Susan Slusser on Reddit
When I’m not dreaming up new signs to print, I like to browse Reddit during my free time. A favorite section of the site (Redditors call these subreddits) is a small Oakland Athletics community called /r/OaklandAthletics. I’m a big-time lurker that rarely posts to the group, but it’s a good way to read up on A’s news outside of Twitter & the traditional MLB news sources.
Around April 2015, beat reporter & former Baseball Writers’ Association of America president Susan Slusser released her much anticipated book. A’s Redditors started a conversation thread & threw out the idea of setting up a question & answer forum, commonly known as an Ask Me Anything (AMA)thread with her as a guest of honor. Redditors were saying that she’s pretty active on Twitter. I’m on Twitter, why not send her a quick tweet to ask? Couldn’t hurt, right?
Whaddya know, she replied!
As a Slusser fanboy, I was starstruck.
I sent her a private message asking her to send me an email if she wanted more details. I was doubting myself, believing that she said yes just to be nice. Her prompt email in my inbox quelled those feelings. Success!
Casual chats
I’m a huge Slusser fan. She’s one of the very few baseball writers I take the time to read & an awesome person to follow on Twitter as she has a really close connection with the A’s clubhouse & tweets a bunch. She’s also the first woman to be elected as president of the BBWAA. Huge accomplishment.
I’m totally fanboy-ing out now that we’re in email communication, but now is the time to play it cool & to try to sell her on the idea of committing to the AMA.
My initial emails described Reddit in a nutshell as she wasn’t familiar with the site, as well as what encompasses an AMA, which is essentially a candid question & answer session.
She was a hoot. Very congenial & was very casual in chat. I even learned that we’re actually not-too-far neighbors! As a token of thanks for contributing to Reddit, I said I owed her a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop. She said that sounded like fun.
Setting up the AMA
I initially thought that the AMA would take place in the A’s subreddit, but got some suggestions to reach out to the larger general baseball audience (/r/baseball) to see if they were interested.
I emailed the moderators in the larger baseball group to gauge their interest in having a Slusser AMA. They loved the idea! The /r/baseball group had a few Friday AMAs lined up, but would love to have Slusser on the roster.
I also worked with the moderators on how to set it up to work out the finer details. A piece of moderator advice:
It would probably be best to ask her to post the thread an hour or so before she has time available, so that there are already questions to answer when she has time. Lots of people post and then say “I’ll be back at 3 PM eastern to answer your questions”, it’s a pretty common practice.
Slusser was new to Reddit, so in parallel with working with the moderators, I gave her had a primer on how to set up an account, what to expect leading up to the day, how to start the AMA thread on the scheduled time, & to make sure that she provided photo proof that she’s the real suzsluss. She was so responsive. I was excited when she showed the same enthusiasm!
Correspondence continued the few weeks before we went live to keep her engaged. During this time, I tried to hype up the even by posting on Facebook, created a teaser Reddit post, & even made a nice little promo ad that I tweeted:
It even got some coverage on local sports radio KGMZ 95.7 The Game! Slusser was a guest & one of the hosts asked:
So you’re doing a Reddit AMA tomorrow. Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?
Days leading up to the AMA, I was getting nervous. This was the first time I’ve organized anything like this & wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. I set up a calendar reminder of the big Friday & tried to make sure not to have any meetings scheduled.
Show time
That Friday morning, I made myself available on stand-by in case anything happened. She was on the road with the A’s as they were scheduled to play the Rays in Florida, so we strictly clarified that the AMA will start at 2:00pm Florida time, 11:00am Oakland time. This was during work hours, so I had to sneak away for an early lunch to monitor everything.
Either Reddit was experiencing high volume of traffic or there was some sudden maintenance, but the site suddenly wasn’t working minutes before the AMA start. I was getting nervous & she was getting frustrated. It was only a 30-minute outage, but felt like hours.
The site finally goes up & she easily finds herself in a groove. She allocated only an hour to write answers, so she answers the queries as they come in. Like a pro.
An insightful AMA
During that hour, she wrote some really meaningful & detailed responses. Baseball fans caught a glimpse into what it’s like to be a roving sports reporter. She talked about how she started her career in sports:
I wanted to be a baseball broadcaster, which I did all the way through college, and I also worked at the college newspaper, covering all sports, and I interned at KCBS radio, KPIX TV and the Sacramento Bee — and the Bee offered me a fulltime job. So that kind of made my decision for me. I’d have thought I’d be doing play by play somewhere, but the chance of a fulltime job was too much to pass up right out of college. And I love it, so I’m glad that’s how things turned out.
I don’t have any desire to be a beat reporter because the travel will quickly wear me down. Her response to what’s the most difficult part of being a beat reporter:
The travel is tough, and baseball particularly so. You miss a lot of social events at home, and it’s long days and tough physically on travel days that also include game coverage. Still, tough to complain when your job is watching sports.
Best part: she even gave me a shoutout!
A big thanks to Ian Sagabaen for suggesting doing an AMA, I’m looking forward to it! You can find Ian, who still owes me coffee, at: greatestsignmaker.com twitter.com/gr8estsignmaker
It’s a good read in its entirety; come check it out:
I’m open to setting up another AMA if anyone has any suggestions on who would be a good guest. A’s Manager Bob Melvin? Coco Crisp? A-Rod? Billy Beane would be awesome, though he’s not on Twitter.
This reminds me, I need to reach out to Susan to follow up on that coffee…
I mentioned this earlier, she’s a pretty awesome person to follow on Twitter:
As always, you can see my whole sign collection on my website atgreatestsignmaker.com.
