An Opening-Day Extra
by Pete Wetmore
When the Tampa Bay Devil Rays brought Major League Baseball to Florida's Gulf Coast, The St. Petersburg Times relied not on sneaker net, but bike net to get an extra edition to fans at the stadium.
A mountain bike carried film of the first pitch from Tropicana Field to the newsroom. A scant 28 minutes bridged the windup by Wilson Alvarez to the moment his image was available for output.
About two hours after the historic opening-day pitch was thrown, Times staffers were hawking the extra outside the stadium.
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A replate of the March 31 edition, the extra carried a photo spread of opening-day activities on the back page and the six-column photo of Alvarez on the front under the headline "Here's the Pitch."
The 34,000-copy extra nearly sold out. Exiting fans bought 16,000 copies, while 6,000 more were sold at sports bars. Another 10,000 sold the next day. Advertisers got a free ride with the replate, and the paper got prime exposure on local television newscasts.
The extra was, in the words of Executive Editor Paul Tash, "a journalistically worthwhile stunt," designed to show how seriously the Times took the arrival of baseball. Two of eight Times photographers at the stadium were positioned to catch different angles of the first pitch--a tight shot of Alvarez, and a wide shot from behind him. Film was used because the published photo would be so large "we didn't think a digital image would stand up," says Sonya Doctorian, assistant managing editor for photography.
All were ready at game time, 5:05 p.m. Stringer Bobby Sanchez waited outside the stadium on a mountain bike--a vehicle chosen because the rider "could break the laws of traffic by riding on a sidewalk if need be," says photographer Brian Baer.
Minutes behind schedule, Alvarez threw the opening pitch. Baer snapped 17 frames from the first base side, then gave his film to a runner who sprinted to the waiting Sanchez. The Times had twice practiced the dash from pitch to processor , but only one roll of film left the stadium for Sanchez's seven-minute ride. "One of the runners didn't quite make it in the time frame to the bicyclist," says Stan Alost, deputy director of photography.
At the newspaper, Baer's film went to the fourth-floor photo office, where a bank of eight Kodak and Polaroid scanners handled 154 rolls of film that day, says technician Mike McBride.
Doctorian chose one frame, which was routed to the AP Leaf Picture desk, then to the imaging department for prepping for output. A low-res image was then made available for positioning in QuarkXPress.
The second roll arrived too late to be considered for use in the extra. "We ended up going with Plan B, and Plan B worked," says Design Editor Patty Cox. She was at the printing plant three miles away, where a "massive juggling act" got the extra off the press by 7 p.m., relates Lou Franconeri, vice president of operations.
"We beat our deadline by 10 minutes," Cox says.
The result: For fans exiting Tropicana Field as early as the sixth inning, "there was the paper at the door," says Sports Assistant Managing Editor Jack Sheppard, "with a picture of the first pitch they had just seen."
Pete Wetmore is a free-lance editor and writer based in Urbana, Ill. E-mail, pw@colegroup.com; phone, (217) 367-6521; fax, (217) 367-5047.