Dear Timmy An open letter to Tim Lincecum on the occasion of his probable Giants farewell. By Dan Fost | September 4, 2015 It’s painful to think of this as a farewell letter, although that’s probably what it is. With your hip surgery complete, your contract expiring, and nothing but rehab and uncertainty on the […]
Category: Media
The Wizard of O.co: San Francisco magazine, September 2014
The Wizard of O.co A decade after Moneyball, the cult of Billy Beane is alive and well—perhaps nowhere more than in Silicon Valley. By Dan Fost Sept. 26, 2014 Billy Beane is so over Moneyball. “I’m sort of sick of me,” the Oakland A’s general manager tells me over the phone in early August. You […]
Opening Day in Oakland, With Prospects of Doubleheader of Anguish for A’s Fans: New York Times, April 6, 2012
Opening Day in Oakland, With Prospects of Doubleheader of Anguish for A’s Fans As the A’s take the field for their home opener Friday against the Seattle Mariners, the team’s overachieving glory days depicted in last year’s “Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt as General Manager Billy Beane are a warm, if distant glimmer. While Opening Day […]
Merger With Investigative Unit Likely to Mean Major Shift in Bay Citizen Coverage: New York Times, March 29, 2012
Once a media reporter, always a media reporter. Although I had not written my media column in the San Francisco Chronicle for several years (I left the paper in 2007, but Media Bytes had ended well before that), The Bay Citizen assigned me the story of their own merger; because of an arrangement they had […]
Bay Citizen, Center for Investigative Reporting to Merge: The Bay Citizen, March 27, 2012
Once a media reporter, always a media reporter. Although I had not written my media column in the San Francisco Chronicle for several years (I left the paper in 2007, but Media Bytes had ended well before that), The Bay Citizen assigned me the story of their own merger. It was a good chance to […]
Pig Farmer’s True Prizewinner is His Fantasy Baseball Team: New York Times, October 2011
I broke this story at the end of the 2011 baseball season, when the best fantasy baseball player in the world – with winnings of more than $300,000 over the past three years – was revealed to be Idaho pig farmer Lindy Hinkelman. Modest Farmer, Managing Mogul The National Fantasy Baseball Championship, a contest paying […]
Bay Area’s Little Leagues Overflow With Would-Be Giants: New York Times, April 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — The good vibrations from the San Francisco Giants’ World Series victory last fall continue to reverberate in the Bay Area, where children inspired by the improbable success of the Giants’ assemblage of castoffs have overwhelmed local Little Leagues. Youths who had never played the game suddenly saw themselves as Cody Ross or Tim […]
Deli-licous!
I need a corned beef sandwich, on rye, with cole slaw and Russian dressing — now! I just finished reading an advanced copy of David Sax’s marvelous book, “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen,” and now I can’t shake my hankering for my favorite […]
Jews, Muslims and America
I had a great experience this week hearing two inspirational friends of mine read from their new books. They both dug into an area of personal interest and wound up illuminating a fascinating history that can teach us all something important. Frances Dinkelspiel started looking into her family history, and found 50 boxes of papers […]
SXSW 2008: Revenge of the nerds
Everyone kept asking for a take on the Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview run awry at South by Southwest in Austin last week. Having weighed in on the subject in Fortune.com, I might as well offer my thoughts. My main thought was: I felt sorry for Sarah Lacy. Sure, I thought she could have done things […]