Minor league baseball beat writer

Probably because there are plenty of Spanish-speaking people and media outlets here already and so they don't feel the need as much.

 

Maybe that's where the clubs that sign them need to push them a little harder. If a guy makes it to the big-league level just because he can hit or throw or whatever, that's fine. But if he can't even speak passible English, he's going to be at a disadvantage over someone else who can.

I had this discussion a while back about a certain big league team that was struggling on the field and at the gate. I told a guy that they better not plan on making a large group of Latinos as the core of the team, because fans (and media) won't respond the same way, even if they win. It's a city without a large Latino population and there is just a disconnect between the players who don't speak English and the fans who only speak English, ditto what happens with some Russians in hockey.

I remember when Yao Ming came to the Houston Rockets of the NBA. The team hired a full-time Mandarin translator for him the first year. By the second year, I recall talk show hosts saying Yao himself needed to work harder at speaking English. And he did. Today Yao can be both fluent and funny in English. The team understood that if he was going to be their showcase player for the long-term, it was imperative that he be able to communicate with fans, coaches, teammates, media and the rest of the people around him.

 

I once covered an independent league team. In many ways, it was one of the most fun beats I've ever had. It seemed like everybody on that team had an interesting story about how they came to be playing baseball for peanuts in the middle of bumfuck.

There was one guy who got as high as AAA in the Braves organization, flanked by two guys who went on to become Major League starters. One day at AAA, this guy gets called into the manager's office, and is told after that day's game he's going to The Show. That night the, guy, an outfielder, throws out his shoulder trying to get a runner at the plate. Needs season-ending surgery. Never makes The Show. Man, that guy was grumpy.

There was another guy who also fizzled out at AAA, got out of the game for a while. My team found him selling drive-thru equipment (speakers, headsets, giant menu signs, etc) in Tennessee.

There was another guy who used to be the punter at North Carolina. Had three punts blocked in one game against Florida State. He was this team's closer.

Had another guy who was once the starting shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates. The second baseman on the same team was the brother of the guy who replaced him as shortstop for the Pirates.

Had another pitcher who was a Cuban defector. Yes, he defected from Cuba to pitch for an independent league team in the middle of bumfuck.

I could go on and on. But I had a lot of fun on that beat.

 

I think if you really want some good advice on this subject you should talk to Dejan Kovacevic, given that he is by far and way the best writer in the country currently assigned to cover a minor league baseball team.......

 

The best thing about being a minor league beat guy is that you catch guys coming up, learning the trade. I was fortunate that early in my career, I covered several guys who made it to the show and did pretty well. It was always nice to have an inside track.
The best advice I can give you is to learn Spanish. It will help you break barriers and the best part is that you can ask your questions in Spanish and many other writers won't be able to write down the response.

 

Is that really an option? I'm no expert on languages, but how long does it take to learn Spanish where you can actually hold a conversation strong enough to get interesting quotes besides taking it "one game at a time?"
Many of us took Spanish in h.s. and when they played those tapes of people actually speaking it ... wow it was tough to decipher.

 

The problem is that when you learn spanish, it's "proper" Spanish. There are so many dialect and words have different meanings in different places. The Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico is different than the Spanish spoken in Mexico. Sort of like someone from a northern U.S. city holding a conversation with someone from a southern U.S. city. Both are speaking English but the dialect and terminologies are different.

 

Or, when the team desperately wants to work a guy into the lineup and has to put a guy on the DL because he's "injured" to make room for him on the roster.

 

That guy was awesome. Just a classic baseball grump.

Once, he got booed for fucking up a fly ball in left. It wasn't really fair, because the dude was hitting like .380 at the time and just carrying the team. Afterwards, I was interviewing a different player and he gets this impish grin, "Go interview Buck" -- that was this malcontent's name -- "I'm sure he's got a quote for you."

So I do. "Hey Buck, Jim Bob says you've got a quote for me."

Buck: "Yeah, I do. Fuck the fans."

Later that year, Buck was named to the All-Star team. I catch him in the clubhouse before that night's game. He was bitching about it.

"I only get three days off a year, and I gotta spend it in (name of buttfuck town where the A-S game was to be held). Fuck that."

Sure enough, by the time the game comes around, Buck is "injured."

Still later that same year, he decided mid-game that the manager was an idiot. From the press box, like in the middle of the fifth, we see him lugging all his bats up the third-base line toward the clubhouse. He has left the premises by the time the game was over.

Asked the manager about it after the game: "Buck said he didn't feel like playing. So I told him he could go home."

Yeah, independent league ball was a blast to cover

 

Loved covering Indy baseball, just for stories like that. Plenty of characters and features.

The first year the team was around, we covered them like a pro beat. Gamers, the occasional sidebar (opening night, when a former pro comes to town, etc.). Even did a league notebook. Plenty of features throughout the year. Covered everything.

Second year not so much, but we still traveled and tried to at least get a stringer to every road game. I still try to approach it like I'm covering a pro beat. Do preps during the year, so it's a perfect summer job. I keep records and stats and have become the unofficial historian for the team.

As the paper shrinks and the fan interest in the team does as well, who knows what we're going to this summer. Heard rumblings I'm going to be stuck on the desk while we string the games, so we'll wait and see.

 

Lots of good stuff on this thread. I've really enjoyed reading through it.

Many people have mentioned it, but it really is a huge difference covering independent ball and affiliated ball. I had the opportunity to do both for one summer each back in my college days.

I was a part-time, mostly agate guy at a 20,000 circ paper the last two years I was in college. But the town had a Frontier League team and few things I've covered were as much fun. The town's folk cared about the team...so we had centerpieced gamers with art for just about every home game from June-start of prep football. It was some awful baseball at times, but I got great deadline experience, had the chance to do some radio work as the local writer always sat in for an inning on the radio broadcast and even was able to chip in on some major enterprise stuff (problems with the stadium lease, eventual move of the team, et al.). It sure did beat sitting around the office on June summer nights looking for "participatory" sports stories.

But, the interesting thing was at that level...unaffiliated, small town ball...readers didn't care about players all that much. For one thing, it was seemingly an endless string of guys from Midwest junior colleges and I never could get many of them to really open up and explain why they were hanging on and riding by bus to Chillicothe, Ohio or Richmond, Indiana. It was an unrealistic portrayal of what sports journalism is, and should be, about...but damn it was fun eating free burgers in shitty press boxes, avoiding wasps and BSing with a bunch of good people.

Then, I had the chance as part of a college class to cover a Single A team with no real pressures...just had to turn in so many stories a week to show that I had a grasp of how to cover sports (which I already had from my part-time job). It also gave me the chance to really work on enterprise/feature stuff that was ignored by the multiple (yes, at least three papers) reporters who were covering the team on a game-by-game basis. They were doing nothing but gamers, small ones at that as the page was already shrinking back then. Meanwhile, I was the lone reporter spending time in the clubhouse before games, checking up on top prospects, et al. I was able to pitch a couple of those stories to larger papers as freelance work.

Now, as the spring prep season winds down here and I don't have much of a vacation planned, I know my summer will be filled with county amateur golf tournaments and sprint triathlons as daily assignments. It's work and I'm very, very happy to have it. But I will be longing for those weekdays where I could be at the ballpark, instead of the office.