Last Pitch of the Game?

The longer this coronavirus plague lasts, the greater the danger for my favorite part of the daily newspaper — the sports section. How do you have a sports section when there aren’t any sports to cover?

Around here, it was big news the other day when a former pitcher in the Orioles’ minor league system named Steve Dalkowski died. He had a terrifying fastball but never made it to the majors.

His claim to fame, according to the obits, was that he was the role model for the screwball pitcher Nuke LaLoosh played by Tim Robbins in the 1988 romantic comedy sports film “Bull Durham.”

The Dalkowski story was a gift to those running The Sun sports department. It gave them a good, semi-local story to run on the section’s front page that was not about the college football draft, the most over-hyped sports event even in ordinary years.

In the current climate, how long can any newspaper keeps its sports section alive?

Last Sunday, I reached for the sports section of The New York Times. Normally, this section is fat with stories on every sport from pro basketball to amateur quoits.

This time, there was no section at all.

Their entire Sunday sports coverage was limited to two pages, buried deep inside their front news section.

As we live in a time when the life of entire newspapers is tenuous, maybe it seems small to worry about the games people play and a single section’s existence. There are mornings, particularly in this season of the coronavirus, when The Sun’s entire paper is limited to 20 pages.

But for many of us, sports coverage holds a special place in our hearts.

We grow up with games, and many of us started our love affairs with reading and newspapers by scanning the sports pages every day. My generation came of age reading Bob Maisel’s morning Sun columns, which felt as if he had a seat in the Orioles dugout, and Lou Hatter and Phil Jackman’s O’s coverage in the morning and Evening Sun, and Cameron Snyder’s Colts coverage each morning.

And there were John Steadman’s columns in The Baltimore News-American. He wrote straight from the heart. And he put together a remarkable cast of reporters that included baseball’s Neal Eskridge and Jim Henneman, and horse racing’s Clem Florio and Charlie Lamb. Oh, and there was a prep sports writer there who later went into TV named Vince Bagli.

Washington had Shirley Povich and Mo Siegel, and New York gave us Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. They were a newspaper’s literati. You read all these folks, and they were worth the price of the entire paper.

The Sun still has some sports writers who bring enormous energy and insight to their work.

But now, according to a brand new study by the Nieman Foundation, sports writing everywhere must become “public service” journalism – and as professional and college programs begin to consider a return to action, with questions about public health lingering in the air, sports must be examined “medically, socially and ethically … for return-to-play scenarios.”

In other words, reporters must make sure it’s genuinely safe to play and all precautions have been taken before athletes return to action and thousands of fans can feel safe sitting close together.

Don’t leave it to the public relations folks to tell us when the war’s really over.

The best sports writing has always taken us beyond home runs and touchdowns. It tells us about the times in which we live, about money and politics, about race relations, about courage under intense pressure, about what the aging process does to strong human bodies.

What it’s not telling us about, at this awful moment, are the games themselves, which have been called on account of darkness.

This will pass. But in the meantime, our sports pages will have to reach beyond the playing field to hold onto readers.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).