This must be retirement/moving on day. First a post on Rick Reilly giving up sportswriting and now this from T.J. Simers.

Sports journalism just got duller in Los Angeles with the news that Simers is going to retire.

As often happens, it wasn’t his choice. The Orange County Register is going to make cutbacks.

Simers writes:

I’m told VSP stands for Voluntary Separation Package, but it really means retirement after 41 years writing down athletes’ clichés, including translating what Tom Lasorda meant to say free of all obscenities.

I could have waited to see if my name falls on a list of employees to be laid off after the VSP program expires, but then I would lose a chunk of severance pay, and I’m going to need it if I ever want to buy a ticket to attend a game, park and eat something.

Or, I could have gambled that I would be allowed to continue writing a column over the objections of emailers.

More:

I started my career using a typewriter, early on sitting next to the great New York Times columnist Red Smith when Bucky Dent hit a home run for the Yankees to beat the Red Sox in a one-game playoff.

I remember Red typing in “Sports of the Times,’’ then his byline and hitting the keys like some grand pianist while I froze. He was writing poetry, while I was just trying to use words I knew how to spell since there was no such thing as spell-check.

Later I would sit beside Jim Murray, no better bookends than Smith & Murray, and read sentences that Murray had written out loud to my wife.

“I could spend six months trying to write a sentence like that and never come close,’’ I would tell her, and thinking back, she never disagreed.

He concludes:

I think I’ll just take the next couple of weeks to write a few last columns, read some more angry email and get excited about whatever it is that will come next.

I hear the Dodgers have an opening for a PR guy.