I always wanted to be a sports journalist. I wanted to be a member of the elite group of writers whose words touched the little kids who ripped open the morning paper to find out how their heroes did the night before. I wanted to be Roger Angell* putting together prose that couldn’t possibly describe our Nation’s Pastime better.
Today, Angell’s free verse has been replaced with Tweets about what LeBron James had to eat for breakfast, and little kids seek out their smartphones to check scores (and probably don’t know what a newspaper is).
Sports journalism in 2012 is completely different than the world I held in such high regard. Anyone who has a computer can be a journalist. The painful realization that my ideal career had disappeared made me hesitate from joining the World Wide Web of Sports. But, as I type on my laptop, play with my iPhone, and as Prince Fielder sits somewhere pondering what the hell he’s going to do with all of that bloody money, I think it’s time to embrace the chaos.
But, that doesn’t mean this will be just another angry sports blog where people whine and complain about trades and endlessly talk about where the players are partying each night. I want this to be a venue for sports fans that don’t punch walls after losses and don’t riot after victories. I want it to be less about team news and player gossip and more about the heart and soul of the games we spend so much time obsessing over. All sports. All shapes. All sizes.
You see, to me, being a sports fan is about being in middle school, drawing different variations of the 1997 Phillies line-up instead of paying attention in class (those poor notebooks). It’s about having your childhood bedroom covered in newspaper clippings of whatever Phillies headlines there actually were, including, perhaps, one from the morning after Brandon Duckworth’s superb major league debut. It’s about being little and pretending to be asleep when you were really listening to Harry Kalas desperately try to make another Phillies loss sound interesting by discussing the most intricate details of the game.
That’s the stuff that makes me a sports fan (also possibly still 12), and that’s the stuff that no one else seems to talk about.
This blog will be my attempt to bring a tiny bit of Roger Angell’s world into 2012, and to bring the love of the game(s) back into the bloggersphere. You’ll see posts about the lighter side of sports, all written by a girl who would rather see Placido Polanco hit a grounder to the right side of the infield with a runner on second base and less than two outs than see someone hit a ball out of the park – any day.
*Roger Angell is an essayist who compiled his baseball essays into best-selling books. My favorite quote from Angell appeared in The Summer Game, 1972. “Since baseball time is only measured in outs,” Angell wrote, “all you have to do is succeed utterly, keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young."
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