Scrapping my first baseball recap

I had never covered Major League Baseball. That held true until my second day at the Sports Journalism Institute boot camp. The Kansas City Royals were hosting the Chicago White Sox. The series was 1-0 in favor of the Royals. We huddled around a TV at the campus newspaper Missourian newsroom. The purpose was to get prepared for covering Sunday’s game. There were 11 of us. Some of us had extensive experience with baseball; others were just learning how to keep score. All of us were about to partake in an exercise that took our understanding of a newspaper deadline to its limits. Through nine and a half innings, we had all written out a basic game recap and were waiting to send them in. With the White Sox up 7-1, we were patiently waiting for the uneventful game to end. Then, in the span of 15 minutes, life lessons were dished out like pop quizzes to each and every one of us.

That morning, we had a video conference call with MLB.com Astros beat writer Alyson Footer. She broke down the basics of the game and provided some insight into what it takes to be successful in this field. What stuck out to all of us though, was her warning about being prepared to write recaps within three minutes of the game ending; her foreshadowing of knowing that at any moment, you might have to scrap an entire recap based on last minute events. That’s exactly what happened. The Royals scored seven straight runs, and Eric Hosmer hit a walk-off single, sending out a rippling effect of deleted paragraphs and changed narratives. We might not have been pleased with the result, but we all learned.  -- Hayden Kim