Get Well Soon

I hope that when I wake up tomorrow morning I don't find out that this has become an obituary.

Peter Gammons, probably the best known baseball analyst in the country, underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm earlier tonight. The most recent report I have seen says that he is resting in the ICU of a Boston hospital, but doesn't list his condition.

Over the years Bob and I have found occasion to mock Gammons for things he has written. The name of our first and longest running fantasy league, the PIGSTY, is a acronym in which we refer to him as "Idiot."

At the time we came up with this clever acronym, we were a lot younger than we are now, and thought we were wiser. Peter Gammons, to us, symbolized the old school of baseball writing, and we knew how it should be done.

Now that we are actually doing baseball writing, we know it's not so easy. And we've also learned that, far from being a hidebound member of the Back In My Day club, Gammons never hesitated to embrace or at least explore the new. What's more, he has never gone in for the kind of vicious, attack dog style of writing of the Jay Mariotti school. His opinions may be right, they may be wrong, or they may be somewhere in between, but they are always civil and well intended.

Get well soon.