An excerpt from my latest Chicago Tribune column:

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The calendar might say 2015, but it seemed like 1965 for many women in sports media Thursday.

The sexism that gets mocked in “Mad Men” played out in a regrettable Twitter exchange between WSCR-AM 670’s Dan Bernstein and Matt Spiegel about CSN’s Aiyana Cristal. Once again, the latest episode served to underscore the challenges that remain undeniably vivid for women in the business.

It began Wednesday when Spiegel issued a tweet questioning Cristal’s broadcast ability while serving as an anchor for “SportsNet Central.” Bernstein responded with a tweet making a sexist comment about Cristal’s looks. Follow-up tweets by Bernstein only made the situation worse.

Bernstein admitted on air he didn’t realize he was in the middle of a blazing social media firestorm until he woke up Thursday morning. Only then did it hit him that making Twitter comments about a woman sports anchor’s appearance probably wasn’t a good career move.

Bernstein and Spiegel both issued profuse on-air apologies for their roles during their cross-talk session, which sounded like a roundtable mea culpa.

“I’m an idiot,” Bernstein said. “There are times when you can be childish and crass and other times when it’s really stupid to be a child. My tweet was childish and unnecessary.”

Bernstein later added, “I’m sorry I dragged in an innocent person who is just trying to do a job.”

Michael Jordan doesn’t sit down for many long interviews these days. However, he was all in when the subject was Dean Smith.

Jordan and numerous other former North Carolina stars are featured in a new documentary, “Dean Smith,” which debuts tonight on Showtime at 8 p.m. The film is a one-hour tribute to the legendary coach, who died in February.

Jordan speaks at length at the impact Smith had on him as a player who went on to stardom with the Bulls.

“I had some rawness to me. He shaped all that,” Jordan said. “I learned a lot. It made me so much better as a professional basketball player.”

James Worthy summed up the feeling of all the players who played for Smith.

“He’s still our coach,” Worthy says. “He’s still our coach.”

Congratulations to Bob Ryan for winning the APSE’s biggest award.

From Joe Sullivan’s write-up on the APSE site:

Now Ryan is also a Red Smith Award winner, chosen as the 2015 recipient by members of APSE and presented to an individual who has made a significant contribution to sports journalism.

 “I’m looking at the list of names (who’ve won the Red Smith Award), and it’s thrilling and humbling to be included among them,’’ said Ryan. “It’s everything I would ever have wanted to do in this business, to think I’d have my name associated with those people.

 “There were two particular inspirations in Jim Murray and Frank Deford. And I’m thrilled to be joining a beloved colleague in Bud Collins, of course.’’

My latest for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana:

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I walked into Walgreen’s the other day, and there it was on the magazine rack: The 2015 edition of “Who’s Who in Baseball.”

The annual book had its familiar red cover. Mike Trout is the featured player this year with smaller head shots of last year’s Cy Young Award winners Clayton Kershaw and Corey Kluber and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Adrian Gonzalez, last year’s National League RBI champion.

Naturally, I plunked down my $9.95 for the digest-sized book. It’s a late winter/early spring ritual for me dating back more than four decades. Did I actually write 40 years? I actually had some heart palpitations with that sentence as the years start to add up when you hit your mid-50s.

I came along just past the book’s midpoint in its history. The annual series hits an important milestone this year. To celebrate, Lyons Press has published “100 Years of Who’s Who in Baseball.”

Long before baseball got bombarded with statistics measuring every possible metric, “Who’s Who” put out its first book in 1912 with a drawing of Ty Cobb on the cover. It has been published continuously beginning with the 1916 edition featuring the then 29-year-old Cobb.

The beauty of the book always has been its simplicity. In alphabetical order, “Who’s Who” runs a headshot in black-and-white with the statistics of every player in Major League Baseball for that particular season.

You won’t find any elaborate biographical sketches of the star players or analytical breakdowns of the Yankees’ starting rotation. There are plenty of other outlets to get that information.

Readers also won’t see any of the modern numbers like OBP (on-base percentage) or WAR (wins-above-replacement). Perhaps those statistics are coming down in the line. After all, “Who’s Who” always has been slow to change. In the foreword to the 100th book, Marty Appel notes the book didn’t include homers until 1940.

Appel writes: “And so the 1928 edition gives the reader games, at-bats, runs, hits, stolen bases and average. The reader would know that (Babe Ruth) had seven stolen bases in 1927, but not 60 home runs. Crazy.”

Indeed, “Who’s Who” is the Sergeant Joe “Just the facts, ma’am” Friday version of baseball books. Appel nails it when he writes, “(The book) is comfort food for the baseball soul—always has been.”

“Who’s Who” allows the reader to follow the arc of a player’s career. It is awe inspiring to see how the mosaic of numbers illustrates greatness for the elite players. Albert Pujols always has been one of my favorites, and I love looking at the St. Louis portion of his career. Year-after-year of 120-plus runs scored, homer totals that peaked at 49 in 2006 and the league-leading .359 average in 2003. Unfortunately, he has declined with the Angels, putting a smudge on his overall record in “Who’s Who,” but I still go wow whenever I turn to his page.

Derek Jeter still is listed in this year’s book with a line noting he retired on Oct. 30, 2014. Again, the statistics are staggering, especially when you look at his post-season record that nearly takes up a full-page in the book. While Alex Rodriguez has tainted his career, his early numbers with Seattle (.358, 36, 123 in his first full season) are something to behold.

Mostly, though, I pick up “Who’s Who” and turn to a random page and examine that player’s statistics. For instance, there’s Aramis Ramirez on page 143. Did you know he former Cubs and current Brewers third-baseman has 369 career homers? Or that Curtis Granderson, on page 69, led the American League with 119 RBIs in 2011?

On page 345, I can chart the decline of Justin Verlander, who went from 2.40 ERA during his MVP season in 2011 to 4.54 last year. His strikeouts also dropped to 159, the first time he was below 200 Ks since 2008. Like the Tigers, I also felt his pain since Verlander was a big disappointment on my 2014 fantasy team.

The 100-year edition of “Who’s Who,” edited by Douglas Lyons and the book’s staff, is a trip down memory lane. It features the covers of every book. Babe Ruth appeared twice as a young player in 1920-21. Joe DiMaggio was featured for the first time in 1942; Mickey Mantle made his debut in 1957.

Remarkably, Appel writes that Hank Aaron, Jeter, Yogi Berra and Jackie Robinson never were featured on the cover. Meanwhile, Eddie Fisher, a knuckleballer for the White Sox, was on the cover for the 1966 edition for what turned out to be his only All-Star appearance in 1965. Some things aren’t fair.

I figure I probably purchased my first “Who’s Who” in 1971 when I was 11; Johnny Bench, listed as “John,” was the main player on the cover. I was a baseball-obsessed kid who couldn’t wait for the new season to start. Beginning in late February, I’d make the daily trek to Stineway’s, the area’s drugstore, eager to get my hands on the baseball preview magazines and the new “Who’s Who.”

My obsession has dulled through the years. I couldn’t name more than five players on the current Mets, but I could recite the lineup and rotation for the ’69 World Series winners.

Time moves on. Perhaps I continue to buy “Who’s Who” because it represents an important link to my past? If so, that’s a good thing. It’s always good to feel like a kid again.

An excerpt of my latest column for Poynter:

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When Scott Cacciola started the season as the Knicks beat writer for the New York Times, he didn’t anticipate that by January he would be writing about a girls fifth-grade basketball team in Springfield, Ill. instead of Carmelo Anthony. He thought a February road trip would to be to Chicago for a game against the Bulls, not to New Zealand to report on a team in Australia’s National Basketball League.

Cacciola never envisioned going more than two months without seeing a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden. “I hope they still honor my credential,” he joked in anticipation of attending a game this week.

Cacciola’s odd season was the result of sports editor Jason Stallman’s decision to pull him off the Knicks beat in January. In a note to readers on Jan. 13, Stallman explained the Times chose to invoke “the mercy rule” on Cacciola. Basically, he wrote the Knicks were so horrendous they weren’t worthy of full-time coverage by the Times.

“The Knicks gave up on the season for strategic reasons [The Knicks traded two of its star players],” Stallman said in an interview. “We thought, ‘What’s the point of having a designated person cover this non-team?’”

Stallman thought the Times’ readers would be better served by having Cacciola report on interesting basketball stories around the world. After basically writing the same story about one loss after another for the depleted Knicks, Cacciola felt like a freed man.

“Early this season it was obvious there wasn’t a lot going on,” Cacciola said. “It did get monotonous at times. Selfishly, this was a great opportunity. Your whole thing as a sportswriter is to try to do interesting stories. This was a breath of fresh air.”

Last week, I wrote a column in the Tribune about the Big Ten’s upcoming negotiations on a TV deal and how the conference might have a choice between staying with ESPN or going with Fox Sports 1 on the cable side. It detailed the risks of leaving the broad reach of ESPN for FS1, which has been struggling to gain a foothold.

The ratings from last week’s conference tournaments should provide some interesting perspective for Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany.

The Big East title game between Villanova, an eventual No. 1 seed, and Xavier averaged 414,000 viewers on FS1.

Meanwhile, of the 22 tournament games that aired on ESPN last week, the least-viewed was an ACC second round game on Wednesday afternoon, and that still pulled in 479,000 viewers.

ESPN televised seven conference title games. The least-viewed was 780,000 viewers tuning in for the Valparaiso-Wisconsin-Green Bay title game in the Horizon League. The American title game (UConn vs. SMU) averaged 1.5 million viewers.

As for the Big Ten tournament games on ESPN, the Wisconsin-Michigan quarterfinal game, which tipped off at 11 a.m. Friday, pulled in 1.06 million viewers. All told, three of the five Big Ten games that aired on ESPN had more than 925,000 viewers.

Certainly some numbers to consider for Delany.

My latest for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana.

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TV viewers love to see perfection in sports. It is why the ratings soared when Michael Jordan was flying to titles in Chicago. Fans tuned in to watch the Derek Jeter Yankees dominate baseball in the late ‘90s. Michael Phelps made NBC very happy at several Olympics.

Back when Tiger Woods was Tiger Woods (doesn’t that sound like ancient history?), he got non-traditional golf viewers to watch him on his inevitable march to Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 majors. Again, it still is hard to believe that his run might end at 14 majors with the last one coming at age 32.

In the TV business, all the various forms of perfection from athletes and teams produce the phenomenon of “moving the needle.” Call it ratings gold.

Perfection now looms again on the eve of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Kentucky comes in with a perfect 34-0 record. The Wildcats are trying to become the first team to run the table since Bobby Knight’s Indiana crew went 32-0 in 1975-76. To put that in perspective, if Kentucky does win out, and another 39 years passes before another team goes perfect again, it will be 2054. By then, we’ll all have some sort of computer chip in our brains to watch the games.

Normally, Kentucky’s run would be a great story. But will they be ratings gold for CBS and Turner?

It hardly appears to be a slam dunk. The buzz meter doesn’t seem to be as high as it should be.

Some factors are at play here:

*There’s little question that the one-and-done trend is a huge drawback for college basketball. For the big stars, college basketball is just a one-year pit stop to the NBA. The whole thing is a joke.

The main problem from a fan’s perspective is the window is so short to become vested in a particular team. One of the things that stood out in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary, “I Hate Christian Laettner,” is that the core of those great Duke teams was together for several years. Laettner and Bobby Hurley were around for four Final Fours; Grant Hill for three. Fans got to know them and that team.

That would never happen today. Kentucky soon will wave bye-bye to freshman Karl-Anthony Towns, the same way it did when Anthony Davis did the one-and-done thing after leading the Wildcats to the 2012 title.

As a result, college basketball fans don’t really know this Kentucky team. If they aren’t as engaged, it could make some fans less likely to tune in.

* I was in the car listening to the Kentucky-Auburn game on ESPN Radio Saturday. With Kentucky winning big, analyst Will Perdue noted that even the Wildcat crowd was subdued. They were bored by another blowout.

Is it possible to be too good? Kentucky is beating opponents by an average of 21 points per game this year. If the Wildcats do a similar steamroll through the tournament, it won’t help CBS and Turner. Routs never are good for ratings.

*There is a Facebook page with this heading: “University of Kentucky Basketball: Making people jealous since 1903.”

Yeah, I can’t say I’m looking forward to another March of Ashley Judd and all those other smug flag-waving Kentucky fans. Last year drove me over the top. Even when the Wildcats supposedly have an off-year, they still get to the final game as a No. 8 seed. At least, they didn’t win.

It’s also hard to warm up to John Calipari basically assembling a future NBA All-Star team in Lexington. Not that I wouldn’t mind a coach at my school, Illinois, doing that once in my lifetime.

Jealous? Sure, I am. I also think I’m not alone in being less than enthused at the prospect of Kentucky winning another national title.

*You can be sure CBS and Turner will be hyping Kentucky’s pursuit of perfection. CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus is bullish on the Wildcats.

“As long as we can ride Kentucky’s coattails, we will.” McManus told Richard Deitsch at SI.com.

For now, it is essentially a one-team tournament. Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sportswrites: “There are 67 underdogs in this tournament, trying to take down one big dog. Paradoxically, the big dog is a Cat.”

Indeed, if there’s one thing viewers like as much as perfection, it’s David trying to take down Goliath. There could be as many as six games in which David gets its shot against Kentucky.

History does show there’s no such thing as a sure thing in the NCAA tournament. In 1992, UNLV came into the tournament undefeated. Jerry Tarkanian’s team seemed to be a lock to repeat as national champions. However, the Runnin’ Rebels were cut down by Duke and Laettner in the national semis.

One way or another history will be made in the next three weeks. Either Kentucky will end the 39-year drought of perfection or the Wildcats will fall in one of the biggest upsets in NCAA history.

The ratings then will tell just how much the viewers cared about Kentucky.

An excerpt from my latest column for Poynter.

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Normally, it would have been a routine post-practice session on Sunday, March 1 for the Chicago Blackhawks. It wasn’t.

In the locker room, Patrick Sharp, one of the team’s top players, strongly denied salacious allegations that he had an affair with a teammate’s wife and other women.

“When people delve into your personal life and make up rumors and things that are completely false and untrue, it takes a toll on you,” Sharp said.

The rumors about Sharp had been floating around town for weeks. There had been rampant chatter on message boards and strong innuendo that something was up with Sharp on sports talk radio. Finally, a Chicago site called SportsMockery, reported it had “confirmed” the story on Feb. 28, and that it was a big reason why the team wanted to trade the popular player.

Yet Chicago’s largest newspapers and other major outlets didn’t report the story until Sharp put it out there with his comments after that Sunday practice. The incident underscores the challenges the “mainstream” media faces in the new landscape.

How should newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times react when the dirt starts flying? Rick Morrissey, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, says the lines are blurred more than ever.

“Just because you can write something doesn’t mean you should,” Morrissey said. “We [The Sun-Times] hold ourselves to a higher standard. We look at it harder than some of these websites that aren’t held in the same journalistic standard.”