When Ken Rosenthal decided to embark on a career as a journalist, he never thought of television.
It was, however, something his father wanted him to do.
“It was never my goal to be on TV,” Rosenthal said. “My dad used to say to me, ‘Well, okay, you want to be a sportscaster… okay. But maybe one day you’ll be on TV,” Rosenthal said.
“I would say dad I don’t go on TV. I don’t want to be the one reading the 11 o’clock news for two minutes. It’s not my idea of what I want to do.
But that would ultimately be what happened…not reading sports news on television for two minutes, but a career in sports journalism that also included a television component.
Rosenthal joined FOX Sports in 2005 as a reporter for their Major League Baseball television broadcasts and coupled with his writing work with the Athleticit has the best of both worlds.
“I’m extremely lucky to have the opportunities that I have,” said Rosenthal, who also served as an in-studio reporter for MLB Network from 2009-2022.
“I never overlook that, forget it or take it for granted. Every week when I go on FOX for the show, I think it’s amazing that I can do this and I’m really lucky. I never would have thought that the television part would be part of it.
Rosenthal graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and quickly began his career at the York Daily Record before going to Mail-post in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. In 1987, he landed a full-time position with The Baltimore Sun in 1987, a position he held until 2000 when he joined sports news.
The ironic aspect of Rosenthal’s career was that he did not aspire to be a sportswriter. His goal was to pursue a career in journalism, particularly in the print media.
“I wasn’t necessarily inspired to play sports,” Rosenthal said. I wanted to work for a newspaper.
Rosenthal, a huge fan of the NHL’s New York Islanders, grew up on Long Island and was a summer intern for press day after his graduate and undergraduate years in college. The Oyster Bay High School graduate admired the work of New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica as well as New York Post basketball writer Peter Vecsey, but he also enjoyed the writing of Jimmy Breslin, a famous news columnist for the New York Daily News.
“I knew early on that I wanted to be a journalist,” Rosenthal said. “I didn’t know I wanted to be a sportscaster until I came to Penn when I went to school. Basically, it was a choice between sports and news. I chose sports because I liked guys better. This is all kind of an accident.
An accident !
Rosenthal has carved out a wonderful career in sports and that includes both print and electronics. Along its journey, the technology and the way sports fans get their information has evolved. A big part of that is Twitter and it’s through this platform that Rosenthal, like many other sports journalists, breaks news mere seconds after learning about it.
But Twitter wasn’t something Rosenthal wanted to get involved in from the start, but he was eventually convinced that it should be part of his toolkit.
“I remember at one point, and it must have been in the late 2000s, I didn’t really want to go on Twitter…I thought that was kind of stupid,” Rosenthal said. “The guys from MLB Trade Rumors said we weren’t going to read your stories… we don’t have time to. If you want to get credit for your work, you need to put it on Twitter. I felt a little funny about that, but they were right.
For Rosenthal, there’s a small semblance of satisfaction that comes with posting a story on Twitter, but according to him, that’s not the end.
That’s because once a reporter publishes a story these days, there are others who will almost immediately join in and eventually join the party.
“The Twitter part for me is kind of old at this point and kind of a situation where you really can’t win,” Rosenthal said. “If I write a story on Twitter, it’s mine for two minutes before someone else confirms it. That’s not where it’s at for me.
Rosenthal continues to break stories on Twitter and excels in her role with the MLB on FOX. But, her first love is writing and that’s the platform The Athletic gave her.
Deep in his heart, Rosenthal likes to tell stories… long stories and not 280 characters on Twitter.
Like breaking the Houston Astros Cheating History which he wrote in 2019.
“It wasn’t a goal to jump in and do a story like that,” Rosenthal said. “We did it and we ran into that, but that story, nobody could touch it. You couldn’t confirm it in two minutes. That’s more the goal right now than cracking a transaction on Twitter. I really prefer to write a true story. In my opinion, that’s how you win now.
Rosenthal joins Athleticism when it launched in 2017 and it marked a new era in sports journalism. The newspaper industry is not doing very well, but Athleticism was a new company that came at the right time when sports fans received much of their news on a mobile device.
Again, the best of both worlds in a way for Rosenthal. Sports fans could read an actual story but just needed a bit of technology to be able to do so.
“I like Athleticism“said Rosenthal. “It was the best of my career in many ways. It’s definitely the most rewarding from a print standpoint because we’ve built something very special in my opinion and built it almost from scratch and built it at a time when there was this pivot to this ongoing video movement and people thought the print was, if not dead, definitely wasn’t what it was going to be and that really bothered me.
Something else that bothered Rosenthal at first but has certainly worked since happened in 2010.
Rosenthal was preparing to work the National League Division Series between the Phillies and the Giants when then-FOX Sports executive David Hill decided Rosenthal was going to wear a bow tie on the telecast.
“I didn’t understand,” Rosenthal said. ” I did not like. I thought that was stupid and bordering on insulting because to me it was always the work that was supposed to stand out and not the looks.
“What I didn’t understand was that television is different and its idea was just to set me apart in a different way than what my reporting or my work set me apart. All these years later, from obviously he was right.
After this post-season, Rosenthal initially thought he was done wearing the bow tie…but he wasn’t.
Former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones had just started an initiative called “Bowtie Cause” which designed bow ties for charities across the country and reached out to Rosenthal.
“He said we wanted you to wear our bow ties,” Rosenthal said. “My first reaction was no, I don’t do that. I no longer wear bow ties. And then a cool head prevailed and I realized that FOX still wanted me to do this and I might as well have some semblance of control over it. And that’s really how it started and I never imagined it would become a thing and something that identifies me. Now if I appear on TV without a bow tie, people will say hey, where’s the bow tie.
Rosenthal has certainly accomplished a lot in his career, but while he still has a lot of gas left in him with what he’s doing now, he has a long-term goal he’d like to conquer somewhere along the line. .
“The only thing I would love to do is write a book about all the things I’ve been through in my career, but that won’t happen for a long time,” Rosenthal said.
That’s because Ken Rosenthal, even though he might call it an accident, still gets the best of both worlds in his career as a sportscaster.
