“The Baseball Vault: Great Writing
From the Pages of Sports Illustrated”
The publishing info:
Triumph Books
496 pages; $30
Released April 9, 2024
The links:
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The review in 90 feet or less
Artificial Intelligence and Sports Illustrated got together for a discrete hook up recently, and the tabloids had a field day.
So did the moral arbiters at our non-profit member station Public Broadcasting Service team.
“Sports Illustrated is the latest media company to see its reputation damaged by being less than forthcoming — if not outright dishonest — about who or what is writing its stories at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age,” PBS reported on Nov. 29, 2023.
“The once-powerful publication said it was firing a company that produced articles for its website written under the byline of authors who apparently don’t exist. But it denied a published report that stories themselves were written by an artificial intelligence tool.”
The truth is, SI’s reputation has been damaged for several years, and this particular misstep had nothing to do with AI converging with Synthetic Intelligence. We were a bit sympathetic to what was really happening.
Since 2018, SI’s content has been leased by the Arena Group, and it was responsible for these third-party product review AI “stories” way down at the bottom of the website. The crime really is that it was ad material disguised as content. The stuff was summarily taken down and perhaps the brand’s reputation was harmed.
It’s not like they were channeling Frank Deford beyond the grave to rewrite some of his most popular Ted Williams pieces. That would be a grave misstep on so many levels.
This was really some superfluous stuff in question.
The humans still left at the Sports Illustrated Union was mortified, and it was a moment to suggest that there’s a chilling effect on all major news corps that had been dabbling in AI software as a way to make up for lost employees. Still, this much ruckus wasn’t really pushed out when The Associated Press started using techbots to assist in its articles about financial earnings reports since 2014, and had also been used to aggregate short sports game stories. Usually there was a tag at the end that explained how that story was produced with a data-driven technology and readers were not in the “Twilight Zone” of their existence.
The fall guy for all this was CEO Ross Levinsohn, and it’s just as well. Levinsohn, a former HBO exec who also worked at Fox Sports, Yahoo and then a crazy time as publisher of the Los Angeles Times despite its internal union outcry of his incompetency, had latched onto SI’s parent company, then known as Maven, Inc., which then sold off its soul to Authentic Brands Group and became part of a NIL scam to make people believe it was worthy of its name. Like, Chuck Taylor Converse. SI still had a magazine, cut back to once a month, and this suspect website with just a small portion of what used to be on the staff.
For those who remember, SI, which launched 70 years ago in August of 1954 as the first magazine to have more than one million subscribers, and in 1983 was the first full-color news weekly magazine highlighting fantastic photography — aside from its Swimsuit issue — has been though all sorts of self-inflicted wounding for a few decades.
Time Inc., sold off SI as part of its assets to Meredith Corporation, which then sold SI to ABG, and the Arena Group got a 10-year license agreement for SI “branded editorial” content, while ABG could license the SI name to other things (such as Super Bowl parties). Or, as the Washington Post noted: “As Sports Illustrated sputters, its owners throw a party for ‘the brand’” sponsored by Captain Morgan.
Arrrrggggggg.
The latest in January of 2024 is The Arena Group missed a $3.75 million licensing payment to ABG, so ABG then created a partnership last March with something called Minute Media to keep fooling everyone.
In the last few years, Triumph Books, a publishing house based in Chicago, has been repurposing “The Best of” Sports Illustrated work — using the power of nostalgia to draw in those of us who’ve longed for the value of long-form sports reporting. On the title page of this book, it lists that all the content is used under license from ABG-SI LLC. And “The Baseball Vault” is the latest in a series of Truimph products, coming after “The World Series” (Oct., ’23) and a history of the New York Mets (April, ’23). SI seems to have actually published “The Story of Baseball In 100 Photographs” back in November, ’18.
With the “Baseball Vault” — a book-form extension of the website we’ve often frequented called SIVault.com — the implication is there’s value here. A saved up treasure now opened for us to re-admired. It’s why we bought gold bars long ago instead of cryptocurrency. You can’t make jewelry out of a blockchain.
We see the names again of some literary heroes, and those we wish we knew better. Even the ones our dad once paid a full quarter of a dollar to read.
Those who’ve managed to stay on staff in 2024 — Tom Verducci, Steve Rushin, Pat Forde, even Jon Wertheim and Jack McCallum — are included.
So are William Nack, Rich Hoffer, Joe Posnanski, Shelley Smith, Steve Wulf, Mark Kram, Rick Reilly, Peter Gammons, Alexander Wolff, Jeff Pearlman, S.L. Price, Leigh Montville, Tim Layden, Emma Baccellieri, Ben Reiter, Ron Fimrite, Robert Creamer and Phil Taylor.
(Nothing, apparently, worthy of George Plimpton, Jim Murray, Pat Jordan, Selena Roberts, Grant Wahl, Ralph Wiley … or Kurt Vonnegut?)
This group comes out of the cornfield, not so much for the full take-out features they once did, but many in the short-blast, two-to-four page updates they did for the magazine.
Of the 46 stories, the earliest is from 1956 — Creamer writes the magazine’s first Sportsman of the Year piece called “The Year, the Moment and Johnny Podres,” focused on the previous season that the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher had getting the team to the first World Series title.
There’s also one from 1959, Herbert Warren Wind’s “From the Hill to the Hall,” about Yogi Berra. Most are from the 1990s and 2000-to-present era.
From the more contemporary lot, Verducci’s piece from 1999 on Sandy Koufax titled “The Left Arm of God” is there. It’s brilliant. And it takes up several pages.
There’s also Verducci’s “The Ohtani Rules” from 2021 — the book jacket includes Ohtani in new Dodgers’ duds to help bring the shelf value up.
Verducci’s sweet Vin Scully tribute piece from his 2016 retirement season is also there. It’s lodged in with a Reilly piece on the St. Louis Cardinals’ Jack Buck from 2001 (to go along with a chapter on “The Storytellers,” that also includes a Steve Rushin story on the joy of baseball on the radio, and Luke Winn’s 2013 piece on Bob Uecker).
More stories are grouped together in the game’s history, legends of the sport, The Negro Leagues, colorful characters, poignant moments, writers reflecting on baseball and what’s to make of the “modern age.”
The newest entry is the last of a Stephanie Apstein piece from 2023 called “Playing for the Yankees Has Its Perks. In-Fight Internet is Not One of Them.” It ends with the last graph talking about how Yankees manager Aaron Boone pays for his own Gogo account and wasn’t aware many other team owners covered the Wi-Fi expenses on team flights.
“He wondered gravely whether the Yankees’ policy might cost them free agents. ‘We’re gonna have to get on that,’ he said. Journalism changes lives.”
The last line if fitting, isn’t it? And human generated. We can tell.
How it goes in the scorebook
All In.
So, what seems to be missing?
Lots, actually.
Creamer’s fantastic May 1964 piece on Scully, which in the SI vault is labeled: “How Vin Scully became part of the California freeways.” That came at a key moment in Scully’s career as he had been courted by the New York Yankees to return to the Bronx, just after the Dodgers’ sweep of the Yankees in the ’63 World Series. Scully thankfully stayed in Southern California. And was, as the story said, a key ingredient in the culture.
That story, by the way, elicited quite a bit of mail to the SI editors, some of which they published in a subsequent issue. One of them was this a couple weeks after the initial story, in the “19th Hole” section of the magazine:
Sirs:
Two things happened when I was trying to play ball at Fordham that have always left me leary of the printed word. One concerned the only home run I ever hit—which was in truth a misjudged fly ball. It was in a college game, and a photographer for the Bronx Home News was present. I gave it the real home run trot and even tried to hang in midair over the home plate so that he could take the proper picture. The next day I went out eager to buy every paper I could get my hands on. The first one I bought featured a picture on the sports page which showed a blurred figure who could not possibly have been recognized by blood relatives, and the caption: “JIM TULLY scoring on his home run.”
The other shock to my system was administered by Lou Effrat of The New York Times. He covered a game that was probably the only one in my career in which I got three hits in four times at bat. The other time I had struck out. We won the game and, since I had contributed to the victory, I eagerly purchased the Times the following morning to read Effrat’s glowing report of my contribution. The only time my name was mentioned was at the head of the third paragraph, which began, “After Scully fanned…”
This is a long preamble to tell you all that has been washed away. Everyone connected with the Scully family wishes to thank you and Robert Creamer for as nice a write-up as a man could ever wish to have.
VIN SCULLY
Houston
That could have been a chapter unto itself.
Also missing: George Plimpton’s tome about the “curious case” of the legendary Sidd Finch (from April 1, 1985), which has its own Wikipedia entry. William Leggett’s story of the Impossible Dream Red Sox from 1967. Rushin’s piece from 1992 about how the Dodgers and Giants transferred the game “Into a Golden State.” Myron Cope’s 1966 profile on Roberto Clemente.
Here’s a likely answer to that: In 1993, Time Inc., which then owned the whole shebang, did its own best of SI baseball writing, with Oxmore House Inc., and Bishop Books. The best stuff may be here in “Baseball: Four Decades of Sports Illustrated’s Finest Writing on America’s Favorite Pastime (Sports Illustrated Collector’s Library). Track it down. Here, we found one on eBay.com for less than $6. Also on Abebooks.com. The authors included here: Deford, Blout, Gammons, Cope, Montville, Nack, Telander, Pat Jordan … plus Robert Frost and Red Smith. This book also has an introduction from then-managing editor Mark Muvoy.
Which leads us to the one thing really missing from this new edition: Some kind of explainer on how these stories were picked, who did the picking, and where more of the gems may be mined online at the SIvault.com. It needs context. That’s lacking here, unfortunately. Maybe because it couldn’t take the 30-plus already picked for this ’93 edition.
Still, nostalgia still sells. And editors’ note: None of this review was generated from an outside source. It’s an internal combustion engine known as mind and heart. And that’s what makes these SI piece true. All their words could be dumped into a software system and perhaps regenerated years from now into some worthy prose. But it misses so much. We appreciate the effort to bring that reminder back.
It’s not a perfect synergy these with all the SI dispersal of valued pieces. But at least this came out of it. Along with a sweet modified cover shot by Hy Peskin of Mickey Mantle that makes some of us recall when that was the actual cover of the SI issue from June 18, 1956, and these days can sell for as much as $300,000.
Someone can buy that issue, and put it back in the vault. For safe keeping.
More to ponder:
Wonder why we post these reviews for no charge on this website? So do I.
Especially after reading this:
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