Joseph Durso, 80; Baseball Writer at the New York Times

Joseph Durso, 80, a longtime sportswriter for the New York Times who also wrote biographies of Casey Stengel, Joe DiMaggio and histories of Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden, died Friday of cancer at a hospital in Stony Brook, N.Y.

Durso co-authored “My Luke and I” with Eleanor Gehrig, the widow of Yankees great Lou Gehrig. The book was made into a television film in 1978, starring Blythe Danner, Edward Herrmann and Patricia Neal.

In his 51-year career at the Times, Durso was a leading baseball writer covering the Mets and the Yankees. He received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Assn. of America in 1995, placing him in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.

Durso was born in New York City and raised in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. After the war, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from New York University and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. His journalism career began at the Newark Evening News in 1947. He joined the staff of the New York Times in 1950 as a copy editor on the national news desk, and held a variety of editing positions before becoming a sports writer in 1964.