When I was 25, I landed an internship with the Chicago Cubs. I’d been lucky enough to intern for the Oakland A’s between high school and college, and to work briefly for both my college paper and radio station before venturing into commercial radio. I knew baseball. I could write and edit. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that of course the job was a good fit, but as anyone who has worked in sports — especially on the non-sales side — can attest, you need to win against long odds in the numbers game just to get your foot in the door. I was lucky, and I knew it.
As the summer wore on, my bosses floated the idea of staying on full-time after the season ended. There were a number of strong reasons why I eventually decided not to, despite wanting to stay in baseball, which I don’t need to detail here. But when the time came to make a decision about whether to accept that offer to stay, or to venture out on my own, I sought advice from many people. Fifteen years later, I only remember what one of them said.
Jimmy Bank was the team’s traveling secretary. Whatever images of that job Seinfeld may have planted in your brain, it’s actually a vital, engrossing, often thankless position. You’re in charge of all the logistics of moving, housing, feeding, and ameliorating a group of a few dozen well-paid players and coaches for the entirety of the baseball season, which begins in earnest in mid-February, as teams report to spring training, and doesn’t end sometimes until early November for those lucky enough to make the World Series. You’re there, through all of it, nights, weekends, holidays, from well before the snow melts off the Windy City asphalt right up until the moment it returns.
I had earned enough trust from him by midseason that Jimmy would task me with various duties, as we worked out of the same dilapidated donut shop that used to house the media relations department, inside the Wrigley Field gates, just up Clark Street from the marquee. The most memorable of those tasks was returning the extra cash after a road trip back up to the powers that be in the front office. Imagine handing an intern making $9/hour anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 in an unmarked white envelope. I guess I must have an honest face. Anyway, the money always made it to its destination in full.
Jimmy was also honest, brutally so. He left baseball for a while, but couldn’t quit it. He’d been in Chicago 15 years already by my season there. So I asked him for any advice he had for working in baseball. He gave me two words:
Get out.
I laughed. Jimmy was funny. But he wasn’t joking. He understood what it means to work in an industry that will never love you as much as you love it. I didn’t take his advice, at least not right away. But I didn’t take the full-time gig in Chicago. Instead, I chased baseball to Texas, then to Fresno, and finally found a different way back to the big leagues in Washington.
In 2012, his 20th season with the Cubs and 34th in baseball, Jimmy was named MLB’s Traveling Secretary of the Year. That offseason, when Theo Epstein was hired and the front office shuffling began, he was let go.
After the following season, my second in Washington, where we’d had wild success growing the teams’ social media profile from basically non-existent to a powerhouse, our department got the same shuffle.
Jimmy retired. I landed on my feet in the far more stable and sure-footed industry of sports journalism.
On Monday, America’s paper of record declared that it no longer saw value in its sports section.
The story of The New York Times and its sports coverage is endemic of the rot at the center of modern journalism and the current state of America. The Times sunk an enormous amount of money into an overvalued asset, letting the creators of Silicon Valley’s latest reinvention (this time, the sports section), cash out before their product had actually achieved anything close to what they had promised (monetarily, at least — they also, more accurately, predicted their own complete and utter destruction of the local sports newspaper, an outcome they were more successful at achieving). That company just recently cut some staff, without being subject to the same union provisions as Times writers. The 35 Times sports writers and editors will be, at least, temporarily reassigned, but it’s hard to be confident about their long-term prospects.
The Times has long seen itself as the standard-bearer and tone-setter for the entire American journalism industry, and sometimes they’ve even been correct about that. Taking the stance that they have this week is nothing less than a declaration of way they value the proverbial toy department. Later that same day, the LA Times announced they would no longer run box scores and the type of daily coverage that used to make sports sections valuable, but that are more quickly and easily published online now. More important for the paper, it means they will no longer beholden to late-finishing games to make print deadlines. Sure, it diminishes the reader experience. But it all comes back to money.
Which is a(/the) bigger problem of it all. At the same time the LA Times made this move, it was reported that the paper’s billionaire owner had decided to spin off his other newspaper asset, the San Diego Union-Tribune, to Alden Global Capital. If you’re unfamiliar with Alden, they’ve spent recent years gutting newspapers all over the country, leading to even more journalism layoffs.
Due to a combination of tech companies siphoning away nearly all digital revenue and news outlets’ miscalculations about how to charge consumers for subscriptions online (among other things), the industry continues its death spiral. Less revenue means more layoffs, which means poorer coverage, which means a worse product, which leads to even less advertising and subscriptions, which leads to more layoffs, until no trusted pillars are left to investigate and hold the rich and powerful to account.
Maybe that’s the whole point.
As tough as working in sports can be, working in sports journalism has it beat by leaps and bounds. A heavy percentage of the sports journalists I follow on social media have been laid off sometime in the last few years, are currently laid off, or both. I’ve applied for dozens of open roles in the past few years, for which I met or exceeded the standards for employment. But rarely have even gotten a first interview, despite 15 years working in and covering sports, putting together a pretty solid portfolio of award-winning work. I just freelance now, when and where I can.
I’ve thought a lot recently about what to tell the students of my sports writing class, which I’ll teach again in the fall semester. What do you tell a collection of hopefuls, spending more for a year of private school education than I did for four at my public university, about their rapidly diminishing future career prospects? How do you adequately prepare them for what it’s really like out there, to convey the sheer numbers game they’re up against just to get a foothold that might crumble from underneath them a few years, or a few months, or a few weeks into their employment, all real layoff timelines I’ve watched friends go through?
How do you explain that a column spun up in the wrong echo chamber will earn you death threats, even as a straight, white man, knowing that for each of those three characteristics you don’t share, the volume and veracity of the threats grows exponentially? How do you tell them that the same newsrooms that expose institutional sexism and racism also harbor them, that if the wrong person is liked by the right boss, it’s not going to matter what happened, or how good your work is?
How can you convey to them that, somehow, this is all worse as a sportswriter, that fans feel like they can treat you the same way they treat athletes, saying things they would never dare say in polite company? That despite needing to know how to write tactfully and intelligently about every major topic permeating our society — health and safety, politics, technology, race, gender, labor — even some of your coworkers will look down on your department as something beneath the rest of the newsroom. As we learned this week, they might just dispense with you entirely.
I guess it’s this — if you absolutely cannot find meaning in pursuing anything else; if every fiber of you knows this is it, you can’t escape it, you love it all too much and you don’t care what might happen tomorrow; if you’ll put up with long hours and low pay with a smile on your face, knowing there are no guaranteed raises or promotions or next jobs, maybe ever, and you’ve made your peace with that: OK. Welcome. Good luck. If not?
Get out.