Based on some of the things that he had written, he seemed to handle his situation with humor, not an easy thing to do.

Mac founded Braves Journal in 1998 because Compuserve offered free web hosting. The original address was http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/MacThomason/, and this is what it looked like. He had parody sports articles — sort of like Onion Sports, half a decade before the Onion launched its sports sections — in a section called “Baseball Free Press.” He did fake chats, years before The Dugout. On the very first page he put up, The “Rafael Belliard Home (Run) Page,” he wrote, “At his current rate of one home run every ten years, Raffy is on pace to break fellow Brave Hank Aaron’s record for career home runs in the year 9537.”

Later, he started The Road from Bristol, an NCAA-style bracket to try to find the worst ESPN personality of all, and it was possibly the highest-profile thing he ever did; it got written up by everyone from the Associated Press to Deadspin. (The AP got his age wrong, of course; he was 34, not 24. And when John Schuerholz sent Mac a get-well card, following agitation by me and some other members of the site, he sent it to “Mark Thomason.”)

Based on some of the things that he had written, he seemed to handle his situation with humor, not an easy thing to do.