Even When He Plays it Straight, He's Tricky

Dave Van Dyck witnessed history yesterday.

A quirky bit of history, yes, but history nonetheless. White Sox hitters Jim Thome, Paul Konerko, Alexei Ramirez, and Juan Uribe hit consecutive home runs in the sixth inning of Thursday's win over the Kansas City Royals.

Those of us who weren't there or watching the game are reliant on Tricky Van Dyck to provide the core details that put us right there in the park with him.

The ChicagoSports.com headline (Try as he might, Hall can't homer White Sox into record books) implies that after his four teammates launched dingers, White Sox catcher Toby Hall flew out to the warning track, hit a long foul (right size, wrong shape), or lined a sharp single to left that could have left the park with any elevation.

But Van Dyck's otherwise well-written sidebar, including quotes from all five principals involved, fails to answer one question: What did Hall do in his at-bat?

The closest we get to an answer is Hall saying of his failure to hit a fifth homer, "I was all done in," which even in the context of what details Tricky Van Dyck provides makes almost no sense.

For those of you who are still in the dark about Hall's at-bat, he struck out to snap the homer streak at four.

Given that this piece is such a rarity in how well-done it is, it feels a little mean to pick on the writer for omitting a single detail, even the most important detail of the story. But no sooner do the guilts set in when, predictably enough, you consider the lead story on ChicagoSports.com...



Clouds on a Sunny Day

If you're the Tribune and you seek to seize the negative in any positive Chicago White Sox development, how would you want your pinch-hitting beat writer, Dave Van Dyck, to handle the lede for the game story in which the following things happen:

• The White Sox win convincingly.
• The White Sox extend their first-place lead.
• The White Sox complete a sweep and a 7-3 homestand.
• The White Sox break the game open with four consecutive home runs, a feat achieved only six times in major league history.
• The winning pitcher is rookie Lance Broadway, 2-0 in his two career big-league starts.

Well, it goes without saying you would address none of those things.

Instead, you'd write about Broadway being sent back down to the minors immediately after the game. As Tricky Van Dyck puts it, "instead of celebrating with his teammates on their charter flight to Oakland"--as if the White Sox are "celebrating" anything with a one-game division lead--Broadway was demoted.

Any reputable media entity would discontinue its "new journalism" practice of seizing the negative. As mentioned below, it's terrific that Van Dyck wrote a sweet sidebar on the string of four homers, but why in the world wouldn't the game story lead with such an amazing feat? The Associated Press devoted its first 14 game story paragraphs to the feat, including reaction from both White Sox and Royals players.

And if the Tribune, always daring to be different, insisted on taking a different tack from the AP, why then was there no emphasis on the White Sox's terrific homestand, resurgent offense, or realigned rotation?

In a rare season where the Cubbies are doing just as well as the White Sox--a fair pace better, in fact--it seems odd that the age-old practice of seizing the negative from the positive still applies to the South Siders. Old habits die hard.

Perhaps once the Cubbies are sold and the sale's wads of cash being squashed into the leaking dike of a $10 billion debt, Sam Zell will simply clear the deck and send all his twisted sports scribes packing. Unfortunately for fans of fair journalism, that's about as likely as a certain north side club breaking a century-long streak this season.

--Brett Ballantini

Schadenfreude Is Sexy!

That fella sporting the vampiric byline and all the cuddliness of a soggy blanket, Dave Van Dyck, got the call to write up Saturday night's White Sox game story. Good news for codgers everywhere; lousy news for White Sox fans.

In just the past couple of weeks, Tribune lede distortions have hit an all-time high. Just two examples: When the White Sox won a 14-inning thriller August 5, the lede addressed shaky starting pitching. On July 26, when the White Sox won their second of two straight games from a heated division rival in come-from-behind fashion, the lede invented angst from GM Ken Williams.

But Tricky Van Dyck dialed it up a notch last night, busting out the schadenfreude and hardly stifling his glee over the happenings at U.S. Cellular Field:

Will this be remembered as Black Saturday, the day the bottom fell out for the White Sox?

In only one gloomy evening, the White Sox lost pitcher Jose Contreras, their postseason ace in 2005, for the season and again lost their grip on first place in the American League Central as they made a flurry of roster moves.

While such vulturing is never appropriate for a journalist, it's especially sick when such joy erupts from a career-threatening injury (keep Tricky Van Dyck away from Kerry Wood by all means necessary!). As the Trickster himself mentions, Contreras was the team's postseason ace in its World Series season. Is it too much to give the guy a smidge of dignity as he limps off a baseball field, perhaps for the last time? And does anyone dare guess at an over/under for the number of times Van Dyck cites his invented "Black Saturday" over the course of the rest of the season?

The second part of Tricky's lede is, as usual, misleading at best. If you didn't know any better, you'd think the White Sox have been yo-yoing in and out of first place all season long. The truth is the White Sox have held first place for all but two days since May, in the first case falling a half-game back before regaining first the next day.

But in Tricky Dick's world, those waiting-to-disappoint White Sox are at it yet again, falling out of first place in their slipshod, Three Stooges fashion.

To his credit, the Trib's Nosferatu of the Diamond does modify the "again" statement five paragraphs in, mentioning that in reality, this loss dropped the White Sox into second place for (only) the second time this month. Still, what's unsaid is that the White Sox were alone in first place for a solid 10 weeks, from May 17 to August 2, have been in first a total of 93 days, and haven't been farther from first than two games all season long. Those latter two marks, by the way, better those of the Trib's beloved Cubbies.

But there go the White Sox, falling out of first again.

--Brett Ballantini

Clobberin' with Lies

Dave van Dyck was responsible for writing up Saturday night's White Sox game story.

(Those of you who just cringed, bonus points for appreciating Tricky Van Dyck's special brand of "writing.")

With the White Sox's offense back in full force and scoring outrageous amounts of runs, you'd think Tricky V.D. would shoot right out of the gate with a delicious lede. Perhaps he'd mention Joe Crede's four home runs in the past two games, an accomplishment not attained by a White Sox player in nine seasons. How about 64 hits in five games so far in the homestand? Hey, he couldn't even be blamed for leading with news of the rarest of baseball accomplishments, a Paul Konerko triple.

No, the lede for the story detailing the White Sox's trampling of Minnesota, their fiercest rival and closest Central Division trailer, by a lopsided, 11-2 margin avoids any such pertinence:

They may have the worst winning percentage of any team leading a division, but the White Sox have a bigger lead than the best team, the Cubs.

Now, let's try to ignore how horrible Tricky Van Dyck's writing is and how lazy and convoluted a lede this is. As is to be expected from a writer from a newspaper that prides itself more on torpedoing its crosstown rival than reporting facts, Tricky Van Dyck's lede is simply wrong.

The division leader with the worst record is not the red-hot White Sox but the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose 34-28 record trails the White Sox by a full 1.5 games. Moreover, the north side bumblers are no longer the "best" team in baseball as the Trib's Hall of Fame-nominated hatchet man implies--they're now tied with the L.A. Angels at 39-24.

Apparently the Tribune sports editors "missed" the falsities when they "fact-checked" Homer Dave's story.

— Submitted by Cubune Watcher Edward B., with an assist from Brett Ballantini

Fuzzy Math (or News That Makes Us Richer, Part 2)

Paul Sullivan was lucky enough to witness a 19-5 pasting of the Brew Crew last night. But apparently he was too distracted by the presence of Mark Cuban in the park to bother fully researching his own writing. An excerpt from his game story:

[Geovany] Soto has 20 RBIs in April, the most for a Cubs rookie since records began being kept in 1956.

Wait a just a second. "Records began being kept?" Isn't baseball the most over-recorded sport in human history?

Now, it's possible that the deep Tribune coffers and resources are vastly overestimated, but there were several options available to Sully before he opted out so lazily:

• Page through the Cubs media guide.
• Telephone his newsroom for assistance.
• Drop $29 on yearly access to www.baseball-reference.com's advanced stats and devote 10 minutes to surfing.
• Befriend one of the millions of SABRheads in the world, many of whom already are likely corresponding with Sully. Such perfectionists would likely do a whiz-bang, instantaneous run of the numbers for Sully for free, and in time for Wrigley's seventh-inning warble.
  
• Contact Stats, Inc., which not only would quickly track a straightforward record like most Cubs ribbies in April by a rookie, it'd probably tell him how many batting gloves that rookie went through during the month and the kid's favorite type of hoagie sammich.
• Or, if all else fails, don't print the stat.
  

Not to be outdone in the popular Trib category of fuzzy math, Sully's study buddy Dave Van Dyck wildly speculates about the presence of every north sider's favorite Racer X, Cuban, in the crowd:

Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks (who fired coach Avery Johnson on Wednesday), has publicly expressed interest in owning the Cubs, but it is still uncertain if he could raise the expected $700 million it would take or whether he could get approval from other MLB owners. Tribune Co. hopes to sell the team by the end of the year, and several groups have expressed interest, although Cuban is the most visible individual suitor.

This is unethical journalism to the nth degree.

DVD very fairly speculates on Cuban's ownership interest in the Cubbies. Cuban likely would bring increased interest, aggressiveness, and competitiveness to the Cubs, the team that's bordering on 100 years between World Series titles and counting. That's newsworthy. The fawning is a little unbecoming, but after untold years of faceless ownership, Cuban could be a fresh breath for the Wrigley regulars.

However, DVD, a Tribune employee and presumed stockholder, cannot resist speculating on a price tag for the ballclub, which has been a favorite pastime from the moment the Lovable Losers approached the auction block.

A modest, reasonable price tag might even be OK, for speculative purposes. For example, stating that the Cubs were expected to fetch at least the $XXX million a prior team sale earned is fair play--after all, the cost of buying into MLB's gold mines is stretching ever upward.

But to pull $700 million out of his hiney isn't speculation, it's auctioneering, and the act is absolutely out of line. We know the Tribune has been bandying about a false-bottom price of $1 billion as the likely cost of the ballclub and Wrigley Field for months now, so DVD's numbers surely don't reflect the combo price. DVD can't even employ the specious price of $500 million in his wild speculation; no, the dutiful stockholder/employee has upped the ante to $700 million, citing it in no small measure as a starting point ("the expected $700 million").

This speculation has no place on the sports page, or anywhere in the Tribune, for that matter, at least without a disclosure accompanying it, per Tribune policy. It certainly has no place being created by a fiction writer the likes of Dave Van Dyck.

--Brett Ballantini

A Tale of Two Stories — Biased Stories

Two stories on the front of the Tribune's sports page today, one about a White Sox victory, one about a Cubs victory. In each, the hometown manager makes self-deprecating comments. Here's Ozzie:

"We got Detroit at the right time. Those guys are going to wake up sooner or later because they have unbelievable talent."

And here's Lou:

Before the game, Piniella said the Cubs were "fortunate" to be in a position to end the trip with a winning record "despite the problems we've had in the rotation and with our offense."

The bias shows in the way each reporter responds to those comments. Even though the Cubs have more reason to thank their lucky stars — they won by one run but had two runs gifted to them, one by an umpire and one by a Phillies error — Cubs house organ Paul Sullivan writes, "But the offense was just good enough Sunday." He writes of Jason Marquis pitching in and out of trouble and writes that "Derrek Lee saved the day with a brilliant stop to present the winning run from scoring with two outs in the ninth." When the Cubs are lucky, they're also brilliant, but when the White Sox are lucky enough to allow only five hits in two games and hit two grand slams on the same day, Dave van Dyck can only be skeptical:

"The question is whether this is real or whether it comes from playing Detroit, considering five the Sox's seven victories have come against, surprisingly, the worst team in baseball."

So, the Sox have a winning record (van Dyck neglects to mention that it's the best record in the American League) only because they beat the Tigers five times. But isn't it also true that the Tigers have the worst record in baseball only because they lost to the White Sox five times? Maybe if they played another team they would have won those games, in which case they would be 7-5, not 2-10.

It makes sense for managers to downplay their teams' accomplishments in April, to stay humble for the long haul. When Lou does it, the Tribune contradicts him. When Ozzie does it, the Tribune piles on.

-- Jeff McMahon

Pitchers Wear Spikes, Right?

It was one thing to see Dave Van Dyck's tiny tear of joy shed in reporting the Cubbies' "fast start" (yeah, the 3-3 one) in Monday's paper. But DVD also throws in to the Kerry Wood support group, wherein all Tribune writers are required to get in line behind the most disappointing phenom in Chicago pitching history as he embarks on his quixotic quest to become, 10 years into his career, a closer.

Wood, you might recall, got off to a rough start this season, coughing up three runs in the 9th on Opening Day at The Shrine. It took a week, but we finally have the explanation for Wood's hacking fit, courtesy of DVD:

"The former starter, voted the NL Rookie of the Year a decade ago, is trying to reinvent himself after years of shoulder problems. His only failed test so far came on Opening Day, when the mound was slippery. But the three runs he allowed came in a tie game and he was spared the loss thanks to a three-run rally by his teammates."

Hey, give Dave credit for at least acknowledging Opening Day, which has otherwise has been erased from Tribune archives. Subtract points for the needless insertion of the ROY (yes Dave, we know that Kerry used to be good) and for wedging some, uh, creative writing into his journalistic output.

An output that tends to resemble, you guessed it, a coughing fit.

--Brett Ballantini

When Does a Start Start?

In today's Tribune, Dave Van Dyck attempts to manipulate time. Unsurprisingly, his sleepy editors allow it.

After Sunday's stirring win vs. Houston, the Cubbies had drawn to 3-3 on the season. Not bad, not good. Hey, that's what .500 represents, right?

Not to DVD, who was beside himself with excitement over the team's three wins in six tries:

"The manager, Lou Piniella, is starting to see his "fast start" hopes come around, with the Cubs ending their first week at home by winning two games in a row and three of the last four."

We've seen this sort of selective memory before by Tribune writers when it comes to their coverage of the Cubbies. Just yesterday, Paul Sullivan extolled team closer Kerry Wood for being two-for-two in saves, conveniently ignoring his Opening Day implosion in order to establish some sort of false "perfection" on behalf of the first-time closer.

Today, DVD is so desperate to establish that the Cubbies have had a "fast start" that he completely doctors the season's first homestand, altering it from the 3-3 mediocrity it was into some sort of 3-1 "fast start." Did the first two games of the season not count on the north side?

Perhaps this explains why the Tribune is so pleased with its Cubbies year after year, even when the losing campaigns vastly outnumber the winning ones: It simply doesn't count some of the losses.

--Brett Ballantini

Same Old Same Old

Did you notice that when the White Sox beat the Cubs 5-3 on Saturday, the Tribune barely covered the game? Instead, Dave van Dyck covered "a few oddities" he noticed during the game, such as Neal Cotts in a Cubs uniform. Could have sworn we saw that last year, but whatever, the Tribune has always been a little slow on the uptake. Dave seemed mostly concerned with making excuses for what remains, as April looms, the company team: "The visiting Cubs didn't bring their second, third or fourth hitters," he wrote, and suddenly we were transported back to the ballfields of our youth, which were paved with asphalt, and listening to the whiney babies who just lost saying, "Yeah, but we didn't bring our best players." You know if the Cubs had won that game the Tribune would have given them a banner headline: "Cubs Trounce Sox! And They Didn't Even Bring Their Best Players!"

Yes, it's like the ballstreets of our youth all over again, only with the Tribune cheerleading for the other team, it's like hearing it from the other team's parents rather than the kids themselves. Most unseemly.

---
From Cubune Watcher Brett Ballantini:

Reluctantly, Phil Rogers announces today that the Orioles may be looking for veteran infield help (Juan Uribe) in a Brian Roberts trade. I'm not sure how I feel either way about acquiring a guy from the substance abuse hit list, but Rogers' addendum is what caught my eye. Now, Rogers won't acknowledge that if Baltimore wants vet infield help back, the foregone conclusion of Roberts-to-Cubbies is scuttled. That would bust the company line, wherein, the Cubbies are supposed to be able to hold up any team they want to get the players needed to pathetically attempt to snap the streak before it reaches 100. No, Rogers points out that, y'know, Roberts-to-the-Sox sure SEEMS plausible, but the minor league system is so bare, there's no way a deal could be made.

Totally off the top of my head: Brian Anderson, Carlos Quentin, Brad Eldred, Jason Bourgeois, Lance Broadway, Andrew Sisco, Nick Masset, Jack Egbert, Mike McDougal, Joe Crede, Charlie Haeger...

Stop the Presses! Cubune Picks Cubs to Win!

You'll be shocked to discover that the Cubs shareholders who work in the Tribune Tower think the Cubs are going to prevail in the Division Series against Arizona. Paul Sullivan, who covered this sloppy team for 162 games and once referred to them as "accidental contenders," predicts they'll sweep the Diamondbacks, and hey, maybe they will. Most Trib writers think they'll win it in four games, and one genius thinks they'll win it in six.

Tribune fiction writer Dave van Dyck thinks the Cubs will win because "The excess of power will be too much for the D'back pitchers and in postseason series three-run homers traditionally win games."

Who has an excess of power? Arizona season HRs: 171; Cubbies: 151, and the Cubs play in a Little League park. Maybe DVD's been taking LSD to work, and we don't mean Lake Shore Drive.

Of the Cubune's public faces, only golf expert and token staff Sox fan Ed Sherman picks the snakes. Whoever he likes, Sherman has shown that his world view remains firmly planted in Cubland. And how could it not be? He drinks out of the same water cooler. He shares the same profit sharing plan. And the Tribune has been pushing a little too hard lately to convince people it has Sox fans on staff:

The Tribune sports desk
Spirited voting among 18 members of the Tribune's sports copy desk—except for the one wise guy who picked Cubs in 6—led to a nearly even split. Undoubtedly the healthy number of Sox fans and Cubs fans looking to alter cosmic karma led to the eight picks for the Diamondbacks.

Only because of a "healthy" number of Sox fans on its Sports Desk did the Diamondbacks get any votes. That shows confidence in the expertise of the Sports Desk, doesn't it? And what's a "healthy" number of Sox fans? When the Tribune hires a Sox fan, it's like getting a flu shot?


Brett Ballantini contributed to this post.