The Press Box - Charles Barkley's New Deal, Baseball Playoff Ads, and Covering Political Losers

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Bryan and David kick things off by discussing the news of Charles Barkley’s new 10-year deal with TNT worth over $100 million (0:22). Then, they touch on Bob Costas's return to broadcasting and his ad reads integrated into the telecast (9:21), before weighing in on Annie Karnie’s short essay in Vogue reflecting on her time covering politicians who never won (24:03). Later, they are joined by ESPN writer Ryan O’Hanlon to discuss his new book, ‘Net Gains.’ They dive into how the soccer compares to other American sports, discuss why soccer is difficult to quantify, and address how one writes a book tackling the analytics (34:31). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Ryan O'Hanlon Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the NFL preseason. Check out the ringer fantasy football show on Spotify or wherever get your podcast. And if you need fantasy football rankings, we've got our rankings, we've got our sleepers at fantasy football. com. So come listen to Danny Kelly, Greg Horlbeck and me, Danny Hyfitz on the ringer fantasy football show. Some big media news just as we record this podcast, Charles Barkley has signed a new 10-year deal with TNT. New York Post, Andrew Marshian reports that the deal is well north of $100 million and likely approaches $200 million. Wow.

Now, what I want to remind you and any press box listener of is, remember when Charles Barkley was retiring from television? Yeah. He was going to retire from television. It was all done. He'd done everything he could on Inside the NBA. Sure. He was going and very publicly as in. publicly as possible he was investigating that maybe he had a job over at the live golf tour.

Yeah. They were going to give him a big offer. He was talking about this, basically saying, I'm just being as honest as I can. Yeah. When I muse aloud about retiring or maybe leaving Turner to go to the live golf tour. Mm-hmm. Now he's re-signed. And I thought about this because I was reading, Timothy Bella has a Charles Barkley

biography coming out. It's about Berkeley. I was reading it the other day, especially the TV sections. You know what Charles Barkley did in the mid-2010s? He talked about retiring from television. He was music aloud about retiring. And all the TNT executives and producers got together,

and they went to his home in the Phoenix area, and they literally gave him a giant golf tournament-sized check that was a huge raise on what he'd been making at Turner. He said, here's the money. Wait, was that the first time he knew what the offer was? Apparently. Was he made so they were just like, you can take this

check or not? It wasn't... I don't know if it was legal tender, but it was the number on a giant check. I don't think Charles could have taken that to Bank of America and cashed it. I think you can, right? Well, I feel like back then, don't you remember we were kids that you could write a check on a napkin

or whatever? Like, as long as it had all the relevant information. information. Maybe not anymore. Is there a difference between the cashability of a golf tournament check and a price is right giant check that you would get? If it has a routing info on there, I think it counts. It works.

I guess the point out of making is, what if Charles Barkley isn't retiring? What if he's negotiating? Mm-hmm. And what if every time we hear somebody musing aloud about their future like this, maybe they're negotiating their next deal. Yeah. And maybe everything we write about it should be in those terms. Okay, that's interesting.

A couple of things. One, I've been thinking a lot about my future so I can sympathize. You know, I've been having discussions with LiveGolf. Maybe I'm done doing the press box. I don't know. I hope the important people are listening to this podcast right now. Yeah, okay. Well, on the one hand, yes, he's done this before.

and even if he hadn't, you know, in a vacuum, it's easy to read retroactively into it and, you know, make an assumption about what's going on. That said, in any negotiation, the person with the most, this power is the person who's willing to walk away, right? And whether that's a show or not, I mean, it's still legitimate because we all know Charles Barkley has the wherewithal and the personality, or we believe him to have the personality that would allow someone just to be like,

now I'm good and walk, right? You've got to project that a little bit, maybe, when the actual negotiations come around. But you're not negotiating against, necessarily against, well, in this case, it's Livgolf. That was a, live golf, a very useful foil here for Barclay because they could offer an astronomical amount of money

and presumably would, right? But in most of these negotiations, you're not necessarily negotiating against the competition. Sometimes you're negotiating against the, you know, things that are, bit more ephemeral, the time of a person who was worth that much money. We talked about that little bit with the Tom Brady, that hypothetical Tom Brady deal, right, where it's like, man, that's an incredible amount of money, but also like Tom Brady's making that amount

of money on like bank interest, you know, like, is this really what he wants to be doing with this time? Well, that's the question. But yeah, I mean, it's a, this is a shocking amount of money even for Charles Barkley. I guess maybe it shouldn't be in the current media climate. But yeah, you should write about that. That's a really interesting question is where you landed. Should we address that in every piece about it? This is not the first time he's threatened retirement. Or if it's somebody else, what if it's someone that's never done it before? Do you write, well, for just one data point several months ago, Charles Berkeley threatened retirement, presumably to only get a raise in his contract and stick around for 10 more years, you know? I mean,

like, how do you cover that? So there's the data point, which definitely should be in there if you know about it. but I would also just say there's a wised up way of doing this. And I remember when Troy Aikman was talking about this, that was actually, again, it seems like a million years ago, but that was earlier this year. I'm negotiating with Amazon. I'm negotiating with Fox. I'm negotiating, it turns out later with ESPN.

I'm just being as honest as I can about this. And in fact, these people may be being honest about thinking about their future. But there's also, I think, as a journalist, you're saying, like, if you're being honest in my, my column or on my podcast or however you are doing, this thing that is going to come out is itself going to be part of the negotiation. You musing to me is going to be part of the thing that puts pressure on the other side. You threatening to walk away from NBA television to go call golf tournaments or just walk away from television altogether. And if that's transmitted,

it could be honest, but it could also be part of the, in any case, it is going to be part of the negotiation. So I just feel that there's there's a wised up way of doing this rather than being the vessel to one when we when we encounter things like this to being the vessel to being the vessel to one side's bargaining. Yeah. There's just something to it. I don't know if it's a sentence here, it's a sentence there. It's a way you tweet it, whatever it is. But the way it turned out this time, just like the way it turned out last time was it Charles Barkley wondered a out about retirement. Turner gave him a huge raise and then Charles Barkley's not retiring anymore. Yeah. And for and it's a, you know, like we said, tinier deal, right? I mean, this is,

this is not just a, I mean, presumably he could walk away whenever he wanted, you know, and not do TV anymore, but that's quite a commitment for someone that wasn't sure what he wanted to do. And let me tell you this in Marchand's New York Post, sorry, Barclay could decide to retire from TV before the deal ends. Uh-huh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I like your point, by the way, but Charles.

He's like a college football coach where he just gets like a five year, a hundred million dollar extension every like two years weirdly. Like they just keep adding time and money onto the contract. And it's if you're Turner like you probably have to do it. I mean, he's, he is in that class of TV star where he is that big and he is probably that important.

He is not replaceable. Like a lot of these people we talk about on TV where it's like, yeah, it would be the same. Like he's on, he's not on a game. He's on a pre. pregame show.

Yeah. And would that pregame show be the same draw or even two-thirds of the draw it would be if they didn't have Charles Barkley. No, and like I said, you're not necessarily bidding against competition. And for the remainder of this contract, presumably they won't be bidding against competition. But if there is more time, it's like you mentioned Aikman. You know, I remember listening to him on whose pot.

Was it flying coach? I feel like it was a ringer family podcast, but he did this a lot where he would talk about, oh, I just like spending time with my kids. You know, that's the number one thing. if I'm ever going to get into team operations or whatever, I've got to be able to spend the time with my kids. And I feel presumably that's very heartfelt. But you are, it's not like just the salary.

It's sort of like the closing costs, right? It's like how much money are we going to pay to end this today? To get this wrapped up now, to kind of end the public conversation about this. And for somebody with the sort of massive amount of power and influences, the kind of people we're talking about, it could be a lot of money. Coming up on the press box pod, the MLB playoffs are back and so is Bob Costas.

We talk about both. What happens, David, when a political writer covers not the winner of a campaign, but the loser. And a very important update on one of our favorite departments here, the old guy or gal has still got it. All that more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here. David this week I did something a little crazy something I haven't done much of all year

Oh what was that? I watched baseball Doesn't that feel like when your friend's humble brag About taking an old school vacation like you know what we did We went to the Grand Canyon Well as someone who takes those sorts of vacations You know someone who went to Dollywood rather recently I hear that

I also got to catch a little bit of baseball this week I went to I went with my son to the to the sports bar is not the right word, but to a, you know, a chain place with a lot of TVs and a bar area. And we sat there and watched the Phillies game. It was a little bit accidental. But yeah, we get to take in the Phillies game with a bunch of people who were there to watch the Phillies game.

It's pretty fun. Baseball turns out to be really exciting in the postseason. And it's really exciting because a lot of the things that people complain about about baseball or worry or, you know, hurting baseball as we, move forward into a different technological era are really cool. Like baseball's long. You know what? When you have a tense playoff game,

long isn't a bad thing. See that Mariners Astros game that was zero zero in the 17th inning. It was pretty exciting. I was watching college football. I was like, I got to flip back because I want to know what is going to happen with this Mariners Astros game. It turned out to be an elimination game for the Mariners.

errors. All the stuff about a manager's decisions become an awesome B story for every baseball game, especially in the postseason. Like the football version of that is to call the right play on fourth down, do you use your timeouts correctly? But pitching changes are amazing. We've had like a Dave Roberts pitching change news cycle here in Los Angeles since the Dodgers lost to the Padres. it is just it again it perfectly works for here's the thing we can talk about after the game

I mean it's and the great thing is that it's irrevocable right there's a very few it's almost like relegation like you know when we talk about soccer there's just certain things where it's like most professional sports leagues don't have the guts to put a rule like that

into place right the closest thing is like the NBA where it's like if you don't shoot your free throw if you're hurt then you can't come back into the game or whatever, you know, but it's just, it's the play, if you pull the pitcher, man, there's no looking back, no second, no second chances. Bob Costas has been calling the Guardians Yankee series for Turner. Funny about Bob Costas, he has not called a full playoff series.

This was according to Richard Deich's column The Athletic since 2000. Did the World Series in 99, did the World Series 97, and the 95 World Series was one of those insane things that only baseball could do where they had Al Michaels and Bob Costas switching off games on different networks. Just insane in retrospect that that would have happened. But this is one of those fickle hand of fate things that always interests me with broadcasters.

It's like Bob Costas was the guy on the World Series or one of the guys in the World Series through the 90s. And then Fox bought the rights to the World Series full time starting in 2000. And Joe Buck called the next 22 world series. Bob Costas could have called 22 World Series in a row. But because one person's boss wrote a check and one person's boss didn't write a check,

Bob Costas has not called a full series since 2000. What have you made of his calling the games and also the reaction to him calling the games on social media? A lot of the times in the show we'll talk about football announcers or various people who sound, I'd say they sound like the sport, right? I mean, you know, Joe Buck and Trigman sound like football is the example that we always use. A lot of people will have critiques of that tandem, but, you know, to me, it's sometimes kind of beside the point. Bob Costis doesn't sound like baseball.

He doesn't sound like a baseball announcer so much as he sounds like a movie version of a baseball announcer or like a dramatic movie version of a baseball announcer. There's sort of like the Harry Carey iteration, and then there's just the, you know, Cornfield poet that is basically what Costas has been doing. I think that the more weird in Costasie he gets, the better it is. But of course, all of Twitter is sort of like latched onto this and has been just writing Bob Costasian poetry or Afroxian poetry or Afrox. or whatever you want to say, which sort of weirdly, I don't, I feel like it's weirdly a complimentary

sort of exercise, right? I mean, it's, I don't think anybody's like standing up and applauding, but I feel like that's about as close as you get to it these days. There's a certain sense of him since he's done this before and he's done this before a while back, which just feels a little bit like Al Michaels calling Thursday night football. Like, I've done this. I'm not going to, I'm not going to disrespect the game or, you know, do anything like that. But I, I have, there's a certain quality, the vocal quality you get when an announcer where it's like, this is not too big for me. I'm not going to over venerate this like I would if I were a rookie announcer. So you see Joe Davis, who's about to call the first World Series for Fox. I just, there's like, there's just a quality

of like, I've been here. Yeah. And I have this, I know this street, right? I know where the, I know, I know where the restaurants are. I know where to park. Yeah. I'm not going to get too bubbly about anything. It's like seeing, you know, like Bob Dylan in concert 10 years ago or something where he's just like, yeah, I'll play the hits, but I'll play them like I want to play them. And maybe it'll just be two minutes of whatever song you're here or 30 seconds of whatever

song you lined up and you won't be able to recognize it until I start mumbling through the chorus. Yeah, it's a sort of like earned irreverence, not irreverence. And you're just going to play by your own rules a little bit. Game two, I believe it was game two of the Guardian's Yankee series. Guardians get a couple of runs in the 10th inning. Cameras, Turner cameras find this kid in a Yankees cap who looks so bummed in the way only a kid could look bummed. I mean, he is just sad his team is about to lose. Here is what Costa said after that.

It's one of the worst things that's ever happened in this kid's life. To this point. To this point. there will certainly be woe visited upon this child later on. But to this point, this is the worst thing. And again, it's true, right? We're all going to grow up and experience tons and tons of sadness along with tons of happiness. That made me laugh so much.

One complaint about watching the MLBA playoffs. I, as you know, David, have no illusions about why sports are shown on TV. Sports are shown on TV to sell beer. That's it. failing that maybe to sell cars. But that is why. This is not a presidential debate. There's no weird that we,

we show them because we think we can make money on the ads. Yeah. Get a good return at least on the ads. There are ads, though, that you tolerate. And then there are ads that start to butt into the game itself. I'm watching game one of a very fun Dodgers Padres divisional series. It's a ninth inning, two-run game. Padres are trying to beat the team

their owner called the Dragon up the freeway Dodgers pitcher Chris Martin gets an out and then Fox in the middle of the inning goes to one of those picture and picture ads for a gambling company where you so you're seeing the baseball but you're hearing the sound from the ad.

So we just had commercials between innings and now after one out we're going to have another commercial which breaks the tension and messes up the ambiance of a ninth inning in a playoff game. Stop it. Stop it. Again, I understand ads.

It's just we tolerate certain amount of ads. We tolerate now more ads and more commercialized things than we probably did 15 years ago. But when it starts interfering with telling the story of a game, that's when I'm out. The logo that's projected onto the. mound. Did you notice that in all these games? Yeah, of course. Okay, a little stupid, a little cheap looking, but whatever. The ads that are rotating behind home plate on it,

okay, the man, if you break up a ninth inning and the sound and the cool sounds of a stadium to show me an ad, that's when I get upset. Yeah, weirdly the ambient noise of baseball is a large component of this. The picture and picture ads, revolution or whatever as loud arguments on both sides. But it did, it does feel just weirdly

insufficient to just to watch baseball without sound. Baseball, one of our few sports that had a vibrant life prior to video, you know, prior to widespread television viewership, you know, it is a very, you know, announcer-driven sport. I mean, there's a lot of dead time that you got to fill space you know this is these are what these guys what these guys are great at um and the noise of the stadium yeah it's just something that we're all so so accustomed to um we don't we talk during the pandemic about how we were kind of shocked at how how much we you know sometimes didn't miss the crowd in the NFL games you know i mean that was it was certainly a component but with baseball it's a really big deal picture and picture taking you is taking us

out that's that might be a bridge too far god that podres crowd just Channing beat LA over and over again in those games down there. That was so cool. It was so cool. And breaking that up is for an ad, for one more ad, and again, I understand the realities of all people.

I understand the realities of sports TV, but it just seems so dumb. Yeah. Speaking of Dragons, flipped over to game one of the Yankees Guardian series. And the aforementioned Bob Kossas had just had an ad read put in front of him. It's not unusual. But here is how that ad read went live in the stadium.

Now, you know, big sellout crowd here, but we weren't 100% sure this game was going to be played tonight. And for more, it's shocking. Here's Lauren Shahati. Guys, thank you so much wild stuff. Here's what we know. Apparently, one of the stars of HBO's House of the Dragon has decided to take in a ballgame here in the Bronx.

Officials are hopeful that the dragon won't breathe fire during gameplay. Speaking of things that take you out of the storytelling aspect of a game, how about throwing to the field reporter for a fake report about a CGI dragon terrorizing the stadium? Yeah. I was also thinking, how many people watching this game don't know what House of the Dragon is? That's a good question. I'm sure some significant number of them, but it does seem like anyone that would be inclined to watch it has already seen.

And I'm not sure that just showing them a CGI dragon is going to get anybody to make a mental note to check it out. That's what I mean. Like somebody is like, I'm watching the Yankee game. Oh. Oh, there's a new Game of Thrones series. It has a dragon. And because of this, not just an ad read, which is we understand under the corporate umbrella there, but because of this, they're showing the dragon. And the field reporter is telling me that there's a dragon over the state.

And now I'm going to watch the show. as opposed to people being actively turned off by that. Yeah. Do you think that, I mean, it seems like we're, we must be going to an age of greater and greater corporate synergy of this sort, right? I mean, every media company gets swallowed by a bigger media company every six months. It seems like this is sort of inevitable, but I don't know. I mean like it just it just seems like it just seems so just so heavy-handed I don't think we're ever going to see a board room or

whoever's making these decisions no one's going to be swayed by just by that argument right she's like yeah that'll be kind of corny somebody thought it was really cool somebody who came up with that yeah I'm sure it does it probably does I mean that's that's that's meeting cool Brian I mean that's exactly what sounds cool in a meeting like that what if we had one of the drag We have all the CGI. They just push a button. Just had the dragon fly over the camera the stadium.

It'll be so good. I don't know. I don't know. But for Kostas' part, it was just, it wasn't ad read. I mean, any announcer, any play-by-play guy worth this salt has had some much nuttier things than that, put in front of them at some point on the radio or something over the year. One fun thing to do is go back and look at all the football games and when they're advertising the NBC and CBS shows coming up.

And just like there's just so many terrible shows that were never successful. Yeah. We're just going to do a super cut of all of the shows that like Al Michaels has had to promote over his career. I'm pretty sure somebody did this with Joe Buck and just did things he'd promote during the World Series or during football games. Kosses told WK&R in Cleveland, I didn't even know what it was. They hand me this card and I'm like, what the hell is this? I read it in as detached a form as I could, and then I see poor Lauren Jihadi, who's just a wonderful person who does a great job on MLB networking for TBS,

and she's got to do this thing, some simulated report. Now I've got to think, how do I distance myself from this without totally trashing it? So I said something, which I hope that reasonable people understood was kind of like me rolling my eyes at the whole thing. On the subject of losers, David, I was reading an Annie Carney essay in vogue. Annie Carney covers Congress for the New York Times. And she wrote this essay about covering losing candidates. We're in political season here.

She writes, everything I've learned about covering politics, I've learned from covering losing candidates. Here is her loser's roll call. Christine Quinn, remember Christine Quinn? Ran for New York mayor in 2013, lost to Bill de Blasio. Joe Loda, who was the Republican, who ran against de Blasio and the general that year, had no chance in hell of winning.

Zephyr Teachout, ran a campaign in the Democratic primary for New York Governor against Andrew Cuomo lost. Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton. Aha, yes, Hillary Clinton,

here we go. Hillary Clinton will definitely win this election. Oh, wait, election night turns into a funeral and Donald Trump's going to be president. And it made me think, speaking of the fickle hand of faith

that visits an announcement, Think about with political reporters. So you get a sign to these elections. And then if the candidate wins, oh my gosh, I've got this Rolodex full of contacts. Oh, yeah. For the person who just became president of the United States. Yep. Probably going to get that cool job as a White House correspondent.

Maybe get the bump up to the cable job. at least, I'm at least going to get like a, you know, appearance job at MSNBC or CNN, but maybe they'll just hire me as their TV White House reporter. Yep. And then it doesn't happen sometimes. And again, like, you can have the exact same abilities on the Hillary campaign and the exact same abilities on the Trump campaign. Mm-hmm.

And your whole career is determined by something that's just completely out of your hands. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, think of Maggie Haberman, who's on the book to her now. Maggie Haberman gets assigned to the Donald Trump primary campaign in 2016, which was not the plum assignment in politics at all, just the opposite. Right. Not even among Republican candidates was at the plum assignment. Then she gets the Donald Trump general election campaign.

Well, he's surely going to lose. It's going to be this weird aberration in American political history and maybe you get a book deal out of it. but then look what happens. Yeah. It's not to say she's not talented or whatever. It's just to say that, oh my gosh, you know, like all these things. I guess it's the same with beatwriters, sports, if your team wins versus if your team

loses. But it's just funny to me. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I think we see it a lot in sports, right? I mean, you can, there's, there are extreme examples, right? I mean, people who cover, you know, specific athletes, specific teams, right, a given moment, and get catapulted into, you know, obviously by virtue of their own ability and not just their, not just their circumstance. But I guess a quintessential example these days is Brian Winhorst, who is just like a sort of, you know, NBA reporter par excellence.

but is he know the beginning of his career was tied with lebron james from you know he was in cleveland when they drafted him and went to miami and and you know now he's just an incredible national reporter with you know his his uh you know sources all over the place but um yeah you don't really think about that in terms of political reporters as much and it's really interesting because it is the other side of it that's sort of more significant right because we can point all this we can all point at all the the writers who have who have found their way into success and oftentimes it's it's it's you know it's if it's if it's i guess it's what's true with the sports and the

politics is that you get assigned a lot of the time right i mean there's always people who are you know agitating for certain beats or whatever in newsrooms but it's not just like i decided to cover this book i'd write this book or cover the subject on my blog or whatever you know it's an assignment that then catapults you to some you know a difference phase in your career. It's pretty incredible. Totally. I remember there was a whole generation of or a whole group of Chicago political reporters who got a big bump when Obama got elected. And again, like, what if Obama loses to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries? Yeah. But all of a sudden, he doesn't. And so you get this. Oh, there's the Obama experts.

Those are the people who have been covering Obama since before he was running for president. Let's give him. Just funny. Got an update for our recurring feature, the old guy or gal is still got it. Yeah. This is one of the media's favorite stories to write. It is. Someone who's getting a little up there, they come back with one final or maybe one of many final works of art, a great movie, great television show, great whatever it is.

And everybody points at them, yeah, old guy still got it. Oh, gal still got it. Can I submit to you, David, that Cormac McCarthy has two new books coming out. Yeah. one's the passenger, which comes out next Tuesday. There was a little preview snippet in the New York Times this weekend. The second is Stella Maris, part of the same series, which comes out December 6th. If these books are good, will this be the mother of the old guy still got it stories?

I mean, he's taken how many years off? Has it been a decade? I don't know. So the big absence increases the size of this story, does it not? Oh, yeah, absolutely. you know he had no country for old men and the movie version of it i think kept him a little bit relevant uh they were kind of you know in in the popular imagination and he also had the bulk of his success relatively late in life right i mean he was a renowned author he was writing

um his early stuff but he was not you know not certainly not mainstream in the way that he was but yeah but that's certainly all that said this that's going to be the tone of these of these pieces. There was an article, did you see this at the Times published a couple weeks ago when they uncovered

a trove of early interviews that he gave? Just an incredible source by, who is it by? I'm looking at it now. Oh, by Elizabeth Harris, if you track it down, but it was just,

it's not just the substance of the interviews, because they are just sort of wonderful and sweet and funny and very, like, young writer trying to, you know,

write himself into existence. But, just the existence of the piece is sort of wild, right? It's like, we found, this guy's, this writer is notoriously reclusive. We're not reclusive, but he doesn't give a lot of interviews. I don't know if reclusive is the right word. But it turns out, back in his early days, he was giving interviews to the local paper that nobody read, national scale.

And we're publishing that as news. It's pretty incredible. It's like the best possible version of like, we found Brian Curtis's old blog, you know? And it's a little bigger than that. No, it is. It is. But like, it's, it's nice that, you know, people care enough for, to, to, to, to, for that to be news. But, yeah, the old guy still got it. I hope the old guy so got it. He's one of my favorite writers. He's always, he's always, he's always a joy to read. And, you know, the writers get a little bit more, I mean, writers should get a little bit more, you know, runway here because a lot of, there's been a lot of, you know, legendary books written. in the twilight years of a writer's life.

But, yeah, when someone's that great, you got to ask it. You got to ask the question. Does the old guy still got it? Yeah, the old guy still got it. Now, is it a fully realized old guy still got it news cycle if the old guy isn't giving interviews? Oh, that's a good question. Because isn't part of this, like, we could bring Francis Ford Coppola on the Tonight Show

or somebody flies out to the UK to do John LaCaree back when he was writing his final novels into a big profile of him. That is part of this, right? It's like we bring him back. Oh, we are celebrating. You're right here. And we're celebrating you in this body of work. But in McCarthy's case,

he's not going to be sitting there, most likely, to do any of this. We don't know. He may, but even if he doesn't, I think there's something a little bit more, books are sort of like inherently, book reviews are inherently autobiographical, right?

I mean, you could read a movie review that just sort of like lists the director's previous movies, but doesn't go into great detail about like the phase of their career. But I feel like with book reviews, it's you have to sort of necessarily compare. I mean, this does happen to move reviews, but it's, you can't write about Core McCarthy book

without writing about Cor McArthur and his sort of, you know, literary legacy. So maybe you can pull it off without him giving the interviews. But who knows? Coming up in 30 seconds, our old friend Ryan O'Hanlon of ESPN is here to talk about soccer writing and analytics. and David guesses a headline about dinosaurs. But first let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week

where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the PressboxPod where they are always, always gratefully received. Today's winner, David, comes from Lister Greg Horowitz. It involves 1980s actor, wrestler, and all-around badass Mr. T. Love Mr. T.

Mm-hmm. And I love him even more now because Mr. T is modeling some health-conscious behavior. He tweeted that he not only got his Omicron booster shot, but he got his flu shot as well. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, I pity the flu. I pity the flu. All right. If you love it when a tweet comes together, congrats. you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

In the notebook dump, David, we're joined by one of our all-time favorites. Former colleague of ours here at the ringer.com, now a staff writer at ESPN, and the author of a new book, which comes out tomorrow, net gains inside the beautiful games analytics revolution. Ryan O'Hanlon, welcome to the press box. I'm glad to know that the way to get on wasn't to continue it working at the ringer, was to quit working and then write a book. So I'm glad I accomplished that.

Okay. We may just leave that one there, Ryan, and move on. I want to ask you, first of all, about your playing career, which you write about in net gains. Late 90s, you have curly hair. You have a Carolina Panthers starter jacket, which is awesome. And you made a kind of free agent move between club teams.

What happened? Yeah, so I was playing for this famous team on Long Island, the Smithtown Thunder, and we were like the best team on Long Island. You guys know me, I'm not the biggest guy in the world, was not as a kid either, but I was one of the few 10, 11-year-olds on Long Island who could kick a soccer ball in the air. and 10-year-old goalkeepers cannot touch the crossbar on a goal. So that was a big advantage for me. And we had a lot of other big kids on the team that were just fast

and would kind of run people over. There was this team we would always play called HBC Elite, the Huntington Boys Club Elite. And I just love how the name was for a group of 10-year-olds was elite was just the nickname they went for. And we would always play them. then after the games, my dad would always be like, that team's better than you. And we would win like, for nothing. And I would be like, what are you talking about? Like, what's, we won? Like,

that's the point. And I think when you're a kid, right, this is probably true across a lot of sports, but when you're a kid, like, the differing age, you know, being born in January, being born in December makes a big difference. And then just like pure athletic ability makes a huge difference when you're a kid. Your actual skill at playing the sport is like very, it's low on the list of inputs in terms of what affects the outcome of the game. So what happened was me and I think two of the other best kids on the Thunder left the thunder to go play for Elite. And we left like basically the day after we beat Elite in a game like 4-1 and Elite's coach got red-carded and was told the ref he wanted to fight him in the parking lot.

But he knew a lot about player development, and it was right to follow him. So, yeah, that's the general early career path for me. Later, you went on to play soccer at St. John's, had a sort of, well, I just got to say, I was not expecting to read so much about Ryan O'Hanlon when I opened this book, and it was a joy and a pleasure to read. And we'll get back to a little bit about that. the challenge of writing about this stuff. But after college, you decided to sort of hang up to cleats.

You start the book by saying if you had been born anywhere else, or if you'd, particularly if you'd born in Europe, you'd probably have played professional soccer. Is that, do you think that has shaped your career as a soccer writer, that kind of, the fact that you didn't go that path? Is this like the classic line about critics, you know?

Yeah, well, but you can take that however you want. I think it probably did a little bit. I mean, it shaped it in the sense of like, and we should say like, I would have played professional soccer in another country. That assumption is like, this is not saying I would be on Liverpool, you know? I would have played like the third division in Ireland or something like that. I think it probably did a little bit. I don't know.

that's probably something I need to dig a little bit deeper into for myself. But yeah, I think like, I mean, I certainly think that like the fact that I played and played at a relatively high level made me sort of, you know, this whole book and even the story I was just describing is kind of about the way things being done were not, clearly not the best way for things to be done. And I think, you know, playing gave me a front row seat. And then I think like I had a failed career basically in terms of my expectation. So that also, you know, I think it certainly encouraged me to kind of maybe take a slightly

different lens on the way things were being done and see, kind of see if there wasn't a better way to play the most popular sport in the world, basically. Soccer, you write, did not have the developmental and data revolution the same way baseball and basketball did. Why not? order net gains inside the beautiful games analytics revolution and you can find out for yourself but I so I think it's it's

I think it's twofold right so maybe threefold so the kind of sports culture in the UK and I think in the in the US are just very different like can look at it this way when the league that became major league baseball in the first place was formed, it immediately became a monopoly or a cartel, whatever phrase you prefer, where

it was like six or seven or eight teams that like had all the revenue of themselves and the league was closed. While in England, when soccer was kind of formalized into a league structure with a recurring set of fixtures, it was always still, it always had promotion and relegation, which I think is like that is a very extreme competitive lever that we don't have in American sports that I think would, you know, change things significantly. But in terms of like the cold-hearted like economic competition, that aspect was very counter to that. And I think, you know, I think ultimately right, like it's it's basically like an economic revolution in the NBA and in baseball, right? It's driven by these guys that probably would have worked for investment banks or did work for investment banks.

And you're kind of looking at these inputs and finding out a better way to create the input to get a larger output. So that aspect, just that kind of way of looking at sports just hadn't really existed in the rest of the world. And then the other reason is it's really freaking hard to measure it. there's 12 shots on average per team in a game in the NBA. I think it's about 100 shots each per team per game. Just think about, like, would we have any clue who the best NBA teams are if each team had 12 shots in a given game? And if they were shooting with their feet and there was a guy who was allowed to use

his hands to block the shot. So it's kind of a twofold cultural. and then like just structural issue, I guess. Yeah, you talk a little bit in the book or a lot in the book about how, I mean, just you visualize the soccer pitch, right? And there's every player sort of doing,

up to their own devices largely, just kind of floating out in their space. And that's just another example of how it's really hard to kind of quantify what goes into a win, what goes into a positive performance. Obviously, there's been a lot of, there was a lot of influence

when advanced metrics started in baseball, other sports started looking, at it. And the fact that it's taken this long for soccer, you heard the same discussion about football not long ago, about American football, about basketball. It's sort of been a progression. Do you think that the advanced magic's revolutions in those sports was necessary for soccer to really start looking that way, both in terms of the hedge fund guys that you mentioned, but in terms of their acceptance of it and just the general various ways to measure things? Yeah, I think so. A bunch of people in the book talked about reading Moneyball when it came out and being like, what the hell is this?

You can look at sports in this way. And then I think, like, it's not a coincidence that there's growing American ownership in European soccer. And that is coincided with a bit of a growing influence of analytics, even if it still really doesn't have a huge influence in my opinion. but, you know, John Henry owns the Red Sox. They broke a curse using, in some part using analytics, famously tried to hire Billy Bean from the A's. John Henry also owns Liverpool now, and they're kind of known as the team that, among the super clubs, they're the team that's most devoted to using data, and they also broke a curse and won the Premier League for the first time while John Henry's own the team.

So, you know, not to, you know, share our billionaire soybean trader with too much phrase, but, you know, there's were people analyzing soccer using data a long time ago, potentially even before other sports, but I just, the way it's kind of come about, it's just really hard to extricate the American influence from what's now happening in soccer a little bit. I was amazed to read that there was tracking data for one Premier League club in the mid-90s. That's way ahead of everything else. Yeah, just didn't, they didn't track, couldn't track the ball was the issue with that, which is kind of important. But not the ball. Yeah. You worry a little bit about what's happened to the NBA and MLB after their various data

revolutions where everyone is standing in the corner waiting to shoot a three-pointer or trying to hit a home run on every at bat? What would a smart but slightly annoying leap forward look like in soccer? Okay. So there's two things. There's a was this team, um, Barnsley in the, uh, second division in the Premier League, or second division in England. The Premier League is the first division. And they're kind of a data savvy team. And basically what they would do is they would just launch the ball, anytime they want to just bomb it up as high as they could into the attacking third, try to chase after it with no real care about any kind of like control, you know, none of passing around the back, none of kind of like being patient,

just bombing it up, everyone running after it and hoping to win the ball. And that's like a pure, it's like the, David talked about the sort of map of the soccer field, which like, You know, the geography of the soccer field is that all the valuable spaces are at both ends and then the middle of the field. Like, when you try to quantify it, you can, it's really hard to come up with anything valuable in the center of the field. So that strategy is, well, our side of the field is most valuable to the other team. The middle is worth nothing. And then the other side of the field is most valuable to us. So we're just going to kick the ball up there, chase after it.

And it's just going to be this like chaotic, like terrible, frankly, terrible to why. watch game. So I think that was kind of a light into that. And if like everyone starts playing that way, it's just, I don't know, maybe I'm being too much of a soccer purist, but just seeing that sounds terrible. And then the other big thing is like set plays are the big thing where it's the one thing where you have, you can have pre-planned movements. You can write up plays and you can pre-practice them. So when there's a corner kick, when there's a foul, those are the areas where you can like execute a very specific plan. And I think a game that is just complete,

helter, skeletor, ball pinging back and forth, and then most of the goals are being scored from like corner kicks and, you know, crosses on a dead ball and headers. That just sounds awful to me. So, it might sound good to you guys, though. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds great.

I'll check it out. One of the things that's, that's, so one of the barriers that you, realize when you're dealing with analytics, you know, advanced metrics in sports is, um, is, you know, kind of putting them in action, the distance between the spreadsheet and the, and the playing field. When I was reading your book, it made me think about, not just the comparison between the, that sort of bar in putting metrics in action in the field and the bar of writing about them in a way that makes people actually want to read them.

them, right? Because nobody wants to, no one's going to buy a spreadsheet book. Well, I guess some people would. Yeah. How much of that was part of your process and trying, I mean, like, because I'll just say up front, this is a book of stories. It's an incredibly readable book that, I mean, that explains, that tells stories as much as it explains data or whatever. But that had to be part of your thinking, right? You're writing about numbers. How do you make this into a book that did people actually want to read? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a way to write it. that tries to like be like a very data heavy like theory of soccer. And I do think that there probably is like a rough theory of soccer within the book

that you can kind of come to the conclusion of. I don't really totally sketch it out, I don't think. But honestly, like I think it's someone asked me this, like, how did you figure out who you were going to write about? and like, you know, I would say the 60% of the ultimate sort of chapter progression is what I had in the book proposal. Like I think a lot of it was just like talking to people doing research and then just like seeing who had the most interesting stuff to say and who led me down the most interesting paths and then kind of piecing that together because there's a ton of stuff that's not in the book. and the book is very, it's like you said, it's very meandering. It goes off in different directions with each chapter.

I think there's a through line through it, but I think I was very cognizant of like, there's a really kind of in the weeds way of writing this book that I think would be appealing to a very specific kind of soccer fan. But I do think that I was probably helped in a way, knowing that I wanted a lot of people to read the book. So, like, I'm writing to a much more general audience even than I probably am at ESPN. So that kind of, like, forced me to kind of focus on the story and character aspect more than I do in my, like, weekly work, I guess.

Ryan, before we let you go, we've been doing a media movie countdown here at the press box pod. Peg to, she said, movie coming out next month. Can you nominate a favorite media movie or two for our list? Yeah, I've got two. Got Game Six, which is the screenplay written by Don DeLillo, and it's Michael Keaton. And Michael Keaton's a playwright, huge Mets fan. That's where Game Six comes from against the Red Sox. And Robert Downey Jr. is this kind of famous,

mysterious New York Magazine theater critic and they're kind of circle it's about that baseball game but then the two of them are kind of circling each other the entire book. I think it's just recently became available on demand. And then also my favorite media movie is Ace in the Hole, the Billy Wilder movie

starring Kirk Douglas about a mining accident in New Mexico and Kirk Douglas is a reporter and he, you know, makes himself a part of the story, I guess, is how I would describe it. I love both of those movies. It's watching the opening scene of that the other day where he walks into the newspaper office in Albuquerque, sort of down and out and fired from every job he's ever had and talks his way into a job, this Albuquerque Daily newspaper. It's so fantastic, probably the best, some of the best five minutes of any media movie. The book is Net Gaines inside the beautiful games

analytics revolution. Ryan O'Hanlon, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, guys. It's time for a feature that has withstood any analytics revolution. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline.

Yeah. Thursday's headline about a movie set visited by the ghost of Marilyn Monroe with some like it haunt. Today's headline comes from our pal Chris from Columbia University

magazine's fall issue. The subhead of this story, David, is how dinosaurs survive the cold. Give you a little more of this from the article. A new study suggests that some of the earliest dinosaurs could also tolerate cold weather, which may have given them an evolutionary advantage when the Earth's climate occasionally fluctuated. How dinosaurs survive the cold. What was Columbia Magazine's strained pun headline? Oh my gosh. How dinosaurs survive? the cold. Mm-hmm.

Ice age, something. Ice, freeze something with sorris. Now, wouldn't our minds naturally go to perhaps popular books and films about dinosaurs? Oh, Jurassic Park, Jurassic. Mm-hmm. When we're surviving the cold.

Jurassic Parca? Jurassic Parca. I should have gotten there faster. Is the answer. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. A couple of things we should put on everybody's agenda, David.

First off, a big one. Election night. Tuesday, November 8th. David and I are not only going to do a pod that night. We're going to do it live. Spotify live. We may be doing a fairly inconclusive hour of American political chat. But there will be so much to talk about.

John Federman versus Dr. Oz, Ralphiel Warnock versus Herschel Walker, the fate once again of Beto, Stacey Abrams, not to mention control of the House and Senate and the future of American life. Dave and I will give you a 15-minute warning on Twitter that night.

But mark down Tuesday, November 8th, and I'm sure, David, the election will leave everybody happy with the results. Also on the press box pod, Rebecca Traster, New York Magazine on John Federman, that went up late last week. I'll be back later this week. And then David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the meeting. See you then, David.

See you later, Ryan.