Another veteran sports writer is leaving The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bob Brookover is joining the summer buyout mini-exodus and riding off into the scribal sunset.

He confirmed his departure in his final column for the Inky, titled “Baseball ain’t what it used to be, but there are still plenty of reasons to love it.”

Brookover:

We appreciate games like the one played Sunday at Citizens Bank Park when the Phillies, behind a brilliant performance from Aaron Nola, beat the Atlanta Braves, 2-1, in the unheard of 21st-century time of 2 hours and 30 minutes.

For the record, it was my last game and it really was a terrific, well-played game.

Baseball, for all its problems, is still a great game. It’s just not the king any more and it could use some corrections.

That’s OK, because I still love it.

Brookover started his writing career at the Courier-Post back in 1982, when he was still a college sophomore. He started by answering phones and then moved up to the Flyers beat and Phillies beat, the latter of which he did for nine years. He moved to the Delco Times in 1997 and made the jump to the Inquirer in the summer of 2000, continuing with the Phillies. Bob took over the Eagles beat from 2003 to 2010 before moving back to the Phillies, then did a stint as a general assignment columnist before wrapping things up with the Phils again.

Brookover joins a buyout group that includes Les Bowen, Paul Domowitch, Ed Barkowitz, Marc Narducci, and Frank Fitzpatrick. The goal was 40 buyouts across the entirety of the company, and then an infusion of younger talent that checks the diversity box, in order to act upon the Temple University study commissioned by the newspaper.

You’re probably familiar with that story by now, but the short version is that the newsroom revolted last summer, the editor resigned, the sports editor was let go, and then there was a diversity reckoning with the Inky being deemed too Caucasian. As a result, all of the new sports hires have been men or women of color, with these older white guys taking the buyouts and moving on. That sounds a little awkward on the surface, but the bottom line is that the company asked Temple to do this study, the results showed a lack of diversity, and now they are aggressively acting to correct that.

On the Phillies beat, the Inquirer now has Matt Breen and Scott Lauber.