A New Book Captures DC’s Media Softball League

Unless you’ve worked for an area media outlet, you probably haven’t heard of the Metropolitan Media Softball League, which has pitted teams from local and national outlets against one another going back to 1991. For a couple months every spring and summer, people who work at places such as NPR and NBC4 have woken up early on weekends and hauled themselves to various Montgomery County parks to represent their employers.

Now that corner of the media universe is captured in a new book, Jim Barnett’s Playing Games at CNN, a memoir of his time coaching the network’s team from 1998 to 2007. Based on the humorous Monday-morning recaps he wrote for coworkers at the time, it’s a nice piece of CNN history, but the book also offers a glimpse of the changing local media business: Opponents of the CaNiNes over the years have included squads from America’s Most Wanted, the Washington Post’s defunct Express, and Washingtonpost.com, which used to be a separate entity.

Those recaps were a way for Barnett and his teammates to celebrate and commiserate over the years. His write-ups capture the fun, as well as the slog, of being in a softball league. “It’s not easy trying to find humor when maybe there isn’t humor,” he says. For example, the day CNN won the 1999 championship, debris from John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash the night before had begun to wash ashore. Players left the field to go work in their softball uniforms; star shortstop John King reported by cell phone as he played. Despite a squad depleted by the breaking news, CNN managed to defeat its chief rival, the Washington Times, and bring home the league trophy. As the heat and humidity soared on the field, he writes, “the ump threatened to call the game not because of the Code Red conditions but because of the frenzy created when approximately 17 beepers simultaneously went off.”

Names of on-air personalities are rare in Playing Games at CNN. The people who show up for softball games in Kensington aren’t typically the ones who appear in Playbook. Barnett says he misses the camaraderie, but managing the CaNiNes wasn’t glamorous: “I’m grateful I’m not waking up at 8 in the morning and heading to the field and having to do raking and putting down kitty litter in the wet spots.”

This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Washingtonian.

Andrew Beaujon

Senior editor

Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.