Interview: Mets Beat Writer Deesha Thosar

Interview: Mets Beat Writer Deesha Thosar

By Scott Bolohan

How did you become interested in baseball? What was your path to becoming the Mets beat writer?
 
Well, how I became interested in baseball was pretty similar to how anyone gets interested in baseball, just watching games with my family growing up, being interested in what the hell my brother and my dad were talking about, and wanting to be included. And it was either you research and what it is, or you’re out. I would sit there and ask a bunch of these questions like, what’s a walk, what’s a ball and it would be all these amateur questions at the beginning, but it was just something that combined with a passion for writing.
 
I knew that once I started college that it was something I wanted to pursue as a career. I went to Penn State and covered a whole bunch of sports there. Baseball and softball were definitely some of them. But Penn State baseball is not something that you can stick with for exactly too long. And footballs always the ultimate. Once I got the football gig, it was more fast-paced like what I expected to be doing. And then I got an internship with mlb.com. So that was kind of my breakthrough. The person that came to visit us said, you get three options, give me your three choices to cover a team. I said Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox, because they’re close to home. And I ended up getting the Red Sox, which is the last one that I wanted on the list, but I was like, fine. And I struggled the first few months covering them, because every time Mookie hit a home run, I was like, ‘Oh, hell, like they’re so annoying. They’re so good.’ But it was actually David Ortiz’s retirement year. I got good experience from that. That was just an internship year, one season. I stuck with MLB as a multimedia digital person, and they just had me cutting gifs. And I knew that’s not at all what I wanted to do. They weren’t ready to take me into the next leap when I was ready, so I ended up leaving mlb.com and was just kind of applying and waiting for other gigs.
 
And then finally the spot opened up at the Daily News and it was just like had to happen. It was like blinders on. I’m not letting anyone else get this gig. It was the Mets, so it was close to home. Baseball, it’s beat reporter, you travel with them, like everything was lining up perfectly. After two weeks of an intensive interview process, I finally got the gig. I just finished my second year on the beat, time moves by fast.
 
This was a weird year, even for Mets standards. What was it like day-to-day covering the Mets during a pandemic? How was it different than what you’ve done in the past year?
 
Oh, it was super different because we didn’t have access to the clubhouse, first of all, so that was just a pain. We had to rely on the Mets PR staff to give us players and they wouldn’t always give us the players that we wanted. Unless, of course, like someone hit the home run of the game. It’s like, obviously, we want that player. But what about everyone else? So ideally, you can just go into the clubhouse and grab whoever you wanted, have a quick, not even like a minute to thirty-second conversation with them and get what you needed. This year was a whole ordeal. It’s a Zoom interview, it’s not just you. I never had a one on one interview with any Mets player or staff. It was always within a group as a beat, which was super difficult because we’re all writing the same thing at that point. Nothing was exclusive. But I mean, in that sense, at least we were all in that same boat together, we were able to reach out to players and staff if we want on our own. But I found that the feedback that I was getting was always, ‘Okay, let me check with the PR.’ It’s like we’re back to square one. So everything had a little roadblock to it in terms of coverage. And we had to stay only in the press box, we couldn’t go anywhere near the players. Things like that just made this job, you know, like in an existential sense, like pretty scary, because this isn’t at all how things should go. And if anyone gets used to it, you know, this is how it could continue potentially, also, depending on the situation of the virus. There’s a whole bunch of challenges.
 
From your experience, how do you think baseball handled the pandemic? Did you feel safe when you were at the ballpark there?
 
Yeah, I think for sure I felt safe. I know that the players and staff members that I talked to always felt safe. Every day that I came to the ballpark we were to go through the security check, got my temperature taken. And there were dozens of questions, asking everything from what I ate last night to how I’m feeling that day, nausea-wise, which is weird when you think about telling that to a co-worker, we’d like to avoid that. But those were things that we hit we all do. It was understandable. And you know, stay six feet apart at all times, there was no food, no meals, which is actually a key part of the job. Because you get to you know, grab a scout, grab anyone to just like have a meal with them and talk. It was just weird in a pandemic, but definitely safe all around. And there were no moments that I was fearing for my life because of my career. In that sense, in my experience personally handled correctly. And from what I’m hearing, from people in the industry now and colleagues and how they’re handling it in the World Series, it’s also doing pretty well, because just running along that same baseline and it seems to be working out.
 
Looking back on this year, were there any particular highlights or stories you wrote that you felt like this was something was really great you got to do?
 
The struggle for me was because I write for a daily newspaper and we need something every day and that’s not just for web or print purposes. It’s just this the way we run so especially before the season started, I found that to be a struggle, because there was no baseball, there were no sports, the country doesn’t care about sports. More importantly, it was like, how can I keep holding on to my loved ones. And that’s what’s important. But that’s not what I’m paid to do. I had to keep kind of being creative and find new angles. My favorite story for this season was talking to Cleon Jones, who played for the Mets way back. This was at the height of all the George Floyd protests, and he was just super upset and super sad. He lives in Georgia right now and he was saying how this is exactly what he went through when he was younger, through the Jim Crow South and segregation and he lived through all of that. And even when he played in the major leagues, it was more of it, fans spitting on him, fans not accepting him. And it was just all of these raw emotional things that you can see how they impact Black players in the league, and how none of it has changed. But he said, what got him through it was actually talking to Jackie Robinson. So that was like, key for him, and that if he if Jackie can do it, I can do this because Jackie had to go through way more of being the first black player baseball player in the league. I think stories like that, especially with baseball, they just connect you, right? You can relate to it, I can relate to it, although it happened decades ago. I think that’s the good part about writing stories like that. I would say within everything that happened within the Met season, on a good note, that was my favorite. But on a side note, the other one was probably Brody with the hot mic, because what was going on the? But um, that was just for pure entertainment’s sake.
 
It’s an interesting point you make there. I wanted to create The Twin Bill because I wanted a place for fans to come and celebrate the game, and we got somewhere around 60 submissions or so. And about 95% of them were from white guys. And I was trying to figure out, is this a writing problem where there’s this sort of privilege to become a writer, is this a baseball problem. Even when I coach my high school teams, they’re almost all relatively well-off white players. So I was trying to think, how can we expand and reach more diverse people?
 
Well, what I’ve found, at least in my writing, because it’s easy to fall into that trap for me, too. And I know, when I started out with this job, I was like, ‘Okay, I have to stick to what I’m doing this for’ and that was including everyone, especially minorities that might not have an interest in baseball. And it’s easy to get wrapped up into the storylines and just focusing on what we’re writing about. But my experience, what includes everyone are stories, like that Cleon Jones story that people can relate to. But also don’t be afraid to put a spotlight on the struggles of why you’re only getting 95% and look into that. It’s happening for a reason. You shouldn’t be afraid to look into exactly why it’s happening. And once you find the answer, don’t be shy from digging in further, and then exposing it because that’s what makes some people uncomfortable. And they might shy away from that type of coverage, but then it’s also going to bring in minorities that enjoy the sport that may not be comfortable enough to speak out because they don’t think that you get it, they won’t they don’t think that you relate. If you show them like, ‘I don’t understand completely, I never will. But I’m open to hearing it.’ And I think that I think that would at least change for you too, in terms of coverage.

Deesha Thosar is the New York Daily News Mets beat reporter. You can follow her on Twitter @DeeshaThosar.

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