There are numerous reasons not to want the job of baseball-team beat-guy — eating in hotels a lot is one; the threat of wedgies from Adam Dunn and having to stare at Nick Johnson’s Jon Polito mustache for 162 games also come to mind — but busting out 162 game recaps on mega-tight deadlines pretty high on my list. Because of how soon the recap is due after the game — usually within an hour or so — most writers bang out their leads (or “ledes” if you want to get awful journalistic) in advance, while the game’s still happening. Plug in a few quotes and the final score, file, and you can head back to the Ramada for a caesar salad with grilled chicken on top and as many whiskeys as you can drink before you just start crying, crying without really knowing that you’re crying or why it’s happening although maybe it’s because you’re so tired, so sad, your stomach hurts, etc. I don’t really know, myself. It’s probably not that bad.
But I just took a part-time job doing xtreme-deadline stuff — I wrote most of the player news notes on this page, although there’s obviously no way to tell that — and that, I can at least say, is pretty miserable. More typing than writing, less about quality than quantity, the whole pooped-up works. It’d probably be pretty exhausting and unpleasant to have to live like that full-time, and I’m sure — in part because he has already admitted as much — that Washington Post Nationals correspondent Chico Harlan can think of things he’d rather be doing than recapping lopsided losses 90-110 times this season. But it probably doesn’t bode well that, two games and two lopsided losses into the 2009 season, he’s already not even bothering to conceal his disdain for the team. These are the first two paragraphs of his recap of yesterday’s 8-3 Nationals loss:
The Washington Nationals might not be this bad. Give them some time — maybe another day or two, maybe another series — and surely they will demonstrate the ability to fall behind by only a few runs, rather than a half-dozen. And maybe their starting pitchers can last four or five innings, rather than three. Surely sometime soon their steady third baseman will be throwing balls to the first baseman’s chest, not his cleats, and right-hander Julián Tavárez — the sort of relief-pitching blanket you only throw atop a raging fire — won’t be making his cameo before the stadium entrance lines clear.
Give the Nationals enough time, and they will return to the mean; debate all you want if that good fortune will also help them win with any regularity. After losing Tuesday night to the Marlins, 8-3, the 2009 Nationals have proven only an ability to turn an ugly season opener into an even uglier season-opening series. In front of 11,124 at Dolphin Stadium, the Nationals trailed 8-0 by the third inning. Starter Scott Olsen was bad against the middle of Florida’s order and just as bad against its bottom. By the middle of the third inning, the Marlins (2-0) — already with two home runs this game, four the day prior — were on pace for more than 800 homers for the season.
I kind of don’t know what to say about this. In a sense, everything that’s there needs to be there, data-wise. And I suppose it’s a bit livelier than the average recap, in the sense that Harlan was obviously having some fun with writing it. That “fun” thing is nothing another couple decades on the job won’t cure, I guess, but I think more notable is the fact that there’s something dismayingly dickish about the whole thing, a sort of bloggy jerkiness that I don’t really think an actual journalist can afford. At the risk of getting Bissingerian, a pseudonymous blogger can type more or less whatever he wants about the subject s/he is writing about — this can be done under your own name, too, I guess — because s/he’ll never have to face said subjects and explain those comments.
I think that a pervasive sense of a real or perceived distance from almost everyone has been one of the uglier results of the atomized nature of life online, and that it drives a lot of the nastier, more sneer-intensive stuff in the media. (This includes the “athletes are idiots” stuff bro-bloggers favor, but also those wincy schadenfreude reality-operas on Bravo with the nightmarish matchmaker and the awful Housewives and whatever) I also think, more practically, that this sort of snarky dis-reliant shit is not the sort of thing I’d want to have to explain to Adam Dunn’s face, especially if I were the same person who made such a big deal about wanting to write about the “characters” and “personalities” of the team I was (so blase about) covering.
In defense of young Mr. Harlan, a box score is perfectly adequate to give you the facts of a baseball game. A beat writer’s recap ought to be about delivering texture and perspective for those who weren’t able to view the game first hand. I have a hard time characterizing anything in that story as inaccurate or unfair. What you call unbecoming snark, I’d call a reasonable if opinionated assessment of the second of two very bad back-to-back outings by the Nats. Whatever the Platonic ideal of the beat writer’s job is, Chico captured the feeling of watching that game play out quite nicely.
The thing that saves young Mr. Harlan’s bacon is that none of the players he writes these things about will ever read a word of it. Oh, maybe Stan Kasten and Mark Lerner will, and maybe he’ll get a nasty phone call now and then in response to one of his stories, but he can handle that. Kasten and Lerner are gentlemen, plus they’re not bigger than Harlan is and prone to punch out his lights like the players are.
Harlan’s going to be in for a rude awakening when he shifts over to food writing though if he doesn’t change his tune. Chefs and restaurateurs read what is written about their food, they hold grudges, and they retaliate.
Good piece. Because the voice of the mainstream sportswriter is so often formalized and reverential, I think rudeness in daily, utility coverage like recaps seems more cutting than it actually is.
I’ll guess Chico Harlan chose this voice mainly to crack up Chico Harlan. Was it to build-in a bright spot to a grinding, low-payoff schedule that otherwise could easily lead to besotted sobbing in two-star hotels? Or was it just for teh lulz?
Not because of the writing (although I do like it) I’m reminded of reports from eavesdroppers in adjoining hotel rooms of the sounds made by H.L. Mencken while he wrote. They claimed to hear short stretches of typewriter keys, followed by some seconds of silence, followed by Mencken’s guffaws.
Rob, if Harlan couldn’t write, this would be tough to defend. KC Johnson at the Tribune went the less facts more opinion/disdain route with his Bulls beat last season, and did not pull it off. It was a grind to read, and it probably only worked for the Grabowskis who really didn’t watch and pull for the team.
Sharing a beat writer’s pain instead of getting a straight report (when all I want is a goddamn recap because I missed half the game and have to be at work in 15 minutes) is a good reason to not get the paper delivered everyday. Since so few people actually get their morning paper, Harlan probably had hyperlinks and hits in mind when typing this one out.
Reads like a means to an end and a paycheck. I can’t wait for him to stop.
If Harlan was the columnist instead of the beat writer I’m not sure we’d give it a second thought; ditto if he worked for the other Post (or either East Coast “Daily News”). Bloggers have certainly made newspapers more willing to erase that reporting/opinion distinction, as have television, but was it a valuable distinction to begin with? A more neutral tone would almost be a form of sugarcoating (as would worrying about how the players might treat you in the clubhouse). To me the snark even reads as the bitterness of a disappointed, emotionally engaged fan – another thing beat writers aren’t supposed to be (except so many kind of are, but hide it).
We’re probably just lucky he didn’t say something about how when you are down 8-0 in fourth inning, Julio Tavarez looks like J-Lo.
I suppose this is because I’m from Philly, but I always thought this sort of coverage would secretly please most managers. Makes the players want to prove the media wrong and/or unite against them. You just don’t want to make it personal. Dunn, of course, has heard worse from his old team’s own announcers.
I think Jason makes a really important point right at the top of his comment — dude is NOT a columnist. Not to say he doesn’t want to be, or that this doesn’t read like an audition for that — there’s a lot of this in the news coverage at the NY Times and WaPo, too, people trying to show a Dowdian way with the telling detail and drive-by snarkage — but I think his job is different. It’s kind of a scolding I don’t feel like giving, though. I don’t really give a shit about game recaps sticking to the AP tintype or whatever, and credit to Harlan for having written a highly readable game recap, which is not an easily or frequently-done thing. If it seemed like I wasn’t giving enough of that in the post above, consider it granted here.
And there is something, as hscs points out, to the fact that the guy can write. That, though, kind of feeds into my beef with the guy — he’s good enough at this to do really interesting work, maybe nudge the recap in a new direction if that’s what floats his boat, and instead he’s just laying back and carping in a bloggy stylee. Which is obviously much easier but, you know, hats off — dude got his quotes, hit his marks, and buried everyone involved in the whole freaking piece except himself. I kind of think that, if you want to make yourself the story in the context of writing something else, why not do what I do and write for CSTB, or some such blog where your only obligation is to be entertaining. It’s a question of context and perspective, I think. I have no problem with irreverence and don’t really want neutrality or some pretended objectivity — it’s dull, and we’re all grown-up enough at this point to realize it’s kind of usually BS. I just sort of marveled that a piece with so little restraint and so weirdly much authorial show-offery got into print.
I will, though, admit that I’m interested to see where he goes from here. Which, besides Rob’s LULZ, was probably Harlan’s real point. So well played, you check-cashing goof. Well effing played.