Baseball Bloggers Alliance Goes to Bat for SI’s Joe Posnanski
Sportswriter Joe Posnanski has hit a blogging home run.
The Baseball Bloggers Alliance has named Posnanski the winner of its inaugural Writer of the Year Award. Posnanski writes for Sports Illustrated, and maintains his own blog and Twitter account.
The alliance said Posnanski was the overwhelming selection of its members – so much so that the award will bear Posnanski’s name beginning in 2012.
On March 28, Posnanski tweeted: “Well ... I’m blushing. I’ve (obviously) never had an award named for me before.”
The Writer of the Year Award was created by the alliance to recognize writers who not only are talented but have embraced the Internet “in a full and vigorous fashion.” Voters took into consideration the 15 nominees’ writing abilities, online presence, and interaction with followers and fans.
“Joe Posnanski is a treasure to anyone that spends time online. Whether from reading his great blog entries or following his Twitter account, rarely a day goes by without a follower finding a gem,” said Daniel Shoptaw, founder and president of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.
Posnanski grabbed 35 first-place votes among the 110 ballots cast. His closest competitor, Rob Neyer of SB Nation, picked up 12 first-place votes.
Posnanski lives in Kansas City but will be moving temporarily to State College, Pa., to write a book about legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Before joining Sports Illustrated in 2009, Posnanski was a sports columnist at The Kansas City Star.
On his blog, Posnanski wrote that he was humbled by the alliance’s honor. Posnanski said he didn’t quite know how to handle the accolades that have come his way recently, including a National Headliner Award for online writing and a National Magazine Award nomination.
“Every instinct in me says to be grateful but quiet about it,” Posnanski said of the praise from his peers. “What we do as writers is so subjective that awards are pretty silly; the same story that wins an award from one organization can be called the worst story of the year by another. The gap can be, and often is, that wide.
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