National Sports Journalism Center

Last week something new, interesting and a bit strange happened: The Mets invited me and my Faith and Fear in Flushing co-writer Greg Prince to Citi Field, along with writers from several other independent blogs. We were given field passes for batting practice and allowed to interview players on the field or in the dugout. The Mets media-relations people gave us a quick orientation, including advice about when and when not to approach the players during their pregame routines. And then they left us alone to do what we wanted.

The problem was that I had no idea what I wanted. I felt curiously ambivalent at finding myself on the field I’d looked at on TV or from the stands for so many nights, and realizing I was 18 inches from players I simultaneously knew very well and not at all.

Yes, the setting was new to me, but it wasn’t like I’d been dropped on the surface of the moon. I’ve been a professional journalist for a long time, long enough to have been a beat reporter, columnist, editor and the head of a section. It’s true that I have little experience with professional athletes, but I know how to interview people, and over the years I’ve talked to people who were in a hurry, hostile, determined to tell me as little as possible or furious about something I’d written. So the idea of talking to players didn’t petrify me.

But I felt out of my element anyway, for a simple reason: When I was a teenager, I made up my mind not to be a sportswriter.

That statement demands a little explaining.

I hope it’s already obvious from previous columns, but I love sportswriting. And I have enormous admiration for the men and women who do it. They have to be diplomats in the locker room and truth-tellers on the sports page. The athletes they interview may have just failed in excruciatingly public settings, been carefully trained to be deliberately dull, or be far more comfortable in a language other than English. To that, add late nights and sudden rewrites and endless travel. Writing, interviewing and storytelling is hard enough even without all those complications thrown into the mix.

Still, none of that was what caused me to decide against sportswriting when I contemplated my journalistic career. It was something more basic and fundamental: I didn’t want to stop being a Mets fan, and I knew that was the price for stepping into the pressbox. So instead of sports, I covered science and technology and finance and a lot of other things. Sports sneaked in the back door, first with The Daily Fix column, and then with Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Blogging gave me a way to be a sportswriter after all. Or, if you think I have no claim to that term, it let me be someone who publicly chronicles a team from both a close distance and a certain remove, serving as a loyalist and historical-minded complement to the beat writers and columnists who work in the pressbox and the clubhouse. Either way, it gave me a way to publish and distribute my work to an audience, with no requirement that I check my fandom at the door.

But blogging never involved actually being face-to-face with the players I wrote about. So while being both a journalist and a blogger gave me a curious double vision about sportswriting, my original decision held. I’d chosen fandom and distance — and then all of a sudden, thanks to the Mets, there was no distance. And I didn’t know what to make of it.

I wound up not talking with any players. One thing that stopped me was not knowing the routines well enough. I quickly saw that if you wanted to grab a player, you had to do it while he was crossing the warning track, which usually meant he was headed for the clubhouse (where we weren't permitted), and at a decent clip. I didn’t want to interfere with the players' preparations, and didn’t know enough to judge when I might be doing so. I also didn’t want to interfere with the beat writers, clustered in the dugout behind us.

But I also wasn't sure I wanted to talk with the players.

Early on, I realized that being Mets fans and bloggers gave Greg and me some odd and thoroughly unjustified advantages over the beat writers and columnists, at least as far as some of our readers were concerned. We didn’t have to be clubhouse diplomats – we could call things as we saw them from the stands or the couch. And weirdly, the fact that we rejected objectivity meant our criticisms of the Mets bit deeper than those offered by folks for whom objectivity was a requirement. Read the comments on any story or column that’s critical of a team and you’ll see the writer dismissed as a well-known hater or someone with an ax to grind. We never encountered that, because anyone sentient could see we desperately wanted the Mets to win.

Being fans also gave us a ready-made connection with readers. We attended or watched more Mets games than most people, felt wins and losses much more deeply than most people, and knew more about the team’s history and mythology than most people. But we had no special access or insight other than what we’d gained from a lifetime of obsession. Given all that, I didn’t immediately see how getting access to players would help our blog – and I could certainly imagine how it could hurt it.

But that was the blogger in me thinking. Since then, the reporter in me has decided all that was a bit convenient. The reporter in me is intrigued by the challenge of using access to find new stories to tell, ones the beat writers might overlook as just part of the scenery but would be of interest to those of us for whom the ballpark isn’t a workplace. I wonder how I could do that given my loyalist perspective, and how such stories might work on the blog. Moreover, the reporter in me has always felt a bit ashamed of having written horrible things about various Mets, knowing full well there was little chance I’d ever have to look one of them in the eye. I’ve had to answer for what I write every other time; why should a blog be an exemption?

I don’t know if the Mets will give us such access again, let alone make it a regular part of what they do. But one way or another, that day is coming. It arrived years ago in the NHL – the Washington Capitals’ guidelines for blog credentials, created in large part by Off Wing Opinion’s Eric McErlain, date back to 2006. So at some level I expected this day to arrive, and bring with it lots of questions that will need to be answered. But what I didn’t expect was that the person least prepared for it would be me.

Note: I wrote an earlier, rawer version of these thoughts for Faith and Fear in Flushing. Whether you’re a blogger, beat writer, sports editor or a reader, I’d love to hear your thoughts about how teams and independent bloggers should approach credentials for blogs. Leave me a comment or email me below. And thanks!

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.