Roy Firestone to Appear on Seamheads Podcast

Join Steve Lenox and Mike Lynch on “What’s On Second: The Seamheads.com Radio Hour” every Monday from 9:00-10:00 PM Eastern as they discuss the goings on in Major and Minor League Baseball. This week’s guests are Roy Firestone, a seven-time Emmy Award-winning and seven-time cable ACE Award-winning host, interviewer, narrator, writer, and producer. As the ground-breaking, original host of ESPN’s legendary “Up Close,” “Up Close Classic” and “Up Close Primetime,” Firestone has interviewed more than 5,000 athletes, musicians, actors and political figures, as well as scores of writers and filmmakers; and Jeff Polman, Strat-O-Matic fanatic and founder of “Play That Funky Baseball,” a strat blog dedicated to the 1977 major league season.

Roy will be discussing baseball in general and his beloved Baltimore Orioles, while Jeff will be filling us in on his 1977 replay that features team owners such as Joe Posnanski, Joe Sheehan, Jonah Keri and fellow Seamhead Ted Leavengood, among many others.

This will be our 14th episode and so far we’ve had fantastic guests on all of them, including former big leaguers, authors, newspaper reporters/editors, radio personalities, scouts and more.  To listen to our archives, check out our Blog Talk Radio show page or download us on iTunes.

Previous guests:

Episode #1: Tom Keegan, author of Ernie Harwell: My 60 years in Baseball , and Sports Editor of the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, who helped us pay tribute to Harwell.

Episode #2: Former Major League hurler Dick Drago, who was drafted by the Kansas City Royals from the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 expansion draft and later served as closer for the Boston Red Sox in 1975 and 1979, and the California Angels in 1976, a year in which he served up the final home run in Hank Aaron’s illustrious career.

Episode #3: Matt Dahlgren, who wrote Rumor In Town , a book about his grandfather, Babe Dahlgren. Babe is most notable for replacing Lou Gehrig at first base when Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak ended in 1939, but there was much more to the man than that.

Episode #4: Johnson City Cardinals pitching coach Doug White, who not only teaches professional pitchers but created a pair of instructional DVDs called “Passion For Pitching” designed for hurlers at all levels.

Episode #5: Writer and author Jonah Keri, who currently serves as a writer/editor with Bloomberg Sports. His latest book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took the Tampa Bay Rays from Worst to First , is due out in Spring 2011. In addition to Bloomberg Sports, Keri has written for ESPN.com , The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , SI.com , Salon , Slate , Playboy , Penthouse , Baseball Prospectus , Baseball America , Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal , and many other publications, and has contributed to many books.

Episode #6: Writer and author Jonathan Mayo, a senior writer at MLB.com , who covers minor league baseball and, most notably, the amateur draft. Mayo worked on the broadcast team assembled for ESPN’s coverage of the first televised baseball draft in 2007, interviewing draftees after their selections. He is responsible for compiling MLB.com’s definitive list of baseball’s Top 50 prospects and has covered the Arizona Fall League, baseball’s winter meetings and many other events. He’s also the author of Facing Clemens: Hitters On Hitting Against Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher .

Episode #7: George Case III, son of former major leaguer and three-time all-star George Case Jr., and former executive director of the Society For American Baseball Research. Case Jr. is most notable for winning six stolen base titles in his 11 years in the majors, but he also contributed footage to HBO’s “When It Was a Game” thanks to hours of recording events with his 8 MM camera during his career. Case III transferred that film onto DVD and produced a 37-minute color documentary called “Around The League 1939-1946,” complete with narration by his father before he passed away in 1989.

Episode #8: ESPN.com senior writer and six-time author Rob Neyerand writer and author Howard Megdal,who discussed, his campaign to become the next Mets GM.

Episode #9: Boston Globe and Boston.com sports writer Chad Finn, founder of the fantastic “Touching All The Bases” blog, and Seamheads.com writer and longtime baseball man Bob Wirz, who writes a weekly column about Independent and Atlantic League baseball and has been working in or around professional baseball since 1967.

Episode #10: Dave Dameshek, who’s spent a good part of his professional life working with Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carrola, writing for “The Man Show,” Comedy Central’s “Crank Yankers,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Dave was a regular on “The Adam Carolla Show” before he began hosting his own shows in his hometown of Pittsburgh, then for ESPN Radio on 710 AM in Los Angeles. Dave currently hosts a podcast called “Daves of Thunder” with David Feeney.  Lew Freedman, an Indiana-based sportswriter, who has worked on the staffs of the Chicago Tribune , Anchorage Daily News , and Philadelphia Inquirer . The winner of more than 250 journalism awards, he is the author of 40 books, including The Day All the Stars Came Out: Major League Baseball’s First All-Star Game, 1933 .

Episode #11: Doug Gladstone, author of A Bitter Cup of Coffee; How MLB & The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees A Curve . With a foreword written by the Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist, Dave Marash, A Bitter Cup of Coffee tells the true story of a group of former big-league ballplayers denied pensions as a result of the failure of both the league and the union to retroactively amend the vesting requirement change that granted instant pension eligibility to ballplayers in 1980. Kristi Dosh, an attorney and the author of Can Money Still Buy the Postseason in Major League Baseball?: a 10-year Retrospective on Revenue Sharing and the Luxury Tax , and is currently finishing a book with the working title of Balancing Baseball: How Collective Bargaining Has Changed the Major Leagues , which will be published by McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers in early 2011. The book breaks down those provisions of the collective bargaining agreement which have impacted competitive balance in baseball and explores their history, progression and future.

Episode #12: Friends and Seamheads, Gabriel Schechter, Joe Williams, Jeff Katz, and Paul Gotham, all of whom called from the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cooperstown to report on the festivities.

Episode #13: Boston Red Sox scout Galen Carr, who discussed life as a big league scout and his time with the Red Sox.

Upcoming guests:

Episode #14: Roy Firestoneand Jeff Polman.

Episode #15: Former major league catcher Don Slaught.

Episode #16: Jim Callis, Executive Editor of Baseball America .

Episode #17: Lyle Spatzand Steve Steinberg, authors of the acclaimed 1921: The Yankees, The Giants, & The Battle For Baseball Supremacy In New York .