Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Tribune":

It must be the contrarian in me that reacts so strongly to people being deified upon their deaths. Jerome Holtzman was a very good, very intrepid baseball beat writer for a very long time, but from reading the tributes in the Tribune and the Sun-Times -- both of which rightfully laid claim to his legacy -- you'd have thought we'd lost baseball's patron saint. I enjoyed Paul Sullivan's formal obit in the Trib, and like Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter, I admired how it stuck it to the Sun-Times for basically chasing Holtzman to the competition in 1981. My colleague Bruce Miles's tip of the cap in the Daily Herald was likewise eloquent about how charitable Holtzman could be with young sportswriters.

True, Holtzman deserves credit for coming up with the "save," an important addition to baseball statistics, but the game was changing, and he was simply the first to recognize those changes in a statistical manner--if he hadn't invented it, someone else would have. While not siding with the Sun-Times in thinking Holtzman had nothing to offer in his later years -- the testimony of Marvin Miller and  Donald Fehr in Dave van Dyck's story, citing how he was ahead of most of his peers in treating the Players Association fairly and not siding blindly with owners in strike negotiations, is convincing -- I have to insist that Holtzman was not "the consummate writer," as George Vass said in the Trib, but a bit of a plodding stylist. I also feel compelled to point out the severe criticism Holtzman comes under in Gene Carney's Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. As baseball's official historian, Holtzman refused to acknowledge any ameliorating evidence about "Shoeless" Joe Jackson in the Black Sox scandal. "On the whole," Carney writes, "Holtzman's work is bleak and black journalism, which begs for a fact-checker." It's the same sort of hard-headedness Joe Mooshil talks about in the Trib obit. Look, I'm not arguing for Jackson's induction into the Hall of Fame -- far from it -- but I admit Carney makes some convincing arguments, and it casts significant doubts on Holtzman's role as baseball's official historian that he didn't.

So the world is a diminished place with the death of Jerome Holtzman, but the press box not so much. And if you think I'm being unnecessarily hard on the journalistic dead, just be glad I didn't have access to a blog when Steve Neal died.

On Tuesday, thanks be to the Baseball Writers Association of America, the sports world finds out who its newest gods are. It's no small job standing the watch at the pearly gates of the Hall of Fame. As afterlifes go, the Hall is right up there with Valhalla, and the voting baseball writers will, in their long lives of service to the sport, perform no act more solemn. At any rate, a story that writes itself is a godsend, and every year the scribes get a story out of explaining who they're voting for and why. The Tribune, casting nine votes this year, published its story last Saturday.

Dan McGrath: "I had a change of heart this year and voted for Alan Trammell after ignoring him in his previous six years on the ballot." Mike Downey: "A stubborn streak in me: Sorry, I still left Goose Gossage's ballot a big goose egg. If he misses out by one vote, it's mine." Philip Hersh: "I won't ever vote for [Roger] Clemens or [Mark] McGwire." Mark Gonzales: "I'm grateful I'll have more chances to vote for [Tim] Raines in the future. But after three days  of crunching numbers and weighing other considerations, I wasn't ready to vote for Raines -- yet."

No, voting for the Hall of Fame isn't a science, and it isn't an art either, and it's a serious digression from journalism. Maybe we should agree it's a presumption. On Monday the tarnished Clemens faced the press in Houston. The AP reported: "The 354-game winner abruptly walked out after fielding several questions from reporters. 'Do you think I played my career because I'm worried about the damn Hall of Fame?' he told a room filled with many potential voters. 'You keep your vote. I don't need the Hall of Fame to justify that I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off, and I defy anybody to say I did it by cheating or taking any shortcuts [steroids, human growth hormone], OK?'"

Did any of those potential voters, as they scribbled down Clemens's words, think, "What an odd position I'm in!"?

When I was young and living in Canada, the King and His Court came to town one summer night to play softball against a local all-star team. The King was Eddie Feigner, unhittable pitching from the mound, next to unhittable when he moved back to second base, and able to handcuff you chucking from center field--or on his knees, or wearing a blindfold. His "Court" consisted of three other guys--a catcher, a first baseman, and a shortstop. Feigner died in February, and the Tribune gave him a proper eulogy on its editorial page, remembering him not as a freak but as one of the greatest athletes of the last century. He barnstormed because there was no league for what he did.

Before the game in Canada, Feigner went on the radio to talk it up. The interviewer offered the obvious questions about Feigner's amazing talent, and then he asked something remarkably specific: How much bigger around is your right arm than your left? Eight inches, said Feigner. The number astonished me. It was freakish. A few years later I heard Feigner performing the same radio duties on a station in Saint Louis. Same questions too, except for one, and I found myself silently shouting at the radio: "Ask him the size of his right arm!" If I'd known the word I'd have shouted, "Quantify! Quantify!" The guy on the radio didn't and I was disgusted. Eight inches! Those two interviews taught me a lesson that as a journalist I've never had reason to forget: the difference between a pedestrian interview and a triumphant one one can be as little as one good question.