Hi Giorgio » Baseball.it

Baseball is lonelier. At least for those who have been attending him for many years, because from today we can no longer count on a friend who wrote much of the history of our sport in Italy. Written in the literal sense, given that Giorgio Gandolfi has passed away, a thoroughbred journalist, a Parmesan transplanted to Turin, with many years of life lived in Milan reporting on Inter and Milan for La Stampa, where he worked for 27 years after the internship at the Gazzetta di Parma and the beginnings as a professional at Tuttosport.

But above all for us Gandolfi was a baseball journalist, indeed we would say “the baseball journalist” of all, the one who dedicated more time, more passion and more energy to bat and run than anyone else. If only because, while he was writing about bat and run in his newspapers, he had the brilliant intuition of founding a magazine at the end of the 1960s which for years had an incredible following in our little world, “Tuttobaseball”. Born as a monthly magazine to tell the stories and characters of baseball and softball, in the most successful years of our sport it even became a weekly magazine, in tabloid format, at least during the championship season, to report news, scores, statistics, interviews, comments on everything related to diamonds. In the golden years, between the Seventies and the Eighties, it reached almost all the newsstands, also because on Tuesdays (or Wednesdays in the most distant places) all of us in baseball, players, coaches, managers and above all fans – because then in baseball there was also this category – we ran to buy this newspaper that told us everything that interested us, in years when the internet wasn’t even a science fiction hypothesis. And despite the fact that sports newspapers still dedicated a lot of space to championship matches.

But Tuttobaseball was something more, it was the magazine where you also found the minor leagues, where you found all the characters you could see and meet on the fields.

For many of us, that magazine was above all a training ground in which to grow and refine our professionalism, because many journalists who later had important careers in national newspapers started or passed through there. But Giorgio knew how to involve many illustrious names from the national sporting scene in his magazine to write about baseball. Colleagues from whom he knew how to “extort” an intervention, a comment, an opinion, just as he also made many footballers talk about baseball, from Ancelotti to Zenga.

But this was not the only merit of Giorgio Gandolfi, because after having supported with his magazine the rise to the federal presidency of Bruno Beneck at the end of the Sixties, he supported the volcanic president by creating a press office at Fibs which greatly promoted the our sport, leading Beneck to sell baseball even beyond its real dimensions. We remember certain presentations of the championships made in Milan in the seventies and eighties with dozens of journalists, even important ones, perhaps even attracted by gifts from the many sponsors of the teams of the time. These were the golden years of baseball, which Gandolfi continued to enjoy even under the Notari presidency. Of course, times that can never return, as some will say, but times in which we were also trying to do something to sell a sport that still had its own dimension and its own minimal popularity.

Gandolfi was a footballer in his youth, but he was also a baseball player, in Parma, albeit at modest levels, but he also played a match in Serie A, in 1961, even against Nettuno. Then his profession took him to Turin to the great Tuttosport school of those years, where he continued to write about baseball. He recounted the great rivalry between Milan and Nettuno in the Seventies, then the boom in Emilia Romagna, with Bologna, Rimi and Parma in the Seventies and Eighties, the World Cups of ’78 and ’88. Especially in the long adventure at La Stampa for which he was the correspondent from Milan for many years, always finding time to run the magazine with the inseparable “editor-in-chief” Enzo Di Gesù, with whom he also edited the Baseball Encyclopedia in the 1980s and a couple of almanacs of our sport, precious tools for those who had to deal with and write about the beat and run.

All of us in baseball, and especially this writer, certainly owe him a lot.

The Director and the entire editorial staff of Baseball.it join in the pain of the family members by expressing their deepest condolences for the passing of their dear colleague Giorgio

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