There will be no "Class of 2013" inducted into the Baseball Hall Of Fame, but there still needed to be coverage of the controversial group of superstar players shut out of Cooperstown by the Baseball Writers' Association of America.
The New York Times came up with perhaps the most visually arresting way of chronicling the 2013 vote that denied entrance a group of steroid-tainted players highlighted by Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa.
The cover of the Sports section on Thursday, the day after the BBWAA results were revealed, featured a use of white space as sure to captivate those into baseball as design enthusiasts. Beneath the banner headline "And The Inductees Are ... " (Or "Welcome To Cooperstown" in another edition) was inches and inches of blank space.
Darren Rovell of ESPN spoke with Times sports editor Joe Sexton and got a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of the captivating cover.
"Wayne Kamidoi, our boundary-pushing art designer, came up with the idea," Sexton wrote to Rovell in an email. "And Jay Schreiber, our baseball editor, saw the chance to capture the very old, very dispiriting story of steroids in baseball in a freshly powerful way. Yes, it was not a surprise that Bonds and Clemens didn't make it. But felt like history had spoken. How to convey that to our readers? I think we did it -- a striking, profound emptiness."
While the cover generated plenty of attention, not everyone necessarily was struck by a feeling of "profound emptiness." Buzzfeed saw the cover as a "sick burn" against the Hall while Bleacher report described it as a "hilarious joke of a sports front page."
What do you think?