Hal McCoy

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

This from a blog I just found on the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/unwritten-rules/read-hal-mccoy/article1244656/

Friday, August 7, 2009 12:26 PM
Read Hal McCoy
If you’ve never read Hal McCoy before, do yourself a favour: spend some time with him this summer. McCoy, a Hall of Fame baseball writer who has continued to ply his trade better than any of us – and that’s not a platitude, he brings it every day – despite the fact his eyesight deteriorated to the point where he had been legally blind for the past six years. And now his employer, the Dayton Daily News, has decided to stop travelling with the Cincinnati Reds and covering games at home. So McCoy will not be writing after this season, and we should all be able to announce it to our readers as elegantly and simply as McCoy did on Thursday .
This is just my opinion, but the two best practicioners of baseball game-story writing in my time in the business were McCoy and Paul Hagen of the Philadelphia Daily News, who does less daily stuff now. These guys cover sports the way the Brits do: with insight and opinion and using quotes only to buttress or even run counter to their own arguments. Unlike too many of our ilk, they didn’t feel the need to run a quote from, say, Roy Halladay saying “I had a good fastball today.” They’d just write it. I don’t know if athletes are any more inane these days than they were in the past or if it just seems that way as a product of a sound-bite world where prattle is used to pad stories because it’s an easy way out on deadline. McCoy’s great strength as a writer is that he assumes some intelligence on the part of his reader but never takes it for granted. He also saw through Pete Rose’s B.S. That, my friends, is an art beyond most of us and it’s too bad the internet wasn’t as much of a force when they were in their heyday because they wrote circles around some of the new “superstar” reporters of the on-line generation.
These guys knew how to work a clubhouse, something nobody teaches any more.
McCoy made trips to Cincinnati a highlight of each Montreal Expos season. He had exquisite taste in cigars – he tried and failed to educate me on the matter and would shake his head whenever I’d show up at Riverfront Stadium with some sub-standard thing, but with his help and a suggested visit to Strauss Tobacconists in Cincinnati, I started to figure out my way around a humidor. I’m still on their mailing list and before I die I will make it to one of their “smokers.” The press box at Riverfront Stadium was enclosed, but the smell of McCoy lighting up never bothered anybody. In fact, it was one of the great sensory experiences of covering baseball. I used to love watching McCoy get ready for a game: he’d open his bag and out would come the laptop, binoculars, impeccably-kept scorebook, media guides, pens … and cigars. They were all orderly. My workspace in a 12-inning game was all dog-eared game notes and coffee cups and mismatched pens and tops and all manner of askew. McCoy’s? Same as the first pitch.
He was the dean of a gifted corps of writers who included Rob Parker, Jeff Horrigan, Geoff Hobson, Tim Brown, Bill Peterson and columnists like Tim Sullivan and Paul Daugherty and, later, Joe Posnanski. Paul Meyer and Bob Hertzel (“Jeffrey, my boy!”) were his contemporaries in earlier days and both knew how to take care of young baseball reporters as did – does – McCoy. He was loved by the real personalities among the Reds, like the chain-smoking Eric Davis (who once had pizzas sent up to the press box when the Reds writers were feuding with then-owner Marge Schott over food in the press box) and the Boones. Like Peter Gammons, he was au courant when it came to music because that was the key to getting to the young players. Horrigan, who is now in the music business in Milwaukee after going on to write for his hometown Boston Herald, knew everybody in the Boston music scene. Whenever they’d show up to visit Horrigan in Cincinnati, they’d go on the field for batting practice. McCoy moved as easily among them as he did among ballplayers.
True story: when McCoy showed up at the Reds clubhouse during spring training in 2003, his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he was ready to quit. Seeing McCoy looking agitated in the clubhouse, Aaron Boone walked over and pulled him to his locker. They sat down. “Aaron told me never to say ‘quit’ again,” McCoy said in a recent story. “He turned me around that day.” Boone also checked in with McCoy during the season. Every day.
This is not meant to be an obituary for McCoy’s career. Hell, I’m not worthy of penning that. It’s just something I feel like telling the rest of you about. And I’m serious: at some point this season, read Hal McCoy. And if you’re of the mind to do so, send along an encouraging word.