RIP Rudy Martzke

... and the Spirits of St. Louis.

 

Man, when USA Today had a full page of baseball team-by-team player stats once a week, that pretty much was nirvana. Remember when the AP would run expanded batting and pitching agate on Sundays?

I used to have to wait for The Sporting News, which would be a few days behind, depending on when it'd show up in the mail. Then Baseball Weekly debuted.

Now I can access anything I want via Baseball Reference, Fangraphs or Retrosheet, so my copies of Baseball Encyclopedia and Total Baseball are really heavy paperweights.

 

No matter how fast you type, nothing was faster than scanning all those stats on one page.

 

Since I never was close to the sports media beat, I enjoyed Rudy's company in the few times I had with him at various late nights at the big events (Super Bowl, Final Four, NBA Finals, etc.).

 

Living in Birmingham, if I wanted coverage of something beside the Tide, Tigers, Falcons, Braves, and Titans, I had to get it from USA Today. It was damned important to me.

 

The Buffalo Braves too, I believe.

 

Fort Lauderdale may have run team-by-team stats before USAT (I know they did in the early-mid80s).

But we stole USAT's idea for running separate NL and AL pages, complete with standings that ran the width of the page (Home, Away, Day, Night, vs. Division, etc.) and notes for every team.

Our IT department even created Atex commands that would make an MLB logo to go with every note. /UFdodgers/, /UFmets/ and so on.

 

All at the same time. He could boost a career or cripple it.