My twin sister Sam and I were born on June 1, 1971 at Columbia Pres in Washington Heights, not far from where the New York Highlanders used to play. How could I have turned out to be anything but a Yankee fan? My brother Ben came two-and-half years later. By the time we were in grade school, we moved from Manhattan to the suburbs. A few years later, my folks divorced, we settled in Croton-on-Hudson, visiting my father in New York on weekends and during the summers.

I attended Hunter and John Jay College in New York, but did the bulk of my undergraduate degree (with a major in Creative Writing) at SUNY New Paltz. I left New Paltz in the winter of 1993, moved to Brooklyn and worked in the post-production end of the film business in New York for the next eight years. In and around the many lousy movies I worked on, I had the good fortune to also work for Ken Burns ("Baseball"), Woody Allen ("Everybody Says I Love You") and the Coen brothers ("The Big Lebowski").

At the end of the 2002 season, I had lived in Bronx for close to two years when I started the "Bronx Banter" blog. I've been writing, virtually daily, about baseball and New York ever since. For the past three years, I've worked on my first book, a biography of the late Curt Flood. This past winter I began contributing columns to SI.com.

Just getting warmed up...