I Heard it Downtown

Yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once – the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.-Crash Davis, Bull Durham.

Davis was talking about the difference between minor league baseball, and “The Show”, the Majors. This past weekend, I finally got called up to the show myself.

In addition to writing snarky notes on politics and whatnot on a very sporadic basis, I sometimes do actual journalist things. During the fall, I covered high school football, and since then, I’ve done some reporting on other events, from the Presidential Inauguration, to little kid swim meets. All of those experiences, no matter how small the event, were fun and worthwhile…but they weren’t  The Show.

On Friday though, I finally got called up. My friend Chris Webb runs The Buckeye Nine, a (really good) sports blog that covers the Ohio State Baseball team.  The Big Ten Tournament was being held downtown at Huntington Park (home of the AAA Columbus Clippers), and he thought he needed an extra hand to cover all the games. He also managed to get ahold of (and this is important), *two press credentials*. The decision was easy.  I was going to spend as much time at the ballpark as possible that weekend.

Huntington Park is brand spanking new, and right in the middle of the Arena District downtown. I don’t know how many of you have gotten the chance to check the place out yet, but if you like baseball, I strongly encourage it. It is one of the best ballparks I have ever been to, Majors or Minors. Remember how Cooper Stadium’s backdrop was a graveyard, and some highways? Now we have the skyline of scenic downtown Columbus. They added seats in the outfield, luxury boxes, leg room…words don’t do it justice. It is just a great place to spend a summer afternoon.

And all of that is for you guys who bought tickets, and didn’t have one of those yellow cards hanging around your neck that said PRESS. This was my Willy Wonka Golden Ticket…and the third level of the stadium, which has the press boxes and the luxury suites, might as well have been the Chocolate factory to me.

You have to understand the conditions I toiled under before. My old paper didn’t give me a press pass, so I sometimes had to pay for my own ticket if the lady working the window didn’t believe I was a reporter (No, I drove all the way from Columbus , in a tie, just to watch Centerburg today). High School press boxes are usually small, can give you splinters, obscure your view, and almost NEVER have free food. After you take into account me buying food, my gas money and sometimes buying a ticket, I would almost lose money covering some games. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like doing it, because I did…just that it wasn’t the show.

You also had to do everything yourself. Keep your own stats, transcribe your own quotes, know your own background information, etc. If you were lucky, there might be a guy in there who hasn’t left his press box seat in 30 years and can tell you some background stuff, but other than that, you are totally on your own.

At Huntington Park, they have a staff that does *those things for you*. When I first stepped into that air conditioned press box, I thought I had died and gone to journalist heaven.  They had rosters, media guides, box scores, statistical information and more all neatly on a table. They had media relations and conference officials ready to answer every question.

AND THERE WAS FOOD. All the pretzels I could eat, and a catered meal at the 7:00 game…which was better than most of the food I make myself at home. Plus, the luxury boxes were almost totally empty, but still stocked with food…so I might have borrowed some fruit from there.

Basically, all I had to do was sit down in the sun with my laptop, watch baseball games, and write. What could be better than that?

The baseball games themselves were a little boring (most were massive blowouts. Indiana won every game by at least ten runs to win the tournament. Ohio State was 3^rd), but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t excitement at the ballpark.

For example, I’d say there is at least a 35% chance the Columbus Dispatch stole from us.

During a slower part of one of the games, me and Chris began to discuss the finer points of interviewing coaches and athletes. Sadly, a lot of sports interviews end up like the one in Bull Durham.

Crash Davis: It’s time to work on your interviews.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: My interviews? What do I gotta do?
Crash Davis: You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down: “We gotta play it one day at a time.”
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Got to play… it’s pretty boring.
Crash Davis: ‘Course it’s boring, that’s the point. Write it down.

We decided that perhaps the most egregious sports interview cliché is the line “It is what it is”. What the crap does that mean? Coach! Why did your pitchers suck today? “Well…you know, it is what it is.”. That’s a little useful for meeting a hard word count, but we learn absolutely nothing. We loudly joked about it, and made several references to that line in our live blog of the game that night.

Bob Hunter, the reporter there from the Columbus Dispatch, wasn’t seated very far away from us, and could have heard the whole thing. We open the Dispatch the next day, and whats his lead?

Big Ten Baseball. It is what it is.

As they say at Wikipedia, Citation Needed.

( Note: I’m not seriously accusing the Dispatch of ripping me off here, but the coincidence is pretty crazy)

The other thing I’m going to really remember is that I got a vote for MVP, and the All Tournament team.  I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me, because the media typically votes on those things, and I was in fact, part of the media, but I was still shocked.

So me and Chris pour over all the box scores, and I frantically google to make sure I have everybody’s name spelled correctly. It occurred to me that we were probably two of the few media members who saw virtually every game. We ended up calling a little more than half of the team correctly, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that a lot of guys were just voting for the people playing in the title game, or in the one or two games they saw. In college football, people complain all the time about media members voting teams based on name, because they don’t watch all the games. I buy into that theory a little more now.

All in all, it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. I have a newfound appreciation for college baseball, and am busily trying to find ways to help take this blog (or others)  to the next level. Writing about sports (or anything really) is wonderful work if you can get it, but once you taste the show, you don’t want to go back to the minors.