DAVID O’BRIEN, AJC ATLANTA BRAVES BEAT WRITER

How to write a running baseball gamer and the writethru as told to

Professor D. Orlando Ledbetter, Esq. • THE BASEBALL RUNNING STORY SCRAMBLE• “I don’t have a plan. I’m just being honest. I don’t have

(anything) to teach college kids, (expletive). It’s flying by the sit of your pants half the time. On a typical 7 o’clock game I start, with our deadlines and they just moved up more, so. . . .but it doesn’t matter where the deadline is, I have to have a game story done whether if it’s East Coast, West Coast or wherever. I (must) have a game story written when the last pitch is thrown.

“You can’t trust that you’re going to go downstairs and things are going to go smooth. You might go down stairs and we’ll be waitng outside 30 minutes. Waiting for the manager to finish talking with the general manager or whatever. Even if the game is quick, if it’s a 7 o’clock game, even with our old deadlines and the first deadline isn’t until 10:15 (p.m.) or whatever it was. That’s two hours, I couldn’t just role the dice and not have a story written. I’d file the story before I went down because like I said we might get delayed down there. Something might happen. I (must) have a story done and hopefully it’s decided before the ninth inning.

“But a lot of the time it’s not and the game has turned upside down in the ninth inning and you’re frantically re-writing, taking out records and (changing) the tone of your story, if it was a negative or positive story and changing that. You try to get it plenty of it where it can stand either way, but I don’t want to just do an AP running story with how they scored throughout. So, I try to write about something significant that happened in the game. Something that I have a little background on or somebody that has been hot or somebody that’s turned something around. Something has happened other than just AP running. Nobody reads that (stuff).

“I file the story before I go downstairs and make sure that they’ve got it (back at the office). Then I come back up and start writing depending on how much time that I’ve got.”

WHEN TO WRITE, AFTER EACH INNING?“It’s not like football or basketball, where you can write during a timeout. You are writing throughout. You can’t wait until the end of an inning. You write between every pitch. You write while they are throwing. That’s the difference between baseball and basketball. You have time to watch the pitch or look at the replay.”

USE OF ANALYTICS “I don’t force analytics into anything. That’s not really necessary in a game story. Normal stats work for that. I write for the layman. Not for the saber metric people. I write for the average fan. Saber metrics is more for notes, stories about trends or whatever. Just the basic stats works. You don’t want to use WAR and WHIP in your average game story. That’s kind of cumbersome in a game story.” (What’s WAR???)

WHAT’S THE WRITETHRU METHOD“Now, we have to re-write for replate at 11:15.”

GOING TO SEE THE SKIPPER “The game story is written at the last pitch then you get on the elevator to get down and get the manager because if he does it quick, he might go five minutes after the game. It might be a short cooling off period. You’ve got to be down there. You don’t want to miss the manager because It might not last long.”

GOING TO INTEVIEW THE PLAYERS“We get the manager first and then we get the players. In some ball parks there might just be one elevator and there is just one media trip down. Then after that it’s open for (fans or suite ticket holders). You have to know the ball park, know how fast you have to get down there or know an alternate route down there. But you really (must) have your story written and get on that elevator to make sure you get that manager. You stalk out some players at their lockers. They come out after they eat.

“Sometimes, if they don’t want to talk, they won’t come out because they know we are on deadline. But they usually bring the starting pitcher out for sure and somebody that did something significant. You hope they do. But if they don’t and you’ve got to hit your deadline, you have to go (back) upstairs. At a home game, we might have another person who can help out. On the road, you’re on your own.”

BACK TO THE ELEVATOR“Then you have to get upstairs and get back to your game story. You hope that (the quotes you’ve gathered) kind of jive with you have written. Sometimes, you go down and you find out that he wasn’t caught stealing. They were hit-and-running right there. Or it was a pitch out. Or a guy missed a signal on a hit-and-run and it wasn’t the base runner’s fault. Or it wasn’t the stupid error that you thought it was. A base running blunder . . . .there are so many things that could happen that you really don’t know until you talk to them afterwards and you might have put it in the game story.

“You try not to speculate too much. You might have an injury update or (your find out that) no he didn’t leave the game because of (a particular reason). He left the game because of (another reason). All that kind of stuff happens. You call the desk if there is news. It’s just so much stuff that could happen on any given night that’s different than the night before. The game could last two hours and 10 minutes or it could be four hours.”

THE NEED TO BE FLEXIBLE“Absolutely! Absolutely because you have to ready to re-write your game story in the ninth inning. You might have the Braves losing. . . this has happened. They might be losing 6-0 and then they score seven runs in the ninth inning. You’ve written this whole story about how terrible things were going and all of that and so you are re-writing that in a hurry. You have to still be able to file it withing a couple of minutes of that last pitch.

“You’re taking out team records and pitcher’s records. They won seven of their last nine. Or, they lost seven of their last nine. All of a sudden you’re got make sure that you take out all of that kind of stuff.”

WRAP “I wish I could be more of ‘this is how it’s done,’ but it’s so different. The times zone are different. Now, with the starting times and our deadlines you have to be flexible. You (must) be able to respond and react. You’ve got to be focused on what you’re doing because there is so much room for error. People are talking and you’re not really trying to talk to people around you and all of that. You’re got to be able to zone people out.”

SOCIAL MEDIA“You can’t do it all. That’s obviously the first thing you need to stop doing. Get off Twitter and start focusing on the game. Carroll (Rogers) would stop doing Twitter in the ninth inning because she didn’t want to mess up the gamer. Of course, then you’ve got people on Twitter going ‘why didn’t you update us.’ They don’t understand that’s not my first priority. I try to keep going and give them the final score or whatever happens. “It’s juggling a lot of stuff at once.”

THE GOOD OL’ DAYS – BETTER DEADLINES

“(At) My first job at the Sun Sentinel, our first deadline was 11:15 p.m. You could write a game story after you got back from the clubhouse.”

TWITTER: @DOBrienAJC