Bring Your Questions for Baseball Sage Buster Olney

Photo: Lisa Olney Buster Olney

If you care about baseball, you should care about Buster Olney. He is the ESPN baseball reporter who seems to know everything about everything, on the field and in the general managers’ offices, and presents it with a calm authority.
I got to know Buster a bit when I was an editor at The Times Magazine and he was the paper’s Yankees beat writer. His articles never failed to include one detail, perhaps about a player’s preparation or an executive’s unorthodox thinking, that turned a daily game report into a memorable piece of reading. He says he fell in love with baseball and writing while growing up on his parents’ farm in Vermont. To escape “the tractors and twice-daily milkings,” he began what became an 18-year career writing for newspapers, including six years at The Times, where he also covered the Mets and the New York Football Giants.
He now writes for ESPN The Magazine, ESPN.com, provides baseball analysis on a variety of ESPN shows, and yes, he’s got a blog. He’s also the author of The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty.
Major League Baseball holds its All-Star Game tonight, so at this pause in the season, we thought it’d be a good time to ask Buster to field your baseball questions. Please leave them in the comments below and, as with all our Q&A’s, we’ll post the answers in short course. Living in New York, as I do, it is easy to become convinced there are only two teams in the league, the Yankees and the Mets. Oh yeah, there’s apparently a team in Boston too. It will be interesting to see how New York-centric your questions are, or aren’t.
Addendum: Olney answers your questions here.