bonds watch
Just before midnight tonight, my life changed. I was standing up, keys in hand, ready to leave work for the night, when I glanced up at the newsroom television set.
"He's up!" someone called from the sports department. And we all held our breath and waited to see if maybe this time Barry Bonds would break Hank Aaron's home run record.
Okay, yeah, so I'm not a sports fan. I'm not from San Francisco, and I wouldn't recognize Bonds if he was standing next to me at the bus stop. I shouldn't have been invested one way or the other. But trust me, it meant a lot to see him bash that ball into the stands and round the bases: It meant the end of the Bonds Watch.
You see, East Coast newspapers have a difficult time with West Coast games. It's tough to get final game stats in the paper when most games don't start till 10 p.m. and we have a midnight deadline. But when there's a potential big record-breaker, we have to have all kinds of contingency plans. We have to figure out how to change our layouts and when to send the color plates to the press, and who's going to fix what to make sure the papers go out reasonably on time and with full coverage.
Tonight, for instance, I had to plan my front-page design around "Well, if Bonds breaks the record, we'll have to move the Utah mine story to an inside page and put the fancy pre-made '756' teaser in its place. At midnight."
So as I watched fans scramble for The Baseball That'll Break eBay, I felt a mixture of joy and chagrin. Joy, because now I won't have to plan my every cover page around Barry Bonds. And chagrin, because all that work I did to get the miner story on A1 was for naught.
That's okay, though. There won't be a Bonds Watch tomorrow, and that's good enough for me.