Friday Morning
Keynote Speaker
Joe Posnanski
Joe Posnanski was born in Cleveland, attended high school in North Carolina, and, having abandoned an early attempt at an accounting major, graduated with a degree in English from UNC Charlotte in 1989. After graduating from college, Posnanski worked as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, The Cincinnati Post, and The Augusta Chronicle before moving to Kansas City in 1996 to be a sportswriter and columnist for the Kansas City Star, where he covered the lowly Royals and other sub-performing Kansas City sports teams of that era. During his thirteen years at the Kansas City Star, Posnanski was twice named the best sports columnist in the country by The Associated Press Sports Editors.
In 2008, Posnanski left Kansas City to become a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he wrote a blog called “Curiously Long Posts.” Since that time Posnanski has worked as a national columnist for NBC Sports, MLB.com, and The Athletic. Named as a National Sportswriter of the Year by five different organizations, Posnanski is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Why We Love Baseball, The Baseball 100, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O’Neil’s America, and The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. He writes at JoePosnanski.com and currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his family.
Friday Afternoon
Guest Speaker
Steve Lyons
Drafted out of Oregon State University in the first round of the 1981 MLB draft, Steve Lyons made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox on April 15, 1985. Starting in early June of that year, Lyons became Boston’s regular center fielder; he went on to play 133 games with the 1985 Red Sox, batting .264 with five home runs and 30 RBIs. Lyons was traded from Boston to the Chicago White Sox for HOF pitcher Tom Seaver in 1986, and during his five-year tenure with the team played every defensive position (including pitcher) as well as designated hitter, pinch hitter, and pinch runner. He also has the rare distinction of having played all nine defensive positions in a single game at the major league level, played between the Chicago Cubs and the White Sox at Wrigley Field on April 23, 1990. Per standard baseball notation, Lyons’s positions during the game were, in order: 2-3-7-8-6-9-5-9-1-4.
Lyons’s colorful personality earned him the nickname “Psycho”; he was known for such eccentricities as playing tic-tac-toe and hangman against opposing players during games, using spikes to mark the infield dirt. After his retirement as a player, he became a television baseball commentator. In 1995, he published a book entitled PSYCHOanalysis, with a foreword by Stephen King, about his personal observations and stories about baseball.