Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

Richard Sandomir of the New York Times has the latest of what’s happening, or not happening, with ESPN’s Undefeated.

More than two years into the gestation of The Undefeated, ESPN’s website about sports and race, the site exists in digital limbo.

It has no start date. It has no permanent leader. Its seven writers are still reporting stories, but they must find editors in other parts of ESPN because the site lacks an editorial infrastructure.

For now, The Undefeated is a shell of what it aspires to be: Its home page serves only to link to eight articles, three of them posted since the departure of Jason Whitlock, the site’s founding editor in chief. Whitlock, who had been hired by ESPN’s president, John Skipper, was ousted two months ago, reportedly amid concerns about his divisive management style.

The current plan is to post one piece a week until a launch that may not happen for several more months. Many, including those inside and outside ESPN, have begun to wonder if it will happen at all.

Richard Deitsch of SI.com talks to women reporters about encountering sexual harassment on the beat.

Barrett Sports Media thinks it is time for more women to be featured on sports talk radio.

Bryan Curtis of Grantland examines why the media loves Jordan Spieth.

Dan Levy of Awful Announcing writes about Robert Griffin III’s problems with the media.

Michael Bradley of the National Sports Journalism Center believes NBC made a mistake replacing Mike Mayock with Doug Flutie on Notre Dame football.

Ken Fang of Awful Announcing has a Q/A with Adam Schein about his new show on CBS Sports Network.

Neil Best of Newsday with a great column remembering the days of Sports Phone.

Tim Graham of the Buffalo News discusses his approach to writing long features with Mark Selig of Backstory.

Sports Book Reviews has a review of “Split Season” by Jeff Katz about the 1981 strike-plagued year in baseball. I read the book and highly recommend.

So I am walking through the various galleries at the Baseball Hall of Fame on a Wednesday morning, looking at Stan Musial’s locker and Sandy Koufax’s jersey, when all of the sudden I hear my name on the loud speaker.

“Come hear author Ed Sherman talk about his book on Babe Ruth’s Called Shot in the Bullpen Theater at 1,” the voice said.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine hearing my name ring out through the hallowed Halls of Cooperstown. And it didn’t just happen once. It happened several times prior to my chat.

Now that is a true bucket list moment.

All in all, it was one of the more memorable days of my career. Many thanks to Bruce Markusen for inviting me to speak during the Hall’s author series during the summer.

Also thanks to Greg Klein of the Cooperstown Crier for his story about my talk.

Did Babe Ruth really call his home run in Game 3 of the World Series on Oct. 1, 1932? Even the author investigating it this decade can’t be certain, but he does have an opinion. 

“The intellectual part of me says, ‘no, it didn’t happen the way it was depicted in the movies,’” said Ed Sherman, author of the book, “Babe Ruth’s Called Shot, The Myth and Mystery of Baseball’s Greatest Home Run.”

Sherman, a longtime reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who now runs the website Shermanreport.com, said that it is more likely Ruth was engaging the Chicago Cubs players, who had been taunting him during the game. 

“Is he pointing? Is he telling (Cubs pitcher Charlie) Root, I am going to knock this down your throat? If so, he missed by about 490 feet,” Sherman said. “He is definitely challenging the Cubs.

“The Cubs were taunting him by saying things I would not say here in a family situation,” he continued. “It is amazing to think about today, but they actually had players standing on-field taunting him.”

Sherman interviewed dozens of people for the book, including witnesses who were at Wrigley Field, and Ruth’s daughter. He even spoke with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who was 12 when he attended the game. Stevens told Sherman he wasn’t sure if Ruth called his shot. However, in a later interview with Scott Pelley for “60 Minutes,” Stevens said Ruth did call it. 

Other witnesses’ accounts proved to be equally unreliable, Sherman said.

“If you were at the game, you want to say he called his shot, because you want to be part of history,” he said. 

I hope the Babe was listening somewhere.

Among the many things I never expected to do in my life is speak at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

So I was excited when Bruce Markusen invited me to participate in the Hall’s author series about my book, “Babe Ruth’s Called Shot.” It was a big thrill just seeing my name on the Hall of Fame’s home page with the write-up below. I look forward to sharing my experience in a future post.

I will be speaking at 1 p.m. on Wednesday. So as Harry Caray would say, “If you’re in the neighborhood, come on down.”

My long-time Chicago Tribune colleague Phil Hersh wrote about losing his Baseball Hall of Fame vote. Hersh has been making his selections since 1983, but a new regulation requires the voters be active baseball writers within the last 10 years.

I know Phil put considerable time and effort into his vote even though he hasn’t covered baseball on a regular basis for years.

Hersh writes:

That move will delight the anonymous Twitter trolls who have hectored me every year to give up my vote because they apparently are upset that I roundly dismiss the candidacies of players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, whose use of PEDs was apparent, admitted or both.

My only regret in losing the vote now is not having a further voice in shutting that crowd out of Cooperstown until their 15 years of eligibility is over. One can only hope that 26 percent of the 520 or so remaining voters will continue to bar the door.

“My only regret in losing the vote now is not having a further voice in shutting that crowd out of Cooperstown until their 15 years of eligibility is over.” Players are only eligible for 10 years now, a change made on 7/27/2014. If you can’t even keep up with changes like this,…

Truth be told, excluding those who are not covering Major League Baseball on a regular basis seems a reasonable move, even if many of us in that category devoted considerable time and thought to the task.

An excerpt of my latest column for the Chicago Tribune:

You also could access the entire column via my Twitter feed @Sherman_Report

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Mark Giangreco was fuming Thursday.

In previous years, WLS-7 would shoot extensive footage of drills during the Bears’ first day of training camp. However, the team’s new media policies limited his crew to shooting only eight minutes of the players stretching.

“The NFL is the most powerful and paranoid entity in all of American sports,” Giangreco said. “It wants to completely sanitize, sterilize and filter every piece of information. … It’s an absurd joke.”

Giangreco was reacting to the new training camp media policies new coach John Fox and general manager Ryan Pace have instituted. The Bears contend the regulations will help protect their strategic information from opposing scouts.

The new policies only affect the 15 days of training camp before the second exhibition. After that, normal regular-season regulations go into place.

Among the items from a list of training camp guidelines reporters received Wednesday upon arriving in Kankakee:

•Television stations and photographers won’t be allowed to shoot any video or photos during team drills. They can shoot stretching and individual position periods, but even then the Bears request the cameramen “shoot tight.”

•Reporters can’t blog or tweet any “team strategy or injury specifics” during practice. For instance, the guideline says, “No reporting of which players are practicing with individual units.”

•There will be no player availability off the field after practice, another departure from previous years. Reporters now have to put in a request for an interview.

Scott Hagel, the Bears’ vice-president of communications, says the arrival of Fox and Pace are “part of the reason” for the shifts in media policies, but not all of it.

“This time was coming,” Hagel said. “The Internet is not like it was 10 years ago. It’s a different world. It is easier to see and gain access to certain things. We want to make sure we’re smart with what we’re doing.”

Scanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

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Sports Media Watch with an interesting post on how ESPN is losing pace with its broadcast rivals.

While the primary rationale behind the shift of sporting events from ABC to ESPN was that younger viewers could not tell the difference, the fact that ESPN was in so many homes was another plus in the network’s favor. Crossing the 100 million threshold made ESPN a virtual peer of the broadcast networks, especially given the trend of seemingly exponential growth. Now, putting an event on ESPN rather than ABC means sacrificing nearly 10 million more homes than it did four years ago, at a time when cable appears to be in decline.

Perhaps that explains why ESPN, after years of starving ABC of major sporting events, has started to bolster the offerings on its broadcast sibling. Having exclusive rights to an NFL playoff game was a major milestone for ESPN and cable generally. Going back on that after one year was a surprising move, and a telling one. While January’s Cardinals/Panthers Wild Card Game was a major success for ESPN — ranking among the ten most-watched cable programs ever — it was also the NFL’s lowest rated playoff game in at least 17 years. If the NFL has the kind of relationship with ESPN that is so often suggested, one can imagine ESPN executives heard from the league about those numbers.

Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing looks at the reasons why the Brickyard 500 aired on NBCSN instead of NBC.

And it’s just those carriage contracts that make the Brickyard 400 and other premier events so important to NBCSN.  While ratings might be down for the event versus its time on ESPN, the record setting ratings for NBCSN are important ammunition to try and gain more revenue through increasing subscriber fees.  And yes, it’s well worth the tradeoff in viewers, at least for the network.  It’s the same reason why NBC puts a couple Stanley Cup Final games on NBCSN each year.  To become a bigger player in the sports media world, NBC needs to put more premier live sports on NBCSN.

The great Frank Deford is the subject of the latest “Still No Cheering in the Press Box” series by the Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland.

Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing notes ESPN still has not hired a new ombudsman to replace Robert Lipsyte.

Deadline Detroit has excerpts from Tom Gage’s induction speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The former beat writer for the Detroit Tiger was the subject of last week’s column.

Richard Deitsch of SI.com talks with women in sports media about how they do their jobs while pregnant.

Dan Shaughnessy has a fun column about looking through the Boston Globe’s sports desk Rolodex of phone numbers.

I have mixed emotions about this.

First, the news from the Hall:

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On the one hand, it definitely was time to evaluate who is voting for the Hall. The list includes voters who haven’t covered the game in decades, not just years.

However, the move will eliminate voters who did put their time in way back when, earning the right to vote for the Hall. They still avidly follow the game.

Still, it will be good for the Hall and the BWAA to review who exactly is voting and whether that person is qualified.

The voting ranks for many big awards and honors needs to be reduced. They have become too bloated with too many voters who aren’t qualified. Next up should be the Heisman.