By: E&P Staff Hal McCoy, the longtime Cincinnati Reds beat writer for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, announced Thursday that he was retiring from the paper after 37 years.
According to McCoy, the Daily News informed him that it would no longer be able to cover the Reds like it had in the past after this season, a fact corroborated by Daily News Editor Kevin Riley in an editorial on Sunday.
"Earlier in the day [Thursday], Hal and I had talked and I told him that, in the future, we wouldn?t be traveling with the Reds or sending anyone to spring training," Riley wrote. "Obviously, he was disappointed.
"Many newspapers have cut back baseball coverage, and the Dayton Daily News is among the last to cover a major league team with a full-time writer even though the team is from a nearby city ... the expense is too great to have a person devoted just to the Reds."
"It is MY choice to retire and my choice to take the buyout," McCoy wrote on his blog, The Real McCoy, on the Daily News Web site Friday. "But I am a baseball writer. That?s all I?ve known for 37 years. Without it, I?m lost."
McCoy began covering the Reds for the Daily News in 1972, and is currently the longest-tenured beat writer for one team in Major League Baseball. In 2002, he was awarded the annual J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Association of America for meritorious contributions to baseball writing.
McCoy continued to cover the team after suffering two optic strokes in 2001 and 2003 that have left him legally blind.
"The Dayton Daily News has been nothing but great to me," McCoy wrote on his blog last Thursday. "How many companies would keep a legally blind employee and furnish that employee with a driver and/or a car service to get him to and from games? The paper did that for me and it certainly didn?t have to do it."
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here