Some sources decline interviews because they are not authorized to go on the record. Some decline because they don’t want to disrupt, say, a free-agent negotiation in progress.
And there are those who, like me, are just trying to avoid my wife’s bad side.
“Susan’s going to kill me,” Billy Beane joked when I called him for a comment at the end of the Winter Meetings last year.
Susan Slusser is the formidable, competition-crushing A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. You don’t mess with The Sluss. Now in her 20th year on the beat, she patrols her territory with an iron pen.