The vanished breed. Or, not.

Take a good look at the photo that accompanies this not-so-veiled eulogy for a craft. Now let me tell you what's ironic about it.

No, not that four of the sportswriters ganging up on Ted Williams are wearing jackets and ties, and one debonair chap has even gone Full Madison Avenue in a three-piece suit. I'm surprised they're not wearing fedoras, too, tipped rakishly over one eyebrow. With a "Press" card stuck in the band.

Ah, but I digress.

("You do that a lot," you're saying.)

Anyway, what's ironic is that it's Williams upon whose revealed wisdom they're all breathlessly hanging. Teddy Ballgame, see, hated sportswriters (especially the Boston sportswriters) with a multi-hued passion. Called them, sarcastically, "Knights of the Keyboard." Thought they knew nuttin' about nuttin', which didn't exactly make him unique among coaches and athletes.

"You never played the game," after all, has always been the go-to evasion of every chump who was ever asked to explain his 0-for-4 day. Or of every coach who was ever asked if he got his clock management skills from his English bulldog, Slobberknocker.

Oh, how Teddy Ballgame and the rest of 'em would loved to have seen what's happening to
the sportswriting biz.

Bad enough that hedge-fund vandals have decided the Fourth Estate serves no vital purpose in American society, except as a handy ATM for the indolent executive class. That's an old story. American journalism, and not just sportswriting, has been a Honda Civic getting stripped for parts  for a good decade. Nothing to see there.

But then along came the Bastard Plague, and Sportsball World went dark. And suddenly the sportswriter became the dinosaur voted Most Likely To Disappear First Into The Tar Pit.

With no games to cover, my fellow scribes became (or seemed to become) as superfluous as tailfins on an oxcart. And already their profession was being emptied out. The bigger the name, it seemed, the more he or she sold the paper or the book or the brand in the Before Time, the more expendable he or she became. Why pay top dollar for talent when you could outsource your coverage to the sources themselves?

Nothing like getting major insight and critical analysis about a team from the team itself. Yes, sir.

But as the piece above indicates, that seems to be the direction we're heading. Because even when the pandemic subsides, and sports returns, news outlets have discovered what life looks like without independent coverage of them. And if it's cheaper just to let the teams cover themselves (the thinking will no doubt go), will that be so bad? Sports will still move papers or web traffic either way, right?

Real journalism, after all, costs money. And those vandals aren't going to pay themselves.

However. How. Ever.

In a catty-cornered sort of way, the Bastard Plague also has revealed just how valuable, and versatile, my former clan really can be. Biased though I am, it's indisputably true that sportswriters always have been among the most skilled storytellers in any newsroom. (They've also been among the most excruciatingly awful writers, too, in some cases. You take the good with the bad.)

And so one of my former colleagues, now the editor of a small paper in Ohio, has moved some of his sportswriters into features for the time being, on the theory that good storytellers can tell any sort of story. And the sports staff of my former employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. has done an exemplary job of finding relevant, compelling stories to tell in the absence of live sports to cover.

(Full disclosure: This month I've been contributing to the JG memories of my 40 years covering the Indianapolis 500. That's not really what I'm talking about here, though.)

What this says to me is maybe there still is value in them-there dinosaurs. And maybe stuff like versatility and storytelling ability and plain old expertise might be worth the investment after all.

I don't expect the vandals to see this, of course. But I'm a crazy optimist, and so I hold out hope that all of this has loosened a few scales from a few eyes.

Just a few, please. All I ask.