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Meet The MLBTR Writing Team

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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 2.7 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 New York City. 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.

Connor Byrne is a longtime writer/editor who came aboard the Trade Rumors family in January 2015 as a member of the team at Pro Football Rumors. Connor left PFR in September 2017, but he has been on the MLBTR staff since the spring of 2016, and he became a full-time writer for the site in May 2019. A Buffalo, N.Y., native, Connor studied journalism and English at nearby St. Bonaventure University – which was after it became painfully obvious that he was not destined to pitch in the major leagues. Nowadays, he’s perfectly content to write about his lifelong favorite sport.

Anthony Franco gave up his dream of being an MLB player when he went hitless all season his final year of youth baseball. One of two Buffalo, NY, natives on the MLBTR staff, 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.

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.

TC Zencka is a Chicagoland native who nonetheless claims the 2001 Diamondbacks as his favorite team of all-time. Since graduating from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he’s worn almost as many jerseys as Edwin Jackson: notably, as an investigator for Public Defenders in DC and a closed captioneer for gems of American television such as Pawn Stars and The Dick Van Dyke Show. He also fed horses for a time in Arizona, ran a 9-stage live-performance venue in Wicker Park, and brewed beer in the mountains outside Beijing for one of the first American craft breweries in China. In 2017, he earned his MFA in Writing for the Screen + Stage at Northwestern University. These days, he provides in-game social media coverage for MLB to the Washington Nationals as a video editor at Nats Park. TC has been writing for MLBTR since 2018. You can follow him on twitter @tczencka.

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.

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