In Memoriam: Ross Newhan — He Wrote the Game

For more than four decades, if it mattered in baseball, Ross Newhan was sitting in the press box when it happened — and by morning, his was the first account you wanted to read. He never took a swing, never threw a pitch. He did something almost as rare: he told the truth about the game for 43 years, in prose so clean you could set your watch by it.

Ross Newhan, the Hall of Fame baseball writer of the Los Angeles Times, died on Sunday. He was 89.

"The Dodgers today mourn Ross Newhan, the Hall of Fame sportswriter, who passed away this morning at the age of 89," the Dodgers said in a statement. "We send our condolences to his wife, Connie, and their friends and family."

He was a Long Beach kid who never finished college — the press box became his university, and he graduated at the top of the class. Newhan started at the Long Beach Press-Telegram in 1961, the year the Los Angeles Angels were born, and spent his career growing up alongside the sport in Southern California. The Los Angeles Times brought him aboard later that decade, and he settled into the traveling beat writer's life, covering the Angels and the Dodgers, two fan bases, one typewriter.

In 1985, the Times made him its national baseball writer, three or four columns a week, and for the next two decades Ross Newhan was one of the game's essential reads. He was nobody's house organ. When the owners colluded to strangle the free-agent market in the late 1980s, Newhan was among the loudest and sharpest voices exposing it, insisting management should pay a stiff price. When the O'Malley family sold the Dodgers, his reporting on the sale won the Associated Press Sports Editors Award for the top news story of 1997. And in 2000, his peers gave him the J.G. Taylor Spink Award — the writers' highest honor, the one that puts your plaque in Cooperstown. He retired from the daily grind in 2004. He never really stopped writing.

Mets fans know his work even if they never knew his name. His national years put him in the press box for our biggest Octobers — the miracle of 1986, the 1988 NLCS against his hometown Dodgers, the Subway Series of 2000. When the Mets were writing history, the man from Long Beach was in the row behind home plate, writing it down right alongside our own beat writers. He was there for all of it, and his clips hold up.

But the greatest story Ross Newhan ever covered, he had to cover from the hardest seat in the house: the stands of his own family. Because late in his career, baseball gave the writer a plot twist no columnist would dare invent. His son made the team.

Baseball has had famous fathers and sons — the Griffeys, the Bondses, generations of Alous and Boones. But as far as anybody knows, there is exactly one family where the father went to the Hall of Fame with a typewriter and the son went to the big leagues with a bat. David Newhan broke in with San Diego in 1999 and spent a decade as the kind of player his father's columns always championed: the grinder who refused to go away. His moment came with Baltimore in 2004, when he hit .311 and legged out one of the most replayed hits of the decade — an inside-the-park home run at Fenway Park, the one where Manny Ramirez cut off the relay throw. A broken leg in 2006 nearly ended it all. David Newhan simply came back again.

And then, in January of 2007, David signed with the New York Mets — turning down the Cubs to do it. Ross Newhan turned 70 that April with his son in a Mets uniform, and the national baseball writer had to learn what every baseball father knows and no deadline prepares you for. "I take immense pride in his determination," he said that spring. "His tenacity is impressive." He also said his son "shows a lot of respect for the game" — and coming from a man who had spent 46 years raging in print against everything that cheapened it, that was the highest praise in the family vocabulary.

David's Mets season was no fairy tale, and this page won't pretend otherwise: mostly pinch-hitting, a .200 average, a home run, the shuttle to Triple-A New Orleans and back, twice. But he hit .358 down there and kept climbing back up the ladder, the way he always did. A year later, wearing Houston colors, he stepped in as a pinch-hitter against the Mets in an August pennant race and singled home the tying run off Aaron Heilman — because in this family, apparently, somebody was always going to be in the middle of a Mets story. David later coached in the big leagues, as the Tigers' assistant hitting coach. The game, for the Newhans, was never just a job. It was the family business, practiced from both sides of the press-box glass.

They don't make them like Ross Newhan anymore, because the business that made him doesn't exist anymore — the beat writer who covered a team for decades, the columnist whose calls the commissioner's office had to take, the byline you trusted before you trusted anybody else. He covered Winter Olympics and Triple Crowns and golf majors, and he always came home to the press box, to the game he'd been writing since 1961.

Cooperstown has his plaque. Dodger Stadium and Angel Stadium have his memory. And Flushing has its own small piece of him: one season when the name stitched across a Mets jersey belonged to the son of the man who wrote the game — and the old writer, for once, got to just be a dad in the stands, immensely proud.

Rest easy, Ross. The column is filed. It's a classic.