Tim Kurkjian
Wednesday, March 27, 2019Timothy Bell Kurkjian (born December 10, 1956) is a Major League Baseball analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter. He is also a contributor to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.
He guests on Golic and Wingo on Thursdays at 7:44 a.m., discussing the latest in happenings in Major League Baseball. He is a frequent contributor to Buster Olney's podcast. He also appears regularly on The Dan LeBatard Show and The Tony Kornheiser Show.
In 1974, Kurkjian enrolled at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. While at Maryland, Kurkjian covered high school sports for his hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Journal. Immediately after graduating from Maryland with a B.A. in journalism in 1978, Kurkjian took an entry-level position with the Washington Star. By 1981, he became a staff writer. When the Star folded that year, he took a position with the Baltimore News-American. That paper also went out of business within two months of Kurkjian's arrival. He began covering baseball as the Texas Rangers beat writer for The Dallas Morning News where he worked from 1981 to 1985. Kurkjian then covered the Baltimore Orioles for The Baltimore Sun beginning in 1986. He was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated from 1989 to 1997. In 1997, Sports Illustrated reassigned him to covering basketball. He served in this capacity for six months before accepting a job at ESPN as a baseball writer and television journalist in 1998 at 40 years old.
He authored his first book, America's Game, in 2000 and released his second book, Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod's Heart to Zim's Head—My 25 Years in Baseball in May 2007. In 2016, he published his book I'm Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies: Inside the Game We All Love. He was the 1999 and 2007 Commencement speaker at his alma mater, Walter Johnson High School, the 2008 speaker at Seneca Valley High School, and also delivered the winter commencement speech at the University of Maryland on December 19, 2007.
In 2012, while Kurkjian and fellow ESPN analyst John Kruk were on their annual bus tour around the spring training facilities, a new craze was created called Kurkjianing where players would impersonate Tim Kurkjian during interviews. Some of the players that did this were Tim Dillard of the Brewers, J. P. Arencibia of the Rangers, and Elliot Johnson of the Rays.
Kurkjian is a regular correspondent on ESPN Radio; he was frequently featured on the former SVP & Russillo show hosted by Scott Van Pelt and Ryen Russillo. One element of this that has proved popular with listeners is when Van Pelt reads out names of American sports stars in a comedic Baltimore accent, often making Kurkjian crease with laughter. Examples can be found on the ESPN website. Since Van Pelt's departure from his radio slot to anchor the late night SportsCenter show, the mantle of making Kurkjian laugh has been taken up by The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, which uses its meme of people in the sports world, be they players, coaches or officials, who look like non-sporting people in mundane or ridiculous situations.