Joe McGuff

Joe McGuff died on February 4, 2006, in Prairie Village, Kansas, at seventy-nine. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award that year, one of the rare occasions the honor has gone to someone no longer living to accept it. He had been president of the APSE himself, and of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, so the award came from an organization he had once run, for a career its members had watched at close range.

He had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1999, and the last years were spent with the disease. The public record does not say whether the award was already in motion when he died; it says only that it was given in 2006, and that the case for it had been complete for a long time.

Joseph T. McGuff was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on August 15, 1926. He went to Marquette University and served briefly in the Army, discharged because of asthma. He started at the Tulsa World and joined The Kansas City Star in 1948, at twenty-two. He would spend the rest of his working life there.

He became the Star's sports editor in 1966. In 1986 the paper named him editor, a promotion from the sports desk to the top of the masthead that almost never happens at a metropolitan daily. Sports editors are supposed to be a separate tribe; McGuff was the exception that the rest of the building trusted with the whole paper.

The Kansas City Athletics left for Oakland after the 1967 season, and the city that had lured them from Philadelphia thirteen years earlier was suddenly without a big-league team. McGuff is credited with a major role in ensuring Kansas City got one of the American League's expansion franchises for 1969, the club that became the Royals. A sports editor cannot award a franchise. He can keep the question in front of readers, owners and politicians every single day until the league finds it easier to say yes, and that is roughly what happened.

The Athletics left in 1967. Two years later Kansas City had the Royals, and the Star's sports editor had a good deal to do with it.

The team acknowledged the debt in public. Before Game 7 of the 1985 World Series, Royals against the Cardinals in Kansas City, McGuff threw out the first pitch. The Royals won that night and won the Series. It is hard to name another sportswriter who has been asked to throw the ceremonial pitch before a seventh game, and harder still to name one who deserved it more literally.

In 1984 the baseball writers voted him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the honor presented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He was named Missouri's outstanding sportswriter five times, and he cast a Hall of Fame ballot for years. In 1992 he published a memoir, Why Me? Why Not Joe McGuff?, whose title is about as close to a self-portrait as a Kansas City newspaperman of his generation was going to allow.

The work outside sports was of a different weight. In the 1990s he served on, and eventually chaired, an independent review board examining sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. It is the kind of assignment a community gives to someone whose judgement it has tested for decades. He was survived by his wife, Kay, and six children.

McGuff's Red Smith Award is one of the clearest cases of the honor going to an editor rather than a stylist. He wrote well, and the Spink Award says the baseball writers thought so, but the reason his name belongs on this list is institutional. He ran a sports section for twenty years, ran a newspaper for several more, presided over both the sports editors and the baseball writers, and used the column to change what his city had. Kansas City has a baseball team partly because a newspaperman refused to let the subject drop.

The Wikipedia record on McGuff is adequate on dates and honors and quiet on the texture: the name of his column, the Chiefs coverage, what he was like in the newsroom. His memoir presumably fills some of that in. This page keeps to what is documented, which is still a full life: Tulsa to Kansas City at twenty-two, thirty-eight years to the editor's chair, a ballclub, Cooperstown, and an award that arrived a few months too late for him to hear about it.