A lifetime love of baseball leads Thomas Scott to journalism

By Ethan Joyce

Thomas Scott sits in a booth outside of the small cafe in Newhouse 3, one of the buildings for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. The current Magazine, Newspaper and Online Journalism graduate student just finished listening to his iPod, and now he is relaxed after completing most of an assignment.

Scott has played sports all of his life. But when it came time to choose a career, journalism wasn't the first thing that stood out.

"I found out I wanted to go into journalism by process of elimination," Scott said.  "Math and science were never my best subjects, but history and English were.  Literature wasn't my favorite part of history or English, but through that I learned that I could write at least decently.  And to me, journalism is writing the history of sports.”

He says that baseball is his love. Not only that, he says it helped bring him and his brother, David Scott, closer together.

He says he quit playing baseball around the age of 14, but his brother continued to play. He says his brother helped lead him back.

With his brother’s help, he made the team at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he played for two years.

He was an infielder who had a career-best .298 BA in 2012 and started 15 of the 17 games he played that season.

He and his brother also share one of Thomas' favorite baseball memories.

"In 2008, the MLB All-Star game was in Atlanta and a bunch of kids from my park and a few other city league parks were allowed to participate in the All Star festivities.," Scott said. " I've never been a Yankee fan, but my brother and I got to escort Jorge Posada onto the field as they introduced the players for the All-Star game."

As of right now, he says he misses playing the game he loves. That being said, he is still trying to find somewhere to play around Syracuse.

"I miss chasing down balls in the hole at shortstop—sound of the ball when I square it up with a wood bat. I miss putting on the uniform and going out with my teammates,” Scott said. "I may have switched to a journalism career route, but I still have dreams of making it to the show."

Thomas Scott Q&A Transcript

Interviewer: Ethan Joyce

Q: All right, so I just want you to tell me first off who is Thomas Scott, and what is your story?

A: Like you said my name is Thomas Scott. I am from Atlanta, Georgia. I went to college at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Sports have been a big part of my life; I have been playing ball since I was probably about four years old. I got a great family, a big family. I got a younger brother who is going to college in Birmingham. And now I am at the Newhouse School of Public Communications to try to be a sports journalist, preferably for baseball, but my other interests are football, basketball and any other kind of sport.

Q: So you mention you want to be a baseball writer. You said you’ve played ball all your life. Are you talking about baseball, or are you talking about baseball, football, basketball overall?

A: Overall, all of them. I would love to be able to do all of them. They are all fun for me. I always like to get into conversations about the different sports. But, if I had to choose one, baseball would be the number one.

Q: And why is that?

A: It’s because it’s what I grew up on. That’s what I’ve been a fan of—I’ve been a Brave’s fan my whole life. Me and my brother can watch baseball games by ourselves and just have a completely good evening just doing that. I love the game, it’s… for me it’s the most related to real life because it’s a game of failure. You can either do well or you do poor, you’re either good or you’re not. So, that’s what I enjoy the most about baseball.

Q: You said you and your brother could watch baseball games all the time. Do you think baseball helped bring you to together?

A: Definitely. I stopped playing competitive baseball when I was probably around 14—that was the last of my youth ball. And then during high school I played football because I just wanted to stay active, but when I got to college, I didn’t play any sports. After just watching my brother continue to play and get better, play high level baseball and get ready to choose a college based on baseball…I realized I really wasn’t done with the game. So when I asked him to help me prepare to try out for baseball for my school, he was more than willing to help, and we worked out together, take infield together—baseball was something that we could both connect with. That was special for us.

Q: So what college did he decide to go to to play baseball?

A: Birmingham Southern College.

Q: Is it hard for you to being so far away from him, and from your family in general?

A: Yeah, it is. It’s a little difficult. It is the first real stretch that I’ve been away from Georgia for this long, and much less my family. I don’t even have much extended family north of Tennessee, really. So this is a brand new, and I’m excited about it. But yeah, I miss my brother and my fam.

Q: So why come up here?

A: Because I wanted to change the scenery—do something new, try something out. Usually, I pretty much stuck to my guns when it came to what I wanted to do. It’s like, “this is what I know; this is what I’m going to stick to.” But Newhouse provided a great opportunity. My advisor in college, Ron Thomas—the director of the journalism and sports program down there—he really encouraged it. Syracuse and Morehouse are trying to build a relationship together. So when I got accepted, I just dropped my comfort zone and just said, “Go for it, and see what happens.” It’s something brand new, and something to get excited for.

Q: And where do you hope Newhouse leads you after you graduate from here?

A: Hopefully into a job! But really, I hope it allows me to make the connections I believe are necessary to progress in this business. I hope that it enhances the tools that I’ve used—I’ve already learned so much in just the first week and a half of bootcamp that being spread out in undergrad didn’t really get to me. So I am learning a lot, I’m ingesting a lot, and I can see it coming together. And I think it is going to work out well.