Welcome!

This is The Generalist, a brand new site by me, Patrick Donnelly. I've been toying with doing this for years, and now I'm doing it. The title comes from an observation I made a few years back that it's a rough time to be a generalist. Which is exactly what I am, when it comes to sports reporting. I've covered pretty much every sport imaginable, from the World Series to the World Series of Poker, from the NBA to NASCAR and everything in between.

The problem is, you can find any number of specialists who can go DEEEEEEEEP on your favorite sport or team. Whereas my my sports knowledge is a mile wide but an inch (maybe more like a foot) deep. So how do I turn a profit? Simple: volume. No, wait ... quality. That's the word I was looking for. I'm really damn good at what I do and the variety keeps my skills sharp. So if you're here to discuss the fWAR of Walker Jenkins or the Timberwolves' top five players in Win Shares per 48 Minutes, well, I hate to disappoint you but you have lots of other places on the web to find them. (And I will recommend them to you at the appropriate time because a lot of those writers are good friends and colleagues of mine.)

What you'll get from me here is a veritable cornucopia of content. As the header promises, there will be tales from the press box, the stuff you might find interesting or enjoyable. But I'll also be writing about other current events, Remembering Some Guys via old baseball cards, things that ring my chimes or set my teeth on edge, and of course some trenchant analysis of our local sports scene.

I've also got an archive of old pieces I've written for a variety of employers and publishers that are lost in the dustbin of the Internet. I thought some of them were really good and deserved a wider audience, so I'm gonna post some of them here. It'll also be interesting to see how some of my opinions have aged and how dated some of the references are.

Oh, and I'm also gonna post excerpts from my still unfinished novel. Be kind in the comments, please. And a bunch of other stuff too. I'm not going to write too much about politics because God knows there's enough of that out there. But you're not likely to walk away from here unsure of where I stand.

All of the posts will be free to read for now, but we'll eventually have a paid subscription tier, meaning some posts will be paywalled. Gotta provide value for subscribers, after all! But again, for now it's all public so please subscribe, sit back and enjoy the ride!