requiem for the sports pages

I want to take just a moment to mourn the passing of The Sports Pages.

I've been reading the sports pages since I began reading for myself. Dick and Jane and Spot were okay for school. Dr. Seuss was great. Tom Swift was good if you had the time. 

But the sports pages were a refuge. In the world I was growing up in, filled with war and protest and assassinations and riots, the sports pages made perfect sense. Everyone played on the same field and I had no idea that it hadn’t always been that way.

One of the beautiful things about sport is that there's a clear winner, a clear loser, and practically nobody dies. The stakes are momentous and pretend. Tomorrow is another day. We'll get'em next year. 

The sports pages I read just for me. 

You could picture any batter and any pitch. You could track the triumphs and struggles of your favorite players and your favorite teams. Like magic, you could have a seat at any game in any city. 

I read the articles if they were good and I had the time. But the real bedrock of sports pages were the standings, and the box scores that told their story. These precious little rectangles of tiny text were safe places to go and live inside a world of numbers and names that generated images at once familiar and exotic. They could take you to the game--any game--in an instant.

The sports pages make perfect sense because of their unequivocal clarity. A baseball box score is a wonder, containing the story of a particular game and the narrative of a season up to that moment. I’d pick through walks, hits, and look for how batting averages moved up or down. Then I'd shift to the standings to see how this single event had helped or hurt my favorite team as they tried to beat out rivals to the playoffs and--hopefully--the World Series. 

Later on I would discover football box scores! and hockey! But my first love, and my first experience of reading for myself, was with the sports pages spread out on the living room floor while my dad sat in his chair reading about the war and the riots. It felt important. Like something grown-ups do.

Sadly, for readers of the New York and Los Angeles Times, that option no longer exists.

Those newspapers (can we still call them papers?) have abandoned the field to digital media and discontinued carrying standings and box scores. They still have sports sections of a sort, but they resemble the human interest stories usually reserved for Sunday magazine features. Gone are the guts of the sports pages. 

What is a sports section without box scores? What is a sports section if you can't even find the standings? 

Without that essential element of sport, there are no more sports pages. And that means some little kid learning to read will be clutching a device, scrolling for scores, maybe messaging friends. Turning those pages on the living room floor at my dad’s feet was a rite of passage into adulthood. Now it's gone, like so much else.