New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The fine print on vanishing scores
I learned early that my name doubles as an editing test.
Take a look at how it was spelled on the sports stats agate pages of my local paper when I was in high school: “Bruning,” “Brue,” “Bruenig,” “Bruni,” “Brunig” and ... “Branch” (there’s no shame if you need to check the correct spelling)
Even at the time, it struck me that “Breunig” only shares three letters with “Branch” (and yes, I think of it every time I read the stellar work of Pulitzer Prize winner John Branch in the New York Times).
It was a lesson on the importance of fact-checking. Being able to look them up on vintage paper clippings four decades later revealed a different truth. With newspapers printing fewer local sports stats, parents and grandparents won’t be able to save such ephemera in scrapbooks and attics like they used to. You can’t frame pixels. And my “cloud” seems to leak memories like it’s summer in Pensacola.
So the news that the New York Times will no longer publish sports agate struck me as worthy of an obituary of sorts. Given that I write for the editorial page, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the sublime pleasures of agate. Or maybe you’re under 40 and only know scores and stats from alerts and websites. But it looks something like this:
Now, that paragraph was more clever if you read it in print, where you can see it in 5.5-point type, which requires a bionic eye to read. The internet gives readers the power to choose font and point size. And, oh yeah, you don’t have to wait for a press to run and pieces of paper to be delivered.
And most printed mistakes last forever. When I was Greenwich Time sports editor in the 1990s, we published a weekly feature revisiting memorable games from decades past. Highlights from a 50-yearold local baseball game drew a call the next day requesting an overdue correction. The caller demanded his dinger finally be documented.
A sports section without an agate page is like a baseball diamond without a
scoreboard. It’s yet another casualty of COVID. When the pandemic seized the United States more than two years ago, the sports world stopped spinning. There couldn’t be an agate page because there weren’t any games. Editors started to get ideas.
Over the years, I’ve considered the view from inside and outside the box score. Most ballgames ended after bedtime when I was a boy, so I learned to recreate them by deconstructing boxes the next day. They taught me percentages, averages and probabilities. Plus, my eyes could read Lilliputian text back then.
During my college years, I experienced the pains of handling agate while working for Fordham’s Sports Information Department. While calling in results to area newspapers, I learned the pain of the dreaded swimming box. One night, after reading the results of the last relay, I finally came up for air. Then it occurred to me I’d dived in too soon.
“I am so sorry,” I told the person typing in the agate. “You’re gonna kill me. I just realized these are not today’s results.”
He gave me a free lesson in patience and professionalism.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he replied. “Let’s just get to it. Start over.”
“Oh wait,” I realized. “Forget it. It was the right one after all.” Silence.
“I erased the file,” he finally murmured. “Now I’m going to kill you.”
I was working at Greenwich Time a few years later when I learned just how excruciating it was to code each piece of agate. Four
decades later, former colleagues and I can still recite the coding, which was like a primitive version of HTML, sans cut-and-paste technology. Headlines, bolded names, standings, etc., each got special coding. Agate probably created a cottage industry for doctors treating carpal tunnel syndrome.
The Times isn’t the first newspaper to try to dodge agate torture. My friend Dan Berman recalled working in a Wisconsin newsroom in the 1980s where two papers shared the same press and composing room.
One of the shared compositors (the people who laid out the pages in the days before they were designed on computers) spilled a dirty secret: the other paper was stealing agate.
So editors set up a sting. They created a faux page, replacing names of horses with the snide nicknames they had for their counterparts from the other paper. The competitors were busted when they published their own names.
My “John Branch” days conditioned me to be particularly careful about documenting names. At Greenwich’s Brunswick School one day in the 1990s, I followed my protocol by asking an athlete to read over his name in my notebook.
“I’ll give you a dollar if you can spell his last name,” he said, gesturing to a peer. They told me the name. “P-A-P-A-N-I-C-O-L-AO-U,” I spelled without hesitation. “Want to try spelling mine?”
They practically bowed in awe.
“How did you do that?” “His sister, Tatiana, scores so many goals for the
Greenwich Academy lacrosse team that we had to put her name on the bulletin board so we’d get it right,” I confessed. “Also, it’s in the AP stylebook because Dr. George Papanicolaou developed the Pap smear.”
The doctor, by the way, turned out to be related. Current Deputy Sports Editor Chris McNamee reminded me this week that Tatiana revolutionized our agate page. To make the lacrosse box score more efficient, we started listing names only once with total goals.
Every time coaches called in scores, staffers would scramble to seize the easy ones (tennis, field hockey, basketball) to avoid wrestling, swimming or track results. We also learned to appreciate coaches who reliably called in night after night.
Some things got easier with time, such as coding. Leagues eventually posted rosters on websites.
When Hearst Connecticut Media took ownership of several Connecticut dailies, we had to shift to a common agate font. Complaints poured in.
“The Mets still stink no matter what font the score is in,” McNamee recalls teasing a caller (for the record, Chris is an avowed Yankees fan).
I’m glad I no longer have to type, code, or see my own name mangled in agate. But give it the dignity it deserves: Agate has always been fine print.