How to survive over the centuries, media division

Over the course of many years as a bureau chief with The Associated Press, I stamped the AP logo on a wide range of coffee mugs, fanny packs, water bottles, golf balls and other trinkets for the staff and newspaper editors. I’m a sucker for advertising specialty products, and I was always on the lookout for something new.

It’s not unexpected that the first chance I got, while running AP operations in Nebraska, I ordered baseball caps. In Seattle, I ordered caps in day-glo green. The cap pictured here is the last remaining from my AP collection, and it features the company’s 150th anniversary logo. (The cap is sitting atop the shell of an old teletype machine that delivered the AP sport wire to the Racine Journal-Times in Wisconsin.)

Corporate headquarters ordered hundreds of these caps in 1998, when it commemorated its founding a century and a half earlier in New York City. A few years ago, some old papers turned up that proved the news cooperative actually got its start in 1846 — two years earlier than had been believed for many decades.

No matter. AP is one of the few companies that can say it has thrived in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.  But as with all meda companies, to survive it must change and adapt to shifting consumer demands, delivery technology and interpretations of the law. There’s a fascinating post today on TechCrunch.com about how AP is suing another news service for allegedly misappropriating AP news. (Thanks to 10,000 Words for the link via twitter.)  The suit refers to the “hot news” concept that AP cited when it successfully challenged Hearst’s International News Service in a similar case many years ago. Tech Crunch is skeptical about AP being able to win with the same argument today. I’ll be curious to learn the outcome.

Ken Griffey Jr. returns to the Seattle Mariners…

… and there was great rejoicing in the land — especially in the Pacific Northwest.

When I first heard the rumblings a few days ago that Ken Griffey Jr. might return to the Mariners, I tried to keep from getting too excited about the possibility. In today’s big-money baseball world, team allegiances are more fading memory than reality. But still, I always harbored a hope that Junior would return to Seattle. Word broke this evening that Griffey had signed with the Mariners, and it brought back a lot of wonderful baseball memories.

I lived in Seattle when Griffey joined the M’s, and we knew we were watching the arrival of an extraordinary talent. Like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, he was a centerfielder with all the tools: speed, power, defense, a head for the game. But most of all, Junior brought a boyish joy to the ballpark every night.

Yankee Stadium always seemed to bring out the best in him, and I vividly remember watching on TV a sensational catch he made one night in the Bronx, springing off the warning track to whip a homerun ball from the top of the fence. When he landed, he broke into a huge grin and charged back to the infield, holding the ball in triumph. If there’s a better Griffey moment, I haven’t seen it.

You can see the catch at the start of this Griffey highlight reel posted on mlb.com. That’s Randy Johnson, the Big Unit, on the pitching mound. I believe No. 29 at the plate for the Yanks is Jesse Barfield (as best as I can tell from the video and this nifty Yankees uniform number database).

I have many other memories of Griffey’s early days with the Mariners, but I’ll spare you the bulk of them. But I must mention the night Griffey and his father hit back-to-back homeruns. Our family was returning from somewhere in Eastern Washington, and we strained to hear the at bats over the crackling radio signal as we crossed the Cascade Range on Interstate 90.

Griffey has been hobbled by injuries for much of his career. I wish him great health in the year ahead. And I hope the Mariners will, at least for one game, go back to the old yellow-on-blue caps that the team wore in the early 90s when The Kid was still a kid.

The Amgen Tour of California returns

I am spoked stoked! The Amgen Tour of California bicycle race has returned to the Golden State, with Lance Armstrong mounting his comeback in fine style today in Sacramento.

I first encountered the Tour of California one year ago, when one of the stages started here in Modesto. It was a thrill to watch the racers take off on a 100-mile-plus ride to San Jose over Mt. Hamilton. The 2009 tour started today with a prologue of time trials in the capitol city. For the next week or so, Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Floyd Landis and several dozen other of the best cyclists in the world will be wheeling through California. It’s a privilege to have them here (and I’m very happy to report having scored an Amgen cap to complement the cow bell I picked up last year).

The Ball Caps Blog on wordle.net

For those of us with word fixations, the Web site wordle.net is a lot of fun. Paste some text into a box, and Wordle turns it into a word cloud. You can also paste in an RSS feed for a blog, as I’ve done with mine. If you ignore the huge KENT at the right side (Wordle evidently gives more weigh to recent posts, and I had recently blogged about Jeff Kent) you get a pretty good idea of where I place my emphasis.