DAN McGRATH
Dan McGrath brings three decades of journalism experience to the Chicago News Cooperative, including more than 12 years as sports editor, associate managing editor and senior writer for the Chicago Tribune.
Before joining the Tribune, Dan worked for newspapers in Freeport, Ill.; Reno, Nev.; Sacramento, Calif.; San Francisco; Philadelphia; and New York. While he has worked most of his career in sports, he also has been a media critic, national correspondent, metro columnist and book reviewer.
Sports sections that he has edited have won more than a dozen top-10 awards from the Associated Press Sports Editors Association. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage in 1992 and for commentary in 1993. A Chicago native, he is the co-author or editor of five books on the city’s sports teams, including the best-selling "Out of the Blue" on the 2003 Chicago Cubs.
Recent Contributions
by DAN McGRATH | Sep 11, 2011
The weather was Indian-summer delightful on Chicago’s lakefront. The sun-splashed, jersey-clad Soldier Field crowd was in a typical state of high anxiety, palpably eager for a first for-real look at their 2011 Bears. The pre-game 9/11 remembrance was subdued and somber, an appropriate acknowledgement of a horrific national tragedy on the 10th anniversary of its
by DAN McGRATH | Sep 6, 2011
The crisp hint of fall that is often in the air for September baseball adds an urgency to the games that is missing from the more languid pace of spring and summer. Contending teams know they have to get busy—they’re running out of time. Time ran out on the Cubs’ fruitless season months ago, of
by DAN McGRATH | Sep 2, 2011
Jim Delany has an ego befitting his stature as a former North Carolina basketball player, a lawyer, and a high-profile, highly paid sports executive. He has a well-earned reputation as Mr. Big in college athletics, a characterization he neither flaunts nor dismisses. During 22 years as its commissioner, Delany has transformed the Big Ten Conference
by DAN McGRATH | Aug 29, 2011
Jim Hendry is a hard guy to dislike, which is why the people who worked with him and the reporters who covered him took a somber view of his recent dismissal as Cubs general manager. Not so Cub fans. In their eyes, Hendry bore the responsibility for two-and-a-half seasons of truly bad baseball on the
by DAN McGRATH | Aug 19, 2011
A late August Cubs-Cardinals series has been an annual high point to dozens of baseball seasons on the North Side, but the Cubs’ two-year slide into National League irrelevance drained much of the juice from this weekend’s three-game set at Wrigley Field. Jim Hendry paid the price for that slide on Friday. Hendry, 56, the
by DAN McGRATH | Aug 18, 2011
Jabb the Gym occupies the second floor of a renovated red-brick warehouse on the city’s scruffy Near West Side, three miles and maybe a light year away from downtown opulence. Accessible by a narrow wooden staircase, the busy room bears the unmistakable scent of men at work and is more functional than fancy, even by
by DAN McGRATH | Aug 12, 2011
Every time a major league player flips a baseball into the stands in response to a fan’s entreaty, it’s a reminder of the strike that truncated the 1994 season and wiped out that year’s entire postseason. Were you angry? Many baseball fans were, and never mind the issues. They saw the players’ decision to walk
by DAN McGRATH | Aug 4, 2011
Details of the debt-ceiling deal are more easily understood than the nuances of offensive line play, so Olin Kreutz’s true value to the Bears went unnoticed by us civilians until they decided to part company with their veteran center. The sky-is-falling coverage that followed would have us believe Kreutz ranks with Gale Sayers and Walter
by DAN McGRATH | Jul 31, 2011
One year after retiring his number 35 and adding his likeness to the gallery along the wall in left-center field, the White Sox unveiled a statute of Frank Thomas on Sunday. The bust will sit on the left-field concourse at U.S. Cellular Field, above the stands where Thomas deposited a good many of the franchise-record
by DAN McGRATH | Jul 28, 2011
Barry Bonds is way too self-satisfied to fret that suspicions about performance-enhancing drug use may have fouled his prodigious baseball achievements badly enough to keep him from entering the Hall of Fame in two years. Other juicers, admitted and alleged, will take heart from seeing Roberto Alomar welcomed into sports’ most exclusive fraternity last weekend.
