Sporting News Abandons St. Louis for Charlotte NC

[GlenBrummer]

The Sporting News has been connected with St. Louis, a baseball twon since 1886. It was recently purchased by the comglomerate American Business Journals that publishes weekly business local newspapers. With no experience in sports and no regard to the history of TSN and its legacy in St. Louis, its new corporate owner has decided to leave its St. louis HQ and abandon its New York offices for Charlotte NC, a town with no baseball team and legacy in baseball. Its ESPN.com and SI.com for me from now on. The new owners are also taking 120+ years of archives undoubtedly to sell them for profit.


By Derrick Goold
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
07/08/2008

The treasure of 122 years of baseball history that called St. Louis home as it grew boasts such prizes as letters penned by Ty Cobb and thousands of bios on baseball players handwritten by the players themselves. And those are just part of 1,500 cubic feet of sports history.

Enough to fill two semis.

Steve Gietschier only knows that because he's had to watch all these goodies packed to be loaded into a couple of trucks. RELATED LINK
MEDIA VIEWS: Sporting News says goodbye to St. Louis

They drive east today.

History is headed out of town.

With Sporting News closing its final St. Louis-based issue late Sunday night and moving operations to Charlotte, N.C., what's believed to be the largest collection of baseball information outside of Cooperstown is leaving. For 22 years, Gietschier organized, cataloged and played host for the Sporting News Research Center. The archives held books, photos and clippings from all sports, but its wealth of baseball history reflects the publication once known as "The Bible of Baseball," a magazine that helped establish St. Louis' identity as a baseball town.

Gietschier is staying. The archives, uprooted, are going, certain to be stored at the new headquarters. It's uncertain how they will be used.

"It's true it would have been nice to keep something this important to the history of the company in the city in which it was created," Gietschier said. "We tried to find a way. ... I thought of it like this: If the (Anheuser-Busch) brewery changes hands, the Clydesdales will stay in St. Louis. They won't go to Belgium."

Based in St. Louis since 1886, Sporting News was founded by Alfred H. Spink and later powered by J.G. Taylor Spink, whose name adorns the award given to baseball writers by the Hall of Fame. The archives are more than just the copies of Sporting News itself, they are the spoils of the magazine's place in sports history.

Purchased by Charlotte-based American City Business Journals two years ago, the magazine has evolved from a newspaper-like publication to a glossy to, in a few weeks, its daily online offering. The archives, which were part of the sale, have evolved as well. Alongside little pockets of snipped newspaper articles are rows of the beefy media guides handed out by NCAA Division I football programs.

"It is sad to see it leaving St. Louis, but it's a happy time as well, to know that we're able to keep it in the company," said Tom Wood, senior vice president of Sporting News. "From (the company's) standpoint, this is a valuable resource — one that doesn't exist anywhere else — and is a real benefit to what we do."

Outside the office Gietschier left for the last time Thursday, there were rows of white boxes, holding enough history for a baseball nut to bathe in. The Sporting News' collection has its Clydesdales — 100 letters written by Hall of Famer Cobb, negatives by famed photographer Charles Conlon — but the archives' heart beats in those slender boxes.

They hold the "Baseball Questionnaires."

These single sheets of paper, distributed to players from the 1940s and into the 1980s, contain answers written by the players. In tight print, Mickey Mantle wrote that he enjoys "Hunting & Fishing," and the 'I's' in fishing are dotted with open circles. In left-leaning cursive, Mantle wrote his nickname was "Muscles." Asked to explain how he got it, the Hall of Famer wrote:

"I don't know."

A trip down the alphabet and there's Ed Musial's questionnaire, which explains how he got the nickname "Honey" from a neighbor. Next to Ed's is his brother's questionnaire. The nickname line is filled in with a steady but stylized cursive, "Stan."

"Well, that's from 1942," Gietschier said. "He wasn't 'The Man,' yet."

In 1986, Sporting News celebrated its centennial and Gietschier, a historian by trade, arrived as the first archivist. He dove into a chaotic wave of baseball flotsam and sports jetsam. Every day was Christmas, right down to the some assembly required.

While picking through the clutter, Gietschier found yellowing photos and even glass negatives. The glass negatives were Conlon's. The archives have photos from 1904 to 1942, taken by the photographer famous for tight shots of Babe Ruth's eyes and Mordecai Brown's three-fingered hand. There are 8,000 negatives, many of them fixed on glass.

The archives were open to authors, to journalists, to broadcasters, to members of the Society of American Baseball Researchers (SABR), to anyone. A gentleman from Australia would visit annually to research the National Football League. There are boxes containing cards for every pro baseball player, pre-computers. Their transactions are painstakingly typed out.

"The beauty of this place is that it was a treasure trove of information," Gietschier said. "People in my business, in (the media) business, could come here and get answers. But so could everyone. We were happy to open the archives to the outside world."

Gietschier and other officials with Sporting News looked for a local home for the archives. Several schools were interested, and long discussions were held with Lindenwood University. But before those progressed, Ray Shaw, the chairman of American City Business Journals, looked through the boxes, several officials said. He saw what they had and decided it was too much, too good not to take to Charlotte, Wood said.

The only part of the archives staying behind are bound volumes of Sporting News, dating back to 1886 and the first issue. At the magazine's emptying office in Chesterfield, in a nondescript room, not too far from a honeycomb of cubicles, is a stack of bubble-wrapped books. There on top of the stack was the volume containing coverage from the last time the Cubs won the World Series, 1908.

They are too fragile to travel, waiting for a home.

Most everything else was packed into the trucks. Some will travel separately, securely, like the prized Conlon original prints — which include the well-known shot of Dizzy Dean — and the Cobb letters to J.G. Taylor Spink. Some of them are written in green ink, offering suggestions and criticism. He gives stock tips (big on Coca-Cola) and signs several of them, "As ever, Ty."

Addressed to St. Louis, those are going to Charlotte, too.

Wood said the archives will be used as they always were, to supply information and research for Sporting News' articles and endeavors. He said there has been talk of having a research center where all of the archives are accessible, unlike the past couple of years when most was in storage. But there's also the fear that this history will be rolled away like the final scene of the first "Indiana Jones" movie.

"We will put it to a great use," Wood said. "With the strength of the (archives), we can do some exciting things with it, things that make it even more accessible and more beneficial to us and all the sports world."

[MFL536]

I felt the same way when the same company who purchased sporting news also purchased Street and Smith.I had collected the Street and Smith baseball yearbook since I was a kid and about 15 years ago I went and collected every year form it' since 1941 when it started.this year the company stopped putting it out a street and smith's baseball yearbook and only put out 1 the sporting news baseball yearbook.the format is different so now my collection is ended.there is nothing better than picking up one of the yearbooks from the 40's ,50's 60's etc and remembering when it was still a game
I hope there archive warehouse is not lost and they someday put everything on public display I for one would travel to see it and get lost in reading as much as I could for a couple of days

[SGTD]

You gotta love Big Business :evil: . History and tradition no longer exists. SGT D

[Mean Dean]

Is the original poster from St. Louis? I don't see how it matters whether Charlotte has a baseball team or not. It's not the longtime home of TSN and that kinda sucks, but who cares if they have a baseball team?

Quoting a different person:
[quote:aaae0c9328]I hope there archive warehouse is not lost and they someday put everything on public display I for one would travel to see it and get lost in reading as much as I could for a couple of days[/quote:aaae0c9328]You mean like [url=http://paperofrecord.com/search_paper.asp?PaperId=834]this[/url]?

Pretty lousy that the original poster would speculate that the archive will be removed from public view, when [i:aaae0c9328]the exact opposite has already been done[/i:aaae0c9328], and therefore the original poster has no idea what he's talking about. How many other newspapers have put 125 years/almost 200,000 pages online for free?

[GlenBrummer]

Yes I am from St. Louis. And TSN has been inextricably connected with this city since near baseball's inception in 1886.

No respect for tradition. And yes I think moving it to town with no baseball team and therefore no tradition is not likely to attract baseball fanatics found in towns like NY, Boston, Chicago and on and on.

Finally the new owner's specialty is publishing business journals.

As to the comment about opeing the archives online, I'm not sure what you mean. The article noted that the tradition in St. Louis was to permit anyone--fan, Joe Schmoe or high falutin reporterr access to the archives.

And the treasured archives are not the back issue but rather the letters, questionaires and photos and similar items of history.

But you are right my indignation would not be the same if the TSN was leaving say Seattle. It stings a lot to lose an institution like TSN to our town. Baseball is a religion in St. Louis but the new owners didn't care.

[pwootten]

As I fell in love with baseball in the early 1970's I subscribed to TSN and literally waited by the mail box each week for it to arrive. The publication today is so different from TSN of that period, when an article appeared about each MLB team along with little nuggets of information added at the end, such as "Tiger Tales" and "Metscellaneous". You didn't see baseball on TV as you do today, and for a Marylander like me TSN was the only way to keep track of those "exotic" teams like the Padres, Expos, and Astros.

It was also through TSN of the 70's that I came to love and appreciate good sports journalism. Joe Falls spoke about trips to Milwaukee where he'd have brats and red sauce at Brewer games. Man, I wanted one of those brats! Dick Young would refer to Cosell as "Howie the Shill" and Leonard Koppett and Jerome Holtzman painted pictures with words.

Musings on an older guy,
Paul