If you’ve ever been on the wrong end of a seething, angry Mark McGwire glare, it’s not something you quickly forget.
I actually wish every journalist could have the experience of having huge, hulking Mark McGwire, the man whose historic home-run chase in the summer of 1998 was a national story, fixing that dinosaur-green glare on you, accusing you of wronging him, and come to understand that he was right.
I was an Oakland A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1990s and was actually on close, friendly terms with McGwire for at least a year or two. The particular glare I’m recalling came one time in 1997, the season the A’s traded McGwire to St. Louis. The A’s locker room was quiet after the game, surely another loss, and I stood there for a minute, sizing up the situation: A group of media, some radio reporters, maybe a wire-service reporter or two, huddled uneasily, afraid to approach McGwire. I had my angle for the day and barely needed a quote from McGwire, but in the interests of being thorough, I wanted to ask him a quick question, just to be sure.
So I walked over to him, and talked briefly, then walked away. Here’s what I noticed: Once I’d broken the ice, the mob descended on him, and peppered him with questions. McGwire, a fundamentally shy man who was not the story that day, was in something like physical agony, having to deal with their onslaught. He looked over at me, part plaintively, part menacingly, and with that watery dinosaur gaze basically asked me: Can you see how horrible this is for me?
I thought of that moment when reading a major, hard-hitting investigative story (not really—that’s sarcasm) by Alexei Koseff of CalMatters.org published in the San Jose Mercury News and other California papers. The Merc headline read: “GOV. NEWSOM SAYS BASEBALL SAVED HIM. BUT THE LEGEND OF HIS CAREER DOESN’T ALWAYS MATCH THE REALITY.”
The major revelation, as captured by the lede of the piece, was that twenty years ago at a San Francisco Giants game, Gavin Newsom—then the Mayor of San Francisco—threw out the first pitch, and did not attempt to shout from the mound to correct the inaccurate introduction of the P.A. announcer. That’s about it.
In an article that seems to have taken weeks of reporting, the only real charge is that Newsom has not done a better job of correcting inaccurate assertions others have made about his baseball career at Santa Clara. It’s true he was scouted by the Texas Rangers, but he was never actually drafted, as the P.A. announcer claimed that day. The announcer also said that Newsom “played first base” for Santa Clara, and he played first base in some games, but injuries prevented him from cracking the varsity lineup.
The article is almost comical at times. For example, a former Santa Clara assistant baseball coach is found who tells the reporter Newsom “embellished his baseball career a little bit at times.” You don’t have to read Janet Malcolm on journalists for it to be blindingly, painfully obvious that just about every journalist, at one time or another, embellishes a story “a little bit at times.” We live in a decade where correcting huge obvious, mendacious lies is more than the national press corps can often bestir itself to do conclusively.
I’ll circle back to discuss Newsom the athlete and what sports meant to him growing up, but my main point here is: Any responsible journalist who puts out on the wires a story that purports to make Newsom out as a liar, fraud or fabulist knows full well that they have given a weapon with which Newsom will likely be bludgeoned.
This was McGwire’s point to me: I can’t ignore the consequences of my actions. I can’t pretend I’m invisible, not an individual with choices to make, “just asking questions” as a reporter. That day I asked McGwire a quick question, and then left, I opened the door to the others—and, morally at least, that was all on me.
As a young reporter at New York Newsday in the 1980s, I spent some time working one cubicle over from one of the greatest journalists who ever lived, Murray Kempton. He was a spindly thin man in his late sixties at the time, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 1984, and yet he came into the office with the pants leg of his suit tied off for bicycle riding. He wrote about the people of the city, and always wanted to hear fresh stories, so he made his rounds, to City Hall, to police headquarters and beyond; out there talking to real people, he would hear about it if he’d written anything that was worthy of criticism or censure. He wrote with a deep moral awareness that real people read his words and were affected by them.
Kempton went out of his way to avoid being trapped in a bubble, and contemporary writers often throw darts from the comfortable confines of bubbles they seem not at all to mind being stuck inside; I think for example of the sad and wretched case of a once-halfway-decent columnist, Kathleen Parker, whose Pulitzer for commentary years ago seemed at least somewhat earned, defiling herself recently by actually writing a column attacking Christine Blasey Ford for writing a book—as if Parker could for a second sever her whining bleat of a column from its certain consequences, including more hassling of Ford, and quite probably more death threats and intimidation of her and her family. Congratulations, Kath. Well done! You should be very, very proud of yourself.
As it happened, the Cal Matters piece on Gavin Newsom and baseball seems, as of a week or so later, to have had a relatively modest spillover effect; from what I heard, asking around, Capitol reporters mostly found the article odd. (Here’s betting that Marjorie Taylor Greene will make some weird insinuation about it eventually, just to try to scrounge up a few more online donations.) The irony is: The hapless headline writer tasked with making a lightweight story sound serious happened on a real truth: Baseball did save young Gavin Newsom, or sports in general, but that was before he went to college, back in high school in Marin County. It does not take much work to read old newspaper articles and see that truth. But then, that’s not the click-bait journalism-as-insinuation that might get one’s article picked up on Fox News.
—Steve Kettmann
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The dinosaur descriptions gave me a good laugh, thanks for that! Fun description of Murray Kempton, too. I wonder what journalism will be like in 10, 20 years?
I don't view anything you did as wrong. It seems legit to get a quote from a superstar who's just been traded, as a reader I'd want to know McGwire's thoughts and feelings after more than a decade with the A's. When you suggested you crossed a line I thought it was going to be something like bringing up his obvious steroid use or his cartoonish superhero physique.