
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 opines on the high levels of discontent among the NBA's top players.
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Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas are the Baseball Hall of Fame's newest inductees. Last year, baseball writers pointedly left some of the biggest stars off the list due to links with performance-enhancing drugs, and this year has been no different. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were again denied induction.
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The U.S. men's soccer team will face a tough road in next year's World Cup. They'll face Ghana, Portugal and Germany in the first round.
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The play Fetch Clay, Make Man explores the sense of identity through the eyes of two significant figures in black history — Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Perry) and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali).
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A tentative contract agreement has been reached between the National Football League and the referees' union. The impasse began in June when the NFL locked out the officials and used replacement referees.
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The Texas Rangers shut out the St. Louis Cardinals in Game Four of the World Series on Sunday night. With the series now tied at two, Game Five is Monday night at Rangers Ballpark.
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The high-priced star's first year of U.S. Major League Soccer did not work out well for him or his team. Now, he's returning on loan in the middle of the season during the debut of a tell-all book that casts Beckham in an unfavorable light.
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In 1960, a team of documentary filmmakers descended on the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary in order to record the campaigning between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. Politically, the results propelled Kennedy to the nomination. Artistically, the documentarians invented a new form.
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The Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York is trying to decide whether to adopt an outer coat of off-gray, or one of very pale yellow. The debate over the color differences is subtle, but the debate over the two colors is very robust.