Billy Altman is an award-winning cultural journalist and critic whose work has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Sport, Inside Sports, TV Guide, People, Entertainment Weekly, msn.com and foxsports.com. Most recently, he served as the Stop The Presses! columnist for Yahoo's front page division.

He covered New York baseball and other sports for many years at The Village Voice, and was head scriptwriter at Olympia Sports Networks for numerous syndicated radio programs, including John Madden's Sports Quiz and Flashback With Jack Buck. A longtime senior editor of Detroit's legendary Creem Magazine, he is a former assistant curator for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a recipient of the ASCAP- Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Journalism.

The author of Laughter's Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), he currently teaches in the Humanities Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. And, last but certainly not least, he works as an official scorer for Major League Baseball at Mets and Yankees games. He's got a rule book, and he knows how to use it.

Blog Entries by Billy Altman

The Good Sheppard of Yankee Stadium

Posted December 8, 2009 | 09:34 AM (EST)


By now, most sports fans, especially those in the New York area, have no doubt heard the news that Bob Sheppard, the longtime Yankee Stadium Public Address announcer whose resonant, lordly tones led Reggie Jackson to dub him "The Voice of God," has let it be known that he was...

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Mets' Mo(u)rning Jacket

Posted November 24, 2009 | 05:02 PM (EST)


As all baseball fans know, the weeks following the end of the World Series are highlighted by the "hardware" season - the bestowing by the Baseball Writers Association of America of individual achievement awards in the American and National Leagues for everything from outstanding fielding by position (the Gold Glove...

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Canyon of Haircuts

Posted November 11, 2009 | 10:57 PM (EST)


Let's say right at the outset that we do understand that, as far as the 2009 baseball season goes, it really is all over but the shouting -- or at least it will be as soon as someone tells Jay-Z to er, Zip it, Zip It good. Which admittedly, may...

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Joe Buck's Broken Record and Other Post-Season Delights

Posted November 4, 2009 | 04:59 PM (EST)


I could say that after five games, the Fox network broadcasts of the 2009 World Series are really getting on my nerves -- but that would be dishonest. That's mainly because they reached this goal somewhere around the fifth inning of Game Four when, by my admittedly non-SABRmetric count, Joe...

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The 2009 World Series: Daddy Dearest

2 Comments | Posted October 30, 2009 | 07:30 PM (EST)


They've now played two games of the 2009 edition of the World Series -- or, as Ring Lardner used to call it, the World Serious -- and I think we can say that we've already learned a few interesting things from the opening contests. For instance, it's hard not to...

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