Who Should Cover the World Series?

It's not just about covering that event, though. It's about your national guy's credibility on the beat 365 days a year. That evaporates fast if you aren't around, whether that beat is baseball, the Supreme Court or the state department.

 

A thousand times yes.

 

I guess we're talking about newspapers that have already covered the entire baseball season, as Chass was. So they've already spent $200K doing it. What's another couple thousand? No one yet, not Jason Fry or anyone on this thread, has put an actual dollar figure on what it costs. It's as if it would bankrupt the industry. I bet this NY-Philly WS could have been covered for, let's say, $2,000: a flight to and from, 7 nights at a respectable hotel (with baseball-media rates, or share a room) -- and what else? Baseball feeds you, delivers you to the press box, there's no transmission cost.

Let's say it's coast-to-coast, 7 games, so let's triple the cost to $6,000. Still a bargain. For that maximum expense, you get two pieces a day for 10 days, probably a blog with them, done live on deadline by the expert your readers respect and expect. That's $300 a piece for unique, quality content.

Until someone shows me otherwise, I'll consider skipping the Series to be a p.r. decision, not a money decision.

 

But the folks in the other departments are going to go crazy or be depressed. We can't have that.

 

I agree. One of the changes in the sports landscape in recent years is that local papers are no longer expected to cover something simply because it's a "big event".

Quite frankly, I'm not sure readers even notice whose name is on a byline, unless you have a VERY well-known writer or columnist. A game story is a game story and, frankly, the games end so late now that it's darn hard to get much of anything in a post-game and still make deadline. Offdays are another story. Maybe you can get some nice stuff there, although cuts in the newshole have pretty much killed the 35-inch feature at mid-size and even many metro papers.

Given the fact that AP and other chains (NYT, Washington Post, etc.) offer gamers, sidebars, notebooks and whatever, I cannot fathom how one can justify the expense of sending a beat writer to cover something where there is no local angle.

 

I agree -- my point, probably poorly expressed, was that if you are going to send someone, get something worthwhile from him or her.

In the past, for far too many papers, it was all about just having a local byline on the same copy that could be had elsewhere.

 

Speaking of national baseball writers - I thought Posnanski left the KC Star. He's got a column on Larry Johnson on kansascity.com today.

One thing I've seen done, which has proven to be popular, is find a local angle whether its a scrub, a front office employee, a groundskeeper with ties to your local area and have them e-mail or phone in a brief description of what it's like to be part of such an event.

 

If your newspaper doesn't have a take on the World Series, this sports fan says I don't need to pay for it or even read it for free. Honestly, the idea that somehow refusing to compete will save people's jobs is an idea both Karl Marx and Adam Smith would unite to laugh at.

 

Posnanski didn't exactly leave, IIRC. He flipped his arrangement: instead of working for the Star and freelancing for SI he's working for SI and freelancing for the Star. I may be wrong.

Most of the people who aren't at the World Series don't have a compelling take on it. They'd just regurgitate the same stuff. Posnanski would and does have consistently compelling takes, which is why he's at SI and the World Series. You can't compete on gamers and dime-a-dozen fluff profiles. You can only survive a war of attrition.

Posnanski is an example of the relentlessly meritocratic world sports journalism has suddenly been exposed to: he thrives, as does Simmons; their backgrounds have zero to do with it. Their talent has everything to do with it. Guys who write stuff that's not unique blend in and get winnowed. This is good (previous examples) and bad (Mariotti).

 

Reilly used to do great stuff at big events - he'd look where nobody else was looking. Interview the caddy, the high school baseball coach of the World Series MVP, the referee of a Super Bowl that didn't have a controversial call, the ball boy, the guy that handles the Stanley Cup before it is presented to the champions.
This World Series made me think what a great article could have been written watching the Series with George Steinbrenner.

 

Part of the reason for covering the WS in the past was it was sort of a baseball convention: All the GMs were there, and a lot of groundwork was done for trades and other offseason moves.

There's less of that now. Some teams don't even send people to the WS because it's not that productive, and the costs of last-minute flights and hotels are ridiculous, depending on where the Series is being played. There are GM meetings right after the WS, and that's where clubs deploy their people. Then there are the winter meetings in December.

So for the WS, that basically leaves the games. Unless you have some sort of compelling angle, it doesn't make much sense to staff them, given the deadline situation. It's money that could be better spent elsewhere.

 

Me.