Jeff Passan: Becoming an MLB insider helped me ‘do the kind of journalism that I put on a pedestal’

ESPN’s Jeff Passan is the rare sports insider who still writes long-form features, trend pieces, and even game stories.

For most national sports insiders tasked with breaking news for a living, the work of getting information and putting it out is a full-time job. Some might have a podcast or a role on a studio show, but the insider of today works very differently than a Peter Gammons, Chris Mortensen, or Peter Vecsey.

This is no accident. Passan clearly carves out time in his busy schedule to report longer features and tell bigger stories about MLB, though he likely does not have to.

In a new interview with his former ESPN colleague Joon Lee, Passan explained how his “perspective changed” from looking down on the insider game to appreciating its value to his career.

“When I was younger, before I was in the scoop game, I looked down on it,” Passan said.

“To me, it was a lesser form of journalism. Someone’s going to get something, so what’s the difference between knowing something now and knowing something 30 seconds from then? Where my perspective changed, though, was when I started going after some more of that transactional news and realized that in the process, getting to know people and getting people to trust you and be willing to give you information, it builds the kind of relationships that allows you to do the kind of journalism that I put on a pedestal a lot more easily.”

Whereas NFL fans might only hear from Adam Schefter on television or his podcast, baseball lovers get an array of writing from Passan about the sport. Within the past two weeks, Passan has broken the news of multiple big MLB contract extensions — and also wrote a deeply felt column setting the table for the World Baseball Classic final.

Faced with the opportunity to become ESPN’s lead MLB insider, Passan took the both/and route rather than leaving behind his past work as a reporter and columnist at Yahoo.

Last year, Passan wrote a great profile of Pirates pitching phenom Paul Skenes in between TV hits in which he bashed Pittsburgh for not spending to field a competitive roster around him.

Passan sees this type of coverage as part of the holistic look he tries to give MLB fans with his work. And he also worries that fans are less able to distinguish between reporting and content than ever.

“I hope people don’t confuse those things, because they are very different. I think we have people with a lot less understanding of how news works and operates now because those lines have been muddled as much as they have,” Passan explained.

“I think ‘citizen journalism’ is an oxymoron. I think that those two things are incompatible, because journalism to me is something that has a set of standards, ethics, and consequences. And when you are not biding by those, you are not a journalist. You’re just someone who’s trying to get information out to the world.”

It is true that with more outright false information being promoted on social media now, the insider has become a more important piece of the puzzle in sports. However, just as Passan believes that pursuing scoops helped him become a better storyteller, the effort that Passan puts into covering the league more fully with his writing also earns him a greater level of trust from audiences and allows him to cut through the social media noise that he decries.