Some personal news
You probably know this but, whew, the business I’m in has changed. I’m sure this is true for every business, but I don’t know about any other business. I barely understand my own business. When I became a sportswriter some 30 years ago, there was a clear path for dummies like. You started at a small newspaper and made your bones. If you were lucky, a slightly larger newspaper might call. If you did well there, an even larger newspaper might give you a shot, and then an even larger one.
Rock Hill, S.C. to Augusta, Ga. to the afternoon paper in Cincinnati to the Kansas City Star.
This was my path but, more, this was THE path. Newspapers were the life then. When I got to be the columnist in Kansas City I had arrived at the greatest job my mind could comprehend. And the job was even better than I imagined it would be. I was home.
Then Sports Illustrated called with a job BEYOND my comprehension, the job I only dared to dream about when no one was looking.
And … well, you know what happened next. The Internet happened. Progress happened. There was a time, not so long ago, when you got newspaper for a million reasons: The coupons, movie times, car ads, real estate ads, the comics, your horoscope, a crossword puzzle, a Jumble, to find out where yard sales were, to look for a job, to check out the box scores, to check out stock prices, to buy a used sofa and, oh yeah, to read about the news and to learn about trends and to find out what the local sports team was doing. Think about the apps that do each and every one of these things now.
Newspapers began shriveling up. Magazines began feeling outdated. The news — well, we don’t have the bandwidth here to talk about what happened to the news. The point is that everything changed. The challenge is to change with it.
And I have changed. A lot. SI. Sports on Earth. NBC Sports. MLB. It has been a whirlwind. I’ve loved every place I’ve worked, I really have. Always though there was a shift that pushed me in another direction.
So, I’ve got a couple of things happening in my life — maybe you care, maybe you don’t, but this is my blog so I’ll tell you.
One, I will continue to write at MLB.com, a terrific place. I’ll be writing three times a week. On Tuesdays and Fridays, I’ll be writing columns — usually live off of something trendy and live in the news. And every Thursday, this should be fun, I’ll be doing a Throwback Thursday piece where I go back into baseball history and tell a story. There will be other surprises here and there, but that’s the bulk of it.
Two, I’m proud to say that beginning today, I will be writing columns for The Athletic. You are probably aware of The Athletic because they basically been hiring amazing people just about every other day; it’s really cool to be a part of it. I’m still working on the schedule, but I imagine I’ll be writing twice or so a week to start and it will be about every sport. We kick off today with a piece about the Cleveland Browns draft.
The Athletic, you might know (or you will figure out if you clicked that link) is a subscription service. As part of my start, they’re offering a sweet discount with this link — just $2.99 per month. Look, you know I don’t sell stuff on this blog but even if you never intend to read a single thing I write, $2.99 per month for the amazing people at The Athletic — Ken Rosenthal, Seth Davis, Johnette Howard, Dana O’Neil, look, I don’t even KNOW all the amazing people who work there yet — is an impossibly awesome deal. Three bucks. Come on. You can’t get anything for three bucks.
Three: Mike Schur are trying something new with The PosCast. We will have a special bonus PosCast at some point in the next couple of weeks and then we are starting the new season of the PosCast on July 17. So what is this “new” thing we’re trying? Well, I can’t go into all the details but I can tell you that we intend to improve our PosCast recording success rate (up from the 37% we’re at ;now) and would like to improve the sound from “voices coming from inside a garbage dumpster” to “noise that will not cause your dog to hide in the pantry.”
There are other things happening, and I’ll share with you as we go. There’s a famous Chinese curse that is loosely translated as, “May you live in interesting times.” Well, I don’t know if it’s a curse. But these are interesting times.
