Jeff Passan Photo credit: ESPN
By Sam Neumann on

The Associated Press Sports Editors announced that Jeff Passan of ESPN.com won first place in its National Beat Writing contest.

Passan placed ahead of Ross Dellenger (Yahoo Sports), Adam Kilgore (The Washington Post), and Alan Blinder (The New York Times), who finished second, third, and fourth, respectively.

Passan received four first-place votes, and Blinder and Scott M. Reid of the Southern California News Group received one each.

Passan’s first-place finish is even more impressive when considering that ESPN’s MLB insider suffered a fractured back during a storm midway through 2023. Despite this, he was still able to produce some high-quality pieces that helped him win this contest, including the news that Kim Ng was out as the Miami Marlins general manager and an inside feature piece on the night that the Texas Rangers won the 2023 World Series.

Passan has yet to comment on his victory, but some of his colleagues have passed along congratulations on social media:

https://twitter.com/PeteThamel/status/1778839582408139068?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1778839582408139068%7Ctwgr%5E6c4a66e6d293d0beda5a0f853184aad6e7905667%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublish.twitter.com%2F%3Furl%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FPeteThamel%2Fstatus%2F1778839582408139068

With this latest victory, Passan continues to solidify his reputation as a national sportswriting powerhouse. He’ll be honored at the 2024 APSE Summer Conference banquet at the Marriott South Park in Charlotte on June 22 and receive a plaque, while the second through 10th-place finishers will receive frameable certificates.

[APSE]

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann