Real Class Act Finally Switches on Hall Light

It is another August in another baseball season. The Dodgers are scuffling to remain in contention for the playoffs. The Angels are 23 games out of first place. For Ross Newhan, this is pretty much life on the baseball beat as he has known it for the last 41 years.

Except on this Sunday, Ross wasn’t chasing the big story in baseball or working the phones or rolling up his sleeves in front of his laptop to brush back another self-important sacred cow or faltering front-office executive.

This Sunday, instead of covering the news, Ross was making it--joining the late Jim Murray as The Times’ second inductee into the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

It is not a position Ross is entirely comfortable with, but, as one would expect, he did the research before heading to Cooperstown.

“The list of writers in the Hall is pretty humbling,” Ross says. “There are the guys I respect who spent all their careers as baseball writers--guys like Charley Feeney, Leonard Koppett, Bob Hunter. But you go back to the early years and there are people like Grantland Rice. I mean, Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. And you say, ‘Wait a minute.’

“You’re on a list that transcends baseball. And when you include guys like Jim Murray and Red Smith . . . what I am doing here?”

That’s typical Ross. In a profession rife with grandstanders and self-promoters, Ross has made a career out of unassuming but diligent consistency, of hanging around the perimeter waiting for the pack to clear before asking the most pertinent question of the day, of dueling with the keyboard in a never-ending quest to tell the story fairly and honestly.

“A question people often ask me is, ‘What is the biggest story you’ve ever had?’ ” he says. “What I take greater pride in is the consistency. When I was traveling with a team, I always felt that if people read me day to day, they’d have a good idea of what was going on with the team, the good and the bad.”

Ross traveled with a team, mostly the Angels, for 25 years before becoming The Times’ national baseball columnist in 1986. Since then, he has written regularly about the Angels--meaning that he has covered the Angels, in some capacity, for the entirety of the franchise’s existence, breaking in with the 1961 expansion Los Angeles Angels as a rookie beat writer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram before joining The Times in 1968.

That’s some good and an awful lot of bad. Forty years of Angel baseball? Including two books on Orange County’s longest-running annual kick in the stomach?

If that’s not enough to get Ross’ name on a wall in Cooperstown, how about his bust on a monument in deep center at Edison Field?

Ross covered the Angels the way they needed to be covered--telling the hard truth, zinging the right targets. Initially, this did not do much for his popularity around the team’s clubhouse.

Alex Johnson, upon seeing Ross pull up in a taxi outside the team hotel in Cleveland, leaned out of his upper-floor window to scream obscenities. Brian Downing, angered by something Ross had written about him in that morning’s paper, greeted the reporter that evening by menacingly waving a Louisville Slugger under his nostrils. Buzzie Bavasi, reacting to an especially bad stretch by the Angels, ordered Ross’ bags off the team luggage truck headed for the airport on a getaway day.

It would have been easy to flinch, to back away for safer ground after so many seasons serving as the messenger for a perennially discouraging story. Ross, however, was not deterred. He jokes that it only cost him his hair and his health--Ross had triple-bypass surgery in 1996--but, after four decades of staying the course, he has built a reputation for toughness balanced by fairness that is respected in press boxes and clubhouses throughout both leagues.

Ross takes what he calls a “common sense” approach to covering baseball. “You can’t just hammer all the time,” he reasons. “I think it does go through your mind at times, ‘I have to come back tomorrow and cover these same people.’

“If you’re constantly negative or positive without objectivity, you lose your credibility. You can get to a point where, if you are negative or positive about something, can people trust you?”

Ross was 49 when he became The Times’ baseball columnist, seeking a respite from the daily deadline grind that often turned his press-box seat into a maelstrom of cursed keyboards, clenched fists and phone receivers angrily slammed onto their moorings. Baseball journalism is not always a pretty sight and Ross, 10 minutes to deadline, is the blood and sweat embodiment of it.

“If they hadn’t created the national [column], I would have been off baseball,” he says. “Because of the combination of the travel and making every trip and dealing with the deadlines. At that point, it had been 25 years or so. That was enough.”

It was a good move for Ross and for this newspaper. In the last 15 years, at a point in life when many writers shift down a gear or two, Ross started hitting his stride. At 64, his writing is better and livelier than ever, as much at ease referencing alternative rocker Mojo Nixon as Otis Nixon.

“I’m willing to let it fly a little more,” he acknowledges.

He also credits his son David’s development as a baseball player from college through the minor leagues to the major leagues for “reawakening some grass-roots appreciation of the game that had either been dormant or I never realized I had. Without sounding corny, I think it’s a good game. It’s a good writing game. The diverse personalities. You have more opportunity than in any other game to analyze and second-guess.”

Ross has been doing it for as many years as Kirby Puckett, another Cooperstown inductee Sunday, has been on the planet. To see that kind of work ethic and sensibility recognized, with all of baseball looking on, is encouraging news for the sport and for sportswriting.

What is Ross Newhan doing in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Improving the neighborhood.