Wild scramble to get Giants and A’s into camp, housed.
For those who make their living covering baseball, a grim new era begins Friday. Zoom meets the pandemic in a relationship that will only be tolerated, never welcomed. And it raises a disturbing question: Whenever we can enjoy the resumption of conventional life, will media access get back to normal as well?
For the moment, indefinitely and throughout the sporting world, the socalled “media scrum” does not exist. There is no access to clubhouses or locker rooms. Oneonone interviews will take place on occasion, but never in person. Everything exists in a virtual world, and when it comes to those indepth pieces so reflective of a reporter’s diligence, most of the work will be done by telephone or texting.
Once (if ) the season begins at Oracle Park and the Oakland Coliseum, credentialed media will be limited to a certain working area, barred from going onto the field or
even roaming the stadium. On Friday, the “spring training” structure will be established when the Giants arrange Zoom interviews with manager Gabe Kapler and possibly selected players after the team’s workouts. That’s how it will continue once the games start for real, media having to settle for postgame group interviews under the team’s control.
Based on everything we’ve learned over the years, the players will cherish this arrangement. As a group, they have grown tired of the media crush and would love for it to become extinct. For several years now, writers and broadcast crews have entered clubhouses and locker rooms to find them almost empty, players hiding out in separate rooms to make themselves unavailable. Some might not appear until we’ve been locked out. They have their own ways to communicate with the public, including social media, podcast appearances, the Players Tribune (their words in print), or such athleterun programs as LeBron James’ “Uninterrupted” network.
In all cases, they know they won’t be misquoted or misunderstood. They’ll be free of dumb questions, inevitable in a group setting, and the mindless types who don’t ask questions at all, rather demanding athletes to “talk about” something. Free to dictate matters on their own terms, they simply don’t need us any more.
How dramatically things have changed.
As a beat writer through most of the 1980s, I had the best of all worlds. Preparing for a Giants trip, writers brought their packed suitcases to Candlestick on the morning of getaway day. After the game, we’d hop on the team bus to the airport, then board the team flight, a private charter with plenty of space for all. Drinks and appetizing food were served throughout. Media types sat near the front of the plane, but it wasn’t offlimits to venture into the players’ area with some sort of special request. Chatting with the manager, coaches or broadcasters was a cakewalk.
Upon landing, we’d walk directly to the team bus — no traipsing down to baggage claim — and head for the hotel, where our bags would be waiting and our room keys laid out on a table right alongside those of the players. On the morning of checkout, just leave your suitcase in the lobby with all the others. Once in the next town, the team bus would be available for trips to or from the ballpark. And all charges, save hotel incidentals, were billed directly to the writer’s company.
One could really get used to this lifestyle. On occasion, writers got a little comfortable and found themselves essentially “bought” by the team in question, never to write a contrary word. I rarely found myself in that kind of company, not with the likes of Nick Peters, Glenn Schwarz and Ron Bergman setting the Bay Area’s tone of reportorial excellence.
It was always healthy to cover a particularly bad team, ripe for sharp but fairminded criticism, and I got it nice and early with the A’s. The 1981 season had been a movable feast with Billy Martin at his managerial finest, everyone enjoying the hell out of a national story that culminated in the playoffs. In ’82, Billy unraveled, as he always did. We four beat writers wrote scathing indictments of a clubhouse lost, often through anonymous quotes from the players, and Martin couldn’t stand that kind of reporting. One by one as a disastrous season progressed, we were called into Martin’s office to receive a brand of savage tonguelashing we hadn’t quite experienced before.
The thing of it was, we had already established a special relationship with Martin. Great example: After Kit Stier had his earsburning turn with an incensed Martin, we figured Billy wouldn’t be talking to him for a while. I remember sidling up to Martin in the dugout the following day, hoping to grab a choice quote that wouldn’t be in the next morning’s Oakland Tribune. Instead, Billy said this: “Go get Kit, will ya? Tell him to come down here. It’s OK.”
That’s called trust, and the product of a very personal relationship we enjoyed with the baseball community through all those bus rides and plane flights. I greatly admire The Chronicle’s baseball writers in today’s climate, because they build that same kind of trust and deliver the same brand of exceptional material. But they get there through endless hotel complications and connecting commercial flights or missed flights altogether, just a ton of aggravation that never before existed. This has been the case since the early 1990s, when the players and teams realized they didn’t writers in the traveling party — not with the general media increasingly attuned to exposing their personal lives — and those avenues were closed for good.
If the players found the media interaction a bit awkward in recent years, they weren’t alone. The pregame clubhouse opens, nobody’s home, and it’s the pitiful charade of twodozen media types standing around by themselves. If we all have a certain interview in mind, suddenly the player arrives and he’s surrounded. Better get over there fast, or you won’t hear a word he’s saying. The same circus unfolds after games, and quite often you can’t speak until the player has finished dressing. There were times when Barry Bonds kept the hordes waiting forever, fiddling and fussing with his attire, then finally turned around to announce he wasn’t talking. Downright sinister, it was.
And you wonder how things became a bit strained between the parties.
Things are about to become terribly bland, to the point of tedium, in the interview process. Most players won’t be asked to join the proceedings on a given day, and you figure they’ll be just fine with that. Once inside the clubhouse, they’ll enjoy the satisfaction of complete privacy, not a journalist in sight. As we Zoom our way into this season, let’s hope it’s not the way of the future.