Ken Rosenthal

Interview

COVID-19 has created a lull in the sports world. This spring training was different for me because for the first time in my 30 years of marriage my wife had accompanied me to Arizona. I was in my hotel room writing a story when the news about the basketball player [Rudy Gobert] broke. I knew right then the sports world was in for a seismic shift.

Instead of having my days full of interviews, shows, reporting, and writing, I have to find other ways to stay busy. I have focused most of my time on The Athletic, but we are slowly starting to tape shows on MLB Network via Zoom. As for Fox, I will start appearing on their show, but the volume of shows is not there. Lately I have focused on writing featured stories. My most recent stories are about a former player [Victor Martinez] who is now a horse owner going into the Kentucky Derby and a former MLB player that will be playing over in Japan this season. These are things that I will be focusing on until updates occur. An update happened today in Toronto with the announcement of no public events until June 30th.

I have covered sports for the past 25 years and have never seen the sports world so quiet. Sports are an outlet for people in distress and now that’s gone. My profession of sports journalism has seen a massive amount of unemployment. Careers are at stake, but right now health is paramount, and I don’t want to write a sad story about sports writers.

Another update is the agreement between MLB and the MLBPA [3/31/2020], and that is something of an accomplishment considering they’ve been at odds for a while. COVID-19 provided urgency to reach a decision. Like any labor agreement there’s give and take, but in this situation, there were not going to be winners. There are only losers. The players got what they wanted: service time. No matter how short or if the season is played, the players will get the number of days that they earned the previous season.  Service time is what gets them salary arbitration and free agency. One source told me that’s worth $800 million in a single season. However, they suffered on the salary front because Commissioner Rob Manfred has the right under the Uniform Player Contract to withhold salary in the event of a national emergency. The players ended up with $170 million to be divided up among the 1,200 men on the 40 men rosters. The money received by the players will be kept in a cancelled season and retained as an advance in a shortened season, with their salaries pro-rated. The most contentious point of the agreement was the amateur draft. MLB at one point wanted to cancel the draft and combine the 2020 and 2021 classes. The players negotiated that MLB can reduce the draft to as few as five rounds as well as defer the bonuses the players sign.

Gaining the trust of the organizations and players has afforded me the opportunity to gather the information that I receive. I believe there are four things that have given me that trust: (1) be a good listener, (2) be fair, (3) prove yourself on a daily basis in your work to show how serious you are, and (4) be effective at communicating what you are trying to communicate. A big challenge with trust is that it comes and goes with people, not because of necessarily things I might do but because they might get ticked off at me for something, this does happen quite frequently, but ultimately if you have that trust and then they are going to come back. Because they’re going to realize, okay, they might have been upset about something that maybe I said or wrote but I’m not coming from a place where I have an agenda. My only agenda in a perfect world should be to serve the reader in a maximum way. It doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes I’m played without knowing it. I try to not let it happen, but I am not going say it’s never happened. Before I make any information public, I like to have multiple sources with confirmation. There are certain situations where I take one and go with it because that source has direct knowledge of the situation. I don’t do that often because it goes against journalistic principles.

Throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview a multitude of people. The three most surprising interviews were: Dusty Baker, Manny Machado, and Carlos Correa. Dusty’s was a few years ago and it was a rambling one-hour conversation. He was out of baseball and I wanted his opinion on different issues in baseball. When I finished the interview, I thought I had nothing, but once I transcribed the interview, I realized how direct he was. Machado’s interview that aired on Fox Sports during the 2018 NLCS sent waves throughout the industry. The interview was focused around his on-field incidents during his career and then he gave the “I’m not Johnny Hustle” answer. I put the full context out there and I believe Fox aired most of the interview. He was being honest but got crushed for it. Finally, we have Correa’s interview from spring training. I knew he was going to have some strong things to say about the criticism that he and the Astros were getting, especially from Cody Bellinger. I didn’t know he was going to go as far as he did. It was surprising, electric, and quite a thing.