from Anna Clark of the Columbia Journalism Review,
Tom Gage is a Detroit baseball writer who will be inducted this month into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as the 2015 Spink Award winner, the highest honor in the field. (The New Yorker’s Roger Angell won last year.) Gage is due to give a speech this month during the lavish induction weekend in Cooperstown, New York.
Trouble is? He’s unemployed....
You’ve had such a long run as a baseball beat writer, including 36 years covering the Detroit Tigers. What’s changed in the business?
To me, the time went by very fast. We used to fly with the team, and now for the most part, you never fly with them, you’re never on the bus with them, and you don’t stay in the same hotels. It used to be that if you had an issue you wanted to discuss, you could talk it over on the plane. I played many a card game with (former Tigers manager) Sparky Anderson, and it was in those games of Hearts that I could see how quick his mind was. Nowadays, it’s very difficult to get close to the team.
It used to be that you didn’t have to rush out of the press box to write everything up. But now, with the internet, it’s not like you have a 6:30pm deadline. Your deadline is all the time. You can’t linger in the clubhouse or wait until after batting practice to speak with a player a second time. There’s less time to develop your sources, your relationships with players, and to just build trust.
Twitter has overhauled the industry. You always have to be monitoring it. It’s really made for baseball reporting.
thanks to Larry Lage for the pointer
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