The sacred MLB boxes

Or, as my old boss put it, "When it's your tit in the ringer, we'll do it your way. But right now, it's my tit in the ringer."

 

I didn't know Katie Graham owned your paper.

 

It always comes down to the tits.

 

Gotta love those Tribune module pages.

Where a 1-0 no-hitter box score takes up exactly the same amount of room as a 14-12, 15-inning box score.

 

All this talk of baseball box scores - which admittedly are carefully perused each day by oldtimers not afraid to call and complain about a missing late game - reminds me of when that paper (LA Times maybe?) decided to drop Garfield.

People called and complained for a few days, got over it and found out life went on.

 

No need to run box scores in print, as long as you're editing the paper for fellow journalists and not for paying customers.

 

No need to run box scores if you're trying to make your paper more relevant locally and not just editing it to please a small faction of vocal readers.

 

But then again, you don't really know if the silent majority wants their box scores or not.

Look, this is, plain and simple, an old fart vs. young buck argument.

Young bucks want all the change in the world.

Old farts want some things to be the way they knew it. And to us, a sports section without the major league boxes is sort of like a pop song without a chorus.

The one argument I do NOT accept is, "People can get it online if they want it." Because, again, we're not in the business of giving people an opportunity to go elsewhere for what they want.

 

I have argued on both sides at different places with different needs, but as for the life-goes-on thing: Yes, even at papers slowly dying. But I do know each time you take something away, the more you make it easier for someone to decide not to bother subscribing anymore.

 

I think the obvious solution to this is to run the full boxes with capsules each day but to do it with half-sized agate type.

 

Pardon the topicswerve, This is what no one has been able to explain to me (nor am I asking Moddy to, since his answer is no better than anyone else's): We grow the web presence. We add apps for the iPhone and iPad. We go to Facebook. We tweet. We give full coverage to the elementary school duck-duck-goose championships since "it's local and people like reading about kids."

So you work a little harder and do all that, and with all the increased "exposure" on all these platforms, they claim they can't give raises because there's no revenue growth. So you ask why, and they say, "Well, there's an advertising slump." So why are we chasing down all the i-readers, when you can't sell ads. "Well, it's the future, we have to be ready." That's right, can't sell an ad, so why not fix the ad problem? Or am I the only one who sees that as the problem while management is too busy playing with the newest gizmos?