By Michael Miner
But before getting into that, let’s go over what the BAT is and stands for. Thanks to the miracle that is Jim Romenesko’s Media News site, Hot Type now enjoys a national readership, and both those readers deserve to be brought up to speed. The Golden BAT–standing for Baseball Aptitude Test–was founded 20 years ago by my predecessor in this space, Neil Tesser, who was not a nice man and wanted to show sportswriters what he thought of them. Tesser’s hypothesis was that the annual pennant prognostications of the bards who chronicle the national pastime were no more reliable than the lunges of a child playing blindman’s buff. So as each new season began, he took to reviewing the predictions made a year earlier and awarding a Golden BAT to the pundit who’d been least in error. The results confirmed his theory.
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The changes in baseball already in evidence in 1994 have had a curious effect on the BAT. The predictive abilities of Chicago’s wisest heads have, if measured statistically, greatly improved. But statistics lie. What actually has happened is that baseball expanded its playoffs while diminishing the number of teams with any hope of getting into them. Before 1969 there were 20 teams competing for two berths in the postseason. Now roughly 10 teams compete for eight. Under the circumstances, it’s harder for a scribe picking the playoff teams to be wrong than right.
For this year the BAT was once again renamed. And the coveted Dimpled Chad BAT goes to the Tribune’s Teddy Greenstein, who finished a close second.
Poetry is such a lucrative line of work that Frank Van Zant estimates he’s turned a cool $800 in just the last ten years–and that’s not counting the free copies of the journals his work appeared in that don’t pay in anything else. Such a journal is Sport Literate, founded in Chicago three years ago to provide “honest reflections on life’s leisurely diversions.” All things considered, the $250 the journal is offering the winner of its current poetry competition is a king’s ransom.
A couple of years later there was a similar conference at Long Island University on Jackie Robinson. Again Van Zant organized a reading. His budget was smaller, and he couldn’t advertise. So he worked “the poetry underground,” and once more the poems flew in. “Remember the name of Ed Charles? He was the third baseman for the Mets in ’69, the year they won the pennant and I guess won everything. He had a poem that he came in and read at the conference. It was in a rhyming pattern that I thought was poetically, at least on the page, a little bit amateurish, but his delivery reading it was amazing.”
According to figures from past Zaslow columns, his “Letters to Santa” program last year brought in $1.2 million in gifts from Sun-Times readers and $119,000 in cash toward the purchase of 3,500 coats–all of this benefiting 46,000 kids. Last August’s “Tools for Schools” drive distributed school supplies to 5,500 schoolchildren.
