Mike Pesca
Mike Pesca first reached the airwaves as a 10-year-old caller to a New York Jets-themed radio show and has since been able to parlay his interests in sports coverage as a National Desk correspondent for NPR based in New York City.
Pesca enjoys training his microphone on anything that occurs at a track, arena, stadium, park, fronton, velodrome or air strip (i.e. the plane drag during the World's Strongest Man competition). He has reported from Los Angeles, Cleveland and Gary. He has also interviewed former Los Angeles Ram Cleveland Gary. Pesca is a panelist on the weekly Slate podcast "Hang up and Listen".
In 1997, Pesca began his work in radio as a producer at WNYC. He worked on the NPR and WNYC program On The Media. Later he became the New York correspondent for NPR's midday newsmagazine Day to Day, a job that has brought him to the campaign trail, political conventions, hurricane zones and the Manolo Blahnik shoe sale. Pesca was the first NPR reporter to have his own podcast, a weekly look at gambling cleverly titled "On Gambling with Mike Pesca."
Pesca, whose writing has appeared in Slate and The Washington Post, is the winner of two Edward R. Murrow awards for radio reporting and, in1993, was named Emory University Softball Official of the Year.
He lives in Manhattan with his wife Robin, sons Milo and Emmett and their dog Rumsfeld. A believer in full disclosure, Pesca rates his favorite teams as the Jets, Mets, St. Johns Red Storm and Knicks, teams he has covered fairly and without favor despite the fact that they have given him a combined one championship during his lifetime as a fully cognizant human.
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Theo Epstein who took the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs to the World Series, acknowledges that his statistics-driven approach to building teams might make baseball boring to watch.
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Hey, did you know the Super Bowl is happening today? Of course you did. Grab some snacks — we're going to tell you what to look for in today's big game.
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Sports commentator Mike Pesca has his say on the unstoppability of Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer.
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Sports commentator Mike Pesca opines on the high levels of discontent among the NBA's top players.
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Sportscaster Bob Wolff is believed to be the only announcer to call a championship game in all four major sports. He died on Saturday at the age of 96.
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Commentator Mike Pesca has some advice about how to watch the Final Four of the NBA playoffs. Here's a hint: don't watch the ball.
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Ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl XLVIII, NPR's Mike Pesca dams up the river of hype to create a cool lagoon of Super Bowl reason.
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This Sunday's Super Bowl features the team with the No. 1 defense — the Seattle Seahawks — against the team with the No. 1 offense, the Denver Broncos. That is surprisingly rare, and has happened just a few times in the 48 Super Bowls to date.
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently toyed with the idea of getting rid of the extra point — the post-touchdown, 1-point kick that's successful 99.5 percent of the time.
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Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas are the Baseball Hall of Fame's newest inductees. Last year, baseball writers pointedly left some of the biggest stars off the list due to links with performance-enhancing drugs, and this year has been no different. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were again denied induction.