The plan was to use this post to determine, once and for all (or not) what constitutes a dynasty and what doesn't. That will have to wait.

Larry Whiteside, a longtime baseball writer for The Boston Globe, died this morning after a long illness. He was 69.

From the Globe Web site: "One of the first African-American baseball reporters for a major daily newspaper, Whiteside wrote for the Globe sports pages for parts of four decades after stints in Milwaukee and Kansas City. He was instrumental in starting the careers of many African-American sports journalists around the country and was a tremendous role model for young reporters he took under his wing.''

That last sentence would include me. My second year in the business, in 1988, I attended the annual convention in Miami of the National Association of Black Journalists, an organization I'd never heard of before then. At that convention, a group of sportswriters got together in a hotel meeting room late Saturday afternoon and talked about ways to keep our small numbers in contact with each other, to know who was where, and to get and give help and support when needed. It was informally named the Sports Task Force. Whiteside was one of the founders.

The year I first became a columnist, 1999, was also the same year the Task Force was honoring him at the convention in Seattle for the work he's done mentoring and opening doors for us. He was as happy about my achievement as he seemed to be about his own.

This is from the task force's Web site; it points out that when Whiteside started at the Globe in 1973, there were no other blacks covering major league baseball for a major daily paper.

According to the Globe, the Red Sox will observe a moment of silence in Larry's honor before tonight's game at Fenway against San Francisco. It's a sad day for sports journalism and for the people he has influenced in his life.