JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

What to write about today? Hmmm. Not much going on. Kinda dead around these parts.

But, hey, wait a minute…Wasn’t there a Wild Card playoff game at The K last night???

Writer’s block be gone! I’m back in business…

**

Between innings, I was checking e-mails and The Star’s Twitter updates (confused my family members, who know I know nothing about Twitter), and an e-mail showed up from my old buddy Mike Waller, former KC Star editor, now retired and living in Hilton Head, South Carolina. (Ah, yes, some people do make big money in the newspaper business.)

Here’s what Mike wrote:

“Hi Fitz,

“Yost has made a lot of bonehead decisions this year but the Royals got to the playoffs despite him.  His decision tonight to bring in Ace Ventura, a young kid who has been a reliever only once in his life and who gives up a 3-run homer to Moss, is Yost’s biggest bonehead decision of the year.  How the hell does this guy keep his job?  I think you need a post on this stupid decision.”

Gotta love it…Weren’t we all feeling the same way after Royals’ Manager Ned Yost jerked Big Game James Shields after only 88 pitches, the last of which yielded a broken-bat single and a walk on a borderline, 3-2 pitch?

My 26-year-old daughter Brooks, who has become a very knowledgeable baseball fan this summer, said later that she thought Yost panicked. Bingo.

…Of course, the never-say-die Royals came back and took Yost off the hook. (Speaking of hooks, Yost probably won’t give Shields an early one ever again partly out of fear that Shields might wring his damn neck when he arrives at the mound.)

**

Regarding The Star’s coverage of the game, I haven’t read it all, but it is obviously exhaustive, and the centerpieces were large, above-the-fold photos on both the front page and the sports section.

The front-page photo shows Salvy Perez, who knocked in the game-winning run, with his arms upraised, mouth open and looking joyfully into the stands. The headline at the bottom of the picture says it all: SALVATION.

The lead sports-page photo shows Perez a few minutes earlier, when he was headed to first base, knowing he had just delivered the game-winning hit. His face is contorted in a joyous scream, his hands are extended in a triumphant reach, and his bat is falling to the ground, perfectly horizontal. The headline above the photo is: HELLO, HALOS.

Wow. Great stuff. The Star can be proud of that visual presentation.

…But now the caveat. The front page-story, under the SALVATION photo, is a mess. It’s a prime example of how some newspapers are still having a lot of trouble shedding their scales and shifting nimbly with changing events.

The Star’s editors decided well before the game to do a feature story about the decibel level at stadium at various times during the evening, starting with the parking lot at 4:55 p.m. and continuing to 11:43 p.m., when Perez stroked the winning hit past the A’s third baseman. (112 decibels, if you’re interested.)

Well, that story might have been a good idea at 10 a.m. yesterday, when the editors gathered around the cherry, rectangular table in the newsroom conference room and planned last night’s coverage. But by 11 p.m., when the game was carrying all of Kansas City on a lurching roller-coaster ride, that story was stinking like a turd on a hot day.

Even though four reporters had put in many hours of work on that story, the editors should have relegated it to an inside page of the sports section.

But, no, they stuck with their stale plan and spread the story across six columns of golden, front-page real estate, on a day when the paper is probably selling more copies than it has in years.

The headline wasn’t bad — “Perez hit gives Royals win in 12th inning at a raucous K,” — but the reader could tell after a few paragraphs that the story had little to do with the game itself.  It was a newspaper shell game.

Had I been calling the shots, I would have put beat writer Andy McCullough’s game story on the front page. As it was, McCullough’s story — under a big headline “Worth the wait” — ran on page 5 of the sports section. The story began like this:

“They new. they all knew, even before it was official. They had waited long enough. They would start their celebration early.

“Christian Colon pumped his fist before he even touched third base. The Royals leaped over the dugout railing before Salvador Perez even touched first. The sound of 40,502 screaming souls echoed through Kauffman Stadium in the final seconds of a 9-8 victory over Oakland on Tuesday, the exorcism of 29 years of suffering across 12 innings of delirium.”

Now that’s a game story; it captures the climactic conclusion, the noise and the fans’ collective relief. That’s what you want in your front-page, biggest-game-since-1985 story.

It was a badly missed opportunity for The Star.

And, unfortunately, Andy McCullough, first-season Royals’ beat reporter and who has put his heart and soul into his writing all season, might be the only disappointed person in Kansas City today.