The Press Box - Covering the MLB Lockout and Announcer Musical Chairs With the Washington Post's Ben Strauss

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

The Washington Post’s Ben Strauss joins Bryan to discuss the news that after 99 days the baseball lockout has come to an end. They talk through the weight of the story and how coverage was perceived, break down Major League Baseball’s reaction to the lockout, and discuss theories that could potentially influence the coverage of labor issues. Plus, more on Troy Aikman leaving Fox for ESPN and Strauss’s paternity leave experience. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Ben Strauss Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The NBA season is heating up and Kevin O'Connor and Chris Vernon have got you covered on the mismatch. They discuss all the news, the trends, and transactions happening around the league. They also offer their on-court analysis and occasionally get into heated debates. Check out the mismatch on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Thursday. Brian Curtis and producer Erica Servantes here. Man, there are a lot of things going on in my little corner of the media world this week. minutes before we started recording this pod, the baseball lockout ended.

We're going to have baseball. And today's guest, Ben Strauss of the Washington Post wrote a fantastic story about how this lockout was covered very, very differently than previous baseball work stoppages. We're going to get into that. Plus, the gloominess of baseball writers, the NFL announcer, merry-go-round, Ben's time on paternity leave, and much more. Here's Ben Strauss. All right, Ben, we're talking on third. Thursday afternoon and baseball Twitter,

a.k.a. the gloomiest place on earth these last few weeks, just got a lot less gloomy. The lockout is over after 99 days. Baseball is coming back. You wrote about this this week. First off, before we get into the meat of your story, how did you find the mood of the people covering baseball? Gloomy seems right. I also, one of the overworked Twitter jokes, I'm sure you'll see,

as all these editors were tweeting, you know, what solved the lockout was all of our 100-day lockout stories that they had planned and read the 100-day lockout stories we're going to run tomorrow. And so they've been working on them. And then, of course, on day 99, it ended. So that was the joke, right, that all these 100-day assignments ended the lockout, of course. Yeah. I saw the one where the negotiations were on the two-yard line and we had the overwork that I hope Pete Carroll's not calling the plays. So we got them all out of the way. Anyway, gloomy. Were they in that kind of mindset of there's nowhere else I'd rather be than covering this story or please make it stop?

I think everybody sort of recognized that it was a hard story to cover. But also that it was an important story to cover and that there was way more coverage. I don't know if this was in the piece, but there was way more coverage of this lockout than there had been of previous lockouts. more daily stories, more different outlets. And I think Passon was one of the people who said, maybe in my earlier in my career, I don't think I would have realized how important this is. But now it is maybe the most important story that I will cover.

So I think there was like a weight to the story. And then you really were like caught between. And I mean, you know, this is part of being a journalist anyway. But, you know, you said one thing. You were going to get killed on social media. And you wrote another thing. at Major League Baseball was going to scream at you. And, you know, obviously people are going to scream at you often, you know,

when you're writing contentious things. But I think that there was, there was an effort. People felt that they were threading a needle here, I think. Yeah. You take a picture of a player's Porsche as it pulls into the parking lot and other people will scream at you. Really? There's a lot of issues.

That brings us to your terrific piece this week about the way the lockout was covered. What did you find? I think that reporters were like a little bit surprised that they would be criticized for reporting. Actually, I could probably get to that later. But I think the top line is, you know, even before that is sort of what the previous answer was, that there was just way more interest and way more coverage of this as a really big deal for baseball. And if you, I mean, for me, for me. me just reading the coverage in the past couple of weeks where so much of it was was so

striking when you look at back at what labor coverage used to be like a because the AP was covering and like Marie Chass was covering and how many other people were covering but you know you've talked about this you know a million times too is that in sports it used to be greedy players right I can't believe that you know the third basins is making a million dollars or two million dollars and it used to be like a pretty prevalent of opinion in sports. And you never hear that anymore. And I think in a lot of ways, that's good.

That's progress, right? You now know how much money owners are making, how much the teams are worth. You can get away. You have to write about the player salary in the context of how much money the sport is making. And in almost a little bit like college sports, where once the coaches were making like two and three

and four million dollars, it became harder and harder to say, why should the players just get a scholarship? you know, teams are getting sold for $2 billion, it becomes a little strange to say, why is that guy making, you know, $10 million a year? But the, I guess the surprising thing was that there did seem to be a sentiment among a lot of writers that a lot of them were looking around

at their own coverage, other coverage, and, you know, noticing that a lot of it was sort of slanted in a similar way. And, you know, there were definitely a few people who wondered if the pendulum had swung a little too far. are. And slanted meaning in terms of in favor of the players? I mean, how does that manifest itself? Maybe slanted isn't the right way. Maybe more sympathetic to the player argument, right? And I think I said this to somebody else. So if you want to say slanted toward the players, another way to put it, would be unslanted away from the owner. So I think you could look at it both those ways.

I mean, how did that manifest? I think without knowing, you know, is this a very good deal for X or a very bad deal for why. I think the way that some people looked at it was some of the process reporting. And it did seem, you know, that if the owners, you know, waited 40 days to give it to, to make a presentation or to make an offer, you know, one of the reporters mentioned, that's just how negotiations work. Like, nobody's going to make a deal 40 days before the deadline. And the owners seem to be getting killed for that, where the players took five days after they first canceled that first week of game. And if that had to be the owners, you know, people would have been screaming about how the owners were delaying and not, you know, coming to play ball.

The Porsche thing was one that came out where you're, I'm here reporting and Max Scherzer shows up in a Porsche. And somehow by noting that, I'm, you know, a plant for management. This was an AP reporter, Ronald Blum, who took this picture. That was just a really weird story because the headline of the story, at least the one you linked to in your story, was Scherzerer, arrives in Porsche as MLB lockout talks resume. Right. It was the lead, too, I think. Yeah.

So it was like that that was what was, to me, when I first heard that, I thought, oh, that's just a detail, a bit of color in a story. Like, surely he didn't mean it like that. But its place in the story was just really, really strange, sort of jarring, if nothing else. Yeah. Right. Somebody might have edited that into like the eighth graph. Like, we're in Florida and here's what you see.

but that seemed to be fairly interesting where there were definitely reporters there who were sort of wowed that that had become a thing and other people who were like if he shows up in a Porsche don't you have to say that you know somebody's landing their helicopter

on spring training field A which maybe like one of the St. Louis owners is doing and if you're going just by writing that there's a Porsche you're making a judgment and if you're going to go going so far as to make that judgment, you have to contextualize. That's judgment.

So that seemed to be an interesting debate point where you had people on both sides. I'm trying to think of another one was when Major League Baseball put out their statement a couple days ago that said, this is deadlocked. And, you know, there was just here's the MLB on the record statement. And that was jumped on by a few folks who, you know, said, if you're going to report the MLB statement, you have to contextualize it, if you call it deadlocked as they want you to, you're feeding into their narrative. And, you know, the pushback on that was, here's an on-the-record statement for Major League Baseball. I have to tell you what they say. And is there sort of a moral

paradigm here not to give you their talking points? And somebody mentioned, right? Like, it's not like somebody, one of the reporters said to me, if I was like reporting on Trump and COVID, I would have had a problem reporting what the White House was saying. This is not that. We're not dealing with stakes like that or moral questions like that. Like Major League Baseball says something. You have to tell people what they said. So in the tension there is the word deadlocked, essentially. They want to say it's deadlocked. The owners want to say it's deadlocked, but we want you to, or we think it should be reported that it's deadlocked because they are making it deadlocked. They are making it deadlocked. And I guess the other layer under that is there's legal ramifications calling it deadlock.

Right? If it's deadlocked, then at some point they can go to an arbitrator or there's, I might be misunderstanding that. But someone explained to me that there is some sort of legal ramification. Like the word deadlock has a legal meeting. Like you're not just saying this is deadlocked. You're offering a legal argument. And you should not do that. So as you talk to people, what were the theories about,

why lockout coverage was less sympathetic to the owners this time around? I think the information thing was the biggest one, right? We just know way, way more about team league owner finances, the real estate tax breaks they get, the gambling money they're trying to, the casinos they're trying to build. And, you know, the villages around the ballpark, like we are more aware of the economics of baseball and really every other sport in ways that, like, we're unfurricular. fathomable in 1994. So I think that was really the top line. And then once you get past that, you know, I think it sort of diversified a little bit where some people were very cognizant of not

doing basic both sides journalism, which is sort of emblematic of the Trump era. You know, some people were talking about their own experiences in organized labor and being at the bargaining table and what it means to organizing of this wave sweeping through media, which Hannah Kaiser of Yahoo mentioned, that she's been at the bargaining table and understands what it means to collectively bargain, that she now realizes that management can change your job at any time, and you have one chance to alter the direction of your workplace,

of your company, whether you're baseball players or media writers. That was another one. I mean, there's also sort of younger, a different set of writers. A couple people joke to me like you see Bernie Sanders like bumper stickers on laptops in the press box. And, you know, in 1994, you probably weren't whoever the Bernie Sanders equivalent was. Maybe you were more likely to see a Ross Perrault bumper sticker on, you know, somebody's like rotary phone in 1994. But I think you probably have a different class of people doing the reporting also. And then, you know, you sort of talked about it.

But somebody put it to me pretty well, I thought, actually. It seemed an interesting way to put it is, right? Like, there is definitely a feedback loop on social media, right? There is one point of view that is definitely praised and, you know, retweeted. And definitely there is an upstream and a downstream, you know, in terms of the two opinions. and writers said, you see the dopamine rush that people get for dunking on the owners, and you do want to feel it.

But they also added, so you're trying to get that dopamine rush. But in this case, you're also right. So it's kind of nice when those two things align. But those were, I think those were most of the things that came up. Here are a couple of additional theories I had and tell me if any of these came up as you were reporting. Old Deadspin, and we put an emphasis on old here, was really, really, really. interested in labor and really, really interested in economics. And I always thought when I read

some of the older baseball writers of previous work stoppages, those guys wanted scoops a lot, but they were not that interested in economics as a subject and labor as a subject that they were going to, you know, just dive into. Old Deadspin took a particular line on this and was happy to go after people who they thought were reporting it wrong or doing it wrong. Do you think that just kind of rewired a lot of? lot of the sports media and we are still in that sort of rewired state? Yeah, I think that there's like an age of people, probably in it, or definitely in it, of people who grew up reading some of those deadspin columns where you read these things that were like, you know, what seemed like basic

journalism at the time and they would, you know, tell you, this is a pro-management view. And labor is a vitally important aspect to sports. And so I think, I think, I think, that's definitely right. And I think you see the seeds of that, right? Like baseball perspectives and fan graphs are, I think they've done some cross-publication, you know, on each other's sites over the years. But definitely, those sites in particular, the way they cover labor, definitely sounds a lot like the way Deadspin did. But I think a lot of the people covering it, you know, were probably in high school, college, or younger, and read Deadspin. And I think that's definitely right. The thing I was thinking is a lot of sports writers now,

particularly newsbreakers, get a lot of their information from agents, perhaps more from agents than they did in the past, you know, where a lot of more, let's say, a larger percentage perhaps of that information would have come from baseball management. And if we're getting information from agents, that is the player's point of view. Do you think that's mixed up anywhere in here? I did ask about that. That was, that was something that sort of is floating around. There was also sort of this idea that Scott Boris is, you know, a huge part of these negotiations. and everybody's relying on Boris, so everybody's deferring to Boris. I asked a number of reporters that.

And nobody really bought the Boris argument specifically. I didn't have anybody bite the scoop thing either. One thing that people mentioned is that you do see players, right? The job is being in the locker room. And so you're going to see players more than you would ever see an owner, right? Like you could cover the Yankees and how many times you're going to talk to house timeline like once a year. Whereas, well, I guess previously we'll see what happens if anybody ever goes back to the locker rooms.

But you would have seen, you know, players every single day in the locker. And so that dynamic of sort of who you're talking to and who you're around, maybe more so than I need a scoop was something that came up. The other one, and I didn't put this in the pieces, the way that the league and the union have set up their sort of PR response teams are pretty different. The league has a spokesman, and he is the guy. Whereas the union reporters told me that Bruce Meyer, who is doing the lead negotiation, is super available to answer questions. he briefs reporters. He's available on text.

One reporter referred to him as being awfully leaky in a way that the league might not be. But I do tend to think that like when you have the person in the room who is explaining the arguments, like you can't beat that. And so I think it seems that nobody on the league side really wants to step up and be a spokesman for their position for whatever reason there are. Oh, the other thing that I should have mentioned is sort of the, the anti-billionaire sense in America, right? Like, it's sort of hard to make a case for billionaires today,

you know, where we are with inequality and, you know, where we've been as a country the last couple years. But sort of coming back, but also the, you know, how much it matters that Bruce Myers explaining things versus MLB's PR person, probably not hugely,

but it may be a little bit. You're able to get explanations that make more sense. Maybe you get a little more information. and maybe, you know, the union has put out a little more information than the league has. It's, you know, minute to minute or, you know, right out of the room. You take all that and then you marry it with two amazing images from the lockout. One of Rob Manfred practicing his golf swing during negotiations. Right.

Another of Manfred smiling during that press conference where he said he was going to cancel games and the season was going to be delayed. Those images, right, do a lot of work. and they do a lot of work on Twitter, especially when they can just be, you know, punched up a billion times. Yeah, basically baseball didn't do itself a lot of favors, right? You know,

everything from, like, scrubbing their website to, you know, our buddy Andrew Marshaan reported that they didn't renew Ken Rosenthal because he was mildly critical of Rob Manfred. Like, the league hasn't done itself a lot of favors to, to engender, you know, a lot of sympathy. I will say that the reporters on the ground were somewhat sympathetic to Manfred about the golf thing and the laugh thing.

And, you know, they were there. And the laugh thing was, you know, he was making a joke with Ken Davidov, who was retiring. And I think somebody told me that Scher actually made a joke about the golf swing thing and said, I do that too, you know. And obviously if Scherzer was caught swinging a golf, you know, a phantom golf club, probably nobody would care. So the reporters there were somewhat, maybe this was the only thing,

they were somewhat sympathetic to Manfred on those two things. You mentioned Kenny Rosenthal, too, and Jeff Passett. And I think that's fascinating because you quoted some of their coverage in here. Those are kind of the two biggest voices in baseball, at least in print and on Twitter. I think it's probably fair to say or somewhere on the podium, right? And the way they were willing to write about the lockout was really interesting. and the way they were, and I think people maybe subconsciously read that and go, okay, and maybe I don't know which way it goes.

Maybe they're reading other people and going, oh, here we go. Or maybe people are reading them and going, oh, here we go. But to have really, really prominent reporters covering in that particular way to me is fascinating. I think that, like Passon especially, right, because he works for a league partner and he was doing this. Wrote Kenny too for Fox. Kenny too for Fox. On the field of the World Series. Yeah.

I think that's right. Somebody mentioned to me when you have, you know, pass in writing what he was writing, that is a big deal and certainly different. I think it also probably speaks to those two guys as, quote unquote, insiders. I think they do their insider job differently than some of the insiders who cover the NFL or the NBA.

Both those guys do, you know, hard-hitting stories and stories that dig on the league. And I think the insiders, in the NBA and the NFL, you know, Shepter and Woj and Shams, are much more often, you know, strictly transactional and sort of very, here's the news. And I think that it's somewhat interesting that in baseball, sort of your two big insiders are pretty good reporters and still doing that kind of reporting. Let's talk about a little bit about announcers. And the announcer, Mary go around that has consumed so much of our attention. Troy Aikman is leaving Fox for

ESPN for a contract that is worth a reported $18 million a year. Joe Buck might follow him. Al Michaels is going to get some kind of job. Curb Street is likely going to Thursday night. I could continue. What is interesting to you about this frenzy? Isn't the top line here, or I guess I don't know, I don't know what's most interesting, but isn't the top line here, just how big the NFL is?

Yeah. Is there like a, right? The most popular entertainment product in America by a mile. and the gap between the NFL and everything else, whether it's sports or entertainment, just keeps getting bigger. And you know, you ask around, and I guess we should also say here,

you know, we know about a lot of stuff because of our friend Andrew Marchand, who's been all over this. Absolutely. But what is the material benefit here for any of these networks, aside from people getting more money and their agents getting more money?

The NFL likes it. It's like what you hear, the NFL likes it and you want the NFL to like you. And other than that, it's like totally amorphous. The telecast is smooth. We want to make it feel like a big event. But there's not like an extra dollar in it. I guess the one thing, maybe ESPN could get a slightly better Monday night football schedule if the league really likes them. But they also just got a great schedule last year anyway.

So I think that it's really just how big the NFL is. And I guess if you're a network, you can just chalk it up to your marketing budget. If you're spending $2.5 billion for the NFL package, what's like another $25 million for the announcing? I think that's definitely part of it. If you wrote the billion dollar check, why are you afraid of going to be afraid of the $18 million? If you wrote the billion dollar check, like what are you going to like you're going to cheap out? Like if you bought the $6 million house and then like you, you know, like you refused. to have a fireplace or what?

It's like, it's marginal. It's marginal. I mean, I think, you know, when you talk to producers and network executives to a point, but certainly producers, they definitely want it to be good. Like, these are their TV shows. And they want their TV shows to be as good as possible. Now, you could argue if you have the $6 million announcer, is your TV show going to really be that much worse than if you have Joe and Troy.

But they want, I mean, that is what they do, right? They want to put on a really, really good. television show that is incidentally also a professional football game. Do you think that there's like industry executives right now who are rooting for Fox to just let Joe Buck walk? Yes. And then, right, you let Joe Buck walk and then they say, right, like, so now ESPN can have this $30 million Monday night football booth, good for them. But then Fox can right be like the, the dam, the stopgap against, you know, the CBS and the Romo contract. And they can put out,

you know, Kevin Burkhard and Greg Olson and say, oh, here's a good booth and we're totally fine. And then maybe all the other network executives can go, oh, maybe Tony Romo isn't worth $18 million. Are they like, is everybody? Too late, right? I mean, I don't know what. So you come to that conclusion, okay, well, we already signed the contract so we don't get to claw back the money now. I mean, there's definitely a sentiment, a very, very widespread sentiment that CBS made this horrible mistake two years ago and that that changed everything. and that none of us can make the same mistake again or just nothing even in the ballpark. And then what have we seen?

It's not even just Troy Ackman. Chris Collinsworth just re-signed a huge contract. Jim Nance just re-signed a huge contract. I was thinking about this today. I think all of those, even if you controlled for inflation, are probably among the top 10 highest announcer deals ever signed in the history of television. I can't vouch for every Kurt Gowdy deal from the 70s. But I think they're all way up there.

So the dam is gone. as far as I can tell. And if Fox were to make a stand, okay, I definitely think some people would applaud them. But I think it's also like, okay, it's over, right? The new number is this. Right. You could sign Burkart and Olson. And if they were like decent, two years from now, you'd have to give them like a triple

rate. Right? Because that's the dollar amount to do that top job. But it's, I mean, I guess aside from like this is just how big. the NFL is and you know it's it's pretty good to be like one of these guys or their agents right i guess like j cutler just said the other day like he'd like to get into it right like and he's a big time quarterback somebody would probably pay him a lot of money right um it's just another great it's like another reason to be a you know a a known quantity quarterback in the nfl is like

you know a lifelong meal a ticket meadowlark's CEO josephs John Skipper, guy we both interviewed, used to be the president of ESPN, said this somewhere in the metal arc universe. I think it was on Lebitard show. And I saw this because Richard Dyche transcribed it. I never saw a scintilla of evidence that people in the booth changed the ratings even by a smidgen. The race to hire people is mostly about internal pride, right? We want to present a good game. We want the media to suggest we have a great booth and the people who can do this very well or very rare. It may make a little difference around the advertising margins, right? If people are saying your show is great, but it doesn't. doesn't matter with the ratings.

And then he goes on to say that it's not about math. I totally endorse that sentiment. And I think all of us sitting here go, you know, it's not, it's not, you're not going to add another viewer to that. I certainly have said that many, many times. But here's the other thing. How many people in our industry is it about math? How many people at ESPN?

How many people at the Washington Post and the ringer and everywhere else? Is it about math, right? That's, you know, maybe some sports radio. host because I can, you know, look at how many commercials, you know, the commercial rates they're getting and how much they're pulling in on their time slot. Right. But that's not really what a lot of media and journalism certainly in particular is about. Well, you could even say that like everything on ESPN and Fox that isn't live sports is sort of extraneous, right? And yet, right, aside from Stephen A. Smith, right? Everything else doesn't matter. Stephen A. Smith, more people do watch, I think.

I think that is actually true. But like as long as you don't have, right, I understand why ESPN when they had Jason Witten and every single Monday night was the laughing stock of sports Twitter, like that is damaging to your brand. But like once you get beyond that and you have competence, like, you know,

Brian Greasy and Louis Riddick and Steve Levy were totally fine. But I think you're right. I do think at ESPN in particular where they've had, you know, that revolving crew, like going back years, everything from Kornheiser to Dennis Miller, like it was sort of, you know, it was a bit of a crap shoot and had had anything, you know, consistent in forever. I think that Jimmy Pitaro did, you know, take some personal pride and I want

to fix this booth that I would like to be the guy that fixes this group. Yeah, absolutely. While they're doing that larger quote unquote reset with the NFL. All right, Ben, before we get out of here. I want to ask you about paternity leave. You had been away from the beat for a little while as a dad, myself, TM, as a father of children. I was interested. I was jealous. Tell me what made your decision to go on paternity leave? They offered. It wasn't, yeah, I didn't ask for it. There's a policy. So I have a two-year-old and now a four-month-old, two-and-a-half-year-old and a four-month-old. And when I went before, the policy was four weeks. So just two years ago, it was four weeks.

And I took that. And somebody might fact-check me on this. But I do think that our union was pushing for more paternity leave. And I think that the D.C. local government passed something or was in the works to pass something to guarantee some paternity leave. And part of those, as that was happening, they deposed, to their credit also, you know, went from four to 20. And I was kind of surprised that you wanted to ask me about this,

but the risk of being just so sincere and genuine, like it was incredible. And I know I have some other colleagues that have taken it. My friend Rick Mace was on it. My friend Will Hobson is on it now. And as far as I know, they're taking the full 20 weeks. Nobody's concerned about it. And I again at the risk of being like overly sincere, it was really just incredible to, you know, spend time not just with a new baby, but my two-year-old and my wife, I took Slack off my phone and I took Twitter off my phone. And, you know, I was present at bedtime in ways that I'm usually not. And my editors were pretty good too. They didn't bother me. I even reached out to ask if they wanted me to write about the athletic sale to the New York Times. They said, no, you're on leave.

And admittedly, it was a little surreal sometimes watching some of the news or hearing, you know, some news and not rushing to cover it. But I was, you know, really gone long enough where I was really actually pretty excited to come back. And now, you know, calling people that I haven't talked to in so long, it's almost a little embarrassing to say, oh, no, I was gone for 20 weeks on paternity leave. Because they sort of look at you like you have three heads. But I like can't say enough about it. and thought it was pretty incredible. What's the hardest part about coming back to work after all that time? I think I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to write something because I didn't write anything for 20 weeks.

I don't remember the last time I didn't write anything besides the occasional email. And I would definitely say that the story I wrote this week probably needed a little more editing on the rock copy than other stories I've done. So hopefully the next one is better. But I think it's actually literally the writing that I was terrified of. like sitting down and like having to put sentence after sentence together in a coherent and interesting way. And it gets better. But no, it definitely took me a lot longer to write that article just being out of practice. And I think just really that was the part that I was terrified of like sitting down and staring at a blank screen and knowing I was going to have to put these

sentences together. Ben Strauss, thanks for coming on the press box. Long time listeners. So thank you for thanks for having me. It's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. In case you can't tell for you list people listening to this, I'm wearing a totally different shirt than I was on Monday. Monday's headline about China and Ukraine was all that she wants. Today's headline, David, comes from Josh Siskin. It's from the Washington Post.

Turns out there's a guy in Washington, D.C., David, who made local COVID graphs. the DC government would announce new cases and this guy would make neighborhood by neighborhood charts and graphs. Very cool. Well, D.C. is no longer announcing new COVID cases or daily anyway. And so the graph maker is hanging it up.

What was the Washington Post's strained pun headline? There's so many things we can do with this. You definitely don't have enough information here. COVID. graph end of a oh yeah okay yep

you're right there end of a what's on the what's on the graph infection positive end of a no the actual graph itself

oh point dots it's the end of the into the point into the chart into the into the graph

into the line into the line it's the end of the lines that's great the end of the lines he is David Shoemaker on Brian Curtis production magic by Erica Servantes

back with this guy Shoemaker on Monday if more lukewarm takes about the media see you then David see you later Brian you