Hal McCoy

New media still needs 'Old Guy'
By Paul Daugherty • pdaugherty@enquirer.com • September 17, 2009

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Old Guy tweets and he blogs. He Facebooks (is that a verb?) and MySpaces and sends 140-character messages from his pocket telephone. They look like a bowl of Alphabits, spilled on the floor:
“Wht RU do’g rt now?’’
Old Guy doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, right now. He’s just, you know, doing it, running as fast as he can just to stay out of last week. All this information, from all over. So how come he doesn’t feel any more informed? Why all the ranting? Do those who yell the loudest have the most knowledge? Or just the biggest mouths?
The more advanced we become with the information we gather and dispense and process, the less we really know. Hal McCoy is just about done at the Dayton Daily News. His 37-year career covering the Reds is down to 16 games, 16 game stories, 16 game notes and 16 editions, give or take, of his blog, The Real McCoy. Hal didn’t scream. He didn’t rant. He didn’t even want to do a blog, when the paper asked him two years ago. (Now, he loves it. Old dog, new tricks.) All he did was inform factually. We won’t see guys like him again. Old Guy is OK with the “new media.’’ He likes the ease of Google-ing for info. He relishes the Nolan-Ryan-fastball speed of checking a stat on baseball-reference.com or a contract at Cot’s Baseball Contracts (mlbcontracts.blogspot.com). He doesn’t know what he’d do without his cell, because now he can play nine holes of golf while waiting for an important phone call. And yet . . . We’re losing something. Our need for speed and our easy access to the Web have conspired to make for an “information superhighway’’ littered with lousy (or non-existent) reporting, knowingly fraudulent opinions and a sense of entitlement that screams Have Laptop, Will Spew. Guys like Hal McCoy made sense of things. They did it by taking the time, day after week after month after season, to develop contacts, to forge friendships, to separate the chaff of rumors and gossip from the wheat of the authentic. It’s hard work, nothing like a guy in his basement with a laptop and an opinion. “Younger guys don’t seem to cultivate sources,’’ McCoy said Thursday. McCoy talked to every scout who ever walked in the door. He can get a general manager on the phone with one call. He spent an hour with Bud Selig the last time the Reds were in Milwaukee. Old Guy wonders: Will today’s bloggers and tweeters take the same time? “People are more informed now. Also, more misinformed,’’ McCoy said. “There are some very credible people doing very credible things. But three-fourths of the time, it’s just people making stuff up.’’ This is just baseball, nothing important. But it happens in politics, in government, in arenas that affect how we think and act and live. Rush Limbaugh speaks, the masses believe. Career political writers and government reporters, people just like Hal McCoy, are retiring, too, or being laid off. Who takes their place? Having lots of information is good; interpreting it smartly is better. It’s like Bengals owner Mike Brown, telling you his team gets as much pre-draft information as any other team. It’s all in the interpretation. News flash: Newspapers are struggling. Press boxes look like bus stations at 3 a.m. Old Guy continues at his antique job, blogging and tweeting and writing opinions for the morning paper, waiting for the proverbial tap on the shoulder. Young people snicker some. They get a little snarky, as they check their world on their newly minted iPhones. Old Guy is shaking his fist, sounding old: “Whaddaya mean, no more 8-track tapes!’’ But Old Guy knows this: Once Hal McCoy’s gone, he won’t be coming back. If you like the blogs, the chats, the tweets and the conversation, understand that every time a guy like Hal leaves, every time a newspaper cuts back, the room gets a little quieter. Ever hear a reasoned man scream?

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.