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WASHINGTON — Mel Antonen, family man, friend to the world, and renowned sports journalist, died Saturday of a rare acute auto-immune disease and complications from COVID-19. He was a longtime USA TODAY Sports and MASN-TV baseball reporter who covered nearly three dozen World Series. In a half century in journalism, he reveled and excelled in telling others’ stories.
He was 64.
Mel Richard Antonen’s own story became the best of all. It began in the tiny town of Lake Norden, South Dakota, on Aug. 25, 1956, when he was the third of four children born to Ray and Valda Antonen.
Lake Norden is 225 miles from the nearest major league ballpark and has never been populated with more than 550 people, but on soft summer evenings fans from counties away congregate at Memorial Park to watch a new episode of South Dakota’s storied amateur baseball history. Its pull never left him even as he walked, as a sports journalist, on Boston’s hallowed Fenway Park with the late Yankees Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio, or sat in a pre-game spring training dugout with another Hall of Fame member, Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew, weeks before Killebrew died in 2011.
The Antonen family has promoted amateur baseball in Lake Norden for decades. Mel loved to tell how his father, Ray over the years brought to the tiny hometown a series of barnstorming pros, including the legendary Satchel Paige and Cy Young Award winner Jim Perry, to play at Memorial Park. On the mornings of home games throughout his childhood and beyond, Mel, his father and siblings would groom the field, with the rising corn and soybean fields ritually marking the progression of summer beyond the left-field fence.
“I love baseball because it always brings me home,†Antonen said at his induction to South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame in 2017. “A baseball park in my mind is a home. It doesn’t matter if it’s next to a cornfield, as it is in Lake Norden, or if it is next to a rumbling subway, in New York.â€
At USA TODAY, and later as an analyst for MASN, the network that covers the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, Antonen “was a very good storyteller who went far beyond balls and strikes and the score of the game,†said his retired USA TODAY Sports editor Henry Freeman.
His journalism career began as a kid, when he called in scores from Lake Norden’s home games to two newspapers that he ended up writing for: the Watertown (S.D.) Public Opinion, which paid him as a high schooler 15 cents a copy inch; and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, where he got his first job after graduation from Augustana University, eventually covering the sports, farm and political beats.
He joined USA TODAY in 1986, where one of his earliest assignments was covering the Tonya Harding Olympics figure-skating scandal. Antonen became a MLB reporter and columnist, covering history from Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games streak to the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa record-breaking home run race and the steroid scandals that followed. The story he often said was seared most in his memory came during the earthquake-interrupted 1989 World Series. There, sitting in a press box high above San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, he watched as the entire stadium undulated dangerously during the destructive Loma Prieta quake. Antonen filed a story, then headed out for days to cover the aftermath, focusing on the human costs.
Hall of Famer Ripken told USA TODAY Sports’ Bob Nightengale that Antonen “was a fixture around the game for so many years, and it was clear that he had a passion for baseball. He was a thorough and thoughtful reporter and left his mark on his profession.â€
Along with the World Series, Antonen covered three Olympics, and professional bowling leagues.
“I can’t imagine being anything other than a reporter, an ink-stained wretch,†he told his Hall of Fame audience.
Freeman, his editor at USA TODAY’s pioneering sports section, said Antonen’s knowledge of baseball, reverence for its history, and his love of stories, was evident from the first day.
“It became clear to me right away the understanding he had of baseball, and a lot of that was because of his father,†said Freeman.
Freeman said one of his favorite stories involved Antonen at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the 100 meters in world-record time, but failed a drug test, was stripped of his gold medal and ordered to be sent home. USA TODAY received a tip that Johnson had reservations on one of several potential flights out of South Korea, and Freeman immediately sent Antonen to the airport to find Johnson and to do anything necessary to get an interview.
Carrying nothing but a walkie-talkie and his reporter’s notebook, Antonen arrived at the airport and quickly discovered that Ben Johnson was booked on a flight to Toronto. Antonen bought a ticket, went aboard and found Ben Johnson – who turned out to be a doctor, decades older than the sprinter by the same name. Antonen turned failure into a memorable human interest story about the frantic hunt through Olympics high-security obstacles that ended with the wrong Ben Johnson.
“It was a non-story that he made a good story of its own,†Freeman said. “It also showed the lengths that Mel would go to get a good story.â€
Using persistence and personality, Antonen scored a rare interview with the notoriously press-shy DiMaggio, late in the legend’s life, after learning that DiMaggio was in Boston for a special event at Fenway Park. The man considered “ungettable†by many sports journalists talked for several hours with Antonen, and they finished with a stroll in front of the Green Monster. DiMaggio “loved the history of baseball,†Antonen years later told the Argus-Leader.
He was a sports broadcaster for MASN’s Mid-Atlantic Sports Report, and radio analyst on Sirius-XM in the last decade of his career, and also wrote for Sports Illustrated and other publications. He did a radio interview on the baseball Hall of Fame voting from his hospital bed less than a week before his death. He especially loved talking baseball with long-haul truckers on his late-night satellite radio show.
Antonen’s mother died when he was 12. His father, himself enshrined in the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame, raised Mel and his sisters, Kathy and Carmen, and brother, Rusty, with the field at Memorial Park becoming a refuge.
“My life reflects the power of baseball,†he said in that 2017 speech. “One of my earliest memories of Lake Norden baseball was the summer of 1969. … In March of that year my mom died after a year-long battle with cancer. But it was baseball, and Lake Norden baseball, with hot dogs and a 10-cent glass of pop and chasing batting-practice foul balls on a beautiful summer night, that created a diversion from fearful images of three months prior – (of) my mom’s tan casket, crying adults, the hearse in front of Trinity Lutheran, on an overcast subzero day, when there were piles of snow in one of South Dakota’s worst winters.â€
Antonen kept reporting and writing throughout his illness with COVID-19 and an auto-immune disease so rare that his doctors told him he may have been the only person on Earth with that combination.
Months after being diagnosed with both diseases, Mel scored an interview with Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and big baseball fan, who talked about the need for caution, but also hope, in a pandemic. “You’ve got to go on with your life, but that doesn’t mean you have to deprive yourself of all the pleasures†Fauci told him. Â
Antonen’s final column for MASN, written after the Dodgers won the World Series in October, paid homage to the comforting and reassuring next-year ritual of baseball. It ended this way: “World Series 2021 prediction: The Padres in six over the White Sox.â€
Mel Richard Antonen is survived by his son, Emmett, 14, and his wife, Lisa Nipp, a photojournalist, whom he married in 2001, along with three siblings and their families. Lisa embraced the many characters in Mel’s baseball orbit, once holding the phone for Mel with the crusty, late Hall-of-Fame pitcher Bob Feller by discussing the beauty of hollyhocks.
“From Joe DiMaggio to Dusty Baker and Bryce Harper, I have gotten to meet and interview and become friends with people that baseball fans around the world would love to know,†he said in that Hall of Fame speech in South Dakota. “But those experiences only happened because I grew up around people that we should all be lucky to know. The lessons learned here, and on the prairie, have gone with me and worked beautifully. And tonight, baseball brings me home once again.â€
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