Ross Newhan

Ross Newhan was born on 5 April 1937. Little has been published about his childhood and schooling. He was Jewish, and in a 2009 interview for Larry Ruttman's book American Jews and America's Game he and his son David discussed their American, Jewish and baseball experiences from youth onwards.

Newhan started at the Long Beach Press-Telegram in 1961, the year the Los Angeles Angels began play as an American League expansion club, and he covered the team for the paper for several seasons while also writing a column.

He joined the sports department of the Los Angeles Times in the late 1960s. For roughly eleven years he travelled with and covered both the Angels and the Dodgers, then spent about seven years covering the Angels alone. In the mid 1980s he became the Times national baseball writer, writing three or four columns a week about the game across the country. He also covered Triple Crown horse racing, championship boxing, college football, golf and the Olympics.

His honours included awards from the Orange County and Los Angeles press clubs, the Bob Hunter Award from the Los Angeles and Anaheim chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, and the Associated Press Sports Editors award for the top sports news story of 1997, his reporting on the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 2000 the BBWAA voted him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, now called the BBWAA Career Excellence Award, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, and he was honoured at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He co-authored the book Coaching Baseball Successfully and retired from the Times in 2004.

Newhan married Constance Fisher, known as Connie. Their son David Newhan, born in 1973 in Fullerton, California, played as a utility player in Major League Baseball from 1999 to 2008 for teams including the San Diego Padres, Philadelphia Phillies, Baltimore Orioles and Houston Astros, and later worked as a coach. Newhan was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1998.

Ross Newhan died on the morning of Sunday 25 October 2026, aged 89. The Los Angeles Dodgers announced the news that afternoon, saying: "The Dodgers today mourn Ross Newhan, the Hall of Fame sportswriter, who passed away this morning at the age of 89. We send our condolences to his wife Connie and their friends and family." The place and cause of death were not made public. Tributes from fans and fellow writers recalled his decades covering the Angels and Dodgers and his pride in watching his son play in the major leagues. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

For more than forty years Newhan was one of the best known baseball voices in Southern California newspapers, chronicling the Angels from their birth and the Dodgers through several eras. His Spink Award placed him among the writers honoured by the Hall of Fame, and his long membership of the BBWAA made him a link between generations of baseball reporters.