Desk editors: What did you do with Braden's perfect game?

I actually agree it's not a command performance anymore. I'm just saying you're not going to be intensely second-guessed if you go that way -- again, assuming there's nothing local that takes precedence. The big teaser treatment works in a non-Northern California market, too.

 

It was for a gift for me (slower than fuck news day with a large Monday section) and it was treated as such. Top of the page here in the Midwest.

 

We gave it the top of the sports front. We also jumped the story and ran a decent amount of text. This is from a Midwestern paper with no connections to Braden, Oakland or Tampa Bay.

 

We're a small paper 2,000 miles from California and I made it the main sports story on the front. It was a slow news day, like others have said, so that helped. But one of the reasons I went that route was because the major metro up the road seemed to do so little with it. They had a small cutout and what appeared to be an extra-long cutline wrapped around it, and then a 7-inch story inside. Figured I'd try to give our readers something extra.

 

What he said. You don't get a perfect game very often. And a day game, Sunday afternoon, on a slow news day? Absolute gift. No NASCAR race that day, decent golf tournament but not a major. Give the seamheads their day in the sun.

 

Thanks to all. Good to hear differing perspectives.

Granted, if the game had been Saturday, it would have made it much harder for me. We had a major road race in our town that day that management considers importnat, plus a bunch of prep events. I still would have put it on the front, but maybe not as large of a photo. All we had Sunday was a run-of-the-mill American Legion game (also had a feature in the can, which I pushed back to Monday night).

I guess it goes to show that no two days are alike. I was actually glad to have it on a day without a ton of other breaking news.

 

Bingo. When Ubaldo Jimenez pitched his no-hitter I led off the baseball roundup with it because we had a crap ton of local stuff out front. And the Braves are actually our "local" MLB team.

 

I didn't have a page to put together that day, but I'll play devil's advocate from here in the Midwest:

I would have teased it and played it big inside. Reasons: I've got nothing unique; just the same wire copy that almost everyone else in the country is running, which is the same wire copy that most of our readers probably read the night before online.

Considering it was a Sunday afternoon game, and our readers wouldn't see the paper until Monday morning, it's semi-old news.

Big package inside, including column and list of other perfect games might have been the way I went.

 

I have a four-page section. Virtually no inside space on those days. I really have to limit jumps and such.

I thought it was much bigger than, say, Tiger Woods.

Also, we have no photogs available Sundays, save for life-and-death emergencies. So shooting a local baseball game, for example, is out of the question. Every once in a while, we'll stash a locally-written feature and run that. But only if we don't have a lot of live national stuff going on. I don't want to cut live stuff to run some BS feature that can easily hold a day or more.

 

I pretty much missed out. No Monday paper for us. And to boot, we just switched over to the new 22-inch web, so I have 42 less column inches to work with per page with for my usual assortment of three pages ... which usually works out to more like 2 full with ads.

 

What are you guys talking about? Pages? Fold? Inside?

(Web joke)

 

We played it as the lede, only because it was a horribly slow local news day.

The Jimenez no-no, to compare, led the MLB roundup on our page six when it happened.