Change Up
Baseball writer Buster Olney tells Jose Negroni what it is like to go from the dugout to the sky box.
THERE'S a big hole in the sports pages of The New York Times. Buster Olney, who won the admiration of many readers because of his lyricism, his graceful succinctness, his electric metaphors and his precise analysis, is gone. He traded himself to the magazines, leaving behind a remarkable newspaper career. He covered minor league baseball, the San Diego Padres, the Baltimore Orioles, the New York Mets, football's New York Giants and the New York
Yankees dynasty of recent years. After seven years at The Times, Olney abandoned daily journalism in 2003 to become a magazine writer. He now turns out four columns a month for ESPN The Magazine. As he expected, he has found that magazine journalism is a different writing game, one that has offered him some calmness at a time when he needed it and has allowed him to get into a flow.
He now also appears on ESPN's cable channels and has finished a book about the Yankees' championship run of the late Nineties—"The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty"—is scheduled for release in July. His new, less frantic schedule also allowed time for him to talk with NYRM and provide some insights into the differences between working for newspapers and magazines:
"I left The New York Times because I wasn't too happy. In the spring of 2003, Howell Raines [then executive editor] was changing the sports section to make college football a priority, and I wasn't too thrilled. So I could either leave or complain to my wife. That's when ESPN called."
"I don't think my style has changed. The magazine can bend for me—it allows me to have a certain pacing. For The New York Times the words are flashier, but you have to grind it out."
"At a newspaper, I was expected to turn in eight-hundred words, whereas in the magazine I can write in long form and submit twenty-five hundred. When you're writing a daily story, you can't always tell about how a catcher sets up, and details like that. So, the magazine definitely has more sex appeal. And you're not required to stay in the locker room making sure that no one spends more time there than you do."
"I did like the adrenaline of working for a daily newspaper—you got instant feedback. Yet after working for twenty-five years, you may get cynical. In the fifteenth and twentieth year, you start saying, 'Yeah, I know that.' So you need something that is going to challenge you."
"Before, I would wake up at 11 a.m., read, write or take a nap till 2 p.m., and then head out to the ballpark until 2 a.m. I miss it a little bit, but I have children now that I have to think about."
"My family was a huge factor when it came
time to make my decision. I couldn't spend a
hundred and fifty nights a year in hotel rooms
and consider myself a good father. Now, I
make sure I'm with my daughters from seven
to ten every night. I grew up helping out on
my dad's farm, pushing around Jersey cows,
so I know my job covering baseball is a gift.
Still, I don't want to feel like I shortchanged
my children. As a parent, I don't want to do a
rotten job of balancing my time."
