About Joe Posnanski

By Alex Holt and Sung-Min Kim

Joe Posnanski was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Posnanski attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he majored in English.

Posnanski started out in journalism as a stringer at the Charlotte Observer, mainly covering high school sports but eventually moved up to covering the Rock Hill, S.C. sports beat for the paper. After a few years, he was hired as a columnist by the Augusta Chronicle but it wasn’t until he was hired by the Kansas City Star in 1996 that his career really began to take off.

While at the Star, Posnanski became famous for his baseball writing, especially after writing The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, a 2007 account of a cross-country trip Negro Leagues veteran Buck O’Neil made to raise awareness of the Negro Leagues’ memory, which Posnanski accompanied O’Neil on.

Before fully leaving the Star in 2009, Posnanski joined Sports Illustrated as a senior columnist, writing there for three years before he left to become the first editor of USA Today and MLB Advanced Media’s long-form sports journalism website Sports on Earth and then eventually a writer for NBC Sports, where he currently works.