Manager, Media Relations - Boston Red Sox

Well, putting up with assholes like me, for openers.
Seriously, it is an 18-hour a day job dealing with extraordinarily demanding people (not nasty, but demanding) both within and outside your organization. Moddy, I know you do game notes. Baseball game notes are, to me anyway, about the hardest, most thankless job I can imagine. Not to mention updating the stats on the Web site at, oh, 3 a.m.
But most of all, being necessarily in the middle of the professional athlete-media member relationship strikes me as a good way to grow old before one's time.

 

Well Moddy will attest to this,

Game notes are mostly for the amusement of the author --- the manager and coaches might take a glance at them and the broadcaster will use some of the information in them

...but seriously, who outside the guy writing the notes cares that Player A is hitting .327 in 19 day-game at bats?

Also - no need to update stats on the website anymore. Thank you BAM!

 

Cubby, the Red Sox PR staff has made game notes a point of obsessive pride since my first year covering the team, which was 1980. It's an institutional deal.
More importantly, the media-team atmosphere around the Sox is intensely claustrophobic. There's a lot of Glenn Close-Michael Douglas in the entire dialetic between New England and the franchise. Being in the middle of that 24/7/365-well, no thank you. On the easiest side of the relationship there could be, columnist (didn't need to be nearly as obsessive as beat guys, and wasn't there every day), I was always sort of glad when the season ended, much as I love baseball.

 

Fair enough. I don't know how the Red Sox handle their PR department any better than I know how any team handles their PR staff outside of my own.

Obviously, PR isn't for everyone ... just as covering a team on the other side isn't for everyone.

...but... so you know ... Everyone is happier when the season is over!

 

Does anyone happen to know if there's been any movement on this job? I was watching MLBTV last night, they were broadcasting the Padres game, and the announcer was saying farewell to a person in the Padres media relations department, Leah Tobin, who he said was taking a job with the Red Sox. I'm just wondering if she's the one who'll be filling this role.

 

Leah's great. Very nice person. And a lot of reporters use game notes, and bitch like crazy when they're wrong (and depending on the media relations dept's work habits, it's often justified).