Covering the pros ain't what it's cracked up to be ... LAA-BOS baseball

Bud Selig likes the way you think.

 

Yes. There's a lot of SEC tournament games that go forever. Any baseball tournament with a long set of games can end very late.

Last year, there was a College of Charleston SoCon tournament game that got pushed back by over 90 minutes due to a fight in another game, and it didn't start till nearly 10pm. The game went extra innings, and didn't end till about 2 o'clock.

There were still several hundred people there at 2 in the morning.

 

Well, it kind of sucks that you have to be working until well past 3, but marathon games are tense and make great stories. I don't see, barring other circumstances, why it's such a bad thing.

 

At most papers, there is no SOP at that hour. You are at the mercy of the pressmen and they are at the mercy of the presses. I have worked with a few writers years ago who, no matter how I tried to explain it, could not understand that in 20 minutes the presses will have printed all the copies they will print that day -- the presses have been running for hours and there ain't no more. It's a nightly variable, too. You might make some papers if problems have put the pressmen behind schedule. Then again, if there have been problems with the presses, the pressmen may not stop even if you send them new pages. Entirely their call. They may not stop even if the final reliever is Christ, Jesus, in a save situation.

 

Reminds me of the graffiti from my freshman dorm.

"JESUS SAVES

A two-hit scoreless beauty. We'll be back with totals and highlights after this."

 

I was waiting for someone to mention this game, because that's what I've been thinking of since this thread began.

Back then (1985), I was working for the often (and deservedly) maligned Marietta Daily Journal in suburban Atlanta -- a p.m. at the time. The game was July 4, and I was watching the game on TV, but I gave up and went to bed when the second rain delay began since I had to be up at 5 a.m. to work the desk the next morning.

So when I get to the office -- about 6:30 or so -- Don Heath, the guy we had covering the game, is already there, furiously cranking away. I figured he had gone home after the game to catch a little sleep and got up early to write for our p.m. deadline.

When I mentioned that to him, he said, "No, I just got here. The game ended at 4 a.m." I chuckled and told him that was a funny line. He said, "No, really. After all the rain delays, the game went 19 innings. Rick Camp hit a home run in the 18th to tie it."

At that point, I laughed out loud. "Now I know you're kidding," I said. Camp, a Braves relief pitcher, was a notoriously awful hitter. I just looked it up, and he had a .074 career batting average and struck out in almost half of his at-bats.

Still laughing, I turned on the computer, started scrolling through the wire and discovered Don was not kidding at all. The Mets won, 16-13, scoring five runs in the 19th. The Braves rallied for two in the bottom of the inning, and Camp came up again with two outs and two on -- the Braves had long since run out of pinch hitters and pitchers -- and struck out to end it.

And yes, they dutifully fired off the promised Fourth of July fireworks show for the few astonishingly dedicated fans left in the stadium at 4 a.m. Supposedly there were quite a few 911 calls from area residents awakened by the noise, some of whom thought Atlanta was under some sort of attack.

 

Never worked for an East Coast paper, but I was on the desk for an Arizona paper for Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. Once it got to about the 11th inning, called my editor at home and asked I how late I could keep it open, then sent out every page except the front with about a 10-inch hole for the game if it ended in time, or could be filled with something else if it didn't.

Do the same thing on Fridays in the fall, with a 12:15 a.m. press time. Anything that comes in after 11:30 p.m. is a Web story. But try explaining that to readers ... all they know is Podunk High got a story and a big picture and Podunk Tech didn't, and the fact that Podunk was at home and Podunk Tech was 100 or so miles out of town doesn't matter.

 

Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay along these lines in "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs". Readers attribute nefarious motives to outcomes that result from innocuous events. If I recall, he used the example of a reporter missing a mayor's call while going to get a candy bar from the vending machine, leading the editors to play the story inside rather than on the front because there is no quote from him, and giving readers that hate the mayor the impression the paper is trying to bury the story.

 

Every newspaper ought to print a piece every year with its deadlines and edition information and an explanation of how the process works. People do not know this stuff. Publicizing it might cut down on reader questions/bitching.

 

What about the 1967 weekend the Sox and Yankees played 40 innings in less than 24 hours in the Bronx? IIRC, one game of the twi-night twin bill went 21 innings, they came back and played a 10-inning game the next afternoon.
But pitchers were men in those days. I remembered reading about Bill Lee once pitching 27 innings in six days for USC at the CWS.

 

I was 14 years old when my Dad and brother went to this twi-night DH in Pittsburgh..

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT198407131.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT198407132.shtml (Game 2, 18 innings)

It was on Friday the 13th! Being a twi-nighter, I'm sure the first game didn't start before 4 or 4:30. The game times were 2:37 and 5:11. Allowing for 25 mins between games, that means the earliest it all possibly could have ended is about 2 am, and perhaps as late as 3 am if it started at 5. Hell, it may have even started at 5:30. Not sure.

The prologue to this story is I was covering the Giants in 2004 and tried to do a 20th anniversary story on this wild night, but I asked about five or six people involved in the game and they hardly remembered anything about it.

 

Wouldn't that be the epilogue?