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Chicago Tribune baseball author Dave van Dyck requested White Sox slugger Paul Konerko on a chilly April day in 2013 whether or not he was having any sleepless nights over an early season stoop.
“At all times,” Konerko replied. “There are moments when you recognize you’ve bought it and if you really feel such as you’re swinging the bat, you’re working exhausting to maintain it. After which there’s different occasions when you recognize you don’t really feel nice up there and also you’re working exhausting to get it.
“You’re at all times working exhausting. There’s no actual in between.”
Konerko might have been describing Van Dyck, one of many hardest-working sportswriters in a city the place sports activities is king. Van Dyck died on Nov. 22 in Florida on the age of 76.
That Tribune story, headlined “Konerko by no means stops working,” was certainly one of van Dyck’s last bylines in a storied profession as a journalist, including being sports editor of the Champaign-Urbana Information-Gazette to over three a long time of writing for the Chicago Solar-Instances and Tribune. He quietly retired in April 2013, was feted by mates and colleagues at Harry Caray’s Steakhouse and later moved to Fort Myers, Fla., the place he spent his retirement years along with his spouse, Connie, and aided the Baseball Corridor of Fame as a member of various Veterans Committees.
Phrase over the weekend that van Dyck had died got here as a shock to a lot of his previous mates and colleagues, a few of whom he helped mentor, together with myself, Tribune’s Cubs author Meghan Montemurro, MLB.com’s White Sox author Scott Merkin and dozens of others who’ve since retired.
“Dave was a fierce competitor, however above all, he cared deeply for the career and people in it,” former Day by day Herald reporter Bruce Miles mentioned. “He was a mentor to all, together with writers from different newspapers. Dave could get the Commissioner of Baseball on the phone and he additionally might get the pinnacle of the Gamers Affiliation on the telephone. He had that type of attain and that type of respect.”
Former Tribune sports activities editor Dan McGrath mentioned it was “devastating” to listen to the information.
“Dave was as valued a colleague as I’ve had and pretty much as good an individual as I’ve identified over a few years within the newspaper enterprise,” McGrath mentioned. “The information, the reporting, the writing, the relationships … Dave had all of it and he introduced all of it to each project.
“Chicago has an extended historical past of nice baseball writing and Dave actually upheld the custom. I used to inform our younger reporters, ‘If you wish to discover ways to be a beat reporter, exit to the ballpark and observe Dave van Dyck round. He’ll present you the way it’s completed.’”
At all times prepared to ask the robust query, van Dyck ruffled some feathers alongside the way in which, from Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and supervisor Tony La Russa to Cubs star Sammy Sosa. When Reinsdorf moved the press field at U.S. Mobile Subject from behind dwelling plate to nicely down the primary bottom line in 2007 to generate extra income, van Dyck lobbied to MLB on behalf of the writers, saying it hindered their view of pitches.
“It doesn’t matter if Dave van Dyck can see how a lot the ball breaks,” Reinsdorf told the New York Times.
Van Dyck was broadly revered by his friends and those he covered, regardless of some variations alongside the way in which. His baseball and auto racing tales had been acquainted to Chicago sports activities followers within the Solar-Instances and Tribune, and he was additionally a daily panelist on WGN AM 720’s “The Sportswriters,” a precursor to sports activities discuss radio stations and plenty of of immediately’s TV imitators.
Hosted by moderator Ben Bentley and that includes native writers together with Invoice Gleason, Invoice Jauss and Toni Ginnetti, the present sometimes adopted Cubs broadcasts on late Sunday afternoons and supplied raucous debates concerning the state of the native and nationwide sports activities scenes. Van Dyck later grew to become a daily on Comcast Sports activities Web’s “Chicago Tribune Dwell,” hosted by Dan Jiggetts and later David Kaplan.
For a few years on the Solar-Instances, van Dyck and Joe Goddard would change group protection on the All-Star break and penned “Pricey Joe” and “Pricey Dave” letters, advising the opposite about what to anticipate from the group they had been leaving. Van Dyck and Goddard mixed on a Sunday pocket book package deal that was a must-read for any baseball fan.
After leaving the Solar-Instances for a short stint as nationwide baseball columnist at FoxSports.com, van Dyck returned to print journalism in 2004 when McGrath employed him to assist beef up the Tribune’s baseball protection. Van Dyck’s vast knowledge of White Sox history was on full show throughout their 2005 championship season..
McGrath recalled van Dyck and Tribune baseball author Phil Rogers protecting the Cubs’ late-night playoff exit in Los Angeles in 2008, then displaying up at Sox Park the following afternoon for his or her playoff sport in opposition to Tampa Bay.
“They’d filed their tales off the Cubs sport, grabbed a cab to the airport and caught a red-eye flight to Chicago so they might assist cowl the White Sox,” he mentioned. “That’s the type of dedication Dave dropped at the job. A professional’s professional certainly.”
Van Dyck was accepting of modern-day analytics, although he remained old skool at coronary heart, as evidenced when he referred to the introduction of wild-card video games as “gluttony” by MLB honchos.
“Including two extra wild playing cards (one in every league) is a good suggestion — if you happen to’re sitting within the accounting workplace of MLB Community or if you happen to’re a fan of a summer time sport being performed in November chilly,” he wrote in a 2011 story. “Apart from that, there’s little or no purpose for it, particularly if it entails a one-game playoff ‘play-in.’ Baseball by no means has been a one-game sport.”
It took years for MLB to understand van Dyck was proper. The one-game wild card format was changed with a best-of-three collection in 2022.
“We’d sit and discuss all the things from the Corridor of Fame to the deserves of superior statistics,” Miles mentioned. “He at all times saved an open thoughts about others’ arguments.”
Van Dyck’s dying discover in February mentioned he can be remembered privately with no providers held. He’s survived by his spouse; his three kids, Laura Silvestri, Geoffrey van Dyck and Amy Muscolino; six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Van Dyck by no means actually loved fanfare and left the newspaper enterprise with out a lot as a farewell column. He requested his Tribune colleagues to not make an enormous deal of his departure, and we reluctantly obliged.
A longtime Chicago chapter chairman for the Baseball Writers’ Affiliation of America, van Dyck was twice named a finalist for the BBWAA’s Profession Excellence Award — then referred to as the Spink Award — which is offered throughout Corridor of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, N.Y. He fell quick each occasions and although many writers have been elected their third time on the poll, he directed the Chicago chapter to not nominate him once more.
It’s a disgrace, as a result of if anybody deserved to hitch the likes of nice Chicago baseball writers like Jerome Holtzman, Ring Lardner and John Carmichael in Cooperstown, it was van Dyck.
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