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For ESPN’s Olney, it’s ‘Baseball Tonight,’ and every night

Buster Olney takes the field before a game at Yankee Stadium. He provides updates and anecdotes during “Sunday Night Baseball” broadcasts.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
Two hours before first pitch at PNC Park, Buster Olney stands near the home team dugout. He holds his microphone out toward Andrew McCutchen, the Pirates’ all-star center fielder and 2013 National League MVP.

McCutchen, at Olney’s request, is running through a few of his impressions of fellow sluggers for a segment that will air later that night on “Baseball Tonight,” just before ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.”

McCutchen flips his hat around and mimes the classic home-run swing of Ken Griffey Jr., crouches into the stance favored by Albert Pujols and adds a dash of teammate Pedro Alvarez’s routine at the plate for good measure. What delights Olney, though, is the capper: McCutchen drops the bat, clenches his teeth and takes on the nerdish demeanor of Tim Kurkjian, Olney’s ESPN colleague and longtime friend.

Moments later, they’re done. A quick handshake and McCutchen disappears into the dugout. Then, Olney, still on the field saying a few hellos, delights in telling several ESPN staffers how the segment will surprise Kurkjian because Olney was careful not to mention his intention to have McCutchen tape the final portion, throwing the segment back to the studio — to Kurkjian himself.

This is life at the office for Buster Olney. At 51, the baseball lifer has become a linchpin of ESPN’s baseball coverage. He hosts the “Baseball Tonight” podcast five days a week, writes 22 to 24 ESPN Insider columns each month, and mans the dugouts providing updates and anecdotes during the 26-week “Sunday Night Baseball” schedule.

In October, he becomes a constant presence in following the playoffs and the World Series — despite the fact ESPN has just one playoff broadcast: the American League Wild Card Game. Yet Olney will be seen and heard across ESPN’s platforms dissecting who’s up and down throughout each playoff round as baseball reaches its fall crescendo.

Like other ubiquitous ESPN faces — NFL insiders Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter come to mind — Olney is on camera whenever news breaks in his sport. ESPN installed a camera in Olney’s house, in the Westchester County, N.Y., suburbs, to make sure he, like Kurkjian, can provide instant analysis on trades, injuries and milestones across Major League Baseball. Nothing happens in baseball these days without Buster Olney weighing in somehow, some way. Often in several ways.

■ ■ ■ ■

Robert Stanbury Olney III — Buster was a family nickname bestowed upon him as a baby — grew up far from a career on national television. His mother and stepfather bought and ran a dairy farm in Randolph Center, Vermont, starting in 1973. (His stepfather still owns the farm; his mom died in 2006.) Hometown highlights include one stop sign and a population of 400. Olney and his three siblings milked cows, cleaned the barn and tended to other chores.

The Olneys never had a TV, forcing Buster to embrace baseball the old-fashioned way: listening to games on the radio.

Neither Olney’s parents nor his siblings were sports fans. In spare moments, Buster played ball, collected cards, studied the history of the game, and obsessively read about baseball in the untouched sports sections from his parents’ Sunday editions of The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Despite his New England childhood, Olney wasn’t a member of Red Sox Nation. He read a biography of Sandy Koufax and became a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers when he was 8 years old, a fandom he maintained through the 1988 World Series — hello, Kirk Gibson — before his first forays into sports journalism and a life of no cheering in the press box.

In the summers, he stacked 40-pound hay bales in the barn.

Peter Gammons (center), with former Detroit manager Jim Leyland and Olney, remains a mentor and close friend.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
“That was Buster’s big deal,” said Sam Lincoln, Olney’s younger half-brother. “He knew exactly how many bales of hay were in the barn each year and he was always looking to improve his record. Statistics have always been his thing — even when he was throwing hay.”

Financial struggles dogged the family farm. Olney’s maternal grandfather, a former executive at General Foods, established trust funds of $25,000 for each of his grandchildren. That money paid for Olney’s tuition at Northfield Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts, where he went for his sophomore, junior and senior years.

At Mount Hermon, in the winter of 1980, a couple of teachers tapped Olney to join them at a dinner the school hosted for Red Smith, the revered New York Times sports columnist. Talking with Smith, and debating him on the Hall of Fame credentials of Rabbit Maranville, Olney decided Smith’s career would suit him well.

First, he had to figure out college. A school counselor suggested applying for the Grantland Rice sports writing scholarship at Vanderbilt. Olney applied, didn’t land the scholarship — and went to Vandy anyway, sight unseen. The reason? “I just thought it would be smart to go someplace different.”

Without a scholarship and with his trust fund depleted, Olney struggled to stay in school. His parents’ financial struggles left him unable to obtain financial aid. One year, he went home to Vermont and commuted 25 miles each way and worked at a bagel bakery in New Hampshire, starting his days at 3 a.m. When he returned to Nashville to resume college, a bagel shop had just opened and needed an employee. Olney got the job, promising the owner, “I’m the only guy who’s going to come in here with bagel experience.”

Olney describes himself as a good student through prep school — but a lousy one in college, where he dedicated himself to The Hustler. That’s not a Larry Flynt publication or a straight-ball pool tournament; it’s the Vanderbilt student newspaper.

It took him six years to graduate with a degree in history. Irby Simpkins, the Nashville newspaper executive who gave Olney his first job, helped pay for Olney to finish school.

After Vandy, Olney took on prep sports and novelties such as pigeon racing (yes, really) as a young reporter in Nashville. His first baseball beat came at The Nashville Banner, where he covered the Class AAA Nashville Sounds. There, he learned nuances of the game from Frank Lucchesi, who had managed the Phillies, Rangers and Cubs before finishing his managing career during Olney’s first season in 1989.

Olney recalls meeting a number of future major leaguers during his two years following the Sounds. And he made inroads with other managers and coaches he would see again in the majors, including Buffalo skipper Terry Collins, now leading the NL East champion New York Mets.


Olney with analyst John Kruk at spring training
Photo by: ESPN IMAGES
He moved on to San Diego, where he got his first MLB beat — the Padres — with the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1993.

All along, Olney knew he had the passion to cover baseball. He became convinced of his abilities with an assist from hall of famer Tony Gwynn. In 1994, while covering the Padres, Olney wrote a tight-deadline account of Gwynn scoring the winning run in the 10th inning in Pittsburgh to win the All-Star Game for the National League. “My biggest challenge was getting better as a writer,” he said. “Tony narrated the play: He scored on a ball hit in the gap and beat the throw. That [story] made me think, ‘I could do this.’”

The Baltimore Sun agreed, hiring Olney to cover the Orioles in 1995. His two years there included Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games-played streak and Roberto Alomar spitting in the face of an umpire.

Neil Amdur brought Olney to The New York Times in 1997 to cover the Mets. Amdur, then the sports editor at the Times, took notice of Olney’s ability to combine deadline writing with unique insight in his stories for The Sun.

“In baseball parlance, he’s a .300 hitter and he knows how to win,” Amdur says today. “There’s a lot of sniping that goes on [among reporters and in media circles]. He doesn’t give you a lot of room to snipe.”

In 1998, Olney took over the Yankees’ beat at the Times, chronicling a historic season that included a record 125 wins, including 11 in the postseason and a World Series championship. Olney churned out hundreds and hundreds of game stories, profiles, analysis pieces and other features over the next several years while following the most dominant team in baseball.

Married in 1996, he became a father in 1999, his second year on the Yankees’ beat. (Olney and his wife have two children: a 15-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son.) He knew then his baseball beat-writing days — requiring him to spend 150 nights per year on the road — would end soon. After the 2001 season, a campaign he chronicled in “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty,” published in 2004, Olney stopped covering the Yankees.

The Times put him on the NFL beat with the Giants for a year in 2002, an assignment he enjoyed but one he knew would be short-lived. At the same time, he grew frustrated with the paper’s shift in emphasis toward college sports coverage under Howell Raines, the Alabamian who ran The Times from 2001 to 2003. Restless for the first time in his journalistic life, Olney pondered his options.

Serendipity arrived in the form of ESPN. The network recruited him in 2003.

As a beat writer, Olney had had little interest in TV work. Peter Gammons, a close friend and mentor, pioneered the transition of ink-stained baseball insiders becoming TV talking heads when he joined ESPN in 1989. Gammons changed Olney’s mind.

“I told [Buster] it’s not any different than when you’re writing,” said Gammons, an analyst at MLB Network since 2010. Gammons and Olney worked at ESPN together for seven years. “Basically, you’re just doing the same job. It’s about information.”

Gammons and Olney talk almost daily, swapping baseball gossip. Gammons praises Olney’s work ethic and integrity, as well as his enthusiasm for the job. “A lot of Peter rubbed off on Buster,” said ESPN colleague Jayson Stark, who has known both of them for many years.

Gammons said if he and Olney are on the phone at 2:45 on a weekday afternoon — when the school bus drops off Olney’s son — the conversation ends there. As much as Buster Olney works, he keeps his priorities in the right order, Gammons and Stark say.

To maintain his Ripken-style reporting regimen, Olney makes efficient use of his time. Colleagues say Olney is usually found in one of two places on the road: his hotel room or the ballpark. He never goes out for drinks or dinner, preferring to get to bed early or watching still more baseball on TV.

Ask him what he eats on the road and Olney says, “Room service.”

Kurkjian sees little difference between the young Padres beat reporter he met in the early 1990s and the middle-aged man who is now his longtime colleague.

When Kurkjian met Olney, Jim Riggleman managed the Padres. Olney and Kurkjian discussed a lingering issue hovering over the team and how matters might turn out.

“Buster looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to ask him every day until I get the answer to this,’” Kurkjian recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, this is who Buster is.’ I think he’s been asking questions every day since to everybody else. … I get tired watching him.”

■ ■ ■ ■

Two years ago, Olney decided to take on another challenge: podcasting. He hosts five shows per week, each episode around 45 minutes. In 2013, the “Baseball Tonight” podcast had 20,000 listeners most days. Now, it’s 60,000.

Olney, giving his take during a “Baseball Tonight” special, also does columns and podcasts.
Photo by: ESPN IMAGES
If Olney ever gets tired of baseball or work or sifting through numbers to find a trend or pattern, he keeps those thoughts to himself.

A day before the McCutchen taping, Olney looks down from the PNC Park press box as the Pirates face the Dodgers. Asked whether the blur of games and lengthy seasons become mind-numbing, Olney dismisses the idea. Every baseball game offers an infinite variety of people and situations and strategy, he says.

And as for all of the extra innings logged writing columns, recording podcasts and recounting the top stories on “SportsCenter” and beyond? No matter what he does, Olney says he has always started his days early, whether it’s milking cows, baking bagels or getting up at 4:30 to start his ESPN column. And he never expects that to change.

One man’s grind is Olney’s comfort zone.

Now in October, the road is calling, with Olney heading to playoff sites and then the World Series. Followed by the winter meetings. And, yes, another spring training after that. All of which he is eager to see, no matter how many times he’s been there before.

As Olney puts it, “I can’t imagine doing anything different.”

Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication.

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