In which baseball media eats itself.
My son played in his Little League world series final, which was also his last game in the league. The teams were tied at one game apiece in the series. It was the bottom of the seventh, the other team leading 7–6, and my son was up with two outs, two men on. Being the good dad, I decided to take the pressure off him by telling him that if he should happen to get up that inning, the game would be on the line. I honestly thought that this would relax him; he smiled. First pitch swinging, Mike drove a long fly ball to deep right center field. I watched as the center fielder looked up, then turned and began running full tilt toward right center. It was not even close. The ball came down about twenty feet behind him, and my son was mobbed by his teammates between first and second. The best part came after the game, when several parents told me that if their team was to lose in a situation like that, they were glad that it was Mike who got the hit. I was more proud of those comments than I was of the hit itself. Mike is now twenty-seven, a UMass/Amherst grad, and a military intelligence officer in the Army National Guard, for whom he works full-time. He is scheduled to spend some time in Afghanistan next summer, the month after his wedding. He has continued to make me the proud father through his character and his actions, just like he did that day.
— MIKE BELL, Jr., Hyde Park, Massachusetts
VINCE VAUGHN IS IN THE BOOTH WITH THE FOX BROADCASTING crew. I cannot hear it right now, but I will later. I already know what he’s saying anyway.
I do not dislike Vince Vaughn. In fact, I quite enjoy him: He’s funny, charming, and a better dramatic actor than he’s given credit for. (He’s actually quite moving in Return to Paradise, a movie perhaps only I have seen.) He has been in episodes of Doogie Howser, M.D., 21 Jump Street, and China Beach. He graduated high school with fellow University of Illinois alum Dave Eggers. It’s difficult to root against that guy.
But after hearing that rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” I want to take him and his Cubs jersey—with “Vaughn,” on the back, of freaking course—I want to pull his shirt over his head and send him face-first through one of those Wrigley troughs. No offense, Vince. It’s not just you, specifically. It’s all of you.
No one remembers this now, but Harry Caray, before the Bud Man ads, before the Seventh Inning Stretch, before Will Ferrell earned a spot on Saturday Night Live with his impression of him, was originally a Cardinals broadcaster. For a long freaking time, actually: He helmed the microphone for the Birds from 1945 to 1969. The team eventually fired him because, according to decades of rumors (oh, if there had only been blogs in the sixties!), he was having an affair with the daughter-in-law of Auggie Busch, the Cardinals’ owner. When he left the Cardinals, he was already fifty-five years old. His career was only beginning.
After brief stints with the Oakland A’s and the Chicago White Sox—he, amusingly, tried to calm down the rioting crowd during Disco Demolition Night by singing his trademark “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” song; the image of him failing to soothe the thousands of furious bellbottomed White Sox fans from setting vinyl aflame is so delicious that it’s a tragedy it was never captured on film—he joined the Chicago Cubs in 1981. Then he became Harry Caray. He was sixty-seven years old.
Let us not kid ourselves: Harry Caray, while sporadically entertaining (particularly when trying to pronounce the names of members of baseball’s rapidly increasing foreign population), became wildly popular in Wrigleyville because he was an old man who drank like a young man. That Harry Caray lived to be eighty-three years old is a feat that would make Keith Richards proud, had Keith Richards not died in 1983. Caray, more than anyone else, established Wrigley Field as a place more to party and carouse than to watch a baseball game: If the broadcaster isn’t taking this seriously, then why should we? Weee! Obviously, I’m hopelessly biased, but that Jack Buck, the lifelong Cardinals announcer known for gravity, irony, and stoic professionalism, had to share a booth with that idiot for nearly two decades makes me want to cry a lot more than Buck’s 9/11 poem did. If we lived on a just planet, Caray would have been renounced for the sideshow huckster barker that he is, and they’d be building shrines to Jack Buck. But it’s hard for Frank the Tank to do a hilarious caricature of Buck, a man who cared more about his listeners than his own brand.
When Caray died, the Cubs kept his tradition of singing at the seventh-inning stretch alive by having various celebrities, pseudo and otherwise, hawk whatever product they were foisting on the American public by screaming the song before chatting in the booth with the boys in the bottom half of the inning. (To be fair, Buck did this once too, though with appropriate distance and, mercifully, “Root Root Root for the Cardinals” enunciated clearly in the verse.) It has now turned the Cubs into the official franchise of casual fan B-list entertainers with something to promote. It secured Wrigley Field as a place to be seen.
These obviously aren’t real Cubs fans. Exceptions can be made for Vaughn, I suppose, Bill Murray, and Jim Belushi, who I have to assume lives right next to the park, considering how often he’s here. (He’s here today too, of course. It’s clinching day.) But the whole thing has careened out of control. Singers have included Mel Gibson (2000), Jay Leno (1998), Mickey Rooney (2001), Muhammad Ali (1999), Kenny Rogers (1999), Eddie Vedder (five freaking times, that guy), Bill O’Reilly (2001), former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (twice), Dick Vitale (1998), and Ozzy Osbourne, who sounded like he was having a series of strokes. They all wear Cubs jerseys and make fools out of themselves and don’t watch the game. You know, like everybody else at Wrigley Field.
BRIEF ASIDE: Eddie Vedder, in between stints of drinking Boone’s Farm, throwing shoes at a picture of President Bush, and singing in a voice that every white male over thirty can do a dead-on impersonation of, wrote a song for this specific Cubs team. He’s that excited. He’s that certain it’s the year. They were playing it in the car on the drive to Wrigley, and we had to slam on the brakes to make sure Mike didn’t have an orgasm. (It didn’t work.)
Here are the lyrics:
Don’t let anyone say that it’s just a game.
For I’ve seen other teams and it’s never the same.
When you’re born in Chicago, you’re blessed and you’re healed.
First time (every time!) you walk into Wrigley Field.
I’m not 100 percent sure that Kurt Cobain was a Cardinals fan, he may have shot himself to make certain he would never hear that song. He’d sure as hell never would have tried to rhyme “love” and “underdog.”
IT IS POSSIBLE the fact that we are six outs away from a Cubs National League Central championship is making me cranky.
MY FIRST REAL JOB out of college was working at the Sporting News in St. Louis. (I’d lived for a year in Los Angeles, reviewing movies and avoiding the beach.) Like every sports fan over the age of thirty, I grew up addicted to the Sporting News. How could I not be? It was, truly, the bible of Baseball.
If I might shift into old crank mode for a moment: Kids today have no idea how good they have it. Today, if you want to know the score of last night’s game—or the game’s highlights, or the postgame comments from the managers and the players, or hear three highly paid former athletes “analyze” the game by telling stories about setting other players’ feet on fire in the dugout, har har, har har, backslap—you can simply steer the ole laptop away from pornography for a few minutes and you have everything you need. Not only do you not have to wait for it, you don’t even have to look for it. It’s right there. It takes no time at all.
The Sporting News was a weekly gift handed to us from the heavens. It was theoretically a magazine, but it didn’t really resemble a magazine: It came on newsprint, the writing was staid and straightforward, there were no double-page photographs, and it was full of statistics like you’d find in the paper. Actually, that was the point: It was full of all the statistics. Unless you lived on the West Coast, the newspaper was unreliable, incomplete, too focused on the smaller picture of the paper’s particular beat. The Sporting News had everything: Team reports on everybody, all the box scores from the previous week’s games, basically just a massive smorgasbord of anything a sports fan—particularly a baseball fan—could possibly want. Sports Illustrated was around too, and that was fine, sure, if you wanted six thousand-word stories on yaks and mountain climbing, but that magazine, when you were young, mattered mostly if your team happened to be on the cover. (Sports Illustrated covers will remain important even if the magazine ever closes. They could just print the cover, and a certain section of the sports fan public would still buy it. Cheaper too.) The Sporting News was for the diehards.
It had been that way since the beginning of time. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt read the Sporting News, and his decision to keep baseball going during World War II was partly in response to a poll in the magazine. Families sent copies of the Sporting News to their sons fighting in the war. It featured prominently in all the old baseball movies and newsreels of the time, as in “Dizzy Dean, pride of the Cardinals, was featured in the Sporting News, and said, ‘Hey, kids, stay in school!’ ” You know how ESPN is now the center of the sporting universe, the institution that drives every conversation? That’s how the Sporting News used to be.
The Sporting News is not like that anymore. Technology attacked it from the inside. Believe me, I know: I’m their featured columnist. You want to know how dramatically the Sporting News has changed? Look no further. Three years ago, Bill James, who said his love for baseball was initially inspired by the magazine, was asked what he thought of the current incarnation of the Sporting News.
He shook his head and sighed. “There is no Sporting News anymore.” And I wasn’t even writing for them yet.
It should be stated that I love the Sporting News. (Actually, they dropped the “the” because definite articles are unhip, but I’m gonna keep calling it the Sporting News anyway, because it makes this chapter longer than it needs to be.) I loved it when I was a kid, I loved it when I worked there, logging agate text and copyediting online box scores at 1:30 A.M., and I love it now. It’s different now, obviously: The box scores are gone, team reports have been cut down, and they do a lot of athlete-centric things, “what’s on Chipper Jones’s iPod,” that sort of deal. It only comes out every two weeks, but I still devour each issue. They work their can off over there, and they put out a great product every two weeks, despite the odds. Because the odds want them to die.
No matter how good the Sporting News is, the majority of the sports fan population will be disappointed with it because It’s Not What It Used To Be. The Sporting News is, from this view, a more useful publication than Sports Illustrated and a vastly more useful publication than ESPN: The Magazine (not that I don’t enjoy Stuart Scott informing fans that it’s rude to boo, and that if we’re so upset, we should get out there and try it). But it doesn’t matter. Time turned what made people love the Sporting News into something that didn’t need to exist. The Sporting News changed for the times. But that’s not enough. Brand names live to be denigrated now.
In one of my columns for the Sporting News, I made fun of the two New York baseball stadiums and invited SN readers to email me their pitches as to why their stadium was unappreciated. I would “reward” the best pitch by buying them and me a ticket to a game this year. I received some impassioned pitches for Detroit, Arlington, Philadelphia, Toronto, even Tampa. But the contest was kind of rigged: I really wanted to go to Pittsburgh.
This was for two reasons. First, I’d heard from numerous people that PNC Park was a gorgeous stadium where it was easy to procure great cheap seats because the Pirates play there. But mostly: I had slated May 12 as my travel day for the game, and the Cardinals happened to be in town that day. That’s cheating, but hey: It’s the Cardinals. I was primed to proclaim the first person to email me about PNC Park the “winner,” but because the Pirates have no fans left, nobody sent me a thing. Then, the day before I had to make a decision, I received an email from some guy, whom we’ll call “Robert.” His note was not inspiring—“The reason that PNC Park is different is that it’s the most beautiful stadium of any sport in the entire world and it’s parking lot is located near our pre-Forbes stadium, Exposition Park”—but who cares? I had my Pittsburgh resident! I emailed him posthaste, told him he won, and asked if he could make it May 12. “I’ll buy the tickets,” I told him. “We can just meet there. My hotel will just be a few blocks away. I’ll buy the booze too!”
I was on deadline, so I began to worry when I didn’t hear back from Robert for a few hours. I kept needling him, saying I needed him to confirm so I could file my next column and buy the plane tickets. I kept offering him plenty of booze in Pittsburgh, assuming that, after all, nobody fails to act when booze is on the line. Still nothing. So I finally gave up. I chose Minnesota, because I wanted to see the Metrodome in its final season. (It wasn’t worth it. Baseball in a forties airplane hangar: No, thank you.) I didn’t think that much more about it.
Three days later, I received an email from a woman named “Barbara.” She informed me that she was the mother of . . . Robert. Who was thirteen years old. Who had told her that “the man from the magazine” had invited him to “meet” him at the Pirates game, that his hotel was right by the stadium, that he would buy his ticket and buy him lots of booze.
“He was a bit overwhelmed by your kind invite,” she said, and I really, really hoped she’d seen the magazine, the column, and the “contest.” Because I had just invited her thirteen-year-old son to come meet a stranger with alcohol at a baseball game. With my hotel “just a quick walk away.”
I’m pretty lucky that I gave up and booked the Minnesota tickets. Because if I had shown up at PNC Park and Chris Hansen had been there . . . I’m not sure explaining the facts of the situation would have gotten me out of it.
OUT OF ALL the emails I received for the contest, I’d say 60 percent of them were from the elderly and the adolescent. Those who never gave up their childhood fetish, and those who were never aware that they were supposed to be disappointed in the Sporting News.
Where do people get their baseball news now? The Sporting News ceded to ESPN, but only for a while, and not all the way. Now you procure all the baseball you want straight from the source, on tap.
RYAN FRANKLIN is pitching like someone programmed a bomb right underneath the pitching mound, and it could go off at any time. A year from now, Franklin will grow a massive goatee, the size, length, and texture of a stretched-out Slinky, but at this moment, he vaguely resembles a normal human being. And he is in a hurry.
Before Vince Vaughn has even had a moment to talk about his new movie, Franklin gets Ryan Theriot to ground out to first base on two pitches and Alfonso Soriano to send a towering, but weak, fly ball to right field on the first pitch. It takes three pitches, and the FOX fellers and Vince Vaughn have only had time for two awkward moments in the booth. Reason No. 34,329,281 not to attempt to become a professional entertainer: If you succeed, you will have to make senseless chitchat in a baseball broadcast booth for an interminable inning, and if your field of entertainment is comedy, you will be expected to Make Funny Happen every five seconds while each broadcaster looks at you, waiting. The only time this ever works is when the entertainer is intoxicated. Unfortunately, Vaughn isn’t there yet. But when he finished his “song,” he implored the crowd, “Let’s close this out so we can clinch this and go out and hit the streets and party!”
My dad, when we return to our seats, asks me, “Who is that guy anyway?”
“He was in the dinosaur movie, Dad,” I say. “The second one.”
“Oh,” he says. “Never saw it. Does he get eaten?”
THIS IS HOW baseball is covered now.
In September 2009, I spent a full day and night at the MLB Network studios in Secaucus, New Jersey. I was there for a total of five hours. Because this was Secaucus, New Jersey, I didn’t leave the building.
The minute I showed up at the studios, I was greeted by Harold Reynolds, a former ESPN analyst who is the type of person who is impossible to dislike. “Will! My man!” he brayed as I stepped into his office before an MLB Network staff meeting. “You’re a lifesaver, man! I’m only here because of you!”
I’m fairly certain this wasn’t true, but I suspect Harold Reynolds talks like this to everyone. He’s got that Bill Clinton ability to make you feel as if you are the most special, amazing person in the room. He has the best job on Earth, and the man wants to hug the world.
The MLB Network hit the air on January 1, 2009, at 6 in the evening. This is not exactly prime baseball time, but that didn’t matter. What mattered is that they were on at all. After launches of quality channels like the NFL Network and the Big Ten Network floundered because they greedily demanded cable companies charge premium rates for their niche stations, the MLB Network made it a goal to be on as many cable systems as possible. It was a page from the MLB.com playbook: If you just make as much of your product available to people as possible, the diehards will bathe in your content and the casual fans will hop in whenever they feel so inclined. You make your work available to everyone and trust your product. It is baffling to me why this was considered so revolutionary.
But it was, and the network was an instant hit. (I actually had the channel on throughout New Year’s Day, even though it was just showing a countdown clock until the first programming began. As you might be able to tell if you’ve made it this far into this book, it would be fair to classify me as the ideal MLB Network customer.) Unlike ESPN and FOX and other networks clamoring for the highest rating possible, at the expense of the growth of the game nationwide, the MLB Network wasn’t all Yankees and Red Sox. The first regular program the channel showed was 30 Teams in 30 Days, a preview of every baseball team with interviews, highlights, and analysis for a full hour. The MLB Network did complete previews of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Florida Marlins. Local Pittsburgh and Miami television probably didn’t do previews that long. It was a channel focused solely on growing the game.
One potential concern, particularly among outside journalists, was that the MLB Network would be a house organ for the league, a twenty-four-hour apology for baseball’s faults, the company line. This is a consistent problem with the YES Network, the Yankees’ cable channel, which has been on the air for seven years and has said nothing about the Yankees more negative than “Joba Chamberlain is struggling a bit tonight.”
This worry seemed to have some merit—after all, how impartially can you cover a league that signs your checks?—until February 7. That was the day that Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts scooped the planet with the news that Alex Rodriguez, the beleaguered Yankees third baseman, had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs back in 2003. (Roberts’s scoop was universally heralded when the story broke, but by the time her book about A-Rod came out that summer, the tentacled beast that is Yankees public relations had discredited her, to the point that she was being accused of “not understanding how men think and live” on national radio. It must be so hard to be a female sports reporter.) When the news hit, on a Saturday, a day that MLB Network would ordinarily just show old games and highlights shows, they broke in live to do all-day coverage. Jeff Heckelman, a public relations director for the network at the time, told me, “We knew we had to do something. We just called everyone we could find and threw whoever was around on air. It was all hands on deck.” This was a story that could have been tremendously damaging to baseball’s reputation—the drive-by sports media loves a juicy Baseball Can’t Rid Itself Of Its Steroid Past! story—and the MLB Network grabbed it and made it theirs. Not in a denying, dissembling way either. The coverage, featuring Reynolds, SI’s Tom Verducci, Matt Vasgersian, and the newly hired Bob Costas, was gripping, tough, fair, and completely on point. Costas did an extended interview with Roberts that passed every journalistic smell test you could have given it. Any fear that the new station would try to paint the league in an exlusively positive light was eradicated. The breaking news coverage was the MLB Network’s Hugh Grant on Leno moment. “People took us seriously after that,” Heckelman said.
I sat in on a 2 P.M. meeting of MLB Network staffers planning out the evening’s coverage. The network, during a typical weekday, goes on the air live at 6 P.M. and stays live until all the West Coast games are over. It features live look-ins of games, analysis, “Ballpark Cams” at half the stadiums (with all of them supposedly set to be ready for the 2010 season), and constant breaking news. It is the closest thing to a twenty-four-hour active news station in sports—ESPN always has some sort of product or personality to sell—and it is a massive endeavor. And they started it on the fly. That requires lots of day-of-game planning, and that requires lots of meetings. There’s a producer who runs the meetings, but mostly, it’s smart people, players like Reynolds and reporters like Verducci and Jon Heyman, talking baseball with the passion of those who care about it more than anything in the world. I know the feeling.
I watched the baseball men talk about picking the runner off first, about how to adjust to the breaking ball when you’re looking fastball (and you should always look fastball), about the ridiculousness of pitchers claiming their struggles are because they’re “tipping their pitches.” (Al Leiter is particularly offended by this. “Jesus Christ, doesn’t anyone just suck anymore?”) At the end of the meeting, Billy Ripken, a network analyst and the younger brother of Cal Ripken, came in and introduced himself to me. “Where you from?” he said. “You don’t sound like a New Yorker.”
I told him I was from a tiny town called Mattoon, Illinois, a town he might be familiar with. His brother is the figurehead of the Cal Ripken Youth Baseball League, and the league once had its national championship game in Mattoon.
As it turned out, Billy and Cal had spent a whole week in Mattoon. He had a few opinions. “Fuck me, dude, you grew up there? The only good thing about Mattoon is getting your ass OUT of there,” he says. “That’s one boring-ass hick town you’ve got there. No wonder you live here now.”
Before I had a chance to tell him that, hey, I kind of like that boring-ass hick town, he was down the hall, askin’ if anybody’s got somethin’ to FUCKIN’ EAT! They clean him up when he’s on air. He’s quite good.
They all left the meeting and went out on the air and did the same thing for six hours, minus the fucks and the ass. They were having the time of their lives. There was a time when you absorbed your baseball news from the Sporting News. Then there was a time when it came from ESPN. Now the smart baseball fan watches the MLB Network. The advertisements and sponsorships, they bring in pure cash, funneled exclusively to Major League Baseball. The workers have discovered the means of production. They are merely selling the product. As always, there are millions of buyers. How could there not be?
MY DAD has never watched the MLB Network. It’s channel 219 on Illinois Consolidated’s cable system, and he can’t ever find it. He still subscribes to the Sporting News, however. It’s not his kind of magazine, though, not anymore. It’s just that his son writes for it now, for some reason.
Franklin finishes off Ryan Theriot on three pitches and the inning is over, in a flash. Vince Vaughn goes away. “Should be quite the party tonight,” he tells Tim McCarver.
I assume FOX is going to bring out Leo Hildebrand for the eighth. Because it’s all about the baseball at Wrigley Field, as always.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE