RCS: You mentioned that you admired Bill Simmons going back to the Boston Sports Guy days. Who are the other sports writers, both past and present, that you admire?

Posnanski: Well there are a lot of people. The past guys are undoubtedly the classics: the Jim Murrays, the Red Smiths, the Frank DeFords and people like that. I'm sort of a sports writer junkie in that way. I've read a lot of people: W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon and all of these people going all the way back. I definitely feel like I'm a sports writer historian.

But currently I feel like everybody sort of gravitates to people who are their friends in a lot of ways. To me guys like Mike Vaccarro at the New York Post, he's like a brother to me. We've known each other for fifteen years, and we think almost precisely along the same lines in so many ways. So that's a guy that I not only admire and feel like he's had a huge impact on my career as a writer, but he's had a huge impact on my career as a friend.

Then there are guys like Michael Rosenberg in Detroit, Tommy Tomlinson, who's a non-sports writer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Adrian Wojnarowski. I'm going to miss a bunch of people, but overall people who I've become very good friends with have had as big an impact on me as a lot of the people that I just read. Those people have a big impact on me too, but I definitely feel like I've been impacted by a lot of different people.

10 Questions with Joe Posnanski