The Power of the Pen: Still A Mighty Sword?

In speaking with Craig Swan recently and subsequently writing about his old Mets manager, Joe Frazier, the name Dick Young was brought up.  I hadn't thought about Dick Young for a number of years and got to thinking about life without this New York Daily News columnist who was rude, abrasive, conservative and almost single-handedly got Tom Seaver traded out of New York in 1977.  Does any print columnist have the same power today?  Is there anyone in sports media who has the power Dick Young once held over New York City?

Mr. Young, who died in 1987, wrote for the Daily News for 39 years.  He was elected to the writers' wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978.  Between 1941 and 1981, he witnessed some of the biggest changes in baseball, from the end of segregation to West Coast expansion to the growth of television to the players union and free agency.  He was a columnist who had very strong opinions; one of the most influential baseball columnists ever.

I was just a nine-year old with a glove and ball in one hand and a stack of Baseball Digests in the other when, in 1977, Young began his vendetta against my idol, Tom Seaver.  Actually, the vendetta had begun at the end of 1976.  Young hated free agency and used the power of his pen to castigate those he didn't feel were deserving of the riches coming their way.  He considered Seaver "greedy" and took the front office side in the escalating war between Seaver and the team over negotiating a new contract to put Seaver's salary more in line with the rising salaries of other pitchers not on Seaver's level.  But the morning after Seaver and the Mets had come to a new agreement, a column by Young in which he wrote about the jealousy Seaver's wife Nancy had for the wife of former teammate Nolan Ryan infuriated the Mets' lone star player.  He cancelled the deal and was traded that day to the Cincinnati Reds.  The full story is recapped very well HERE in an article written by another long-time Daily News columnist, Bill Maddon.

The question remains: Could a columnist in 2009 have the same effect on a player's emotions?  Could a single columnist have the power to sway player movement between teams?

Today is a very different time from 1977.  Back then, there was no internet.  Baseball fans did not have access to columnists from all of the country at the click of a mouse.  There was no 24-hour Regional Sports Network owned by teams.  There was no ESPN; no MLB Network.  There was no 24-hour a day sports radio.  There weren't thousands of bloggers writing their own opinion pieces and chopping up the overall audience for baseball opinion into smaller and smaller pieces of the pie.  There definitely weren't players writing on their own, blogging their sides of the story.  Curt Schilling and 38 Pitches, or Jimmy Scott's High & Tight, were thirty years from fruition.  Back in 1977, there was Dick Young, fellow Daily News writer Jack Lang, who took the opposite view of Young's but was not as influential (although Lang is in the Hall of Fame as well), and the other papers in town.  Town.  This wasn't worldwide by any means.  Everything was local.  It's not anymore.

In politics right now, Rush Limbaugh seems to have been able to score a major influence on public, and politician, opinion.  In 2009 baseball, it appears that's impossible.  But...  Just when you nod your head in agreement, we remember just a month ago how Selena Roberts and David Epstein broke the story, and about a million hearts, on how Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003.  In one day, this article shifted a nation away from a formerly untarnished (in terms of illegal performance enhancers) player.  Roberts also has a book coming about A-Rod and wrote a scathing indictment about him for the New York Times, in essence calling him a Miami slumlord.  From afar, it would appear Selena Roberts has it out for Alex Rodriguez.  Is she the Dick Young of 2009? 

Even with Roberts, however, the comparison is difficult.  Her piece was with a national magazine, Sports Illustrated, that had (free) worldwide distribution on the web.  It was covered in ever city in America on sports radio; by ESPN, by the MLB Network.  While the Seaver trade in '77 was a national story due to his fame and brilliance on the mound, was the coverage of the story afterward as impactful?

And the stories themselves are very different.  Young was right to a degree.  Seaver's story was about greed.  He wanted more money; at least as much as Nolan Ryan and Don Gullett and others starting to benefit financially from free agency.  His greed was also directly related to his pride, his ego and his competitiveness.  Plus, relative to these other players, he did deserve more money.  He was arguably the greatest pitcher of his generation.  The Rodriguez story isn't about a player complaining about his contract.  It's about a player who cheated, who broke rules, who lied and was caught in his lie.Two very different stories during two very different times.

The late Dick Young did not survive unscathed from the Seaver affair.  Already considered divisive, he has not been looked upon especially favorably by history.  When he took the Mets front office side in the Seaver War, Young's son-in-law was working for the Mets, thus there was a conflict of interest for Young as the story progressed.  And while Young's biggest beef was Seaver's desire to break and negotiate a new contract, Young himself broke his own contract four years later and left the News for the rival New York Post. 

Not all youthful journalists remember this Dick Young/Mets front office/Tom Seaver affair.  They write to be written.  But there will always be some who write to be famous.

Did Roberts expose A-Rod out of an objective effort to find out the truth?  Or was it for egocentric, Dick Young-style personal reasons?  Maybe a little of both.  After all, it is the job of a columnist to write about their personal feelings.  But is Roberts a columnist?  Or is she an investigative journalist?  There is a difference.  Or at least there should be.

There are other journalists who investigate and find information that is rich and damning and important.  There are Howard Bryants and Jeff Pearlmans who let their subjects do the talking.  There is Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, the two journalists who exposed the BALCO scandal and broke the story that Jason Giambi had testified to using steroids.  Williams and Fainaru-Wada refused to disclose their sources and, at one point, were sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of court.  Would Dick Young have gone to jail to protect anyone's anonymity?

Dick Young was not an investigative journalist.  He was pure columnist by 1977.  He was all ego, all bravado, all about selling papers, getting read and making a point - His Point.  At the time, his point was valuable.  It was powerful.  With all due respect, Tracy Ringolsby or Peter Gammons or Dan Shaughnessy don't have the same opinion-swaying power.  Their motives may be there.  They want to be heard.  They want to be read.  They want to sell papers or have ads clicked through on their websites.  But the power of the pen?  Too diluted today, at least in sports, to have the negative force of a Dick Young.  Not from the opinion perspective at least. 

And, like a dictator being removed from power by democracy, that's not necessarily a bad thing.