No-hitters and Your Paper

A shouting match over a no-hitter? Seems like a waste of energy to me.

Having worked for many a douche over the years, I've learned to pick my battles.

 

It didn't start as a shouting match. The desk was VERY divided in our opinion. And we like to shout -- it is a lost art in newsrooms these days.

rb

 

Yeah, the deskers even paused their solitaire games to weigh in.

 

USA Today ran it as a brief on the cover, at least in my edition. Not saying papers should strive to be USA Today, but it is a national newspaper and doesn't feel the pressue of playing local coverage.

 

Amen, brother.

 

We played it big because Buehrle pitched for the minor-league team here in 1999 (and helped lead the team to the Midwest League title).

Usually we try to get no-hitters out front. If it's a West Coast game, and it ends right before deadline, we'll tear up the baseball page (Page 2) and make it the lead, then follow up the next day.

 

The only places I've worked where no-hitters were automatic for the covers were places that had no local MLB, although both do now. It's not a matter of laziness, just the feeling that in markets with no MLB, your readers are baseball fans in a more generic sense (or with widely scattered allegiances), and in markets with MLB, the interest is more specific to the local team. In a busy sports market, once you've told the reader that someone out of the area threw a no-hitter (via a strong refer), how much more do they need to know on the cover? In most cases, I am not all that interested in how many close calls there were or who made the final out -- Joe Blow threw a no-hitter in a game between two distant teams; that's all I need to know.

 

So, I'm curious. I'm not busting chops...

You put the Supreme Court's decision, 5-4, that upheld a ban on mid-term abortion practices inside? This decision gives future measures an open door and could affect generations to come (not to mention roughly half the population). It is one of the most debated topics of the last 50 years and got trumped by Mark Buehrle?

Yikes. That took some huevos.
Or were you talking about the "text message" case?  

 

Appropos of nothing in this conversation but still needs to be brought up by somebody - Mark Buehrle is one of the best guys in all of sports. Candid. Accessible. And 100 percent real.

 

Small section. Small staff. Lots of local to squeeze through the funnell on deadline as it was without re-doing the front (we're into district time here on spring sports). Not one of the big three for our market -- Braves, Marlins and (chuckle) Devil Rays -- so it topped our MLB package inside and we teased it on the section front. Had it been a perfect game we'd have moved something around and given press room a heads-up. Otherwise, this is the best we could do and for that we offer no apologies.

 

No secret – Northeast Mississippi.

I probably didn't explain well enough that we regard those teams as part of our regional coverage emphasis, as we do witht the Saints, Titans and Falcons in football.

But in an environment with space at a premium, MLB coverage is getting squeezed.

 

Still waiting for Dan Rydell to return and give us more of his wisdom.