Meet The MLBTR Writing Team

MLB Trade Rumors employs a team of writers to bring you the latest hot stove news and analysis.  Let’s meet the team:

Tim Dierkes started MLB Trade Rumors as a hobby in 2005, and has since written over 12,000 posts as MLBTR grew into baseball’s most popular hot stove website as well as his full-time job.  MLBTR has received over 3.1 billion pageviews since its inception and is a favorite of baseball writers, executives, agents, players, and fans everywhere.  Tim currently lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and four children.  He is a lifelong Cubs fan, but swears it does not affect his objectivity on MLBTR.  Follow him on Twitter: @timdierkes.

Steve Adams is a full-time staff writer for MLB Trade Rumors. MLBTR’s longest-tenured writer, Steve grew up in the Twin Cities and currently resides in Minnesota. He is a graduate of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, where he studied English Literature with a Writing Emphasis and Public Relations (when his fantasy baseball schedule permitted). Steve has been a baseball fan since he can remember, and is thankful to be (barely) old enough to have vivid memories of his beloved Twins’ most recent World Series title in 1991. Steve has been writing for MLBTR since May of 2008, and began providing fantasy analysis for MLB.com in May of 2011. He has also written about the Twins for SB Nation’s Twinkie Town and fears that his voice may never fully recover from 2009’s Game 163 tiebreaker against the Tigers. You can follow him on Twitter: @Adams_Steve.

Anthony Franco gave up his dream of being an MLB player when he went hitless all season his final year of youth baseball. A Buffalo, NY native, Anthony was a Cubs fan growing up but lost track of baseball for a few years once he stopped playing. He rediscovered his passion for the sport in college at the University at Buffalo, where he got his first opportunity to write about baseball for Fantrax, a fantasy sports site. A part-time writer at MLBTR since 2019, Anthony joined the full-time staff in June 2021. Anthony graduated from UB with a history degree in 2017 and graduated from Boston College Law School in 2020. You can find him on Twitter discussing baseball, complaining about the Las Vegas Raiders, and raving about the occasional 1950’s movie: @affranco10.

Darragh McDonald grew up in the Toronto area and got to watch the Blue Jays win the World Series when he was 9 and 10 years old, thus dooming him to a lifetime of baseball fandom. He started writing for MLBTR in March of 2020, which somehow got nudged out of the worldwide headlines that month. A graduate of the Ryerson University Film Studies program, Darragh has also occasionally worked in television and written bad screenplays.

Mark Polishuk has been part of the MLBTR crew since October 2009.  He has also written about baseball, soccer and hockey for such outlets as Field Level Media, ESPN.com, The Boston Herald, The Canadian Press, The11.ca, Plastic Pitch, The Sports Xchange, The New York Post, and the official websites of both Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.  A native of London, Ontario, Mark holds a BA in English/Film Studies from the University Of Western Ontario.  His greatest on-field achievement was performing an unassisted triple play during a softball game in eighth grade gym class — “Just like Bill Wambsganss!” Mark yelled at the time, a reference lost on his classmates.

Nick Deeds grew up in the Chicagoland area and has joined in his family’s generations-long tradition of Cubs fandom as long as he can remember. He was in high school when the Cubs finally ended their World Series drought in 2016, and since then his love of baseball has grown to include the entire sport, rather than just his home team. He began writing for MLBTR shortly after graduating from Western Illinois University with a degree in Political Science.

Leo Morgenstern grew up in Toronto but fell in love with baseball through Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and the rest of the 2008 Phillies. Since graduating from the University of Toronto in 2020, he has written about baseball all over the internet, covering the Phillies for the dedicated team blogs at SB Nation and Sports Illustrated and covering the game at large for FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Just Baseball, Pitcher List, and, most recently, MLB Trade Rumors. When he isn’t writing about, reading about, or actually watching baseball, he tries his best to be funny for The Beaverton, Canada’s least-trusted source of news. You can follow him on the website he still refers to as Twitter @morgensternmlb.