No, but thanks for asking

Why is a Monday night game the centerpiece on Wednesday's 1A? Probably because journalism will never give up its insistence on breaking the Fourth Wall and speaking directly on behalf of the whole beleaguered city/state/nation/whatever:

It felt like the whole state was sighing Tuesday, didn’t it? When we weren’t pounding on tables or screaming at replays?

It’s not like we’ve never experienced a loss before. Are you kidding? Lions fans experience loss? Are a wine maker’s fingers purple?

Can't say I saw a lot of the Whole State on Tuesday, but the parts I did see appeared to be holding up pretty well amid the burden.  

And while we're at it: No "cracked." If it ain't funny enough to stand without the prompt, it ain't funny enough, period.

No, you can't use the average

When we tell you young sprouts that you should never write puns as headlines, it isn't because we want to crush your souls. OK, it isn't just because we want to crush your souls; the larger reason is that you should never write puns in headlines unless you are very, very good at it,* and on the off chance you are, whatever story you're hedding probably doesn't lend itself to the pun treatment anyway. 

Should you think all the soul-crushing is worth the candle, though, several things must ye do. One, make sure the pun works literally as well as figuratively. The headline is still supposed to deliver the mail, after all, and if cleverness gets in the way of telling your audience what went on, best to omit the cleverness.** Two, it's a headline, so any of the facts it sets forth need to be clear -- not just implied -- in the text. So if you've bet your immortal soul on "Fast four-ward" in the hammer and reminded us in the deck to expect "a quartet of reasons to care," you probably shouldn't start by offering three reasons to care:

• The Tigers play baseball
• Baseball is fun
• In January, you'll wish you could watch the Tigers and the Royals!

That's as may be. I suppose the job of the columnist is to stir up all the people who will have their hands full with basketball and hockey by then, but it's still only one reason, for a total of three.

OK, it's sports, and nobody said there would be math. But proceed to the jump:

No, that's five reasons. (You can tell, because it says "Here are five reasons.") You can't take the average of three on the front and five on the jump and call it a four-peat "fast four-ward." That's not how measures of central tendency work.

Are there more important things to worry about? There are certainly more important topics to worry about (and if you're expecting major regional papers to have the sort of alarm-bell effect about crises that they might have had two decades ago, you are in for a long wait). But that doesn't mean there's no relationship among the skills involved. Editors are the quiet kids at the end of the row who look at their own scorecards to check when the announcer makes some proclamation. With some care and feeding, they grow up into the quiet kids who check their own scorecards at news conferences when the secretary of state is describing the latest outrage from Iran. That still doesn't mean they get to do puns in headlines, but it might give a sense of purpose to the otherwise routine soul-crushing.

* Sort of like your NBA career. If you were that good, we probably would have noticed by now.
** But come hear the paper in Toronto next month that tells you why this maxim is slipping from our grasp as well.

Stoned again

Here's how you can tell whether you are playing the part of David or the part of Goliath. If you are the one being peppered with stones, you are almost certainly not David.

We can at least make a joyful noise unto the Gannett hub that it doesn't say "the story in the Gospels."

Can't anybody here play this game?

No, he didn't -- say "I likes where our team's going," that is. According to the story, he was barely in the same ballpark:

"We need to keep forging ahead. Keep making improvements. But I like where our team is headed." 

Since football is one of the few things the paper covers as next-day news* anymore, could we at least have checked the spelling of his name against the lede?

Jim Harbaugh's not ready to get "emotionally hijacked" just yet. 

Then there's the 1D cutline:

Michigan's Donovan Peoples-Jones celebrates his 79-yard punt-return touchdown in the third quarter Saturday against Army at Michigan Stadium.

The one with a slightly different photo on 2D repeats the Forbidden Verb, but at least it gets the opponent right:

Michigan's Donovan Peoples-Jones (9) celebrates after returning a punt 79 yards for a touchdown against Air Force on Saturday.

In case you missed the news last weekend: More or less as soon as the current contract allows, the Freep told its staff that it was moving design and copy editing to the Gannett hub (or "regional design studio") in Louisville. The War on Editing appears to have reached the stage at which the losing side is allowed to keep its horses for spring planting. The hub process might be inevitable. That doesn't mean we have to like it, but we can wish it looked more like a bad idea than an idea whose time has come.**

* It's at least a lesser sign of the apocalypse that the day's Tigers gamer was written by a stringer, not a staffer.
** Here's the Kid Rock paragraph online, if you're wondering how much attention the print edition gets: When the concert was announced, I didn't get upset about it. And I know why: Little Caesars Arena is a hockey arena. Many crowds over the years, I suspect, have been fans of performers like Kid Rock. I didn’t put his concert on my calendar.

Currency devaluation

Nobody ever walked out of the old bandbox commenting on the gem just twirled by the portly portsider. Really. That's just the way sports deskers fit the elongated yellow fruit of their craft into the merciless space left after the ads were sold. (On the other side of the room, ire was stoked as bus slay punk was bailed and thousands fled blaze.) So there's a bit of nostalgic charm in awakening to a perfectly preserved relic of the past -- sort of like seeing a triceratops on the front lawn, rubbing the painful bruise on its head and looking around for its wallet and keys.

The top of the picture is included here for scale. There's actually room there for "to defeat Twins" or something equally mundane, but that's really another point. "Gem" doesn't yield to an exact definition, though we expect a lot out of it: if not always a no-hitter, at least a pretty good shutout and/or minimal hits. Not -- with all regard to anyone who increases the odds of the blimp being overhead for October night classes -- giving up two runs in 6 1/3 innings. I'm all for the sound of ash against horsehide, of manual typewriters, of rotary-dial phones being slammed down on the hopes of press agents, but let's have a little respect for the game here.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh

Sad it was to see the Red Wings bounced from the playoffs before the last frost of the spring (and before the Superior Fish folks even got the "Octopi Supply" sign unrolled). Sadder still to think of Pavel Datsyuk packing for home with a year left on his contract. Saddest of all, though: Someone downtown still thinks a "Dat's" hed is worth the top of the sports front.

They're called Forbidden Heds for a reason, you know.

(And yes, traditionally, it'd be nice to have the shutout and the goal "send" the Wings home, rather than "sends.")

Calm down, everybody

Would someone mind injecting a few drops of sweet reason into the water coolers downtown?

Short version: Technically, no. Memorial Day is not the "battle for the playoffs." It's barely even the battle for spring. The season is less than 30% complete. Back in the days before the World Series overlapped with the War on Christmas, it was known as the Fall Classic. (And you guys should remember that; the Tigers represented the AL in the last Series before the curse of the playoffs began.)

You don't have to get off the lawn, and you can wear your baseball cap backward* if you want to. This isn't really a securitization rant, but it does raise some parallel questions. If you're at panic stations for the postseason already, how are we going to know when to start taking you seriously?

* Baseball caps are sort of like the Arabic alphabet; they're only "backward" if there's a fixed value of "frontward." Your music, on the other hand, is STILL JUST NOISE.

Read it before you post it

Dear friends at the Old Reliable: If you can't be bothered to read it before you publish it, why should anyone be bothered to pay for it? 

But Smith endured, managing the stress with equanimity. After all the challenges, he came back to reign in the ACC again before retiring in xxx at age 66.

Considering that you said "1997" earlier -- well, fill in your own strained metaphor for basketball ineptitude here.

True, the canned obituary is one of those traditions than can lead to problems -- say, when the writer has moved on to more prominent pastures before the file has to be used. And I'd be surprised if any desk of this century has a quiet enough night that someone can safely utter the ancient phrase "Hey, let's polish up the pre-obits a little." All the more reason for a bit more care on the front end:
 
His commitment to building a championship program strained his marriage, however. He divorced his first wife, xxx xxxx in xxxx, with whom he had three children. In xxx he married xxxxxxx, and they had two children.

In fairness, the xxxx and xxxxxx have been cleaned up* -- but the sister is still "Joanne Ewing" on her first appearance and "Joan Ewing" on her second. The mystery guard "Jed Dalton" turns into "Ged" in one quote, suggesting he might be the Ged Doughton on this roster. And copy editors were put on this earth to wring redundancies out of sentences like this:

In 1971, Smith also treated the media covering his Tar Heels in the 1971 NIT in New York City to dinner at Mama Leone’s.

Newsroom lore has long held that sports audiences are the pickiest. Whether that's true or whether it's the sort of morality-play-disguised-as-ghost-story that we tell young copy editors at bedtime is a question for the ages. But your Dean Smith obit is going to be read far beyond the confines of the sports pages, meaning a lot of people have a chance to form judgments on your outfit's professionalism. Doing stuff right really does make a difference.
 
* Yes, the story's still a little confused about "X's and O's" vs. "X&O."

How are we going to get THAT home?

Considering how easy it seemed to be to work in some sort of preposition -- "at Rose Bowl tailgate," say, or "in Rose Bowl parking lot" -- you have to wonder why the idea didn't catch on more widely.

Oh, shut up

Pausewise, these are trying times:

Few things give people more pause than a human biting another human.  

Offhand, as it turns out, I could think of quite a few. I'm not sure "allowing the sports department to offer broad social-cultural generalizations without adult supervision" is among the top five, but -- you know, add some size and some offensive help and it might still make a late-season run.

Playoff preview: Deke of Earl

Let's start with a few questions for language fans:

• How well do you get the summary deck shown at right?
  Dissidents and supporters abroad are determined to deke the communist regime's security agents (Miami Herald, 1A Sunday)
• Where are you from?
• What's your favorite sport on TV?

Read more »

Don't do this either

Just don't.

We're No. 4! And ... No. 19!

Today in the War on Editing: UPI simplifies the guessing game about what that pesky "USC" means:

... Florida State was No. 12 in the pre-season poll and took over the No. 1 spot Dec. 1, two days after Auburn stunned season-long No. 1 Alabama with a return of a missed field goal.
Auburn (12-2), which didn't receive poll votes until early October and wasn't ranked until Oct. 20, is second. Michigan State (13-1) took the No. 3 spot with South Carolina (11-2) finishing fourth and Missouri (12-2) coming in fifth.

Good so far?*
 
... UCLA (10-3) comes in at 16th and Oklahoma State (10-3) ends up 17th with Texas A&M (9-4) at No. 18. South Carolina (1-4), unranked in the final regular-season poll, takes the 19th spot and Arizona State (10-4) is 20th.

Sadly, no. N0. 19 would be the USC in that other time zone.

Thanks to the alert cousins in the Philadelphia bureau, who also provided the hed.

* M-I-Z!

The Magnificent ... wait, what?

This isn't really "do the math." It's barely even "do the arithmetic," since it more or less boils down to "take your shoes off and count, being sure to stop at the seventh little piggy."

Astute readers will note that by now, the image has been, erm, updated, as shown at right, though there's still a stray arm in there that looks like something from the Big Soviet Encyclopedia days. But the prose is still its magnificent self:

This week, we finally get to see six of these seven samurai clash -- in showdowns that have everything except Yul Brynner! -- and if we've already broken the three-reference-per-sentence barrier, you know this week is good, before we even get to the Dysfunctional Power Rankings and Flinch Bowl.

Thanks to the alert Philadelphia bureau for the catch -- and thank you, toy departments everywhere.


 

A tarantula on a slice of angel food

The game was as taut as the preceding paragraphs. 

Raymond Chandler's dead. Throw strikes.

In this grinder, there came a display of the lineup depth that makes these the highest-scoring teams in the American League: When have you seen a 2-1 game in which the Nos. 9 hitters drove in all the runs?

"Nos. 9 hitters" could be the awesomest Safire plural in the history of the world in space. Do writers actually do this to themselves, or was the copydesk making the new guy carry the grammar bags back to the hotel or something?
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Stupid stuff you shouldn't do with polls

Sad news for CBS Miami: Even if you're writing dumb throwaways about poll results to feed your sports-starved population, you do not get to make stuff up:

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – While the Miami Heat tied the 2013 NBA Finals at 2-2 Thursday night, outside of South Florida, the San Antonio Spurs are the overwhelming selection for Americans to win the NBA championship.

Set aside the "while" clause for a moment -- what do "most Americans" think about the NBA finals?

According to Public Policy Polling, 32 percent of those surveyed wanted the Spurs to win the Finals while 20 percent selected the Heat. The polling came as part of a larger poll dealing with other political issues of the day.
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Heavy lifting

Cue the clock radio, brush off the Berra-isms, it must be playoff time in a major southeastern city badly in need of the sort of lift that only sports can provide!

If you can tell which 1A hed goes with Monday's game and which comes from last year, you're off to a good start. (Today's front is at left; June 8, 2012, is at right.) Ready for a real test? Here are some excerpts from the two columns. Identify each by the year it ran:
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Oh, the inanity

Q: Are there cities other than Detroit that can regularly contend for the coveted Unhinged 1A Sports Prose trophy?
A: Yes.
Q: What would be some examples?
A: Listen and attend:

This Miami Heat team is so great.

So very, very great.
Read more »

And then again ...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that -- actually, no. There are no cases under which fans' private choices of nether garb can influence the outcome of the game.

Would it be too much to ask for, maybe, a rating system for 1A stories? So we can tell in advance which ones the paper itself believes and which ones it doesn't?

Common cold cured! Mideast at peace!

... so there must be some 1A space left over for letting local experts recite cliches and semi-truisms about the power of mind over matter, or something:

Survive at all costs. Dig deep. Believe. Focus. And the superhuman is possible.

If you've ever wondered what that will to live looks like in action, you saw it in LeBron James' laser-focused eyes, his trance-like determination, as he led the Miami Heat on a one-man scoring bonanza that caught the stunned Boston Celtics flat-footed and forced Game 7 of a sudden-death playoff series Thursday night.

Call it fight or flight, but don't mistake this all-consuming desire to overcome as an asset isolated to the sports world — this resolve, to persevere despite the odds, resides in all of us, experts say.

Could we just watch the game, please?