Goodbye, ‘Google Baseball’
Farewell to Mark Gonzales, who is leaving the Chicago Tribune
The life of a baseball beat writer sounds like a dream job, and for the most part it is.
What could be better than watching baseball for a living and getting paid for it, especially in Chicago?
There’s a lot more to the job than meets the eye, such as trying to confirm or shoot down every rumor about your team on Twitter, meeting deadlines for stories due before, during and after games, transcribing hours of recordings to find the right quotes and dealing with athletes, managers and executives who might not be in the mood to talk.
But even your worst day covering baseball is better than the best day at some mundane jobs, and few have done it better or longer than Mark Gonzales, who left the Chicago Tribune on Friday to begin a new chapter.
Gonzales joined the Trib in 2005 as the White Sox beat writer and replaced me on the Cubs beat in 2013. Most beat writers are fortunate to cover one championship team. Gonzales covered two teams here — the 2005 Sox and 2016 Cubs — and another in Arizona in 2001, when he chronicled the Diamondbacks for the Arizona Republic.
His first Tribune byline, on March 2, 2005, was an analysis of Sox roster decisions in spring training, along with reporting on manager Ozzie Guillen’s vow to be more aggressive with hit-and-run calls early in games.
“We have to go out and expect to win,” Guillen said. “Create that here. Just don’t
say it’s another game.”
That began a memorable season that ended with a World Series sweep in Houston and the championship parade down LaSalle Street. After 8½ years on the South Side, Gonzales switched to the North Side in August 2013, when the Cubs still were in the early stages of their rebuild and about to fire manager Dale Sveum.
One year later the Cubs made the switch from manager Rick Renteria to Joe Maddon and signed freeagent Jon Lester. The rest is history.
Gonzales’ final Cubs byline for the Tribune appeared last week, reporting on the Washington Nationals’ signing of Kyle Schwarber, one of the core players of the rebuild. It was a fitting bookend to the career of a prolific beat writer who had 9,784 bylines featured in the Tribune over 16 years and another thousand or so blogs that appeared only on our website.
You can do the math. Suffice it to say that’s a lot of baseball information for readers to consume, and if you were a die-hard Sox or Cubs fan, you enjoyed every bite, in good times or bad.
“The Man for All Seasons,” Maddon called Gonzales in a text. “He’s ‘thee’ Sir Thomas More of sports writers, comfortable and capable in any arena. He was Google Baseball before tech was invented. A good friend. I wish him well in his next career.”
Gonzales indeed was a
Renaissance man. He and Maddon probably discussed vintage autos and football as much as baseball. He easily could have become the best college football beat writer around if he had gone in that direction, and he might still. The road is wide open, and we no doubt will be reading him again in the not-too-distant future.
I’ve known “Gonzo” since the late 1990s when I was the Tribune’s Cubs beat writer and he covered the San Francisco Giants for the San Jose Mercury News.
We first teamed up in August ’99 when he shared some information on Giants owner Peter Magowan, who called the Cubs a “bushleague operation” because of a decision to postpone a Cubs-Giants game at Wrigley Field without any substantial rain falling for the first two-plus hours of a 3-hour, 45-minute rain delay. Some things never change.
When he moved north from the Arizona Republic to the Tribune in 2005, we appeared together in a commercial for the paper imagining what the town would be like during a Cubs-Sox World Series. That scenario never came to fruition, but we’ve teamed up on countless stories over the years, often on breaking news where one of us would rush up to the Wrigley Field press box to file a story for the website and the other would stay in the clubhouse to gather quotes from players to add to our report.
No one loved the competition more than Gonzales, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and a relationship with more scouts, players and executives than anyone I know. Not every story was fit for print, but he knew them all.
I’ve seen dozens of colleagues leave over the years for various reasons. Change is part of any news organization, and you learn to get used to it. I once was part of that change when I moved to sports in 1987 after starting out as a cityside reporter and as Mike Royko’s legman. Our current sports staff is smaller than our entire Preps Plus staff was back then, but we’re just as conscientious about delivering news, analysis and entertainment to our readers.
Still, it gets harder every time we lose a teammate with the professionalism and expertise of a Mark Gonzales or a Teddy Greenstein, who recently left the Tribune for a position at a sports betting site. (Having to postpone their going away parties because of the pandemic also sucks, but that’s another story.)
Since 1997, Gonzo, Teddy and I have been the only three Tribune writers on the Cubs beat, from the days when Sammy Sosa was just another name to “We stinks” to the end of the drought and the current slow-motion deconstruction of the championship core.
The news business has undergone dramatic changes since then, and sports writing obviously is much different these days with earlier print deadlines, less emphasis on the final score and the nonstop need to “feed the goat” — tweeting every morsel of information you find before getting the chance to put it all in context in an article.
No complaints. That’s just the way the world is, for better or worse.
Covering baseball in a town that eats, sleeps and lives for the sport is about as good as it gets, and having the opportunity to work alongside one of the best in the business made it that much sweeter.