I had my first brush with journalism at age 13, when I was in junior high school. Big league baseball was my full-time hobby. I was so caught up with the sport that I subscribed to a weekly baseball magazine, the Sporting News.

It had a page of letters to the editor, and I read them all. I’d been to minor league games when visiting my grandfather, an Atlanta Crackers fan, and wondered why there were no major league teams in the South. I was told cities in the South were too small to support a team. This was the mid-1950s.