Wednesday, March 11, 2009

No doubt about it: White Sox's Gordon Beckham a big-time talent

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/whitesox/chi-09-white-sox-chicagomar09,0,2643671.story

This article is about White Sox prospect Gordon Beckham's play thus far in Spring Training and the possibility of him making the team. It starts out with by setting up the context for a very good quote:

"If there is one telling statement about the influence Gordon Beckham has had during his first spring training, it came Sunday from White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen:

'It seems like he belongs in the big leagues.'"

This intro does a good job of telling you that the story is going to be about as well as letting the sources tell the story. The writer can tell us all he wants about Beckham and what he has been doing, but we have no reason to believe him without evidence. The quote from Ozzie Guillen is a very good one that reinforces the main point of the article. It is also set up on the page well: it is a semi-shocking quote, and the way that it is set off from the rest of the text in its own paragraph helps to highlight it and make it stick out to someone who may just be scanning the article.

The nut graph is two paragraphs long. The first plays off of Guillen's quote, while the second uses statistics to further back up the main idea. The article then uses mostly quotes to tell the rest of the story. Only small paragraphs are used to set up or wrap up quotes, with large portions in between of quoted material from relevant sources. They use excellent material taken from Gordon Beckham himself as well as coaches Ozzie Guillen and Greg Walker. Since those two will have a large part in the decision of whether or not Beckham makes the team, it is important for the article to show their opinions to support its claims. For example, the pitching coach could have an excellent opinion of him, but a quote from him would be almost meaningless because he isn't really relevant to the decision.

1 comment:

  1. I think one statement could have used a little context: "Guillen is being forced to soften his stance on whether last year's first-round draft choice can break camp as a starter for the defending AL Central champions." What exactly was Guillen's stance in the past? I'm not very familiar with baseball, so I need to be told!

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