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Longtime Sportswriter Larry LaRue Dies
He covered the Seattle Mariners for more than 20 years.
By John Levesque November 10, 2017
Larry LaRue, a supremely gentle man with a gift for storytelling, died of a heart attack Monday while visiting family in California. He worked for The News Tribune of Tacoma from 1988 to 2015, most of that time spent as the newspaper’s beat writer covering the Seattle Mariners.
Seattle Business magazine wrote about LaRue’s entertaining book, Major League Encounters: One Hundred Personal Stories of the Select Group of Men Who Make Their Living Playing a Game, in 2012. Available on Amazon.com, the book incorporates LaRue’s favorite stories from more than 30 years as a baseball writer.
News Tribune sports columnist John McGrath, a friend and former colleague, says LaRue “wrote about baseball as if each game were part of a 162-chapter novel.” LaRue left sports and became a news columnist in 2013 and retired from the News Tribune in 2015. Before joining the Tacoma paper, he worked at the Long Beach Press-Telegram as a beat writer covering the California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels).