By T.J. Simers
A dear old friend emailed outraged about what is happening to the LA Times sports section.
He was still giddy about the Angels’ amazing, super, dramatic comeback twice to beat the hated Astros Saturday.
“Not a word about it in the LA Times,” he wrote. “Ohtani started the comeback rally with a massive HR. Maybe you can read about it in the LA Times on Monday.”
He was so angry, mentioning he has two subscriptions to the Times, one of his own and one for one of his children, and now he’ going to cancel both.”
He’s dead wrong, of course.
The Angels won 13-12 in maybe the most exciting game of the year, but the Los Angeles Times doesn’t care. Never has about the Angels. You have seen how the Times covers the Angels and doesn’t cover them on the road,
Even if the paper had not made so many dreadful changes, dear old friend, a 13-12 classic would not have been enough to get the paper to make an adjustment. They went with giant pictures of Ohtani on two of the paper’s first four days as a magazine because everything in this new-look section doesn’t make sense.
And they would probably have had Sarah Valenzuela writing about the dramatic game, and that would have sucked the joy right out of the feel-good story.
She was still writing about Ohtani’s finger bothering him and what happened Friday night in Sunday morning’s newspaper.
Her only timely writing came in a tweet Saturday night, taking a selfie to show how she almost got nailed by a foul ball in the press box. Very dramatic.
On this, the one-week anniversary of the Times going into the dumper with a format change, people thought I was kidding when I said they were going to get four-straight days of soccer coverage on the first sports page. Three down and one to go.
The newspaper has been horrible, lousy and unreadable this week. They ran 26 letters to the editor online, and speaking from previous experience, no matter how bad the reaction to anything they could always muster a couple of positive responses.
It was 26-0 in describing the Times as an atrocity now online, by the time they made it to the newspaper the editors had cut eight negative letters, making it only 18-for-18 in negative reaction.
The Times has made it clear it is not going to listen to its subscribers, running the letters and then a “thank you for subscribing” letter from Sports Editor Iliana Romero. I’m not sure if she typed it with one finger, but in other words, we don’t care; we’re going to do what we like.
I stand amazed at the Times reluctance to make its better writers write, while filling the newspaper with soccer, WNBA and women’s track. Homeless soccer, and three pages of it?
And where’s Plaschke? Still pouting about becoming the Page 7 columnist? I hope he’s not ill or under suspension like people guessed when I went missing a decade ago,
We’ve had two Helene Elliott columns two days in a row. Need I say more?
The times used to have a DD1 page for the online paper. Why don’t they put in some DD pages that has real sport news for the people that read the paper online. There must be more people like me that only get the paper online. These pages would only be in the online paper – so they could be added later after the 3 PM cut-off.
A 3 PM cut-off is ridiculous..