The New York Times Sports Section, RIP

Those of you who weren't alive to see the sports section of The New York Times in its most complete glory, I feel for you. The Times disbanding its sports section this week is a blow, but in absolute truth it would have hurt a great deal more if it had happened, say, 40 years ago.

The paper never really seemed to think of its sports section as something terribly important, in any time, but New York baseball fans surely did. They may have loved the more visceral approaches of the Daily News or the New York Post, but they also loved the more nuanced takes from the best of the Times.

There was Dave Anderson, a refugee from the Brooklyn Eagle and the Journal-American, who'd eventually become a Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished commentary, in 1981. He won the prize largely for his take on George Steinbrenner's laughably disgraceful firing of composed, cerebral, first-year, American League East-winning Yankee manager Dick Howser.

Steinbrenner tried to convince one and all present at that press conference that it was Howser's idea to exchange a gig managing the Yankees for a shot at the Florida real estate game. "Say this for Dick Howser — instead of going along with George Steinbrenner's party line yesterday, he declined to comment," Anderson wrote, in a column called "The Food on the Table at the Execution."

By not answering questions, he answered them. Anybody could see that. And anybody could see through George Steinbrenner's scheme.

"What advice," Dick Howser was being asked now, "would you give Gene Michael?" "To have a strong stomach," Dick Howser replied, smiling thinly, "and a nice contract." Minutes later, the execution was over. Dick Howser got up quickly and walked out of the room without a smile. Behind his round desk, George Steinbrenner looked around.

"Nobody ate any sandwiches," the Yankee owner said.

That from the man who once had a classic lead slaughtered by a particularly un-seeing Eagle copy editor, after a game in which critical errors cost the Milwaukee Braves against the Brooklyn Dodgers. "The Milwaukee Braves died with their boots," Anderson began. Classic. Then, the un-seeing copy editor added, and made stick, "on."

There was George Vecsey, whom I first met through his writing a biography or two aimed at the juvenile market. (Including The Baseball Life of Sandy Koufax, written after the Hall of Famer's baseball retirement and awkward premiere as an NBC announcer and pre-game host.) He retired from the Times at 2011's end, but he was a cool yet enthusiastic presence who knew emotion, not economics, was at the core of sports love.

"To its credit," Vecsey writes on his Web journal, "this great paper continued to report and comment on the major issues in sports ... [but i]nevitably, the excitement over the 'local' teams was lost. I felt the absence of emotion. Readers felt it."

Speaking for myself, in retirement I had more time to read the paper--the print version, in a blue bag, in my driveway every morning. My friends in the Times printing plant call it 'the daily miracle,' and for me it is.

... But now the sports department is going to be disappeared, while promising new jobs for great editors, great reporters. I hope they appreciate Kurt Streeter, whose most recent Sports of the Times column savaged the pro-gambling baseball commissioner and the owner of the A's, as they prepare for the A's to vacate Oakland for Las Vegas.

That was the man who also wrote a sweet and sad elegy to A. Bartlett Giamatti, upon that short-lived baseball commissioner's death eight days after he pronounced Pete Rose persona non grata from organized baseball. (Therein, Vecsey first enunciated that the good of the game isn't the same as making money for the owners, a precept upon which I've leaned shamelessly.)

At the very least, the Rose affair kept Giamatti from sitting in the stands very often. He did get to see Nolan Ryan record his 5,000th strikeout last month in Texas, ticking off at least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.

Giamatti knew that baseball is about rooting, about caring. Let us envision him on the edge of his seat, a smile softening his gray beard and somber eyes, his fists itching to pump the air as Ryan blew his heater past Rickey Henderson. Let us picture him in Seattle or in Atlanta, suffering with the home fans, or back in Fenway, letting his true passions out.

As long as he was commissioner, there would have been the chance he would act and speak out of his convictions, and that these would have made him the ultimate steward of the national game.

There was also the singular Red Smith, whose death in 1982 opened the way for Vecsey to become a Sports of the Times columnist in the first place. Smith, a longtime New York Herald-Tribune fixture who was hired by the Times five years after that once-august paper collapsed into the short-lived World Journal Tribune experiment. Smith, who graduated thus from mere titan to another plane entirely, becoming the first of his breed to win the Pulitzer for distinguished commentary in 1976.

Smith, a wry observer who kept baseball foremost among the games he loved (he dismissed basketball as "whistleball" and despised hockey), a man who suffered no fools gladly. He suffered them ungladly, especially, when they tried to manipulate Hall of Famer Henry Aaron's coming blast of Hall of Famer Babe Ruth to one side as baseball's career home run champion for the box office above the game's integrity:

Bill Bartholomay, the Braves' president, meant to keep Aaron on the bench through the first three games in Cincinnati in the hope that the crowds would fill the Atlanta park to see Henry go after Ruth's record in the eleven-game home stand that opens Monday night.

(Commissioner Bowie) Kuhn realized that in the view of most fans, leaving the team's cleanup hitter out of the batting order would be tantamount to dumping the games in Cincinnati. He explained to Bartholomay what self-interest should have told the Braves' owner, that it is important that every team present its strongest lineup every day in an honest effort to win, and that the customers must believe the strongest lineup is being used for that purpose.

When Bartholomay persisted in his determination to dragoon the living Aaron and the dead Ruth as shills to sell tickets in Atlanta, the commissioner laid down the law. With a man like Henry swinging for him, that's all he had to do.

Of course, Henry swung big in the top of the first on 4 April 1974, turning the Reds' Jack Billingham's heater into a 3-run homer to tie Ruth at 714. The "persistence" to which Smith eluded led to Braves skipper (and Hall of Fame third baseman Eddie Mathews) holding Aaron out of the second game, but playing him under orders in the third, where Aaron took an honest collar before the Braves went home and he could pass Ruth against the Dodgers.

There was Ira Berkow, who hasn't won a Pulitzer for commentary yet but whose writings about baseball have elevated the human element into transcendence and can be had in several splendid anthologies, including Summers in the Bronx (Yankee writings), Summers at Shea (Mets writings), and It Happens Every Spring (all around the game).

There was Claire Smith, drafted from the Hartford Courant and graduated from groundbreaker (the first woman on a regular U.S. baseball beat, covering the Yankees; the late Alison Gordon did it in Canada, covering the Blue Jays for the Toronto Star) to Hall of Fame writers wing winner — joining such Timespeople as Smith and Anderson — and, in one of the sweetest turns of poetic justice, this year's Red Smith Award winner from the Associated Press Sports Editors.

The woman whom Steve Garvey once pulled aside to give an interview, after his fellow Padres tried to block her during a postseason series, said upon hearing the news, "What I never dreamed of was being honored with the Red Smith Award, because that's the Mount Olympus in terms of the writers who've received it."

The Times bought The Athletic, of course, and it makes sad sense that adding that online journal to its holdings should make its own sports section superfluous. Says former Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte to New York: "[B]uying The Athletic was really about getting rid of the sports section."

I never understood why they bought it in the first place. If you remember, The Athletic was built on the business model of stripping the sports section of all the other newspapers in the country and giving you one person to cover every single team in the world.

They are going to have to strip The Athletic back to the bone because the business model of covering everything certainly doesn't work. The Times's sports department, which even as denuded as it is, contains some of the smartest and most sophisticated sports reporters in the country. So, what is going to happen to them? Are they going to be integrated into other departments? Maybe. The devil is in the details, because how is The Athletic going to cover things?

The Times has also had issues aplenty, usually on the news and political sides, in which it's compromised its veracity and its image all by its own not-so-sweet self, and for a time long enough.

But it's hard not to feel you should attend a funeral when learning the Times sports section has died. For me, who first read the Times sports pages when Arthur Daley was still writing Sports of the Times during my boyhood, it's like learning a favorite cousin has gone to the Elysian Fields.