This morning, I received an email from a fellow baseball fan who is frustrated by the molasses pace of games. He noted the game times for the recent Cubs-Dodgers series in Chicago, all of which lasted nine innings.

Thursday: 3:53, Dodgers 8, Cubs 4.

Friday: 3:31, Dodgers 14, Cubs 5 (“the snappy one of the bunch,” my friend said).

Saturday: 3:44, Cubs 8, Dodgers 7

Sunday: 3:45, Dodgers 8, Cubs 5.

My friend added, with much chagrin, his three kids “have no interest in watching baseball.”

Yes, those games were high-scoring, but I have documented many times here that there are plenty low-scoring games that go long. Bill Madden of the New York Daily News noted last week Tampa Bay’s 1-0 victory over the Yankees took 3:28, the longest 1-0, 9-inning game in history. Talk about a snooze fest.

At last, MLB looks to like it finally act. Today, out-going commish Bud Selig formed a committee to speed up the game.

The release from MLB:

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Major League Baseball announced that Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig has conducted a conference call with a new committee that will study the issue of pace of game. The goals of the committee will focus on decreasing time of game and improving the overall pace of play in the 2015 regular season and beyond.

The committee will be chaired by Atlanta Braves President John Schuerholz. Other members include (alphabetically) New York Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson; MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark; Boston Red Sox partner Michael Gordon; MLB Chief Operating Officer Rob Manfred; MLB Executive Vice President, Baseball Operations Joe Torre; and Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner.

Commissioner Selig said: “We have the greatest game in the world, but we are always looking for ways to improve it. The game is at its highest levels of popularity and we will continue to strive to identify ways that can build on its stature well into the future. With the cooperation of all appropriate parties, we can make progress on improving the pace of play, and we will have recommendations in the very near future for the 2015 season. I believe that this group has the experience and the perspective to be mindful of our game’s traditions while being creative about our approach in the future.”

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It’s real simple. Just go back to the past and insists hitters remain in the box in between pitches. It would be a huge start.

As a connoisseur of sports journalism, I was blown away by ESPN’s OTL inside account of how the Ray Rice saga went down in Baltimore and the NFL offices. The depth of reporting by Don Van Natta Jr. and Kevin Van Valkenburg, the two “Vans”, was exceptional.

The story shows the power of investigative journalism still rules in the new media age. Nothing beats boots-on-the-ground, making calls, mining sources and doing scores of interviews to provide a perspective on a story you can’t get anywhere else.

In many cases, the reader had the feeling of being in the room with these executives when the important decisions were being made.

Despite the Ravens claims of “inaccuracies” and poor assumptions, you know that OTL’s account is exactly how it went down. The Ravens lobbied the NFL and Roger Goodell to be lenient on Rice, a favorite of the owner. As a result, the league aggressively didn’t want to see and/or learn of the contents of the elevator video.

I also know how ESPN operates, especially for a story like this. Its editors require multiple sources to confirm key information, such as John Harbaugh wanting to cut Rice. Even though the Baltimore coach tried to distance himself from that report Sunday, it’s all just a smokescreen.

The OTL story was a good day for journalism. Congrats to ESPN’s two Vans and all others who were part of this important story.

I’m fairly certain Roger Goodell is skipping the Sunday pregame shows these days. Or if he’s watching, the NFL commissioner is turning the sound down when he is the focus.

Yesterday featured yet another round of the analysts sharply criticizing Goodell for screwing up the Ray Rice situation. This time, the focus was on his poorly-received press conference.

Some of the harshest words came from ESPN’s Tom Jackson on Sunday NFL Countdown. As we’ve seen in the past, especially with the Rush Limbaugh fiasco on Countdown, you always can count on the former Denver linebacker to be a strong voice.

Jackson: “Until these men in these offices on Park Avenue really care about the women involved in these incidents we are not going to have real change. The good part of this – public pressure, political pressure, corporate sponsorship – I don’t care why it happens. They are going to be brought kicking and screaming to the table – to the table of resolving this problem.”

Said Jackson on the press conference: “I thought it lacked substance. I thought that it was a lot of what I had expected. I knew that the questions that were going to come were going to be very difficult. Unanswerable when you have handled the situation as ineptly as it had been handled up to that point. So, we heard a lot of – and you know, it’s always nice to hear somebody say I made a mistake and I’m sorry, but I didn’t think that there was any substance as to what we are going to really do going forward to change what happened over the course of the last few weeks and what happened over the course of the last few weeks is not over yet, and he knows that.”

Cris Carter also received praise from Richard Deitsch at SI.com.

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Meanwhile, on the other side, there’s Ray Lewis. He is an awkward spot, having played for Baltimore where he was a longtime teammate of Rice. Plus, there’s the credibility issues, given everything we know, or think we know about the Baltimore linebacker.

Yesterday, Lewis actually said: “There’s some things you can cover up. And there’s some things you can’t.“

Really, like what, Ray?

Chad Finn of the Boston Globe writes today:

What has become obvious — never more so than during his shameful performance on yesterday’s morning edition of “Sunday NFL Countdown” — is that no matter what you think of Lewis’s self-aggrandizement and cloudy past, he lacks every rudimentary quality expected of an analyst.

The list of what he has working for him ends at two: He’s a big-name ex-player, and he has an intense charisma. The former is hardly scarce — the NFL pregame show landscape is speckled with semi-charming former stars. And the latter gets old as soon as you realize how phony it is.

Lewis emphasizes and over-enunciates random words. He is addicted to the pregnant pause. He prosthelytizes to obfuscate. He requires these affectations in a desperate attempt to give his words the weight they lack. It works only on the already converted. He’s the same bad actor he ever was.

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Meanwhile, while you were watching the end of the Denver-Seattle game on CBS, the crew at NBC’s Football Night in America also went hard after Goodell.

Rodney Harrison and Dan Patrick had this exchange:

Harrison: “I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of players and they are extremely frustrated with the Commissioner. They said, first, he’s so quick to punish the players when something happens with the players. And also they expected him to fine or suspend himself. That didn’t happen. He made over $40 million last year. A lot of players are upset with that. They expect him to write a check for $5 to $10 million to hold himself accountable.”

Patrick: “Well, I wonder what Roger Goodell would have done to somebody in that position who had done what Roger Goodell had done or didn’t do. Would he have fined or suspended them? When you watched the press conference, I wanted passion. I didn’t want something scripted. It felt very presidential in the presentation. It just didn’t have any substance there. It should have been with your notes, with your heart, with your feelings there, and it certainly was lacking in that department.”

Harrison: “When a player gets fined or suspended – I’ve been there – they take that money out of your check. They don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. But he gave himself the benefit of the doubt and he’s telling us, ‘Ok, it’s no problem. I’ll get better.’ But we don’t get the benefit of the doubt.”

Wanted to share a commentary Kevin Blackistone wrote for the American Journalism Review about media coverage of the Ray Rice/domestic violence situation in the NFL.

The headline reads: “We haven’t let the facts get in the way of the Ray Rice react.”

Blackistone makes the case that the media is portraying the NFL as being full of players who commit domestic violence. By extension, the main targets are African-American players, who comprised 70 percent of the league.

He writes:

The new polling service Vox Populi reported Saturday that it found a majority of Americans believe the NFL has a widespread epidemic of domestic violence problems, including 70 percent of people who identified themselves as NFL fans and 73 percent who are women.

A college classmate and friend of mine, USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan, commented during a PBS NewsHour segment we sharedthat the NFL was “full of Ray Rices.”

There is only one problem with these perceptions: still, the numbers don’t bear them out.

His main point.

Benjamin Morris’s statistical analysis was rife with the refrain of a qualifier. It read, one way or another, “…NFL players have much lower arrest rates than average.”

The good news about the FiveThirtyEight story is that it was tempered with that caution. The bad news about the kind of attention most of the media has been apoplectic about concerning Rice – and two other players arrested (one of whom also has been convicted) for domestic violence since Rice’s arrest in February – is that it has been without context. As a result, we in the media – the sports media in particular – have perpetuated a stereotype that football players are more prone towards violent expressions of misogyny than the rest of us. Given that two-thirds of NFL players are, like Rice, black, the reporting also plays down to the narrative of the black athlete as villain.

What is particularly pernicious, however, about much of our reporting and opining about the implications of the Rice case is that the laser focus on the NFL and its players does a disservice to what is a broad campaign to stamp out domestic violence.

“Domestic violence doesn’t know any income level or any particular profession,” Laurie MacDonald, president and CEO of the Center for Victims in Pittsburgh, pointed out last Friday on an edition of NPR’s On Point Radio; I was a guest as well.

“I’ve seen heart surgeons, I’ve seen unemployed mill workers, all sorts of people commit violent acts against women,” she said.

“The Rice family…unfortunately became the family that shined the light on domestic violence in this country, which needed to be done, and I think in many cases, the system fails. The NFL does not have a prosecutorial arm.”

Former APSE president Tim Stephens posted results of a survey with sports journalism hiring managers, instructors and students.

He writes: “(The goal is)  to learn more about the priorities in the classroom as well as the priorities in the newsroom. The goal is to outline where the interests of universities and the newsrooms are in alignment as well as areas upon which they could work together to strengthen the connection of interests and priorities.”

Definitely some interesting perspective. Here is a key finding about the preparation of sports journalism students:

– Hiring managers are concerned about recent graduates’ knowledge of basic reporting skills. Twenty-six percent of hiring-manager respondents expressed moderate to strong negative feelings when asked if recent graduates they have seen as job candidates in the past three years have the ability to obtain information from public records requests and by research and interviews. While that is lower than the number of positive respondents (36 percent), it is an alarming number nonetheless, especially when paired with 38 percent of respondents holding no strong opinion at all. Conversely, only 13 percent of educators and students held moderate to strong negative views, and 73 percent of educators and 66 percent of students/graduates held moderate to strong beliefs that they do have strong basic reporting skills.

Said one hiring manager: “Some schools are doing a better job than others with the new breed of journalists. I have seen a dip in the quality of reporting skills.”

“I have found that candidates today are better prepared for providing info on different platforms and are more proficient at multi-tasking,” one hiring manager said. “While helpful, that doesn’t mean they are better reporters and/or writers than the candidates before them.”

Not every hiring manager sees this as a problem.

“It’s a buyer’s market. These kids coming out of school don’t have all the reporting skills that past generations of journalists had, but for [news organization redacted] to resonate as a relevant brand in an all-digital space, that’s a sacrifice well worth making,” one hiring manager said. “The payoff is in their multimedia skill sets. In that respect, these kids are ready to walk into our newsroom and make valuable contributions right away. They understand what news readers will want to consume, how to deliver it to them and how to maximize its reach without leaning on website promotion. Our younger hires and interns have added an important element of diversity to a newsroom that already had its share of strong journalists.”

And…:

One student respondent agreed with hiring managers who were critical of graduates’ basic reporting skills. “I think that social media has been pushed so hard that students are not developed in a specific area of expertise. I can’t tell you how many students/professional sports journalists [I have met] who don’t even know how to keep their own stats or how to FOIA (or even what that stands for). Yikes!”

Yikes, indeed.

Yet there are opportunities out there for students who learn the craft.

– Hiring managers and educators see opportunities growing for recent graduates. Sixty-two percent of hiring managers answered moderately to strongly positively when asked if salary requirements in their departments have led them to consider less-experienced applicants than they may have considered in the past. Eighty-four percent of educators held moderate to strong beliefs that this is true. Conversely, 41 percent of students/graduates held no opinion at all.

“Salary requirements have been an issue for me,” one hiring manager said. “Reporters with a few years of experience usually ask for a higher salary than my company offers.”

But not every hiring manager agrees. Smaller and mid-sized news organizations may find they are able to compete for experienced job candidates in a way that they did not previously.

“If anything, I am looking at better qualified candidates than my predecessors have because while our salaries have stayed the same, those of so many other organizations have come down closer to our level,” one hiring manager said.

What this means, if true, is that recent graduates with strong skills sets may be able to compete for jobs at larger organizations that they may have previously thought unattainable but they may also find more competition against experienced journalists in smaller organizations that previously would have been viewed as entry-level opportunities for them.

I liked the results of this question.

– Many hiring managers would leave the newsroom if they could.Almost 25 percent of surveyed hiring managers said they envision themselves teaching as a university journalism professor at some point in their careers, and 39 percent had moderate to strong feelings that they would leave the newsroom to teach if they could.

Of course. Everyone is looking for a place to land these days.

Very cool. This Sinatra guy could sing.

In honor of the Washington Nationals clinching the NL East title, here’s a D.C. favorite. Frank Howard didn’t play on any great teams with the Senators, but he was the undisputed king of power in Washington.

A massive man at 6-7, 255 pounds, “Hondo” could mash. From 1968 through 1970, he had seasons of 44, 48, and 44 homers. All told, he had 382 career homers.

Here are his stats of a memorable career.

The Chicago Tribune might need to assign a full-time Brandon Marshall media beat reporter. Last night was another busy one for the Bears receiver.

Actually, it should have been quiet. I wrote on the Tribune’s site that Marshall was given a scheduled week off from his Inside The NFL analyst job because the Bears played a Sunday night game in San Francisco.

From the post:

Marshall and the team returned early Monday morning. If he did the show Tuesday, it would require him catching at private plane between 5:30-6 a.m.

DeBlasio said Marshall’s absence wasn’t due to him remaining in Chicago Tuesday to get treatment for his injured ankle.

“There are no issues,” DeBlasio said. “He wasn’t here because of the Sunday night game.”

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Ah, but Marshall fans still could get their fix by watching a profile of him that aired on ESPN’s E:60. Actually, the piece by Lisa Salters originally aired two years ago. It was updated to include Marshall’s recent comments on his issues with domestic violence and the Ray Rice situation.

The profile detailed Marshall’s multiple problems with domestic violence and his personal turnaround once he learned of his psychological disorder.

Marshall wasn’t pleased to see a re-air of the profile and vented his displeasure on Twitter.

I got a statement from ESPN late last night:

“This story was originally told two years ago on E:60 and we felt it was particularly worth telling again at this point given what’s been in the news the past week. Marshall’s story brings an important perspective: the story of a player who faced similar circumstances and through persistent dedication, changed his life, in an effort to regain the respect of fans and players.”

Interestingly, Marshall did not go public with his complaints when the piece originally aired, according to ESPN.

Also, there were media folks who wondered why Marshall was upset. Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk thought the story had a positive tone.

What’s surprising about the profile, given Marshall’s reaction, is that most people who watched it probably came away from it with a more favorable view of Marshall than they had before. The profile delved into Marshall’s history of domestic violence accusations, as any complete profile of Marshall should — that’s part of his history, part of who he is. But the profile also portrayed Marshall as a man who realized he had a problem, sought mental health treatment, turned his life around and developed a strong and healthy relationship with his wife.

Obviously, Marshall felt the piece would have a different focus. But as he now knows, there are no guarantees.

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One more note: The Brandon Marshall media beat will continue Friday. He is featured on this week’s A Football Life on NFL Network. I will have more on the film soon.

Claire Smith says she doesn’t like to be regarded as a pioneer. Yet how can she be regarded in any other way?

When Smith was a baseball writer in the 80s, she often was the lone African-American and the lone woman in the press box.

I knew Smith back then when she covered the Yankees for the Hartford Courant. I recall her being a real pro, and I know others would agree.

Of course, I was a young, rather naive sportswriter trying to survive on the White Sox beat for the Chicago Tribune. I wasn’t completely aware of the obstacles Smith experienced on the beat.

I know quite a bit more now, and so will you after you read Smith’s excellent first-person story in the latest edition of Still No Cheering in the Press Box. This installment for the Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland is a must-read if you want a history lesson in sports journalism and want to learn about somebody who truly made a difference in the profession.

A few things that stood out. As I mentioned, Smith on being different in the press box:

I was a Yankee writer; we opened on the road that year in Kansas City. I was walking onto the field, and Dave Winfield was out there stretching, and he said, ‘Claire, Claire, come here.’ Dave is a riot, a real great guy. So he says, ‘Some of the brothers were talking, and we starting talking about you and we noticed not only are you a woman, but you’re BLACK! So, we decided, whatever you need, you just come to us.’ I said that I would. He unintentionally makes me laugh all the time.

People ask me all the time, ‘What was the hardest thing to overcome, being a woman, being black,’ and I said it’s no contest because it’s unacceptable to be a racist, but it’s still very acceptable to be an idiot when it comes to gender. And that’s been proven over and over and over again. I could never imagine someone dropping the n-word in a clubhouse then. There would have been hell to pay. But, some of the stuff that comes out of player’s mouths that are aimed at women, it’s just juvenile. And it still happens today.

Smith details in a long passage how she wasn’t allowed in the San Diego Padres locker room during the 1984 NLCS. She concludes by writing about the players who came to her aid.

Those are the folks that I want to remember the most: Goose, Garvey, the Cubs, the Yankees, who filed an amazing protest against what the Padres did. When I asked the Yankees’ media director why they were doing it, he said, ‘Because no one treats Yankees beat writers like that.’ I remember going, ‘That is so cool!’ Everyone was coming to the defense of the female reporter, and the Yankees were coming to the defense of one of their people. I’ll never forget that.

The whole thing was very difficult. Ask anyone who goes through something like that, it just traumatizes you. But, what happened to me was mild compared to some of the stuff that other women have had to deal with.

Advice for covering the beat:

Don’t cut corners, and don’t give in to conformity. Be different. If you are on a beat, and there are ten reporters on the beat, and nine of them follow each other around, don’t be the tenth.

Blaze your own trail. If someone starts following you, don’t let him or her gain insight into what you are doing. If you’re talking to Alex Rodriguez, and I come up, stop asking questions. Demand that I ask a question, and if I don’t have one, tell me that it’s your interview. This goes for pregame though. After the game, it’s everyone for themselves. Protect your sources, but demand that your sources protect you by having as much integrity as you do.

And there’s much more. Definitely worth your time.