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Over the course of the last two decades, Jeff Passan has established himself as one of baseball’s preeminent newsbreakers.
But there was a time when ESPN’s senior MLB insider considered shifting his coverage from the diamond to the hardwood.
“I was thinking about doing NBA there for a little while,” Passan told Front Office Sports’s Baker Machado in a recent interview.
Although the award-winning reporter didn’t specify when he weighed making such a switch, it was presumably just after Adrian Wojnarowski’s sudden departure from ESPN in Sept. 2024. As the network searched for Wojnarowski’s replacement, The Athletic reported that it was considering putting Passan on its NBA beat.
Such a move never came to fruition, as ESPN ultimately hired Wojnarowski’s former protege, Shams Charania, as the new face of its NBA reporting. (Wojnarowski is still making news as the GM of St. Bonaventure’s men’s basketball program.) But while Passan confirmed his interest in the gig to FOS, he also conceded he would have faced plenty of challenges had he opted to make such a seismic career shift.
“This job, at the end of the day, is about relationships,” he said. “And it’s about cultivating relationships to the point where those people, when something happens, think of you and think, ‘I should tell Jeff this. I should tell Adam [Schefter] this. I should tell Shams or Pete [Thamel] or any of the others who try to do this crazy job.’
“And those relationships take time, and they take nurturing. And I’m in my mid-40s now. I don’t want to spend a couple of years just essentially getting to know people to try to get to anywhere near the level I’ve gotten to just in terms of the people I know across the game that’s taken 23 years to build.”
There was also sentimental value for Passan in remaining where he’s already most familiar.
“I love baseball, too,” he said. “That’s the thing at the end of the day: I like baseball better than all the other sports. So while it would be a real challenge and a fascinating exercise—nah. No thanks.”
Eighteen months after Wojnarowski’s unexpected exit, it’s hard to question ESPN’s succession plan. Not only did the network add one of the top NBA insiders in Charania, but it also avoided the domino effect of having to replace Passan on the MLB beat. Despite his previous temptation of shifting sports, Passan insists he’s at peace with spending the remainder of his career at the ballpark, referring to himself as “pot-committed” to baseball coverage.
