Strasburg, who is returning from Tommy John surgery and will make his first rehab start Sunday in Hagerstown, Md., will not be made available for interviews before the game and no media members will be granted access to the clubhouse before or after the game, according to D.C. Sports Blog. No photography or videography is permitted during the game, writes the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg.
In case anyone out there is wondering, all these things are standard practices allowed for media at baseball games — and that's for major league games, not Single-A Hagerstown Suns games. All that "notebook" stuff you read in addition to the Red Sox game story? Most of that comes from pregame interviews in the clubhouse. All those shiny photos you click through in online galleries? Those are taken during the game, as you might expect.
Add this to the restrictions placed on any interviews with super prospect Harper — including prohibition from asking Harper about anything that takes place during the game — and the Nationals look a little paranoid. Make that a lot paranoid.
The Red Sox have had some superb prospects in recent years. Hanley Ramirez and Jacoby Ellsbury, for instance, were considered future stars before they had progressed past Single-A.
Ramirez and Ellsbury seldom spent 45 minutes expounding on their childhoods, their world views and their favorite recipes during their time in the minors, and Ramirez didn't always talk, period. But reporters were at least allowed to approach him, and Ramirez was allowed to say "no." It was a novel concept that worked.
The fallout of the Nats' restrictions isn't that it makes reporters' jobs harder; it doesn't, since it's easier to sit back and not ask any questions or take any pictures. And none of you really care how easy it is for us to do our jobs, anyway.
The actual consequence is that the public perceives Strasburg and Harper as arrogant prima donnas. Fans read the two-word cliche answers by the players in news articles and assume Strasburg and Harper are aloof. The only images fans have of Harper are the YouTube clip of him blowing a kiss at a pitcher and the magazine articles conducted when he was 16 years old, before the public relations handlers had tucked him away from view.
The stated reason for the restrictions is the avoid distractions, which is kind of funny. If Strasburg and Harper are to develop into superstars in the nation's eighth-largest media market, they'd better get used to the media scrum. I wonder what a 17-year-old Kobe Bryant at Lower Merion High School would think of 18-year-old bonus baby Harper being shielded from too much exposure.
The Nationals are supposedly on the path to being a pretty good team in two or three years. One would think they'd want to welcome people in, to chronicle the turnaround of their directionless franchise. Instead, they seem more interested in acting as though they have something to hide.
