Chatting Brewers and baseball coverage with Adam McCalvy

Baseball season has arrived, and to celebrate, I sat down with a good friend and former colleague, Brewers beat writer Adam McCalvy of MLB.com, for my weekly podcast . We chatted about the team's direction, the changing nature of the business and the landscape of baseball in general. Check out the full interview at LakeCountryNow.com.

The Brewers will be bad in 2016. The fans know it, the players know it, the team knows it, the team's brass knows it. In a way, all that knowing is a good thing for Milwaukee baseball fans.

"I give them some credit with being up front with the fans," said Brewers beat writer Adam McCalvy, entering his 16th season covering the Brewers for MLB.com. "In Cincinnati, I'm not sure it's quite as transparent about what they're trying to do as it is here. We talked to (team owner) Mark Attanasio and he said, 'When we come to a point when we have a plan, I''m going to do my best to articulate it,' and I think he's done that. They're trying to get people to buy into the idea that we're bad but there's an end in sight. I think it helps that there's a team 90 miles down the road that just came through it.

"2002 was bad and dysfunctional. 2016 is bad with a plan. I think a lot of the dysfunction ... is mitigated by the fact that they have an idea what they're trying to do."

Opening day

McCalvy, whose tenure began with the opening of Miller Park in 2001 and included the most dismal year in franchise history, 2002, knows what it's like to be in a clubhouse without much optimism for winning games. He's also seen plenty of evolution, both on the field and in the job of sports coverage.

The New Berlin Eisenhower and University of Wisconsin graduate looks to one place on the field when he tries to determine how long the Brewers' rebuild, which began in earnest over the offseason when new general manager David Stearns executed a series of trades focused on strengthening the organization's young core, is going to take.

"The thing I am most watching in terms of on-the-field this season is the starting rotation. That's going to dictate how long this takes. Those are players mostly under club control for a while. Jimmy Nelson is one of those guys. (Wily) Peralta, is he trade bait or a keeper? (Taylor) Jungmann. With (Matt) Garza out, I'm sure we'll see Zach Davies in a couple weeks. Jorge Lopez took a huge step forward last year, can he take another step forward? Scouts are on the fence about him. And who can they find beyond that? Those guys are either going to carry this rebuild further quickly, or it's going to hold the rebuild back. Because those are not pieces you can just go out and grab.

"I think there's enough of a volume of (position) players that they don't need to necessarily worried about hitters, but do they have enough pitchers that are going to be emerging, lead-a-franchise types?"

McCalvy was hired when MLB.com was in its infancy, taking a position as an assistant web editor.

"I had absolutely zero qualifications for the job," he said. "They were hiring 60 people in a span of a couple of weeks right before spring training. I honestly believe it was because I could form coherent sentences and was available and got a job."

The role changed quickly to news reporting, becoming a much higher-profile gig in the process, and it's never stopped changing. Today, most stories are limited to roughly 500 words on MLB.com, with video and other multimedia elements supplementing the coverage.

"From the first day of this job, it has been adapt, adapt, adapt," McCalvy said. "When things started to change in his direction, I just did it. My bottom line is that I want eyeballs to be on the things I'm doing. If that means writing shorter stories, which has happened at MLB.com and other publications, I'm going to do it. ... You have to decide what's important, what's newsworthy, and what can I grab people with?"

Strange new world

Last December, MLB.com writers became members of the Baseball Writers Association of America for the first time, a considerable recognition of the way the organization has served in a reporting capacity and brought in a number of experienced journalists.

McCalvy said it was a long process to establish legitimacy as an independent newsgathering service while wearing the name "MLB."

"That tag line at the end of my stories is legitimately true," McCalvy said, referring to an indication that his content is not subject to approval by MLB or its clubs. "That said, I'm not naive enough to think there's not a gray area. My job is different than, say, Tom Haudricourt at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It doesn't stop me writing things when I have to write them, when bad things happen. When Ryan Braun happened, I felt like we covered that fairly, accurately and completely."

De facto danger

He's had run-ins over the years with players, notably one amusing anecdote involving Brewers reliever Mike DeJean, who took exception with a headline labeling him as the team's "de facto closer" after a rash of injuries thrust him into the role.

"The next morning you show up at the park and hear the words that no beat writer wants to hear, 'Player X is looking for you,'" McCalvy said. "He lights me up and says de facto is disrespectful. We talked it out, and I told him what I thought the word meant and what they were going for in the headline. ... I think we sort of worked through it, and it was OK and we shook hands. And that was kind of the last I thought about it."

Until a charity event over the winter, when DeJean told McCalvy to see him on the first day of Spring Training. When McCalvy did so, DeJean produced a photo of his new truck, with a license plate that said "DE FACTO."

The story is a funny one, but McCalvy said it doesn't hurt to occasionally get a reminder about the sport's human side.

"For these guys, it's not flippant," McCalvy said. "This is their life, their career. Yes, they're playing a game, but this is serious business for the players and their families, and sometimes it's good to have a reminder of that."

He doesn't know if the game is failing to attract younger fans, a criticism that has been levied based on baseball's pace of play and old-school approach. But he doesn't see evidence that the game is suffering, either.

"They've been saying that about baseball forever, and it remains this massively popular business," McCalvy said. "Are kids getting out in the sand lot and playing baseball like you and I are when we were kids? I don't know. What I do know is that the players seem younger and better than they've ever been, so I don't think there's some crisis of young talent in the game right now."

With Bryce Harper openly stating that the game gets too caught up in archaic practices of censoring celebration and "playing the game the right way," even wearing a hat on opening day that said "Make Baseball Fun Again," that young talent may also be working to infuse some new energy into baseball.

"I feel like there's a turning-of-the-corner happening," McCalvy said. "The Bryce Harper comments, that's a guy that can engineer change. There are players who don't feel that way, young players, but I think there's more open mindedness in the game right now, even on-the-field X's and O's stuff. For a long time, managers ran their bullpens as these roles. It kind of drove the numbers crunchers crazy and some of the more creative minds crazy. I think that's eroding a little bit, too. (Brewers manager) Craig Counsell strikes me as the guy who's very open to new ideas, to numbers."