Jay Mariotti resigns

My question is why does Cooke care what Guillen and Harrelson think now when he didn't give a damn two days ago? I don't like Mariotti, but Cooke sounds like just as ugly a person.

 

You might be right about Bernie . . . but given #2/#3 . . . how f'n scary is that?

Shame on the Trib. They HAD the money.

 

I think Holley would have done a good job.

 

If by 30 years you mean dating back to 1978, I'll take John Schulian in my top three. Not sure what his precise run was at the Sun-Times, but he was a masterful writer and (I recall) he left that paper for two classic reasons: Murdoch bought the place, which at that point was considered as traumatic as Zell taking over these days, and Schulian allegedly drove back into the office one evening and slugged an editor with whom he'd had a beef in a telephone conversation. ;D

I'd want Bob Verdi in my top three as well.

 

Bob Verdi was very good.

Ron Rapoport at the Sun-Times was often quite good.

John Schulian at the Sun-Times; was he there in the last 30 years? If so, he's an obvious one.

 

(Joe Williams beat me to the punch while I was typing. Nice job, Joe.)

 

Anybody check that ST poll on the Deluca column page?

Currently, 75 percent (7,189 voters) say they won't miss Mariotti compared to just 24 percent (2,384) saying they will.

Sure, the fanboys who didn't like Mariotti ripping their teams are driving the votes. But did anybody expect the numbers to be that tilted?

 

Yes, absolutely. I'm surprised it's not a wider margin. If the most popular columnist in the world quit, the votes would be similar. People love to hate the media, period.

 

First, I strongly doubt that DeLuca was ordered to write that column. He had trashed Mariotti in print before, though not so thoroughly, and both he and Telander tried on other occasions but had their columns spiked. That being said, I'm sure management at the Sun-Times didn't mind this at all! I agree that it seemed a tad bizarre for the newspaper to run it, but as a guy who has little use for Mariotti - and vice versa - I did enjoy reading it!

"Who is Chris DeLuca?" A darned good baseball reporter/columnist for the Sun-Times. I only know him to say hi to, but I find his work to be consistently outstanding. He works story angles others don't think of, reports hard and is one of the best interviewers in town.

As for Cooke and the other Sun-Times editors over the years, they got what they deserved. They let Mariotti become a monster and were the ultimate enablers. Over the years, an editor or two tried to rein him in and make him stick to "his days," but they ultimately caved in, saying, "Hey, if the guy wants to write, who are we to stop him?" Never mind that he trampled on Telander and the others at the paper, helping bring morale down at a place where it was pretty low anyway due to the financial woes.

As for my blog post on Mariotti, the only thing I regret is that I didn't quash this whole notion of him "never mailing it in" or of him being the "hardest-working columnist."

It depends upon how one defines these terms. If Mariotti wrote 6 or 7 times in a week - as he usually did - 3 or 4 of the columns often covered the same points over and over and over again. During the White Sox run in 2005, he recycled his bashing of Reinsdorf, Williams and Guillen so often, he could have just cut-and-pasted. And that's only one example of dozens (hundreds? thousands?).

He wrote a lot of words - often - but did that make him hard-working? A hard-working columnist does his own reporting. He shows up for night games at 3 p.m. to work his angles. He doesn't show up at the first pitch, call the desk, demand to be sent the quotes the reporter worked hard to get, read what Web sites were saying, slam out a column based on those quotes and leave 10 minutes after the game. A columnist who does that repeatedly - even if he does it 7 days a week - isn't working hard as a journalist. And by just about never doing the work, Mariotti was, in a sense, "mailing it in" every time he rehashed his same old points using the fresh material supplied by others.

Let's not even go into the lack of ethics involved with all of the above - leading readers believe he was doing the work when he wasn't.

What really cracked me up is the way he had his bosses bamboozled. They would fly him all over and put him up in the best hotels - believe me, no Fairfield Inns for Mr. Big - and for what? Just to have a dateline on the column? Meanwhile, the paper was going broke, cutting jobs, reducing travel for reporters, etc. Amazing. (This, of course, wasn't Mariotti's fault but the fault of his enabling bosses.)

It's not as if Mariotti had to be in St. Louis or San Diego or New York to write what he did. The reason one goes on assignment is to gain access to what one can't get at home: the quotes, the feeling in the clubhouse/locker room, the facial expressions and tones of voice of athletes when asked certain questions, etc. We are supposed to be the eyes and ears of the readers, take them where they normally can't go. If we choose not to go there ourselves, what use are we to the reader? The way TV covers games, anyone with a laptop in any living room in America could do what Mariotti did over and over and over and over and over again. In fact, I'm guessing many could do it better.

 

Verdi was a better PURE writer than any who've been named, here.

 

I agree that the Sun-Times editors were enablers here. They kept tossing him money, and it doesn't appear anyone stepped in during all of the squabbling with Telander.

I think they helped create the monster.

It still wouldn't surprise me if he shows up at ESPN.

 

I think ESPN.com considers itself above Mariotti's shtick.
I don't think Skip Bayless writes for ESPN.com. anymore.
At least, he isn't listed among the 16 (!) Page 2 columnists.