From Sports Phone To Twitter

By Scott Benjamin

ESPN New York Mets reporter Rich Coutinho says even though pro athletes' salaries now rival the Powerball jackpot, he still has a rapport with players who even care about him as a person.

Former Mets manager Bobby Valentine offered moral support after 9/11; former New York Knick Allan Houston was always cooperative and poignantly discussed race relations; former Met slugger Carlos Delgado was accessible and even apologized when he once snapped following a game; Met infielder Jose Reyes wrote an endorsement for Coutinho’s book, “Press Box Revolution” ($24.99, Skyhorse Publishing, 259 pages), which was published last month.

The 25 chapters cover topics ranging from the transition from Sports Phone to Twitter, unfair media coverage, the increase of women sports reporters and how WFAN has changed sports talk radio.

Former New York Giants defensive back and NBC television sportscaster Beasley Reece said in 1991 that by then money had altered the relationship between athletes and reporters, since pro athletes no longer needed the media's dispatches to help generate speaking engagements or television commercials.

But even in the city of Skyscrapers, reporters and athletes are friendly.

Coutinho said he agrees with Reece’s comments of a generation ago that the New York City sports media grinder is exaggerated. If you are friendly, cooperative and not getting into fights in midtown Manhattan discos, pro athletes in Gotham have little to fear.

“You have to understand the differences between personalities, since, for example, on any baseball team you have 25 people, some of whom fit in different categories," he said. "You need to do role reversal and understand how they might react, Kevin Kernan, the sports columnist at the New York Post, is a master of asking the follow-up question in a respectful way.”

“Reporters sometimes don’t put things in context and realize that some of these athletes are 22, 23 years old and they’re going to make mistakes, just as recent college graduate do,” Coutinho said in a phone interview. “Particularly when they’re under pressure and they’re making a lot of money.”

He wrote that Twitter, which had its initial presence in 2007 in pro sports, may represent the biggest change in the 35 years since he landed his first position after graduating from New York City’s Fordham University.

“After the game the reporters are talking about what they sent on Twitter, which becomes their own personal branding,” Coutinho said. “They’re not talking about what happened at the game.”

He said over the years, there has been less coverage on the human dimensions of sports.

Coutinho said he agrees with Frank Deford of HBO’s Real Sports that columnists devote too much time to reminding readers that sports is a business instead of covering the fantasy aspects of the games.

“When you go into the press box, you can be a little kid again,” he said. “If life was all about money, we could all become stock brokers."

Coutinho said players probably aren’t going to talk about their political positions, for fear that it might cause some commotion or limit their commercial value. However, perhaps there could be more stories like those a generation ago on former Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez’s interest in Civil War history.

“You used to go to spring training and there would be six stories on the same day, each with a different concept,” he said. “Now, too often, you see six stories on the same player.”

He also laments the proliferation of statistics.

“Too often, sports reporters use stats as a crutch,” Coutinho said. “For example, it’s not the number of pitches thrown, but the quality of the pitches.”

The late Sports Illustrated media columnist William Taaffe once wrote that the late Jim McKay, the famed ABC sportscaster, knew that a well-told story was more valuable than a well-worn fact.

Coutinho said occasionally the New York sports media has been too provincial, failing to appreciate some hometown heroes and their notable accomplishments.

“People didn’t appreciate that Bobby Valentine was the only manager to take the Mets to two consecutive National League Championship Series,” he said regarding some of the coverage of the former skipper, who was at the helm from 1996 to 2002.

“They tried to play gotcha sometimes with Bobby,” he said. “Bobby suffered from the comparison with Joe Torre, who won four World Series managing the Yankees. Joe never seemed agitated.”

Coutinho is a product of Fordham’s campus radio station WFUV, where he got his initial training in the late 1970s and early 1980s along with ABC’s Mike Breen, YES/ESPN radio mainstay Michael Kay, YES studio analyst Jack Curry and New York Giants radio play-by-play announcer Bob Papa.

“Fordham has surpassed Syracuse when it comes to sports-casting,” he added, referring to the upstate New York university that has produced Bob Costas, Marv Albert and Sean McDonough and had long been considered the cradle of sports-casting giants.

“You do a lot of behind-the-scenes work during your freshmen year, and you get to learn what you’re good at and what you’re not good at,” Coutinho explained regarding WFUV’s system. “Once you’re out in the field, you’re meeting some of the top people in sports media.”

“If WFUV was a commercial station, it would generate considerable revenue,” Coutinho said.

He said he also benefitted from the curriculum at the Bronx campus.

At Fordham, there are "a lot of group projects where the other members of your group edited, revised and tweaked what you were doing,” Coutinho said. “You were not in a silo.”

He said “there are more job opportunities out there” now for sports media professionals than 35 years ago when he graduated.

“But too many of those jobs are low-paying,” Coutinho added. He urges younger sports reporters to do advertising sales or voiceover work so they’ll always have adequate income.

He said too many newspapers have been unwilling to consider new advertising streams through sponsors for a high profile sports columnist or a clubhouse report.

Coutinho said he believes there will be further cost-cutting at ESPN, which announced a round of layoffs last month. That was partly due to losing subscribers to online streaming systems, according the news reports.

“They have some massive rights fees,” he said of the cable sports network, which has the rights to parts of just about every major sports league and is the prime outlet for the NBA and the college football championship.

Regarding the current Major League Baseball season, Coutinho says Mets fans shouldn’t give up on a team that is below .500 nearly two months into the season.

“Last year they were two games below .500 in the second week of August and finished 12 games over .500 – which means they were 14 games over .500 over the last month and a half of the season to get to the Wild Card round,” he said.

He expects that the Mets, who have improved since an 0-7 road trip earlier this month, will make a move for a Wild Card position soon after injured left fielder Yoenis Cespedes returns and general manager Sandy Alderson acquires reinforcements for a beleaguered bullpen.

“It’s durability as much as pure ability,” he said. “If your team is healthy in August, you have a chance to get in the playoffs if you’re still in contention at that point.”

Former Met pitcher and current SNY game analyst Ron Darling and Valentine said last spring that they never had seen four pitchers so good, so young on the same team as Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Steven Matz.

But all four of them have had extended injuries or periods of ineffectiveness since then.

Coutinho acknowledged that the Mets might end up with four marquee starters over the coming years, but the names may include Seth Lugo, Zack Wheeler or Robert Gsellman. With the depth of their pitching coupled with the vastly improved offense, featuring outfielders Michael Conforto and Jay Bruce, he believes they can continue to be a contender for a number of years.

However, maybe the best pitcher who’s been in the organization at some point over the last two years is Michael Fullmer.

“But they had to make that trade,” Coutinho said regarding the deal that sent Fullmer, the minor league prospect who became the 2016 American League Rookie of the Year, to the Detroit Tigers for Cespedes who was the catalyst in the 2015 National League championship season for the Mets.

Fullmer is 16-9 with a 2.96 earned run average for the Tigers since the start of last season.

Coutinho said he is concerned that the impact “of social media and sports talk radio make it seem like every baseball game is like the NFL, it’s a must-win contest. That’s not reality in a 162-game season.”