Jim Alexander: Before we begin, I figure we should recognize a weird confluence of events Wednesday, both of which have something to do with baseball. In the wee hours of the morning, well before sunup, they imploded the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas (and did it in true Vegas style, with fireworks, drones and the whole bit leading up to the big moment). The reason: To clear space – eight or nine acres of space, actually – for a stadium for the A’s. I still don’t think it’ll ever be built, but we’ll see.
A full continent away and most of the day later, another edifice with Tropicana in its title was severely damaged. The Tropicana Dome, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, had its fabric roof destroyed as Hurricane Milton was ravaging the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, among other parts of Florida. The AP story noted that there were no injuries inside the stadium, but that it had been planned as a staging area to support first responders and debris cleanup operations. It’s way too early to tell what this means for the Rays, and there are far bigger problems on the ground in Florida right now. Still, like I said, a weird confluence.
As for something not quite as weird but still unusual, I give you … the power of the bullpen game. This is how the Dodgers compensated, at least on a one-night basis, for a starting rotation that has been patchwork for much of the season: Eight pitchers, seven relievers and Landon Knack, who in this case was the “closer,” shut out the Padres on seven hits Wednesday night, 8-0, and brought the NL Division Series back to L.A. for a Game 5 Friday, a couple of days after most observers – and, I suspect, many Dodger fans themselves – had assumed another early playoff exit.
So, two questions: Can the Dodgers pull this off and humble the Padres? (Or maybe the humbling part is too much to ask, given the group of personalities on San Diego’s roster. Just beating them and moving on would suffice, I suppose.) And the second question: With a day’s rest in between Game 4 and Game 5, is it really that outlandish to make the deciding game a bullpen game as well?
To be honest, I don’t think it’s that bad an idea, although doing so would imply that you don’t trust either Yoshinobu Yamamoto – whose turn it would be on regular rest – or Jack Flaherty, who flipped starting days with Yamamoto at the start of the series with the idea that he’d be available out of the bullpen for a potential Game 5. (And has anyone noticed how well Trey Sweeney, one of the prospects the Dodgers traded to Detroit for Flaherty, is playing at shortstop for the Tigers in their own postseason?)
Your thoughts, Mirjam?
Mirjam Swanson: This isn’t a good analogy but I’m gonna make it anyway: Every summer I take my kids to visit their grandparents in their little town up in Oregon, and my mom loves to point out what’s changed – new flower pots on Main Street, maybe. A new stoplight is monumental. But then I get back to L.A. a week later, and there’s two new businesses in place of the spots I used to go to, buildings are different colors – or a new one is standing where one wasn’t a few days ago, I swear …
… baseball is like that. Just changing constantly, the people involved so creative in problem-solving, gaming the game, finding ways to put together a puzzle of how to play defense or how to angle swings or how incredibly hard pitchers should throw, and how many times through the lineup they should be allowed to go. At the end of the day: How best to go about getting 27 outs?
And seeing its success, I wonder: Will the Bullpen Game became the norm? Or at least much more normal? And not just in must-win situations with teams that might or might not trust their starters, but strategically, regularly, every day?
I suppose it takes some expert managing, both in the when-and-who of it, the usage and massaging so many pitchers’ expectations. And it takes all of those guys holding the rope successfully, like they did for the Dodgers on Wednesday. But also, the way baseball is, it seems like a cheat code if you can get it to work – keep batters seeing different looks every time up. Keep hitters facing fresh arms all game long.
I’m sure there’s a million tendrils to consider beyond that – would fans hate it? Would players? Would anyone care? What might it mean contractually?
But will the Dodgers do it again with a trip to the NLCS on the line? I wouldn’t be surprised. And should they? Heck yeah.
Jim: A historical note: Everyone credits the Rays with inventing the bullpen game. Wrong. The first documented use of an “opener” that I’ve found was in the 1924 World Series, when the Washington Senators used right-hander Curly Ogden against the New York Giants (and ultimately won that game and the championship in 12 innings, with future Hall of Famer Walter Johnson getting the W).
And the Dodgers used a (sort of) bullpen game on Sept. 4, 1965, five days before Sandy Koufax pitched his perfect game. That night, in a 5-0 victory over Houston in the Astrodome, reliever Jim Brewer went 3⅓ innings, followed by normal starters Johnny Podres (four innings) and Don Drysdale (the final two outs of the eighth) and reliever Ron Perranoski pitching the ninth to get the save. (Save rules were a little different then.)
(That nugget, by the way, came from a book on Dodgers’ history. I love plugging it every chance I get.)
Moving right along … you wrote about USC and Lincoln Riley in today’s paper, and particularly his struggles to show any sort of accountability. It’s not that he can’t do it. It’s just that he seems to insist on his own narrative, one that doesn’t always dovetail with the reality on the ground. To be fair, most major college football coaches are prone to spin and deflect in a similar manner to avoid answering questions about those uncomfortable truths. Right now, with USC at 3-2 overall and a very uncomfortable 1-2 and 12th place in the Trojans’ new conference – and with at least one prominent player deciding to redshirt in anticipation of getting out of the program – Riley seems to be spinnin’ like a top.
It’s not that he’s incapable of accountability. It just seems to be inconvenient. Or is there something I’m missing?
Mirjam: You’re right, every coach does some amount of spinning and deflecting or obscuring or narrative-crafting … but Riley goes an extra yard with it. There’s an art to coachspeak, if you will. There’s a certain balance that fans will entertain and accept. And then there’s telling a public who clearly saw a struggling defense that they weren’t, in fact, seeing a struggling defense? Or blasting the media for making up a story about an in-house issue that came to bear hours later because it was not, in fact, made up but happening in clear public view, on social media? Admonishing a reporter for asking about the biggest play of the game and acting as if that question was somehow out of bounds? Because, “who cares” what the player thought? (We all care what the players think, right?)
Thing is, if USC was dominating, I don’t think any of those things turn many heads with a fan base who cares most about winning. People take coaches’ sides more often than not, in all the sports. But when your team isn’t living up to outside hopes and expectations, then those moments are magnified and they do start to matter, because people also start judging those off-the-field reactions as well as the team’s on-field performances. So I would try to avoid inviting extra scrutiny in my media sessions, is all.
… which probably, on some level, is why the NFLPA wants to uninvite reporters from locker rooms – because the less time players spend talking to media, the smaller the window for saying something they might regret?
Jim: The NFLPA is asking that media be barred from locker rooms, both postgame and during the week, because – according to their statement – “Players feel that locker room interviews invade their privacy and are uncomfortable. This isn’t about limiting media access but about respecting players’ privacy and dignity.”
I don’t believe that second part for a moment. The NFL mandates an open locker room for, I believe, 45 minutes three days a week at the practice site. After games, the room is in most cases open only after the head coach has done his postgame briefing in the interview room (although the Chargers are doing something different this year, opening the locker room first before bringing Jim Harbaugh to the podium). And, increasingly – not only in football but other sports as well – when a player is surrounded by a media scrum there’s also a PR minder monitoring and eventually saying, “Last question.”
I’d believed we’d gotten past this modesty and privacy issue years ago, when Melissa Ludtke sued and won the right for women reporters to have equal access in baseball clubhouses. Her book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside, is a recollection of that era and that fight. And as one who broke into baseball writing about the same time, in the late ‘70s – and who has seen the progress in equality since then – it saddened me to see much of the current debate (on social media anyway) revolve around media members seeing players naked. In reality, they don’t. Players don’t talk to us, for the most part, unless and until they’re fully dressed.
Bottom line, it’s not about modesty. It’s about controlling the message.
And I think there’s another issue. Players in college are sheltered because there’s no locker room access, coaches in many places determine who gets to talk and who doesn’t, and the amount of cooperation you get when you request a particular player largely depends on the willingness of SID and PR staffs to help (and, again, what the coach will allow). It’s hit or miss, so if a player wants to escape public accountability it’s easier to do so. So now they come into the professional ranks, and all of a sudden it’s harder to avoid the media.
A couple of other observations: Yes, there are times when we are standing around in a locker room waiting for particular players to show up. The players hate it, but here’s a bulletin: So do we. It’s reached the point where pregame access in baseball is useless because players are either busy or hiding. Same in the NBA, where there’s a 30-minute access period before games but seldom is anyone of any significance in the locker room.
But this is a trend, and a disturbing one. This past season the WNBA, which in the past actually allowed the media in the locker rooms pre and post-game mirroring the NBA access policies – with players completely dressed in all cases – closed the locker rooms. You want to talk to someone specific, you get them on the court before the game. Afterward, you get whoever comes into the interview room, and getting anyone beyond that, again, probably depends on how much the team’s PR staff is willing to help.
And here is the real issue: Open locker rooms and clubhouses enable reporters to establish working relationships with players beyond the transactional question/answer situation. Those working relationships build a foundation that enables reporters to understand what’s going on with a team and report it to the reader. That includes information you’ll never hear from the in-house media, who work for the teams and won’t tell you what management doesn’t want you to hear.
Sorry for the length, but why should the reader expect the people who cover the Dodgers, Lakers, Rams, Trojans etc. to be any less diligent in their reporting than those who cover, say, city government? You shouldn’t. That diligence may make some of the subjects of their reporting uncomfortable at times … but should those reporters be beholden to them or to you, the reader?
Mirjam: Well put, Jim.
I don’t think most people really understand how valuable that reporting space is – and it was invaluable as a beat writer. What we learn about players from locker room access shows up in so many ways, whether as background or as full stories.
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One of my favorite stories I wrote while covering the Sparks was on a role player named Alexis Jones. She and I chatted in the locker room a few times – conversation, not an interview – just about the team, the game, the weather, whatever, and eventually she told me a little about her family and all they’d been through. Which led to more conversation about that, still not in any official interview capacity, but as two people talking. And eventually that led to a sit-down, on-the-record interview, but it wouldn’t have if she hadn’t trusted me to tell it. And I wouldn’t have known to ask her about their challenging situation, and their inspiring strength to keep going, if she hadn’t told me. Which means, in this new WNBA without locker room access, that’s a story about a role player who wasn’t going to make the postgame podium all too often, and it would never have been told. And that seems counterintuitive for a league that wants more people to know and care about its players.
There’s so many examples of that, and it’s always a joy to watch good reporters work a locker room, not sticking their recorders and cameras in players’ faces, but learning about them as humans – and knowing those conversations are going to benefit everyone following or invested in the team at some point.
I wish more people understood that their favorite stories they’ve read or heard about their favorite players come from this sort of reporting – and not from news conferences or scrums, where people are often more guarded and calculated. But I don’t think most people get that. Wish they would.
