I went to bed early last night and, unfortunately, missed Salvador Perez’ historic, second-game-in-a-row grand slam against the Seattle Mariners.
I read about it — and the Royals’ 12th inning victory — on kansascity.com when I got up this morning, but I’ve got to tell you it was an extremely disappointing read.
For years, The Star had a history of hiring great baseball writers, like Bob Nightengale (now a baseball columnist for USA Today) and Bob Dutton (now retired), but since 2018 it’s been a different story.
Just like the quality of the writing in the rest of the paper, the quality of Royals’ reports has gone south.
Perez became the first Royals’ player to hit home runs in consecutive games, and those two smashes were electrifying to Royals’ fans. Somehow, though, Royals’ beat writer Lynn Worthy managed to make it sound perfunctory.
Here’s how Worthy, who’s been on the beat the last three seasons, started his story about Perez’ heroics:
While in the midst of a career season and a year likely to make history for a player at the game’s most grueling position, Kansas City Royals All-Star catcher Salvador Perez has continued to attain new levels of amazement.
He has more home runs (three) than strikeouts (two) in his past three games dating back to Wednesday. In his last two games, he has four hits, eight RBIs, two grand slams and just one strikeout.
Perez became the 24th player in the history of the American and National leagues to hit grand slam home runs in back-to-back games when he hit one for the second consecutive night to help the Royals to an 8-7 extra-inning win on Friday night in Seattle.
Even more appalling was the caption on a photo accompanying Worthy’s story. The caption — which Worthy was not responsible for — read:
Kansas City Royals’ Salvador Perez points skyward as he heads home on his grand slam against the Seattle Mariners in the fourth inning of a baseball game Friday, Aug. 27, 2021, in Seattle.
Patty laughed out loud when she read that. She came into the house from the patio, screeching “…in the fourth inning of a baseball game?!”
Point being it was pretty obvious from the photo, with Perez rounding the bases with a grin on his face and his right index finger raised high, that this, indeed, was a baseball game.
Patty was equally disgusted with Worthy’s soporific account of the game, and I told her that just for fun I’d try to come up with a version that did justice to Perez’ feat.
So, I sat down at the computer and in about 15 minutes came up with this:
With the Royals trailing 5-1 against the Seattle Mariners last night and the bases loaded, Salvador Perez had the chance to become the first Royal ever to hit grand slams in back-to-back games.
On the third pitch from Logan Gilbert, Perez swung hard at a ball low and over the outside part of the plate. He connected, and the ball sailed deep toward centerfield. Mariners’ outfielder Jarred Kelenic ran back and climbed the wall but sank back in futility as the ball fell into the extended hands of fans a few rows up.
With one swing, Perez had not only set a Royals’ record but had tied the game and positioned the Royals to go on and win the game 8-6 in 12 innings.
“We’re watching an MVP-style season with what’s going on here with this guy,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said after the game.
**
Now, I’m not going to run out and apply to become Royals’ beat writer for The Star — I’m sure most of the staff regards me as a pain in the ass anyway — but I ask you: Doesn’t that go a long way toward capturing the thrill of that event? And wouldn’t it make you want to go on reading?
That’s what the first sentence, or the first few sentences of a story are supposed to do — draw the readers in and “hook ’em” from the get-go.
Poor Lynn Worthy and poor KC Star…For the most part, they’ve lost one of the most important dimensions of reporting: vibrant writing.
**
You can see Perez’ home run here.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I once looked up what various professional journalist organizations had to say about dealing with criticism. Everyone indicated that journalists, as a core value of their ethics, are to be open to criticism and yet, as you point out, The Star can’t even take it from one of their own. Even more ironical is that the person I had in mind as I was doing that research was your friend and mine, the former Reader’s Rep, now in charge of orthodoxy on the editorial page.
Headline: Salvy Did It Again!
and your rewrite says it all!
You might remember yourself as quite the hotshot stylist while on The Star’s payroll, but I don’t recall back in the day setting time aside to savor stories bylined James C. Fitzpatrick. You were an Ok writer and reporter. Nothing against your work. But back then we didn’t have retirees taking potshots at us on line. It the shoe was on the other foot, you’d be crying cheap shot.
If you’ll recall, your namesake was the in-house writing and reporting critic. He was pretty tough. In fact, before firing him, Art Brisbane once said of him, “It’s like having a jackhammer in the newsroom.” Nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of Casey’s poison pen, but he kept us on our toes.
Sometimes I tend to be the jackhammer outside the newsroom. And even though I wasn’t a Pulitzer Prize winning writer or reporter, I know the difference between riveting and lackluster. If you guys down there are happy with what you’re seeing, you’re deluding yourselves…And don’t get me started on that pathetic website. But you’re already well aware of how bad it is, Casey boy.
Who cares?
The star doesn’t even contribute free articles on Google. If you want to pay for this stuff (which Jim argues is garbage) to see it, fine. But there are plenty of media outlets outside the star who covered it and reached out to more than the 50,000 eyes that read the report from Lynn Worthy.
Not sure if Worthy is even really a person or an algorithm.
To be sure, I don’t think everything The Star does is “garbage.” There is some good coverage and some good writing, but much too little outstanding work. And I do think the website is terrible. It’s about 40 percent sports, 20 percent restaurants and 40 percent news, and the same stories are repeated again and again as you proceed down the page…I write about The Star very little any more because it upsets me and, sadly, it’s frequently not very relevant. With that, I’m swearing off criticizing The Star for the foreseeable future. There’s a lot better material out there…I’m also going to restrain from picking on the outstate politicians, Jason; that’s equally unproductive.
This is how Seattle Times reporter Ryan Divish began his story on the Sunday Royals (baseball) game:
“With their postseason hopes taking a painful combination of body blows and haymakers over the past three days, most of them coming from the bat of Salvador Perez, the Mariners came into Sunday’s game needing a victory to stop their slide from relevance.
“In their time of desperation, the one player who has worn a Mariners uniform longer than anyone else on the field and has never played a game past the regular season, allowed his team to dream for another day and added a few more fans to the growing contingent who want the organization to bring him back for another season.
“When it seemed like the Mariners were trending toward a disastrous four-game sweep, Kyle Seager smashed a two-run homer in the bottom of the seventh inning, providing the difference in the Mariners’ much-needed 4-3 win over the Kansas City Royals at T-Mobile Park.”
Very resourceful of you to find that, Casey. (How many Caseys are out there, I wonder?)
And, of course, you confirmed my point: Exceptional writing requires time, effort and thought. Thanks.
“To avoid ‘a mini-riot,’ Kansas City didn’t enforce its own mask order at public meeting.”
I’ll praise the Star for the way they covered one recent event. The Star was the only news organization I saw that so explicitly noted the Mayor’s and Council members’ refusal to enforce KCMO’s mask mandate at their public hearing. (Full disclosure: I am a supporter of mask mandates.)
Businesses frequently face hostile reactions in enforcing the mandate, but city officials still expect them to enforce it. Yet, the Mayor and Council members made no effort to enforce it at their own public hearing. To put it mildly, that’s very disappointing.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/coronavirus/article253602148.html
Good for The Star, reporting the story…But I disagree about the city’s response. Those people were riled up, and the prospect of a “mini-riot” seemed, from my reading, very possible.
Jimmy, you’re right: we disagree. In fact, we totally disagree. The public hearing (which was also a committee meeting of the Council) was held at the Kansas City Regional Police Academy. If the mask order can’t be enforced at a police facility, where can we expect it to be consistently enforced?
The Mayor/Council members knew there would be a hostile audience. They should have announced to the crowd that the mask mandate would be enforced, and they should have arranged for adequate security to be there to escort people who didn’t comply out of the building. If the crowd refused to cooperate with the security officials, the Mayor should have adjourned the meeting until the auditorium could be cleared.
Then, the Mayor and Council members could have continued the committee meeting and held their vote after (hopefully) a serious and substantive discussion. That would have upheld the rule of law, as well as demonstrate to KCMO citizens that the Mayor/Council aren’t asking businesses to enforce any laws they aren’t willing to enforce themselves. It would also have protected the health of those who were attending and those they might subsequently infect (which is the whole point of the mask mandate in the first place).
Makes me roll in my grave. I’m old enough to remember when Jorge Soler set the Royals’ record for most home runs in a season and Lynn Worthy wrote 300 bland words on it, without color or quotes, then wrote a 1,500 word story on the acquisition of Ryan McBroom. We were lucky to have reporters like Rustin Dodd and Andy McCullough (even if he’s a big-headed blowhard).
Don’t get me started on Pete Grathoff’s thorough reporting on a fan who won the Sonic Slam Inning a few days ago. I guess it’s better than posting Twitter links, but really.
I had forgotten about McCullough, but I remember Rustin (not related to Dennis) Dodd. And don’t get me started on Grathoff at all…World’s laziest reporter. Should have been sent packing years ago.