Smaller and Smaller

When Clare was a junior and senior in high school, I “did the book,” as the saying goes.  That meant scoring games, keeping team stats, rating the umpires and calling the newspapers with capsule summaries of our wins.  Nowadays, anyone keeping the book wouldn’t have to bother calling the papers.  Why?  Because they couldn’t care less, at least not about girls’ softball.

In the seven years since Clare graduated Morton West, softball has virtually disappeared from the sports’ pages of the Sun-Times and the Tribune.  Yesterday, Oak Park-River Forest—one of our big non-conference rivals—won the big-school state softball championship; according to Clare, the winning pitcher is going to Auburn, which should qualify as big news.  In the Tribune, it was worth one sentence (as it was for boys’ baseball).  The Sun-Times didn’t even bother reporting on softball.

Over on the pro side, the WNBA Sky are back to sentence-paragraph coverage; the earlier stories were just a dead-cat bounce, the extra space devoted to the Sky playing their ex-star, Elena Delle Donne.  You’d almost think the papers don’t care.

But wait, they cover the French Open, if only with wire stories.  Do you think it has anything to do with getting to run photos of leggy women athletes the way the Times did today?  Nah.