My SI Journey
Twice, over 20 years apart, Sports Illustrated played a pivotal role in my development as a journalist.
Yesterday’s news that Sports Illustrated is on the ropes—much of its staff has received layoff notices—is sad, yet not entirely surprising. Not only has journalism as a whole been struggling to remain vibrant in this Internet age, but SI’s caliber and influence have been waning for at least 20 years.
Is this the end for the magazine that for many years was among the world’s most iconic and revered publications? Your guess is as good as mine; time will tell.
What I know for certain is that despite its struggles and potential demise, Sports Illustrated will always hold a special place in my heart because of its pivotal role not once, but twice in my life, two decades apart.
To really trace it back, let’s get inside the impulsive mind of my 9-year-old self as I stood at the threshold of our kitchen one hot summer day in Marshfield, Mass. I decided that was the moment I should perform a standing broad jump—just when someone else was opening the freezer door.
My head banged into one of the door’s sharp edges. Blood, then a trip to urgent care, ensued. While waiting to get stitches, I picked up this magazine I’d never seen before. Drawn to the stories, the photographs, the statistics, I devoured it.
My dad took notice and a few weeks later I received the best 10th birthday gift ever: a subscription to SI.1
On my first cover was a glum-looking Billy Martin, the New York Yankees manager feuding with star slugger Reggie Jackson.
I had seen one of their recent confrontations, a nationally televised game during which Martin had yanked Jackson from Fenway Park’s right field for not hustling after a ball.
Now I could take a deeper dive. I was hooked, not only as a reader but as an aspiring writer. Several months later, I concocted an (entirely imagined) game story between the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams.
Six years later, I wrote my first newspaper story—a sports feature—for the Marshfield Mariner. The lede was in the SI mold—at least, I tried to be creative, as the caption notes below.
When I enrolled in journalism school a few years later, reading thousands of SI stories had served as an integral part of my training. By then, I had written hundreds of stories for the Mariner.
Along the way, thanks to SI, I had 52 lesson plans annually. On Thursday, I’d go to P.O. Box 1892, turn the key and reach inside for that week’s treasure.
I enjoyed the photos, but it was the writers I idolized, including Curry Kirkpatrick, Ron Fimrite, William Nack, Paul Zimmerman, Alexander Wolff…and, especially, Frank Deford, who later generously provided me with a critique of my college newspaper clips that I sent to him.
After reading SI from cover to cover, I could never bear to throw it out. Two stacks of issues, in chronological order, rose up from my bedroom closet floor.
In college, I adorned my dorm room wall with a variety of the magazine’s covers, enough to spell out S-I. Yes, pretty geeky.
Although I covered sports in college and aspired to write for SI, my first job out of school was covering a couple of communities—government, police, breaking stories, business features and the like. Sports took a back seat as each subsequent beat brought me to into society’s other arenas.
But the sportswriter in me remained.
In 1998, amid the Mark McGwire & Sammy Sosa duel to set a new single-season Major League Baseball home run record, I spent countless hours poring over stats going back to 1920 in the Baseball Encyclopedia and created a statistic comparing home run champions from across the generations.
I called it the Home Run Power Ratio, got stories published in a few places and then decided—what the heck?—to pitch it to SI, too.
After weeks of back-and-forth communication, Sports Illustrated agreed to publish it.
The next week, my bubble burst: they wouldn’t be running the piece, after all. Instead, editors went forward with Keith Olbermann's take on the home-run record chase. In place of $2,500 and a moment of SI glory, I got a “kill fee” of $500 and a “maybe next year” consolation.
Amazingly, thanks to another McGwire-Sosa home run binge (fueled, as we later learned, by steroid use), “next year” happened.
I didn’t get to write a story—instead, for its October 11, 1999 issue, the magazine carved out a brief piece (below) crediting my research and listing the top home run hitters when adjusting for each year's homer rate.
I received another payday, but more importantly I'd achieved my longstanding dream. And it led a few months later to my securing a two-year stats research gig with Sports Illustrated for Kids.3
On top of that, the experience gave me a shot of confidence that I was equipped to be a reporter on a national level.
Over the next seven years, I worked as a freelance reporter for numerous publications. The most prominent one was also, in terms of my own journey, perhaps the most poetic: Time, the magazine that spun off Sports Illustrated in 1954.
Here’s a heart-warming next-gen Sports Illustrated discovery story: a few months ago, while substitute-teaching at the local high school, I loaned a month-old SI issue to a student during study hall. To my delight, he became engrossed with it. After confirming that he would continue reading it after the school day ended, I told him it was his.
I wonder if he’s sought out other issues. The archives, known as the Sports Illustrated Vault, are here.
Why a post office box? Some years earlier, we got rid of our mailbox after one too many instances of vandalism at the end of our long driveway, which was out of sight from our house.
Special thanks to my friend, Kate O’Brien Ahlers, who tipped me off to this opportunity and was a champion for me to get the freelance role. The “Medill Mafia” in action!
What? So at last I learn the backstory to why Matt Baron's writing excels that of others? I have long admired his ability to make a story engaging and alive--but now at last, I learn it is because of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED? And that early in his life. Well, I guess dreams can start when we are young, and just keep going
Thanks, Matt. Had an avid interest in this story and your personal story.
I knew the Rams were outstanding in the Chuck Knox era (although apparently Ray Malavasi, who would take them to the Super Bowl the next year, was already their coach), but I would have thought your fictional triumph for the Seahawks over them would have been a bigger upset than it was. I didn't realize that, at least briefly, the Seahawks were on a better trajectory than their fellow expansion team, the Buccaneers (although I guess the Bucs also came fast, playing the Rams in the championship game after the '79 season). Jim Zorn put up a lot of passing yards early, but by the time I became a big NFL fan, Dave Krieg was pushing him out.
Ouch! Frank Deford let his guard down with "beware of what coach's say." And here I am remarking upon it some 40 years later. Shame on me. Not sure whether the error shows that being prone to such spontaneous errors has no bearing on a writer's true powers , or if that was an anomaly for him.
A lot of Yankees on the leaderboard of your post-1950 home run ratio stat, but the Giants crowd struck me as odder for some reason. You can't argue with Mays and McCovey, but the Giants didn't win a lot of pennants. And Dave Kingman was a Giant in other seasons, so it seemed there was one more Giant.
Kingman hit 30 of his 37 home runs in '76 by the all-star break, so it's tempting to think his ratio at that point must have been absolutely outrageous, but actually his AB/HR at that time was 11.5, not that much different than the 12.8 he ended up with. He only had 128 AB post all-star break. It's a hidden strong home run season, hidden in part because it's easy to miss that the implications of 474 AB are very different than 574, say.
Have been puzzled lately about why "Internet" is capitalized. I'll look that up.