Few baseball writers know the game as well as Tom Verducci. The longtime Sports Illustrated writer and FOX Sports television analyst, who cut his teeth at The Daily Collegian and also walked on to the Nittany Lion baseball team, has sources across the league and a deep knowledge and love of the sport. His reporting has earned him national sportswriter of the year honors and five Emmy awards. We caught up with Verducci ’82 Com—a 2024 Distinguished Alumnus—to discuss the influences on his career, the sea changes to the sport and his profession, and his differing approaches to the keyboard and the microphone to inform fans about the finer points of America’s pastime.
Penn Stater: Your dad, Tony, was a baseball and football coach in New Jersey. What did you learn from him about both the game and what it was like being around players and coaches?
VERDUCCI: I learned about the details of the game. Everything mattered, and so I saw the game from the inside out. I was lucky. Most people come to a game or a sport as a fan, and I literally had a father who was a coach, so I saw everything from a coach’s perspective. And I’ve always thought that was a big advantage for me. I understood the “whys” behind whatever happened on the baseball field. I remember one time an umpire missed a balk call. It was a state tournament game. And I remember talking to my dad after the game that, you know, he put this play on to influence a balk and he got it, but the umpires missed it. Those things kind of happened a lot. Like the reason games were won were maybe a little thing that you didn’t notice. Everybody notices the home run or the strikeout. I really got plugged in to the details, not just in baseball but in football, because my dad did both.
But probably the biggest thing that I learned was the fact that he was always doing something for a living that he absolutely loved. Even when he wasn’t coaching, he was always doing something to make himself to be a better coach, whether it was scouting other teams, diagramming football plays. Around our house, any scrap of paper seemed to have Xs and Os on it. He’s watching a football game on TV, he’s taking notes. And I just thought that was so cool. I just knew instinctively that he was doing something that he loved, and I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t that be cool if I got to do that someday?”
PS: You were a walk-on with the baseball team at Penn State. Did you make your college choice because of baseball, because of the sports journalism program, or both?
VERDUCCI: Well, it goes back even further. Again, my dad’s the connection here, because there were some summers where he helped out at the Penn State football camp. And I went up there a couple of times and just absolutely loved the campus. It was the first college that I ever saw. I thought it was beautiful. I’m one of eight kids, and what attracted me to it as well is, it wasn’t home, but it was close enough to home. It was like the perfect distance for someone who wanted to get out of the house. That was before I even started thinking about curriculum and what it took to get into Penn State. I just liked the vibe and the campus itself, the physical nature of the campus, which I thought was beautiful. But I knew I wanted to study journalism. I knew I wanted to write. I knew I loved sports. And when I looked into Penn State’s journalism program, everything that I saw, it was outstanding. I loved the fact that it had a daily newspaper. I remember thinking that that’s like having a real job in college. I was used to a high school newspaper that came out like once a month. The fact that it was Division I, big-time sports, I thought that would be really advantageous for somebody like me to be around a big-time football program. And I knew the writers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh would be coming in on Saturdays to cover the game, so a lot of real-world experience there, even by osmosis.
PS: How did you balance those long hours at The Daily Collegian with baseball responsibilities?
VERDUCCI: It’s pretty crazy when I look back on it. I mean, they were long days, long nights, and especially nights at The Collegian, working as an editor and putting the paper to bed, and then doing page design and editing stories and writing stories. It really is like a full-time job, but I loved it. And I liked being active. I was never sitting still. I wouldn’t say it was hard, because in both cases these are my biggest passions in terms of vocation—writing and sports. So it wasn’t like I was like, oh man, I gotta go to The Collegian today, or oh man, I gotta go to baseball practice. It was all pretty fun, and looking back on it, it was a great time in my life. Busy, but I never felt like I was overwhelmed.
PS: Why do you think you gravitated toward covering baseball?
VERDUCCI: Well, baseball was always my favorite sport, and I can’t tell you why. But my parents like to tell a story about how when my dad was watching a game on TV, I was like 2 or 3 years old. They loved to take out pillows and spread them around the room in the shape of a diamond. When the batter hit the ball, I’d run around the pillows. It was just something about the game that I really liked, and as I got older, I felt like there was so much to learn about the game. I felt like the more I learned about it, the more I didn’t know about it and wanted to find out more. I still am learning, by the way. But yeah, it’s always been my favorite sport. I like the fact that there’s so many levels to it. The more you know, the more exciting the game is. Like the anticipation of what might happen, to me, is as exciting as what actually does happen. I was really lucky, because [for my first job] I covered the [Miami] Dolphins [for Florida Today]. And then I went to Newsday in New York. And I started out covering high school sports, and it was one day in February where the sports editor comes up to me and he says, “Can you get down to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow to cover the Yankees [in spring training]?” And at the time, Fort Lauderdale was like the place to go for spring break. I probably looked out the window and saw it was a foot of snow on the ground. I was like, Fort Lauderdale tomorrow? When’s the next plane leave? It just happened to be the baseball beat that opened up at that particular time. Now if I could have chosen a beat, which you can’t really do in this business, I would have taken baseball more than any other sport.
PS: Baseball’s TV ratings were up last year. Attendance was up. Why do you think the game is so healthy right now? Is it just because we had two big-market teams in the World Series, or is it the star power of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani and Paul Skenes? Why is baseball kind of thriving right now, when it hasn’t in recent years?
VERDUCCI: There’s no doubt that having New York and Los Angeles in the World Series and Judge and Ohtani specifically, the two biggest stars in the game, had a huge effect on the ratings. You also need, to get really, really big ratings, a long series. We didn’t get that. We got a five-game series. Even if it’s too small a market team, you get to a game seven, a lot of people will tune in. So length of series is probably the most important thing. But having the two biggest markets, yeah, I think that had a lot to do with it.
I will say that baseball is in a really good place right now, and to me, a lot of this has to do with the installation of the pitch timer. The games move along so much faster now. I was really worried about the game two or three years ago, and I was writing about this 10 years ago. There was so much dead time in the game that baseball was giving people the exact opposite of what today’s marketplace demands, which is, as a consumer, you want more action and less time. Baseball was giving people less action over more time. It was a disaster. It was just bodies standing around a baseball field. If you watched the game on TV or in the stands, there was nothing dynamic about it. It was an inert game. And they basically, overnight, chopped down 20 to 25 minutes of nothingness. If you’re watching the game on television, the fact that you think that next pitch is going to come in 10 to 15 seconds, that really engages you as a viewer, rather than, when is the guy going to throw the next pitch, and what’s on another channel?
I think a lot of people watched the World Series because it was the Yankees and the Dodgers who may not be hardcore baseball fans, but they’ve heard of Judge and Ohtani. And if they hadn’t seen a game in a couple years, I think they must have liked what they saw, because the games do move a lot better. I think the pace of the game is the biggest thing why baseball now, I think, is in a growth period. We can’t compare it to the ’70s and the ’80s. We live in an age now they call the attention economy. We only have so much attention to give. Like our bandwidth for our brains can only handle so much. And we keep getting more and more choices to make. I mean, it’s just crazy, with all the different networks and satellite channels, streaming options, how many options we do have. Baseball is competing against so much more. But I think if you just compare it to where the game was even five years ago or 10 years ago, I think it’s in a much better place.
PS: Did the players push back a lot on the pitch clock, particularly the pitchers? Did guys grumble about that behind the scenes, even if the fans were loving the shorter games?
VERDUCCI: Man, that was the biggest surprise to me about the pitch timer. I was prepared. I think I wrote this. Like for the first two months, three months of the season, just being ready for a lot of complaining, because players, especially the older guys, they have their habits. If you’re a hitter, there’s a routine these guys go through before every single pitch, not just every at-bat. And I thought it would be very disruptive to their routines. But they had it in spring training, so they had a month to get used to it, and I was surprised at how quickly they adapted, really. I thought they all did a great job. I mean, there were exceptions here and there, but for the most part, I think they adapted a lot quicker than I thought. It was not the big issue I thought it was going to be.
PS: Other than competing with other sports and that attention economy, what challenges do you see down the road for baseball?
VERDUCCI: Well, in the short term, you’re looking at Oakland and Tampa Bay, who are both playing in minor league stadiums in 2025, for different reasons, but that’s obviously not ideal, and both still have not really settled their long-term homes. So those are still two loose ends. Baseball went through a great renaissance of ballpark construction, starting with Camden Yards. There’s a lot of just beautiful ballparks out there, and it’s a great way to spend a night; even if you’re not watching the game, which a lot of people are not, because there are just so many food choices, entertainment choices. You can walk around. There’s just a lot to bring people out to the ballpark besides the game. Those are issues that need to be solved. And probably the biggest issue is—and this is true for just about every sport—how the media landscape shapes out, now that the regional sports network model, which carried the game for so long, especially financially, is breaking, if it’s not broken entirely. We’re moving toward a streaming future, and what that entails and how we’re able to make choices and how the games are shown and who the TV partners are. The next three or four years are going to be definitive in terms of how baseball is consumed over the next generation. And I don’t think anybody actually knows for sure how it’s going to play out, but we just know we’re in this kind of disruptive period right now with not a lot of answers, a lot of possibilities.
PS: How did you get into TV? And what do you like about it, versus just the beat writing aspect of things?
VERDUCCI: I don’t know how I got into it other than just the momentum of doing what I do. And as more media outlets popped up, you know, whether back in the old days there was an outfit, cable I worked for, CNN/SI that Sports Illustrated was in partnership with CNN, so I got a lot of reps there. I didn’t know when I started out in the newspaper business that I was getting into what really is a dying industry, right? It’s not a growth industry, for sure. So to be relevant, I think you do need to have a lot more variation to what you do. When I was at Penn State, there were people who were in electronic journalism and people who were in print journalism, and nobody really did both. It looked like a whole different subset of people doing the other discipline. I never thought about TV. I never wanted to be in TV. It’s just sort of a natural outgrowth of what I was doing. And as I started to do it, I guess, like a lot of things I do, I want to be the best that I can be at it, and I found I really enjoyed it too. I still love writing. But there’s something really exciting about not having a delete key. There’s no second draft. Everything is going out there in real time in the sports world; there are no second takes. That to me is the most exciting and most challenging part, just to nail something the first time every time. You’re not going to do it every time, obviously, but to be able to think on your feet like that and still come across as somewhat coherent, I kind of like that challenge, especially when I do games in the booth. There’s nothing better than that. Describing a game or whatever’s going on and being entertaining and informative at the same time.
PS: And do you still have that mindset of when you were a kid of finding things that average people aren’t going to know from a box score, or even from the broadcast otherwise?
VERDUCCI: I’ve always been curious about that. I tell a lot of college students this: If you want to be like everybody else, that’s pretty much the definition of average. Find what you do well. Do something better than anybody else, but if it’s your strength, play it up. And for me, it always comes back to curiosity. I love what I do, and there’s a certain element of curiosity that’s attached to that where I want to learn more. I always go back to something [broadcaster] Vin Scully told me when I wrote a story when he was retiring with the Dodgers. I asked him how he could possibly be, and he was, just as good at the end of his career as he was in the beginning. It was amazing. How do you be this good for this long? And he actually gave me a quote from Laurence Olivier. He said, it’s the humility to prepare and the confidence to pull it off. And I always remember that, because the humility to prepare, to me, is so important. I think what that means is, you’re never big enough to just get by on your name or what you’ve done in the past. It’s always like a player will say; it’s day to day. You’re judged on how you did in your last game, and you’re looking forward to the next game coming up.
To me it’s the same thing with writing a story or having a broadcast, it’s like you’re doing it for the first time. I still remember clear as day, the first day I was working for Newsday on my internship after I graduated from Penn State, I was in the newsroom and I was at a computer writing the story, and the sports editor, a guy by the name of Dick Sandler, came up to me and maybe he thought I was nervous or something. I don’t know. But he said, “Just remember, you’re not writing for The Daily Collegian anymore.” And I remember it struck me as so weird. Like when I sit down at that keyboard, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s 20,000 people reading The Daily Collegian or 2 million people reading Newsday. It really doesn’t. It’s me and the keyboard and the story, and trying to write it the best that I can. And I’ve tried to do that, again, whether it was my first day at Newsday or years later at Sports Illustrated.
You have people who will give you advice, and listen, I’ve had a ton of people over the years who really, really helped me, and you really need that. I always say encouragement is huge, especially when you’re younger, because you’re not always sure. But you also need to be sure, there has to be some compass inside of you that says you can do this, and you want to do this. And for me, I feel like I’ve always kind of found that confidence, if you will, even if it’s a false confidence sometimes. Whether it’s a long story, a short story, whether I have 10 minutes on deadline to write it or I have two weeks to write a feature story, I try to give the same effort every time.
Lisa Salters ’88 Com
Reporter, ESPN
Salters is a sideline reporter and co-producer for Monday Night Football and the lead sideline reporter for NBA on ABC. She has also worked on in-depth pieces for E:60 and Outside the Lines.
Jenny Vrentas ’06 Sci
Reporter, The New York Times
Vrentas covered the NFL for Sports Illustrated for nearly a decade before moving to the Times, where she works as an enterprise and investigative reporter.
Emily Kaplan ’13 Com
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Kaplan—a former Penn Stater intern—covers the NHL for ESPN and does rinkside reporting during the Stanley Cup playoffs. She was also a regular panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn. Check out our 2023 interview with Kaplan and read her essay from our Jan/Feb '23 issue.
Stephen Hennessey ’11 Com
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Michael Robinson ’04, ’06 Com
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The former Nittany Lion quarterback and NFL running back appears on programs including Good Morning Football and The Insiders.
