San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Farewell from the Giants writer
Before my paid 13year doctoral education with Professor Bruce Bochy, I studied under Dusty Baker, who said something a few days after he and the Giants parted in 2002 that seemed profound.
Dusty said it’s good for people to reinvent themselves every 10 years or so.
By that measure, I owe myself more than two reinventions, although I know now I wasn’t meant to do anything else for the past nearly 31⁄ decades than write 2 about the sport my father brought to me when I was 8.
I can still feel the chill of a rare Los Angeles fog while stepping out of his 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air to the park on La Cienega Boulevard where he handed me my first bat, took about 20 paces, turned and started underhanding me a softball. I had a very high swingandmiss rate but connected on one that seemed to be headed for the moon. It prob
ably went 100 feet.
You think after that I was going to write hockey?
The reinvention process is not just good for you, but everyone else as well. In my craft, unless your name is Roger Angell, Leonard Koppett, Claire Smith, Shirley Povich, Nick Peters or Bob Stevens, you can overstay your welcome in a hurry.
Anyone with a modicum of selfawareness can sense when that has happened. You look around and realize that it’s not just the game that evolves, but the job, and the experiences of the players and coaches and managers you cover. You glance around the press box and see vital, eager sportswriters just beginning their graduate educations and wonder if it’s time to give up your seat.
I don’t want to overstate the case. If I didn’t think I could still inform, analyze and entertain in a way that added value to the fans’ enjoyment of baseball, I’d have skipped out years ago.
I might have opened a bakery. I liked that idea. Can’t knead dough worth a damn and can’t wake up in the dead of night to bake, but I like to eat sweets. ( What do you mean that’s not a good business plan, skippy?)
So I didn’t invent Henry Schulman 2.0 or 3.0. In some ways I’m still the iPhone 3 of ball writers. That iPhone was retired long ago, so that’s my cue.
After forcing you to read to the 11th paragraph — sorry, sport, you’ll never get that time back — I’m here to say that after covering the Giants for The Chronicle for the past 23 seasons and baseball since 1988, I’m stepping away to give someone else a shot to hold the best sportswriting job a human can have. The 2020 season was my last.
I have accepted the voluntary buyout that Hearst offered Chronicle employees and will retire from daily journalism on Jan. 4.
You won’t be rid of me for good. I still have some feature stories that will run before ( and maybe after) my last day. I also plan to keep my quill and inkwell handy. No, really, I file my stories in calligraphy. The copy desk hates it. I will haunt the press box at Oracle Park and work at my leisure.
I still want to write baseball, but not on daily deadlines. Maybe I’ll start that novel I’ll have no patience to finish, or work as a pourer in a winetasting room. I always thought that would be a cool retirement job, as long as the winery doesn’t investigate a little product “shrinkage” here or there.
This semiretirement also will allow me to enjoy the sport in the purest way, by watching the games without my brain overloaded with potential ledes and angles. Baseball as baseball. What a thing.
A lot of these goodbye notes turn into a retrospective of stories covered, but there is no need here. You all know the Giants history since my first year, and I don’t have the time or space to list all of my favorite and least favorite players, stuff like that.
Maybe it’ll be in the book I’ll probably never write.
I will simply tell you what I’ll miss most: the press box camaraderie, watching a season unfold from a ( figurative) frontrow seat, my favorite restaurants and writers on the road, the joy of seeing my work in America’s best sports section and, most of all, my Chronicle colleagues.
What I won’t miss: the stress of multiple daily deadlines, travel and the negativity around sports.
One of my pet peeves is the press and fans attacking earnest people doing their job earnestly. Criticism is fair, but not to the degree it has been amplified and personalized, especially with the advent of social media and the ability to attack anonymously.
This is where I would thank all the people who made this life of mine possible and enjoyable, the athletes, fellow beat writers, colleagues and the like. I couldn’t possibly do so without inadvertently skipping dozens of people. I will thank those folks personally because I’ll have the time.
But I would like to mention two people, without whom I would not have had this career, and two more who made it especially fun and rewarding.
The first is the late Bob Valli, the Oakland Tribune sports editor who made me a baseball writer, and Glenn Schwarz, my longtime sports editor at the Examiner and then Chronicle, who taught me how to be a better baseball writer and whom I consider a lifelong friend.
The others are my teammates and friends John Shea and Susan Slusser, who are two of the best baseball writers in the history of the genre.
I also would like to thank the people closest to me in my life who indulged me in this career even if it meant being away for weeks at a time.
Finally, I want to thank the readers.
I have gotten so many kind notes of thanks and encouragement over the years. A few of you have sent a particular message that really hit home. These folks told me that as kids their parents sat around the breakfast table together reading my Giants stories. Now, a generation later, they are doing the same with their own children.
You can’t read a letter like that and fail to understand how fortunate you have been. I hit the career lottery and leave The Chronicle with more gratitude than I ever could repay.