“What were we gonna write? ‘Wade Boggs was seen in a bar with a woman’?” Doria asks. “Things happen under your nose as a reporter that don’t meet the standard.”
Glen Crevier, assistant managing editor for sports at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the president of APSE, notes that as the result of a tip, the Star Tribune broke the story last year that Minnesota Vikings running back Onterrio Smith had been caught with a “Whizzinator,” a device used for beating urine tests.
But Crevier acknowledges that a lot of stories are difficult to get into print “because you have to respect your sources. Hopefully, our standards are rising on how we use anonymous sources.”
One point on which there is widespread agreement is that it’s both inefficient and unfair to ask the beat reporters — those assigned to cover the team and the games — to risk access and relationships by suddenly turning into investigative types.
“Our beat guy ... has put up with so much crap” as a result of the BALCO story, says Fainaru-Wada. “There’s no way those guys can deal with their jobs and at the same time investigate this in any real way. It’s not the responsibility of the beat guys to get those stories.”
One of the groundbreaking works of sports journalism actually came from a Major League pitcher named Jim Bouton. With his scandalous 1970 book, Ba.jpg "The fact that it took two reporters outside of the sports department to help unearth what may be the darkest moment in baseball since the 1919 Black Sox scandal raises a critical issue.")
ll Four, Bouton peeled away the gauzy myths that permeated Major League Baseball and exposed the players as founts of human foibles — and in some case, as serious amphetamine users.
Bouton paid a price for trying to debunk the fantasies that can define the relationship between the athletes and the fans. There are a lot of reasons for the almost irrational appeal of sports: the sheer escapism; the refreshing clarity of a contest with a finite time limit that almost always ends with a winner and a loser; and, of course, the sometimes heroic exploits of people who wear the uniforms we cheer for.
For his role in pulling back that curtain, Bouton was ostracized from the baseball fraternity and not invited to a New York Yankees old-timer game until 1998.
Today, Boutonbelieves that most sports scribes aren’t built for hard-news digging because they share the same feelings as the rooters in the seats.“More sportswriters are in it because it’s fun. They’re fans,” he says. “I don’t know if they’re cut out for it.”
“Yes, it would be great if we had more investigative journalists in baseball,” he adds. “But not if we had to take them off another beat.... We have a basically uninformed public. People are ill informed by the media at all levels.”
