Customer Reviews

Baseball and the Media: How Fans Lose in Today's Coverage of the Game

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George Castle's book on baseball and the reporters who cover it, "Baseball and the Media," is frequently fascinating and always on target.

It's also difficult to describe thematically.

Castle writes in the introduction that his book that baseball deserves better coverage than it is getting, and takes off from there. I suppose there are elements of that in here, but mostly it's an excuse for Castle to look around at the sports journalism landscape and comment on what he sees. Nothing wrong with that by any means; we could use more analysis in that sense.

Castle has dealt with baseball in a variety of ways as a journalist. He's written stories about the Cubs and White Sox as a newspaper reporter, done radio programs on the sports, and written seven books. Castle, therefore, has been around the block, and is ready to comment.

But here's the interesting part: his observations apply to other sports just as easily as they do to baseball. So if you have any interest in how sports journalism works, this is a good primer.

As Castle surveys the landscape, he has good reason to be unhappy at times. The newspaper business has greatly altered the way it covers baseball in the past, say, 30 years. The days of one game story are long over, as the demand for information in the form of notebooks, sidebars, off-day stories and offseason stories has grown exponentially. In fact, there is no offseason any more. Clearly covering a baseball team, with its travel and competitive demands, can be draining.

While those stories help keep an increasingly demanding and sophisticated fan base more or less happy, other reporting has gone in the other direction. Television sportscasters have less time on the air and, thanks in part to ESPN, have more pressure to simply show highlights. The idea of breaking stories has become almost wishful thinking.

Radio has evolved. The all-sports station in a market usually dominates, while the others avoid the subject if they can. Talk shows have gone from information-driven to entertainment-driven, with hosts who rarely appear in locker rooms. (In fairness, some newspaper columnists suffer from that same disease. Electronic journalists also tend to work in packs for several reasons -- partly logistical (especially for cameras), partly because many are afraid to ask a question.

The economics of sports journalism have changed too. Out-of-town media outlets are less inclined to spend money by sending a reporter to the big city for a story, when they can cut out the travel time and get extra stories by staying at home. You could argue that more people in, say, Peoria care about the Cubs than any particular high school, but that might not work with the bean counters.

Throw in the Internet, and no one is too sure where that is eventually headed, but we know fans can follow baseball in entirely new ways every day. Castle doesn't know where the business is going either, but he thinks it's important to look around.

"Baseball and the Media" is a little Chicago-centric in its approach -- understandable -- but readers don't have to follow the Cubs and White Sox to understand the points here. There's also the issue of a small niche audience. But those who like to know how and why they are receiving the sports news they get should find this a very worthwhile effort.

I believe a discussion of the current state of American sports coverage is long overdue, particularly with the proliferation of talk radio hosts and newspaper columnists who are increasingly detached from the events they purport to cover. I find it amazing that a person has to go to a smaller volume published by an independent press to find this kind of analysis. As a fan of most sports, I am frustrated that football gets away with the kind of fawning attention that ignores the fact that it has the same types of problems as baseball and basketball, and this book deals with that situation in a reasonable way. However, the best sections deal with the media "celebrities" who lack the intestinal fortitude to confront the people they choose to criticize lavishly. Despite their protests, they are cowards and it is about time that someone put that in print. I suspect this volume will not get the attention it deserves, but it is far better than practically everything else out there in the sporting press. The author should be commended for his work.