Welcome to the DeFranco Post!

Baseball and Football, and Life, with a Philly bent.

(Coming soon!)

Hey there. I'm DeFranco. And I post. My full name is Christiaan DeFranco. Most people call me Chris. Some folks call me other names.

I'm a Philadelphia native who prefers his Italian roast pork with sharp provolone and long hots on a Liscio's roll.

Sadly, I have to eat healthy now. So, as far as anyone knows, my last roast pork sandwich was in 2018, I think. (If I ate such a sandwich last week, like on Thursday, I don't recall.)

I'm a writer, journalist, and occasional cartoonist. I employ the Oxford comma on a case-by-case basis. I’m into baseball, football and comfortable shoes. Sometimes I'm serious.

I cover the Philadelphia Eagles for a greater-Philly and eastern PA company. I’m also plugged in to Phillies coverage, not only for the company but on a freelance basis.

I believe in the stolen base, the hit-and-run, and pressuring the defense by putting the ball in play. I believe we’re enduring the Analytics Era of baseball, in which statistics are both overused and misused, and I can prove it. And I believe Bill Walsh is the greatest coach in NFL history.

Also, despite the ESPNification of sports language, the correct plural form of “RBI” is “RBIs” — with an “s” (except in box scores, of course). Everyone knows that Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are two of the best looking stars in Hollywood, but not everyone recognizes they're also two of the greatest actors of our time. And if Ivan Rodriguez is in the Hall of Fame, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds should be too.

What exactly is this website anyway?

Full disclosure, before I begin: I created DeFranco Post when I was recovering from some serious health issues, including a blood infection and spinal-fusion surgery. (I won’t bore you with the details.) However, literally within a day or two of launching the site, I started working again and got extra busy with multiple projects — leaving this site in limbo.

However, I always planned to return here and run DeFranco Post on a regular basis. I’ve recently been trying to figure out how to do that without forsaking my other obligations. It will happen.

In the meantime, here’s what this site will be about…

Are you tired of hot takes, fake debates, disingenuous opinions, and manufactured outrage?

So am I.

Are you sick of non-nuanced thought, context-free analysis, regurgitated talking points, dumbed-down discourse, cherry-picked facts, bias by omission, false equivalencies, the inability to scroll titles on Netflix while watching a title on Netflix, and baldfaced lies? (Exhale!)

I’m right there with ya.

And are you fed up with being shouted down for expressing your honest perspective, just because it may oppose the tidal wave?

You’re preaching to the choir.

The good news is, you’ve stumbled upon the right place.

Here at the DeFranco Post, I speak my mind. I'm unafraid to be candid, whether I’m expressing my opinions or sharing aspects of my life. And I encourage you to do the same.

There's no boss to answer to here, nobody to tell you to sit up straight, take your elbows off the table or, heaven forbid, turn off the game.

My primary agenda is the truth. (Plus, I needed a place to vent and explore various streams of consciousness, and I decided it would be fun to create this site.)

I believe in honest, compelling writing, thorough research, follow-up questions, and thoughtful discussion — with you.

This isn't a debate throwdown. It's a conversation, an open exchange of ideas and viewpoints.

You’ll find content here that you can't find anywhere else. The topic may be sports, pop culture, relationships, or the existentialism of being a dragonfly — I discuss it all. I try to do it intelligently and authentically.

To add your comments on posts, all you have to do is subscribe to this site for free (which takes a matter of seconds).

Guest authors also will contribute along the way. (You might end up being one of them.) We're not afraid of long-form here either, as you can tell. We're happy to get in the weeds on any subject. “Inside baseball” is literally what we do! And we'll deliver content with passion and imagination.

Baseball and Football. And Life.

Back when newspapers still roamed the earth — the numerous, unwieldy and unencumbered beasts that they were — the most literary section of nearly every paper was the sports section. It is what drew me to sports writing.

Baseball, aside from writing and, in a lesser sense, drawing, was my first love. (I also liked music at an early age, and movies, and nature shows too, come to think of it, but now I'm veering way off track.)

Baseball… with her grassy aroma, her psychological mysteries, her nature of being alone onstage while performing as part of a team, her pure sounds of a humming fastball smacking deep into the pillowy pocket of a catcher's mitt, a bat squarely cracking into a pitched ball, and cleats clickity-clacking on dugout concrete, she breezed into my life long before my honey-haired, junior-high crush, who was the first girl I ever truly fell in love with. Before her, I fell in love with baseball.

And, unlike my junior-high crush, baseball never let me down, even when baseball dealt me different kinds of crushes, like Joe Carter crushing my soul with one swing in the 1993 World Series. After the dust settled and the sting eased (still only slightly) from that type of total letdown, that longstanding investment of time, energy and attention all squashed in a singular moment, baseball remained, the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Every day and night in the summer, and even in the fall, she was always there, and still is now.

(Is that too much? Am I laying it on too thick?)

I genuinely loved the history of the game and how it encompassed 20th century American history, the fabric of American life for generations. I'd get lost in books about baseball, compilations from great beat writers and columnists through the years as they chronicled and captured moments in time. I'd scour encyclopedias of statistics and even a 1980s edition of “The Bill James Baseball Abstract,” which was interesting to a point before it all just became unreadable horseshit.

Bill James never answered the real questions, such as Why? and How? Why does he put up those numbers? How does he do it? What makes him tick? Bill James and analytics never even asked.

That’s the job of players themselves, coaches, and, you guessed it, writers. It’s the reason analytics are not everything (even though they are a valuable thing).

I loved listening to the game. I loved Vin Scully, the most literary of all the broadcasters. He made every game into a story, from radio in Brooklyn in 1950 through the television era to the Internet age and 21st century streaming from Los Angeles.

I loved hitting. I loved every aspect of it, from the mental to the physical to the metaphysical. I loved studying hitting and hitters. Some of my favorites were Will Clark, Tony Gwynn, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Jack Clark, George Brett, and John Kruk. I remember thinking what a good pickup Kruk was for the Phils when they got him in 1989.

I also loved watching Clemens on the mound and Ozzie Smith at shortstop. My parents divorced when I was young, and my dad moved away to Memphis. My younger brother and I often spent summers there, and our dad would drive us 5 hours up to St. Louis to take in full weekends of games of the 1980s Cardinals.

Interestingly, the old Busch Stadium almost could have doubled as a twin of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia — an early-1970s, all-purpose, concrete monstrosity of blah — but despite their similarities, Busch was somehow different, better. I don’t think it was the uniformly colored seats, the vegetation above parts of the outfield wall, the arch-shaped facade surrounding the top of the stadium, or even the beautiful downtown setting (even though all of those factors helped). I’m guessing it was the brand of baseball on the field.

I went to a lot of Yankees games as a kid, too, my dad being from Jersey and whatnot, although he grew up much closer to Philly than New York yet chose the Yankees. Hmm…

In fairness, he stuck with them for that lost decade from the early ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, when they mostly stunk, when they had Donnie Baseball, Dave Righetti, Dave Winfield and not a whole lot else. He also hung in during that dour, eight year period that began in 1965, after CBS bought the team, that saw only one strong season (1970, when the Yanks finished runner-up to the Baltimore Orioles in the American League East) and a combined record of 548-649.

Any true fan of baseball has to appreciate the New York Yankees (and the St. Louis Cardinals) — like them or not. They are two of the great franchises in all of sports.

I love football also. It came to me a little later in life, although I always watched the Philadelphia Eagles and adored Reggie White, Randall Cunningham & Co., and Buddy Ball. I followed the Joe Montana 49ers, the ‘85 Bears, Penn State and the University of Tennessee. (I ended up attending both Penn State and UT, but that's another story).

I fell in love with the Xs and Os of football, especially on the offensive side and the myriad philosophies of moving the ball down the field to score. Back when “Madden” video games allowed users to create their own formations (within football rules) and draw up their own plays, including running and blocking schemes, I became addicted to football experimentation.

As an athlete, I was fast and agile (dubbed by some in school “the fastest white kid in the class”) with good hands, and I could read the field. These attributes came in handy for playing wide receiver — mostly in organized recreational games of tackle, with no pads (which was pretty brutal, in retrospect). I’ll never forget when burly Andy Burr, whom I had known since elementary school, took me down one time. The way he wrapped me up and landed on me was bone-crunching. (Good tackle, Andy!)

My skill set also helped in baseball, in centerfield and on the base paths. I never went out for football in high school though. The head baseball coach, a height-challenged, balloonish hothead I couldn’t stand, was an assistant on the football team. Sometimes I wish I had played football anyway (and over my mother’s objections), because I might have excelled at it, perhaps even more than at baseball, but hey, c’est la vie.

In college, where I majored in journalism and behavioral science, I wrote my senior journalism project on Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense. Walsh was the cerebral anti-jock, though people who labeled him as finesse totally misunderstood him (and never met the likes of Ronnie Lott, Michael Carter and Tom Rathman). Walsh was the Renaissance man of football, an astute and detailed creative, a philosopher, scientist, psychologist, and boxer.

Much like this introduction (not all posts will be quite this lengthy, by the way), aspects of my life and my personal perspectives will be woven throughout the site. Many posts will be unrelated to sports at all, and they will be collected in a section I simply call Life & Culture.

Every now and then, I might even post fiction. (The fiction here, however, unlike some cable news outlets and certain corners of the Web, won’t be disguised as fact.)

I’ll post regularly about the Philadelphia Phillies and Baseball, the Philadelphia Eagles and NFL, and College Football. But, from day one, I will discuss teams from other cities as well as national sports issues.

I’ll touch on other sports as well, that aren’t baseball or football. (Eventually, I might add writers to focus on basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf and Olympic sports beats, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how this thing goes.)

I usually won’t be getting into politics. Plenty of other places exist for that (and those discussions too often degenerate into fruitless arguments and hatefulness). However, I might bring up values and how they fit into the political realm. After all, aren’t values what politics really boils down to anyway?

Although I bring a Philly bent, you don’t have to be partial to Philadelphia to appreciate this site. You just have to appreciate intelligent content.

Reliable postings

I’ll be posting consistently, usually several times a week — when the inspiration strikes or I have ample time. (I have a few other projects in the works, outside of this site, which occupy a large segment of my schedule.) Some posts will be recurring features, such as Today’s Brew and Going Deep, but they won’t appear daily and might not even appear weekly. They’ll simply pop up from time to time.

I generally subscribe to the old mantra of “quality over quantity,” and postings may be less frequent in the beginning than later on, but they’ll gradually ramp up.

If you’re cool with all that, then pull up a chair.

For now, the DeFranco Post is completely free, and it will always remain at least partially free.

It should be fun!

To say your piece via email, or to report a news tip you might want investigated, contact: chris@defrancopost.com.

A little about my bio

I’ve spent 20-plus years in professional journalism. During that time, I've happened to accumulate a bunch of awards, including from the Associated Press and Keystone Press Association. My work has appeared in a variety of publications, I’ve done numerous radio and podcasting appearances, and I'm currently ghostwriting a book about the mental side of hitting in baseball. (The book on hitting has spanned years, and our publisher, McFarland, has been patient, but a ghostwriter’s timetable is largely at the mercy of the person who hired him.)

Among my favorite career highlights (so far), I covered Matt Cain when he was drafted in the first round out of high school by the San Francisco Giants. I covered John Calipari when he was rehabbing his career at the University of Memphis, before he cemented his legacy at Kentucky. I covered the Memphis Grizzlies. I’ve interviewed John Chaney and Allen Iverson one-on-one.

I’ve done press interviews with Michael Jordan, Larry Brown, Larry Bowa, Charlie Manual, and a long list of Phillies and Eagles players and coaches.

My coverage of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State, with inside reporting and commentary that went against the media frenzy, was picked up nationally and included appearances on ESPN Radio.

I also covered the 2016 elections in Florida and Hurricane Matthew. I’ve covered high-profile murder trials, government corruption, mismanagement in the healthcare system, rock concerts, film festivals, art shows, religion and tons of other stuff.

That’s a chunk of my professional resume, but I’m convinced this site will speak for itself.

My hobbies include film and music. I’ve seen U2 in concert 18 times. I was the lead singer and lyricist for a two-man band in college. (My total lack of singing ability didn’t deter me!)

I’ve seen every episode of the original “Law & Order” series at least 12,689,487 times and nearly as many episodes of “Seinfeld” (through season 7, after which Larry David left). I like all kinds of standup comedy, and I love my dog Sam.

Below is a mug of me.

In the late 2000s, I founded a self-hosted website called the Philly Sports Journal, which a few of you might remember. It was extensive and steadily grew for three years, but started becoming a full-time job (and I already had a full-time job). So, rather than trying to continue it without adequate time to meet my own standards, I decided to end it.

This site is brand new — very different, streamlined, more personal. (I’ve kept only a select few characteristics from the old one.)

DeFranco Post currently resides on the Substack platform, although I still own all the content. It meets my needs right now, and it’s a good fit for the minimalist approach I wanted to take regarding design. Some of the design and functionality limitations are a bit too minimalist for my taste, but I digress.

I like it, and hopefully you will too.

Special thanks to Ian Bronstein, Steph Hector Brown, Joel Finkelstein, Lisa Gratz, Joseph Harkenson, Harry Kauffman, Alexia Rachel, Rachel Schmeidler, Chandler Smith, Liam Stairiker, Heather Teefy and many others.