An Interview with Mark Gonzales

“I always feel bummed out if I miss out on a story. I don’t beat myself up like I used to but I don’t feel good if I miss a story.”

“I’ve never thought of myself as a feature columnist because I don’t have the touch some people do. I enjoy the competitiveness of the beat and the daily interaction. I like beating someone.”

Mark Gonzales: Interviewed Aug. 27, 2006

Position: White Sox beat reporter, Chicago Tribune

Born: 1961, San Jose, Ca.

Education: San Jose State, BJ, 1985

Career: Peninsula Times-Tribune, 1980-89; San Jose Mercury News 1989-99, Arizona Republic 2000-2005, Chicago Tribune 2005 –

Personal: married
Hobbies: Reading, fitness, travel

Favorite Sports Movie: The Longest Yard

Q. How would you describe your job?

A. All encompassing. One that just doesn’t start at the ballpark. It starts from the time I get on the computer or read the paper in the morning to getting to the park with some kind of plan. I try to get to the clubhouse with a plan of attack where I’m not reliant on what somebody may say. I want to initiate the news unless something jumps out. I’m not only reporting what happens but also what it means and how it might impact next week or next month.

Q. What are the pressures of your beat?

A. I try to be as competitive as possible. With Internet coming on and websites, basically 24-hour news, you’re always on guard. I always feel bummed out if I miss out on a story. I don’t beat myself up like I used to but I don’t feel good if I miss a story. Those are the pressures. I enjoy writing on deadline, writing concisely, getting to the point and not wasting words. It really forces you to narrow in on what’s the most important thing the reader wants to know. Or something the reader will be surprised to find out. If you miss out on something it really stands out. So you’re really forced to narrow in on something quickly.

Q. How much is your performance measured on breaking news or beating the competition?

A. A significant amount. People want to know what’s going on with a particular team or player or trend and therefore you’re held accountable to stay on top of that as well as give them something they can’t find by other means. You have to kick a lot of tires to do this job right.

Q. What’s your typical day at the ballpark?

A. I always check the lineup first thing. If the lineup changes there might be a particular reason. I take a head count in the clubhouse before batting practice. The Sox are finishing a streak of 24 games with out an off day. When I go to work Tuesday I’ll find out why one guy raised his average, and another guy had his drop, and if the long stretch had anything to do with it. So you’re following up before the manager speaks. I’m in fact-gathering mode before the manager speaks.

Q. Do you watch your competitors?

A. I might take a glance. On other hand if I have to worry what they’re doing all the time that’s kind of a sign of insecurity on my part. I have to feel locked in and secure – yeah I’ll take a glance but I’m not going to eavesdrop.

Q. Which outlets do you worry about?

A. It’s usually the other newspaper. I’m in a town with two all-sports talk radio shows – they have reporters out there – you do have to be aware of that – and be aware that one is the flagship station and rights holder and they might be entitled to more access than you. That’s ‘The Score’ – WSCR 670 – which is in the first year of a five-year deal.

Q. Has WSCR broken news?

A. One time this year (starting pitcher) Jose Contreras had lower back problems. The suspicion was raised that the news came from the son (Ozzie Guillen Jr.) of the manager who has a Spanish-speaking talk radio show. Ozzie’s oldest son is a good kid but it did raise eyebrows. He’s entitled to whatever employment he chooses and in some ways it’s a coup for the station.”

Q. Is the beat reporter’s job more precarious than ever?

A. Yes. There are more and more avenues for news to come out. I got an e-mail from reader who asked if the Sox traded for (reliever) David Riske because he had got a call from realtor who wanted to rent a room to a David Riske. It turned out it was true. They announced the deal later that day.

Q. Do you post breaking news as soon as you get it?

A. We’re encouraged to put it on the website. Earlier this season, during a day game between the Cubs and White Sox, Michael Barrett apologized to AJ Pierzynski for punching him six weeks earlier. I sent it to the website and it was posted at game time, 2 p.m. It’s pretty much a 24-hour deadline, even if it’s not earth-shattering news. If Paul Konerko hasn’t played for three days and then he’s in the lineup they want that posted right away. Our Cubs writer sent a text message from the dugout recently when Mark Prior was put on the DL and they posted it right away.

Q. Do you always feel on the clock?

A. In the off-season I make sure I’m off when I’m off. I work with good people. Dave van Dyck backs up both teams and can serve as a national writer. When he’s working I don’t worry. During the season it’s tough to step away. Last night I was off and I stayed home and watched the game. Today was a good day to get away from it and I took a walk with my wife, although I did tape it. Usually they give the beat writers home weekends off as much as possible. The flip side is I have to work more in the off-season. Next month we’re on the road for 13 of the first 17 days.

Q. Is it harder to be a beat reporter than a columnist?

A. Tough question. For me I’m not so sure. Few columnists can really write colorful columns with great detail on deadline. It’s a tough art to master. The good ones do their homework. Some people have the touch and some don’t. I’ve never thought of myself as a feature columnist because I don’t have the touch some people do. I enjoy the competitiveness of the beat and the daily interaction. I like beating someone. But I’m always looking ahead. If you sit back and enjoy it chances are you’ll get beat the next day.

Q. What do you read?

A. I’m always checking out BaseballAmerica.com for minor league information and other amateur baseball developments of interest to me. I forget to tell you, I keep a day-by-day book on players to follow trends that often develop into a note or even a story. For diversion, the first websites I read are the LA Daily News and LA Times for USC football stories.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Tracy Ringolsby (Rocky Mountain News) – he’s solid and thorough. Hal McCoy (Dayton Daily News) is a colorful writer as well as a good reporter. He can really write with flair – for all the years he’s covered the Reds he’s never gotten stale. Mark Whicker (Orange County Register) really does a good job of writing on deadline with a nice touch and a knack for very good reporting. We have a very good staff but I’d sound biased if I mentioned it.

Q. How do you develop sources?

A. It starts with trust. Trust is very important. You have to let people know you as much as you want to know them. A lot of this job is interacting and talking to people. You can talk to a source for 10 minutes and maybe not use anything but if you can get that person to know you that’s a pretty good foundation. Not just the manager and GM – baseball is so all-encompassing – you need to know the vice-president of marketing and the farm director and the amateur scout – it really helps to know everybody. I feel I’ve benefited by staying in contact with people from teams I used to cover. Sometimes I find the best information on the team you cover comes from people with teams you used to cover.

Q. Do you need a thick skin?

A. More so than ever with e-mails. Sometimes fans let you have it, even though they might not know the whole story. We have this thing called “Ask the White Sox Writer” – it’s posted online – I’ve had fewer than five nasty comments. The questions generally are insightful. It’s been fun.”

Q. Did it help you that your first season on the White Sox was their championship season?

A. I was lucky. I knew (GM) Kenny Williams – I covered him when he went to Mt. Pleasant High School in San Jose. I knew a few of their scouts and front office people – so I had a good start there. It was fortunate coming in to deal with a manager like Ozzie (Guillen), and the players were very good to work with.

Q. Ozzie has had his problems this season. How do you work with him?

A. You have to be direct with him. He’s probably better with the beat writers than the beat writers are with him. I don’t know where all this evolved but he really takes an interest in the beat writers, because we’re there with him most of the time. Not to say he doesn’t care about columnists. He does, as long as they’re fair. If a columnist takes him to task he’s okay as long as the columnist shows up and asks him directly and is fair.

Q. How did you handle the Mariotti slur? (Guillen referred to Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti as a “fag” after a critical column.)

A. That was an interesting situation. Our national baseball writer (Phil Rogers) was there and he decided I should write it. I had to telephone our sports editor and tell him what was going on, so they said write five inches on it. It was a national story in the sense that the degree of hatred in the word that was used really brought it to the forefront.

Q. Did your opinion come through?

A. Not at all.

Q. Do clubhouses shut down on writers?

A. I’ve seen it happen to a couple of guys. It’s very uncomfortable.

Q. Are most clubhouses civil to writers?

A. It varies clubhouse to clubhouse. Last year’s was the best one I’ve ever come across. When I covered the Diamondbacks one or two guys made it difficult. On the whole it was okay but you’d be surprised how much difference one or two guys can make.

Q. Advice to journalism students?

A. Just keep kicking tires and seeing what’s out there. There’s always going to be an emphasis on news and writing. You see people who don’t want to do it for the long run yet there’s always a need for beat writers. There are two openings now – the Angels job on the Orange County Register and the Cubs beat on the Sun-Times. I don’t see people who like to do this for a long time. Some don’t like the travel. Some feel their niche is writing rather than reporting. I see more people doing this for two or three years and moving on. There is a burnout factor.

Q. What about you?

A. No. I enjoy this now. If I lose the competitive feeling maybe it will be time to move on but I haven’t felt that.

(SMG thanks Mark Gonzales for his cooperation)

An Interview with Aaron Gleeman

“We recently posted a two-paragraph Help Wanted ad on Rotoworld, looking for a couple of part-time baseball writers for the upcoming season, and received over 800 applications within 72 hours, many of them from veteran journalists…the pool of people interested in getting involved with fantasy sports is massive.”

“Writing about fantasy sports requires tons of opinions and predictions, so it’s fairly easy for people to judge how much of an expert you really are after a while…My finest moment is probably touting Johan Santana as the next big thing back in 2002. To this day people who own him in keeper leagues still thank me.”

“Since joining Rotoworld I’ve interacted in person or via e-mail with most of the beat writers covering MLB teams for newspapers, and save for a few examples they’re generally extremely outgoing and fantasy friendly.”

Position: Senior Baseball Editor, Rotoworld; Contributor, NBCSports.com; Blogger, AaronGleeman.com

Born: 1983; St. Paul, Minnesota

Education: University of Minnesota School of Journalism; left early for job with Rotoworld

Career: AaronGleeman.com 2002-present; Insider Baseball 2003-2006; The Hardball Times 2004-2006; Rotoworld 2005-present; NBCSports.com 2006-present

Personal: Single

Favorite restaurant (home): Yangtze, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, “my favorite spot for Chinese takeout. Awesome hunan chicken.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Greasy Tony’s, Tempe, Arizona, “best Philly cheese steaks outside of Philly, with the added touch of using napkins and silverware from other restaurants.”

Favorite hotel: Bellagio, Las Vegas “Stayed during the most recent winter meetings, defeated the $2-$5 no-limit game, and decided the whole place was way, way too nice for a bunch of baseball writers”

Aaron Gleeman, posted on aarongleeman.com, February 19. 2009:

http://www.aarongleeman.com/

I’ve been blogging about the Twins (and other things) since August 1, 2002, which is the equivalent of a few centuries in blogger years (they’re like dog years, but with fewer flea shots and more typing). In fact, this blog is so old that when it launched Ron Gardenhire was a rookie manager, his team was trying to make the playoffs for the first time since 1991, and there was exactly one Twins blog
even on my radar. Oh, and I was home for the summer following my freshman year of college.

In the half-dozen years since then Gardenhire has won 557 games, his team has gone to the playoffs four times, this blog has had 4.9 million visitors, and the “Twins blogosphere” has expanded to include literally dozens of sites. Several of the best, longest-running Twins bloggers have sadly hung up their keyboards
over the years
, but a new Twins blog starts up seemingly every week and never before has there been this much Twins coverage available to fans.

At some point during the past six-plus years I’ve linked to just about every Twins blog, but the medium has expanded so much so quickly that it’s impossible to keep up with everything and everyone. My daily reading routine typically includes around a dozen Twins blogs, and with spring training starting up
and another season thankfully around the corner it seems like a good time to give them some attention that goes beyond the sidebar links. So, in no particular order here are my favorite current Twins blogs …

Q. Can you describe and explain your work for various outlets?

A. My primary job is Senior Baseball Editor for Rotoworld, which involves writing columns and player news blurbs, editing our annual Fantasy Baseball Draft Guide magazine, and coordinating the site’s baseball coverage. I’m also a frequent contributor to NBCSports.com, shooting videos and writing columns. And I’ve been blogging about the Minnesota Twins and other stuff at AaronGleeman.com since 2002.

Q. How does the work of fantasy sports media differ from that of non-fantasy sports media?

A. The big differences are that we’re typically not out covering live events or interviewing athletes and our focus is on individual performances rather than team success. No fantasy owner cares if the Nationals just dropped their 100th game, because he’s interested in whether Ryan Zimmerman went 0-for-4 or 2-for-4. Our coverage is representative of that and tends to revolve around analysis and projection more than reporting and recapping.

We also need to cover every team rather just focusing on one beat and tend not to get caught up in “intangibles” because whether or not David Eckstein is truly a “scrappy gamer” doesn’t really change his actual numbers. Oh, and we don’t worry nearly as much about who’s dating Madonna.

Q. Can you give us an idea of the size of fantasy sports media? How difficult is it to break into?

A. Fantasy sports is definitely a multi-billion-dollar industry at this point. I just saw a study showing that something like 40 million Americans play fantasy sports on a regular basis. In terms of breaking in, it’s pretty tough. We recently posted a two-paragraph Help Wanted ad on Rotoworld, looking for a couple of part-time baseball writers for the upcoming season, and received over 800 applications within 72 hours, many of them from veteran journalists. It’s an area that continues to thrive while some other forms of media have declined and the pool of people interested in getting involved with fantasy sports is massive.

Q. How is a fantasy sportswriter’s performance measured? Your proudest moment as a fantasy sportswriter?

A. Writing about fantasy sports requires tons of opinions and predictions, so it’s fairly easy for people to judge how much of an expert you really are after a while. We rank players constantly and do projections for everyone’s stats, so it’s tough to get away from your performance, right or wrong. My finest moment is probably touting Johan Santana as the next big thing back in 2002. To this day people who own him in keeper leagues still thank me.

Q. Your thoughts on continuing in fantasy sports media or moving into non-fantasy media?

A. I’ve bounced back and forth quite a bit already. I co-created The Hardball Times and wrote hundreds of “real baseball” columns there while serving as the site’s editor-in-chief, and my blog has never been about fantasy sports. I’m also fortunate that Rotoworld and NBCSports.com both allow me to branch out beyond strictly fantasy topics on a regular basis. At the same time, I really enjoy fantasy sports and the audience is probably more passionate and knowledgeable than the average sports fan, so it’s a great job.

Q. What is the attitude of non-fantasy media toward fantasy media?

A. I’d say it’s a bit like the attitude mainstream media members have toward bloggers. Some look down on the whole thing, but the sheer number of people involved/interested in the medium has that number shrinking every day. Since joining Rotoworld I’ve interacted in person or via e-mail with most of the beat writers covering MLB teams for newspapers, and save for a few examples they’re generally extremely outgoing and fantasy friendly.

Q. What is the pressbox credential situation for fantasy media?

A. My guess is that getting credentialed is pretty tough for a lot of fantasy media, but being part of the NBC Sports family gives Rotoworld access that smaller sites can’t secure. We don’t typically cover individual games, but I’ve been credentialed for the MLB winter meetings several times and our Senior Football Editor, Gregg Rosenthal, is part of the media throng at the Super Bowl.

Q. Who owns Rotoworld and how much traffic does it get?

A. NBC owns Rotoworld. On a monthly basis Rotoworld averages two million unique visitors and 40 millions page views.

Q. Who and what do you read and watch for your sources of information?

A. Player news blurbs have always been the driving force behind Rotoworld and those come from our staff constantly scouring every possible source of information for news and notes. That includes every major newspaper and website, plus the never-ending blogosphere. We source everything, break the information down into an easy to digest format, and add our own analysis.

Q. Do fantasy sports, with their emphasis on individual stats, erode team partisanship among fans?

A. Absolutely. I’m sure there are some Red Sox fans who refuse to draft Yankees on their fantasy teams, but trying to balance that is part of what makes fantasy sports so great. There’s nothing more amusing than a Minnesotan watching the Vikings play the Packers while rooting for Greg Jennings to catch a touchdown.

Q. Which coaches are fantasy players wary of and why?

A. Prior to being fired recently Mike Shanahan was enemy No. 1 for fantasy football players. Denver almost always had productive rushing attacks under Shanahan, but since Terrell Davis retired he rarely stuck with one running back for long and seemed to enjoy being coy with the media about who would be getting the carries in a given game. He’s a tremendous coach, but the members of fantasy football nation who devoted roster spots to Selvin Young, Tatum Bell, Peyton Hillis, Michael Pittman, Ryan Torain, Andre Hall, and P.J. Pope last season probably won’t miss Shanahan.

Q. The NFL says fantasy football is not Internet gambling because it is “a game of skill”. Internet gambling or game of skill – which is it?

A. Definitely a game of skill. It’s sort of like poker in that while there’s plenty of luck involved in the short term, ultimately skill emerges over the long haul. If you’re trying to win, joining a fantasy football league with Gregg Rosenthal should be avoided every bit as much as sitting down at a poker table with Phil Ivey.

Aaron Gleeman, posted on Rotoworld.com, December 11, 2009

http://blogs.rotoworld.com/matthewpouliot/

–

You know things are officially coming to a close when you’re sitting in the media room watching hotel employees take down the MLB logo backdrop from the press-conference stage. Even if some huge move happened right now, there would be nowhere to announce it and only a handful of reporters to cover it. In other words, the winter meetings are over. This was my second trip to the winter meetings and there were far more big moves this week than two years ago in Orlando, although there are still plenty of big names without homes and big rumors swirling …

* A.J. Burnett appears to be deciding between the Braves and Yankees after both teams upped their offers multiple times this week. A couple more increases and he’ll be closing in on a $100 million deal, although my guess is that the Braves will eventually bow out.

* For now at least the Cubs are done talking to the Padres about Jake Peavy, but I’d be shocked if we don’t hear plenty about general manager Kevin Towers trying again to deal him before spring training. I’d still bet on Peavy being on another team come Opening Day.

* If speculation about Mark Teixeira wanting to play close to home are true then he’s deciding between the Nationals and Orioles. If instead he merely wants to be on the East Coast then the Red Sox may be the front-runners. And if all of that talk is overblown and he’s simply looking to cash in for as much as possible the Angels are still very much in the mix. Wherever he ends up, it sounds like it’ll be for more than $150 million.

* There’s been very little talk about Manny Ramirez, aside from Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti saying today that he remains a) very interested and b) unwilling to hand out a four- or five-year deal. Several teams may eventually shift their focus from Teixeira to Ramirez, but for now the Dodgers are still the most likely destination.

* Derek Lowe will almost surely sign with an East Coast team. For now the Phillies and Yankees appear to be leading, but if the Red Sox come up with a competitive offer I’d bet on Lowe returning to Boston.

* If my reading-between-the-lines skills are worth anything, then the Twins will trade Delmon Young before spring training. Possible destinations? Let’s say … Seattle, Philadelphia, Colorado, and San Francisco.

* And last but not least I’ve learned plenty of important lessons this week. Among them: Lou Piniella likes to bet on horses
, sometimes clubs will make you a member
even when you don’t want to join, everything at the Bellagio is extremely high-end except for the toilet paper
, being let into a team’s hotel suite
isn’t as exciting as it may sound, $12 pizzas taste the same
as $3 pizzas, Ken Williams is the pied piper
of newspaper writers, Johnny Chan is just as intimidating in person
, and Greg Maddux is a class act
.

My hope is that you enjoyed reading my coverage of the winter meetings as much as I enjoyed writing it, so thanks for all the comments and e-mails. And don’t forget to check out Rotoworld’s constantly updated player news page
for all the latest news, rumors, and analysis, because the offseason moves definitely don’t stop rolling in once everyone checks out of the Bellagio.

(SMG thanks Aaron Gleeman for his cooperation)

An Interview with Randy Galloway

“I’ve said for years that the art of writing is not my strongest point. My strength is having opinions and a work ethic and liking what I’m doing. Because as you know a lot of sportswriters don’t like what they’re doing.”

“I have been told I write like I talk, particularly from people in other parts of the country. They say I’m the only guy in the country who writes like I talk. I don’t know if that’s good or not. But I’ve tricked them so far for 40 years and I want to continue to do so.”

“I’m a fan of people. I want these people to do well, but you have to separate that from being a fan of the team in how you report.”

Randy Galloway: Interviewed on October 10, 2006

Position: Columnist, Ft. Worth Star Telegram; host, ESPN 103.3 FM

Born: 1943, Mayfield, Kentucky

Education: Sam Houston State, North Texas State

Career: Dallas Morning News 1964 (part-time), Port Arthur News 1965-66, Dallas Morning News 1966-1998, Ft. Worth Star Telegram 1998 -;

WBAP radio 1985 -2002; ESPN 103.3 FM 2002 –

Personal: married, two daughters, four grandchildren

Favorite restaurant (home): Bob’s Steak and Chop House, Dallas – “best steak going and they throw in a carrot, too”

Favorite restaurant (road): Joe’s Stone Crab, Miami Beach – “never miss it when I’m there – stick with the stone crabs – hash fries are the best”

Favorite hotel: Edmonton, Fairmount Macdonald. “Old restored hotel. Best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. Great bar, great rooms, great service.”

Q. You wrote yesterday, “McNabb missed nothing on Sunday. Bledsoe missed the boat. Even the dock, actually.” How do you come up with lines like that?

A. I don’t know. I’ve heard this all my life – how do you think of things to write? How do you do what you do? The answer is I don’t know. I never figured that out. It’s something I always wanted to do – one side of my family was in the newspaper business for three generations. I grew up around the newspaper business. My mother, Margaret Galloway, wrote for the Morning News and then smaller papers – women’s news. My uncle, Danny Bingham, was a political writer for the old Nashville Banner. My Aunt Jen was with small papers in Kentucky – she wrote for the women’s section. My grandfather, George Bingham, was a publisher in Kentucky. So it was something I was around – the combination of that and loving sports – I guess I just morphed into a sportswriter.

I can remember the first time I read a Blackie Sherrod column – in eighth grade – Blackie had worked on the Fort Worth Press with Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins and Gary Cartwright – a Hall of Fame staff – but by ‘57 he had come to the Dallas Times Herald. I came home and saw his column and said, “That’s what I want to do”. We all grew up trying to write like Blackie. If you were smart you realized you were making a fool of yourself and changed in a hurry. Blackie’s style was unique. He had his own version of the English language – a good version – his style could grab the reader.

Q. How would you describe your style?

A. I’ve said for years that the art of writing is not my strongest point. My strength is having opinions and a work ethic and liking what I’m doing. Because as you know a lot of sportswriters don’t like what they’re doing – I love the hell out of what I’m doing. I’ve never been scared to give an opinion. That’s carried me a long way down the road as opposed to just being a pure writer. You don’t have to have Blackie Sherrod’s kind of talent – but you have to find your style and go from there. I can think of three guys who are just terrific writers, but it kind of stops right there. I know guys who – if they could write like they talk – they would be the best in the business, but it never comes across.

I have been told I write like I talk, particularly from people in other parts of the country. They say I’m the only guy in the country who writes like I talk. I don’t know if that’s good or not. But I’ve tricked them so far for 40 years and I want to continue to do so.

Q. Do you write in a Texas idiom?

A. Yes. Because that’s the way I talk. No doubt about that. What I talk to students they ask if my style would work in LA or Miami or New York – I say I don’t know. Luckily I grew up here and never had to leave to do what I want to do. I like living here. Blackie said he was asked that all the time. The Morning News was a country newspaper with little emphasis on sports in the 1960s – then in the late 1970s there was a boom – our 20-man sports staff expanded to 100 in two years – Dave Smith brought in writers from all over the country. Gary Myers came from New York and Gary asked me if Blackie could take his column and be as big in New York and I said yeah, but he had doubts it could happen. Blackie was a Texas guy who did it here.

It’s a blessing I never had to do that. A great part of all this is being here and the emphasis on sports here and on newspapers and TV and radio and the amount of money spent. You couldn’t ask to be in a better place, particularly if it’s your home.

Q. Has your radio work impacted your print work?

A. Great question. I worry like hell and have for years. I’ve been doing radio for 20 years. The last thing I want is for someone to say Galloway is not giving the same effort on print because of radio, or vice versa. You serve two masters – it’s a huge responsibility in both areas. If it impacts you so that you’re not concentrating on one as much as the other you really have a problem. It’s an ongoing worry for me. When I started radio my editor at the Morning News, Dave Smith, was against it, even though the executives favored it because of the publicity for the paper. But Dave never liked it and it probably led to a falling out after a number of years – we’re all right now. Dave was worried about control and about what I would say on the radio. When I left for the Star Telegram in ’98 he was asked that in a radio interview – “Did Galloway break stories on radio that should have been in the paper?” – and he said “Absolutely not”. He said I was way too professional for that – I really appreciated him saying that. Frankly, newspaper is always the first priority.

A good example is when Buck Showalter was fired (as Texas Rangers manager) last week. I got a call in the morning before the announcement. I called our beat guys and other columnist. I told our beat guys to get it online now. As soon as the Star Telegram got it up online I could go with it on air. So you can play both ends – you can serve both masters because of the newspaper website.

In the newspaper business today you don’t hold a story. I like for people to wake up in the morning and fall down with a huge headline – the proverbial scoop. I’m old school – you hit the competition and the reader over the head. Well, that’s gone. You got a story now it’s going online. I’m uneasy with that but such is the nature of the beast.

Q. So you’re on the clock for 24 hours?

A. I was a baseball beat man for 10 years and I tell people no way I could do it now. You are on the clock for 24 hours a day if you are a beat man. My admiration for beat people always has been at the highest level, and even more so now. Covering baseball in the 70s you had one cycle – once the game was over and the paper went to bed at midnight you didn’t have to worry about anything. If you got beat you couldn’t answer for 24 hours – at midnight you were totally off the clock.

Q. What do you read?

A. The Internet – greatest device ever invented for sportswriting. Ten years ago when it surfaced as a tool I was one of those saying “Never”. Now I don’t know how I survived without it. Every day I deal with all the websites, sportspages.com, espn.com, SI.com, Fox and CBS and various other websites.

Q. What about blogs?

A. I don’t read the blogs and never have.

Q. Magazines?

A. I’m ashamed to admit, no. I read SI, but not as religiously as I once did. For 30 years when SI came out I read it, but now I’m more likely to read SI.com.

Q. Must reads?

A. Peter King and Don Banks at SI.com. Tom Verducci (SI) – I love his work. Bill Simmons – I’m glad he’s back on ESPN.com. The Dr. Z stuff (SI.com). Marc Stein (ESPN.com) for basketball.

Q. You wrote in a column that that “professional journalists cover the real world”, implying that sportswriters are not professional journalists. Do we detect a bit of existential angst?

A. I’ve always considered sportswriting – God bless it – a great way to make a living and have a lot of fun. It’s a noble endeavor but not one that ranks with what’s going on in Baghdad or in the White House.

Although having been in it long enough I can say that things have changed a heckuva lot in the jock kingdom. Beat guys have to be police reporters, financial experts, shrinks and everything else – so a lot has changed. I’ve always tried to keep sports in proper perspective based on what we cover – that line was a friendly shot at a friend of mine – he’s in TV – who always is saying, “I’m a professional journalist”. Okay, I’m not – I just make a living at this.

Q. What kind of personality does it take to succeed in sports media?

A. You have to have a trust factor with people you cover. That includes an openness that I’m not out here to burn you but to give an opinion on what’s going on and why it is happening. And while there will be things you won’t like I’m going to try and write it strictly from a business standpoint and not a personal standpoint.

People don’t like to have bad things written about them particularly if it’s personal. I’ve had people mad at me for years over something that was written. Now you see the sports media with all the blogs and e-mails – we’re almost held to the same standards as the athletes by the readers. So the criticism comes in aimed at us and I’ve seen people in our business become touchy over that criticism. I like it. My e-mails pile up like crazy. I used to say I would never do the e-mail thing but now of course I can’t live without it. I love it – particularly those who are critical. I learn from it – it holds us to higher standards, so to speak.

Q. Do you have to be a fan to do your job?

A. I do think you have to like sports. People always ask me if I hate the Cowboys – they want to know why I’m so critical of the Cowboys. I write more about the Cowboys that any other team although the Mavs are coming up to that. A lot of fans don’t want to read critical stuff. My answer is that I grew up here and I was here the day the Cowboys were founded in 1960, so I’ve watched this team grow.

I’m a fan of people. I want these people to do well, but you have to separate that from being a fan of the team in how you report. Anybody in our business is lying if they say I don’t care what the New York Giants or the Cowboys do on a Sunday. It can work both ways. I loved being in Philadelphia two days ago and watching Donovan McNabb and how that game worked out. I could have cared less who won that game, but I liked what McNabb did compared to the other guy (Terrell Owens). It was justice.

Q. It’s been said that sportswriters root for good stories. Is that true?

A. To a certain degree. Do I always want a good story? Yes. But I’m not necessarily agreeing with all of that. That leads to almost a talk show mentality – I’ve done one of those for years – and I call Mondays “overreaction Monday” after a Cowboys game. Around here it’s said when the Cowboys win newspaper sales go up, but when they have a game like Sunday (38-24 loss to Eagles) I got a helluva lot more response through e-mails or radio than when they beat Tennessee 41-7 the week before. Do I want a good story – yeah. Do I hope it develops like Sunday – yeah. It wasn’t a good Cowboys story but it was a good McNabb story.

(SMG thanks Randy Galloway for his cooperation)

Embracing a strange moment

RANDY GALLOWAY

In My Opinion

My clumsy man-hug moment of the year came the other night.

Actually, I can’t remember another man-hug moment – ever – at least not while on a newspaper clock.

But with the Mavericks having won the NBA’s Western Conference, and now headed for The Finals, Avery Johnson had just finished his postgame media session Saturday night in Phoenix.

As he departed the podium, I was standing next to the interview room door.

Avery walked by. He was, well, pretty damn happy.

Admittedly, so was I. Happy for Avery. For Del Harris. For Ro Blackman. For Keith Grant, a Day 1 employee of the Mavericks from 1980.

People that you know and like, I got no problem being happy for their success.

Anyway, I gave Johnson a smile.

Understand that it was one of those “manly” atta-boy smiles.

The next thing I know I’m wrapped up in a man-hug.

Not handling it well (it’s probably a generational thing), I uttered something like, “Good for you, man.”

Keeping it manly, don’t you think?

But my friend, Radio Boy, he will read this, and then I will get the Journalism 101 lecture.

“You, as a professional journalist,” Radio Boy will Voice-of-God me, “cannot be going around man-hugging people that you cover.”

I didn’t. I was on the receiving end. Didn’t mind at all, actually.

And “professional journalist?”

Save that for the people who cover the real world. Say Baghdad. Or the White House. I write sports.

Maybe you noticed, I do have my favorites. Never denied that, and never failed to make it obvious.

Avery happens to be one of them. So is Big Nellie, now and when he held the same job.

In Arlington, I’ll take a happy man-hug any day from Rudy Jaramillo and Bobby Jones.

At Valley Ranch, the same goes for, yes, Jerry Jones. Don’t be shocked or disappointed.

Nobody has ripped Jerry as much as I have over the years, and will again, just as soon as this Eldorado Owens stupidity blows up on him.

But to say I don’t like Jerry, personally, that’d be a lie.

If I was into man-hugging, the list would be extremely short, but I’d man-hug anybody I wanted.

I guess, however, it’s that generational thing that prevents me from thinking along those lines.

But at times in this job, you also have to do the clumsy “forced” man-hug.

That’s in print, not in person.

On the list of people I’d never man-to-man hug, Mark Cuban would be up there pretty high. Not in the John Hart range. Or the Bill Parcells range. But way on up there.

And for Cuban, I’d say the feeling is mutual.

But in the category of “forced” man-hug in print, I refer to a column in this space from May 21, or before Game 7 of the Spurs series.

The general theme was “The Curse of Cuban.”

Something along the lines of how a once-free spending owner was being torched in the postseason by guys he refused to pay. The irony of it all.

Michael Finley had just hung a punch on the Mavs in that series’ Game 6, forcing a finale in San Antonio.

Steve Nash, of course, had done it one May ago in the playoffs.

I was wondering, in print, if some bad hoodoo-voodoo, thanks to Cuban, had cursed the Mavericks.

Now we know, however, that Finley was survived, and Nash was survived this time in the conference finals, and I am hereby revoking the Curse of Cuban idea.

(No, I do not count the Heat’s Antoine Walker as part of the hoodoo-voodoo connection. Actually, that was Big Nellie’s failed experiment.)

In this job, you’ve got to keep score on the people you owe.

Cuban, I owed, based on that particular column.

If I’m lucky, this will be last forced man-hug ever involving Mark.

But with Avery, this kind of unforced stuff is OK.

I’m just real picky about my man-hugging partners.

Randy Galloway’s Galloway & Co. can be heard weekdays 3-6 p.m. on ESPN/103.3 FM.

Just saying ‘No’ well worth this expense

By Randy Galloway

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

841 words

7 September 2006

The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram

Tarrant

1

English

Copyright (c) 2006 The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram. All rights reserved.

I’d do it for a million bucks.

By the way, that’s a million dollars a week.

Let’s see:

Fifty-two mil annual income. IRS gets over 40 percent. At current gas prices, and with 800 horses under the truck hood, being on the road constantly between Valley Ranch, downtown Dallas and Arlington, that’s another million gone.

I’m figuring take-home at just over $30 million. That’d put me at about a yearly break-even point based on the wife’s credit cards and my continuing bad habits.

But in the name of charity, I’d do it anyway.

I’d hire out as the “No Man” for our local trio of jock kingdom owners.

Jerry, Tom and Mark, they’ve all got plenty of Yes Men.

Some of which are even so-called media members.

But what our three rich locos really need, at the split cost of $333,000 a week (plus loose coins), is a No Man.

For a million bucks a week, I could have been there for Jerry in late winter, telling him, “No, dammit. Shut up, and listen to me.”

This was pretty simple, really. Mr. Jones’ Cowboys won nine games a year ago but missed the playoffs after crashing down the stretch.

Now, the NFL, it’s the easier league for a quick turnaround, the easiest league to be an instant title contender.

So what did the Cowboys need to get that done in ’06?

The right kind of No Man would have said, “Jerry, forget the goofy receiver. Throw all your off-season money at the offensive line and a big-time kicker. If you can win nine games with what you had, how many Ws can you add with what you need?”

Of course, the Yes Men applauded lovingly in the background as Mr. Jones did it his way.

At least, however, he did get the kicker, but now we wonder if it was the right one. Yet, as the new season approaches, the offensive line is the one area that could wreck the team.

And Mark? Well, if Jerry is considered hopeless when it comes to common sense, then Mr. Cuban is a terminal case.

If anyone ever needed a No Man, it’s Mark.

No, you don’t personally hijack the NBA Finals. No, you don’t turn the biggest local moment in basketball history into some kind of ego insanity trip.

Shut up, Mark. I’m your highly compensated No Man. Listen to me. Move away from it, including the baseline. Get your butt outta there.

It’s about the players, about the coach and the coaches. It’s not about you.

And so the Mavericks, maybe the best overachieving team ever around here, ended up being labeled nationally as a bunch of whiners.

It’s not what that team was about. It’s not the way that team should be remembered.

But Mark, without a No Man, ended up putting his personal stamp on his team. A stamp of disapproval in national eyes and, ahem, Bennett Salvatore eyes. That’s really unfortunate. As unfortunate as losing four straight in The Finals.

Then there’s Tom.

What are we going to do with Mr. Hicks?

Basically, he’s well-intended, but also desperate for a No Man.

Tom went on the radio with Norm Hitzges this week and gave opinions on his baseball team.

He said the Rangers’ players lacked mental toughness and clubhouse leadership.

No, Tom. No.

The No Man could have saved you.

If an owner wants to name names, then fine. But by offering a blanket clubhouse indictment in these two key areas, that means Hicks included, well, let’s just concentrate on one of many players who doesn’t lack mental toughness or leadership.

Michael Young.

Shut up, Tom.

Among others, you insulted your best overall player, and one of the best in baseball.

And the time is coming, in two years, when Young’s contract is up. Don’t think he won’t remember that.

Listen to the No Man, Tom.

You are an owner who is making a minimal financial contribution to payroll, at least by baseball standards.

Throwing rocks. Living in a glass house. Not a good combo, Tom.

The right kind of No Man would have been in your ear, telling you what to say and how to say it.

But you don’t say what you said.

The Rangers lack a lot of things, but I don’t see mental toughness by the players being even in the top 10.

Don’t listen to people who are telling you what they think you want to hear.

Listen to your No Man.

I don’t work cheap, but I will say No.

Randy Galloway‘s Galloway & Co. can be heard weekdays 3-6 p.m. on ESPN/103.3 FM.

Randy Galloway, 817-390-7760 rgalloway@star-telegram.co

/103.3 FM.

An Interview with Cal Fussman

“I’ve always felt people are more apt to give good answers when they’re relaxed, and that they can become relaxed when they see that you’re relaxed.

My goal is always to make people forget they’re being interviewed.”

“Walk into an interview with 100 questions in your head. Do not bring in any notes. Notes remind people that they’re being interviewed. Use two tape recorders so you can relax and won’t have to look over and check that they’re running properly.”

“I rarely ask a question that can be answered with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.”

Cal Fussman: Interviewed on January 13, 2010

Position: Writer at Large, Esquire

Born: 1956, Brooklyn, New York

Education: University of Missouri, 1978, BJ

Career: Freelance writer. Work has appeared in GQ, ESPN The Magazine, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Time, Life, Discover, Inside Sports, Sports Illustrated and numerous publications around the world. Worked briefly out of college for The Miami Herald and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Spent a couple of years at Newsday in the early ’90s.

Personal: Married, three kids

Favorite restaurant (home): Nate ’n Al Deli, Beverly Hills, “great breakfast vibe.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Le Bernardin, New York, “French seafood doesn’t get any better in America.”; Bartolotta, Las Vegas, “Italian seafood doesn’t get any better in America.”

Favorite hotel: La Mamounia, Marrakech, “made me feel like Winston Churchill”; The Gritti Palace, Venice, “made me feel like Somerset Maugham”; The spa at The Encore, LasVegas, “a very relaxing place to write”

Author of: MY REMARKABLE JOURNEY, the autobiography of Larry King; DOUBLE OR NOTHING, with Tom Breitling, the story of two guys who met over a veal parmigiana hero while in college and went on to make two one-hundred million dollar deals in Las Vegas; AFTER JACKIE, an oral history of the minority ballplayers who followed Jackie Robinson into the major leagues; THE GUEST WHO THREW TOMATOES, children’s book.

Excerpted from Cal Fussman profile of Muhammad Ali, Esquire, Oct. 1, 2003:

http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/ESQ1003-OCT_ALI_rev

HIS RESPONSES to questions were always short and simple, and sometimes profound.

“What was more important, saying, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong’ or not stepping forward when your name was called for draft induction?”

“The action,” he whispered.

“You’ve made a lot of people smile and laugh for a long time. But what makes you laugh?”

“Something that’s funny.”

“What is goodness?”

“My mother.”

“What’s your definition of evil?”

“Unfriendliness.”

“What did you learn from trying to come back from retirement at age thirty-eight, when you were badly beaten by Larry Holmes?”

“Stay around too long and you get whupped.”

“What makes you most proud?”

“My family.”

But sometimes there would be no response.

“Do fears diminish with time, or do they increase?”

Nothing.

“What are your biggest regrets?”

Silence.

Q. What’s the short history of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” column?

A. For about a dozen years, Esquire has been running the wisdom of people who’ve lived extraordinary lives in their own words under the heading “What I’ve Learned.”

The column has given me a chance to sit down and ask any question to: Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Clint Eastwood, Johnny Depp, General Tommy Franks, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Kennedy, John Wooden, Bobby Bowden, Donald Trump, Larry King, Lauren Hutton, George Clooney and others including the father of open-heart surgery, the first man to break the sound barrier, and the founder of the Internet.

Q. What’s the difference between a great interview and a so-so interview?

A. After a great interview, I celebrate over a wonderful meal. After a so-so interview, I don’t feel like eating.

Q. What part of interviewing is perspiration and what part is inspiration?

A. To me, the key is relaxation.

I’ve always felt people are more apt to give good answers when they’re relaxed, and that they can become relaxed when they see that you’re relaxed.

My goal is always to make people forget they’re being interviewed. This would obviously be a little more difficult if I was working with a camera. But I recently experimented with a camera, and my experiences have only amplified my approach.

Sometimes I do a lot of homework before the interview to enable my subject to relax. But I’ve been placed in the exact opposite situation. Esquire recently asked me to go out and interview a guy named Gerry. All I knew about Gerry was his name and his address. I didn’t recognize him when he came to the front door. Which is exactly what the editors at Esquire were counting on.

Gerry was Gerry Butler, an actor who’d starred in 300 and a few other recent successes. The editors wanted to see what would happen when an interviewer showed up at a movie star’s house with no idea who he was.

I had no idea that they were expecting a cover story (August, 2009). But I just treated the experience as if I’d met Gerry on a train. We had a great time. Because I was relaxed, he could laugh. It’s much easier to open up when you’re laughing.

Q. What kind of questions work best?

A. Why? How? I rarely ask a question that can be answered with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’

Q. How do athletes compare with non-athletes as interview subjects?

A. Depends on the setting. I would never want to interview an athlete in the locker room. There is something about a locker room that makes people think in clichés. In a relaxed setting, one-on-one, an athlete should be just as interesting as any other human being on the planet.

Q. What makes you cringe when you hear other interviewers?

A. When they turn the interview into a combat zone in order to look important.

Q. How would you coach a young sports media person to be a good interviewer?

A. Walk into an interview with 100 questions in your head. Do not bring in any notes. Notes remind people that they’re being interviewed. Use two tape recorders so you can relax and won’t have to look over and check that they’re running properly. Oh, and make sure they’re always loaded with fresh batteries.

Q. What would you have written about the Jim Brown interview that could not be conveyed in your format?

A. I don’t think the Jim Brown interview would’ve been better in narrative prose. But it would’ve had more impact if it had been on film. His expressions and the tone of his voice would’ve added a lot.

Q. Did you actually ask Yao Ming about fortune cookies?

A. I first met Yao in China back in 2000. I noticed at the time that there were no fortune cookies in China, and that Chinese people were intrigued to hear about them. So it made sense to get Yao’s impression nine years later.

Q. What did you ask Sting to get him on the subject of tantric sex?

A. Working without a camera gives me many advantages. Many of my questions start out with stories. I told Sting about a time when I went to a tantric sex seminar. So I wasn’t interrogating him about a subject that might make him suspicious or uncomfortable. I was asking him about a common experience.

Q. Leslie Nielsen gave you this: “There are many lessons my father gave me. But there was one that always stuck with me: He said to me, “Just remember, never say ‘That is.’ Say ‘That’s.'” What did it feel like to receive wisdom from Leslie Nielsen?

A. People who make me laugh are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Their minds move very quickly. You have to be smart to be funny, and smarter still to pretend to be dumb and funny. So I expect wisdom from people who make me laugh.

Q. You are posed with Nelson Mandela in your Facebook photo. What’s the story behind that?

A. I met Nelson in Ireland at the Special Olympics while working on a profile about Muhammad Ali. Ali was a hero of mine growing up, and it can be scary to meet your heroes because they can disappoint you. But Ali went beyond my expectations. When we met with Nelson, it was as relaxed as hanging around with an old friend.

Q. What sports media do you consume and why?

A. I find myself more and more gravitating to ESPN.com. I read everything that Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated writes. And it’s great to come across a book like Andre Agassi’s OPEN.

Excerpted from Cal Fussman “What I’ve Learned” interview with Leslie Nielsen, Esquire, March 18, 2008:

http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/leslie-nielsen-0408?click=main_sr

It was a boy’s name first.

One thing a person won’t do when he’s laughing is try to beat you up.

When I was a boy, I delivered newspapers on my bicycle at 64 below. The worst part is, I wanted to impress the girls, so I had to look good. I couldn’t wear a hat with earflaps. I had to sport the wave. So I’d put some water through my hair and push that wave up over my forehead. Then I’d step outside and splicccchhh — it would freeze.

On the Arctic Circle, where I grew up, laughter is part of the food of the day. Nobody wants to hear you say, “Gee, it’s really cold.”

There are many lessons my father gave me. But there was one that always stuck with me: He said to me, “Just remember, never say ‘That is.’ Say ‘That’s.'”

If you’re going fishing, make sure you don’t bring your sperm-whale line with you. A sperm whale goes down to twenty-five hundred feet and can hold its breath for eighty minutes.

Even if you did catch a sperm whale, when you put it in the boat, he’d sink it.

It took me a long time to realize that I came from a dysfunctional family. But, you know, at least I had the revelation.

I remember as a young man seeing Death of a Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb. When the play was over, nobody in the audience moved. All you could hear was a little sniffling. The silence was just overwhelming. It was a remarkable demonstration of the power of the theater. I’ll never forget that. Never.

Yes, it’s true, I’ve been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.

(SMG thanks Cal Fussman for his cooperation)

An Interview with Jason Fry

“To me it’s often instructive that whenever there’s a big controversy in a particular town you get the clearest view of it from a sportswriter from somewhere else. One of the San Francisco Chronicle columnists…wrote one of the best pieces about Alex Rodriguez’ troubles with the Yankees last summer.”

“During the NLCS, I read a great Cardinals blog called Viva El Birdos, even though the NLC didn’t go the way I wanted it to go. I felt I had more appreciation for the Cardinals and how their fans felt by reading a passionate Cardinals fan that was a great writer.”

“It’s fashionable among some bloggers to bash traditional sportswriters, but I don’t know of a responsible blogger who will do that. There is no doubt that most if not all bloggers rely on reporters who go into lockerrooms and work the phones and talk to general managers, and without that all bloggers would be much poorer. Bloggers forget that at their peril…. I do think that what Simmons and the great bloggers who followed his lead have done is taken away the idea that you can’t have great sportswriting unless you are in a lockerroom. It’s not true.”

Jason Fry: Interviewed on January 4, 2007

Position: co-columnist, Daily Fix; co-columnist Real Time, Wall Street Journal Online; co-blogger, Faith and Fear in Flushing

Born: 1969, Charlottesville, Virginia

Education: Yale, 1991, American studies

Career: IAQ Publication 1994, WSJ Online 95 –

Personal: married, one child

Favorite restaurant (home): The Good Fork, Brooklyn “it speaks for itself”

Favorite restaurant (road): Sonic, “ a chain”

Favorite hotel: “don’t have one”

Carl Bialik: co-columnist, Daily Fix, WSJ Online; free-content editor, Numbers Guy columnist, WSJ Online; co-founder, Gelf Magazine; host, Varsity Letters reading series

Born: 1979, New York City

Education: Yale, 2001, math/physics

Personal: single, no children

Career: WSJ Online 2002 – ; Gelf Magazine, 2005 –

Favorite restaurant (home): Amorina, Brooklyn “most creative pizza toppings, no annoying wait like Di Fara, no pretensions, and the talented chef, Ruth Kaplan is a friend of mine”

Favorite restaurant (away): Bentara, New Haven “delicious, inexpensive Malaysian with a great wine list”

Favorite hotel: “friends’ couches”

Editor’s Note: The Wall Street Journal Online’s Daily Fix column, written by Jason Fry and Carl Bialik, is a digest of quality sports journalism culled from print and online media. The column, launched in August 2001, has been written by Fry and Bialik since August 2002. Bialik did not participate in this interview.

Q. Are you a connoisseur of good sportswriting?

A. I certainly hope to be. I’ve arrived at much greater appreciation of good sportswriting since writing for the Fix for these five years.

Q. Did you read sportswriting before doing The Fix?

A. Before doing this I certainly enjoyed sports, but mostly I stuck to baseball, which is the sport I love above all others, and the Mets, the team I love above all others. So my horizons were not as broad about the great sportswriting that is out there.

Q. How do you know when you see a good sports column?

A. Good question. It just kind of feels right. Am I quickly reminded of what’s being commented on, without having to wade through the whole recollection, which is a tricky balance. Beyond that – is there a point of view I didn’t expect, or if I did, is the writing so well done or so insightful it makes me think about it or appreciate that perspective? The other thing that jumps out – is the writer passionate about the subject? Every columnist faces the dilemma of having to produce a column when nothing is moving him or her. I’m sympathetic to that as a columnist myself – you can tell when a columnist has caught fire.

I also write a column called Real Time about how technology is changing our daily lives. Writing that has been good for The Fix – it’s given me an appreciation for what columnists face having to file as many times as they do. My co-writer Carl Bialik, who writes his own weekly column called The Numbers guy, would say the same thing. It’s easy to criticize columnists but you’re not as quick to do it when you are doing it yourself.

Q. Does Daily Fix criticize writers?

A. Very rarely. Honestly, that’s because part of what we hope to do is motivate the reader to click through and read the columns. Life is short – the workday is busy – we don’t see the point of sending people off to bad sportswriting. Once in a great while we take exception to something, but then it’s the argument, not the writing. That’s just not what we do.

Q. Can you tell immediately if a column is worthy of mention?

A. Usually. Having written The Fix for years there are writers I’ve come to rely on. There are some sportswriters out there who, even if it’s not a newsworthy day, they’ll do a lot with very little – and that helps us.

Q. Who?

A. Joe Posnanski (KC Star) , Bruce Jenkins (SF Chronicle), Lisa Olsen (NY Daily News), Bill Simmons (espn.com), Ray Ratto (SF Chronicle), Tom Boswell (Washington Post). I could go on and on, there are some wonderful writers out there. On days when not much is going on we tend to go to our all-star columnists hoping they will save us.

Q. How do you put together The Fix?

A. It’s interesting, because the Daily Fix was envisioned as a showcase for great sportswriting when it began in the summer of 2001. The primary mission was to find great writing, introduce it and get out of the way of the writers. It soon became apparent that’s not what our readers were expecting. What they wanted was a water-cooler primer of the biggest stories of the day – with great writing about them. That’s a different thing. What we find now is that when you come in you know there are three or four stories that are so big that people are writing about them and people want to read about them. Today it’s the Sugar Bowl and the Dolphins coach going to Alabama – it would be strange if those topics were not in The Fix, and indeed they were.

Beyond that we have favorite writers we always look to see. We rely on e-mail tips from readers – that’s invaluable. Google News can be your friend – it has helped me a lot in finding columns in smaller papers off my usual route.

We try to get it out by noon at the latest. We come in and write until we have 1300 words. That’s an arbitrary limit but if you do more you risk exhausting people. If there’s really big news we blast out an early Fix to get people talking. We did that after the Fiesta Bowl because it was such a great game.

Q. Do you have to watch sports to do The Fix?

A. It certainly helps to have a mental map in your head before you go in to do it. We’re looking for good sportswriting. When Simon Barnes (Times of London) writes about soccer I can appreciate soccer through his eyes even though I can’t remember the last time I watched a soccer game. Our emphasis is on writing. My hope is that I can find good writing about a sport I’ve never seen.

Q. Do you have to know a lot about sports to size up good sportswriting?

A. Not necessarily, though it certainly helps. As a huge baseball fan I can appreciate an in-depth article or column that takes me into the subtleties but I don’t think it’s essential. Again, it’s the emphasis on writing above all else.

Q. By reading nationally and internationally do you get a different perspective than fans that read only local writing?

A. I think so. There are a couple of things I’ve learned doing The Fix. To me it’s often instructive that whenever there’s a big controversy in a particular town you get the clearest view of it from a sportswriter from somewhere else. One of the San Francisco Chronicle columnists – and I think the Chronicle has one of the strongest lineups of columnists – wrote one of the best pieces about Alex Rodriguez’ troubles with the Yankees last summer. It was either Bruce Jenkins or Scott Ostler. Being out of the day-to-day Sturm and Drang helped the writer. Not that the stuff in the Daily News and Post wasn’t good, but having a clear view helped the writer from San Francisco. I would like to think that that column jumped out at me because I was so used to scouting writers from other cities.

Another thing I feel I’ve gotten a sense of is how cities root and how sports is seen in different towns – I don’t think I would have appreciated that until The Fix broadened my horizons. It’s interesting to watch the tenor of Philadelphia versus Chicago versus Los Angeles versus New York.

Q. Does reading broadly make you a better sports fan?

A. Ideally I enjoy having gotten more of a national perspective, but at the same time part of loving sports is loving one team to death. That applies to writing too. I’m a huge Mets fan. I will read every local story on the Mets, which in New York is a lot of newspapers. And then I’ll read the best blog coverage.

At the same time it’s a great experience having more of a national perspective – it helps me appreciate the big sports stories coming out of other cities. I’ve gotten used to following them.

Q. Do you recommend wider reading for fans?

A. Absolutely. Every team is made up of good people who love their mother and deserve to win every game and every fan can tell you that. To give you an example, during the NLCS, I read a great Cardinals blog called Viva El Birdos, even though the NLC didn’t go the way I wanted it to go. I felt I had more appreciation for the Cardinals and how their fans felt by reading a passionate Cardinals fan that was a great writer. To me it makes those kind of Cinderella stories about teams that get rolling more entertaining if you can see it from their side’s perspective.

Q. Did The Fix link to Viva El Birdos?

A. Yes. We will link to blogs. Our feeling is that great sportswriting is great sportswriting wherever we find it.

Q. How does The Fix monitor the vast universe of blogs?

A. We don’t do it as well as we should because of how big that universe is. Having read Viva El Birdos during the fall I now know it’s out there – if something big happens to the Cardinals I will go back to it.

You could do a whole Daily Fix entirely of sports blogs and come up with a terrific roster of sportswriting every day. There are some fantastic writers out there blogging every day.

Q. There’s a philosophical debate between traditional sportswriters and bloggers over whose method is better. Any thoughts?

A. I’m a blogger myself. Faith and Fear in Flushing, with Greg Prince. To your point, it’s fashionable among some bloggers to bash traditional sportswriters, but I don’t know of a responsible blogger who will do that. There is no doubt that most if not all bloggers rely on reporters who go into lockerrooms and work the phones and talk to general managers, and without that all bloggers would be much poorer. Bloggers forget that at their peril.

I do think that what Simmons and the great bloggers who followed his lead have done is taken away the idea that you can’t have great sportswriting unless you are in a lockerroom. It’s not true. What Simmons did was weave together being a fan with being a reasonably impartial observer of sport. And being up front about sport not existing in a vacuum but being a part of your life – how your love of sports or a team warps your life and how you build your life around that.

Even though all bloggers like me owe him a debt, he didn’t invent that. Go back and read Roger Angell’s (New Yorker) pieces from the 1960s on baseball. He was an out-and-out fan of the Mets and Red Sox and a huge fan of the game – he talks about watching games or an entire season and how he felt about that. I’m sure Roger Angell didn’t cheer while in the pressbox but he’s certainly cheering in print. It’s not a huge leap from Angell to bloggers like me and everybody else trying to write objectively about the teams they love without apologizing for loving them.

Q. If everybody is writing, who is reading?

A. I suppose so. But there are a lot of people I know who read, whether The Fix or our blog, who are passionate fans of sports and very good writers, but have no urge to pick up a pen or hit the keyboard. I certainly hope so. Writers need readers to become better writers.

Q. Seems like Daily Fix doesn’t do as much with the major sports websites as with print?

A. I think we have a fair proportion, certainly of espn.com links. There’s no explicit plan regarding that – I would venture to say it’s a matter of proportion. So many papers have one or two or more terrific columnists, while there still are comparatively few sports websites with established columnists. It will be interesting to see how those percentages change in the next five years.

Q. Do you get any direction from sportspages.com?

A. I do look at it sometimes. I do a lot through Google News, which aggregates papers worldwide. The problem is that it’s hard to tell a straight game story from a column.

Q. Same shortcoming if Google News doesn’t aggregate websites, no?

A. It’s a fair point. Personally I look at espn.com every day to see what their columnists have to say. Most days something good is there. Yahoo Sports has hit my radar with Dan Wetzel and Jeff Passan. Another site that recently hit my radar is Slate.com. Today’s Fix had something by Josh Levin on why college football is so much more innovative than the NFL.

More and more of those places are getting added to our rounds – same thing with blogs. Every year we do best columns of the year – it should be called favorite columns – and one thing we picked up for ’06 was The Dugout. It sounds crazy but it’s an imaginary chat room between baseball players, with pictures and made-up nicknames and chat room talk. Dugout did a farewell to Buck O’Neil that was one of the most moving things I saw all year. For me it’s a way of finding more great new writers.

Q. How much opportunity is there for new writers?

A. There’s always opportunity for good writers who want to work really hard and learn – no matter what the medium. It’s certainly true that you have more avenues for creating a name for yourself and an audience. Obviously it depends on what you want to do. Some writers still want to go into the lockerroom. Some writers want to write about their life as a fan and now they have a way to do that with a blog. To me good writers who are really passionate about their craft ought to concern themselves with pursuing that craft rather than with career counseling.

It comes back to why The Fix showcases websites, blogs, and papers. Why can we write about sports we haven’t seen? It goes back to good writing being good writing, and that writers write best about what they love the most. That’s old advice but it’s still true.

One thing that can be frustrating writing The Fix is that people write in to compliment us about something a columnist has said. We’re just quoting somebody’s effort and work – they deserve the credit for that. Whenever somebody says they like the Daily Fix it’s flattering. We provide a service, and we hope our service is getting people to appreciate the great writers out there.

Q. Are you lobbied by writers and editors?

A. Writers and editors do write in pointing out the stuff they’ve done. That’s great – we’re totally happy with that. I can’t think of a situation where I haven’t been happy to have that or where anybody has been obnoxious about it. Promoting yourself is part of writing. Writing is hard and it takes a certain humility. I’m thrilled writers do that. If you’re a writer and nobody is reading you what’s the point? It’s even more important now with so much more to read and people feeling like they have so much less time.

Q. Best sports section in the country?

A. My favorite is the San Francisco Chronicle – Bruce Jenkins, Gwen Knapp, Scott Ostler and Ray Ratto are all great writers and favorites of mine. Other papers whose deep benches impress me are the Washington Post, Philly.com – combining the Daily News and Inquirer – and the Detroit Free Press.

Q. Best online sports section?

A. espn.com. People like to bash it, but there are a lot of very, very talented writers there.

(SMG thanks Jason Fry for his cooperation)

1. Bill Simmons, ESPN.com: He’s come a long way in our five years, from the Boston Sports Guy to the master of Sports Guy’s World, hirer of interns and the columnist most identified with the nation’s best-read sports site. At his worst, Mr. Simmons can come off as bored or burnt out — feelings he confirmed in an interview with SI.com earlier this year — and sometimes his columns are too much old TV and not enough sports. (An online widget that allows readers to mad-lib mock-Simmons columns is eerily accurate.) But even then, he’s reliably hilarious and almost impossible to stop reading.

And he pioneered not one but two powerful ideas: that writing about sports at the highest level doesn’t mean having to surrender being the kind of fan who lives and dies by the box score; and that sports can be discussed as just one ingredient of a lively, cross-pollinated pop culture that includes everything from music to old TV shows to ads. A million bloggers are in Mr. Simmons’s debt on both scores.

Finally, when a subject near and dear to Mr. Simmons’s heart comes around, something like the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl titles (after they won in 2002, he wrote, “Now I can die in peace“) or the 2004 Boston Red Sox championship, productivity may grind to a halt as his readers hit refresh on ESPN.com, waiting for his column to publish.

First Fix appearance: A diary of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ victory in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. “Some of you who have never encountered Mr. Simmons will find you share his rather bent view of the world,” the Fix wrote then. “If so, you’re in for a treat if you follow the link to the archive to his other stories. But beware: He can be an addiction.”

2. Thomas Boswell, Washington Post: After 22 years at the Post, Mr. Boswell remains our favorite baseball writer at any newspaper. Writing on deadline, he turned in a valedictory column about the 2004 Red Sox with allusions that reach to the heavens. Last year, for the first time in his column-writing career, Mr. Boswell got a hometown team to chronicle, and his joy upon the arrival of the Washington Nationals has been infectious.

First Fix appearance: Just two weeks into the column’s run, and in the middle of an exciting baseball season, Mr. Boswell wrote about … golf.

3. Jeff Jacobs, Hartford Courant: Too many columnists “report” by watching ESPN, reading the newspaper and calling on their memories of sports history. Not Mr. Jacobs, who goes to games, talks to overlooked sports figures and crafts original stories with careful thought and an engaging style. In 2003, Mr. Jacobs argued when a high-school football coach’s well-intentioned act cost him his job. The next year, he was there to celebrate when an official’s poor decision provoked a noble act at a high-school swim meet in 2004. Last year, Mr. Jacobs was sidelined by quadruple-bypass surgery, but he has returned with impressive energy.

First Fix appearance: In November 2001, writing on UConn men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun, his brother Bill, and their father who died too young.

4. Bruce Jenkins, San Francisco Chronicle: Grand Slam tennis tournaments create a pack mentality among sportswriters, who focus on the same predictable storylines. But Mr. Jenkins manages to break away from the pack with his unique take on the sport’s most-notable figures. Two years ago, Mr. Jenkins profiled Roger Federer, “the quiet genius of Wimbledon,” by focusing on the Swiss star’s love for his cow. And last year, the match of the U.S. Open, between Andre Agassi and James Blake, was captured best by Mr. Jenkins’s deadline prose.

First Fix appearance: Appropriately, a match report about the 2001 U.S. Open quarterfinal meeting of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi in which neither man broke the other’s serve and four tiebreakers were contested.

5. Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle: Along with fellow Fix honorees Jenkins, Ratto and Scott Ostler, Ms. Knapp rounds out the nation’s deepest bench of sportswriting talent. She excels at engaging her topics deeply, and addressing uncomfortable truths without discomfort. She has criticized herself and her fellow Bay Area sports scribes for going easy on the unfolding steroids scandal. In December 2004, she noted that Barry Bonds was getting a lighter touch than Jason Giambi was receiving in New York, perhaps because Bonds was more productive at the time. (Those roles have reversed since then.) Earlier that year, Ms. Knapp attended the memorial service for NFL player-turned-war victim Pat Tillman, and discovered a life worth remembering for much more complexity than merely being a “pure and simple hero.”

First Fix appearance: In August 2001 — back before BALCO, No. 73 and No. 715 — Barry Bonds merely was trying to stay ahead of teammate Rich Aurilia in the MVP race.

6. James Lawton, The Independent: When the world’s attention turns to soccer, the Fixers turn to the U.K. for the best English-language coverage. Mr. Lawton is our favorite read because he brings great passion to every column. In 2003, as the race to sign David Beckham was on, Mr. Lawton wrote, “we need to say his fame — if we want to be serious for a minute — has been built on a lie. It is a great big whopping lie.” No one wrote more movingly about Greece’s stunning victory at the 2004 Euro Cup. And last year, Mr. Lawton was amusingly over-the-top in describing the day on which American Malcolm Glazer purchased purchase Manchester United as the “the blackest one in the history of English football.”

First Fix appearance: Ahead of Brazil’s quarterfinal World Cup match against England in 2002, Mr. Lawton wrote that Ronaldo was eyeing redemption. Ronaldo scored all three of Brazil’s goals in their semifinal and final victories.

7. Dave McKenna, Washington City Paper: Mr. McKenna writes for a weekly paper, which lowers his frequency but grants him more space to write and to think things out. He uses those advantages so well that just about every one of his columns is Fixworthy, even though many of them are intensely local in a city that hasn’t had many sports successes in the last five years. In 2003, Mr. McKenna told the story of local hoops prodigy Kendall Marshall, who weighed 82 pounds, was 11 years old, and was already being hyped as the next LeBron James (back when Mr. James was a high-school player, not one of the NBA’s best players). Mr. Marshall, incidentally, is now six feet and hit six consecutive three-points at a recent youth tournament. And last year, Mr. McKenna profiled a local businessman who inserted himself, Zelig-like, into a Washington Nationals press conference to ask a pointed question about steroids.

First Fix appearance: In November 2001, Mr. McKenna explored why so few place kickers are black.

8. Joe Posnanski, Kansas City Star: Mr. Posnanski combines several virtues: clean writing; a knack for getting subjects to open up to him; and refreshing optimism. In 2002, he described weekly chess matches he played against Chiefs running back Priest Holmes, and what they demonstrated about his approach to football. And in 2004, defying all logic, he predicted in good humor that the Royals would make it to the World Series.

First Fix appearance: When the Royals fired manager Tony Muser in the first month of the 2002 baseball season, Mr. Posnanski explained that Mr. Muser simply had lost too many games. The Royals would go on to lose 100 games that year, 104 in 2004, 106 last year — and set a pace of 107 losses so far this year, perhaps redefining how many losses is too many.

9. Ray Ratto, San Francisco Chronicle/ESPN.com: A reliable cynic has been a welcome fixture on any sports page during the last five years of failed drug tests and boorish player behavior. The Bay Area has had more than its fair share of both types of badness, and Mr. Ratto has delighted in all the material. And man, can he write! In 2004, when Terrell Owens was on his way from the 49ers to the Eagles, Mr. Ratto wrote of the Philadelphia-T.O. tie-up, “This marriage comes straight from Satan’s left-hand suit pocket, and it will end very, very badly.” And earlier this year, Mr. Ratto explained why the allegations that Barry Bonds used steroids could never be wrapped up tidily.

First Fix appearance: Mr. Ratto questioned whether Mark McGwire really intended to retire when he announced as much in 2001. (Four years later, Ratto questioned whether McGwire’s fumbled testimony before a Congressional panel on steroids would imperil his Hall of Fame chances.)

10. Adrian Wojnarowski, The Record/ESPN.com: The New York area may have more columnists, per team, than any other metro area, and too many voices become too shrill to stand out. Mr. Wojnarowski manages to cover the major teams in original, thoughtful ways from his perch across the Hudson River. In 2002, when both resident teams of nearby Giants Stadium had Super Bowl hopes, Mr. Wojnarowski chronicled “the best of times for the beleaguered New York football faithful.” And the following year, when Todd MacCulloch was forced to retire from the NBA because of a neuromuscular degenerative disorder, Mr. Wojnarowski chased down stories from Nets teammates and friends about the beloved center.

First Fix appearance: After Rich Beem improbably won the 2002 PGA Championship, Mr. Wojnarowski offered some commentary from Papa Beem. The column had more staying power than did Mr. Beem, who has won just one more tournament — in 2003.

Tomorrow: Backstage at the Fix.

An Interview with Stefan Fatsis

“Just eight players who were on the Broncos when I was there in 2006 were still with the team when I wrote the new afterword – and just seven were when the 2009 training camp opened…I like to describe this book as the story of a dysfunctional workplace, in which paranoia is the preferred mode of operation and open communication is as familiar as Urdu.”

“With the web and social media, the nature of the race is changing. Everyone is a wire-service journalist now – including the athletes themselves, who can tweet their own news…I’m not saying anything brilliant here, but I think we’re in a fascinating transition period. New media are forcing mainstream media to reconsider their every process. Kill the morning-after game story!”

Stefan Fatsis: Interviewed on August 10, 2009

Position: Author/freelancer

Born: 1963, New York

Education: University of Pennsylvania, 1985, BA

Career: Associated Press, 1985-1994; Wall Street Journal, 1995-2006; Current – Regular guest on NPR’s “All Things Considered”; SI.com columnist; Slate.com sports podcast panelist

Personal: Married to NPR host Melissa Block; daughter Chloe, 7

Favorite restaurant (home): Komi, Washington DC, “Greek-derived; owner is a Broncos fan”

Favorite restaurant (away): Arpege, Paris “got engaged there”

Favorite hotel: Don’t have one!

Author of: “A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL”; “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players”; “Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America’s Heartland”

Stefan Fatsis, excerpted from Sports Illustrated, July 14, 2008:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1141764/1/index.htm

IN A couple of weeks, NFL
training camps will open. T.O. and his new sidekick Pacman—sorry, make that Adam—will star in the new season of HBO’s Hard Knocks. The 24/7 media machine will air endless loops of players in mesh cutoffs jogging, throwing and catching. Millions of pages and pixels will analyze the season ahead.

And none of it will convey the emotional reality of life inside the National Football League
.

Two summers ago, after two decades on the business end of a notepad, I joined the Denver Broncos
as a player. My goal was to write a book about the NFL
. My inspiration was George Plimpton
‘s Paper Lion, which offered the first inside glimpse of the growing sport of pro football (SI, Sept. 7 and 14, 1964). Plimpton quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions
and wore number 0. I placekicked and wore number 9. Neither of us was very good.

Paper Lion was groundbreaking sports journalism, but it was a product of its time. Plimpton devoted the bulk of his book to football’s then obscure strategic machinations, mythmaking tales from the trenches and training-camp hijinks—seven pages alone on rookies singing their college fight songs. A Brahmin intellectual in an aboriginal tribe, Plimpton made professional football sound like fun.

There were, to be sure, sophomoric diversions during my days in Denver
, like the time a punter’s keys were taped under a toilet or when coaches promised to abbreviate meetings if a certain kicker made a field goal. A 300-pound offensive lineman, P.J. Alexander, even made me sing my alma mater’s song. (I spend one page describing that.) Those antics stanched the boredom of 15-hour days. But they didn’t obscure a surprising truth about the NFL
: A lot of players hate their jobs.

Once they stopped laughing at the gray-haired guy in the size-7 cleats, my teammates saw me as a megaphone: I could correct the vast public misperceptions about what they do. The players wanted me to understand that apart from Sundays, which are simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating, their working lives are a seemingly endless string of unpleasantness: injuries, reminders from coaches that their jobs are on the line, distrust of their bosses, disgust over being scheduled like preschoolers, unfathomable psychological pressure. “You’re just seeing the worst part,” wide receiver Charlie Adams said to me about training camp. “Although the season kind of sucks, too.”

Bronco after Bronco compared college to the NFL
. In the former, players said, coaches tried to maximize their potential. In the latter, coaches sucked them dry. Starting linebacker Ian Gold
had a lucrative six-year deal. But he wore a shell of embittered indifference that he blamed on an institutional lack of integrity and loyalty. “You lay it on the line for these people, for this organization, and all it is is a moneymaking machine,” Gold said. “They’re looking for your replacement the day you step foot in this door.

The NFL
rolls that reality into its Lombardiesque image of toughness. From the absence of guaranteed contracts to the revolving locker room door, players are kept on an emotional knife’s edge in an attempt to breed desire and desperation. The players want compassion and communication. They get pressure and paranoia instead…

Q. ‘A Few Seconds of Panic’ is out in paperback. Did you write an update? How did the book challenge you as a writer?

A. I did write an update, that I think is revealing in several ways. One, just eight players who were on the Broncos when I was there in 2006 were still with the team when I wrote the new afterword – and just seven were when the 2009 training camp opened. That fact very starkly demonstrates the impermanence of pro football that is a theme of the book.

Two, the team’s offseason turmoil — owner Pat Bowlen firing coach Mike Shanahan, new coach Josh McDaniels trading quarterback Jay Cutler – says a lot about how the NFL operates as a business. I like to describe this book as the story of a dysfunctional workplace, in which paranoia is the preferred mode of operation and open communication is as familiar as Urdu. Which brings me to, three, my appraisal in the afterword of the GM at the time I was in Denver, Ted Sundquist.

After reading the book, Sundquist told me he was surprised by the level of animosity the players felt toward management. I told him that I was surprised that he was surprised, because the players I was with were so overwhelmingly disillusioned by the management of their business. But Sundquist, whom I admire enormously, also said the book changed how he would run a team if he got another chance – that is, more openly with greater respect and consideration for the players. If that happens, and that’s this book’s contribution to the NFL, I’ll be satisfied.

Q. What are the pleasures – and pains –of writing sports for the Wall Street Journal?

A. You mean what were they? I can’t swear that my pleasures and pains are the same as those experienced by reporters at the paper today; it’s changed rather a lot since I left to kick footballs.

When I worked there, the pleasures could be enormous, mainly because the mandate was to cover sports differently from how the rest of the media covered it. I had the freedom to take the time necessary to investigate academic shenanigans by ex-college basketball coach Jim Harrick or the dangers of aluminum bats (I wrote one of the first comprehensive pieces on that, in 1996) or the legal claims of the BCS. I was allowed to follow a baseball researcher on a hunt for a man he suspected of being the first black player in the majors (we found the evidence among century-old records in a small town in Georgia). I got to write about Retrosheet’s efforts to assemble the box scores of every MLB game and why baseball pitchers don’t wear single-digit uniforms and why NFL players are wearing fewer pads than ever.

I had the privilege of learning from John Helyar, who wrote brilliant sports-business narratives, and of succeeding, for a time, the great Fred Klein, one of the last of the erudite, literary sports columnists. I got to write distinctive daily columns from two Olympics and cover a World Cup – without having to worry about a single time, score or record. The Journal’s goal was to do things smartly and exactingly and comprehensively – but also differently. Because of the volume and cacophony of sports media, that could be especially challenging, but it also made the rewards much greater.

The pains? An occasional tone-deafness to sports. An editor or two. The usual reporter gripes.

Q. Have you ever done competitive sports journalism involving breaking news? Your thoughts on the daily journalistic horse race and those who run it?

A. I’m proud to say I broke plenty of sports news for the Journal – sports-business news, anyway. I was never a team beat writer – and never really wanted to be one. But I did work for the AP for eight years, so I understand that the horse race is part of journalism.

With the web and social media, the nature of the race is changing. Everyone is a wire-service journalist now – including the athletes themselves, who can tweet their own news, which is what soccer player Jozy Altidore did the other day when he broke via Twitter his own story that he was joining Hull City of England’s Premiere League. I’m not saying anything brilliant here, but I think we’re in a fascinating transition period. New media are forcing mainstream media to reconsider their every process. Kill the morning-after game story!

Mainstream media want to make sure consumers are looking at something that includes the dwindling numbers of ads. Reporters want to be the first to report something. Peter King apologized to his bosses the other day for reporting via Twitter, not on the site of his employer, SI.com. And athletes and other newsmakers want and have the ability to better control their own messages and images. For now, everyone is feeling his way and no one has good answers.

Q. Aside from collecting royalties for “Word Freak,” what was your greatest Scrabble moment?

A. When I played an obscure and beautiful word that I had studied and fallen in love with: OQUASSA. It’s a small lake trout.

Q. Your critique of the Facebook Scrabble application?

A. I play it all the time against friends, but it has more than a few flaws, chief among them the lack of a “challenge” function – you can’t challenge an opponent’s play – and the lack of a “tile tracker” to tell you which tiles remain unplayed and the inability to play a timed game.

The whole Hasbro-Scrabulous showdown – when Hasbro, Scrabble’s owner, shut down the popular unauthorized site and replaced it with its own program– was a fiasco, in my mind. But I’ll save my deconstruction for another forum.

Q. What sports media – mainstream and non-mainstream – do you consume and why?

A. Everyone’s list is a lot longer than it was a few years ago, and I think that’s a good thing. I read everything from the ink versions of the Times and Post (Washington) and Sports Illustrated to smarty pants sites like Baseball Prospectus and Football Outsiders to fan sites like Big Soccer and Orange Mane – for Broncos fans – to the impossibly prolific Joe Posnanski’s impossibly well-written blog to the excellent Sports Law Blog to web mainstays like Kissing Suzy Kolber and Deadspin to the hilarious Soxaholix to the indispensable Team Handball News, because I love me some team handball.

If I’m going to be informed about what I’m supposed to be well-informed about I need to absorb as much information as possible, and there’s never been more information about sports and culture as there is now.

Q. Your journalistic and writing influences?

A. Newspaper column-writing division: George Vescey. WSJ division: Fred Klein and John Helyar. Sports nonfiction conference, inspiration division: George Plimpton. Sports nonfiction conference, irreverence division: Jim Bouton.

Q. What’s next?

A. I hope another book, possibly nonsports. Working on it.

Stefan Fatsis, from Slate, Oct. 26, 2006:

http://www.slate.com/id/2152255

On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records
for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY).

In the community of competitive Scrabble, of which I am a tile-carrying member, the game has been heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with potential staying power. Cresta’s 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently.

Since virtually all sports involve variable conditions, comparing one performance to another is technically imperfect. Consider the absence of black players in Babe Ruth’s day, or the presence of steroids in the Barry Bonds era. On its face, the new Scrabble records seem to avoid such problems. No one’s juicing in Scrabble. Points in a game are just points in a game, and Michael Cresta scored 830 of them. On Scrabble’s members-only list-serve, Crossword Games-Pro
, most players have hailed this harmonic convergence of vowels and consonants as a triumphal moment. But the record-worthiness of the shot heard ’round the Scrabble world is more complicated than it might look.

Let’s begin with the fact that Cresta and Yorra aren’t expert-level players. They know the basics—like the 101 two-letter
and most of the 1,015 three-letter
words—but they’re both rated
in the bottom third of tournament players. In Lexington, where the record was set during the club’s regular Thursday-night session, Yorra is known for trying implausible words and hoping they’re in the Official Tournament and Club Word List
. Cresta has memorized thousands of obscure words (like those ending in WOOD or starting with OVEN) by reading, writing down, and tape-recording pages from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
. But he doesn’t study the highly probable words that are essential for climbing the competitive ranks. “These are not guys who have low ratings because they haven’t played in many tournaments,” Mike Wolfberg, the Lexington club
‘s statistician, told me. “They have low ratings because they aren’t very good.”

So, how did they break the all-time Scrabble scoring record
, set during a tournament by two experts, one of whom has been known ever since as Mr. 770? The simple answer is that Cresta-Yorra was a fluke. Given that Scrabble is played in more than 200 clubs and there are more than 200 tournaments a year in North America, the thinking goes, it was inevitable that Mr. 770’s record would fall, especially with the growth of serious study and an increase in words
in the Scrabble dictionary.

But there’s more to it than that. To understand how Cresta and Yorra broke the record, let’s take a closer look at the game. (For the full play-by-play, click here
.) Yorra opened with JOUSTED, a “bingo”—Scrabble lingo for using all seven tiles, which earns you an extra 50 points—worth 96 points. Cresta then traded in all seven of his tiles in the hope of getting more-playable letters, not an unusual move. Yorra bingoed again, very nicely, with LADYLIKE for 73 points and a 169-0 lead. The first L in LADYLIKE landed between two triple-word-score squares, giving Cresta a shot at Scrabble’s holy grail—a “triple-triple,” covering two triple-word scores with one word. That’s worth nine times the value of the word, plus the 50-point bonus for using all seven letters.

Triple-triples are rare in Scrabble—I’ve played no more than a dozen in a thousand or more games—because they require a confluence of mathematically improbable events. Cresta’s play, FLATFISH
, for 239 points, was especially unusual because it contains infrequently occurring letters (two F’s and an H) and isn’t a common word. Many good players would have missed it. Cresta didn’t because he had studied words beginning with F.

Yorra challenged FLATFISH, a reasonable move given the word and its score, but it was in the official word list, so he lost his turn. Cresta exchanged tiles on three of his next four turns, while Yorra bingoed again, this time with SCAMsTER
. (The lowercase letter represents one of the game’s two blank tiles.) Yorra told me he had no idea whether the word was legitimate. (It is.) SCAMsTER was simply the first possible bingo he saw. That put another letter, the R, in a triple-triple lane. Cresta, who held I, O, Q, U, and X, recognized he was three-quarters of the way toward a really huge triple-triple: QUIXOTRY. (He had studied words starting with Q.) He exchanged two letters from his rack in hopes of drawing the needed T and Y. From Cresta’s vantage, 56 tiles were unseen, including three T’s and one Y. The probability of pulling one of each was 1 in 513.*

Cresta beat the odds. And when Yorra didn’t block the open R—because he played his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG
, for 72 points—Cresta laid down his 365-point QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought).

After making just three plays, Cresta had an amazing 614 points. The rest of the game was pedestrian. Neither player bingoed again, though Cresta played the recently added word ZA (short for pizza) for 66 points. When he laid down VROW
, a Dutch woman, Cresta passed 770. (For a cell-phone-camera image of the final board, click here
.)

Looking at the game as a whole, it’s clear that a lack of expertise created the conditions for the record. The play that enabled QUIXOTRY, for one, was a clear mistake. When Yorra played SCAMsTER, which scored 65 points, there were eight other bingos available worth 72 points or more that wouldn’t have dangled a letter in a triple-triple alley. Among them were several common words, including the 94-point dEMOCRAT
. Most players would have taken a few extra moments to search for one of those moves.

I asked Jason Katz-Brown, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology junior ranked 10th in North America, to analyze the game. Unlike most players mid-level and higher, Cresta and Yorra didn’t keep track of the letters they drew on each turn, so it’s impossible to fully examine their possible moves. But we do know what letters they played on each turn. When Katz-Brown input those into a Scrabble-playing computer program
he co-wrote called Quackle, he found that Cresta and Yorra had better moves on 14 of their 22 nonbingo turns. One example: Cresta scored just 30 points using the second blank when he could have held it and tried for another bingo.

Technically, Cresta’s strategy was unsound. Fishing for a once-in-a-lifetime play might be understandable in a casual game, where winning is less urgent. But in competitive play—even in a club setting, where there’s less on the line than in a rated tournament—exchanging letters three times, as Cresta did, to enhance some combination of Q, U, I, and X is unorthodox at best, suicidal at worst. (The strategically correct move was to dump the cumbersome Q
and move on.) In Scrabble, the player who waits for the miracle word usually loses. The implication: Cresta wasn’t terribly worried about whether he won or lost.

“If they weren’t really trying to win,” an intermediate-level player named Mike Eldeiry wrote on the Crossword Games-Pro message board, “then can we really consider it our record? Fun, yeah. Neat, sure. Promotable, why not? But record, ummmmmmmm, I don’t know.” Eldeiry told me the game reminded him of a 600-foot batting-practice home run. If experts always shot for the moon, he said, “I think they’d have cracked 850 by now. But they’d have lost a lot of games in the process.”

Most CGP posters defended Cresta and Yorra. Lexington-club regulars said they just played differently than Joe Expert might have. The democratic Scrabbling message: Even someone who doesn’t study word lists for hours on end can achieve greatness. “Non-experts often make suboptimum plays,” wrote Rod MacNeil, a top-100 player who witnessed the game. “This time that resulted in some pretty eye-popping plays. But they found them.” Another expert, John Van Pelt, said, “When faced with the possibility of playing a Q-X triple-triple, they see it as a good opportunity to advance their winning chances. So they go for it.”

Cresta, who is 43 years old, didn’t start playing Scrabble competitively until a couple of years ago. He told me he loves learning and playing unusual words; at carpentry jobs he sometimes transcribes dictionary pages onto walls or sawhorses. In the record game, Cresta said he went fishing as soon as he drew Q, U, I, and X. “I wanted to get QUIXOTE down bad, or QUIXOTIC.” When SCAMsTER hit the board, he immediately spotted the possibility of QUIXOTRY. But he also realized that those other
words
were possible
. “I like to gamble,” Cresta said. “I’m trying to win the game, but I’m trying to get that word down, too.” Strategy wasn’t a big concern. “I’m not playing a top player.”

The difficulty posed by this game, and by games in general, is judging the role of circumstances in the commission of records. In this case, the sensible moves would have been just another set of moves in just another game. The wrong moves produced history. But is that enough? If 830—or any record—happens as a result of boneheaded play, tactical ignorance, or the pursuit of a good time, should it count? Or should records be reserved for those who have earned the right to set them, and who set them in expert fashion?

Here’s what I think: Michael Cresta holds the record for club play, while Mr. 770 keeps his tournament mark. And here’s what Michael Cresta thinks: “It’s really not that big of a deal because I’m really not that great of a player. If you get two experts together, that game’s not going to happen.”

(SMG thanks Stefan Fatsis for his cooperation)

An Interview with Sam Farmer

“Unnatural as it might feel, you have to establish a personal brand these days. With Facebook and Twitter, I have new tools to direct people to LATimes.com, and, more specifically, my stories. You can’t just ignore this technology, hoping it will go away. You have to embrace it.”

“As for what I did to get ahead, I stayed true to my style, didn’t panic – much – in the darker moments, and I stopped worrying about going to Kinko’s each week to send out my clips. When I put my energy into my day-to-day work, good things happened.”

Sam Farmer: Interviewed on April 2, 2009

Position: NFL columnist, LA Times

Born: 1966, Madison, Wis.

Education: Occidental, 1988, BA English

Career: LA Times San Fernando Valley edition, 1988-90; Bellevue (Wash.) Journal-American, 1990-91; Kent (Wash.) Valley Daily News, 1991-95; San Jose Mercury News, 1995-2000; Los Angeles Times, 2000-present.

Personal: married, two kids.

Favorite restaurant (home): La Cabanita, Glendale, CA “Some of the best and most authentic Mexican food in LA, and that’s saying something.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Mustards Grill, Napa, CA “Having lived in Napa for three weeks every summer (Raiders training camp), I really got to know the local eateries. No dish in Napa Valley tops the Mongolian pork chop at Mustards.”

Favorite hotel: Grand Hyatt Kauai resort. “The vistas are so stunning, they look fake.”

Sam Farmer’s Facebook status updates:

April 2, 2009, 2:01 a.m.: Coming off back-to-back pro days — UCLA then USC — and happy to have them in the books. Really wish I’d used sunblock, though. ‘Tis the season.

March 31, 2009, 10:13 a.m: I’m tweeting like a (somewhat annoying) bird from both UCLA and USC pro days, plus the NFL draft. Twitter: LATimesFarmer

March 26, 2009, 8:37 p.m: I’m now a willing (but somewhat confused) member of the Twitterati. What I’m saying is you can follow my updates on the NFL, draft, etc. at Twitter username: LATimesfarmer. (close commercial)

Q. Tell us about your new Twitter initiative – how will you use it and why do it?

A. Hey, if you don’t like change, you’re going to hate irrelevance. I’ve just started using Twitter – most recently sending real-time updates from USC’s pro day – and it helped me focus my thoughts for writing later in the day. I like that it helps me connect with readers on an informal basis. There are some great story ideas out there, and Twitter can help me find them.

Q. How does your Facebook site complement your mainstream and Twitter efforts?

A. Unnatural as it might feel, you have to establish a personal brand these days. With Facebook and Twitter, I have new tools to direct people to LATimes.com, and, more specifically, my stories. You can’t just ignore this technology, hoping it will go away. You have to embrace it.

Q. Give us an idea of how you approach your online blog in contrast to your print stories?

A. I try to be conversational. That makes for stories that are quicker to write – and read – and have a far less stilted feel. It’s all about connecting with the readers, telling them what they want to know.

Q. How do you envision the future of multi-platforming for reporters?

A. Well, I carry a Blackberry for tweeting, a flip camera for video clips, a digital recorder so I can upload sound… and sometimes even a notebook.

Q. How would you advise a media student to prepare for a career in sports journalism?

A. Stock up on food now.

Q. Who were your career influences? What did you do to get ahead?

A. I was so fortunate to have some great mentors who took an interest in helping me, everyone from Dan Raley of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – RIP, the paper, not Dan – and Dave Tepps of the Mercury News, to Bill Dwyre, to Mike James, to Dave Morgan, to Mike Hiserman, to Bill Plaschke, to Scott Ostler, to Chris Dufresne, to Mike Penner, to Austin Murphy… too many to list, really.

As for what I did to get ahead, I stayed true to my style, didn’t panic – much – in the darker moments, and I stopped worrying about going to Kinko’s each week to send out my clips. When I put my energy into my day-to-day work, good things happened.

Q. Who and what do you watch and read to keep up with the NFL? What are some of your favorite bookmarks?

A. I think Peter King does a terrific job, as does Mike Silver. Dave Goldberg at Associated Press is excellent. So is Don Banks at SI.com. Mike Reiss at the Boston Globe is superb in his Patriots coverage. I’ll read every story Jackie McMullan writes, particularly her in-depth features.

The ESPN bloggers are all friends of mine and are really sharp, especially Matt Mosley. Very clever.

My guilty pleasures: Profootballtalk.com and Deadspin.

Q. Why isn’t there an NFL team in LA? How weird is that?

A. It’s strange, but getting less strange with each passing year. Why isn’t there one? No suitable stadium and no public money to help build one. Consensus building is dead in this city. Only way you get everyone behind you in LA is when you’re on the 110 freeway and you get a jump on rush-hour traffic.

Q. Three reasons why the LA Times will survive?

A. The people, the people, the people.

If anyone can figure out a way to make a newspaper float, it’s the sharpest minds in the business. And there are some incredibly creative and resourceful people in that building – I’m banking on them. Oh, and praying too.

Sam Farmer’s blog, latimesblogs.latimes.com, March 6. 2009, 10:55 a.m:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/sports_blog/2009/03/more-fisticuffs.html

This was entertaining. I stopped by L.A. Southwest College this week to spend some time on the set of “Pros vs. Joes,” the Spike TV show airing in April that pits retired NFL and NBA players against so-called everyday Joes in various football and basketball skills challenges. Actually, the Joes are pretty athletic this season, many of them former college athletes.

I watched former NFL players Rich Gannon, Priest Holmes and Adam “Pacman” Jones play in a three-on-three football game — with helmets and shoulder pads — against three no-name competitors. Although some of it was hokey (when’s the last time you saw Gannon rush the passer, or drop back into coverage?), there were a couple of big hits.

One of the better collisions was one at the goal line between Jones and a “Joe” named Dan Adams
, a 5-foot-10 sales rep from Boston who played linebacker at Holy Cross. He set an NCAA single-game record with a staggering 21 solo tackles against Colgate.

Anyway, Adams stuck Jones at the goal line, jarring loose the football. It was pretty funny, because Jones had been talking trash to that point, referring to Adams as “Waterboy
.” A few minutes after the hit, the two exchanged punches and had to be separated.

“He hit me 10 yards out of bounds, kind of a cheap shot,” Adams said. “I couldn’t sit there and not retaliate. You’ve got to have some pride and dignity.”

As for the oft-suspended Jones, released by the Dallas Cowboys after the season, he didn’t seem too concerned about how he came off on camera.

“I guess that’s the person he wants to be,” Adams said. “But I guess in his defense, people kind of get caught up in the heat of the moment.”

(SMG thanks Sam Farmer for his co-operation)

An Interview with Mark Fainaru-Wada

“Sure, we’ve taken grief for what’s come out publicly about the source situation. I’ve wanted to scream at the top of my lungs to set the record straight.”

“I became obsessed with the story – it took hold of a different part of me…I constantly worried about getting beat – I would wake up paranoid and panicked about getting beat. It became consuming in a way my family was not prepared for.”

“Two times I got mad about the legal thing – once was thinking about being in jail while Bonds broke the record. The other related to my kids.”

Mark Fainaru-Wada: Interviewed on March 13, 2008

Position: investigative reporter, ESPN

Born: 1965, Los Angeles

Education: Northwestern, 1989, BJ

Career: Knoxville News-Sentinel, LA Daily News, The National, Scripps Howard News Service, SF Examiner 1997-2000; SF Chronicle 2000-2007, ESPN, 2007 –

Personal: married, two children

Favorite restaurant (home): Boulevard Restaurant, SF, “favorite spot of my wife and mine – we go there on anniversaries or moments we want to celebrate – the fois gras is great”

Favorite restaurant (away): Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, Marina del Ray, Ca., “great southern place in a shopping mall introduced to me by the guys from the San Jose Merc when I was on the Stanford beat”

Favorite hotel: Valley River Inn, Eugene, Oregon “beautiful little hotel right on the river – I stayed there when I was covering the Pac 10 – it’s cool and the food is good”

Author of: Game of Shadows, with Lance Williams

Mark Fainaru-Wada, excerpted from espn.com, March 8, 2008:

…When she returned from Australia, Jones graced the cover of Vogue as the picture of femininity and strength, sporting a form-fitting, sequined red dress. A headline proclaimed her “THE NEW AMERICAN HERO.” Inside, along with photos taken by Annie Leibovitz, a story announced, “Hail Marion: Marion Jones isn’t just the fastest woman in the world — she’s determined to be the greatest female athlete in history.”

Jones is now wearing government-issued garb for telling not one, but two separate sets of lies to federal officials. First, she lied to agents working on the BALCO case about her performance-enhancing drug use. Then she lied to a separate constellation of law-enforcement types about her involvement in an unrelated check fraud scheme.

Perhaps the most stunning aspect about Jones’ dissembling is the extent to which she worked to maintain her public persona, to give her adoring fans the impression that she was a victim. The lies and the attacks on her accusers were relentless, both from her lawyers and from her own mouth, and they revealed a woman whose nerve seemed to know no bounds. That stance four years ago, coupled with her eventual guilty plea last October, has served to cast doubt on just about every other athlete who insists he or she never touched a performance enhancer in their life — including the recent similarly adamant denials from Roger Clemens.

In many ways, Clemens’ tactics in dealing with allegations he used performance-enhancing drugs seem to come straight out of Jones’ playbook. He has forcefully and unequivocally denied that he has ever cheated; he has sued his accuser; he has lobbied politicians and employed a powerful Washington lawyer/strategist. Simply, he has gone on the offensive. And now he’s the target of a perjury investigation led by the FBI.

Jones’ public denials began in earnest in April 2004, when the San Francisco Chronicle published a story linking her to performance enhancers from BALCO. Her attorney, Joseph Burton, called the piece “character assassination of the worst kind.”…

Q. Will there be a sequel to Game of Shadows?

A. No sequel is planned. The story continues obviously, but we’ve done what we’re going to do from a book standpoint. The weird part is that HBO bought the rights to the book, so conceivably there will be a movie. That’s surreal, and really flattering. What’s really encouraging is that they hired Ron Shelton to direct, and he seems really interested. We’ll see what happens.

Q. Who should play you?

A. Nobody. People keep asking that. I’m praying they stick strictly to the book. The more Lance (Williams) and I get asked the more I try to ignore it because it’s too weird. The thing that’s cool is that the story could get told to a broader audience. The guys at HBO like Ross Greenberg seem really interested in talking about the broader issues – the impact of this stuff – and telling the story about the use of these drugs and Rob Garibaldi, the kid who killed himself, and looking at the folks at USADA as heroic. I think they have a grasp on telling the story in more than a sensationalist way.

The whole thing is out of my sphere or knowledge so I’m just stepping back and watching. Every now and then we get e-mailed some questions and we try to provide answers as best we can.

Q. If there were a sequel to Game what would it include?

A. The last update for the paperback was after the ’06 season. Obviously a lot of stuff has happened – the Bonds indictment, the Clemens saga, more Congressional hearings, more revelations about other players. It’s a story that does not seem to want to end even though I keep thinking it’s going to end. It’s a great story, the story of a lifetime and I’ve had a blast covering it and working with Lance. But it would be nice to work on something different after 4 1/2 years of working on the same story.

Q. What would be the end?

A. Good question. I always thought, for our purposes at the Chronicle, Bonds was at the end of the story. It seemed like the natural place where we would stop covering it. The Bonds case would play out and there wasn’t a lot of reason to chase other ancillary parts. Lance went to D.C. to do Clemens, but it’s not like the Chronicle will spend its energy chasing all the angles.

Now that I’ve moved (to ESPN) there’s a desire to continue chasing pieces of it. The question becomes, at what point do you decide ‘okay, we’ve done enough of this, let’s move on to something else’. When TJ (Quinn) and I got hired we recognized we had stuff we could add to ESPN’s coverage and we both hoped we could do stuff together outside of the steroids world. I’ve been there four months and in that time the story just exploded again. I started the day Bonds was indicted and then the Clemens stuff came out. It’s not like it’s slowed down.

Clearly cheating is not going to disappear. And this notion that baseball is clean now that it has a policy – which has plenty of loopholes in it – is a false notion. There are holes in just like there are holes in the NFL policy. Which doesn’t mean you cover these stories non-stop. Bonds and Clemens remain the last two central pieces of the story. After they play out you might have another federal investigation that touches another sport or other big names – just because cheating is so pervasive.

Q. What does it take to be an investigative reporter?

A. A lot of people are more qualified to answer that than I am. You have to have an interest in the area you are covering and be willing to dig and dig. Most good reporters think that way anyway – some people say there’s no difference between an investigative reporter and another reporter. On one level that’s true – we should all be investigating the areas we cover. But at the Chronicle we had a national investigative team that was afforded the time to dig. A huge part is having that commitment from your media entity. At the Chronicle it was ridiculous – they gave us free reign to cover this and other else for four years. It was a major commitment at a time the newspaper was shrinking and resources were scarce. Phil Bronstein recognized the importance of investigative reporting and having the time and energy to do it.

There was no magic to the story we covered. We worked sources the way people work sources. I tend to be anal – when I can call five sources I call ten or twelve. It’s a matter of being patient and continuing to push.

Q. Did the story return enough value to the Chronicle to justify the cost?

A. That’s a good question from a financial standpoint. The Chronicle had one of the biggest circulation declines recently. If that’s a gauge on value I guess people would argue not. We know we lost readers by virtue of people being Bonds fans and canceling subscriptions.

Was it worth it in the journalism sense that we did stories of public interest that weren’t being told and that were part of a discussion of eliciting change? It seems that’s what reporting should be about – informing readers and the public. It sounds Pollyanna-ish at a time when newspapers are bleeding like crazy. It’s not something Lance or I thought about – we just covered the story. Not only did we have the luxury of not thinking about the bottom line, nobody came to us and said we shouldn’t be covering this story, despite being in San Francisco and the Chronicle having marketing connections to the Giants – nobody said boo about that. There was never a question about going ahead with it once we got into the story and saw it was worth it.

Q. What was the impact of the Balco story on your personal life?

A. It was difficult. I’m always loathe to complain – we had a great job and got to do great stories and I wouldn’t change any of it. I felt like I used to have a good balance in my life in terms of work and home. I did investigative in sports and I thought I did relatively decent work but I also had a decent balance about it – I was able to leave m work at the office and get home and spend time with my wife and kids and not be immersed in my job. I wasn’t traveling that much. But when Balco happened that went out the window.

I became obsessed with the story – it took hold of a different part of me. The story was weird, too, because it was an investigative project and also a daily story. It became our beat. I constantly worried about getting beat – I would wake up paranoid and panicked about getting beat. It became consuming in a way my family was not prepared for.

When my wife met me I was in the middle of a break from journalism – I was teaching high school English after the National folded. This wasn’t what she bargained for. She has been incredibly understanding and so has the rest of my family. I’m not complaining. We had a great story to chase and we got to chase it and we had all the support we could want from the paper. Save for the legal crud it’s been a blast.

Q. How did the legal part affect you? (Fainaru-Wada and Williams were sentenced to 18 months in September 2006 for refusing to disclose the source of leaked grand jury testimony. Their sentence was dropped in February 2007 when defense attorney Troy Ellerman admitted that he leaked the information.)

A. I would advise anybody to avoid it all cost. It was the part of this that was sort of surreal. I’m good at denial – I spent a lot of time putting my head down and trying to get through it. The support we got was ridiculously great. The Chronicle was incredible – it spend ungodly amounts of money supporting us. Lance was a steadying force. He’s a calm dry Midwesterner and I’m a somewhat neurotic excitable Californian. He was a steadying force for both of us.

Q. Did you think you would serve time?

A. I’m good at denial. I spent my time not thinking about that happening and hoping it would go away. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I thought about it every day we were facing the subpoena. After the sentencing hearing in September (2006) it became more real to me. I thought the lawyering was remarkable and that Eve Burton, Hearst’s general counsel, was doing everything to make our case. But the law seemed crappy and once we had our sentencing hearing we were going to end up in (jail) after our appeal was exhausted in March.

Two times I got mad about the legal thing – once was thinking about being in jail while Bonds broke the record. The other related to my kids.

Q. Your feelings the day Bonds broke the home run record?

A. I was out of the country on vacation and head about it through an e-mail. It all seemed inevitable to me – at that point it was obvious it was going to happen. There were so many aspects to the way it was playing out. It was obvious fans in San Francisco were embracing it – at least many were.

All of the people who loved Bonds said the story was about us going after Barry. The reality is we were just covering a story that Bonds happened to be central to. He was the most famous athlete in the story and he was directly connected to two men at the heart of the conspiracy. Now he’s subject to a perjury indictment. It’s not like we made Barry part of the story. We never begrudged what he was doing.

Clearly we wouldn’t be talking about a home run record if he hadn’t taken the drugs. Part of this has to do with Barry’s issues with the media and the presumption that the reason for the story is because he’s mad at the media and has been targeted by the media. We’re never going to convince those people that that’s not the case. Of course it’s not personal. We covered a story launched by the federal government. Unfortunately for Bonds it went straight to him.

Q. Play the role of a shrink. Why did Marion Jones and Barry Bonds lie to grand juries while Jason Giambi did not?

A. Interesting question. Lance and I have been loathe to offer opinions on stuff we couldn’t base on facts, so I’m reticent to answer that. I do think, not just about Bonds or Marion, but broadly speaking, that athletes live in an entirely different world than we do. They’re making millions of dollars and being treated as heroes, which is just so far removed from the normal existence of anybody else that perhaps it contributes to why they feel compelled to be defiant in certain ways.

Look at Marion’s stance – it’s so utterly bizarre. Her defiance was so intense she almost believed what she was saying. Part of it was the belief that they were doing nothing wrong. It’s just part and parcel of the way sports are and the way they’ve been treated. That’s a really broad brush. Not that I or anybody else could get inside their head. I mean, here’s Marion Jones, one of the most famous female athletes in the world – a heroic figure to girls everywhere. She’s made millions, and now she’s confronted with the prospect of being exposed as a fraud. I don’t know how any of us would react to that.

Q. What are your thoughts on Troy Ellerman?

A. We never have talked about sources. We made promises and kept those promises.

The one broad thing I’ve said and Lance has said repeatedly is that we got help from a lot of people on the story. It covered four-plus years and there were sources on all sides of the story. One universal thing was the belief that the case was being prosecuted upside down – that the athletes were skating – that the government by treating it like a traditional drug case to get the dealers was missing the point. The athletes were not guys buying crack on corners but multi-millionaires making more millions by virtue of using drugs. People who helped us on those stories universally sent out that message.

It’s very frustrating. Lance is so much better dealing with it than I am. I read too much and take too much personally. Sure, we’ve taken grief for what’s come out publicly about the source situation. I’ve wanted to scream at the top of my lungs to set the record straight. But it’s a combination of our lawyers advising us to talk about what’s important and to not say the wrong things and trying to ensure that the government doesn’t come back down on us.

One thing I know is that the way the story is portrayed in public is not a set of facts I’m familiar with. From the very beginning of the story in September 2003 as we began to contact sources the immediate focus was on (Victor) Conte and (Greg) Anderson and Balco and the athletes receiving immunity. Certainly after the indictments were handed out and the names redacted, our sources were like, “what the hell is going on – athletes should be held accountable.”

Q. That came from all sides?

A. From all sides. We dealt with the government side, the defense side, athletes, agents, others in the case who knew about it – all different spheres of sources are addressed in the story. There was a consistent theme throughout – why on earth are these athletes’ names being protected?

Q. Will you ever be able to write the complete story on how Balco was reported?

A. I don’t know if anybody cares. There are certain people who are interested – some who want to take shots at us about it. Some think it’s about the messenger, but does anybody really care about how we got this person or that person to talk? It’s such an inside baseball kind of thing. I’m happy to talk about it to the extent we can, but for the most part reporters don’t talk about source relationships. We have talked repeatedly about the dynamic of how we got people to talk.

I’m not going to break promises we made or talk about things beyond what we’ve deemed acceptable to talk about. I don’t mean that in a haughty or condescending kind of way. I don’t think you’ll find a reporter who will talk about source relationships. We did what reporters have done forever.

As it related to the grand jury we didn’t break any laws. Nobody accused us of that. We didn’t do anything unethical or immoral. We got truthful stories that were newsworthy and published them, not with careless disregard, because we believed they had value and were truthful.

Q. How much should readers know about sources?

A. It’s important as best you can to reveal as much as you can about sources. Nobody wants to use anonymous sources. It’s not like we wanted to use them to get these stories – we’d love to have people on the record. It’s just not the nature of investigative stories, and certainly not this one. But when you use them you want to tell as much as you possibly can. As a reporter you want to recognize possible biases and motivations.

The important thing is that our stories were based on documents that were part of the federal investigation. Early on in the story we were told by sources that Bonds was using these drugs. Essentially rules were laid down by our editor that we were not going to write a story about Bonds using drugs based on anonymous sources saying he did. It wouldn’t have been fair. We needed to see a document. In this case after the indictments were handed out the government handed over more than 30,000 pages of documents and evidence and discovery to defense attorneys, including 2,000 pages of grand jury testimony. It was material to be used in preparing for trial.

That’s the other sort of legal inside thing our lawyers point out when people say we trampled on Barry’s rights. You go before a grand jury not because you’re promised confidentiality. You go because you are subpoenaed and you promise to tell the truth and there’s a chance that if it goes to trial that stuff will become public. If you talk to the lawyers they all believed it was going to come out. In this case the grand jury had completed its business and had indicted four men. The material was not under a grand jury cloak but was discovery for defense as it prepared its case. That was all part of our process in getting to those documents. It was people wanting a promise of confidentiality because they wanted to whistle-blow on a story playing out behind a curtain.

From Associated Press, February 14, 2007:

SAN FRANCISCO — Attorney Troy Ellerman swore under oath that he wasn’t the source for media leaks of secret grand jury testimony of elite athletes discussing steroids. He even went so far as to blame the government for sharing the transcripts with two San Francisco Chronicle reporters. Ellerman kept quiet for more than two years as the reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, went to the brink of imprisonment for refusing to divulge their source.

And it turned out he was the source all along.

Ellerman, who represented two key figures in the BALCO steroids investigation, admitted in court papers filed Wednesday that he allowed Williams and Fainaru-Wada to view transcripts of the grand jury testimony of baseball stars Barry Bonds
, Jason Giambi
, Gary Sheffield
and sprinter Tim Montgomery.

The Chronicle published stories in 2004 that reported Giambi and Montgomery admitted to the grand jury that they took steroids, while Bonds and Sheffield testified they didn’t knowingly take the drugs. The leaked testimony also was featured prominently in the writers’ book, “Game of Shadows,” which recounts Bonds’ alleged use of steroids.

A federal judge ordered the reporters jailed after they refused to divulge their source, but they have remained free pending an appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ellerman’s plea deal states that federal prosecutors will no longer try to put the reporters in prison, but Williams and Fainaru-Wada still declined to discuss the case.

“As we have said throughout, we don’t discuss issues involving confidential sources,” they said in a joint statement.

Ellerman’s attorney, Scott Tedmon, could not immediately be reached.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, called it one of the best possible outcomes for journalism.

“Ultimately, the reporters did not have to go to jail and they did not have to compromise on ethics, and that’s a good thing,” Scheer said. “All the press can promise, and it’s not a lot, is that we’re not going to give you up.”

Ellerman agreed to plead guilty to four felony counts of obstruction of justice and disobeying court orders, and to spend up to two years in prison and pay a $250,000 fine. A judge still has to approve the terms of the plea agreement; no hearing date has been set.

Ellerman briefly represented Victor Conte, the talkative founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative who went to prison for steroid distribution and has long been a prime suspect in the grand jury leaks.

He later represented BALCO vice president James Valente, and it was while preparing Valente’s defense against steroids charges that Ellerman became a key source for the two Chronicle reporters.

Conte and Valente were among five men who pleaded guilty in an earlier phase of the investigation.

“I find the fact that Troy Ellerman has admitted to leaking the BALCO grand jury transcripts to be outrageous,” Conte said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “This man was an officer of the court who was highly paid to provide the services of a criminal defense attorney. Instead, he chose to serve his own agenda and act in a way that was tremendously damaging to his own clients.”

Ellerman, a 44-year-old resident of Woodland Park, Colo., is commissioner of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

In March 2004, he signed an agreement that he would not disclose grand jury testimony given to him to prepare the defense. But in June of that year, he allowed Fainaru-Wada to come to his office and take verbatim notes of Montgomery, and the Chronicle published a story about the sprinter’s testimony on June 24, according to court documents.

After telling Judge Susan Illston that he was angry about the leak, he filed a statement with the court swearing that he wasn’t the source. And in October 2004, he filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against Valente because of the leaks.

The following month, he again allowed Fainaru-Wada to take verbatim notes of the grand jury transcripts, this time of the testimony of Bonds, Giambi and Sheffield, the court papers show.

Prosecutors said a “previously unknown witness” they did not identify approached the FBI and offered to help prove that Ellerman was the source.

Larry McCormack, former executive director of the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame and a private investigator connected to the BALCO investigation, confirmed to The Associated Press late Wednesday that he was the one who tipped off FBI agents.

“Doing illegal things and watching people go to prison behind it and thousand and thousands of dollars being spent on it … I didn’t think it was right. I told Troy that several times,” McCormack said.

“I feel bad for Troy and his family, and I wish he’d never done this to begin with,” he added.

San Francisco U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan said the plea deal should end speculation that his office was a source of the leaks,

“I’ve maintained from the beginning that neither the agents nor the federal prosecutors involved in the BALCO case were the source of any grand jury leaks,” he said. “I’ve always had the utmost confidence in this team’s integrity.”

Besides Conte and Valente, chemist Patrick Arnold, Bonds’ personal trainer Greg Anderson, and track coach Remi Korchemny have all pleaded guilty in the BALCO probe. Korchemny and Valente were sentenced to probation and the others were each sentenced to jail terms no longer than four months.

Bonds has never been charged, but suspicion continues to dog the San Francisco Giants
slugger as he chases baseball’s career home run record.

He told the grand jury he thought Anderson had given him flaxseed oil and arthritic balm, rather than the BALCO steroids known as “The Clear” and “The Cream.” A federal grand jury is investigating him for possible perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

(SMG thanks Mark Fainaru-Wada for his cooperation)

An Interview with Helene Elliott

“At a lot of places the hockey beat is a place to test young writers and see if they can handle something bigger.”

“What bothers me is when people call blogging “citizen journalism.” I’ve seen stuff written about me on blogs that’s just inaccurate.”

“If you are an mlb.com correspondent and you start writing things critical of Bud Selig do you think you would keep your job? It may not be edited by MLB but MLB would remember what you wrote. When it came time to pick the correspondents for next season they would go in another direction.”

Helene Elliott: Interviewed Sept. 12, 2006

Position: Columnist, LA Times

Born: 1956, Brooklyn, NY.

Education: Northwestern, BJ, 1977.

Career: Chicago Sun-Times 1977-79, Newsday 1979-89, LA Times 1989 –

Personal: married

Hobbies: “who has time?”

Favorite sports movies: Pride of the Yankees, Slapshot

Honors: Hockey Hall of Fame, 2005, Elmer Ferguson Award for distinguished writing

Q. Is it true the Times is not covering the Kings and Ducks on the road?

A. Correct. We have a new sports editor (Randy Harvey) who believes that the numbers do not justify the expense and space for hockey in the paper. He sees hockey as a niche sport.

Q. Did you have any input?

A. No. He’s the boss. I’m the worker bee. I was upset. Anytime the sport you cover is downgraded in the eyes of your boss, my reaction was ‘wait a minute, he’s telling me I’m wasting my time’. But when you look at a paper like the LA Times where the sports section has shrunk so badly over the last 10 years or so, and look at all the pro and college teams we have to cram in, plus horse racing, the NFL, Olympics, participatory sports – there’s just so much space and you have to make some tough decisions.

Q. What was the reaction by the NHL?
A. I’m told it was a topic at the recent p.r. meetings for the entire weekend. I covered the Stanley Cup finals this year. Of the 30 teams in the league more than half were not represented by reporters at the finals. Anaheim had nobody. Atlanta, Buffalo – nobody. Boston – only the Globe was there. Columbus wasn’t. Chicago and Colorado – only some of the games. Neither Detroit paper sent a reporter to the finals. Nobody from Newsday, nobody from the New York Post. Nobody from Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Jose, or Washington. Nobody from Tampa Bay – the defending Cup champions.

Q. Breathtaking. What’s the NHL’s spin on it?

A. The league said newspapers aren’t as important as they used to be – they lack immediacy – all this kind of nonsense. They should have been panicked.

We’re seeing shrinking sports sections. When I came out to California there were six or seven department store chains that would buy five to eight pages of ads per week. Now those stores have consolidated, so you don’t have all those stores buying ads. You don’t have the independent car dealerships buying ads. You don’t have the pages and ad space, therefore sections are shrinking. Editors have to make choices. Also, this was an Olympics year. Some papers spent their money going to the Olympics.

Q. Is your NASCAR coverage increasing?

A. Yes. We brought somebody in from the business side specifically to cover it.

Q. Will NASCAR be covered more than hockey?

A. No. The Ducks are going to be good. We’re going to go to more games if they’re in it. Chris Pronger’s first game back in Edmonton – we’ll cover that. Kings coach Marc Crawford’s first game back in Vancouver – we’ll do that.

We have two hockey teams, two basketball teams, USC and UCLA – just to much – plus we cover the NFL extensively. It’s like trying to put 20 tons of fertilizer into a 10-pound bag every day. If I’m the NHL I’m worried about NASCAR – absolutely. I’m worried about a lot of things.

Q. Overall, how is the NHL doing after the lockout?

A. The league still has a lot of problems. The decision to go with OLN as the US cable outlet could be a huge mistake. Commissioner Bettman said OLN gives the league great treatment, but it doesn’t matter if nobody can get OLN. Last spring the Ducks made it to the Western Conference finals but an astonishing percentage of cable homes in Orange County couldn’t get OLN. It had exclusive rights to the conference finals. So the core audience couldn’t watch its home team. That’s incredibly damaging. Plus they came back from the lockout and did all these wonderful rules changes to increase scoring and limit the things that bog down the game and then they go on a stupid ad campaign. They don’t know to market their strength, which is the players.

In many ways the league is where it was before the lockout. It got back its core audience, but it’s facing the same problem it did before – how to get casual fans to become hockey fans. Attendance came back, but that wasn’t the problem, it was TV money and expanding into areas not traditionally hockey areas, in the south and west. It’s getting the casual fan to notice the speed and skill of the game and translate it into TV audience.

Q. Would you advise young journalists to aspire to the hockey beat?

A. We’re seeing in a lot of places that the hockey beat is a jumping-off beat to something better. Jason Laconfora (Washington Post) started as a hockey writer, then was promoted to the Redskins – he’s risen in the star alignment. At my own paper Mike Bresnahan was the Kings writer for a season and was promoted to the Lakers. The Lakers and Dodgers arguable are the top two beats at this paper. At a lot of places the hockey beat is a place to test young writers and see if they can handle something bigger.

Q. How do you feel about that?

A. I don’t know. It is what it is. It’s reality except for Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and a few other cities. Hockey is not the premier beat, and if you’re an ambitious young reporter you want to be covering the sport and team that gets the most attention. It you’re in a city like Nashville or Columbus where there aren’t that many pro beats it’s a plum assignment.

Q. Why do you cover hockey?

A. I’m a general columnist now. As of Labor Day.

Q. Congratulations.

A. Thank you, I think. I always loved hockey. I found hockey players the best players to deal with – the least spoiled and least selfish. You don’t see NHL players refusing to talk like athletes in some other sports. They’re more accessible, more down to earth, less spoiled by the cult of personality you find in other sports.

Q. How long did you cover hockey?

A. Since 1980 on and off. I was hired by the LA Times as a baseball writer and I did the Angels for three seasons and the Lakers for a season, but I always seemed to go back to hockey.

Q. Your reaction to winning the Hockey Hall of Fame writer’s award?

A. I was stunned. Totally surprised. I never expected it.

Q. Did you have difficulty as a woman covering hockey?

A. Early on I dealt with the locker room issue, but hockey teams were probably among the first to grant equal access to female reporters. For a number of years the Maple Leafs wouldn’t, but even they came around. The players are so good to deal with they don’t care about gender – they’re so happy to get some exposure and get the game out to the public.

Q. As a general columnist will you shy away from hockey columns?

A. No. I did one yesterday (September 11^th) on Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis being killed on Flight 175 out of Boston. During the summer the Ducks signed a kid from the LA area who had played youth hockey in the area – it wasn’t just a hockey column – it was indicative of a trend we’ve seen here, of kids playing the game after Gretzky came here. You see more California kids in college hockey and in the junior leagues in Canada. I’m not going to shy away from hockey columns but I won’t do every column on hockey – there might not be enough going on to warrant that. But if there is a hockey column to do I’d probably get first call on it, as opposed to Plaschke or Adande.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune – he’s so versatile and enthusiastic and he finds quirks and angles you don’t see very often. Scott Ostler (SF Chronicle) is clever and an easy read. He’s so funny – you can be funny without trying hard.

Q. Where do you get your information?

A. I’m a newspaper reader. I’m also online quite a bit for out-of-town papers. For hockey I go to the Canadian newspaper websites or TSN, the Canadian TV network. I go to sportspages.com and branch out from there. I’ve got many bookmarks.

Q. What about blogs?

A. Not that many. I go to fan websites sometimes. Depends on how much time I have. You can get too engrossed in blogs and reading when you should be out there talking to people.

Q. Can you characterize the general quality of blogs?

A. It varies really. What bothers me is when people call blogging “citizen journalism.” I’ve seen stuff written about me on blogs that’s just inaccurate. One wrote that I got my job because my father was in the business – my father had nothing to do with journalism. There’s a lot of inaccurate stuff out there. Some are accurate and raise good questions. A reporter wants to know what fans are thinking and asking and going through a fan website can be useful.

Q. Can you name one or two?

A. Letsgokings.com. That’s one I look at about the Kings.

.

Q. Are sports journalists working harder than 25 years ago?

A. I would say so. It’s like being on the job 24/7, if not for the paper then for the website. It used to be if your event finished too late for the paper you could go home and go to sleep. Now you do it for the website. If there’s no room for a notebook or column or feature you do it for the web. There is this eternal search for content.

Plus our job has changed – we’re dealing with labor and contractual matters like the hockey lockout and baseball strike. You have to be able to write economics. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know. Our job probably encompasses more than every before.

On top of that some blog says the Kings or Ducks are doing something and you have to react to that. Or you have to react to the team websites. Or the athletes’ own websites, which they use to make announcements.

Q. Are writers for the league websites doing real journalism? Mlb.com for example?

A. It’s an arm of Major League Baseball. If you are an mlb.com correspondent and you start writing things critical of Bud Selig do you think you would keep your job? It may not be edited by MLB but MLB would remember what you wrote. When it came time to pick the correspondents for next season they would go in another direction.

Q. How should readers approach league sites?

A. With healthy skepticism.

(SMG thanks Helene Elliott for her cooperation)

An Interview with Gordon Edes

“I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.”

“I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.”

Gordon Edes: Interviewed on August 13, 2008

Position: National baseball writer, Yahoo! Sports

Born: 1954, Fitchburg, Ma.

Education: North Park College, Chicago, history, political science “hired as a copy editor at the Chicago Tribune three classes short of a degree”

Career: Chicago Tribune, copy clerk 1972-76, copy editor 1976-80; Los Angeles Times, 1980-89; Atlanta Journal Constitution, 1989; The National Sports Daily (RIP), 1990-91; Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 1991-96; Boston Globe, 1996-2008; Yahoo!Sports 2008 –

Personal: Married (Bonnie) with three daughters, “one Iowa Hawkeye fan for a son-in-law and one 6-year-old grandson destined to be a Cubs fan”

Favorite restaurant (home): Walden Grill, Concord, Ma.

Favorite restaurant (away): Trattoria Contadina, San Francisco “neighborhood joint on Russian Hill, with 4-star food. Thank you, Blake Rhodes, Giants PR”

Favorite hotel: Marriott Harbor Beach, Ft. Lauderdale “the place that gave me a grand piano during the World Series”

Gordon Edes, excerpted from Yahoo!, Aug. 12, 2008:

ATLANTA – He was laid to rest on an off day, about right for a man who broadcast in the neighborhood of 5,000 ballgames. And while he couldn’t call his own funeral, Skip Caray almost certainly would have approved, except for all the people wearing neckties, which he loathed.

Still, the service didn’t run too long, it wasn’t interrupted by a rain delay, nobody did the wave, and there were plenty of funny stories from his old partners, Pete Van Wieren and Ernie Johnson Sr.

Best of all, his beloved Atlanta Braves
were there to see him at the end – Chipper Jones
was a pallbearer, John Smoltz
and John Schuerholz spoke, and front pews were filled with manager Bobby Cox, his coaches and Braves players past and present, Phil Niekro, Otis Nixon and Rick Camp paying their respects with Tom Glavine
and Jeff Francoeur
and Brian McCann
.

And no one was allowed to make Caray something in death he wasn’t in life…

…Over countless hot summer nights, Caray, who never lost the radio man’s knack of connecting with one listener at a time, as if he was sharing the same back porch, delivered smiles by the bushel. A foul ball would land in the stands, Caray would pretend to identify the hometown of the fan who caught it.

“He’d say, ‘A fan from Visalia just caught that one,’ ” said Ernie Johnson Sr., whose son, Ernie Jr., has become a fixture on NBA telecasts. “People would actually call up and ask, ‘How did Skip know?’ “

Q. As you leave the Titanic, er, Globe for Yahoo, what are your thoughts on the people who are left behind? How did it come to this?

A. My leaving is very bittersweet. Covering baseball for the Globe, and making regular appearances on NESN as part of my Globe duties, gave me about as high a profile as a baseball beat writer can have. The intensity of the beat trumped anything I had experienced in the past; former Globe sports editor Don Skwar gave me a taste of what was to come when he called my parents’ home at 8:45 on Thanksgiving morning my first year at the Globe because the Herald had a Mo Vaughn contract update in the paper and he wanted me to call Sox GM Dan Duquette—at his parents’ home—to do a folo!

This was my 12^th season covering the Sox. I expected to retire at the Globe, working at my hometown paper. How could you ask for a better audience, knowing that one of my heroes, Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as my high school English teacher, Pete Lincoln, were reading me regularly? But the Globe vision of my future did not match up with my own. I expected to return to my former job as the paper’s On Baseball columnist once they settled on a new beat reporter—Chris Snow had left in ’06 to become a hockey front-office man, and when they asked, I had agreed to go back on the beat until they found a replacement. I agreed to remain on the beat in 2007 and 2008 while Amalie Benjamin gained more experience.

But prior to the ’08 season, sports editor Joe Sullivan said that his plan was to have two on-baseball columnists, Nick Cafardo and myself. To me, that was like returning to half a job. I said if he wanted to keep Nick on Sunday Notes, that was fine by me, but I felt I had earned the On-ball designation, we had only one on-ball columnist for other sports and that’s what made it distinctive. He disagreed, and Steve Henson, the baseball editor at Yahoo!, offered me the chance at a baseball writer’s dream job, a national job in which you are restricted only by your imagination.

The Globe offered buyouts; I took mine, and subsequently was denied it. I appealed that decision, Yahoo! waited for that process to play out, but when it became clear it would drag on, I gave my notice and left on Aug. 1. I remain extremely disappointed that the New York Times Co. dispensed over $30 million in buyouts last year but elected to deny me; I remain hopeful that decision will be overturned, but in the meantime I made it a point not to let that impact my work.

I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.

I told Joe Sullivan, and I meant it, that the nearly 12 years I spent at the Globe were the best of my professional life. I trust the friendships I made while there will endure.

Q. What can you tell us about your Yahoo job? How often will you write? Does it involve podcasting or any electronic work? Can you keep a straight face when you introduce yourself as Gordon Edes of Yahoo?

A. I’ll answer the last question first. That does take some getting used to, but I’m learning already that the recognition factor is high. I haven’t had to spend much time explaining who we are. I expect to write at least four times a week, if not more, and my sense of what the job entails, and what I want it to entail, is constantly evolving. I expect there will be a fair amount of videostreaming, mailbags, chats and the like, and I expect podcasting will be a component, too. Breaking news, analysis, opinion, features—the job gives me the freedom to do all of the above. And if Steve wants me to write the gamers during the World Series, I’ll be happy to oblige. And then there is the sweetest of words: No running.

Q. What attracts you to a story? Name a few of your favorite stories.

A. I love the telling of a story in detail, giving people the sense that they are seeing things through a unique window when they are reading me. The stories behind the story, like the pieces I did on the Sox failed attempt to trade for Alex Rodriguez, the signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka, or a reprise of the Kirk Gibson home run in 1988.

I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.

I like breaking news, though in our 24-7 cycle scoops have a shelf life of about five minutes. I am drawn to the human element, like weaving Tim Wakefield’s joy at flying with the Blue Angels into the story of a Blue Angel pilot who was a huge Sox fan and died in an air show a couple of years after standing in the Sox dugout at the Series. I surprise myself, sometimes, that after 28 years in the business, I still find as much pleasure as I do in going to the ballpark. I was told long ago that the purpose of my job was to inform and delight: I still strive to do so.

Q. How would you grade yourself on your coverage of the Steroid Era? In retrospect, would you have done it differently?

A. I failed badly, out of naivete and ignorance more than anything else. I didn’t raise the issue enough, and certainly didn’t press it with my bosses. One of the biggest stories I missed was giving light treatment to the fact that the owners and players were willing to shelve drug testing as an issue in exchange for labor peace in the 2002 CBA.

How would I have done things differently? I don’t think beat reporters should have been acting as private detectives on a nightly basis—their primary responsibility was to tell the reader who won and lost and why—but in my On Ball role I certainly could have pounded away at the issue.

Q. You don’t call attention to yourself in your writing – why?

A. The power is in the story itself, not who wrote it. You tell a story well enough, the attention will come.

Q. How have e-mails changed your reporting process?

A. A good deal, I would say. It’s the primary way I communicate with Red Sox owner John Henry for example. In some ways it gives you better access; there are people more inclined to answer an e-mail than return a phone call. But I also think some give and take is sacrificed in the process.

Q. You tend to downplay the more advanced baseball stat measures – why?

A. On a nightly basis, I would agree with you that I downplay some of those numbers, though I think you would find that I have championed the work of Bill James and the people at Baseball Prospectus, and incorporated some numbers (OPS, WHIP) that I paid scant attention to in the past. But I also have never lost sight of the fact that I write for a broad audience that might get lost in the VORPs and WARPs and Win Shares, and the people who are into that stuff can find plenty of places to get their fill.

Q. How do you keep up with baseball? What and who do you read and watch?

A. I receive a daily file of newspaper stories written on every team. I also think Baseball-Reference.com is the single greatest resource to come along in my years in the business. I read Buster (Olney) and Peter (Gammons) at ESPN and Baseball Musings, Steve Henson has introduced me to ProSportsDaily, and I am now immersing myself in all that we have on our site.

Q. Beaver Cleaver – any relation?

A. What would ever make you ask?

Gordon Edes, excerpted from the Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 2007:

…The Sox won their sixth straight Series game and fifth straight of this postseason with one never-before-seen wrinkle. Papelbon, who had not picked off a runner since he broke into the big leagues in 2006, nabbed Matt Holliday straying off first base to close out the eighth inning. Holliday had nearly taken out both Papelbon and second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a line single up the middle, his fourth hit of the night. The ball appeared to glance off Papelbon’s leg and caused Pedroia, who gloved the ball with a sprawling spot, to writhe in pain after he landed heavily on the left shoulder he’d dislocated already once this postseason.

At the plate was Todd Helton, the signature player in Rockies history. But he never saw a pitch in the eighth, as Papelbon whirled and picked off Holliday.

“Probably will go down as one of the biggest outs of my career,” Papelbon said.

It was not happenstance. Holliday was intending to steal – he confirmed so after the game – and the Sox had a strong suspicion he was going.

They knew that the Rockies were scouting them in the Division Series against the Angels, when Howie Kendrick stole second and third unchallenged against Papelbon in the eighth inning of a tie game.

“If you were advancing us, you would have said the same thing, that Pap is 1.8 [seconds] to the plate, and he doesn’t pick,” Mills said. “But it was a different situation in the game against the Angels. We didn’t care if he stole, because we had confidence in Paps getting the hitter and we didn’t want to take anything away from him to try to get the runner on that situation.

“We know they’re advancing us, they’re watching it. That night I was talking to Pap in the shower about that exact thing, and about what was to come. [Bullpen coach] Gary Tuck was talking to him about it, [pitching coach] John Farrell talked to him about it, about different things we were going to do.”

When manager Terry Francona went out with trainer Paul Lessard to check on Pedroia, Mills noticed that Glenallen Hill, the Rockies’ first base coach, never stopped talking to Holliday. Mills also had a color-coded chart he keeps on every player, that showed that Holliday likes to steal on the first pitch with two outs. “It was right there in my pocket,” Mills said.

Indeed, it was right there on the chart, multiple steal attempts Holliday had made on the first pitch with two outs.

“You put all those things together, and it comes up, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick once to see where he’s at, and then we’re going to slide-step.’

“And, we were watching. I got a big lump in my throat because he kept inching, inching, inching off, and Pap did a great job of holding the ball, letting him get off there. And then I’m sitting there, with a lump in my throat, hoping he doesn’t throw [it] away.”

Papelbon made the play, Mills said. “He made the great pick.”

But while it was nowhere as dramatic as Kirk Gibson knowing that Dennis Eckersley was going to throw a backdoor slider on a full count before Gibson hit one of the greatest home runs in Series history, it was a stunning example of how inside knowledge and paying extraordinary attention to detail can turn a Series.

“There are a lot of times we don’t want him to throw over,” Mills said. “But in this situation with Helton and [Garrett] Atkins coming up, we couldn’t afford it, and it just happened to work out.”

(SMG thanks Gordon Edes for his cooperation)