Picking Splinters by Mike Hume

Spring Puts Stories
Back on the Field

Opening Day marks a turning point. No, not just for our beloved Nationals, who debuted in Philadelphia last Monday, but for the way the sport has been covered since the end of the 2004 World Series.

Ever since Keith Foulke flipped the ball to Doug Mientkiewicz at first base for the last out, the focus of baseball hasn’t been on the sport, but on story lines. No more box scores. No more statistics. No more play by play. Those cold objectivities gave way to stories about the dissolution of The Curse, about the “Idiot Culture” of the Red Sox, about steroids, even about that pesky ball that Foulke flipped to Mientkiewicz. For the past four months, the written emphasis on baseball has not been on the sport.

That’s not a gripe at the coverage, it’s just the way it is. As a writer, I love covering the lives of athletes and stories off the field as much as I love reading about them. But there’s just something about the sport itself that’s comforting, something that’s ... true.

Another point of clarification: I am not saying that the off-season player profiles are fictitious, or even embellished, but I am saying that compared to stories based on events or statistics, there is wiggle room.

Writers have a lot of power. When you sit down in front of a computer you’re quite literally faced with a blank canvas on which they can craft back stories, quotes and glimpses of a whole however they see fit.

When I interviewed for an internship at ESPN the Magazine several years back, they asked me my opinion on the latest stories they had written. One that I had read was about Gary Sheffield and I told them I didn’t like it at all. I thought the writer was working to imprint a manufactured image of Sheffield on my brain. The writer spoke of how “you don’t know Gary Sheffield” and how hard his life has been, how alimony payments are always sapping him.

Maybe they are. Maybe this extremely sympathetic portrait of an athlete I had always presumed to be a jerk is the accurate picture. But maybe there are parts that the writer chose to leave out. Such as, how those alimony payments came about in the first place.

In stories like these, there are grey areas. That’s not a bad thing, far from it, as it often makes the piece a better read and more interesting. But we’re surrounded by grey areas in everyday life. After a while, I’m grey-area-ed out. Come each spring, I crave a little concrete certainty. And I’m not talking about taxes.

What happens in games, and later detailed in box scores, is real. There’s no subjectivity. It’s 60 feet, six inches from the pitching rubber to home and 90 feet to first base. And while writers can shade events with a slight hue, you can’t script what happens on the field.

In most cases it’s a far wilder ride than anyone could dream up. Analysts have been stating all season that Pedro would have a huge impact for the Mets, and after posting 12 K’s in his debut against Cincinnati, who could argue? But would anyone have guessed that it was the Reds’ off-season acquisition Joe “The Joker” Randa who would laugh last with a walk-off home run? It is crazy. It is true. And to me that’s entertaining.

There’s a reason that writers say that the best stories write themselves. That’s because, when the game is being played on the field, the pens aren’t in the hands of writers. They’re in the hands of athletes, scripting their own seasonal biography with each swing of the bat.

All winter there have been profiles, conjectures and predictions. Who is Zach Day? How good will the off-season acquisitions be for their new teams? How good will the Nationals be now that they’re in a new home? Those are all fun in their own right, but to me, they’re a poor substitute for the drama on the field at the start of the season.

Now we can finally get the answers to some of those questions and predictions. Now that we know Zach Day the artist, let’s see Zach Day the sinker-baller.

Baseball can provide any number of impossible dramas on the field for its audience, dramas that aren’t filtered through the pen or keyboard of a third party. For someone who makes a living as one of those third parties, it’s always refreshing when reality doesn’t need any refining.

Mike Hume may be emailed here.