Where Were You?

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Well, it wasn't what Young wrote, per se, but the idea that Grant and/or others in the organization were providing Young these quotes.

I think the "family" thing was a nice sturdy peg for Seaver to hang his indignation onto. He may also have figured that going over Grant's head and getting "his" wasn't going to help the organization in the long run and could in fact inspire a small-minded "sportsman" like Grant to continue starving the org for talent to spite him.

I think the only thing that could have saved Seaver was Grant's resignation.

[Guest iramets]

If Grant had offered his resignation immediately, Seaver might have left anyway, and then you'd be writing "Well, the only thing that would have saved Seaver was Grant's crucifixion."

I hate being an apologist for Mets' management (no, really! I'm not comfortable in that role!) but I don't think most people see Seaver as causing this crisis, as Madden argues. Probably 99% of Met fans see Seaver as a victim of evil Mets' management, a helpless peon being treated contemptuously by a money-focused ballclub run by a stockbroker who didn't understand the game of baseball. If you ask the average Met if Seaver demanded to be traded after having all his contractual demands satisfied, they'd look at you cock-eyed and ask if you were looped.

I certainly wasn't aware until I read Madden's article that Seaver had been offered, and agreed to, a contract extension that, for its time, was quite generous. I also didn't remember specifically what bad, bad things Young had written about Seaver's wife and Ryan's wife--turns out it was pretty much nothing, but Seaver spun it as "Young wrote that my wife was a spread-eagled whore, and I was pimping her out to Ryan's dyke wife etc. and I couldn't work here anymore and how dare he talk about my family like that blablabla."

And yeah, Young was a fairly trashy, petty man, but remember the definition of a good sports column--"entertaining and slightly short of libel."

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

I'm all about Seaver's complicity in his trade. We had this same discussion years ago when Cookie made me type out the whole fucking Young column.

[Guest iramets]

I'm getting older (tomorrow I turn 54) and I forget things, like conversations I've had and people I had them with and who are you again?

As you get older, btw, three things happen to you

1) You forget things
2) you repeat yourself a lot
3) you repeat yourself a lot

Is that hand-typing post archived somewhere? Maybe I should read it again.

[MFS62]

In his book The Long Season, ex-player now sportswriter Jim Brosnan mentioned Young.
He said Young was one of a group of irreverent young reporters nicknamed "the Chipmunks". IIRC others in that group included Leonard Koppett and Leonard Schecter.
Brosnan states that they were the first to go into the clubhouse, listen to the chatter, then report on the behind the scenes side of baseball. I got the impression that the players really liked, and opened up, to them.

Brosnan also said (I paraphrase) that management can buy the sportswriters by giving them a free lunch.

Later

[Frayed Knot]

Except that many believe Young abandoned that irreverence in his later years as he began to resent the money athletes were making, the independence it gained them, and also the fact that, with the rise of television, newspaper men were no longer the dominant force in sports that they once had been.
By that point, Young was increasingly taking mgmt-friendly and other "establishment" viewpoints as he railed against the new world order of free-agency (though not for him), network announcers (esp Cosell), and basically the state of the world.

[MFS62]

FK, as someone who read Young over the years, I can say that seemed to be true.

Later