I, Sportswriter

I've been a writer almost as long as I can remember. I wasn't producing anything profound by any stretch; some of my earliest work involved creating stories for the Hot Wheels cars that I spent many an hour racing¹ in my room. My love of sports does stretch back as far as I can remember².

I had also established that I wanted to be a journalist at a young age. One project in seventh grade involved picking a career and doing research for it, including shadowing a person of that particular occupation for a day. I followed a reporter at the Sun Newspapers and just thoroughly enjoyed it.

So when I told people I wanted to be a reporter, many of them connected this desire to my love of sports and asked if I wanted to be a sports writer. I scoffed and sneered that I wanted to be a real journalist³. I told those people I wanted to report on things that matter.

How, then, did I get here? I'm officially a semi-professional sports journalist and am currently in talks to run MAC Report Online, as well as an incredible opportunity I'm not going to fully discuss at this time.

What I really wanted to be was a political reporter. What better, to follow the movers and shakers around and tell the world what they were doing⁴? I would be contributing to the democratic process, ensuring an informed electorate. I actually believed this.

So I set out with that goal in mind. I was able to land the statehouse reporter position at The Post, and I did a lot of work that I was proud of. I produced copy that was compared favorably to similar work at major metro dailies. I was doing what I had dreamed of, and I was good at it⁵.

That pretty much ended when I left The Post. I couldn't go back, and when I finally could, I found that I didn't want to. I wrote my column for Speakeasy for a couple years, and it was fun, but it was more an exercise in self-indulgence than anything else.

I finally left Speakeasy when I got tired of its terrible management⁶, and my public outlet for writing, save my blog, went with it. I had my poetry- always have- but that has always been a largely private endeavor. I never really stopped writing, but I felt like I needed an outlet. However, I had become disillusioned with the journalism industry and felt my life going in another direction, so I wasn't sure what to do.

Allow me to rewind a bit. I signed up for the newly-revamped Bobcat Attack forum in early 2005, just as the Ohio basketball team was starting on the run that ended with a MAC tournament championship and a thrilling date with Florida in the NCAA tournament. While I had always been an insanely close follower of sports, my knowledge of them was quite superficial.

Through the forum, I became connected with other fans. I started signing up for other fora and connecting with more people. As I did, I acquired more knowledge. Through these connections, I happened upon The Mid-Majority and Fire Joe Morgan.

While it may seem crazy, I credit these sites with opening my eyes⁷. Through FJM, I learned of sabermetrics⁸, which has been invaluable in fantasy baseball⁹. More importantly, Mid-Majority, and its spin-off site, Basketball State, turned me on to tempo-free stats.

I won't bore you with the specifics, but it's an entirely new, different, and superior method of using statistics to evaluate player performance on the basketball court¹⁰. I saw the value in these stats early on and jumped on them.

One of the other fora I'm a member of is the Buffalo fan site, UBFan. One Buffalo fan, Tim, runs a blog, Hoops Junkie. In January 2007, he decided he was going to go on vacation and needed a couple people to man the ship while he was gone. I figured, hey, why not? So I asked if I could give it a go, and he agreed. And it was fun, so I asked him if I could make more contributions to the site every so often. Apparently, he liked what I wrote¹¹, and he said that was cool.

So I was doing that for a bit, and Dave Ruthenburg, who runs MAC Report Online¹², said Tim sometimes contributed to the site and saw I was writing for HJ as well and wanted to use a couple of my articles on his site. Would that be OK? Yeah, sure. Eventually, he said I was free to submit anything for the site that I felt would be appropriate.

So I was doing writing for Hoops Junkie and MAC Report Online, based solely off of my passion for MAC basketball and writing. I was employing my skills with tempo-free stats¹³, which had grown a considerable amount. I shot off an email this winter to Dave, who had recently moved to Oklahoma, a far cry from MAC land. I asked him if he needed any help covering the tournament. He said yes. I suddenly found myself with a media credential for the MAC tournament.

I ended up covering most of the tournament. I did two of the four games in the first and quarterfinal rounds, plus both semifinals and the finals. It was a blast, and I took in every minute. I even set up a Twitter account for MRO and gained a lot of followers. It was a big hit. The 12-hour days, while tiring, didn't faze me at all.

During the tournament, Dave flew in from OK and we spent most of the latter part of the week sitting next to each other. At some point, he asked me if I would be interested in running the site next year, as he felt like like I was doing good work and he needed someone closer to the ground.

So I went, essentially, from random idiot on a message board to what looks to be the editor of a respected site, as well as the undisclosed opportunity, which I'm actually more excited about, and will explain later. As I joked to Whelliston in Cleveland, I'm a lesser, regional version of him¹⁴.

That took a lot longer to write than I anticipated. Sorry. Still, it's kind of extraordinary journey. I kind of feel bad for people that want to be actual sports writers. I just consider this a hobby that has taken me on a great ride. Don't know where it's going to take me next, but I'm excited to see.

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1 I had tournaments with full brackets and seedings and everything. I even had a rankings system. This was serious business. Acquiring a new Hot Wheels (not a crappy Mattel) was a big deal; I had to see where it fit in in the ranking system, how good of a car it was. I was aware that races were probably influenced as much by the unequal strength of the arms I used to race the cars and that I favored some cars, especially Ferraris, over others, but I didn't care.

2 I remember my first baseball game at the old Municipal Stadium. The Indians were playing the Red Sox, and Mike Greenwell hit a foul ball off the roof of that gigantic stadium. I don't remember how old I was. Maybe four. I do not remember my first basketball game; apparently I saw Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play. My first football game was a Monday Night Football affair in which Bernie Kosar beat Steve Young.

3 I felt that sports reporters weren't taken seriously in the journalism community. I have not been fully disabused of that notion.

4 I was certainly inspired by All the President's Men, but I had already established my intentions to become a journalist before reading it or seeing the movie.

5 If you really want to read my old work, Google "Jeffrey Fitzwater" or search for that in The Post's archives (if they work). You can also ask me and I'll do the searching for you. I'm just that nice.

6 And getting the "Most Improved" award from a first-quarter editor that clearly hadn't even read me before just felt like a slap in the face. I'm not bragging, but I was the site's biggest draw when I was there. At least pretend like you know what you're doing when you're my editor.

7 I should also say that they are/were run by terribly nice people. When FJM decided to hang it up, I sent them all emails to tell them my gratitude for the site, and they graciously wrote back. I have also had the pleasure to hang with Kyle Whelliston, the proprietor of Mid-Majority, on a number of occasions. Great guy.

8 I love, LOVE, the fact that Tufts University actually has a class on this.

9 Since employing these stats when drafting my team, I'm much more successful than I ever was before. It really works! I'm making $30,000 a month working from home! Call now!

10 As Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey said in Michael Lewis' fantastic piece in the New York Times: "Someone created the box score, and he should be shot."

11 I just went back and looked at my first entry on the site, and it's terrible. Boy howdy.

12 The #1 site for Mid-American Conference news! Really.

13 Established sports writers are notoriously slow to adapt to new ways of thinking, especially when it comes to statistics. So, in a way, I'm still kind of on the cutting edge and have even been recognized as such, which is pretty cool.

14 He started Mid-Majority out of love for mid-major basketball. He traveled to games, used the site to chronicle his travels, and ended up as a writer for ESPN and Basketball Times. Now he travels all around the country, is kind of a rock star, and has a lot going for him.