By John Iaboni, Sports Media Canada special correspondent

Sunday, February 28 marked the final day of the Vancouver Olympics and it was also the day that Jordan Bastian, who covers the Blue Jays for MLB.com, earned a medal.

Jordan Bastian

No, no, no … it wasn’t an Olympics medal but rather a keepsake for completing the 26.2-mile Tampa Bay Gasparilla Distance Classic Marathon! To capture it as sort of his Olympics moment, we asked Jordan to take a bite out of the medallion and he complied.
We are glad to report that he suffered no damage to his teeth in the process, which is more than we can say for German luger David Moeller who, when posing for photographers, broke a tooth after putting the bite on his Olympics Silver Medal.
“It was my fourth marathon,” says Bastian, who set a personal best time of three hours and 43 minutes, shaving off more than 20 minutes from his previous personal record. “I started marathons a couple of years ago and I did this one because it was taking place while I was down here for Spring Training. And I’ve done a few other ones, including Chicago twice which was a lot of fun. But I didn’t hit the type of goal times I wanted so I trained right over the winter and did this one this year.”
What prompted Bastian to pursue marathons?
“Honestly I took a look around the press box a few years back and I said I wanted to be in better shape than some of the guys I was seeing who had been in the field for a long time,” he says. “So it kind of started as a weight loss motivation thing. When I was a kid I worked out to play baseball and at this stage I needed that thing to keep me motivated so now I work out to run marathons. If you go back to my junior year of college, I’ve lost about 50 pounds. I’m down to about a little over 160 now but at my heaviest I was about 215. That was just all through portion control and running.”
Bastian says he’d love to qualify for the most famous marathon of them all.
“Boston’s something you strive for as a marathoner,” he says. “I’d love to do New York some day too. The energy at Chicago was awesome. The one down here had a smaller field so you were running by yourself for a lot of it. But it was a beautiful course.”
Bastian is a bit of a marathoner when it comes to baseball coverage as well because he estimates his workload averages about 130 Jays’ games per season. His roots are in the south suburbs of Chicago and his route to the Majors was via journalism.
“When I realized that my genes were only going to take me so far playing I wanted to find a way to just be surrounded by baseball,” he says. “When I was looking into colleges the two things I loved were writing and baseball. So journalism seemed like an appropriate direction for me to go. That’s what led me to Michigan State; they had one of the top J-schools in the U.S. I went there and after a couple of years started working at newspapers. I really started falling in love covering Minor-League baseball in Lansing with the Lansing Lugnuts who are now affiliated with the Jays and were in my last year at Michigan State. A lot of sports reporters and baseball reporters I talk to say being a baseball beat writer wasn’t their original plan but that was my plan from the beginning.”
Bastian started as an intern with MLB.com in 2005 and moved into a full-time role in December 2006. While the Jays have been his beat, the Cubs are the team in his heart.
“I was a Cubs guy in a (White) Sox house,” Bastian says. “I played second base and Ryno (Ryne Sandberg) was the guy in town. I even had a high school coach who jokingly mockingly called me Ryno because he was a big Sox fan.
“My Mom grew up a couple of blocks from old Comiskey Park. She’d tell me about the Go-Go Sox of Minnie Minoso. But I grew up with Sandberg and the (Wrigley Field outfield) Ivy, Sammy Sosa, Mark Grace and those guys, listening to Harry Caray, skipping out on church every Sunday to hop on the 22-Clark Street bus and go to Wrigley and buy an obstructed view seat. When you’re in a two-team town and you can’t love baseball in Chicago, then you’re not going to love baseball.”