
Mike Pesca
Mike Pesca first reached the airwaves as a 10-year-old caller to a New York Jets-themed radio show and has since been able to parlay his interests in sports coverage as a National Desk correspondent for NPR based in New York City.
Pesca enjoys training his microphone on anything that occurs at a track, arena, stadium, park, fronton, velodrome or air strip (i.e. the plane drag during the World's Strongest Man competition). He has reported from Los Angeles, Cleveland and Gary. He has also interviewed former Los Angeles Ram Cleveland Gary. Pesca is a panelist on the weekly Slate podcast "Hang up and Listen".
In 1997, Pesca began his work in radio as a producer at WNYC. He worked on the NPR and WNYC program On The Media. Later he became the New York correspondent for NPR's midday newsmagazine Day to Day, a job that has brought him to the campaign trail, political conventions, hurricane zones and the Manolo Blahnik shoe sale. Pesca was the first NPR reporter to have his own podcast, a weekly look at gambling cleverly titled "On Gambling with Mike Pesca."
Pesca, whose writing has appeared in Slate and The Washington Post, is the winner of two Edward R. Murrow awards for radio reporting and, in1993, was named Emory University Softball Official of the Year.
He lives in Manhattan with his wife Robin, sons Milo and Emmett and their dog Rumsfeld. A believer in full disclosure, Pesca rates his favorite teams as the Jets, Mets, St. Johns Red Storm and Knicks, teams he has covered fairly and without favor despite the fact that they have given him a combined one championship during his lifetime as a fully cognizant human.
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Theo Epstein who took the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs to the World Series, acknowledges that his statistics-driven approach to building teams might make baseball boring to watch.
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Sports commentator Mike Pesca wonders whether Major League Baseball will modernize to attract a young audience, and how it will keep them for life.
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Sports commentator Mike Pesca opines on the high levels of discontent among the NBA's top players.
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Commentator Mike Pesca, host of Slate's daily podcast The Gist, who offers his take on the Oakland Raiders head coach Jon Gruden.
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Sportscaster Bob Wolff is believed to be the only announcer to call a championship game in all four major sports. He died on Saturday at the age of 96.
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Commentator Mike Pesca has some advice about how to watch the Final Four of the NBA playoffs. Here's a hint: don't watch the ball.
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Former University of Missouri football player Michael Sam revealed over the weekend that he is gay. Sam, an All-American defensive lineman, may become the first openly gay player in the history of the NFL if he is selected in this year's draft. Since he made his announcement, reactions have streamed in from every corner of the football world.
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Ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl XLVIII, NPR's Mike Pesca dams up the river of hype to create a cool lagoon of Super Bowl reason.
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This Sunday's Super Bowl features the team with the No. 1 defense — the Seattle Seahawks — against the team with the No. 1 offense, the Denver Broncos. That is surprisingly rare, and has happened just a few times in the 48 Super Bowls to date.
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently toyed with the idea of getting rid of the extra point — the post-touchdown, 1-point kick that's successful 99.5 percent of the time.