The great ones could play in any era.
Most baseball arguments, whether in barrooms or in cyberspace, generally boil down to this conclusion. Joe DiMaggio and Ty Cobb were so talented they could compete in today’s game, no question.
The same statement applies to the man generally regarded as the best baseball writer of this generation. Tom Verducci writes — and talks — about the game like few others before him.
“Tom is a singular entity in sports media because he is a writer who reached the highest level of (broadcasting) a big-four sport. It’s never happened before,” said Richard Deitsch, senior editor and media columnist at Sports Illustrated.
Verducci is the national Sportswriter of the Year two years running for his work at Sports Illustrated. He’s entering his 24th season at the magazine. He’s also won a pair of Sports Emmy Awards for TV work at MLB Network and is the first person ever to win as both Outstanding Sports Reporter and Outstanding Studio Analyst.
Verducci is not only the first non-former athlete to win the latter, but also became the first analyst of a World Series broadcast who was not a former player or manager when he sat in the Fox booth for the Fall Classic in 2014 and 2015.
“He is a guy that does what I don’t think anybody else can do,” said Joe Buck, Verducci’s broadcast partner with Fox. “No ex-players are going to write like he writes, yet he is a writer that analyzes a game like an ex-player.”
In a day and age when social media has turned journalism into something measured in characters rather than pages, and loud and outrageous is considered healthy debate, Verducci brings old-school values and intelligence to the table, no matter the medium.
“He’s a throwback,” said Buck. And the term fits even more when you consider how against type Verducci really is.
“He’s one of those guys that just doesn’t look like your typical sportswriter,” Buck said. “And I mean this with all due respect to the other sportswriters, but this guy’s like a GQ model walking around and everyone else has got salad hanging out of their mouths. So he kind of catches your attention.”
Strong roots for success
Verducci, 55, is not just well groomed, but his 6-foot-1, 185-pound frame suggests his skill sets are more athletic than scholarly. And he was good enough to walk-on to the baseball team at Penn State. But Verducci’s ability to relate to athletes in a way no modern sportswriter seems to goes back to his New Jersey roots as Tony Verducci’s son.
Tony Verducci coached high school football and baseball from 1955 to 1988 at Seton Hall Prep. Verducci’s connection to Penn State began when his dad helped work summer football camps with Joe Paterno. Those early memories of University Park remain vivid.
“Anybody who sees (the campus), how can you not love it in the summer?” asked Verducci, who earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Penn State in 1982.
When you’re the son of a coach, discipline and attention to detail aren’t learned so much as they are consumed. Verducci recalls his dad jotting down notes while watching football games on TV.
“The preparation, the work habits, all those things, from a young age I picked up from my dad,” said Verducci — the fifth in a line of eight children. “The other thing that really resonated with me was it wasn’t work to him. He loved what he was doing. And I was like — that should be what everybody does in life.”
Verducci, who said he knew sports writing was his passion as far back as elementary school, cut his teeth at The Daily Collegian. His first job after graduation at Florida Today had him on the Miami Dolphins beat, following them to Super Bowl XVII in 1983. Their legendary coach was Don Shula, who “treated me like I knew what I was doing, even though I was some kid who really didn’t know what I was doing.”
Verducci’s first baseball beat was covering the New York Yankees for Newsday in 1985. Five years later, he became the newspaper’s national baseball columnist and in 1993 Verducci joined Sports Illustrated, an iconic brand in journalism.
“I can’t even call it a dream job because I never even thought it was something that was possible,” Verducci said.
‘Biggest story in baseball’
The daily baseball beat is filled with the nuts and bolts of who’s doing what and where. At SI, long-form journalism allowed Verducci to “deep dive into stories, people, and issues.” And this is where Verducci has thrived, focusing more on the how and why and taking baseball reporting to a new level.
In 2002, at the annual pre-spring training meeting of SI’s baseball writers and editors, Verducci put the big story in focus.
“I told them, ‘Listen, the biggest story in baseball right now is steroids in the game. Somebody’s going to write this story and it better be us.’”
It had been barely more than three years since SI had named Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as Sportsmen of the Year, and baseball fans everywhere marveled as decades-old home-run records fell. Barry Bonds set a new standard when he hit 73 home runs in 2001.
“What really got me motivated,” Verducci said, “was the end of the 2001 season. I had a lot of players … who came up to me and were openly complaining about how unfair the game had become, that it wasn’t just a few renegade players. They felt like playing the game clean was a disadvantage … and that just didn’t smack me as anything that was right.”
“We need to tell stories that nobody else is telling,” said Peter King, the preeminent football writer in the game and Verducci’s colleague for four decades at both Newsday and SI. “And you need to develop the kind of relationships with people that are going to allow them to trust you to tell the real stories about the sport that you’re covering.”
Those relationships helped Verducci change the game.
In June 2002 recently retired Ken Caminiti, a former National League Most Valuable Player, admitted to Verducci in the pages of SI that he had been a steroid user. What were just whispers before now had a name and a face attached — a big one — with an article that estimated steroid use in baseball to be 50 percent or higher.
“He was always a very honest person,” Verducci said of Caminiti. “And for us in the business that’s exactly what you want — people who speak their minds without an agenda.”
Within weeks of the article’s publication, Congress told officials from Major League Baseball and its players union that some form of testing for performance-enhancing drugs had to be included in their new collective bargaining agreement. And barely more than two months after that, MLB instituted its first-ever form of steroid testing.
Affecting meaningful change through the printed word has happened countless times over the centuries. It happened in baseball because of the relationships Verducci had built and how they affected him.
“Because I do love baseball, I didn’t love where baseball was going,” Verducci said. “The game was very fraudulent at the time.”
And while in the aftermath of the Caminiti article, Verducci could feel the cold stares in clubhouses around the majors, it wasn’t long before he quite literally entered the players’ fraternity to write a story he calls his personal favorite.
Earning respect on the field
In the spring of 2005 Verducci went to spring training as a player, in uniform with the Toronto Blue Jays, for five days.
“My idea was: I cover baseball. I should know the game from as close a vantage point as I could get.”
It actually shocked Verducci when then-Toronto GM J.P. Ricciardi gave his approval without hesitation. Joining the Blue Jays as an outfielder and taking part in all the hitting and fielding drills alongside actual major league players, Verducci discovered the obvious to be true.
“I’ve always known baseball is a hard game,” Verducci said. “I’ve never kidded myself that it’s not. But it did impress upon me when you see the game up close how much faster it is.”
Blue Jays players were a bit uneasy at first. Here was the same reporter who helped expose a clubhouse secret of PED use now walking into the lion’s den and asking not to be eaten. What other scandalous information could wind up in the pages of SI?
That tension was short-lived. “He was one of the guys,” said former Blue Jays outfielder Frank Catalanotto, who was in Verducci’s hitting group every day that week.
As good an athlete as he was, even at age 44 then, Verducci held his own amongst the big leaguers. And by that we mean he suffered no major injuries and managed to make contact — a popup to first base — in his one at-bat during an intrasquad game against hard-throwing right-hander Chad Gaudin.
“I was amazed I didn’t strike him out, to be honest,” Gaudin said with a chuckle, admiring the level of skill Verducci brought to the battle. “He put together a pretty decent at-bat for never playing. It was pretty impressive.”
So impressive that Gaudin didn’t realize until after it was over that it was Verducci batting against him and not a regular player. He fit into his temporary surroundings, both on the field and in the clubhouse.
“He got his chops broken a lot of times by a lot of guys,” Catalanotto said. “He took it like a champion and he also dished it out.”
The respect Verducci got from his teammates grew 10-fold when, as a thank you, he handed Catalanotto and the others in his group gift cards to P.F. Chang’s, which goes on the Mount Rushmore of restaurants baseball players frequent.
“One of the things that Tom has proven over the years is that if you really can get good access and write about it in a sort of John Updike style, you’re going to have the best of both worlds,” said King, who was envious of his co-worker’s experience in uniform.
The tone was different than the Caminiti piece, but the idea was the same. It comes from a credo that Verducci actually handed out as advice to his future colleague Deitsch, at the time a college student seeking guidance.
“Find out what you want to know from those who know.”
‘Digging in the dirt’
It’s how the journalist finds new ground. And breaking new ground is something Verducci takes seriously.
“I do that by being in places and digging in the dirt where the crowds don’t hang out. I can’t be satisfied by plowing the same ground that other people are plowing,” he said. “I’ve gotta keep fresh, I’ve gotta look for things that are new or interesting or haven’t been discovered yet.”
He admits it’s harder to do that in the age of the Internet and the minute-to-minute news cycle. Twitter has changed the look of journalism in 2016, and Verducci is not a fan.
“A lot of the things Twitter is good for are not exactly in my wheelhouse, whether it’s snark, self-promotion or disregard for grammar — which bugs me!" he said.
“I like to do things that are hand-crafted for lack of a better phrase. That kind of stuff to me is microwavable and there’s nothing lasting to it. It's useful in its own ways but for me — I haven’t seen the upside to it.”
Television, on the other hand, provides an outlet that does allow the freedom to expand on stories and ideas about the game. When John Entz helped start the MLB Network in 2009, he knew Verducci was a different kind of analyst.
“What struck me most was that any time it was his turn to speak, he always had something interesting to say,” Entz said. “It was never just a bland answer filled with clichés. I always felt like he made people smarter."
Entz, now president and executive producer at Fox Sports, took the bold step of hiring Verducci as a color analyst for baseball’s showcase, the World Series. Verducci excelled in the role, even though there was an energy level he never experienced before while covering a baseball game.
“It’s like walking on stage,” he said. “It’s not quite being on the field, but literally under the lights.”
After positive reviews, Deitsch thinks it will be seen as a barrier-breaking move in the future, which isn’t normally said of white males in this industry.
“Tom will have opened doors,” Deitsch said. “He will have helped break the mold of always having to put a former athlete or coach in the color analyst position.”
“He doesn’t just come at this from a writer’s perspective,” Entz said. “He knows the game inside and out.”
And where others have failed in TV, Verducci’s skill as a communicator helped him strike a balance between the guy that can write a story in 5,000 words and say it in 15 seconds.
“Tom can introduce a point, make a viewer understand a point, and summarize the point in a short window of time,” Buck said. “And that’s not easy to do.”
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I personally have known and admired Tom for more than 20 years, one Penn State grad to another. Tom is a reporter who breaks definitions — a writer who excels on TV, open and engaging, not a crusty old newspaperman.
Like Tom, I am often asked for advice for young people entering the field. Here is how I would sum it up: If you aspire to write or talk about sports for a living today, Tom Verducci is everything you should want to be.
Editor’s Note: Sweeny Murti is a 1992 Penn State broadcast-cable graduate. He has worked for WFAN Radio in New York City since 1993, serving as New York Yankees beat reporter since 2001. He can also be seen regularly on MLB Network and SportsNet New York, where he has won two New York Emmy Awards.