A perfect symmetry

Sporting News, The, August 1, 1994 by Steve Marantz

There is a beautiful symmetry to baseball that does not often exist in our personal lives But sometimes we are surprised.

In 1963 my family moved from Weirton, W. Va., to Omaha. The move took us out of the media orbit of the Pirates, my favorite team, which I sorely missed. One of my new acquaintances was 12-year-old Steve Nogg, a genial boy with a flappy jaw that enabled him to get his mouth around an orange. Steve Nogg not only had a big jaw, but he also had a big heart. One day he walked out of Chris' Rexall at 50th and Dodge and handed me The Sporting News.

"Here, read about your Pirates," he said.

An enduring friendship was born, built on baseball and the weekly journal that delivers sports news to remote places.

Today, in writing a column for The Sporting News, I can imagine the voice of the magazine's legendary publisher, the late J.G. Taylor Spink, who was described by the Saturday Evening Post as "an energetic, plumpish, bull-voiced man of excellent digestion." Other descriptions of Spink, who died in 1962, emphasize his "strong-willed personality." judging by photographs, Spink was not a man to whom you would give an exploding cigar. His bull-voice is in my ear.

"Young man?" I hear the voice say.

"Yes, Your Gruffness?"

"Who the hell are you and what are you doing in the Bible of Baseball?"

Fair question. As a roundabout way of explaining, let me first recall another legend, the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill, whose admonishment, "All politics are local" is the basis for many well-nourished careers at the public trough. Tip meant that people care most about what happens in their backyard, not in the next county or two states over. There is a sports corollary: "All sports are personal." It means that sports interest us to the extent that they touch us personally. If China's top female runner sets a world record in the 1,500 meters in the Outer Mongolia Invitational, you shrug. If your neighbor's daughter wins a high school cross-country event, you become a fan of her team. It's that simple.

This is another summer of baseball's labor discontent. I can mark my career by the chronology of baseball's labor strife. When the baseball players struck for the first time in March 1972, I was in journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia. The world already was thought to be beyond shock but I was shocked. Of all the radical notions of the era, this seemed the strangest: that baseball players could strike, as if they were, well, steelworkers. I thought about the steelworkers in Weirton, a mill town, and how as a child I watched them play in their mill leagues. I wrote an overwrought paean to those millworkers and their selfless love of baseball, contrasting them to "baseball players who aren't satisfied with the richest pension plan in the world" and "tight-fisted, profit-crazy owners."

The story was published in the Columbia Missourian, the university's daily newspaper, and launched me as a sportswriter. One of the Missourian's student reporters was John Rawlings, a dry-witted cherubic Texan who now sits, also with excellent digestion, at J.G. Taylor Spink's desk. Another student reporter was Neil Hohlfeld, a TSN correspondent who covers baseball for the Houston Chronicle.

In 1976, the year Andy Messersmith and Peter Seitz unchained the players, I had the good fortune to work for Joe McGuff and Fritz Kreisler at the Kansas City Times-Star. They taught me to get details right. One evening another sportswriter filed a story about a local golfer who had won an award. The golfer's name was Dutch Stamberger. Unfortunately, the story that came out in the next day's Star was about another golfer: someone named Stan Dutchberger. Sputtering over his morning coffee, McGuff caught the mistake and corrected it for later editions. The sportswriter went on to a better-paying job - in TV.

In 1977, as baseball's first wave of free agents scattered to the winds, I landed on the Boston Globe, then the Bloomsbury of sports journalism. Surrounding me in the newsroom were Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, Will McDonough, John Powers Mike Madden, Lesley Visser, Larry Whiteside, the late Ray Fitzgerald and Alan Richman, now the food writer (and eater) for GQ Magazine. Other departments joked that the floor under the sports department would collapse from the weight of its egos, but it never did. What occurred almost every day was a sports section of sublime sensibility. In their pre-TV days, Gammons and Ryan had energy to bum, which they did by talking sports to each other, on the telephone, and to innocent passers-by: custodians, student co-ops, delivery persons, indigent homeless, etc. The Globe's late hockey writer, Tom Fitzgerald, supposedly fed up with their incessant chatter, is said to have snapped, "Is my typing disturbing you?"

Gammons has become baseball journalism's divine diva; however, buried in his past is a football story. It occurred during his brief stint as a general columnist and mine as the Patriots' beat reporter. On a pre-playoff December morning I invited him to ride with me to Foxboro. In the clubhouse, I pointed him toward a nervous young kicker, David Posey, who was trying to put out of his mind the last-second failure of another kicker. In capturing Posey's anxiety, Gammons fell back on a comfortable frame of reference: "If it all comes down to Steve Grogan and John Hannah and friends maneuvering into position in a 21-23 game with 14 seconds remaining, then out will trot David Posey, alone. He is the assumed part of the two-minute drill. He doesn't hit anyone. No one takes him one-on-one. He's supposed to kick a dumb ball through the uprights, like an extra point or catching an infield popup." Baseball or football, Peter could bring it.