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GOAT writers, by sport

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Joe Williams, Sep 20, 2013.

  1. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    I know. But beat reporters don't write once a month.
     
  2. Gold

    Gold Active Member

    No way was Dick Young the greatest baseball writer ever or even in New York. Buster Olney, for one, was far better when he was at the New York Times.

    Supposedly, he was the first one to go to the clubhouse after the game. Well, after World War 2, more baseball games were televised in New York earlier than most other cities. Somebody would have figured out that you had to do something different that a game story because readers had already seen the game.

    He gave readers no clue about how salaries worked or any sort of balance between management and players. As for his "scoops", if you read The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn said the Dodgers front office fed him the scoops. His son-in-law worked for the New York Mets in the 1970s, and he was pretty much a shill for management. Dick Young was in no way an honest broker of information for New York readers.

    Maybe some people would say he lost his zing at the end. The problem wasn't just that he was a bitter old man, the problem is he was a bitter old man for more than 20 years.

    Maybe there are people who worked with him who might say he was a good fellow, but that doesn't help readers learn about what was going on. If you read him in the 70s or 80s, you read bitterness of a writer who became irrelevant.
     
  3. Smasher_Sloan

    Smasher_Sloan Active Member

    Salaries had little relevance in Young's era of beat coverage. The reserve clause was in effect. There was no balance between management and players. No arbitration, no free agency. If a player didn't like what the club offered, his alternative was to sit at home.

    I don't recall Kahn writing that the Dodgers fed Young scoops, but most beat writers figure that any story they didn't have was fed to the competition.

    By the time Young's son in law worked for the Mets, Young was a columnist and his influence had waned. The big stories then were all in the Bronx, and Young had no foothold there.

    In my very limited dealings with Dick Young, I found him to be an unpleasant and sometimes irrational man. But to dismiss his work based on the latter stages of his career is like saying you saw Willie Mays play for the Mets and don't understand why people think he was so good.
     
  4. exposbabe

    exposbabe New Member

    Let's not confuse longevity with GOAT-ness.
     
  5. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    I don't know if Dick Young was the greatest beat writer if all time. Probably not. But my understanding of journalism history is that he was one of the first guys to start writing more analytic game stories rather than the more descriptive pieces of guys like Grantland Rice. He did this because he was responding to the fact that his audience had either seen the event on television or heard about it from someone who watched it.

    While he may not have been the very first guy to write more analytically -who really knows who was first? - but given his large audience and the fact that Young was evidently pretty good at gamers made him one of the more important figures in sports journalism history. I know he turned into a cranky old man as a columnist but that should not detract from his achievements.
     
  6. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    I'm with you, Lancey.
    Young did less to invalidate his legendary credentials as a baseball writer by his late-career veer than Bonds or Clemens did in invalidating their HOF credentials with their late-career turns.
     
  7. Schottey

    Schottey Member

    So, you're saying the GOAT could also....wait for it....wait for it.....be a kid? 8)
     
  8. Gold

    Gold Active Member

    It wasn't a case of Dick Young's last five years (he died in 1987), it was more like the last 20 or 25 years. The players union was a factor since 1966, and people reading Dick Young were poorly-informed. I could always tell when somebody was a Dick Young reader in the 1970s and 1980s because they didn't know what they were talking about. Writing "pretty good game stories" is no reason to be considered the greatest of all time. Dave Anderson covered the Dodgers at the same time as Dick Young, and he was a far better writer than Dick Young.

    Dick Young would have a lot of blind items in his Sporting News columns, which were mostly rewrites of things he had written in the Daily News. Smasher, you said he was sometimes irrational. That's kind of my point. And after television, if Dick Young didn't figure out game stories had to be different, somebody else would have. Dick Young was an influential writer when the Tom Seaver situation occurred. His son-in-law worked for the Mets at that time, and Young was a complete bobo for Donald Grant.
     
  9. Smasher_Sloan

    Smasher_Sloan Active Member

    I'm not getting the logic of "if he didn't do it, someone else would have." You can pretty much say that about any accomplishment, can't you? If JFK didn't win the election in 1960, someone else would have. If Eli Whitney didn't invent the cotton gin, someone else would have.

    The players union had no leverage until the Messersmith-McNally decision led to free agency. Players had no leverage. You could hold out and hold your breath the whole time, but the team still held your rights as long as you lived. You took their offer or you didn't play. There wasn't a lot to analyze.

    I didn't even like Dick Young personally, but he was a major force in his time.
     
  10. Gold

    Gold Active Member

    The Messersmith decision was in 1975. There was news on the labor front for eight years before that, although you would be ill-informed about that if you read Dick Young instead of Murray Chass.

    Some inventions, like the cotton gin or Jonas Salk discovering a polio vaccine, are visionary. Other inventions, like the invention of shin guard or the flap on the catcher's mask, were things which somebody would have figured out. In broadcasting, I have heard about people talking about brilliant ideas in such topics as creating radio formats or talking to the audience like Gary Shandling. My reply is that those things aren't like the Salk polio vaccine.

    Dick Young was a major force because he worked at the largest newspaper in American. I think one difference is the question of when Dick Young became irrelevant. I would say right around 1970. Other baseball writers, like Peter Gammons, passed him by.
     
  11. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    Young was an outstanding baseball beat writer in his day. Outstanding. But best ever? Hard to say, given how long there has been baseball reporting in newspapers. Ring Lardner was a beat guy once. Heywood Broun was a beat guy once. It'd probably be better to select such writers by era (pre-World War II, 1945-1967 or so, etc.).
     
  12. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Let's also not confuse being a great reporter with being an exceptionally skilled writer.
    Gammons's prose didn't necessarily crackle.
     
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