Introducing Evan Drellich, the Herald’s new baseball reporter – Boston Herald

Editor’s note: Evan Drellich is the Herald’s new baseball reporter. He’ll begin writing at today’s home opener. This is his introduction to Sox fans: 

Do you have any idea how rare it is today for a news organization to send at least two writers to every baseball game? To foot the bill for all the memory-foam travel pillows I always lose but disguise on an expense report as lunch?

Find your Ron Washington voice from Moneyball: it’s incredibly rare.

The Herald does that. This is The Show of baseball writing. Covering the Sox alongside Jason Mastrodonato and Michael Silverman for the Herald is the big time, in the simplest terms, and it’s really cool.

It’s also a serious undertaking. I’ve said it in cover letters, and I’ll say it in this space, too, because I believe it: A baseball reporter should be a reporter first and foremost, just one who happens to write about sports.

I’m not here to root for the Red Sox, or against them.

I have literally been here before, though. Kind of.

I was a Red Sox beat writer previously, at MassLive.com in 2013 (and at MLB.com as Ian Browne’s understudy before that).

The last game I covered for MassLive was the happiest of times. I remember Koji Uehara’s last out, I remember the look on Ben Cherington’s face on the field as the architect of a championship team. A small smile was plastered on him.

Then I left to cover the Astros, who I contend have been the most fascinating franchise in baseball in the life of this collective bargaining agreement, from 2012 through the present. (I like to talk about the CBA. It’s important to baseball, and I hope it’s important to your inner nerd, too.)

But I was told to tell you a little bit about me, so here’s a medium bit.

I walked into a student newspaper office in 2005 at Binghamton University (it’s the alma mater of Tony Kornheiser and Flo from Progressive) and said I wanted to write about major league baseball.

I was told I couldn’t do that, but I could write about men’s lacrosse. So I did that in 2006, and four years later, I was covering a full season of major league baseball and haven’t stopped. A lot happened in between, but I’m too sober to go into detail.

Why’d I want to write about baseball? I was the crazy fan once. I have more than 3,000 posts on a message board. I fought off trolls before you even became one.

When we talk about steroids bringing fans to baseball, about the slugfests and the March on Maris capturing America’s attention, I was that guy.

Bud Selig, you snared this New York City kid in 1998.

The Mets landed Mike Piazza and Mark McGwire was such a spectacle that I threw one of my most memorable childhood tantrums in order to get tickets to a Big Mac doubleheader.

He homered twice, too. Thanks, dad! (Who now resides in Massachusetts and played catch with me Sunday.)

I was at Game 7 of the 2003 and 2004 ALCS as a fan. At the former, I took every penny I had in my bank account — definitely fewer than 200 dollars — got off the subway, and happened to overhear one guy ask, “Anybody need one (ticket)?”

The timing was really lucky. I had no plan to get in otherwise and I gave him all I had. Then I chased after him.

I needed two bucks back to take the subway home.

At Game 7 the next year, a scalper walked me right up to the center-field bleachers entrance in the middle innings, gave a nod to a woman working security, and they let me right in.

I had sat in the bleachers before, but can you imagine what Lonn Trost would have said if I hadn’t?

One appeal: if you know where to get a good egg sandwich in this town, drop me a line at evan.drellich@bostonherald.com.

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Follow Evan on Twitter at @evandrellich