultra-sensitive to criticism. The Times has no problem criticizing other individuals and organizations but believes it is above such treatment.
“They want more enterprise pieces in the paper and it doesn’t leave much space for anything else,” said a current staff member.
An enterprise piece is a major feature generated by a reporter often having no link to a news development. A perfect example of the Times’ idea of enterprise was a stunning story that appeared in the newspaper April 1 under the headline “Sport’s Growth Runneth Over.”
I say stunning because what Times reader could believe what he was seeing. At a length of 1,500 words yet. Cup stacking? You gotta be kidding. I know a fellow who thought it was. A 77-year-old lifetime reader of the Times was so incredulous he was certain it was the Times’ version of an April Fool’s joke.
“Look at the date,” he exclaimed, certain the Times would admit the hoax the next day.
I assured my friend it was no hoax. “The Times doesn’t do April Fool’s,” I said. The next day came and no Times admission of cup stacking being a hoax.
The subjects of some other recent enterprise pieces: beach volleyball, duckpin bowling, the 16 ½ pound trophy that goes to the winner of the European Championship League soccer final, a scientist’s quest to break the two-hour marathon barrier.
Why should enterprise pieces take up so much space little is left for baseball? Taking the most egregious example, the marathon piece consumed five pages, two of them full-page photos of the scientist running at the Dead Sea.
The photos are attractive enough that you might want to hang them on a wall, but unless the Times wants to become the second coming of Life Magazine Times readers who are baseball fans don’t want to look at pretty pictures at expense of not knowing what happened in the games the night before or what Clayton Kershaw has done in his last half dozen starts.
The Times excuse for omitting coverage of games and players: “There are so many outlets where you can find what happened in games,” a staff member said, citing the Times rationale.
A former staff member, though, pointed out the fallacy in that reason, writing about the elimination of box scores except for the Yankees and the Mets. The former staffer wrote:
“Aside from the inexcusable erosion of the widespread baseball game and columnist coverage readers took for granted from a once prestigious sports section, my chief complaint remains the absence of all box scores, save the local ones, from the former newspaper of record.
“If there is truly no need for them anymore because of their availability (I suppose) on the Internet, then how does The Times justify a full page of weather every day? That info is even more readily available, including on updated apps and every 2 minutes on the radio.
“How about replacing the weather page with a full and thorough sports agate page that includes all the box scores fit to print. Put it on the back page of the sports section, which is where I start reading from these days because the dress page does not have as much interest for this sports fan. In other words, treat the Times sports section like a tabloid, going from back to front.”
Another former staff member, using a recent game, pointed out the kind of information baseball fans miss with the elimination of box scores:
“Dodgers needed 17 innings to beat the Padres. Matt Kemp goes 0-7 to drop his average to .222. Clayton Kershaw was used as a pinch-hitter. Padres used 7 pitchers. The second pitched the fifth and was credited with a hold. Dodgers used 9, including one in the eighth who gave up a hit and a walk in a third of an inning and was eventually charged with the tying run but still got a hold! The winner worked the final three innings. He is the Dodgers starter for Tuesday after throwing 38 pitches, plus bullpen and between innings. Baseball. You gotta love it.”
The Times, though, is loving it less while loving soccer and tennis more. The Times had three writers covering the latest French Open tennis championship. The newspaper may not have that many covering the next World Series.
Another former staffer wrote about the shrunken roundups of games. The roundups are what prompted the Times to hire me in 1969. The executive editor of the Times, James Reston, who began his professional career as the traveling secretary of the Cincinnati Reds, asked the sports editor to experiment with a roundup, and it was written for the first half of the season by staff writers.
Reston liked the format and told the sports editor, Jim Roach, to hire someone to be the regular roundup writer. I turned out to be that person, though before the 1970 season ended, I was covering the Yankees.
The former staffer wrote:
“The Times seems to believe that roundups are a waste of space that can be better allocated to sports that have little interest from readers. It is not sure if it wants to be Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine or the newspaper of record.
“Is it still depending on the focus group that did not know who Steve Young was when he was the 49ers quarterback backing up Joe Montana? That out-of-focused group said Young had little name recognition. Now he’s doing national TV commercials and commentary.
“The Times is saying baseball ‘fans’ already know the essential game details from ESPN, or from Warner Wolf broadcasting from his new residence in Naples, Fla., on the ‘Imus in the Morning’ radio show, and thus it does not need to repeat them, even if it is only for its archives.
“To relegate games to one-sentence ‘tweets’ on its agate page shortchanges both the Times and the reader, especially the little kids learning to read a newspaper.
“Baseball details no longer matter, the Times is saying. Its digressiveism minimizes the daily history of the game. There is not even a reference to where on its website readers can find information about the games not mentioned in the ‘roundup’ or games that have a scoreline in the agate. Some days two-thirds more scores appear in the standings than do in the ‘roundup.’ So The Times is driving readers to competing websites. That is a strange business lineup.
“Remember the good old days when Murray Chass came to the office at night and culled the wires – there were two wires then – for the baseball game stories and rewrote them in a pithy, cohesive bylined roundup with more insight than the current generation of analysts, anchors and anchorettes? Or the days when information was provided by radio in faraway places like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cincinnati?
“Now in the digital age The Times is giving the middle digit to its dwindling baseball followers.
“For The Times’s dying daily national baseball coverage, the honorary pallbearers should be Willie, Mickey and the Duke.”
Decimating its game coverage is only part of the newspaper’s kissing off baseball. Once upon a time, the Times cared about breaking news developments. We once had a sports editor, Joe Vecchione, who unlike many sports editors, had no favorite sport. He just wanted his reporters to turn up stories other papers didn’t have.
The Times’ current sports editor apparently doesn’t operate that way. His national baseball writer, Tyler Kepner, to my recollection, has never had an exclusive news story, sticking instead to soft, fluffy features and apparently practicing that adage no news is good news.
SAY HELLO AND GOODBYE TO A COLUMNIST
Regular readers of this site may recall the columns written occasionally by Zachary Kram. I don’t believe I ever identified him, but I do now because he is taking the next step in his desire to follow his grandfather into the sports writing business.
Sometimes sons and/or daughters follow their father into his profession. When he was a young man, my father was a writer, though by the time I began writing, his time as a writer had long passed. The genes, however, remained, and they do now for Zach.
He graduated earlier this month from Washington University in St. Louis and four days later began working for The Ringer, a website that will launch in the next few months. The Ringer is a project of Bill Simmons, who formerly headed the Grantland website at ESPN.com.
I would love to have had Zach write regularly for me, but The Ringer pays and murrychass.com doesn’t.
Forgive a grandfather for boasting, but I am merely citing facts when I say that Zach graduated with a 3.99 grade average, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, was named Missouri collegiate journalist of the year as a junior and won two Washington U. newspaper awards, for a single year and for his collegiate career.
Obviously, I am very proud of Zach and am very confident he will achieve what he wants to achieve. I am also confident that we have not seen the last of him on this site.