Special Article
Terry Pluto on Baseball
By Collin Agee
On February 24, I participated in a webinar with renowned sportswriter Terry Pluto, as a member of the Cleveland Club of Washington DC. Pluto has spent a career covering sports, most of it for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Plain Dealer. This is an excerpt from that webinar, on the subjects of baseball and umpiring.
One of my pet peeves is that politics has permeated sports and sports coverage by the media. If you read the Washington Post, you know what I mean. Pluto described his personal approach to sports:
“I’ve been fortunate,” Pluto said. “It’s been an enjoyable career. I say that what I really do is in the diversion department, that is, I write about a topic people enjoy participating in and watching, and that learning more about this topic – sports – diverts them from harsher realities. A lot of society is stressed out, and for certain short periods of time people who read sportswriters can set their minds to other matters.”
Pluto began his career covering sports in North Carolina and then Baltimore. “I remember the excitement in 1979 when I covered the Orioles getting into the World Series. But that was nothing like the excitement I felt covering the 1995 Indians when they got into the World Series – because the Indians was a team I had known as a kid. I’ve been very lucky to cover teams I grew up with, because I knew them so well.”
Talking with Cleveland Club participants, Pluto lamented the problem in baseball of the richest markets paying the most money for the most celebrated athletes. “Over the last five years, the winningest teams have been, in this order, the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Astros, the Guardians and the Brewers,” he said. “The first two have paid huge amounts of money in salaries, the Astros used to, and the Guardians and the Brewers don’t but have beaten the odds.” He added, “You know things are bad when the Yankees are complaining that the Dodgers are spending too much. But we can fix this. The NBA has been showing that.”
He noted the remarkable 2025 Guardians season coming from 15 games back to winning the Central Division. His feeling is that the team’s chemistry took them to this notable feat. “Could any other team have done this?” he said. “I don’t think so. They are well run; they are smart; they are good guys and they have what I think is the greatest player I have ever seen in a Cleveland uniform – José Ramirez.”
I asked Pluto about this article he wrote last year about automated balls and strikes. Note that he believes that it will make umpires better.
He said he thinks that the two ball/strike challenges per side per baseball game is the correct number (and that challenges in the NBA take far too long).
He has written 23 books. I have read a couple. I think the most popular is Loose Balls, about the ABA, which is a pretty colorful subject. His baseball books include, “The Curse of Rocky Colavito” Here’s his book list:
You can learn more about Terry’s views on the weekly podcast “Terry’s Talking”:
To learn more about Terry Pluto and his books, go to terrypluto.com