About Joe

Joe Posnanski is National Columnist for NBC Sports.

Posnanski was Senior Writer at Sports on Earth, a joint venture of USA Today and MLB Advanced media. He was Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated from 2009 to 2012. The last year he was named National Sportswriter of the Year (by the Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame). He also was named Best Sportswriter at the Blogs With Balls 4 Conference, earning him a muppet that looks like him. This is easily Posnanski's daughters' favorite award. The Baseball Bloggers Association named him him their inaugural best online writer and renamed the award "The Joe Posnanski Award," another fantastic honor though not quite a Muppet that looks like him.

He was sports columnist at The Kansas City Star from 1996 to 2009. He won more awards there, if you're not bored by his bragging already. He was twice named the best sports columnist in America by The Associated Press Sports Editors. He was also nominated for twenty-one awards by the APSE, and won additional first place national awards in feature and project writing.

He has written four books: "The Machine: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds;" "The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America; "The Good Stuff," a collection of columns; and "Paterno," a biography of the Penn State football coach, which was released Aug. 21, 2012. "Soul" won the prestigious Casey Award as the best baseball book of 2007.

Joe previously worked as sports columnist for The Cincinnati Post and The Augusta Chronicle, and started his career as a multi-use reporter and editor at The Charlotte Observer. Joe grew up in Cleveland, where he spent the bulk of his time rooting for losing teams. He and his family lived in Kansas City for 15 years, where he spent the bulk of his time writing about losing teams. Joe, his wife Margo and their two daughters Elizabeth and Katie now live in Charlotte, N.C., where they are in close proximity to losing teams.