Diversify, Diversify, Diversify: My 2015 in Review

Sports writing is my third career. After college, I worked on political campaigns and for candidates after they were elected to office. Then I went to law school, and ended up practicing law for most of the next 18 years, with a few breaks to go back on the campaign trail and into government.

I gave all of that up five years ago. This gut-wrenching personal essay published on Deadspin explains why and what happened next. But if freelance money for interesting sports writing continues to dry up, I may be onto my fourth career in 2016.

So 2015 was a year of trying to stay nimble, by continuing to pursue longer form feature sports stories while looking for other paying freelance opportunities.

The highlight of my 2015 was this story on Major League Baseball’s push to market new young stars, published on NewYorker.com. That story led to several speaking engagements, which led to good networking, which led to a radio spots and podcasts.

I wrote a few other essays for Deadspin, including this one on how to talk to your children about sexual assault and sports. The comments on the story were, er, interesting.

My favorite stories to write in 2015 were ones that went beyond the teams, the players and the games, to the essence of what it means to be a sports fan. I spent a great deal of time in Oakland during the NBA Finals and filed this story for Vice Sports on the cruel irony of the Warriors finally reaching the top, just as the team plans to leave Oakland for a new arena in San Francisco. I also wrote this personal essay for Vice Sports on the end of an era on Long Island, with the NHL’s New York Islanders decamping for Brooklyn.

I covered my hometown San Francisco Giants from a statistical perspective for KNBR.com, the new website of the team’s flagship radio station. And I published this detailed historical study on offensive production by position on FanGraphs. But 2015 marked a huge slowdown for me in writing about baseball, my first and truest love in sports.

And then along came Men’s Journal, with the opportunity to write about baseball’s postseason for an audience of more casual sports fans. And that turned into my last story of the year on the top food shows on television right now.

I’m a picky eater and a vegetarian, so the idea that “food writer” is a viable career step seems unlikely. But if you’d asked me five years ago if my next move was into sports writing, I would have heartily laughed. You never know.