TIM KURKJIAN AND PEDRO GOMEZ
Every day of the Major League Baseball season for twenty years — from 1990–2010 — Tim Kurkjian cut out the box scores from the newspaper of each game played and taped them into a spiral notebook.
He estimates that this daily task, running 15 minutes per day over 20 seasons consumed 40 days of his life.
He discontinued this practice only because fewer and fewer papers continued to print the box scores. And he wasn’t happy about it.
The man loves baseball.
So does Pedro Gomez.
The son of Cuban refugees, he was born just twenty days after his parents’ 1962 arrival in the United States and two months before the October missile crisis.
Growing up in Miami and attending high school with Jose Canseco (Coral Park HS) whet an appetite for baseball that grew to know no bounds.
After years of reporting on high schools and general assignment sports gigs in Miami and then in San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, Gomez became a full-time baseball beat writer in 1992 covering the Oakland A’s for the San Jose Mercury News and the Sacramento Bee through 1997.
He was a national baseball writer and sports journalist for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix from 1997–2003 when ESPN came calling and Gomez has been a premier baseball correspondent for “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” a well-respected regular on SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight for the past sixteen years.
These two men, born a half-dozen years apart are among the very best in the business of reporting and insightfully analyzing the great game of baseball, once referred to as “America’s Pastime.”
The pioneer for all professional sports today, baseball is woven into our nation’s tapestry and is indelibly etched in our identity and pedigree just like Bald Eagles, Dixieland and Apple Pie.
Wrigley Field and Fenway Park are recognized as U.S. landmarks on a par with the Washington Monument, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park.
Kurkjian and Gomez knew this long ago.
They also learned first-hand of the peripatetic nature of their chosen field, exacerbated by the increasing instability of the newspaper business.
Resilience would come to define them.
Kurkjian’s journalism career began with the Washington Star in 1978, the year he graduated from the University of Maryland. The paper went out of business in 1981.
He worked briefly for the Baltimore News-American days after the Star’s collapse; the News-American folded within two months of Kurkjian signing on.
Rising from the mat yet again, he became the Texas Rangers beat writer for the Dallas Morning News, a position he held through 1985.
From there it was back to Baltimore for four years covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun before fielding a phone call from Sports Illustrated offering him the senior baseball writer’s job.
He accepted and carved out a handsome niche for himself at SI from 1989–1997. He also reported for CNN-SI.
Kurkjian joined ESPN in March 1998 as a baseball insider and he’s been there ever since, reporting for Baseball Tonight and assuming a senior writer position with ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.
He has covered every MLB All-Star Game and World Series since 1982 and is a published author of three books, “America’s Game”; “Is This a Great Game, or What?”; and “I’m Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies” which was released in May 2016.
He has been a seasoned, well-respected and perspicacious mainstay — the voice of baseball reason — on Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter for the last twenty years, a near eternity.
Gomez’ life recently assumed an added baseball-related twist and a most gratifying one at that.
Seems all those hours playing catch in the backyard with junior has paid off.
Junior in this case is son Rio, a soon-to-be 25-year-old left-handed pitcher who was selected by the Boston Red Sox in the 36th round of the 2017 Draft out of the University of Arizona.
The realization of countless father-son dreams enacted in a singular workplace — on the baseball diamond — is a source of great pride, not to mention pinch-me moments for the two.
Pedro (and the rest of the family no doubt) beams like a beacon and Rio wants to pitch in the bigs.
Badly.
“When [Rio] got to the University of Arizona, I told him, ‘No matter what, you’ve already reached a level that so few ever do,’” the elder reflected. “He pitched in the Pac-12 Conference. That was amazing. To see him pitch in a Super Regional successfully and then to have his name called and to be drafted, he keeps taking steps.”
The younger Gomez does not feature comet-like velocity or fall-off-the-table stuff but he knows how to pitch. Command is his thing; inducing swings-and-misses.
In five 2018 appearances with the Red Sox Single-A affiliate Lowell Spinners his stat line sang a ditty laced with bravado: 13 ⅔ innings; five hits; 13 Ks; 1 BB; 0.66 ERA.
Says Rio, “What I work on is having a great changeup because I’m not a guy who’s going to blow it by you. I’m not going to be [throwing] 98 [miles per hour]. That’s not me and I’ve accepted it a long time ago so that makes it easier for me to work on other parts of my craft instead.”
He’s also accepted the fact his father’s celebrated status as a big-league insider gives him nothing.
“There’s definitely no advantage athletically. You don’t get any extra ability to hit a ball harder or throw a ball farther from that,” he wryly remarked.
Besides, the kid wants to make it on his own.
“I don’t think anyone wants to be known as that guy’s kid or that guy’s brother,” he said. “That’s probably a big reason why I don’t tell anybody that my dad is Pedro Gomez when I get to a new team or a new level. I don’t ever bring it up until they find out and I think part of that is because I don’t want to be known like, ‘Oh, that’s Pedro’s kid,’ or ‘That’s how he got here: because he’s Pedro’s kid.’”
“I got here because of me.”
Kurkjian and Gomez have set the bar high.
They are two of the very best at what they do, the gold standard pair promoting the global game of baseball.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in August 2019.]
