William F. Leitch (born October 10, 1975 in Mattoon, Illinois) is an American writer and the founding editor of the Gawker Media former sports blog Deadspin. Leitch is a national correspondent for MLB.com, a contributing editor at New York, critic at Grierson & Leitch, contributor to The New York Times, GQ, The Washington Post and NBC News and has published six books, including Catch, a novel, Life as a Loser, a memoir, God Save the Fan, a book of sports essays and Are We Winning?, a book about fatherhood and baseball.

This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. (May 2015)

His fifth book, the novel How Lucky, was published by Harper in May 2021^[1] and received an endorsement from author Stephen King.^[2] His sixth book, the novel The Time Has Come, was published by Harper in May 2023.

Leitch was born and raised in Mattoon, Illinois, which is also the setting of Catch. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. While there, he was an editor at the university's paper, the Daily Illini. He now lives in Athens, Georgia.

One of Leitch's first brushes with fame came when he appeared on an early episode of Win Ben Stein's Money. In an excerpt from Life as a Loser, published on Blacktable.com, Leitch describes the experience of taping this episode within hours of being dumped by his fiancée (a fact that co-host Jimmy Kimmel included in Leitch's introduction).

Leitch lives in Athens, Georgia with his wife, designer Alexa Stevenson, and their two sons, William and Wynn.

• Life as a Loser. Arriviste Press, Inc. 2004. ISBN 0-9746270-0-3.
• Catch. Razorbill. 2005. ISBN 978-1-59514-069-2.
• God Save the Fan. HarperCollins. 2008. ISBN 978-0-06-135178-5.
• Are We Winning?. Hyperion. 2010. ISBN 978-1-4013-2370-7.
• How Lucky. Harper Books. 2021. ISBN 978-0-06-307309-8.
• The Time Has Come. Harper Books. 2023. ISBN 978-0-06-323851-0.