Peter Gammons

From Wiki Gonzalez

Peter Gammons is America's most famous baseball journalist, formerly for the Boston Globe, and currently for ESPN.com, where he writes a weekly rumors column ("Diamond Notes") and other columns as breaking news appears. He regularly appears on ESPN TV and radio programs to discuss/plug his columns, which are available exclusively to ESPN Insider members.

Primates seem to have raised their collective opinion of Gammons as a baseball writer in recent years. It is left as an exercise for the reader whether this change is because Gammons has improved, or because Primates have been exposed to numerous dingbat mainstream sportswriters like Jay Mariotti, Skip Bayless, and Phil Rogers, such that Gammons looks good in comparison.

If Gammons has improved, Primates suggest, it is because he has adopted knowledge of sabermetrics and some of the alphabet soup of modern stats into his daily routine of rumor-mongering and analysis, while the aforementioned lesser writers are mired in their old routines. Other Primates nevertheless maintain Gammons displays his lack of understanding of sabermetrics by his inconsistent and invalid application of advanced metrics.

Some claim that, in the dark ages before he went national, Gammons was a really good sportswriter. Supporting this claim, Bill James in his Historical Baseball Abstract identified him the best sportswriter of the 1970s. He is considered the inventor of the "news-and-notes" column format seen in Sunday sports sections. Recently, his fellow journalists elected him to receive the Spink Award for his career achievements and "for meritorious contributions to baseball writing."

Gammons indirectly caused a week-long forced sabbatical for ESPN stablemate Rob Neyer when Rob strongly criticized one of Gammons's columns in print. Details are sketchy as to what went down there.

Gammons is renowned for misspellings and run-on sentences in his ESPN columns. It has been speculated that Gammons dictates his columns and submits them in raw form; these columns are then slapped up on ESPN.com with very little (if any) interference from an editor.

The Score Bard made his reputation with a random Gammons quote generator, whose output is easily mistaken for actual Gammons news and notes. On Old Primer, a Peter Gammons impersonator made a Primey-winning post in which the fake Gammons declared his columns to be "word art."

Sometimes nicknamed "Gammo" or "Count Chocula," Gammons bears a disturbing likeness to Andrew Jackson. Go ahead -- pull out a $20 and take a look.

Gammons has a habit of working musical references into his columns, which end up appearing ridiculous as often as not, such as misspelling Pete Townshend's last name (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/gammons/story?id=1931282/). He once listed Richard Thompson (http://www.richardthompson-music.com/) as one of his favorite guitarists, and he himself played in a band (the Fabulous Penetrations) in his college years, so Gammons does have some musical taste.

As further proof of his interest in music, he MCs an annual concert in Boston to benefit the Jimmy Fund, with special props given to Trauser, a local Boston band featuring Theo Epstein on guitar. Other local artists he is likely to namedrop: Dropkick Murphys, Kay Hanley, Susan Tedeschi.

External Links

• Image of Peter Gammons (http://keymancollectibles.com/images/wpe2F1.jpg)
• Gammons's blog (http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=gammons_peter)
• Gammons's annual concert (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/gammons/story?id=1692997)
• Gammons receives Spink Award (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=1944776) - December 13, 2004