Suddenly, all the news doesn't fit

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are the latest to retreat from the sports department's mission.

The end of the New York Times sports department, or at least its surrender to The Athletic website that it bought last year, would not have sent Red Smith rolling within the confines of his grave.

He would have found another place to build his sentences, famously doing it one droplet of blood at a time, as he did when baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn was insisting that World Series games be played in frostbite conditions in 1977.

“Bowie Kuhn’s thermal underwear must be as threadbare as a sportswriter’s vocabulary,” Smith observed. “What other reason could the high priest of baseball have for starting this year’s postseason play early enough to get the boys out of the trenches by Thanksgiving? Surely he hasn’t discovered at this late date that snow time ain’t no time to sit outdoors and watch a World Series…Possibly because his longjohns are now worn thin, he has condensed the postseason schedule a wee bit so that this year’s operations may be concluded as early as the fifth week of the football season….In any event, Kuhn’s love affair with Nielsen still is a consuming flame.”

Kuhn was thus bleeding from several bodily locations and never felt a thing. 

Smith could be lacerating and also funny. He could report and also entertain. He could get out of the picture so he could stand at a point and see everything. He would have gently needled today’s lust for decimal points and Top 10 lists, and it’s hard to imagine Red jumping up and down and screaming for a coach to be fired for performance, or demanding an impulsive trade. Instead he knew the stories were in the people, and that’s where he directed his attention, and ours.

Smith was the defining American sportswriter of his time, the time before his time, and even today. The Times wasn’t his first newspaper and might have been a little too stuffy for his taste, but a Sunday morning with Smith, Dave Anderson and Arthur paley, or any combination of the above, was a warm coffee-shop experience. It prized the written word as something worth the investment of your time, not something to be gulped like a McMuffin in the morning. And it also showed that the written word could be written just as eloquently about games and gamesmen, not just about an exhibit at the Guggenheim, or the ballet. Unfortunately, gameswomen weren’t part of the equation back then.

The Times never was the best sports section in the country, not with the existence of such ambitious, well-invested staffs as the ones on the Boston Globe or the Philadelphia Daily News’. It didn’t always serve day-to-day fans of New York teams as well as the New York Daily News and the New York Post did. But it had authority. When Robin Finn wrote about tennis, or Larry Dorman about golf, or Michael Katz about boxing, or Gerald Eskenazi about the Jets, there was reporting and writing that showed the substance of in-person experience, of past events that might explain current ones.

Murray Chass was a tireless chronicler of the Bronx Zoo years in Yankees history, negotiating his way around Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson. He also was an open campaigner for the Players’ Association and its struggle for free agency, but he happened to be on the right side of history there. Baseball people respected writers who were there every day and asked the uncomfortable questions when the situations warranted. Whitey Herzog, who shared nothing with Chass but a life in baseball, called him “Mo Chase,” and Murray used that as his e-mail address.

That is the worth of having certain people cover certain sports or certain teams for a while, because of the relationships that flow out of that, the knowledge that trickles down.

Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register wrote a 3-part series that explained why the Angels’ farm system had been so unproductive. It was easily the most worthwhile thing written about the ballclub in at least 12 months, and only Fletcher, who travels with the club and knew what to ask and who to ask, could have done it in that market.

For generations, Red Sox fans woke up knowing the scores and the heroes and goats, but they fetched the Globe because they wanted to borrow Peter Gammons’ lens, to discover what quote he had secured from the clubhouse, or what parallel he had drawn to the days of Ted Williams and Jackie Jensen. Philadelphia Flyers fans eagerly thumbed through the Daily News to see what Jay Greenberg thought. 

Once those connections are severed, fans just walk away. They don’t tell the newspapers that they’re leaving. They’re just gone.

The Los Angeles Times has slowly retreated from that mission and, on Sunday, announced it was abandoning game stories and box scores to allow their writers to use their talents in a “magazine” format. A more truthful approach would have been to explain that (A) the Times was moving to earlier deadlines, thanks to printing complications and (B) the Times just didn’t want to spend the money on team travel anymore.

In doing so they invited fans of the Dodgers and Lakers to find their news elsewhere. It’s just another chapter in the way newspapers have innovated their way into obsolescence and irrelevance. One reason today’s young athletes have trouble relating to reporters is because they’ve likely never read a newspaper, and are unprepared for questions that go deeper than, “What were you thinking when you were running around the bases?”

The Athletic has receded from its grand ambition of covering every team, every day. It also lays off people and uses a subscription model that can sometimes work in self-defeating ways. If a writer is covering one team and senses that the team’s fanbase wants to hear good news, that is what will be delivered, because writers are being judged by the commerce they could drum up, not by truth or literacy.

Executives of The Athletic initially said they would kill off newspapers with this enterprise. The irony that The Athletic was eventually bought by a newspaper was superseded by the shock of The Athletic taking over one, or at least one of its sections.

This is not a criticism, because The Athletic’s plans have served to open up jobs throughout the industry, and its profiles are often groundbreaking, and it has excellent beat people like Michael Russo (Minnesota Wild) and Jourdan Rodrigue (Los Angeles Rams) who must be read, and not just because they are so thoroughly plugged in.

Maybe the Times/Athletic marriage, which has guild/non-guild elements to it, will serve New Yorkers well. Maybe one of those reporters will be there to ask why the Jets didn’t have any time outs at the end, or why the Mets used Adam Ottavino in the seventh instead of the eighth. After all, that’s what fans ask. And, again, the Times wasn’t doing much of that either.

But there was no public groundswell against the nuts and bolts coverage that is now being rejected, no reason to abandon the types of fundamentals that, if not for newspapers, will not be practiced anywhere.

Recent news about sports media wasn’t all bad. There were reports that Northwestern’s football team, which lost 11 of 12 last fall, was performing dangerous, disgraceful hazing rituals. Coach Pat Fitzgerald was suspended, and everyone waited for the storm to clear.

Instead, the Daily Northwestern, run by students, found more specific hazing incidents, and found evidence that Fitzgerald knew exactly what was going on. On Monday, Northwestern fired Fitzgerald, who had won 110 games in 17 seasons and was part of four of the school’s five 10-win seasons, either as a coach or player. He was a key linebacker on its last Rose Bowl team, in 1995.

Throughout the country you see young writers, the ones who have grown up hearing that the newspaper business would go the way of the Whig party and the rotary phone, who might have believed and accepted it, and yet are doing the work at an extraordinarily high level. It’s fun being Quixote, especially when you believe in the industry far more passionately than do those who run it. 

Maybe they have learned how much fun it was to be Red Smith. Maybe some are even reading him.