Question for all of you

I'm the sports editor (one-man shop) at a weekly paper and we're going to enhance our summer coverage this year by covering the minor league baseball team that is up the road. with us being a weekly, obviously game stories are not going to be the top priority, so I was curious as to what some of you thought first about the idea, and secondly, what things would you cover?

 

Feature stories on players -- local people who work at the park or have ties -- any local kids coming through the area on a road trip -- fans from the area who don't miss games...

 

Definitely focus on features, and maybe notebooks of interesting tidbits from the past week's games. If you feel like you need to at least talk about the results, you can have a "Week in Review" graphic where you just have the score and a 1-line highlight of each game, and run that as a sidebar with whatever feature/notebook you do.

Even for dailies, I've always thought that for the most part that extensive gamers for minor league baseball miss the point of the sport. Yeah, there are a lot of people in attendance, but from my experience, most of them are there for the experience of being at the game rather than the final score. It's cheap family entertainment where you can spend $20-$30 bucks and take your kids out for a night, watch some future stars, play with the mascot, and eat some ballpark food, and if the home team wins, all the better. But if the home team doesn't win, it doesn't really ruin your night like it would if you were at a pro or college football or basketball game. And I just don't think that most of them would pick up the paper the next day just to read a recap of the game action.

 

Captzulu is totally correct. I don't think most publishers and top editors understand this, however.

 

Thanks a ton for the help.

 

Ditto all that. You can always try to do some kind of feature-ish gamer where you can focus on specific aspects of games from the previous week ... maybe a few pitchers did particularly well or one hitter is on a hot streak. Talk about the games but focus on the larger aspects.

 

you basically are running about 12 or 13 stories, right? once a week for three months? so dig hard to find off beat and unique features. don't parrot the local daily's feature coverage.

 

features, columns, notebooks and don't forget short capsules from the games that did take place during the week. (emphasis on short ... two to three graphs on each game tops) and don't headline your capsules ... give them some kind of "week in review" treatment.

 

The daily doesn't provide them any coverage.

 

Heck, you could fill the entire summer on stories like this. Have your reporter sell concessions for a night. Have him shadow the radio guy (if there is one). Have him be the guy who ringleads all those silly between-innings contests. Interview the ticket takers. Talk to the old guy who comes for every game (in Daytona, for example, "Front Row Joe" has been to 700-some straight games, and he's sponsored). EDIT: Another one I just thought of: What do all these young studs do in your small town for entertainment, especially considering that a lot of them might not even be 21?

I would think most minor-league teams, especially at the low-A level, would be happy for the publicity. Might not work in AAA, though. There'll be a fine line between being their shill and providing entertaining coverage, though, so walk it carefully.

 

Some good ideas. You could also talk to the players about what baseball means to them kind of stuff. What do they like, hate about practice? Favorite/best drill. Tips for youngsters, etc.

You could talk to the clubhouse guys about who has the dirtiest uniform every night. How do they keep it clean? Does he take pride in getting grass stains, etc?

Stuff anyone can relate too.