Buster Olney

Robert Stanbury "Buster" Olney III (born 17 February 1964 in Washington, D.C.) is a columnist for , ESPN.com, and covered the New York Giants and New York Yankees for "The New York Times". He is also a regular analyst for the ESPN's "Baseball Tonight". Olney is one of about 575 voters for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Early life and career

Olney grew up on a dairy farm in Woodstock and Randolph Center, Vermont, which came in handy when he served as the "Cow Insider" for Mike Greenberg's milking of a cow on "Mike and Mike in the Morning" on June 21, 2007. He was educated at Vanderbilt University, majoring in history, and Northfield Mount Hermon School.

After graduating, Olney began covering baseball in 1989, as the "Nashville Banner"'s beat reporter assigned to the Triple-A Nashville Sounds. He later worked at the San Diego Union-Tribune and Baltimore Sun. He arrived at the "Times" in 1997 and in his first year won an Associated Press award. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for beat writing, in 1997 and 1999.

He is one of the most prominent proponents of "traditional" baseball strategy, often referred to as small ball, in opposition to sabermetric baseball strategy, which Olney sometimes calls "Moneyball" strategy after the Michael Lewis book of the same name.

In 2004, Olney published "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty", ISBN 0-06-051506-6, a nonfiction account of the Yankees' most recent run of championships in the 1990s. The book also considered why the team lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2001 World Series and why it has not won a championship since that time. Since leaving the Times, Olney has become a constant on the ESPN family of networks.

External links

* [http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/archive?columnist=olney_buster&root=mlb ESPN.com: archive of Olney's articles]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/ask_reporters/olney.html Ask a Reporter: Buster Olney]
*imdb name|1658504