October 30th, 2006 → 8:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
…here’s a move I don’t get: the re-signing of Mike Timlin. I know the guy has been a stopgap these last few years, but that’s sort of like saying the 2000 election fiasco was a stopgap to a Bush presidency; all it really did was delay the inevitable. I also know, as the Sox took pains to point out in their press release, that Timlin had a 1.40 ERA before he went on the DL at the end of May.
But man, did he ever look like a guy who’d fallen off a cliff when he came back in June (and if a lingering injury caused him to suck that bad, shouldn’t he have stayed on the DL?). You could make a pretty decent argument that it was the sheer awfulness of Timlin that was the turning point in the Sox’s season, more than the absence of Varitek, more than the absence of Wakefield, more than the death of Nelson De La Rosa. (I know he didn’t die until last week, but c’mon: you all know he wasn’t able to focus his full karmic energy on Yawkey Way.) Starting just before the five-game bloodletting at the hands of the Yankees, Timlin single-handedly blew enough games to send the Sox well into second place. And there was also that little matter of him blaming the offense for the Sox’s problems. For those of you who mercifully managed to miss that, I’m not joking.
The arguments for keeping Mike on board are that he’s been a bargain for the four years he’s been in Boston; he’s pitched well — sometimes very well; relief pitching is both hard to come by and hard to predict; it’d put a strain on the clubhouse to lose yet another veteran (and besides, who would lead chapel?); and the $1 or $2 million he’ll cost the team is peanuts relative to a $125 million payroll.
The arguments against re-signing Timlin are that you don’t pay for past performance; he hasn’t pitched well in more than half a season, and when he wasn’t pitching well it sure looked like more than a flukey, post-injury type of deal; he’s shown he has the potentially put plenty of strain on the clubhouse if he is around; and every now and then you find someone like David Ortiz for $1 or $2 million.
(Please note: if Mike Timlin comes back and has a season more in line with ’03 and ’04 and less in line with the second half of ’06, I reserve the right to make like one of those paid sportswriters and act like he’s been my favorite player all along and that re-signing him was one of the front office’s most brilliant moves.)
Post Categories: Mike Timlin & Red Sox front office
October 30th, 2006 → 12:07 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Okay, I’m overstating things a bit; I was stymied in my efforts to come up with a headline that punned off of either “Ferris Bueller” or “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” So without further throatclearing: the New York Times‘s best columnist is not Paul Krugman or Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd. It’s Ben Stein, who’s been quietly penning a column for the Sunday Business section titled “Everybody’s Money.”
I say quietly because Sunday is ugly stepdaughter of the Business department (although recent efforts to improve its quality have resulted in marked improvement). The people who cherish the Sunday Times — you know, the “she reads the Book Review, I do the crossword” people — are the liberal arts, self-styled intellectual types who want to read about books (even if they don’t read books), or want to be up-to-date on the arts world (even if they don’t actually go to museums). Business folk, on the other hand, are not reaching for a door stopper-sized paper on Sundays. They get their news during the actual work-week; that’s why the Wall Street Journal doesn’t even bother publishing on Sundays. (Its recent Saturday edition was created mainly to draw in more women readers.) A recent stilted effort to move the Times media coverage from Monday to Sunday died a quick death when the paper’s media writers staged a mini-revolt.
But I digress. Stein’s column — this week’s was about the total lack of shame in corporate America — isn’t so good because it’s well-written and easy to understand, although it’s both. Its strength lies in the fact that many of Stein’s columns seem to go against what you’d assume Stein’s views to be; a life-long Republican and former speech writer and lawyer in the Nixon administration could reasonably be assumed to be a deranged firebreather (think Pat Buchanan) or at least a reliable conservative (think William Safire). But a surprising number of Stein’s columns decry the greed (and stupidity) or corporate America. What’s more, Stein’s pieces seem more affable than angry. He’s not shouting from the treetops or preaching to the converted, which is the trap most opinion-mongers on both sides of the aisle fall into. He likes money. He likes being well off. But he doesn’t let that, or his political affiliation, blind him to the realities of our current economic environment.
So let me be the first to call for freeing Ben Stein from Sunday’s purgatory. Let’s move the man to the actual Op-Ed page! He’d certainly stand out. And that’d be a good thing.
(As an aside/addendum, Joe Nocera, who was poached from Fortune this past April, may very well be the Times‘s best on-staff columnist. I get why he’s in the paper’s Business section and not on the Op-Ed page…but why, in God’s name, is he relegated to Saturday, the least-read paper of the week? Anyone? Anyone?)
Post Categories: Ben Stein & Joe Nocera & New York Times
October 28th, 2006 → 12:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
There were a number of very weird things about this year’s Fall Classic.
* For the first time ever, Tony La Russa was involved in a World Series that went more than four games (although that may have only been because of Kenny Rogers’s extra, um, assistance).
* David Eckstein passed himself off as a power threat.
* The Detroit Tigers pitching staff singlehandedly lost the Series on their errors. I guess there are some drawbacks to having such a young pitching staff.
* Jeff Weaver somehow transformed himself into a big game pitcher.
Now we can focus on the hot stove season. And honestly, I’ll get around to those post season wrapups…
Post Categories: 2006 Playoffs & Tony La Russa
October 28th, 2006 → 12:13 pm @ Seth Mnookin
“Mr. Jensen, who had previously rejected an offer of The Village Voice’s editor inn chief position, said that he had been offered the new position this week. One of his initial duties will be to hire Web designers and employees for the expanded Web sites of the 17 newspapers owned by the company.” (Emphasis added)
— “Village Voice Stalwart Resigns in Latest Post-Merger Shake-up”
The New York Times
October 28. 2006
Post Categories: New York Times
October 26th, 2006 → 5:58 pm @ Seth Mnookin
“And then there is the matter of which friends to include and which to leave out — a problem that plagued Nancy Pinckert, and her husband, Byron, 56, both architects, when they chose nine people to join them last month for a luxurious three-night hotel stay at the Calistoga Ranch in the Napa Valley, complete with minibus transportation to wine and olive-oil tastings and dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.
Ms. Pinckert, whose 50th birthday the trip celebrated, said she was careful not to mention it to friends she didn’t invite. ‘We thought about explaining why we couldn’t ask them,’ she said. ‘But no matter how you try to position it, people feel rejected.'”
— “A Deluxe Vacation, Your Friends Included”
by Shivani Vora
The New York Times
October 26, 2006
Post Categories: New York Times
October 26th, 2006 → 5:55 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Remember back in spring training when Gary Sheffield said the Yankees better pick up his 2007 option, or else? And remember how happy he said he was when Brian Cashman told him, yup, the team intended ot do just that? (“There was only one place [I want to play], and that still remains the same,” Sheff said at the time. “I don’t want to play for nobody else but the Yankees.”) Since then, Sheff has: 1. bitched and moaned when he was told that an intention to pick up a player’s option is different from actually picking it up; 2. said, after the Yankees traded for Bobby Abreu, that he didn’t feel threatened because he was a “team player” who wanted to help the team win a World Series.
Well guess what? The Yankees picked up Sheffield’s option…and he’s back to pouting the corner. “This will not work,” he said. “This will not work at all.” He then went on to say the team best not play him at first base or trade him to another team. (If only Gary had managed to stay someplace for five years he’d have that no-trade clause. Oh well.)
I know: this shouldn’t come as a surprise; players lie all the time, like, say, when they tell everyone who’ll listen they wouldn’t play for a team and that money doesn’t matter and then sign with that very same team in the offseason for marginally more money. And in a weird way, I can’t help but admire a guy who can take so many directly contradictory positions on one issue.
Post Categories: Gary Sheffield & Yankees
October 26th, 2006 → 11:05 am @ Seth Mnookin
On Monday, Slate’s Jack Shafer, (and here’s the standard caveat/suck-up included in the vast majority of stories press critics write about other press critics) — who’s somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance and is a reporter and writer I greatly admire — (now I can commence my criticism) took his trademark orneriness and applied it to the recent hand-wringing about media cutbacks.
Jack makes a couple of good points, such as:
* “[J]ournalists don’t want you to know this, but thanks to technology, it’s never been easier to hunt down a story, capture it, and bring it back to the presses for printing. A middle-school student sitting at a Web terminal has more raw reportorial power at his fingertips than the best reporter working at the New York Times had in, say, 1975. The teenager can’t command an undersecretary of defense to return his phone call as the Times guy can, but thanks to Google he can harvest news stories and background information that would take the 1975 model journalist days to collect.”
and
* “It’s hard to sympathize with the woe-is-us crowd of journalists when you learn that the number of full-timers employed by U.S. news-media organizations today has increased by almost 70 percent compared with 1971, according to The American Journalist in the 21st Century. The book doesn’t even include in its census the new jobs in online newsrooms or at the business-wire upstart Bloomberg News.”
(I’d be curious to know more about that study. Does it include staffers at the magazines that have sprouted since 1971? Because I’d be surprised if the Star (or Maxim) is the type of journalism the so-called hang-wringers are referring to.)
But Shafer completely misses the boat here:
* “The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market. For instance, Tribune critics denounce it for cutting the foreign bureaus at the Baltimore Sun and Newsday, which it owns. But should every metropolitan newspaper* keep its Moscow or Jerusalem bureaus when readers can click to Web coverage from the New York Times and the international press, especially when many of those papers are losing circulation? Something’s got to give.”
The (admittedly excessive) extension of that logic is that every story only needs to be covered by one outlet;** the past several years have shown the extent to which that’s not true. The best-known example of this is Knight-Ridder’s coverage of the WMD situation in Iraq (coverage which Shafer has praised). When the Times, among many other outlets, was accepting the Bush administration’s WMD rationale for war, Knight Ridder led the pack in uncovering the extent to which this wasn’t true. (Earlier this year, most of K-R was bought by McClatchy.) There are plenty of other stories the designated big-kid-on-the-block has missed over the years, from Watergate on; thank goodness other, redundent outlets have been there to pick up the slack. Foreign reporting is incredibly expensive; in fact, it’s essentially a subsidized part of any news operation. (Brief digression: the fact that the Times‘s public editor spent a column debating whether this was acceptable shows the extent to which the public editor position has become a joke.) But it’s also necessary (and will only become more so in an increasingly interconnected world); in fact, as Times editor Bill Keller has said (and I’m paraphrasing here), it’s this type of reporting that comprises news outlets core mission.
I’ve worked at a daily paper, and lord knows there’s lots of deadweight at virtually every daily in the country. (That’s just as true at many weeklies; I’ve oftentimes been confused by just what the hell people do all the time.) The fact that so many newspaper employees are guild members makes the shedding of this deadweight incredibly difficult, and it’s the guy who’s been collecting a steady paycheck while writing an occasional brief (or online column) that’s the least likely to accept a buyout. (Why take a lump sum when you can get paid for doing next to nothing?) Judiciously culling staffs — when judicial culling is possible — can only be a good thing. But foreign bureaus and investigative reporting is precisely where this culling shouldn’t occur. We need three U.S. reporters covering Moscow a lot more than we need three covering the local school board, but it’s the Moscow reporter who’s more likely to see his job disappear even if it’s those school board reporters who are more likely to be phoning it in.***
* This is a bit disingenuous. Neither Newsday nor the Sun is an example of the type of “every metropolitan newspaper” Shafer’s trying to evoke with this phrase, the argument here isn’t whether the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the Kansas City Star should have a fully staffer contingent of international reporters.
** I fully realize Jack is not suggesting a national team of reporters with everyone covering one subject and sending those dispatches out to the rest of the country; I’m trying to make a point here.
*** Please: no hate mail from school board reporters. I’ve covered school boards. A lot of local reporters are great. Etc etc.
Post Categories: Jack Shafer & Media reporting & New York Times
