Jon Paul Morosi, national MLB writer for FOXSports.com visited Hillsdale to speak to the Sports Journalism class Tuesday.
How did you make something you enjoy, talking about baseball, into a profitable career?
I think that I let my curiosity guide me when I was in college. I didn’t go to college thinking I was going to be a sports journalist; my ideas were a lot along the lines of coaching, maybe teaching or politics. I didn’t really think about sports journalism until the end of my freshman year because I worked for the Sports Media Relations Office at Harvard. I realized the idea of getting paid to watch sports was very intriguing to me.
I just got exposed to it, loved it and was fascinated with the way newspapers came together. I never found a reason to stop doing it. It’s like being in show business or playing sports yourself, you just keep doing it as long as you can do it, and if it comes down to having to do something else, just be flexible and willing to do something different.
How did you get a job specifically writing about baseball?
My mentor John Lowe, who is a baseball writer at the Detroit Free Press. I met him while I was at (the University of) Michigan visiting my then-girlfriend and now wife. My best friend growing up worked at the college paper at Michigan and John does a lot of advising informally. He spends a lot of his time in the off-season at the Michigan Daily helping students. I met him, we started talking and stayed in touch. I think that when the opportunities came along to do baseball, it just kind of all fit together. My love of the sport combined with the fact that John was mentoring me, and then I had a lot of opportunities to cover baseball right out of the chute. Fall of ‘04 I had an opportunity to cover the ALCS and the World Series. It all kind of fit together at once. Like a lot of things in journalism, there was a lot of luck involved.
Why do you often mention topics unrelated to sports in your columns?
I think that our job [as sports journalists] is, in a lot of respects, to bring perspective to what’s happening in baseball. There are people who will write just about the numbers and games, and I just feel I try to find other things that are a little bit removed and a little bit outside the intricacies of the actual sport. It’s probably because of my education quite a bit. I can’t write as a super statistically baseball-minded guy because I’m not that. You have to be you.
What was your favorite story to write?
My favorite story that I wrote recently was probably the final game of the ‘11 [MLB] season. That great game 162 when there were four games that all mattered and the conclusion was Longoria’s homerun to left field. I was able to remember from a conversation years before that that notch was cut out because Tampa used to have a player, Carl Crawford, who played left field and they wanted to cut the notch so Crawford could make exciting catches over the wall. Crawford by then was at Boston and he didn’t catch the ball in left field that was happening at Baltimore, so he was unable to make the defensive play there; meanwhile, his team got eliminated when Longoria hit the ball over the notch that they had actually been cut for Carl Crawford. It made for a really special experience to be able to write that in that circumstance.
What are some of the greatest difficulties in being a sports journalist?
Not always knowing where the news is coming from and where the story really is. There are phone conversations going on between GMs that I don’t see. It’s like trying to cover a game you’re not watching.
It can be a little overwhelming because you have to cover all 30 teams, and there’s never a deadline because there’s always something going on. To take a vacation now, I basically have to leave the country and be out of phone range.
What is your favorite baseball team?
As a journalist, I’m not allowed to have favorites, but I grew up in Michigan rooting for the Tigers. I can say that as a matter of historical fact. I don’t have a favorite team from a rooting standpoint. In sports journalism you’re a fan of your story. You’re a fan of what’s going on to make your story better and more widely read. From a human standpoint, you root for people who are good people.