GOAT writers, by sport

NASCAR — Joe Whitlock

 

Probably not the right answer, but you could do a lot worse than the Boston Globe trio of Peter Gammons on baseball, Will McDonough on football and Bob Ryan on basketball.
But your baseball short list could also include Jimmy Breslin, Tom Boswell, Jayson Stark, Mark Whicker, Dick Young, Roger Kahn and, for one day, John Updike.

 

Was a little torn on Gammons because of his changing roles -- beat, national, Globe, SI, ESPN -- but agree with your overall point on those three.

I only know Whicker as a columnist, and he's terrific. But never read his baseball beat work, whenever and wherever he did it.

As for Breslin, c'mon, he did enough baseball-specific work to qualify here?

 

Gammons invented (or is given credit for having invented) the weekly "around the league" notes column, which pretty much every beat writer in every sport has copied.

 

That should qualify as a negative.

 

Jay Greenberg was as good a hockey beat guy as I ever read.

 

I admit, I have never quite understood what he is actually being given credit for, because J.G. Taylor Spink had been writing these type of columns for The Sporting News for decades before Gammons ever saw the inside of a press box. But Spink wasn't a beat writer, instead gathering all his information from the office in St. Louis, so I don't know if that makes a difference. It shouldn't, IMO.

My understanding is that the "around the league" notebooks fell out of favor with TSN in the mid-1960s (after Spink's death) when they started branching out as an all-sports weekly instead of "The Baseball Bible." So Gammons probably deserves credit for re-popularizing them a decade or so later. But it's not like he was inventing something that had never been done, and it's not like TSN was some obscure publication before then, either.

Maybe people just had short memories by the early '80s (or whenever Gammons started getting "credit" for it) and forgot that TSN had basically been doing the same thing for most of its history until the previous 15-25 years.

At times like this, I miss spnited because that old goat would probably set me straight in a heartbeat about Gammons' GOAT status. (Which I'm not arguing against, by any means. He was a master of that style of beat reporting, whether he invented it or not.)

 

I think Gammons' contribution was networking with other scribes across the country to regularly get fresh information. He was also well-connected enough within MLB that GMs and other executives would take his calls. I don't know that he invented the concept as much as he enhanced it beyond what had been done previously.

 

That's beautiful. I met him at the All-Star Game in Pittsburgh in 2006, and he seemed like the kind of guy who'd do that.

 

What made Fisher a great beat reporter as compared to someone who was pretty good and lasted a long time?

And Dick Connor when he covered the Broncos was the best beat writer to ever have worked in Denver. Conner was a more fluid writer than Simers.

And I agree that Gammons did the best notes column I have ever read in any sport.

 

NFL - Bob McGinn, Rick Gosselin. The best copy editor I ever worked with said TJ Simers was the best NFL beat writer he's ever seen and I'll take his word for it.
College football: Chris Dufresne, Mark Schlabach
College basketball: Jerry Tipton
NBA - Bob Ryan
Baseball: Hal McCoy, Tom Boswell


Gammons' notes column was legendary, but he loses huge points for being such a homer.

 

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