Galarraga imperfect game treatment

I was a bit surprised over at sportsdesigner.blogs.com to see that the Indy Star sports front had nary a mention of the Galarraga/Joyce incident (though they had the Stanley Cup game as a teaser, so time wasn't the issue), while the Dallas Morning News chose to include it as a ~10ish pt. refer line below Griffey's retirement announcement, which got a photo.

Meanwhile, it was centerpiece for the Los Angeles Times.

What's the right way to play this? In my mind, the story is bigger than either of the perfect games this year -- the outcry has been major.

Not putting the story -- or at least a prominent refer with photo -- on the sports front seems a bit odd.

What did your shop do, and what would you do if you had the chance to do it all over again?

 

How could this not be front-page material? Even for a hyper-local paper, some mention has to be made of that fiasco, regardless of geography.

If I was designing a sports section, that would have gotten huge play. Just for the sheer intrigue. For sure above the fold, w/ art and hopefully one of those dynamite quotes from Joyce ("I just cost that kid a perfect game"), and then a second piece inside.

If done right (thoughtful headline, emotional photo), that package could have sold papers. It's what people are talking about, even non-sports people.

I understand there's a different mindset at smaller papers, but I think it would be a serious injustice to readers to ignore Galarraga/Joyce simply to cram more info. from the county track meet onto the front.

 

I'm with you. The Indy Star's decision, being about five hours away from each city involved and not having its own MLB team, seems particularly odd.

I don't mean to single the Star out, but there are only so many papers whose sports fronts I can look at free online.

My paper played this in the same slot it has played previous perfect games this season, with the story on the front.

 

That probably was bigger than any of the perfect games this year just because of how it ended and should have been given lead-story treatment, especially considering the game ended in less than two hours. Two things to consider here: Hopefully, Bud Selig will do the right thing, overturn the call and give Galarraga the perfect game he deserves; and Jim Joyce is a very good umpire who hopefully won't be lumped in there with schlocks like Angel Hernandez, Joe West and Bill Hohn who have a knack of injecting themselves into games.

 

No photos were on the Canadian Press wire by my deadline, and our hyper-local section front is buried in the middle of the A section as is, so it went in place of where a Jays/MLB roundup story would otherwise go on the third of our three pages.

Griffey and Stanley Cup took over the middle page. All local on the front, all the time.

In a perfect world, the story leads my B1 front page, alongside Griffey and hockey, and my local teases from B1 and starts on B2.

 

Detroit Free Press main hed: Robbed!

Detroit News main hed: Perfect Robbery

Both 1-A, of course.

 

That's apparently not gonna happen.

Might make too much sense.

 

I hope at lease one person writes a column that says, "I didn't watch the game and, given all the columns that will be written about this, I really have nothing else of substance to add."

 

Brilliant. You should go into the BP Communications department.

 

All I'm saying is that would probably be better than some local columnist that has no Major League Bbaseball expertise hammering out 15 or so inches because it's a big event and the columnist thinks he or she has to give an about it.

I think a far better use of space would be to go with a national columnist who knows the rules, history, relevance and likely effect of the decision.

Sadly, I'm afraid there will be quite a few bad local columns, instead.

 

I like that one a lot.