A Word About Baseball Journalists
PLUS: CONTRACTS CONTAINING DEFERRED DOLLARS DOOM NATIONALS
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Over the past 34 years, the Atlanta Braves have 28 winning seasons, 24 playoff appearances, 21 division titles, 6 NL pennants, and 2 World Series championships — with some of those numbers expected to increase this season . . .
The Milwaukee Braves, who existed for 13 seasons, are the only team in baseball history that never had a losing record . . .
Except for 1914 and 1948, the Boston Braves were one of the worst teams in the game’s history — and especially awful in 1935 (38-115) . . .
The distance to the deepest center-field corner in Braves Field when it opened in 1915 was a whopping 550 feet — that’s no typo — and yielded many inside-the-park home runs . . .
If not for Ted Turner, who wanted the Braves as programming for his newly-created TBS SuperStation in 1976, the team would have left Atlanta and beaten the Athletics as the first team to have four different homes . . .
The Yankees have been among the top three in payroll in 16 of the 17 seasons since Hal Steinbrenner became controlling owner in 2008.
Leading Off
The Bards of the Ballpark
By Bill Pruden
Ted Williams derisively referred to sportswriters as “Knights of the Keyboard” and had a running feud with them throughout his career.
But Williams’ disdain notwithstanding, to we mortal fans, the men — and ever greater number of women -- who cover baseball for a living, who are paid to go to and write about games, have always served as an important bridge to the game while also being figures of envy.
They are also partly responsible for baseball’s reputation as the “Literary Game,” the one that attracts writers and appeals to the “thinking man.”
There is, of course, a difference between the literature of baseball and the proverbial first draft of history penned by the sportswriters who report the game’s daily goings- on.
But either way, they reflect a distinctive connection between the game and fan, and while “cheering in the press box” was discouraged, the best have always helped strengthen the bond between the game, the players, and its fans.
The way the game inspires people to write about it and the love of the game those efforts reflect are evident six days a week in this very newsletter.
But for all of that history and the memories that any of us long-time fans may treasure, I fear that the centrality of the written word to the game of baseball and its role as a connection between game and fan, has diminished to the detriment of all.
That’s true despite all the changes in the game — from the focus on analytics to the increased number of games that are televised or streamed, not to mention the innumerable highlights aired in the days, weeks, and months after any game.
I have been mulling this question for awhile but it took on a new meaning about a month ago when I got an inquiry from sportswriter Dave Kindred, whose writing on baseball and other sports I had long enjoyed and admired.
Ironically, he had seen something I had written in Here’s the Pitch that was related to a project he is now working on, and he emailed to ask if we might talk. I was at once flabbergasted, humbled, and thrilled. What could I possibly tell him, a long-time sportswriter for some of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers as well as the National and the Sporting News, not to mention having written some well-received books?
We had what I can only describe as a truly joyful conversation, just two fans talking baseball. But in the aftermath, I found myself thinking about what writers like him had meant to my life as a fan.
Growing up in a time of limited TV viewing, to be a baseball fan meant turning first to the sports section when the morning paper arrived and then supplementing that with the Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, and Sport magazine.
From those sources emerged one’s favorite writers, the people who told us the story of the game we loved. Indeed, growing up in northern New Jersey, outside New York City, our house got The New York Herald Tribune and not The New York Times because, my father explained, the Trib had Red Smith. With no other option, we switched to the Times after the Trib folded in 1966 but were thrilled when Smith joined the Times in 1971.
But by then, I’d had the good fortune to discover the Boston Globe sports page and even more fortuitously, Peter Gammons, who had started at the Globe in the spring of 1968 just months before I started boarding school outside of Boston.
With Gammons and Bob Ryan (who while best known for his basketball coverage did his share of baseball writing and is in fact a Hall of Fame voter) arriving at the Globe at the same time, I was truly blessed.
Adding to the excitement was my connection to the Globe sports section, a product of my responsibilities as a member of the School’s Press Club where my classmate Buzz Bissinger and I called in scores and stats to the Globe’s sports desk, adding to their high school coverage.
As I moved to new schools and new jobs, I discovered new writers who became the lens through which I viewed the game.
I read Dave Kindred as well as Tom Boswell in the Washington Post when I worked in Washington and my time in law school in Cleveland introduced me to Hal Lebovitz and Terry Pluto of the Plain-Dealer.
A later stint in New Jersey offered the chance to again enjoy the Times and now Dave Anderson on a regular basis, while Frank Deford and The National provided a lifeline during a year in graduate school in Indiana where I was geographically isolated from baseball but at least able to enjoy the work of the unparalleled roster of baseball writers that Deford had assembled.
In additon, my two years teaching in Baltimore introduced me to Ken Rosenthal, a gift that has kept on giving.
It is fun to recall reading the early work of those now justifiably viewed as legends. And yet it seems to me now that they are at once throwbacks and part of a rapidly vanishing — if not all but gone — breed.
For the last few decades, I have been in Raleigh, North Carolina, where baseball is literally a minor-league sport, with the nearby Durham Bulls waving the banner for the game, while college basketball and football are the dominant focus of media coverage. And yet even beyond Raleigh, I often feel that the current newspapers, whether online or print, don’t really cover the game as they once did.
Maybe I am wrong, but it seems to me that the focus on analytics that has taken over the front offices has become no less central to baseball reporting. Different stats are part of the reporting narrative, not to mention the awards criteria and Hall of Fame balloting decisions. But as I often remind myself, that is the reality of change.
Yet at the same time, the writers I grew up with just seem different from most current reporters, or bloggers – the wide range itself a sign of changing times – and so I find myself taking refuge in the baseball books that are more reflective of the old style and are in fact often the products of former reporters.
Indeed, one needs to be of a certain age — or at least be a close reader of the author’s bio on a book’s flyleaf — to know that Jane Leavy, for example, was a baseball-focused sportswriter for the Washington Post before she turned to books, where her array of works on Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth remind us of the way writers connected fans to the game and its heroes.
Happily, she is not alone in continuing to offer works that reaffirm the power of the written word in maintaining our love for the game.
Bill Pruden is a high school history teacher whose love for baseball's history was sparked when as a seven-year-old, he witnessed Roger Maris hitting his 61st home run at Yankee Stadium in 1961. He has been writing about the game--primarily through SABR sponsored platforms--for about a decade. His email address is courtwatchernc@aol.com.
Cleaning Up
Contracts With Deferred Dollars Limit Washington Nationals’ Revival
By Dan Schlossberg
There used to be a saying that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
Now that Washington has been a National League city since 2005, only the league has changed.
True, the 2024 Washington Nationals finished fourth rather than last in the five-team NL East, but the team has the unenviable task of pole-vaulting over a trio of well-heeled juggernauts in the Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies, and New York Mets.
The Nats, sometimes known as the Gnats because of their peskiness, won a world championship via the wild-card route in 2019, when they actually finished second, four games behind the Braves, but prevailed in the playoffs with their 1-2 pitching punch of Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer.
Today, that same 1-2 punch is long gone from the Washington roster but not from the payroll. Their deferred salaries are still a drag on the pay list.
Although newcomer Nathaniel Lowe will be the highest-paid player on the 2025 team at $10.3 million, Scherzer will get $15 million from the Nats even though he now wears Toronto livery and Strasburg, basically ineffective while injury-riddled the past few seasons, will be paid a whopping $23.6 million.
Other than Bobby Bonilla and Shohei Ohtani, they are the poster boys for the foolishness of deferred dollars.
"We filled in a bunch of spots that we needed to fill without expanding too much, or the budget too much, and blocking prospects too much," general manager Mike Rizzo said from the club’s West Palm Beach training camp.
"The [payroll for] players on the field is about the same, if not a little less, than it was last year but I think that we have a better team than we had last year."
Thanks to a bountiful bounty from the Washington farm system, he could be right.
Washington wound up fourth last year (71-91) but with a cheaper roster, it will try to win more than 71 games for the first time since the halcyon days of 2019.
Rizzo wants to bolster his ballclub by dipping into the free agent market but doesn’t want to break the piggy-bank either. According to Roster Resource, the team’s projected payroll ranks 24th at $110 million. But oh, those deferred dollars!
In 2026 alone, $49 million is due as a payoff on those long-ago contracts.
Roster Resource ranks Washington 24th among the 30 clubs with its projected $112 million payroll. One reason the team is so low is the plethora of young players, including many that retain rookie status for the 2025 campaign.
The Nats are virtually certain to finish fourth again, well ahead of the moribund Miami Marlins, a team that spends even less than the Nationals, but well behind the Big Three that are Beasts of the East year after year.
The club’s best players are left-handed starter MacKenzie Gore, who led Washington to wins (tied with Jake Irvin), strikeouts, and ERA last season, and shortstop CJ Abrams, the only National to top 20 homers last season.
Rookie Dylan Crews, like Abrams, has 30-steal potential, and free agent signees Lowe and Josh Bell could help if they didn’t play the same position (first base). Center-fielder Jacob Young, a contact hitter, adds speed and defense.
The Nats will miss closer Kyle Finnegan, still an unsigned free agent, but hope a cadre of young pitchers, plus rebounding veteran Michael Soroka, can help manager Dave Martinez improve from last year’s 71-91 record. At least the team is headed in the right direction.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is the author of 42 books, including The New Baseball Bible 2025, a 512-page illustrated unorthodox baseball primer, due from Sports Publishing June 3. He’s also written two Hank Aaron biographies. To book a Zoom talk or public appearance before Father’s Day, email ballauthor@gmail.com.
Extra Innings: Teams That Need New Ballparks
Will the White Sox be the next team to relocate if its demands for a new ballpark are not met?
The team’s lease at Rate Field (nee Comiskey Park) runs through 2029. Ancient owner Jerry Reinsdorf, pushing 89, lobbied for a reported $1 billion in public funding for a new stadium in Chicago’s South Loop last year. The White Sox were continuing to pursue the South Loop project last fall but have been greeted with mostly silence since . . .
Also on the short list of soon-to-be-abandoned stadia is Chase Field, which has fallen into disrepair in Phoenix. The Diamondbacks have long threatened relocating if they can’t get Maricopa County to authorize the millions of dollars in needed upgrades . . .
The Athletics, starting a three-year sojourn in Sacramento while their new Las Vegas stadium goes up on the Strip, are Exhibit A of a team that tired of its host city dragging its feet on promises to fix a broken ballpark . . .
The minor-league Oakland Ballers will play in the Oakland Coliseum, so the old major-league stadium will host a minor-league team while its former tenant is a major-league team playing in a minor-league stadium.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@outlook.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.
Terrific post today!