Murray Chass On Baseball: THERE ONCE WAS A RACE HERE

Not only that but George Vecsey is not retiring…plans to enter Empire State Building Run-Up!

In a column last week about the pending extinction of the Sports of the Times column in The New York Times, I quoted the article in the New York Observer that disclosed the plan as saying that George Vecsey, one of the Times columnists, “told the Observer that at age 70, ‘he’s about ready to retire.’”

Vecsey, in an e-mail, said he told the Observer no such thing. He never told anyone he was retiring, Vecsey wrote. “Because I am not” he added. “I like what I do.”

John Koblin of the Observer, Vecsey said, “asked me how long I planned to work and I said something like, ‘Let’s put it this way: I don’t think I’ll be doing this a decade from now.’” He added in his e-mail, “I also told him, as long as I can walk faster than people half my age going up the stairs from the clubhouse to the press box that I would keep working.”

I asked Koblin about the matter, and he responded, “I asked George how many years he had left as a columnist. He replied, ‘Not too many.’ He went on to explain, as I quoted him, that it’s a young person’s business and that he wouldn’t want to get old in the job. George is 70. I took that to imply that he was about ready to retire. If George is saying to you that he’s going to be doing this for a while then that’s great news for all of us.”