The Penn Stater Magazine

Writing Inspiration from Jayson Stark

March 24, 2010 at 3:56 pm Lori Shontz Leave a comment

Jayson Stark, baseball writer for ESPN.com, usually asks the questions. Wednesday morning, he fielded them as he spoke to a room crammed with Penn State journalism students. I especially hope they paid close attention to how he answered the first question, about how he developed his conversational writing style.

“All I’ve ever tried to do is be me,” he said. “But I grew up in Philadelphia, which is a city of great sports writers. And I read them all. I devoured every word. If you want to be a writer—or a journalist, or anything—you really should be watching and reading and listening and studying the people you love the most.”

I know exactly what he means. The only way to learn to write is to read, read, read. And when I was in college, spending most of my time in The Daily Collegian office, one of the people I read was Jayson Stark. I’m a Pittsburgh girl, but I splurged on The Philadelphia Inquirer every Sunday during baseball season to read his Major League Baseball notes column. It was always well written, it always made me laugh, and it always taught me something about writing.

Stark was the second speaker at the Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, a two-day event sponsored by the College of Communications. I require that my journalism students go to one of the two lectures because the other thing that young writers must do, whenever possible, is listen to other writers talk about the craft. Make that any writer. I no longer qualify as young, but I still learn by listening to writers tell about the story behind the story.

Stark said one of the reasons he left the newspaper business after 21 years was because tightening deadlines made it difficult to do good work. He used to have to file a story after a baseball game, for instance, as fast as 10 or 12 minutes after the final out. Now, as a writer for ESPN.com, he is able to continue his reporting after the newspaper journalists have run back to the press box to meet their deadlines.

“I have the ability, the luxury, the time, the space to tell those stories the way they deserve to be told,”  he said. “It’s really cool to be able to do that. I am going to be the last person out of the locker room. They are going to have to kick me out.”

Celebrating the 2008 World Series.

Stark has always had a knack for finding the perfect number, the telling statistic, so I also loved hearing about how he came up with this nugget: When the Philadelphia Phillies finally won the World Series in 2008, the city had watched its four major sports teams play 9,029 games without celebrating a championship.

No, Stark didn’t have that number at his fingertips. He did a ton of advance research. He counted every game played by the Phillies, the Eagles, the Flyers, and the Sixers over a quarter-century. “I believe in details and trying to add facts and numbers that give perspective,” he said. “The next thing I know, I’ve ruined an hour of my life. But I have to find the answers to those questions.”

He was smiling as he said it. “Ruining” an hour? Hardly. For those of us who love to dig for information and find entertaining ways to present it, it doesn’t get any better.

Lori Shontz, senior editor

Entry filed under: College of Communications, The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: ESPN, Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, Jayson Stark, journalism, Philadelphia Phillies, The Philadelphia Inquirer.