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.
-
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.
-
Sports commentator Mike Pesca has his say on the unstoppability of Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer.
-
Sports commentator Mike Pesca opines on the high levels of discontent among the NBA's top players.
-
ESPN is parting ways with Hank Williams Jr. The network will no longer use his signature song "All My Rowdy Friends," to introduce Monday Night Football.
-
NPR's Mike Pesca attended two of the kick-off shows for the Vote for Change concert tour. He spoke to members of the rock bands Pearl Jam and Death Cab for Cutie about why they're rocking for a change in the Oval Office.
-
NPR's Mike Pesca profiles the efforts of Bruce Springsteen fan and political activist Andrew Rasiej to get "The Boss" on the Kerry bandwagon. Rasiej has reserved Giants Stadium on September 1 in an effort to goad Springsteen into headlining a concert there to protest the Republican National Convention, which will nominate President Bush for another four years in office on the same day, just across the river.
