Where Do You Get a Bat Like That?
Sometimes reporters ask why when readers are wondering how. Oblivious to what intrigues the hoi polloi, the scriveners have had more to say about sin, penance, and redemption than Milton and Dostoyevsky did. Just this Tuesday morning, Greg Couch reported in the Sun-Times that “several experts” are of the conviction that “if Sosa wants his old life to return, it will be important to live on as the old Sammy.” Two pages away, the headline over Jay Mariotti’s column asserted “Hold the hug: No free pass for Sosa’s sin.” Earlier Mariotti columns on the state of Sosa’s soul were headlined “A permanent smudge of suspicion,” “Yankees’ visit overshadowed by scandal,” and “The ‘Old Sammy’ is gone forever.”
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Sosa didn’t beat up a girlfriend or slice a stranger outside a nightclub, but Day’s point was that Sosa’s indiscretion took place on the field and violated baseball itself, a game he played so well that fans were ready to forgive him anything he might do off the field. I think Sosa’s punishment isn’t so much disgrace as it is demystification. We hold some athletes in awe as symbols of youth in all its wholesome splendor, others as the menacing emissaries of outlaw culture. Sosa has lost his place in the first camp, but corking a bat is way too wussy a dereliction to get him into the second. One thing the papers did tell us in detail was why some famous physicists think a corked bat is of little help in hitting a baseball–hallowed superstitions notwithstanding.
The Trouble With Transparency
But a paper’s dedication to truth is demonstrated by what it prints in the first place as well as by what it corrects later. The Tribune would not only not be diminished but would be enhanced by a willingness to print truths inconvenient to the interests of its parent company.
Were truth and transparency–combined with aggressive coverage of the FCC debate–too much to hope for from a paper that makes as much of its virtue as the Tribune does? The editorials lauding deregulation rang with idealism. For instance, on June 1 the paper–certain of how the FCC would vote the next day–criticized it for not going further. In the name of first principles, the Tribune called for total deregulation of media–“The notion that the government should control the breadth and volume of speech is offensive to the 1st Amendment.” But the best proof of virtue is virtue, and the Tribune would have made its case more persuasive by matching high-mindedness with candor.
Medill’s Dick Schwarzlose added to Chicago magazine’s April issue on over- and underrated Chicago by weighing in on journalists. Underrated–the eccentric Colonel McCormick, who built the Tribune into a juggernaut. Overrated–Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Sun-Times in 1984 but “in the end, ran the paper only two and a half years.”
