TV Has Write Idea for Change

So, Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball (it says here).

Whoever.

It was founded with the almost perfect geometry for its purposes--90 feet between bases, 60 feet 6 inches from pitcher’s mound to batter, nine men to a team, three outs a side, three strikes and you’re out, the ball in play only between the foul lines, unless you popped it up.

If an infielder played a ball perfectly, you were out. You have about 3.4 seconds to beat the throw. You had to “hit ‘em where they ain’t” or, in the case of Babe Ruth when he came along, “hit ‘em where they’ll never be.”

The game might even have been a poor second to lawn croquet in public acceptance when it came along. Except for one thing: One body of the population at large found it fascinating--the literary types, the would-be poets of the press. Hero worshipers, they found the frustrations of the game and the difficulties of overcoming them a kind of metaphor for life and they pulled out all the stops in dramatizing it. Homers covering a Trojan War, Kiplings covering an Empire.

It became “the grand old game” and the “national pastime” not because of its basic ingenuity but because of the coverage lavished on it.

The game recognized its debt to those rhapsodizers and a new entity crept into being, the “press box.” The beat writer became as important to the team as the second baseman.

Almost every innovation of the game found its creation in a typewriter. The decimal points were brought into play by the press’ figure filberts. The batting average, the earned-run average, the romance of the no-hit game, the triple crown or MVP winner, the “.400 barrier,” the “20-game pinnacle,” the hitting streak, all originated in press copy. When a friend of Jimmy Cannon’s spotted a figure-happy colleague carting a briefcase into a press box once and asked him what was in it, Cannon replied, “Decimal points.”

Make fun of it, if you will, but the decimal point became the linchpin of the game. Baseball without a box score is just complicated calisthenics.

A burly outfielder was no longer No. 3 in the lineup. He was “the Sultan of Swat,” the “Bambino.” Teams were no longer Yankees or Dodgers, they were “Murderers’ Row,” “the Daffiness Boys.” Players were “the Big Train” and “the Iron Horse.” Pitches were “fade-aways.” Eccentric pitches were “screwballs.” So were eccentric pitchers. Dependable pitchers became “the Meal Ticket.”

It was all good, clean fun and good for the republic. Wholesome recreation. Bring the whole family. An heirloom sport, passed from fathers to sons. Or daughters.

I bring this up because an extraordinary thing has occurred in our little world of sport, which has of late been given over from the press box to the camera stand, and to that ubiquitous, ever-prying eye of our lives, the television camera.

The TV cameras see the game for you, they make the newspaper description of it obsolete.

But wait a minute! People who saw the game in person in the old days would run to get a paper to see what they saw--or at least to put it in historical perspective. They wanted what they saw verified, embellished.

What has happened is the network, ESPN, the apotheosis of televised sport in this country, is coming out with an expansion of its service. No, not more cameras, different vantage points, high definition, instant replays, or stop-action shots. The network has come out with--a little traveling music, professor--the printed word!

The top purveyor of sport in the land recognizes there’s a symbiotic, synergistic relationship between newsprint and the games people play.

So ESPN has come out with a bi-weekly sports magazine. Why? Well, the notion here is the guys in charge realize sports need that extra promotional dimension.

When Walter O’Malley announced he was moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, one of the first reasons he cited was that Brooklyn had lost its daily newspaper, the Eagle.

“And anyone who thinks you can run baseball without a daily newspaper doesn’t know baseball,” O’Malley advised.

Or doesn’t know any sport, for all of that.

ESPN the Magazine was the brainchild of John Walsh, a crack sports newsman, who had been executive editor of the ESPN network since 1990. Walsh raided the staff of Sports Illustrated for his managing editor, John Papanek, and put together a staff of writers, not talkers.

But for a TV sports giant to delve into the print media is a concession of sorts that their product--while it can certainly exist on its own--can coexist with print to mutual benefit.

I take great pride in the fact that the modern mega-sport network, at least by implication, acknowledges its debt to Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner and the others who built up their sports in the first place for the “And now back to the studio for an update” set.

The new publication will hardly be a house organ. It proposes to concentrate on coming events, contests which, presumably, ESPN will televise. It will concentrate on “core” sports--i.e., the ones put in place by print over the years.

It will cater to the young. “It’s not your father’s sports magazine,” we are cautioned.

Maybe not. But by its mere presence, the magazine is honoring a tradition as old as baseball, bringing us back to a time when sports coverage was readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic. And even people who went to the game bought the World Series extra on the way home.