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 BATgirl Returns Four-peater Ginnetti is a mean clean prognosticating machine. Though the Bulls were also pretty consistent, the mid-90s can be rightly remembered as the Toni Ginnetti era. The Sun-Times sports sage won the coveted BAT award three times in a six-year span and was never out of contention. Ginnetti, always modest in victory, bestrode the times. But after her last title in 1998, Ginnetti found victory harder to come by. Perhaps it was simply that the competition grew ever fiercer for the prestigious BAT, or that major league baseball became too volatile to reward rational analysis -- wild-card teams like Anaheim and Florida were emerging from nowhere to win unlikely championships and promptly vanish. Though Ginnetti often came close, a fourth BAT eluded her grasp. Some began to whisper that prognostically she'd passed her prime. The BAT, of course -- standing for Baseball Acumen Test -- is the highest aspiration of every Chicago sportswriter aside from a free postgame buffet. Each spring the BAT honors the writer who a year earlier foresaw most clearly the approaching season's pennant races. Founded by Hot Type columnist Neil Tesser back in 1981 to test his theory that crack baseball writers are no more insightful than a litter of wombats, the annual BAT competition has by and large proved Tesser right. Yet it's also established over the years that some scribes are far shrewder judges of a 25-man roster than others. For instance, former Sun-Times baseball writer Dave van Dyck -- whom Ginnetti acknowledges as her mentor -- won four BATs before leaving the paper. That was a remarkable feat. But finally Ginnetti's matched it. In 2004 she prevailed by every measure. She accurately called the Twins to take the AL Central, the Yankees the AL East, and the Dodgers the NL West, and both the Red Sox and Astros to reach the playoffs as wild cards. No one else did as well. But what really separates her from the pack is this: she actually picked the wild-card Red Sox to become not merely the American League pennant winners but world champions. Only one other vote was cast for the Bosox to shatter the Curse of the Bambino, that of her Sun-Times colleague Doug Padilla. To retain a sense of perspective, allow me to point out that neither Ginnetti nor anyone else had a clue about the Saint Louis Cardinals, who only won 105 games and the NL pennant. A pity. Any sportswriter who'd done justice by the Redbirds (a team I am not indifferent to) would have been exempted automatically from consideration for the Whiffle BAT, which can be construed as a consolation prize for trying hard but is more accurately the mark of Cain. At any rate, this year's Whiffle BAT goes to last year's Golden BAT laureate, Jay Mariotti of the Sun-Times. Others named fewer playoff teams, but Mariotti earned the trophy for picking the Red Sox to win the American League pennant and the Yankees the World Series. Mariotti might want a word with his copy editors. As a virtual award, the BAT can be made of any material. Most years a Golden BAT is awarded, but the BAT reflects its times: back in 1992, for instance, it was renamed the Cupronickel BAT in deference to a recession so desperate that Americans elected a Democrat president. It became the Lead Slug BAT to register the nation's contempt after big-league baseball hit rock bottom in 1994 and suspended the season rather than come to terms with the players' union. The 2000 elections brought yet another change -- the 2001 Dimpled Chad BAT, appropriately given to a sportswriter who finished second. This year I'm marking the zeitgeist -- as in "They told me it was just some kind of liniment" -- by awarding the first Clear Cream BAT. Anxiously I dialed Ginnetti's number. It took a moment or two, or maybe less, for her to compose herself after learning of her triumph, and then I put the question to her. Are you clean? I said. Or was your brilliant comeback performance pharmaceutically enhanced? "No, not at all," she said. "Whenever I go to the doctor the only things he has to test me for are the usual things." Over the years many BAT laureates have candidly shared their championship techniques with me, and it can be said that picking winners often involves about 30 seconds of focus in a barroom setting. It's the rare set of predictions that hasn't been pharmaceutically enhanced. But I trust Ginnetti. "Was it because I picked Boston?" she asked, correctly guessing what clinched her victory. Like almost everyone else, Ginnetti put misplaced faith in last year's Cubs, and she went as far as to envision the Red Sox and Cubs meeting in the World Series. So what it came down to in the end, she said, was her conviction that Cubs futility would prove an even more powerful force than Red Sox futility. But she's not one to dwell on success. "Didn't I pick Seattle?" she said. So she did, and Seattle finished 63-99, last in the AL West. "I sort of remember my picks, but the ones that were so wrong I think, 'God, what was I thinking!'" No doubt it's this perfectionism, which no pill, ointment, or suppository can supply, that has made Ginnetti a great champion. "Sometimes I'm a year off," she mused. "I remember being a year off on Philadelphia when they won. Maybe I'm a year off on Seattle." Pioneer's New Frontier The writers and editors of the Pioneer Press gathered in Glenview on March 31 to listen to the new editor in chief, John Ambrosia, describe the future. Ambrosia said the chain of suburban weeklies had been covering the same beats in the same way for decades and it was time to change that. "Right now we're set up on the principle, more or less, of one town and one paper and one staff writer devoted to that town exclusively," he told me after the meeting. "I propose to take a fifth or a sixth of the staff and dedicate them to business and regional issues, have them out in the street more, working different sources. For example, the business community is really the life's blood of a town as much as the village hall is. We do a magnificent job of covering school boards, municipal governments, civic events, but not so much covering regional and business issues with local import." Ambrosia wants select reporters and editors to develop areas of expertise -- regional planning, for example -- and produce broadly focused reports that individual papers can then massage to play up a local angle. "For instance," he said, "we have lots of publicly held companies in our coverage area, but we don't do a good job of interviewing CEOs. We cover transportation as controversy, but we don't keep tabs on plans for transportation." A young Pioneer reporter told me the reaction to Ambrosia's plans turned on how "entrenched" the reporter was who was reacting. "For me, it's a no-brainer," he said. "I think it's exciting. Ambrosia's general theme was getting away from covering the same 12 village officials and quoting them week after week." Ambrosia says it'll be at least two months before his new ideas show up in his papers. |
