no longer the best gig ever

      So, the Washington Post sports section is gone, a casualty of the newspaper’s recent decision to eliminate around a third of the paper’s editorial jobs. The New York Times sports section was eliminated nearly three years ago. The New York Daily News got rid of its sports editor around a decade ago.

      And it was a tough time to be a professional sportswriter even before the recent cutbacks.

      With the internet and social media, streaming and cable, the few newspaper sportswriters who remain are now on call all the time, 24 hours out of 24. They have to keep posting and posting and posting, breaking news even when there is no news, responding to other information sources even when there is not much of a response available.

      They have to compete against not just other newspapers, but against a multitude of networks and fan sites and Substacks and podcasts and even content generated by the athletes and teams themselves.

      They are supposed to understand and write about complicated financial details, luxury taxes and convoluted contracts, and mysterious stuff like the NBA’s second apron and free agency maneuvering and transfer portals. They need to be familiar with legal issues and esoteric statistics like exit velocity and wRC+ (weighted runs created plus; I looked it up).  

      It’s not an easy job anymore, at least for those who still have the job.

      Now, with the imminent arrival of spring training, I am reminded of what a glorious job it used to be and how grateful I was to have it.

      When it was hovering just below freezing in New York, my newspaper, The New York Post, paid for me to head to balmy southern Florida. One year it would be spring training with the Mets, then on the Atlantic Coast; the next year it would be the Yankees, on the gulf side of the peninsula.

      I got a small apartment or hotel room and rented a small car; both on my expense account. In the mornings, I would go out to the training site, hang around the batting cage, shoot the breeze with some of the players I knew, introduce myself to those who were new to the team.

      I’d talk to the manager and try to come up with a story idea—would the new phenom have a chance to make the major league roster, or did he still need some Triple A experience? How was the rehab going for one of the starting pitchers? Could the slugger recover from the end-of-last season’s inexplicable slump?

      Nothing about contracts, and average yearly salaries, the minutiae of Tommy John surgery, complicated descriptions of incredibly complicated potential free agent signings or comparisons of BWar versus FWar.

      At around noon or 1 p.m., I’d finished taking my notes—on a little reporter’s notebook, no smartphones available—and head back to my little apartment and my Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter. I’d type up my story—my one story for the day, my 800-word commitment—and then go find a Western Union office to send the story back home to the paper. Yes, that’s how we used to transmit our stories back in the stone age.

      Then I’d have the rest of the day to myself.

      No updates to file. No tweets to post. No AMAs on Reddit to respond to or blog posts to manage or ESPN revelations that I had to address.

      Sometimes, I’d spend the rest of the day at the pool, or maybe go to the beach. Once or twice, I went to the jai-alai parlor if there were afternoon matches and then I’d go have a nice dinner.

      A few years later, when I decided to leave my job, so I could do more than write 800 words a day, my colleagues and many friends couldn’t believe I was giving up the best job in the world.

      They may have been right, then. They wouldn’t be right now.