A few Alex Gordon stories you probably haven't heard

Including stuff about chewing tobacco, bubble gum and dead grass...

As I’ve explained before and probably will again, you cannot start a personal blog and then ask the people who run big league baseball for a press pass. Otherwise, every baseball fan would crank up his or her own blog and then get a free seat in the press box.

So if you want a press pass you have to work for some “legitimate” news organization and these days that’s getting pretty hard to define, but why don’t we let that sleeping dog lie for now?

Bottom line:

If I’m going to write about baseball in general, using information available to anybody, I can post that stuff here on my blog. But if I’m going to use information I gathered with the press pass I got through the Kansas City Star, that stuff has to appear in the Kansas City Star or on its website.

And if you find that confusing, I’ve explained the situation accurately.

But let’s move on to today’s subject; retiring Kansas City Royal, Alex Gordon. And we’ll start — which I tend to do — with a story that’s actually about me.

Like professional athletes, sports reporters often resort to clichés when asked about their jobs. One of those clichés is we don’t care if the team we cover wins, which is BS because covering a losing team is miserable and can also hurt your career in journalism.

The number of people looking at Judging the Royals – the baseball blog I wrote for the Star – climbed every year and peaked in 2016, the year after the Royals won the World Series. In 2017 a lot of those “Forever Royal” fans found something better to do than read about a losing baseball team and guess what year I got laid off.

But I’ve now slipped into whining which I believe is highly underrated; I’ve made a pretty good career out of whining, whether it’s about baseball or politics or my own personal problems.

So where were we?

Oh yeah…stuff reporters say that isn’t 100 percent true.

We also like to pretend that we have no personal feelings about the people we cover which is once again, BS. If a guy is a dick every time you approach him, you’re not going to like him and if a guy is nice every time you approach him you probably will.

Alex Gordon is a very quiet guy and because I’m insecure (isn’t everybody?) I took that as a sign he didn’t want to talk to a reporter, but once we got to talking (a story I tell in the Star article) I found out he was a really good dude.

So when I found out Alex decided to retire I decided to tell a few stories that mostly didn’t make it into articles on Judging the Royals.

But since those stories happened while I was using a Star press pass, the article has to appear on their website and here’s that link, although it’s acting goofy and if it doesn’t work when you click on it you might have to copy and paste it into a Google search which probably seems like a pain in the ass, but is well worth your time because you’re going to get to read about me making myself sick chewing tobacco while Alex timed how long that took.

See? I told he was a nice guy.

Alex plays his last game on Sunday and I’d suggest you read the article before then because it will give you some insight into the guy you’re watching and the Chiefs don’t play until Monday night, so if you’re a Kansas City sports fan you really ought to watch Alex Gordon’s last game.

I know I will.

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article246015310.html