Forgive the following long-winded post …
I’ve been meaning to give Geoff Baker a shout out since the beginning of spring training, but other responsibilities and general journalistic laziness got in the way. After watching the Seattle Times’ Mariners beat reporter take an e-beating last week, though, I figured it was time to finally do it.
It’d take way too long to dissect the controversy that Baker stirred up last fall when he reported on the clubhouse whispers that Ichiro wasn’t a team player and was in danger of finding himself on the wrong end of a locker-room beatdown. But suffice it to say, it made Baker — a 2006 transplant from Toronto — persona non grata in some fan circles. At the time, you had people crying What kind of a hack airs a team’s dirty laundry in the press, just to sell some papers? and whimpering We wouldn’t hear any of this if the M’s were winning, until the team went on a last-minute tear, losing the first pick in this June’s amateur draft in the process and giving fans something else to bitch about. End of story, right? Not so much. Last week, when Ichiro finally showed up to Peoria, Arizona, for the M’s spring training after the long offseason and a stint with the Japanese national team in the World Baseball Classic, Baker naturally asked him about the accusations and threats, to which Ichiro basically said, “Really, Geoff? Next question.” (He also said something about feeling like a mother, but that’s beside the point.) Of course, dredging up the six-month-old story did not do anything to quiet the “hack” cries, and everyone wanted to hate on Baker again for a couple days. (Wow, so much for not dissecting the whole sordid story, huh?)
But here’s the thing: No matter what you thought of the Ichiro story (and as far as I’m concerned, it was a story that needed to be told), Baker has been an animal when it comes to pumping out Mariners news. If you haven’t checked out his blog, do it. Aside from the daily stories he files for the print edition, he sets up a live video feed almost every day to dish up clubhouse nuggets that wouldn’t be big enough to make the paper but are plenty interesting to baseball obsessives. And his blog posts aren’t the kind of snarky, meandering drivel you get at Left Field; dude breaks it down unlike any baseball writer I know other than Derrick Goold at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Baker’s blog is a must-read supplement to his print stories, and no post sums up that point better than this one, from the same day as the “Ichiro Returns to Spring Training” piece. It’s in-the-locker-room analysis that would be too long winded for the print edition but offers essential context for the situation nonetheless. A lot of baseball writers put on airs in their reporting, like they’re God’s gift to the fan because they’ve got access to the players, but Baker just tells this story like it is, like he’s relaying it to you over beers in the hotel lobby.
Another Seattle guy, former P-I reporter Jim Caple, who’s writing for ESPN.com these days, wrote last week about the death of the newspaper and what it means for baseball fans. It’s one of those pieces that makes you all nostalgic for the old days, even though you know it’s probably best that they’re in the past. But I’ll tell you what: If the Newspaper As We Know It does die, you better be damn sure that Baker’s next-level approach to covering baseball will survive. And that ain’t a bad thing.
Photo via Geoff Baker’s blog
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