Amid all the steroid and hot-stove furor comes word that Peter Gammons will be enshrined this summer in the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Gammons, best known today for his analysis on “Baseball Tonight” and his ESPN.com column, wrote for the Boston Globe for more than 20 years in addition to a Sports Illustrated stint, and he virtually invented the “baseball notes” column that is now a staple of every Sunday sports page.
Some fans dislike Gammons’ run-on sentences, his wannabe-hipster music references, and his over-reliance on unnamed sources. But “Old Hickory” (as he’s called due to his resemblance to Andrew Jackson) has a collection of sources (named or not) unrivaled among American sportswriters- and I like his unwieldy prose- I think it’s charming. Congrats to Peter; the honor is much deserved.
Posted by Stephen Silver at December 13, 2004 06:11 PMI think that all of Gammo's sources simply treat him as a conduit for their disinformation campaigns at this point. He's got so many sources with so many different agendas that Peter just throws a whole lot of stuff against the wall. When one scoop out of every five or ten turns out to be true, everybody sings the praises of "The Commissioner" and proclaims him a baseball journalism treasure. I'm afraid his act has worn thin with me.
Posted by: Krybo Amgine at December 14, 2004 03:57 PM