Steve Kettmann

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Steve Kettmann (born 1962 in San Jose, California) is a writer and journalist known for political commentary and baseball books. He earned a degree in English at UC Berkeley in 1985 and spent a year in New York as a Newsday reporter covering politics and other topics.

He has written political pieces for The New York Times and the Santa Cruz Sentinel, including columns in support of Christine Blasey Ford. He was an early critic of Donald Trump and helped organize a live reading of George Orwell’s 1984 at Bookshop Santa Cruz as a protest, writing about it in the Santa Cruz Free Weekly.

Kettmann is best known for his baseball writing. His book Baseball Maverick (2015) examines Sandy Alderson’s influence on baseball, including his work with the Oakland A’s and later the New York Mets, and how he mentored Billy Beane. He was a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1990 to 1999, covered the A’s, and wrote on steroids; he was among the first to say McGwire used steroids in a New York Times article in 2000 and appeared on CNN as an expert.

The New Yorker described him as the ghostwriter of Jose Canseco’s Juiced in a 2005 piece, amid controversy. His first book, One Day at Fenway (2003), describes a single Red Sox–Yankees game from multiple viewpoints and was nominated for a Quill Award. He edited Game Time, a collection of Roger Angell’s baseball writing from The New Yorker, published in 2003.

Kettmann has reported from more than 40 countries for outlets including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, GQ, Parade, The Village Voice, Salon, and Wired, as well as European papers such as Berliner Zeitung, Die Welt and Der Spiegel. He lived in Berlin from 1999 to 2012 and wrote a weekly column for Berliner Zeitung (2000–2001). He is a 1999 Arthur F. Burns Fellow and speaks German and some Spanish.

His other books include What a Party! (co-written with Terry McAuliffe, 2007), which debuted at No. 5 on The New York Times bestseller list, and Letter to a New President (co-written with Senator Robert Byrd, 2008), a guide for the next president. In The Hill, he discussed working with Byrd on that book.