This is a condensed version of a presentation my old friend, Stan Teitelbaum, gave recently to the Society of American Baseball Research in NYC:
HOW SPORTS WRITERS INFLUENCE THE IMAGE OF MAJOR LEAGUERS; FROM DI MAGGIO, WILLIAMS, AND CAMPANELLA TO ROCKER, MC GWIRE, AND BONDS
“Sportswriters always have had a powerful role in shaping the image of our elite major leaguers, but there has been a gradual and very dramatic shift in the way writers cover sports stories. The gentlemen's agreement of earlier times in which off the field incidents were not addressed or under reported, has been replaced by a readiness among writers to report about off-the-field moral or illegal transgressions. Scandal is now what drives newspaper sales.
Joe Di Maggio was a master at cultivating his image. He gave the press good sound bites, and they fell in love with him and conveyed this to the hero hungry fans and pumped him up as a super star supreme. In a best seller biography about Di Maggio, Richard Ben Cramer wrote, "He understood that we would give him anything, if he would always be the hero we required". The anything was unrelenting unconditional love. Ted Williams, on the other hand, maintained a defensive indifference to how he was perceived by the writers as well as the fans, which masked his sensitivity to criticism and feeling undervalued, as he had been in his childhood by neglectful parents. As a result he often was lambasted by the press, and he didn't need much assistance in this department, because he was dismissive toward them and engaged in an ongoing feuding relationship with the writers.
In more recent times a sample of media takedowns can be seen in the player-media relationships of John Rocker, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds. In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Rocker described how he hated playing in New York, and made disparaging remarks about foreigners, minorities, and gays. Rocker claimed that he had been misrepresented in the story, and threatened the writer. Nevertheless, he was suspended and fined by MLB and ordered to get a psychological evaluation and sensitivity training. In defense of Rocker, John Stossel of 20/20 questioned whether Rocker should be punished for his remarks in a country that espouses freedom of speech. Stossel argued that players who had committed acts of violence, like Jose Canseco hitting his ex-wife, and Charles Barley throwing a man out of a barroom window, were not suspended or forced to have psychological evaluations; so violent speech should not be viewed as more offensive than violent action.
Mark McGwire has become the symbol for the widespread collusion of denial surrounding the use of steroids in MLB. The writer who exposed him, Steve Wilstein, was vilified, because the media were eager to pump up McGwire as the new home run champion in the feel good story of 1998. Ultimately, McGwire was shot down by the writers in 2006, when his name appeared on the HOF ballot for the first time and he received a flimsy 23.5% of the vote, which I think was payback overkill by the writers who may have been projecting their anger at themselves for having ignored the obvious during the home run circus and functioned as a group of enablers.
Barry Bonds, the most compelling symbol of the steroids era, was also proficient at alienating the sportswriters who have consistently described him as rude, surly, scornful, contemptuous, and insulting. Some writers in their zeal to discredit Bonds have overstated his pathology. Bob Klapisch, a New Jersey sportswriter with a large following has labeled Bonds as a sociopath. This is a serious misunderstanding and misuse of a psychiatric diagnosis, since the term applies to people who engage in repetitive law breaking activity and violating the rights of others. In this way Klapisch is encouraging readers to misconstrue his pathology and further darken Bonds's image.
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