By Ken Carpenter
There’s no update yet this morning on the fan who fell from the upper deck at the Ballpark at Arlington (Texas) last night.
Not on the Dallas Morning News' website, not on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram site, not on ESPN.com. Not on websites run by The Plain Dealer in Cleveland or the Beacon Journal in Akron.
They stopped a Major League Baseball game for 16 minutes last night when the man fell. There were 20,428 fans in the stadium, at least tens of thousands watching on TV – and we all want to know, “How he's doing? Who is the guy? What are his injuries?”
Note to baseball writers — when a fan falls out of the upper deck, your job is no longer to cover the game, your job is to cover the news. The Associated Press will handle the gamer, but the real story is inside John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.
Put down your third hot dog and the public-relations notes packet, pack up your gear, hail a cab, and stake out the hospital.
There is a link on DallasNews.com this morning: "Condition unknown of fan who fell trying to catch ball from second deck of Rangers Ballpark."
No, the guy's condition is known -- by him, his family, doctors and nurses at the hospital, ambulance personnel, medics at the stadium. Lots of people know his condition. It's only unknown to the fans who were watching and the lazy journalists who were sitting in the hotel bar after the game.
Good friends Paul Hoynes (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland.com) and Sheldon Ocker (Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio.com) are veteran newspaper men, both were at the game, but neither got the story.
I guess that's what happens when you go brain-dead covering the drudgery of 162 MLB games a year, not to mention 30 more games in "spring training."
You get so used to waiting for press-box announcements, or reaching for PR handouts, that you miss the news when it falls into your lap -- or, in this case, out of the upper deck.
Oh, by the way, the Rangers beat the Indians 12-1. Everybody got that story.
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