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.

 

Back in the 90s, my one abortive attempt at running a rotisserie league required getting that edition in order to figure up the week’s results. Didn’t the AL and NL print on different days?

 

Part of me from time to time wonders if I could ask AI to make me a sports section from 1990 to read, that’s how much I miss how organized and quick and efficient it was to read one.

It wouldn’t be the same, though. They were handcrafted and idiosyncratic in a way AI would never recapture.

 

Rudy took fantasy football and basketball seriously, which made those draft days half-day events to remember. He was also known to pull off the road on vacation to call in a trade or waiver-wire claim.

 

Given that pro sports – except the Charlotte Hornets – were not yet in my area and that it was a D-I/ACC fishbowl, if McPaper hadn't been around, I would have had even less access to the outside world.