Sitting in a Pennsylvania Starbucks on a spring day in 2017, the baseball writer Jayson Stark found himself not there to get a cup of coffee, but to sign a stack of Topps Allen and Ginter baseball cards with his face on them. 

Stark’s picture — clad in a white shirt, gold tie and suit jacket — always shocked him. The baseball card company had written to Stark that it wanted him on a card, but it felt weird, he said. After all, Stark was the writer, not the player.

“I’m still hitless, I’m still several thousand hits behind Ichiro, and I always will be,” Stark joked in recalling the experience, referring to the legendary, recently retired outfielder.

But through his work from press boxes across the country for the past 46 years, Stark has stood out. After being honored with his own baseball card, Stark last December was named the recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for “meritorious contributions to baseball writing.” He’ll be presented with the award during the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction weekend from July 19-22 in Cooperstown, New York. Stark, a 1973 SU graduate, said he’ll be the first Newhouse graduate to receive the honor.

Stark’s path to Cooperstown wasn’t immediately clear. He is a former news editor at The Daily Orange who covered some sports in college and spent a year writing suburban news at the Providence Journal the year following graduation. 

But Stark knew that his dream job was as a baseball journalist, and he quickly transitioned back to sports. His time at the Journal led to The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for 21 years as the Phillies beat writer and national baseball columnist. Over 17 subsequent years, he became a regular presence at ESPN, where he was a senior baseball writer. Now, he’s a senior writer at The Athletic, the upstart sports website, and appears regularly on MLB Network. 

“The idea that you can actually dream of doing stuff at 10 years old and then it happens, and then you end up in Cooperstown, New York, winning an award that the greatest sports writers who ever lived have won, that doesn’t happen to that many people,” Stark said.

The day after he moved into SU, Stark walked into The Daily Orange’s office. Starting with his first D.O. story on the history of SU football, Stark said, he built up the “internal toughness” necessary for a professional beat. He learned that players won’t talk some days and the ability to type sentences that haven’t been written before, which he had to do in 1980: “The Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series.”

During The D.O.’s split from the university in 1971, Stark — its news editor — worked with the other head editors to create something new “one daily edition at a time.” They had a blank slate, could cover topics they couldn’t before, and pioneered the paper’s independent status.

“We needed people to do stuff so we could get the paper out, and there was nobody to be a news editor,” Stark said. “And they kind of looked at me and I said, ‘OK, I can do that.’”

Following his four years at Syracuse, Stark longed for an end to his career’s “strange turn” in news and a return to sports. While at The Inquirer, Stark wrote his “Baseball Week in Review” column and covered some of the most successful Phillies teams in franchise history. He then combined print and broadcast journalism at ESPN, wrote three baseball books on the side, and continued to “take a step back and look at the game from 30,000 feet.” 

After covering some of the most popular players and marquee moments in baseball history, he’ll soon join many of those in the Hall of Fame, right alongside his writing mentors. For Stark, it’ll be another reminder that he’s fulfilled his lifelong dream.

“I’ve always had a love of baseball writing,” Stark said. “And from the time I was 10 years old, I wanted to do exactly what I’m doing now.”

Published on June 29, 2019 at 7:24 pm

Contact Andrew: arcrane@syr.edu | @CraneAndrew