There have been plenty of memorable moments over the past few years that Yankees fans can recollect with pride. The World Series wins and the key home runs are all special, but one of the great moments anyone can recall is waking up one Saturday morning in February and grabbing the Newsday on the front lawn, flipping to the back and reading the headline “Bronx-Bound?” with Texas Ranger Alex Rodriguez pictured. You want to know the guy who was the first to break the news before anyone else? Read below.
There are few trades in baseball that are head turners, but Alex Rodriguez coming to the Big Apple was certainly one of the most shocking and monumental deals in the sport, and it was then-Newsday sports columnist Jon Heyman who had the inside scoop.
“That was such a big story in New York and it was great to get that one first,” said Heyman, who worked at Newsday for 16 years.
But nowadays, breaking a story like the A-Rod trade would be played out differently in a news media outlet.
“That was only three years ago and we still held it for the paper,” said Heyman. “Three years later, you would never take that chance [of another paper breaking the story] and wait.”
With the coming of age of the Internet and the decline of print media, more news and coverage are now available online. Heyman, who spent most of his career writing for newspapers, is now a part of that outlet: the Internet. Heyman works as a national baseball columnist for CNNSI.com and contributes to Sports Illustrated magazine.
Making the transition from Newsday to CNNSI.com expanded Heyman’s audience, and e-mails from baseball enthusiasts all over the world, including Iraq, are not uncommon. But the switch to Sports Illustrated wasn’t something Heyman expected.
“At some point, I thought I’d be [at Newsday] forever,” said Heyman. “But management changed and they became very corporate. The emphasis was how they were going to make money rather than put out a good product.”
Growing up in Lawrence, N.Y., Heyman was very close to coming to Binghamton, but his father agreed to pay the tuition at Northwestern University “because their journalism program was well-known,” he said
After graduating from Northwestern, Heyman, like most journalists, started in a small market. He began his career covering mostly high school sports in Molino, Ill., but the cold weather climate led him to Santa Monica, Calif.
“I covered the Raiders, so at least I had a chance to cover a professional team,” said Heyman, who eventually covered the Anaheim Angels for three years before returning to New York as the Yankees beat writer for Newsday.
“I remember as a beat reporter, a lot of times you have uncomfortable situations where a guy doesn’t even want to talk to you,” Heyman said. “In my position now, when I go to the Mets, for example, I get to talk to the guys I enjoy talking to.”
Handling stories on a national scale, Heyman doesn’t have to worry about game results or team rosters. His columns contain insider knowledge like potential trades, hires, and insider information about management and players.
“I’m a natural gossip,” said Heyman, who competes with only a handful of insiders who try to get to a story before others. “You try to develop sources and contacts in the game and people who have this insider information, earn their trust, and try to get information out of them and be first.”
But now that he strictly focuses on baseball, Heyman sometimes misses the vast array of topics he could cover as a Newsday columnist.
“I would have liked to say something about Bill Belichick and Michael Vick,” said Heyman. “But I have no regrets.”
In addition to his work for Sports Illustrated in print and on the Web, Heyman often appears on radio spots for his good friend, Michael Kay, and on television spots for SportsNet New York’s “Daily News Live,” reaching across the different media outlets.
“The whole media is evolving because of the Internet,” said Heyman. “I knew that’s the wave of now and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Published Sept. 25, 2007 in Binghamton University's "Pipe Dream" Newspaper.
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