T.J. Simers' lawsuit against the Los Angeles Times

You are considered a swell guy among sports writers if your dog likes you.

 

I know he wasn't considered a swell guy by most of the colleagues at his last job.

 

In the minds of the entitled.

 

It's not entitlement to receive what you have earned.

 

I was more or less demoted once by an SE who didn't like/respect me from a previous stop, probably because I didn't like/respect said SE. My pay wasn't affected, so I just kept on truckin'. Never thought about suing anyone. Damn, I guess the statute of limitations has expired on that one by now.

 

I am not a friend or fan of TJ Simers. Some of you have seen my comments as Gold, so I guess this is a self-outing (I couldn't figure a way to sign in as Gold, so I use this account now). I thought he was a BS artist when I worked with him in the days before cell phones and thought he was the same as when he wrote his column for the LA Times. LA Times management is worse than whatever Simers sins were.

There is a saying that bad cases make bad law. According to facts presented at trial, TJ Simers had good performance reviews until he had medical problems. If his writing was as bad as I thought it was, they didn't figure out at the LA Times. If that was a problem, he could have been reassigned from the column to covering the NFL as a national writer. The LA Times had no problem that their leading sports columnist knew nothing about basketball and less about ice hockey.

If anybody thinks Simers did this out of pure greed, I will tell you anyone doing this will go through a lot of stress being part of this type of lawsuit. A person will make few new friends and have existing friendships and associations tested. There was also a problem because Simers took a job with another newspaper, which the appeals judge seemed to have a problem with.

This was an ugly situation for the Times and the conduct of a couple of their witnesses showed arrogance. Given the fact that they were offering buyouts you have to wonder about the Times' motivations. The financial aspects would indicate that a resolution could have been reached giving Simers' three years' salary as a settlement in exchange for dropping a lawsuit. It seems the Times wanted to send a message to other older employees being offered buyouts.

 

OK, I overreached in presuming he was liked by his colleagues. I think fellow media folks from other outlets liked Simers well enough.

As for the "demotion" stuff, I think people should be able to retain the "rank" they earn. But these jobs don't come with tenure status like college profs. You get moved into a role by one supervisor and then a new supervisor comes along and wants his own columnist or NFL writer or whatever. It happens. Or management decides it loves a new hire more than it loves you. Who's good and who's not is often subjective in this business, so they can get away with liking/disliking anyone or anything. I'd rather have someone just move me around (if that's what it comes down to) than phony-up a couple years of negative performance reviews to justify what they want to do anyway.

I never was a fan of Simers' stuff. He seemed to be writing for other writers more than for sports fans and Times readers, in my opinion. But management "loved" that for a long time, until it didn't love it anymore. Life goes on.

 

As a long time LA Times reader and not a sportswriter, I enjoyed his columns. He was not a mainstream guy and did not regurgitate press releases.

He was biased against Mike Garrett and biased for Tommy Lasorda, but he was still fun to read over a cup of morning coffee.