About
Created By Mike Duffy on November 2nd 2016
Email: blog@thekzonenews.com
When the 2016 baseball season was coming to the end, Mike was going crazy on what he was going to do when the season was over. He was always curious about what goes through players minds pre-season, after season, and during it. So Mike decided to send a direct message to a player on Instagram and later that night the player wrote back. This sparked an idea for a blog. He started doing player interviews. Then Mike asked his fellow classmates Ian and Mojo if they wanted to bring their minds to the blog. The blog has now grown to a dozen writers and aims to build a stronger following.
Mike Duffy- 18 years old – Freshman at ASU
email: mike@thekzonenews.com
Created by
Growing up in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles; Mike has seen his home teams in the World Series 5 times. Moving to Los Angles the same time Mike felt right at home when his favorite player Chase Utley came too. Being such a big fan of every Dodger, Phillie, and Yankee, his love for them can get him into many baseball arguments. Mike, while agreeing with many Sabermetric beliefs, is a big fan of scouting and wants some of baseballs technics not to be all formulas. He loves baseball and making this blog is fulfilling his dream of being a sports interviewer and writer! After school you can either catch him playing Outfielded or Announcing for School Games.
Ian Joffe – 18 years old – Freshman at UC Berkley
email: ian@thekzonenews.com
Senior Writer, Editor
Ian hates player interviews. So, when he learned that his friend Mike Duffy was founding an interview blog, he was a little disappointed. However, he quickly realized that Mike was having immediate success. So, he decided, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! Ian Joffe is a 17-year-old Los Angeles native, who loves engineering, podcasts, swimming, cats, chess, and especially baseball. In terms of MLB, he leans far on the SABR side, spending hours a day in the depths of BBR and Fangraphs. As Pythagoras once put it, “All is number!” He enjoys writing statistical analyses, often using computer code to gather and visualize mass data, and having friendly arguments with the anti-SABR Mike. Let’s wish his Red Sox a great season!
Mojo Hill – 18 years old – Freshman at University of Oregon
Writer, Editor
Mojo is an avid Dodgers fan who also follows the Mets very closely. He loves going to Las Vegas 51s Minor League games to interact with the players and collect autographs, and of course Dodger games to root on his favorite team. He’s also interested in studying and analyzing stats of his favorite players, which include Clayton Kershaw, Gavin Cecchini, Andrew Toles, A.J. Ellis and T.J. Rivera. Outside of following baseball, he is a varsity tennis player who is out on the courts nearly every day and a bass clarinet in his school’s marching band.
Brandon Gutierrez
Staff Writer
Maddie Marriott – 17 years old
Staff Writer
Maddie is a 16 year-old Philadelphia native with a passion for writing and of course, the Phillies. When her cousin, K Zone founder Mike Duffy, asked her to write for the blog, she was ecstatic, because it combined her two favorite things: writing and baseball. Her all-time favorite players are Chase Utley and Carlos Ruiz. Aside from baseball, she also enjoys reading and writing poetry, singing, and traveling. She is also a big fan of her other beloved Philly sports teams; the Eagles, Sixers, and Flyers. Maddie appreciates the need for sabermetrics in baseball, but also thinks that you can’t tell everything about a player from a stat sheet.
John (Jack) Kennedy
Writer
Jack is obsessed with all Philadelphia sports teams, watching every single Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, and Eagles game there is, but the Phillies are by far his favorite. One of his favorite hobbies includes traveling around the country and following his favorite teams to catch as many games live as possible. His favorite player right now is Aaron Nola and his favorite of all time is the late Doc Halladay. When Jack was just a little kid, it was watching Doc throw for the Phillies that inspired him to become a pitcher. He now pitches for Ponte Vedra Thunder, a travel team near him where he lives in Florida. Beyond baseball he is a center back for Florida Elite Soccer Academy.
Emmet Weinstein
Writer
Aaron Heyman
Writer
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