By Nancy Colasurdo
He has been called a resource encyclopedia, a baseball savant, and, officially, a digital publishing specialist for the stats and information group at ESPN.
For Mark Simon, the latter is like something he’s been preparing for his whole life, both wittingly and unwittingly. It’s what happens when you pay attention to something you love and excel at, and your parents are smart enough to pay attention, too, and you keep paying attention to it right through college and beyond. Mastery begins to happen. Persistence gets you places.
“How can you argue with being at a place like this?” Simon says in our recent interview.
It’s his weekly prep day at ESPN and I’ve just asked him how he feels about how he fits into the world right now. He says he always knew he’d do something that involved writing and that the kids who wrote in his sixth grade yearbook figured he’d wind up at ESPN or Sports Illustrated.
“I had a way of distinguishing myself in school,” Simon says. “I could do mathematics principles better than anyone else.”
His parents picked up on it. He was reading box scores at age 5. For his eighth birthday he received The Bill James Baseball Abstract and while at first he didn’t understand the math of it he began to figure out what made one player better than another. While his dream was to be a play-by-play announcer for the Mets or Knicks, the alternative that also appealed to him was to be a sports writer who distinguishes himself with different angles than most would unearth.
It’s the ‘distinguishing himself’ part that has served Simon so very well in his career. He lives riveted to it. At his college newspaper, he helped double the size of the sports section and as the sports director at the college radio station, he built something small into something more ambitious. And then, of course, there was his jump from six years at a Trenton newspaper to ESPN, brought about by simply showing the right person what distinguishes him.
One night in 2001 when the Indians came back from being down 12-0 to the Mariners, Simon wrote ESPN columnist Jayson Stark with an idea for a note in his column:
“I wrote something like, ‘This was the biggest blown lead in a baseball game since Charlie Brown blew a 50-0 lead with two outs in the ninth. He traded spots with Peppermint Patty so she could go sell popcorn. His first pitch went to the backstop and knocked Patty out. When she came to, it was explained to her that Charlie Brown allowed 51 runs and lost.”
Stark used the note and Simon wrote back asking if Stark could give him the name of a contact for Baseball Tonight because he wanted to apply to be a researcher for the show. Two contacts later, Simon was in Bristol, Conn., in a dream scenario in the world of him – answering an interview question asking why Keith Hernandez’s Hall of Fame candidacy was more legit than Bill Buckner’s or Steve Garvey’s.
“I answered every question with no pause,” says Simon.
In 2002 he was a temporary remote events researcher for baseball and college basketball, but by 2004 (until 2010) he’d become the head researcher for … wait for it … Baseball Tonight because “a few breaks went my way.” From there he became a baseball research specialist and now he is a digital publishing specialist.
It is almost comical that Simon was reluctant to join Twitter, as he’s closing in on 28,000 followers as of this writing.
“I thought it would be too distracting,” he says with a laugh.
But instead Simon (@msimonespn) jumped into the fray. When he was asked to guest host a podcast, he did well and he began to co-host twice a week.
“The next day I had twice as many followers as the day before,” he says of that first time, again with a chuckle.
These are the things you can’t prepare for when you go to school and pursue your passion. You can’t anticipate as a 1997 college graduate that someday this marvel called Twitter is going to play right into your strengths. But you keep your focus and work hard and then one day you realize Jessica Seinfeld is following you on Twitter.
Simon reached out to her and she said she was following him because she was “looking for people to help me talk to Jerry and my kids [about baseball].” About a year after Jessica, Jerry Seinfeld became a Mark Simon follower. As it turns out, the comedian loves to devour baseball statistical things online and likes the heat maps that Simon Tweets regularly; they’re a sort of ‘weather map’ that shows where a hitter hits well and poorly.
“He’s looking at those?” Simon recalls thinking. “Sure enough, he’s re-Tweeted them.”
Simon reached out and wound up doing a Q&A about baseball with Seinfeld in August 2014. At the time, Seinfeld had just turned 60 and had been doing a joke about not having a bucket list, “If you want to kite surf down the Amazon, go ahead. I'm going to crack open a beer and watch a ballgame.”
Simon excels at having these kinds of moments with people because their connector is the love of statistics. He likes covering the big game or writing a feature and sees it as an extension of what he’s already doing. The numbers lend credence and depth that, again, distinguish Simon’s work.
“I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as a stats person,” he says.
To many he’s known as the guy who can name the last batter of every World Series from 1954 to 2013, as he humorously demonstrates on a video that went viral. He will also soon be known as an author. The book he’s writing, due out in June 2016, is part of a series and it’s called Numbers Don’t Lie: The Biggest Numbers in Yankees History.
“It’s a good fit for me,” Simon says.
Another series of events stemming from his initiative brought this opportunity his way. He’d lent his sharp eye to some book projects, notably by Stark and ESPN columnist Buster Olney, and then to boot the publishers saw Simon’s video and got a kick out of it.
Now he is in a place where he is so grateful for the assistance he’s had along the way he does his best to pay it forward. There are a number of things he likes to advise those who write to him and one of them goes like this:
“Be nice to people. You get what you give. Most media members will gladly engage with civil social-media followers when they have the time, particularly if asked a smart question. If you like what someone wrote, tell them. Be sincere. It won’t hurt. And you’ll be remembered.”
Simon knows of what he speaks.
Photo Credit: Steve Berthiaume
