On May 8, Gerry Fraley tweeted this celebratory message: “Started at the Dallas Morning News on this day 30 years ago. Will still match our sports section against any in the country.” Seventeen days later Fraley was dead, no longer able to withstand the ravages of colon cancer.
It is another blow to the business I have enjoyed for nearly 60 years. Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe died Feb. 21; Marty Noble, who had retired, died March 24. Now Fraley May 25. Cafardo was 62, Noble 70, Fraley 64.
Cafardo’s and Noble’s deaths were sudden, unexpected.
Cafardo, the Globe’s very good baseball columnist, collapsed and died outside the Red Sox spring training clubhouse in Fort Myers, Fla., reportedly having suffered an embolism.
Noble, the best reporter who ever covered the Mets, primarily for Newsday of Long Island, collapsed and died of a heart attack in Port St. Lucie, Fla., after visiting acquaintances in the Mets’ clubhouse. He had packed his suitcase and was heading home.
Fraley, despite his cancer, had planned to travel to Pittsburgh to cover a Rangers’ series with the Pirates until his doctor told him not to travel. Evan Grant, his colleague at the Morning News, said Fraley apologized for not being able to make the trip.
Fraley and I experienced several similarities, including the fact that his mother and my parents are buried in Pittsburgh. Fraley and I both attended college in Pittsburgh, he at Carnegie Mellon, I at the University of Pittsburgh. The schools are only minutes apart. I also grew up in Pittsburgh 10 minutes from Carnegie, though well before Fraley was in college.
He went to Carnegie planning to study engineering but switched his plans after working one summer as a clerk for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I assume clerk was a euphemism for copy boy because I worked for the Post-Gazette for a summer as a copy boy.
Fraley, according to Grant, had not been lured into doing television, as so many baseball writers have been in recent years. “Gerry did TV or radio appearances when asked,” Grant said in an e-mail, “but preferred not to. He was a print guy to the core. He had no steady radio or TV gigs.”
Grant said Fraley’s colon cancer was diagnosed in 2017. “When it was diagnosed, it was very advanced,” he related. “Aggressive chemo, I believe, shrunk the tumors, but there was no operation to remove them. The cancer became active again sometime over this past winter. It was clear he was struggling, but he did not tell anybody to what degree until it was, well, too late. There was nothing anybody could have done to help him unfortunately.”
Fraley may be the only baseball writer whose death prompted a tribute from a United State president. “It always seemed to me that baseball was his real passion, thereby establishing a kinship and a lasting friendship,” said George W. Bush, who was managing partner of the Rangers before he went into politics.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that cancer is another similarity Fraley and I had, though I have been more fortunate than Fraley. This week (June 4) marks 16 years since Dr. Chandranath Sen freed me of a malignant brain tumor, a remarkable surgical feat for which I will always be grateful.
Finally, there is one more connection between Fraley and me. When Omar Minaya was the Rangers’ assistant general manager, he asked Fraley to introduce us because Minaya was from New York and had read my articles in The New York Times. I came to appreciate the introduction because I have found Minaya to be among the best people I have ever known in my many years of baseball coverage. They don’t come better than Omar.
I didn’t know Cafardo well, but I respected and appreciated his work. Unlike his predecessor at the Globe, Peter Gammons, Cafardo wrote columns and articles readers could believe. When Gammons covered the Red Sox, Manager Don Zimmer called him a .220 hitter, suggesting he was right only 22 percent of the time. Zimmer might have been exaggerating. No one could ever say such a thing about Cafardo.
As good as Noble always was in his baseball coverage, not just of the Mets but of baseball national, I believe he reached the pinnacle of his career after he retired from MLB.com.
Three months ago Tom Seaver’s family announced the Hall of Fame pitcher was dealing with dementia and would withdraw from public view. Knowing Noble was a free agent, I asked him if he would write a piece about Seaver for this website. Twenty-eight hundred words later, we published the best piece anyone ever wrote about Seaver.
If you missed it, go to this link.
Sadly, the column following that one is the column I wrote about Noble’s sudden death.
I have two other baseball deaths to mention here. One is David Montgomery, chairman and former president of the Phillies, who died May 8, five years after he was diagnosed with cancer of the jawbone. By the time Montgomery died the cancer had spread significantly.
Then there was Bill Buckner, whose infamous error altered baseball history. Buckner died May 27 of Lewy body dementia at the age of 69.
My friend Noble had an unusual connection to Buckner. When Buckner’s 10th inning error cost the Red Sox Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, it tied the Series at three games each and forced a Game 7. Noble, however, was unable to cover Game 7. He had a more important assignment that day. His second daughter, Lindsay, was born.
BASEBALL, BASEBALL WRITER DISAPPEARING
Readers of this website often write asking what has happened to baseball coverage in The New York Times. They ask me because they know I used to work for the Times and covered baseball. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for them. I suspect they have given up and feel the issue is useless.
However, I have one bit of news for them on the subject. I initially learned this from a baseball writer at another paper but have confirmed at least part of it with people who are involved.
Tyler Kepner’s Sunday “Extra Bases” column has gone the way of the dodo bird. It is no more. According to the writer who originally told me about the column’s demise, it happened because it wasn’t getting enough “clicks.” I think in today’s digital world that means not enough readers were clicking on to read it.
Seeking confirmation from the sports editor, Randy Archibold, and Kepner, I emailed them both last Friday.
The sports editor did not respond to my request for comment, but a communications vice president replied, saying, “The column will not appear weekly and we don’t discuss traffic at that level.”
Clicks…traffic – where has the newspaper business I know gone?
Kepner has grown up in the digital world, but he doesn’t seem to be any better off. He has been stripped of a Times staple, which has to be pretty embarrassing.
In response to my e-mail, he said, “I can confirm that the Extra Bases column has been discontinued. Beyond that, I do not want to help. I find your blog extremely mean-spirited.”
I’m not sure how to react to that accusation. I readily admit that I have been critical at times, but isn’t that what a columnist is supposed to be? In being critical, I get some readers who disagree with me and some who agree. I’ll take both camps. It keeps thing lively.
I would suggest to Kepner if he had occasionally been critical he might have stirred enough interest to keep “Extra Bases” alive. He would very likely reply that he wasn’t writing that kind of column. However, in my last four years at the Times I was writing an “On Baseball” column, which Kepner writes, and I found ways to take a position some of the time.
Kepner’s problem was he wrote soft, fluffy features that he disguised as columns. Readers obviously had little or no interest in what he was writing. And his editors didn’t help him. If readers weren’t clicking, they knew it and should have discussed it with him.
On the other hand, maybe the editors were looking for an excuse to shred baseball coverage. Look what they have done to it. They use Associated Press reports even when the Yankees play at home.
Kepner, I believe, undermined himself by not being the national baseball writer he touted himself to be. He didn’t cover baseball news. Anytime the Times had a baseball story of national importance, it always said some other publication reported it first.
Kepner has said he has been the Times national baseball writer for 10 years. If he had an exclusive story in that time, I missed it. Apparently so did his editors.
This is a comment from the person who alerted me to the demise of the Sunday column:
“He turned the column into a soft read, lacking in any opinion or hard news. But I also knew you had been creator of the Sunday Times baseball notes column, a staple of the paper and it’s another horrible example of our industry disintegrating before our eyes. Soft as it was, it was still more interesting than 3,000 words on women mountain climbers and Ethiopian dog sledders.”
I hope what I have written here is not too mean spirited for Kepner. But I will finish by spelling out what the creator of the Times Sunday baseball column did in the 24 years he wrote it, from August 1984 to the end of April 2008. This is from one of my first columns on this website:
This is the type of Sunday notebook I wrote for The New York Times for nearly 25 years. I wrote a total of 1,155 notebooks, seldom missing a Sunday, and produced more than 4,000 original items. I wrote them until the sports editor, Tom Jolly, told me, the notebook was an anachronism.
“The notebook concept,” Jolly wrote in an e-mail, “was born at a time when the Sunday paper was the place to catch people up on what was going on around the nation, especially on news and events people may have missed. But at a time when the paper is shrinking – literally – and the Internet is growing, a weekly notebook has become an anachronism.”
Considering that Jolly didn’t work for the Times in August 1984, when the notebook was created, how did he know why it was created? It had nothing to do with “news and events people may have missed.”