Baseball and the Media: How Fans Lose in Today's Coverage of the Game

by George Castle

Overview

What sports fans read, watch, and listen to at home often isn’t the real story coming out of the locker room or the front office. George Castle should know: he’s covered baseball in Chicago for decades and witnessed the widening gulf between the media and the teams they’re supposed to cover—and the resulting widespread misinformation about the inner workings of the game. In this book, Castle chronicles from the inside the decline of baseball reporting and shows in clear and practical terms how ill-served today’s sports followers are by those they trust for the straight story.

Charting the path of a veteran sports reporter’s career, Baseball and the Media traces the changes in baseball coverage from the days of the old-time players and scribes to the no-holds-barred (and no facts checked) sports-talk radio of our time. Along the way, Castle introduces readers to the politics of baseball media (does sports journalism actually have its red and blue states?), documents the transformation of athletes from role models to sports-media celebrities, including emblematic characters such as LaTroy Hawkins and Carl Everett, and illuminates the profound changes in the way sports in general—and baseball in particular—are conveyed to its avid consumers, who are the losers in the end.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803264694
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	01/28/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

A native Chicagoan, George Castle covers the Chicago Cubs and the White Sox for the Times of Northwest Indiana, the Chicago area’s fourth largest newspaper. His weekly radio program, Diamond Gems, is broadcast on forty stations. He is the author of seven other books, including Where Have All Our Cubs Gone?, The Million To One Team: Why The Chicago Cubs Haven’t Won the Pennant Since 1945, and I Remember Harry Caray.

Read an Excerpt

Baseball and the Media

How Fans Lose in Today's Coverage of the Game

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By George Castle

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2006 George Castle
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9981-8

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CHAPTER 1

A Long, Strange Journey to the Press Box and Clubhouse

The path to a Major League clubhouse is decided early in life. A select few have the natural gift to play baseball, sport's most mentally challenging game, at its highest level. A larger group is athletically challenged, but either talented enough or lucky enough or both to end up in the locker room with pen and notebook or tape recorder.

But it's not certain where a dual passion for writing and baseball originates.

Some of it is environmental. Your mother brings home two newspapers each day and you learn writing style by osmosis and repetition. The local team, in this case the Chicago Cubs, starts winning after two decades' wandering in baseball's desert, with saturation TV coverage providing an easily opened window for you to get close to the game.

Perhaps the rest is just embedded deep within you. Those who are fated to be good in math go on to clean up in the tough courses and, in many cases, help rule the world because they can work the numbers so well. Baseball and basketball mogul Jerry Reinsdorf was surely a math whiz in school back in Brooklyn. Those less fortunate go into literary or creative pursuits. I liked history and current events, so naturally I'd read and follow the news.

In my formative 1960s, Chicago was blessed with four distinctive daily newspapers — the Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily News, and American. By age thirteen, while living in West Rogers Park, five miles northwest of Wrigley Field, I read three of the papers daily, the Tribune excepted because it was reflexively conservative and Republican. Reading became a true gateway to the greater world in a tumultuous era.

When the Tribune started moving toward the center under editor Clayton Kirkpatrick in 1969, I began reading the giant daily regularly. Soon I'd get an even closer view during my first entrée into the business around April Fool's Day, 1974, while finishing up my freshman year in college. A friend of my mother's friend worked as an executive in the Tribune's insurance subsidiary. An opening for a copy clerk on the 11:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift Fridays and Saturdays was available. In true Chicago and media fashion, the word was put in and I journeyed through the front door at 435 N. Michigan Avenue.

Strolling into the fourth-floor Tribune's city room was like taking a trip through a modern-day Wonderland. I had my more mundane gofer's duties such as answering the switchboard, stripping the AP and UPI wires every half hour or so, moving copy from desk to desk, and fetching coffee from the mailroom downstairs. The camaraderie was special on the night shift, also called the "dog watch." The daytime caste system broke down to a degree. The old sea-dog desk guys would talk to you. Emphasize "guys." In 1976, LeAnn Spencer became the first woman to work such late weekend hours on the desk, her cries of "Copy!" many octaves above the typical bullfrog-level summonses of the night crew.

Telegraph editor Bob Seals tipped me $20 every Christmas, a handsome sum for a college student making $4.60 an hour (double the minimum wage at the time). Veteran copyeditor Bob Corbet advised me to leave the paper eventually, work my way up elsewhere in the business, and "come back here a star." Falstaffian deskman Bob Hughes rumbled down the aisles in the middle of the night, singing "Amelia Earhart, Where Have You Gone?" When he wasn't laying out the final replate edition, George Schumann talked about how he could "sleep in shifts" during the day to handle the overnight hours while making a 120-mile round trip from his New Buffalo, Michigan, home.

The secrets of the night shift stayed there, like inside-baseball clubhouse information. The entire cadre of city-room copyeditors was scheduled to work from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. starting Friday night. However, their editing completed about 3:30 or 4:00 a.m., they began drifting home one by one. I could even steal away one of the nights around 4:30 a.m. during the baseball season to get a few more hours' sleep in order not to be totally bleary-eyed going to the 1:15 p.m. ball game at Wrigley Field. "We don't pay people now for not working," thundered Jim Dowdle, the number two Tribune Company executive, when I told him of this featherbedding situation twenty-five years later.

The Tribune sports department was off to one side of the newsroom. It might as well have been in a different world. If it took an executive's recommendation to get a part-time job on the city-side dog watch, what kind of internal politics did it take to become a member of the sports department? The all-male staff of the time certainly wore their elitism proudly, if not arrogantly. Men in their late twenties and thirties, even the summer intern, walked around with mammoth, dirigible-shaped cigars stuffed in their mouths, the kind of smoking accessory only the wise-guy types a generation older at Friedman's or at the Devon-Western newsstand logically would savor. The stogies were seemingly a combination of macho, member-of-the-club rite of passage and a showcase of smug satisfaction with their employment.

Sports obviously operated in a different world than the rest of the paper, oriented toward a deadline dash when game results would come in all within about a ninety-minute period. On Friday night, August 30, 1974, I found Bob "Lefty" Logan, Cubs and Bulls beat writer and top punster in Chicago sports, typing furiously on an Underwood manual. Logan watched the Cubs-Padres twinight doubleheader from San Diego on sports editor Cooper Rollow's office color TV. In those days, if a Chicago baseball team was well under .500 and out of the race later in the season, the local dailies cut out much of the road travel for their writers. Logan had not been sent to the West Coast with the Cubs, forcing him to cover games off TV, a not uncommon practice in the era. The next morning, the game story was datelined "San Diego" with a "Special to the Tribune" byline. Logan's name was nowhere to be found. It would not be the first time, and is still far from the last, that baseball fans were not getting the whole story — or truth in packaging — about their teams from the media.

At age twenty, my own work would soon appear in the sports section under another man's byline. Gary Deeb was the new TV-radio critic, imported from Buffalo. He soon became an overnight sensation and the most talked-about columnist in town this side of Mike Royko with his take-no-prisoners criticism of bad programming, talent, and executives along with some sharp broadcast-industry scoops. Time Magazine called Deeb "the terror of the tube." But Deeb had also started a Tuesday sports TV-radio column in the jock pages and needed someone steeped in Chicago sports knowledge to do the legwork. I became that person, having met and conversed with Deeb on the dog watch. He was a lone-wolf worker, prowling in at night to type his column for the advance features-section deadline after doing a first draft in longhand at his nearby apartment.

Deeb paid me out of his own pocket. I assisted him by researching critical columns on Howard Cosell and White Sox color announcer J. C. Martin and a praiseworthy piece on the Cubs radio teaming of Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau. But the best-remembered Deeb column, to this day, was his 1975 satire on Bears radio announcers Jack Brickhouse and Irv Kupcinet. I gathered 90 percent of the information in that piece, with Deeb using many of the lines I submitted in a preliminary column form. "Dat's right, Jack," Kup's typical response to Brickhouse's request for analysis, became a catchword in Chicago sports. Brickhouse had helped develop an entire city's enthusiasm, me included, for its often-losing teams. Yet he was unintentionally comical working an NFL game as the public's only live media conduit during an era of home-game TV blackouts.

Decades later I'd become friends with Brickhouse and even put together an historical exhibit on his career for the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Still the mid-1970s was a time when Brickhouse, who had close business ties to Chicago's sports owners and thus was never wholly objective, deserved some knocks. He was a mediocre football announcer. Vince Lloyd told me in 2003 that Brickhouse, to whom baseball and basketball broadcasting back in his native Peoria were almost his birthrights, really did not understand football's intricacies.

Deeb even persuaded the features department to run my own bylined piece, appearing in his column space during his July 1976 vacation, on the lack of science-fiction TV shows in the gap between the original Star Trek's cancellation and the advent of Star Wars mania.

The continuation of this apparent first big break came when John Waggoner, the Tribune's news editor and number three man in the editorial department, offered me a summer internship for 1976. I had gotten to know Waggoner as I started my Friday night shifts while he was finishing up his deadline work. An internship was a good entrée to being hired full time later on at the Tribune; if not, it was certainly a sterling section on a résumé that would impress another sizeable newspaper. Inexplicably, though, I froze up, telling Waggoner I needed more published experience before I could work as an intern. I had needed someone to get in my face to counsel me that a phalanx of assistant city editors and copyeditors provided layers of protection for my copy, and I wasn't going to be assigned to national politics or City Hall. A year later, with more published clips at a college daily, I approached Waggoner to ask if the internship offer was still good for 1977. "It's a tough world out there," he said in telling me "no."

That bad news took place after the Deeb work connection also had been severed, due to a disagreement over assigned research not used and, in turn, not compensated. With the twice-a-week all-nighters finally getting to me physically, I left the Tribune in April 1977 to assume a $135-a-week summer news internship at the Decatur Herald and Review, 180 miles south of Chicago. I probably learned more at the smaller daily than I would have at the colossus on Michigan Avenue. But a request for full-time employment at the Herald and Review when I graduated from Northern Illinois University in 1978 had been nixed by my supervising city editor, who felt he was stuck in the agribusiness-industrial city and did not wish the same on me.

As life progressed, the alternate road I took became the only sure way into the press box and locker room.

Following two other writing-related positions after college, I learned a friend was leaving a part-time sports job at the weekly Lerner Newspapers' Chicago North Side main office, recommending me as his successor. I started in April 1980, glorying in what I thought was my good fortune. It was not the Tribune, but it was a sportswriting job in my hometown.

I soon began a sports column, which I tabbed "The Bleacher Bench," after my summertime ballpark roost. My first effort was about finding Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, working as a management trainee at the Bank of Ravenswood on Lawrence Avenue, two miles from Wrigley Field. Banks was not exactly overworked while I talked to him. In the middle of the bank lobby, he intently listened to decade-old audio highlights of his teammates I had provided to him.

The value of my Lerner sports position appeared to inflate even more when I obtained my first press credential to cover games at Wrigley Field. However the credential was only a daily pass. And it had restrictions imposed by Cubs media-relations director Buck Peden, mindful that I only worked for a weekly. I could not gain access to the tiny, inadequate home clubhouse down the left-field line. I also could not eat a pregame lunch in the Pink Poodle, the media dining room behind home plate. However, in a twist, I was allowed to use the Poodle's kitchen phone to feed interview tape to an Evanston radio station for which I aired a daily sportscast during the 1980 season. When I'd enter the Pink Poodle a half hour after games, the place had an open bar with hard liquor, one or two or more for the road for the thirsty media. But in 1981, after Peden was transferred to another job, a more friendly media-relations type finally granted me my first season credential with full clubhouse and dining-room access.

The 1980 credential squeeze by the Cubs did not compare to what I encountered back at 7519 N. Ashland Avenue as a first career lesson in the kind of media management that negatively impacts baseball coverage. Company owner Lou Lerner had just acquired full ownership of the chain from his mother, sister, and brother. Lerner also had dabbled as a petty Democratic Party activist who was rewarded for early support of Jimmy Carter with the ambassadorship to Norway in 1977. But Lerner's political and financial passions did not extend to the team at Clark and Addison. I did not know whether Lerner hated the Cubs (one report had the West Rogers Park native a White Sox fan) or hated the Tribune Company, formerly the archconservative antithesis to his late, liberal father-publisher Leo Lerner. Maybe he just hated ambition among his help.

Whatever the motivation, Lerner certainly did not want any straight-on coverage of the Cubs even though the team played smack-dab in the middle of his circulation area. I had to come up with a "local angle" for any Cubs-related story — the batboy hailing from a local high school, community opposition to the installation of lights in Wrigley Field, and so on. Management's lame excuse was that the dailies covered baseball so well that a weekly should cover what the dailies didn't. Yet if a murder occurred outside the ballpark (as actually took place two decades later), the downtown print and broadcast outlets would cover it just the same as the local weekly.

Lerner and his puppet editorial director, Charles Mouratides, ignorantly demanded coverage of micro-interest, high-school sports and summer-park district softball without ever being in touch with what their readers really desired. This was the first indication to me that media coverage of any event, baseball included, often is determined by the whims and fancies of the boss. In this mediawide trend, baseball coverage sometimes yields to lesser, "local" sports, even in newspapers not far from the teams' home ballparks. Barred from more than scattershot Cubs coverage, I sought out some freelance baseball writing opportunities, but instead I ended up authoring a TV-radio column for Pro Football Weekly and taking other freelance work.

An attempt to blast myself out of Lerner failed in 1984 when Rupert Murdoch swooped in to buy the Sun-Times after Ted Field, half-brother of primary owner Marshall Field, wanted to cash out to finance his movie production company. Scores of news-side and feature department staffers, worried about Murdoch's low-rent reputation in publishing tabloids, bailed out of the Sun-Times. Columnist Mike Royko led the exodus, joining the Tribune, a paper he had long baited in print.

There was one catch. Only three sports department staffers, including sports editor Marty Kaiser and assistant sports editor Mike Davis, departed. There was only so much more sensationalism Murdoch could inject into sports coverage. Besides, writers are usually out of the office and divorced from the petty day-to-day office politics. Desk editors tend to work at night when the honchos are not around. Employment at a big-city sports department was a sweet plum, indeed, no matter who signed the checks.

The four hundred dollars I spent to buy a new suit, figuring I had some angles to get a job interview at the Sun-Times, went to waste. Other attempts to move on to bigger, better jobs in the Chicago market fell short. Editors at dailies had a haughty attitude toward writers on weeklies, wrongly believing they either weren't good enough or could not handle daily deadlines. The Newspaper Guild's contract for Lerner Newspapers' editorial employees prohibited any work for "competing" publications, thus precluding slipping in to the downtown dailies or the suburban Daily Herald via the side door of part-time gigs or stringing. This situation was exacerbated when the Guild failed to secure a cost-of-living increase in the five years an apparently cash-strapped Lou Lerner ran the paper. The Guild went all-out for its "glamour" contract at the Sun-Times when the crying need for improved wages and benefits was at smaller publications such as mine.

Why not simply leave the job, you say? I was advised by too many pundits to move away from Chicago, the stereotyped manner to move up in journalism and one that negatively impacts the wanderers' acumen in covering each new market. But move to where? Staffers of dailies from smaller cities throughout the Midwest were willing to move down in class at a weekly such as mine just to live in a big city. Not everyone can uproot their family. In addition, Lerner Newspapers provided a steady, albeit modest wage with benefits, the two most important factors when you have a young child. And there was that not-insignificant fringe benefit of season Cubs and White Sox credentials as sports editor of the North Side editions. A quarter-loaf was better than none at all.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Baseball and the Media by George Castle. Copyright © 2006 George Castle. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
1. A Long, Strange Journey to the Press Box and Clubhouse,
2. Old-Time Players and Scribes,
3. The Baseball Beat Writer,
4. Celebrity Players or Upstanding Role Models?,
5. Not Baseball's Golden Children,
6. LaTroy and Carl as Jekyll and Hyde,
7. A Lot Less Chewin'the Fat with Managers,
8. All the News That's Not Fit to Print,
9. The Red and Blue States of Baseball Journalism,
10. The Politics of Baseball Media,
11. Chicago a Toddlin', But Soft, Baseball Media Town,
12. No-Shows in the Press Box and Clubhouse,
13. Sports-Talk Radio,
14. No More Harry Carays,
15. Old versus New Media,
Afterword,

Editorial Reviews

"Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in sports reporting, especially the Monday-morning media quarterbacks in the blogosphere-both as ammunition and as cause to pause for thoughts."

IL) Daily Herald (Arlington Heights

“Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in sports reporting, especially the Monday-morning media quarterbacks in the blogosphere—both as ammunition and as cause to pause for thoughts.”—Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL)

Daily Herald