Where are the box scores?

This is a question I've been hearing a lot the past two days, with the start of the Major League baseball season.

I received several calls and e-mails wanting an explanation. Some readers have threatened to drop the paper, others have been understanding.

The simple answer is we don't have the space to dedicate an entire page to baseball in the newspaper Monday through Saturday. We will continue to have a full baseball page in Sunday's Sports section.

With reduced space in the Sports section on a daily basis, we have been forced to make some tough decisions. We've dropped NBA boxes and NHL sums already, with little to no complaints. We needed to reduce our baseball "package" and have done so by reducing the number of boxscores we run.

We will continue to feature baseball games on the cover of the Sports section when we can. We will run boxscores from all the Midwest teams - Cubs, White Sox, Twins, Royals, Brewers, Cardinals.

We will run features on players of interest when space is available. We will continue to provide standings and scores on a daily basis.

But our focus will continue to be on local sports, events and features on players and teams that are in our backyard. The University of Iowa, Iowa State, Northern Iowa will remain important to us, as well as the 80-some high school teams in the newspapers circulation area.

It's a changing world and there are many ways to get information these days. That's why we want to focus on local, something, for the most part, our readers cannot get from the ESPNS and various Web sites around the globe.

I hope you will give this new format a chance, take a look at the whole package and not just the items we've dropped but, hopefully, the value we've added.

posted on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 8:35 AM by jr.ogden   |    Login or Join to Post Comments

Comments

Thursday, April 09, 2009 10:32 AM by Bosoxfan

# re: Where are the box scores?

I am nearly 60 years old and grew up in Cedar Rapids. My father admired Ted Williams. He taught me how to read box scores when I was eight years old, and I started reading the box scores every day to see how Ted had done. I became a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan as a result. Ever since, I have read box scores every day during the six months of the baseball season while eating my breakfast, first in the Des Moines Register and in the Gazette since it began publishing in the morning. When Mr. Buttry did his series of columns about down-sizing the paper, I do not recall reading anything about eviscerating coverage of major league baseball. So I was stunned this week to sit down to breakfast, open my paper and find . . . virtually no information about most of major league baseball. In the paper this morning, one finds four box scores, a three half-column article about the Cubs game, and a one-third column articel about the Twins game. One cannot find any news about the eight other games that were completed by press time. All I can say about your judgment is Wow! A large amount of information about a game can be learned from a box score. The Gazette has ceased to be a source of news about major league baseball. You didn't even see fit to try to pass off line scores as an adequate replacement, as Gus Schrader did briefly at some point in the seventies. Wow, what a total lack of respect for the game and its fans. I find that to be a very odd strategy for attracting readers in a time of dwindling interest in newspapers. I am cancelling my subscription today.
Thursday, April 09, 2009 1:47 PM by jbcub14

# re: Where are the box scores?

I was one who received a response from JR concerning the omission of box score. Even though I appreciate that, I still think the Gazette's decision is short-sighted. My point is that there is a point of diminishing returns whereby eventually the Gazette will lose more readers than its new streamline stradegy is trying to retain. Case in point is the first comment on this thread where the reader has cancelled his subscription.
Secondly, JR states the new emphasis is on "local" teams including Iowa State. This comment is a joke considering the only Iowa State coverage in the Gazette is via a "correspondent" on an irregular basis. I would think the true Cyclone fans have dropped their subscriptions years ago.
I will survive without all the box scores but times-they-are-a-changing, and not for the better.