…so this entry is a bit of an aside about my hopes for someday becoming a sports journalist and how I recently got to spend a day living the life of one, thanks to my summer internship.

Anyway, I’ve been a big news junkie since I was a kid. I guess it comes from the fact that my parents always kept a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle around and the television turned to KQED or CNN growing up. When I was eight or nine I decided I was dead-set on becoming a writer later on in my life, and that morphed into my aspirations of being some kind of journalist when I hit high school and started writing for our paper (which was called The Scroll, for anyone who might care in the slightest. Our mascot was a knight, so I guess that went with the whole medieval theme we had going on).

From the time I became a really big sports fan about seven or eight years ago, I started reading the Sporting Green in the Chronicle every day, pretty much cover to cover. During the baseball season I read all of the game reviews from Henry Schulman (the Giants’ beat writer), and columnists such as Scott Ostler, Ray Ratto and Bruce Jenkins. I read their articles not only for further knowledge and analysis of the teams I loved, but also to pick up on their reporting and writing styles; the way guys like Ratto and Ostler so smoothly incorporated puns and jabs into their columns, the way Jenkins could so eloquently set a scene of utter jubilation or desolation. I was probably the only kid at my high school (and definitely the only female) who brought the Sporting Green to class every day and read it in between periods (yeah I know, I’m kind of a dork). I’m such a news junkie that I have a box of sports page clippings in my closet at home that I kept to memorialize great and historically good/bad games, mostly by the Giants (e.g, Lincecum’s first Major League start, Bonds’ home run chase, the horrific grand slam loss to the Rockies last year) but also with some guest appearances from the Warriors and their “We Believe” season.

But I’m getting off-topic a bit with my baseball/journalism nerdiness. My point is that I’m sure there are some downsides to being a beat writer, aka that all the traveling and bag-searching hastles at airports gets old, and the press box food might not be all that great, and you’re away from your family a lot of the time. But since I haven’t had that many opportunities to travel in my life, I see some hidden glamour in the life of a beat writer who bounces from Pittsburgh in one night to Miami the next. Just being able to follow around a team of professional athletes and watching baseball and getting paid for it sounds like a dream come true, even if you have to deal with the athletes that hate the media (a la Barry Bonds in his playing days) or the ones that always spew out Bull Durham esque cliched responses (which from my outside perspective seems like a good majority of baseball players).

Speaking of which, I guess this is as good a place as any to get into the meat of this entry, which is how my summer internship got me standing within an arms’ length of Buster Posey last month.

Basically, I’m a summer intern with a television news station in San Francisco. To be specific I intern with the sports department, which means I go to work twice a week and get academic credit for watching Giants games and writing down highlights, along with doing some other odd jobs around the station. It’s a cool internship that’s given me an opportunity to delve into another media, aka broadcast journalism, which I’m not as familiar with.

As I discovered on July 18, there are also some other perks to this internship, like the opportunity to shadow a sports reporter/anchor around at the Giants’ ballpark and into the press box and locker room for postgame interviews with the players. Most Giants fans probably remember that game, if not by the date than at least by saying “that last game of the Mets series.”

Yeah. That game. Where the umpire called Travis Ishikawa, the winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning, out at home when a replay later showed he was safe. The game we eventually lost when we should’ve instead swept New York.

But anyway, it’s woulda coulda shoulda at this point. It’s just that context is necessary for describing what my experience was like. Because you don’t quite know the expression “so silent you could hear a pin drop” until you find yourself in the locker room of a professional sports team that has suffered such a blow.

All the journalists stood milling around in the center of the clubhouse for about ten minutes, barely talking in murmured voices amongst themselves as they waited for the players to come in from the showers etc. I remember noticing Matt Cain sitting in front of his locker, his head propped up by his chin (think of “The Thinker” pose) and a distinct frown on his face. You could tell he was really thinking about that game, delving into it in his mind for a good long while, letting the loss that should’ve been a victory wash over him. And he hadn’t even pitched that day; it was a Jonathan Sanchez start, if my memory serves me correctly. It shows you how competitive he is and how he takes a loss seriously; he isn’t one of those athletes that will joke around with other guys in the clubhouse as long as he had a good day pitching or at the plate, even if the team itself lost.

But anyway, it was really interesting seeing all the journalists work. It was like they were a pack of animals or something; they all traveled in a herd and surrounded one player when they saw he was dressed/almost dressed and started asking him questions before all finding the next guy they wanted to talk to. It was as if it was synchronized, although I guess these guys have been in the business so long that they just do this instinctually. They all surrounded Pablo Sandoval, asking him the typical questions you’d imagine for that game (how bad the loss was, how he did at the plate, if he thought Ishi was safe, etc.), then moved across the clubhouse to Brian Wilson, who had come into the tenth inning tie and given up the go-ahead run to New York. He took the entire blame for the loss and, as you can imagine, spoke in a pretty reserved tone. The reporters bounced around to Ishikawa, Posey and Aubrey Huff (who, by the way was clad in purple plaid golf pants–a vibrant shade of purple, too–with a white belt and matching shoes; pretty stylish get-up, actually) before dispersing from the clubhouse.

It was definitely cool to see these guys that I’ve followed since I was a kid–Schulman, Ostler and other reporters–interview the athletes that I pretty much worship on a day-to-day basis. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit awkward and out of place, 1. because I was clearly the youngest one there, and therefore probably didn’t resemble a reporter, and 2. because I’m female. I know that women reporters are allowed in locker rooms and all that, but I was torn between glimpsing around and trying to check out Tim Lincecum and Buster Posey (who I admitedly like for more than their talent on the field) and keeping my eyes towards the ground or an inanimate object so as to not suddenly look up and find myself staring at a naked Pablo Sandoval (although yeah, I did see him shirtless…and I know he’s got enough people harping on him for his weight, but let’s just say the ‘Panda’ nickname is warranted). Quick aside–excuse any shallowness that I might have just exuded there. But come on, I am a twenty-year-old girl, so of course I’m going to notice if some of these athletes are cute.

But all-in-all I left the ballpark that day feeling pretty awed, and the whole experience definitely increased my fervor for wanting to become a sports journalist someday, if that could possibly pan out for me.

If you got through all that and my random asides to boot, congrats–and lemme know what you thought of it!

Go Giants in Atlanta!