National Sports Journalism Center

To America’s sports editors, I respectfully submit my perennial request for more and better game stories in your newspapers and on your websites.

My pleas, beggings, and assorted grovelings have come to naught over the years because too many editors believe that Everybody Already Knows What Happened.

I am here to say that you can sit all night in the left field bleachers at a major league ballpark ($32) and have no idea what happened in the game itself.

You can get lost in the sensory overload of a vast stadium with all that music, with videos dancing on a humongous centerfield screen, and with tens of thousands of people hub-bubbing. There also are the interruptions. The grandson wants a hot dog ($5.50), the son a beer ($7.50), the daughter-in-law a crab cake sandwich ($12.50). There is, too, I must confess, the occasional, welcome distraction that affirms the wisdom of Jimmy Cannon’s line, "Never saw an ugly girl in a baseball cap." (Priceless.)

After four hours, you leave the ballpark knowing the Atlanta Braves beat the Washington Nationals. You think the score was 4-1.

But anyone sitting in the left field bleachers with a 10-year-old eating nachos out of his catcher’s mitt has no real idea what happened on the field. Even at home, I can pay full attention to TV’s repeated replays and still want a game story that explains and enriches the goings-on. Red Smith told us why: "People go to spectator sports to have fun, and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again."

The curious thing is, there never has been more information available to the ordinary fan. But it’s scattered throughout the site or section in ways that ask us to find the pieces and assemble them ourselves. Quotes are over there. Over here, a laundry list of notes. Everywhere, agate. It’s too much information. And it’s not enough.

Give me a story. A story. Not the numbing monotone of play-by-play. Give me the Red Smith fun that is inherent in a story.

"What-if scenarios at this point have little utility," one such story began. Chico Harlan of The Washington Post wrote about the Nationals’ 101st loss of the season. Pitcher John Lannan gave the home team seven strong innings but was betrayed by his team’s "worst-in-the-majors fielding." Harlan went on: "All in the same inning, his right fielder missed a line drive in the lights, his second baseman booted a grounder, and neither his left fielder nor his center fielder took charge on a fly ball between them. The good news was, at least the other four fielders did all right."

There in the left-field bleachers, I knew only that the Nats were terrible. Harlan told me how terrible: "Had Lannan been operating in a fanciful world where fielders catch what they should, he would have been finished with the first inning after three batters and 12 pitches. He would have returned to the dugout, game still scoreless . . . ." Instead, he needed 35 pitches and the Nats were down 2-0 before coming to bat once.

I want a game story that gives me narrative, perspective, voices, and meaning, all of it done tightly and brightly. Not easy. But if you reach for the stars, you might touch a cloud. I have written hundreds of game stories, which means that in my reaching I have committed most every mistake possible, the most memorable coming when the University of Louisville won a football game on a play so bizarre that in describing it I forgot a primary rule of any game story: Tell ‘em who won.

Louisville’s quarterback, on the game’s last play, had dropped back to pass – only he didn’t have the ball. He had pulled away from center too quickly. So the center still had the ball tucked up in his crotch. He crab-walked backwards in hopes of finding his quarterback. The quarterback hustled back to the center, took the ball, dropped back again, and threw a touchdown pass that won the game. Wow. What a thing. Let me at the typing machine!

Well. The score finally weaseled its way into the story in the 11th paragraph. By then, the story had jumped to an inside page. My lame rationale was, "The score was in the headline, wasn’t it?"

Typically, the score is an adjective dropped into the second or third paragraph, as when Chico Harlan wrote, "In the Nationals’ 4-1 loss . . ." That Louisville game changed everything for me. With the passion of the converted sinner, I now preach the beauty of getting the score in the first graph.

I swim against the contemporary tide on another issue as well. I believe the game story is the heart of sports journalism. The games are the beginnings of all our reporting on personalities, controversies, issues. We cared about Michael Jordan not because he was tall, good-looking, and charming, but because he could play a game better than anyone else ever had. To ignore the games is to tell stories with no foundation. Worse, newspapers and websites that give short shrift to game stories have surrendered to other media in the battle for public attention.

There’s no reason to give up. Because the written word is a powerful weapon, there is good reason to stand and fight. Even when everybody thinks that Everybody Already Knows What Happened, the truth is, no, they don’t – and they want to know more. For that, I have blessed confirmation from Jeff D’Alessio, editor-in-chief of Sporting News Magazine and Sporting News Today.

Once a month, D’Alessio polls about 100 readers. On the topic of gamers, he says, "To a person – men and women, young and old – they all like them, when they’re done right. They don’t want gamers filled with play-by-play. They do want intelligent analysis and perspective on what last night’s game means to the big picture. And, probably most important, they want to hear what the participants said. Poll 100 readers, and they’ll go 100 for 100 on that one."
Done right, D’Alessio said, game stories:

1. Treat the season as if it were a novel, each game a chapter. "Every season is filled with twists and turns, highs and lows, and the best gamers capture all of that drama, have climactic endings to set up what’s next, and make you want to read more."

2. Take readers into the locker room. "I assume the reader saw the same things I did and probably knows sports just as well as I do. So why spend three sentences describing a sequence when you could use that precious space to let the manager tell you what he was thinking he made the key call? I tried to talk to a minimum of 10 players and coaches for every gamer. That may seem like overkill for an 18-inch story but who does the reader really want to hear from – the schlep with the press pass or the star guard who hit the game-winning shot? If a gamer doesn’t have a quote in the first three graphs, I’m not reading on."

3. Go heavy on reporting detail. "Give the reader detail he would never know had he not read my story. What did the pitching coach say to the closer who gave up the game-winning home run? Where did they talk? How long did it last? Did the closer slam the door on his way out or close it gently? Take readers inside his mind, inside the clubhouse. Does the closer have a tough time sleeping after blowing a game? Nudge that obnoxious TV cameraman out of the way after he’s done ‘asking’ the pitching to ‘talk about the home run you gave up’ and own the interview, even if the subject looks at you funny when you ask about his sleep habits."

4. Do analysis without sliding into the columnist’s territory of opinion. "No one knows a team better than the beat writer; no one can better put into perspective what one game means in the bigger picture. It’s about capturing the mood of the clubhouse you’re in every day."

5. Do single-topic ideas, more sidebars than traditional gamers. "The days of gamers packed with play-by-play are long gone; I’d rather read a story that’s focused – on a person, a trend, a sequence, a single topic."

I will not give up the idea that newspapers can make D’Alessio’s wish list come alive. And yet – oh, my – here was the say-nothing lede on one newspaper’s gamer after the University of Texas won a football game: "So much for slow starts and a lack of style points. Given the Longhorns’ dominating, 64-7 win Saturday over Texas-El Paso, it’s obvious that coaches used the lack of a dominating resume win as a point of motivation this past week."

In the comments section under those words, there was this from a reader: "Texas wastes its time, squanders its legendary status as an elite program, and diminishes its manhood playing non-conference cupcakes like UTEP. It is silly, embarrassing, and cowardly! UT & Mack Brown need to hitch up their big girl panties and go play some teams who just might give them a freakin’ game of it."

Between the nothing-said and the gauntlet-thrown, there was a middle ground on which a great game story could have been built.