About

Marty Niland is a retired journalist who spent more than 40 years covering everything from high school sports to major colleges, the National Football League and major league baseball.  In 1995, while working for States News Service, he was among the first to report that the NFL was returning to Baltimore after  an 11-year absence. Nine years later, he helped The Associated Press break the news that the Montreal Expos were moving to Washington, ending the city’s 34-year major league baseball drought. On April 14, 2005, he was part of the AP team that covered the first regular-season major league game in Washington since 1971. In February 2006, he rushed to the Wilson Building in the middle of the night to inform the nation that the DC Council had reversed itself and approved a lease that resulted in the construction of Nationals Park. Before the Nats won the World Series in 2019, Marty’s favorite moment in the history of the Nationals, the DC area and sports in general was Jayson Werth’s walk-off homer in Game 4 of the 2012 National League Division Series against St. Louis, which he personally witnessed at Nationals Park, along with his son, Mark, his life-long best friend, Bob, and his former blogging partner, Steve Walker.