PicoBlog

It’s been almost 18 months since I covered my last baseball game and there’s not much I miss about my old life as a beat reporter.

I could write thousands of words about what I didn’t like about the job, about the significant toll it took on my health and the way the media industry has evolved to make beat reporting a largely unsustainable profession. 

Those words, however, would be a waste of my time and an even greater waste of yours.

As Opening Day approaches, I wanted to write about an element of the job I didn’t fully appreciate until I left. 

It’s the community.

From the readers who sent weekly emails lambasting the way Farhan Zaidi built the Giants’ roster to the anonymous Twitter “reply guys” who routinely crushed Gabe Kapler’s bullpen management (often during a 107-win season), I miss our correspondence. 

I miss the one-line emails telling me my columns suck, I miss the readers who would leave an occasional voicemail at the San Jose Mercury News office to question why I was such a failed writer that my game stories never appeared in the paper and I even miss the texters who would fire off a late-night message to KNBR during the postgame shows I hosted telling the station Mark Willard should never take a night off.

What, specifically, do I miss about all of that?

For all of the overwhelmingly negative comments reporters such as myself received during the season, there were dozens if not hundreds more readers who were profusely grateful for the updates beat reporters provide.

Given the tremendous stress of a seven-day-a-week-work-every-night-and-weekend job, it was almost impossible to see the forest through the trees in the moment. It was difficult to keep the positive interactions at the front of my brain, because so often, I felt like I was hanging on by a thread. 

Why? Here’s the sample of what the first day of a road trip might look like.

• 11:30 p.m.--Get home from covering a night game

• 6 a.m.--Wake up to catch a flight to San Diego

• 8:15 a.m.--Board flight to San Diego and immediately fall asleep for the entire 90-minute flight

• 9:45 a.m.--Land at the airport and open a text to see the Giants made roster moves

• 10:15 a.m.--Finish story about roster moves and go catch a Lyft

• 10:45 a.m.--Request early check-in at hotel so you can hopefully sleep a little more

• Noon–Alarm goes off, make a phone call and tape an interview for your off day story

• 2 p.m.--Radio hit on KNBR

• 2:30 p.m.--Arrive at Petco Park 

• 2:30-6 p.m.--Conduct and transcribe interviews, watch batting practice, drink three cups of coffee

• 6 p.m.--Finish pregame story (which has to hold up overnight because it will be printed for the morning paper before the game ends)

• 6:40–First pitch

• 9:40–Publish game story, head to the clubhouse for interviews

• 10:10–Return to the press box to update the game story and if something is newsworthy, write another story (by the way, a dwindling number of media outlets have editors at this time of night)

• 11 p.m.--Return to hotel 

Part of me looks at that schedule and understands why I have no desire to return to a beat. Part of me thinks that if you showed my 15-year-old self that schedule, I’d think I was the luckiest person in the world.

It was always so easy for me to focus on the challenges, but when I think back on the job, it’s much more important to savor the best memories.

And so often, those memories involved the incredible community of Giants fans who supported my work.

If I wrote a mailbag, I was never short on curious readers who wanted to know more about the team. If I stepped into the concourse to grab (the way-too-small) chicken tenders during the third inning, someone would tell me they heard me on the radio that day. And every time I wrote a big feature that I sunk a lot of time into, there would be Twitter followers and emailers thanking me for helping them learn more about their favorite players.

Whether it’s the ever-increasing demands of the companies we work for or the real-life challenges away from work that make the job more exhausting, it’s so easy for beat writers to forget what makes the profession so special.

I certainly took the support for granted, and now that I’m more removed from the beat, I think it’s important to say thank you. 

Thank you for the kind words, the interesting questions and the money you spent on subscriptions. Thank you for the phone calls during postgame shows, the mid-game reply tweets that would produce laughter in the press box and the times you didn’t press send on something when you probably really wanted to. 

Since leaving the beat, writing about baseball on a full-time basis again isn’t something that has crossed my mind. But after stepping away, I have regularly felt compelled to tell readers how much I miss our interactions. 

They kept me going, and this season, they’ll keep others going too.

What should you expect in this space?

If I’m being honest, I don’t have firm plans for this Substack.

Right now, I’d like to find a place to write once a week (typically on Fridays) about subjects that interest me. If you’re a reader who wants to know more about life on the beat, covering baseball, hosting radio shows or where the best breakfast burritos in the world can be found, send me an idea and I’ll probably turn it into a post sometime in the next few weeks.

If it’s not clear by now, the aspect of writing I miss most is the community. So if there’s something you’re interested in learning, I’m more than happy to share.

Where can you find my other work?

Nowadays, I work behind-the-scenes at The Athletic, where I don’t do any writing or reporting.

Though my time writing about the Giants is behind me, I still appear on-air at KNBR, where I co-host Talkin’ Baseball on the weekends with Marty Lurie and Bill Laskey. This season, I’ll also appear regularly on Extra Innings where Bill and I will talk about everything that happened during the week in Major League Baseball.

Here’s my first Extra Innings appearance of 2023, which took place on Sunday, March 19.

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