The Press Box - NBC Vs. TNT for the NBA, College Reporters Covering the Protests, Stephen A. Smith on Mike Trout, and the Baseball Beat With The Athletic’s Andy McCullough

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan welcomes Andy McCullough, a writer for The Athletic and the author of the upcoming Clayton Kershaw biography ‘The Last of His Kind.’ They start off by discussing NBC's and TNT’s bidding for the NBA’s TV rights and what the NBA would look like without TNT (01:47). Then, they discuss the ongoing college protests over the war in Gaza and the student reporters covering it from the ground (13:12). After that, they discuss recent comments from Stephen A. Smith and Charles Barkley (25:04). Finally, they delve into Andy’s career as a baseball beat writer, what it’s like to be on deadline every night, and the process of interviewing Clayton Kershaw for his new book (45:47). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Andy McCullough Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sure, the weather is getting warmer and you're probably planning your next vacation with your family, but what better way to avoid your family on that vacation than listening to three dudes argue about quarterback tears if you can trust a wide receiver over 30 years old, and if Jim Harbaugh still thinks chickens are nervous birds. Join me, Craig Horlebeck, along with Danny Hyfitts and Danny Kelly every week on the Ringer fantasy football show. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox.

Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Eduardo Ocampo, who is sitting in for Brian Waters. Coming up on the pod, it's NBC versus TNT for the NBA. The rights, that is. College reporters have the story of their young careers in partial defense of Stephen A on Mike Trout, plus Charles Barkley swipes at the media and a new book about one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

All of this with today's guest host. He is Andy McCullough. He is a national baseball writer at The Athletic. Before that, he was on the beat in cities from coast to coast. He is the author of the last of his kind, Clayton Kershaw and The Burden of Greatness, which comes out next Tuesday. He is one of the most gimlet-eyed sports writers ever produced by Syracuse University. Andy, welcome to the press box.

Well, thank you. Thank you for including my college there. So I can just automatically be hated by, you know, 85% of the audience of the sickos who listen to this pod. I was trying to just put you in the Syracuse pantheon there. Pass and smiles a lot more. I think. Sure.

Yeah, I would too if I made that much money. Here we go. Here we go. This is why I wanted 80 on the pod. I'm so ready. Let's start with the NBC versus T&T battle for the NBA. As everyone obsessed with sports media knows, there are some NBA rights negotiations going on.

We know ESPN's got a piece of the NBA rights. We know Amazon's got a piece. The league is looking for one more network, probably. to complete the three-man weave. And there was a story in the Wall Street Journal by Joe Flint, Amal Sharma, and Isabelle Simonetti. We do bylines here that says NBC is ready to pay $2.5 billion a year for that final piece, which would be twice what Turner, the current rights holder, pays.

What do you make of an NBA future that doesn't include TNT? I mean, I guess, like, my sole concern as an occasional consumer of basketball is what this would mean for, you know, inside the NBA, you know, is like, is there going to be a place where I can watch, you know, Shaq and Chuck and Kenny? I mean, that's like, genuinely, like that, you know, and I know we like talked about that as like a prep before the show, but honestly, that's my actual answer. It's like, where is that show going to be? Because that's what I would like to consume moving forward. So I assume someone will buy that, right? Well, it's funny, isn't it, that we would take a pregame show and just move it en masse from one network

to the other? Yeah, I mean, it seems it seems relatively unprecedented, I guess. But that is like, I don't know, like in terms of IP, that has to be the best IP in the NBA. Outside of, I guess the game, the games are fun. Well, you have free agency too. That's kind of IP in the NBA. Sure. Yeah, people get really into that.

Yeah. But yeah, and I think it's a testament to how great inside the NBA is and how long it's been great, that you would take something like that and just put it somewhere else. Yeah, there's like been a, um, There's been like a meme going around on Twitter. People have been talking about sort of like Trumpian figures of speech that have been incorporated in their daily lives. You know, like, you know, many people are saying and like, wow, I did not know that.

You know, like, just as you just say now. And I was thinking, like, you could do that with Shaq and Chuck. They're just stuff that I say, you know, just directly from them, like the idea of police presence and, you know, the, like Google me, you know, don't commit crimes with checks, you all the stuff that I've learned from watching the show over the years. And so, yeah, they've created something really, like it feels like all the other pregame shows and all the other sports are trying to replicate and sort of can't, just because they're like, they're not as funny.

I don't know. I mean, you're a more astute observer of this. Is that too, like, simplistic of an explanation? I think the most simplistic explanation would be they don't have Charles Barkley, who's just the John Madden of that genre. Yeah. I think Shaq's pretty great too. I think Shaq is almost underrated and how funny he is in that.

He's really great. But he kind of needs Barclay. Sure. Because Barclay's more of a volume shooter. Jack's going to come in, right, from the corner, from the left-hand corner over there, the right-hand corner, I guess, if you're facing the cameras. But you need Barclay to just go. They're, yes.

That's true. It's basically, yeah, they have the, you know, they have the, you know, they have the, the Michael Jordan of sports talk sort of characters in Chuck. I do think the thing that their capacity for humor allows them to be is essentially sort of cranks, right? Like, they're kind of like reactionary, you know, cranks in a way. And like, so I think of someone like, like John Smoltz does the national broadcast for Fox.

And he tends to be like pretty accurate in his analysis about the problems, you know, within the modern game. you know, and how they relate to like an over emphasis on analytics and things like that. But Smoltz is pretty serious when he makes his points. And so he kind of, you know, comes across as like more of a scold in some of this, you know, because he's not like putting humor into it. And so like if you think about like how Shaq and Chuck effectively endorsed like Nicola Yokic freight training Markeith Morris a couple years ago in a way that like,

you know, if you had said like, no, I think it's good. I think it's good that he hit that guy. Hitting people is right. The way Shaq described it was like, don't turn your back on me, Brad Miller, because I'm swinging, you're laughing. And so the point, it's like a spoonful of sugar as you get this sort of reactionary basketball take that I find pretty enjoyable. It's so true.

And remember, they have that alternate T&T pregame show and there was that movement a couple years ago. Like, what if we had a show where people were really watching basketball and they were really cognizant of analytical? and the new numbers and, you know, our very nerdy friends in the sports writer world. Sure. We're trying to get that going. It was like, actually, we really like famous people being funny.

I think there has to be room for all of it, right? Like, there has to be, there's room for that sort of, like, top-level take where you want to see someone who you remember watching when you were younger offering their sort of basic analysis. It's not even basic, because it's not basic. It's rooted in decades upon decades of playing and watching basketball, right? So I feel like I don't want to shortchange it too much. But you want that sort of like top level, you know, that gut reaction.

But then there's people who, you know, really want to talk about what is stuff that people do in basketball? They still do the two, three zone and stuff like that. I'm not like locked in on the, on the, I've had to watch a lot of baseball over the last 15 years. So I've become the sort of in all sports now. Like when I watch an NBA game, I'm like, man, they keep taking threes, you know? Or like when I'm watching the NFL and it's like third.

And I'm like, can you please run the ball? It's third and two. Run the ball. I have become, you know, the other sports, the sort of person who sends me emails asking why baseball teams are not bunting more, you know? And it's nice to just sort of recognize that, I guess. Totally. I love your point, too, about the smile because, you know, I was watching some playoff

basketball these last couple weeks. And you go to the ESPN halftime show and nobody's smiling. Everybody looks incredibly grim. Yeah. Which I find very, very strange. Like just Kendry Perkins and Stephen A. are looking like, you know, there's been this horrible national tragedy that they're about to have to handle live on the air. Yeah.

But I think what's at the root of that is the NCAA guys like each other. I had somebody tell me one time, it's like pregame shows are not about chemistry. They're about friendship. And you can always tell when people are actually friends. Do we think anybody on those ESPN shows are actually friend friends in the way that Chuck and Kenny are, and the way Chuck and Shaq are and Ernie and the way they talk about Ernie. Sure. Guys you've been with for decades on the air and in some of the cases of the players before that on the court.

Like that is some, that is a good, a commercial good that you cannot create a lab at like. Yeah. And the way that they're very clearly often, they had talked about something off the air in a much spicier way. And often, you know, Shaq or Kenny will tee Charles up seeing how like far into his take he will go. I guess, you know, like the Galveston one that, you know, has gone viral the last couple of days. By the way, as a native Texan, what do you got on Galveston? So it was so far away from me up there in North Texas. Big state. Yeah.

It was, yeah, it was spring break. It was, it was ocean or Gulf. But, yeah, not much. Okay. All right. Well, anyway, they clearly were like talking about that off the air and we're just so ready to go into it. They were all just cracking up again. And I just, yeah, it's a hard dynamic to, to recreate.

And so, you know, I don't know if, like, taking the NBA to, you know, NBC and having a version of roundball rock produced by Jack Antonoff would be enough to replace it. You know, I actually like a lot of Jack Antonoff's music. That was a cheap shot. But, you know, I think that there would, yeah, I think that that's my, just my main concerns, just where are those guys going to be? Barclay went on a Cleveland ESPN affiliate this week and said he does have an out in his contract, which is a 10-year deal with Turner that he can move if they lose the rights. That kind of stands to reason that Turner would not be paying Charles Barkley for an additional seven years to do baseball and hockey.

It'd be kind of great, actually. Chuck Newing hockey. I mean, I would watch it. I think Turner would probably want out of that deal. They would probably be like, you know, it's totally fine. Please take your option. my favorite thing that Berkeley does is he's always teasing his imminent retirement from television. Every interview he goes, I don't know if I'm going to make it to the end of this contract.

But then this week, he's like, hey, I got this great deal where I can get out of this. And then I'm a free agent. It's like, oh, it's funny because you keep talking about retiring and also keep talking about getting your next big deal. Yeah. I can see it both ways where like doing this job is incredibly sort of like mentally taxing. or I could see it as like this is the easiest most fun job in the world. It's probably somewhere in between. But like you can sell me on either one for how challenging it is to do it, I guess.

Do we think it's mentally taxing for Charles Barkley, who's then calling into ESP in Cleveland? I get it. He's, he really is like, he is special. He is, he is a special at this. He's so good. Are you amused by the nostalgia for the NBA on NBC? No. I don't, I mean, I just sort of.

It reminds me of being a kid and I feel like it's like people want every basketball game to feel like a Bulls finals game from the 90s almost. Like they want to hear the song and the, I forget what it's called, but you know, the Bulls song that they play and see the, you know, the intro. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. See the intros and they, you know, they finish with Michael Jordan. And then you go to a basketball game, and every team for the past, you know, 30 years now has been doing a version of that. And, you know, it ends with end, et cetera. Theo Ratliff. And it's just not the same, you know, sort of experience. So I think, you know, yeah, there's a nostalgia for just, I think people just want to feel like they were young again, which is understandable.

You know, time is fleeting, all that sort of stuff. I share that. I just want to let people know that the only thing about the NBA on a number. NBC from their childhood that will still be intact is round ball rock marv has retired marv's not coming walking through that door no bob costas i don't think we'll be walking through that door mattie gookos the czar the telestrator they may take a call but i don't think they're coming back either so when we talk about the nb on nbc will not be those people and maybe most importantly michael jordan will not be playing basketball and winning championships right you you will not be

not be able to watch that anymore. You can go on YouTube right now and find a lot of those games, I'm sure. It is, it is sure. Surely true. Alex Sherman of CNBC reports that John Tesh is open to licensing Round Ball Rock. It's kind of like Charles Barkley is open to a new contract. Yeah, I'm open to losing weight, you know? Like, sure, count me in. A new topic for you, Andy. There are protests about the Warren Gossett, college campuses from coast to coast. And one story that has come out of that is the work done by students. journalists to cover the protests and the police response to the protests. Now, you and I were college reporters once upon a time.

And here's what I love about this. By their nature, college journalists treat every utterance of the school president, every protest on campus, every new rule or regulation, like it is the biggest story in America. How incredible is it for these reporters to find that this stuff is actually the biggest story in America. Yeah. I just want to thank you for having me on the show to discuss the lighter side of life and do some spoofs and goofs about sports media and, you know, just kind of keep it, keep it low key. Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to be very serious about this because it's obviously a topic that demands that. I think like genuinely being, not just in sports media,

of being in the media, it's kind of a disheartening time, which is the general trends. You know, so I've had so many friends, you know, laid off. I've worried about myself getting laid off all that stuff, you know. And, you know, it doesn't, there's just a lot of reasons to feel disheartened. And so it really is like genuinely inspiring to see these kids sort of throwing themselves at this story in, you know, with the sort of seriousness that it deserves. and, you know, being up to the moment and being as invested in doing as good a job as they can to, you know, service the readers of their campus publications. And, you know, I remember being, like, 20 years old and covering a bar raid at Syracuse as if it was, like, you know, the Pentagon papers and, you know, like literally sprinting from the bar, like, 25 minutes back to the Daily Orange so I could, like, write the story.

to get it in the next day's paper at, you know, two in the morning. And so I remember that sort of you just like at that stage in your life, you feel like every story you write is like the most important thing you've ever done, I guess. Like you just feel that sort of as you're expanding in your career. And so the idea of actually covering stuff that like really does matter and then really has like sort of, you know, nationwide consequences. Like it's, it's kind of, I just imagine I would be terrified in that spot. And so seeing these kids, you know, the way that they have handled themselves, like it really is, you know, like, it just makes me feel good for the first, you know,

makes it feel good about the industry, I guess, that there's still people so passionate about doing this. part of college journalism is learning to do the job and also being able to make mistakes in a way that doesn't completely end your career before it even get started. So just imagine the additional weight of everything you put out is being looked at by professional journals and the world. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a great point because it is, you know, the college newspapers is like an incubator for, you know, trying to get into the field. And, like, Like there's, you know, at the paper, you know, at least at Syracuse, I imagine it's pretty similar.

You know, other colleges, like there's some people who are like really serious about it. And there's some people who are kind of goofing off and some people are doing it for a school requirement. And you kind of all blend together. And, you know, some days it's good. Some days it's bad. You know, whatever you can get to drink on the weekends. It's fun. But like, it really is a chance to experiment and to make mistakes and to, you know, like try different story formats.

and, you know, if you spell someone's name wrong, like, it's bad and you feel bad, but, like, it's not going to cost you, you know, your future and you're not going to have that sort of spotlight on you. And so, yeah, I mean, like I said, like that pressure just like, yeah, just kind of get, like, you know, I literally just had like a little chill actually just thinking about being in that spot and, you know, just, but, you know, I do feel like that in order to, in order to like be willing to, you know, kind of fight your way through this business, you really have to like love it. And I think that, you know, you can see that the passion that they have. And I think that's wonderful. You know what I mean? A couple of things that have stood out for

me. The outside reporters in some of these cases have been restricted from campus as these protests are going on and the police have been coming in. Student reporters have their ID card. Right. So they've been the ones that are able to cover it. And of course, they know these groups. and they know the camp is much better than some reporter parachuting in. We've had student reporters attacked by counter protesters at UCLA. When you talk about balancing your life, this is finals time for a lot of these reporters. Right. So they are covering the story of their lives.

And maybe this is a good prep for the future. Covering the story of your life and also trying to deal with the rest of your life. And maybe even graduation, which is now not a boring ceremony for them, but also this fraught thing that requires coverage or in the case of USC requires coverage because it's not even happening anymore. That's fascinating. There's a woman named Sarah Barlin at WKCR.

That's the student radio station at Columbia. She told Mother Jones that her thesis was about the 1968 protests at Columbia University and the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Now for the station she is covering the protests and the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Geez. What a strange turnaround that is.

Yeah. I will say as someone who graduated from college, having spent his senior year on academic probation, because I stopped going to class junior year because I was working in the newspaper too much. Don't worry about finals. Just write good stories. Someone will hire you. No one's ever asked me for my GPA. I have no idea what it was.

So don't worry. Skip your finals. You'll be fine. This is Andy's advice to aspiring journalist. College isn't that important. I mean, honestly, like compared to the experience you're getting covering this, like, it's not. You know, it's not. And one thing, too, that like the point you made about how the students covering, you know,

they have access because of their, you know, the ID cards and stuff, but they also know the groups involved and they know the people. I mean, like, there are sometimes where people will ask me about, you know, breaking into sports writing and things like that. They're in college and, you know, they go to college somewhere and they're like, here's a, you know, here's a college. I wrote about like the Knicks and I'm like I don't send me a call I don't care like you don't know about the Knicks like you live in Wisconsin tell me about what's going on at your school like do journalism at your school like I don't I don't want to know your analysis of like you know what's going on at a basketball team in the NBA like you're not interacting with those people and you can see like the value of the these like the students are putting in that they like they know they actually

know the subject matter you know and that's like kind of the purpose of the college paper is like it understands how the college works and so at a time when the college becomes a you know a subject of fascination there's a reason they're a good resource this is what they do they cover it every day totally you want to tell them you have the whole journalistic ecosystem right in front of you you have the powerful people that are screwing things up in this month we've had a bunch of those you've had the newspaper that can be annoying to the powerful people and then you have the readers the students that you are representing yeah exactly yeah this is the real world. It's just a little miniature version right in front. That's a great way of putting it. Yeah,

totally. That's a great way of putting it. Yeah. I made the same mistake at UT. They would be like, hey, you know, the provost just did this. Can we dive on that with a hot editorial? And I'd be like, oh, I was going to write about George W. Bush today. Sure. There'd be this great push pole where they were trying to, you know, tell Curtis to write about something that he actually could understand. Yeah. People reading the paper would actually care about rather than political takes. Well, if you had known me back then and I was somehow younger than you or older than you, maybe your career would have gone better. But instead, here you are interviewing me.

I looked up your goodbye column from The Daily Orange. Oh, Jesus, no. No, no, no, no, no. Here we go. Now, we're ready? Eject. Eject. I just want to just give readers a sense of the gimlet-eyed character that was already coming forward.

The lacrosse team won a title. It's 10th, but football sucked. and men's basketball only won two NCAA tournament games. So if you fixated on winning and losing, well, sorry to hear. Look at that. Look at how hard bitten you were at age 22. As you can relate to this, the head coach for all four years that I was at Syracuse was Greg Robinson. When I covered the team, the football team did not have a blitz package.

They ran a base 4-3, basically every down, playing in the Big East in 2008. They were trying to stop speed sweeps from Noel Devine on WVU with a base 4-3. It was unfathomable to watch. You just killed them in the paper every week? Oh, yeah. It was we literally, my best friend, John Clayton and I, we were dueling columnist one day. and it was, when should Syracuse

fire Greg Robinson? And John said, and I said, fire him now. This was like week eight. And John said, fire him at the end of the season. Those were the two takes.

That was the point of a point. Yeah. Oh, my God. I wrote staff editorials at UT at the Daily Texan. And these were the, like the newspaper's opinion. But because of some transparency

initiative, we decided that the column should be signed. Okay. Now, Andy, when I say signed, I don't mean the words Brian Curtis at the bottom. I mean literally a reproduction of my signature in pure founding father style. That's beautiful. At the bottom of every column. How stupid is that in retrospect? I think that, I mean, I bet the readers were like, wow, this is how I know they really

believed in this take. Oh, my God. I also remember hearing quotes in history class or politics. political science, including one from Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier historian, and almost sprinting back to the newspaper office so I could incorporate the quote into the column. Now, I'm pretty sure I was not writing about frontier history that day, so that was just an absolute terrible fit of a go-to quote. Yeah, that's what it's all about.

So, yeah, contrasting that with like covering stuff that is actually like national daily news, slightly different and I tip my cap to those young folks getting after it. Last note here, there's a tweet from Samma Kalar, who's a senior investigative fellow at the Columbia J-School. She tweets, I'm currently inundated with media requests and we'll have to say no to any more interviews today. Thank you for your interest. Please reach out to my other J-school colleagues that were there.

However, I have tons of footage slash photos for anyone who wants to license it. So to the media professionals out there, it's cool to interview student journalists and their professors. It is even cooler to pay them and give them work to tell you what's happening on their campus. That is generally how the process works for news gathering, yes. Let's segue here, do a very, very hard segue into Mike Trout. That's a New Yorker Euro step, if there ever was one, yeah. He plays for the angels, Andy. I don't know if you know that.

He has a torn meniscus. It's going to have surgery. He'll be back later this year, probably. On first take, Stephen A. Smith had an opinion about that meniscus. Well, it's driving me crazy. And let me tell you this. Mike Trout is a sensational player when he's healthy. One of the greatest.

He really, really is. And I'm a huge, huge fan. But I've grown disgusted with. with his lack of availability. It makes me question. I know he looks the part. What the hell are you doing to take care of yourself? Always injured.

I mean, damn, it's baseball. I mean, what are you talking about here? It's not football. It's not boxing. It's not the UFC. You're not running up and down to court 94 feet basketball for 82 nights a year. It's baseball.

Half the time, y'all are standing out in the outfield, you know, chewing on pumpkin seeds or something. waiting for fly ball to come your way. How the hell is he always hurt? I don't understand this. It drives me nuts when I see baseball players getting hurt. What is it that you're doing with yourself physically that you can't stay healthy playing baseball?

Now you get hit by a pitcher, so that's different. I get all of that. But these oblique injuries, you're running around the base and catch a hamstring injury, you're running out for fly ball and all of a sudden gets tweaked. What the hell is going on? He's so good. He's so good.

Look, I... Sorry, I hadn't watched that since yesterday, and I forgot some of the little details. So, yeah, man, Stephen A is the, he is the Barry Bonds of Takes. Like, he's the best to ever do it, like, except no substitutes. I mean, okay, so, like, I have a podcast. It's not very good. going to plug it, but like I do have a podcast. And like, we, you know, we were like, we talked a little bit about the Mike Trout injury. And all we could come up with is like, oh, yeah, what a bummer

that that guy, you know, couldn't stay healthy, you know, it's like, I just, you know, there was nothing like sort of interesting to say, you know, there was no way to, there's no, it's a, yeah, it's a bummer. It sucks. He's, you know, he's a Hall of Fame player who, you know, hasn't played more than 140 games in a season since like 2016. Okay. But, you know, what separates Stephen A from mortal men is like he just, he knows how to do it. Like they say in pro wrestling, right? Like what makes a heel effective is if everything he says has a kernel of truth. And it's true that baseball players, outfielders in particular, spend a disordinent amount

of time standing around eating pumpkin seeds. That is just true. I've seen the dugouts after games. They are littered with pumpkin seeds. seeds. And you can't, the pure joy, by the way, on Mad Dog's face when Stephen A dropped the line about the pumpkin seeds, like, it's just, that's two professionals doing it. You know, it's, it's just like to see the way they ply their craft. So I thought it was a great take. Obviously, if you're Mike Trout, you're furious with this because it's not based remotely in reality. But

in terms of what that show is designed to do, which is generate attention, 10 out of 10. It goes to what you're saying about Barclay. It is the crank take joyfully rendered. Like he's amused by his own take as he's delivering it. So if you and I just said that with a straight face, it'd be like, oh, come on, man. Right, right. That's what makes it entertaining.

And again, if you're Mike Trout, if you're a member of the Angels, if you're a baseball player who takes this criticism seriously, yeah, I understand why you're pissed off. I think that they're in on the joke. I hope that they're in on the joke at this point that it's meant to be entertaining. Maybe I'm wrong about this. This is Stephen A or these are Angels outfielders?

No, they're eating pumpkin seeds and standing in the outfields. You should see it. It's just, you know, they've given up on sunflower seeds as a consumer consumption activity. But yeah, I just, like the job of the program is to be entertaining, you know, and that was an entertaining rant, not remotely based on reality. not, you know, I don't, I don't know, I don't know. I don't see the harm in it unless, you know, Mike Trout is really upset. Mike Trout's really upset. Yeah, he should, you know, he should pop off and say something. But most likely, the reason he's upset is because his knees hurt and, you know,

he's been dealing with these injuries. And, you know, so I don't know. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm a little too blithe or glib or whatever about this. But I was amused to see, you know, baseball writers some rising up to be like, this is wrong. Like, that's not how it works. It's like, He had no shit. Everyone knows that you can get hurt playing baseball. It's a very physically demanding sport. Whatever. And what we're mad about, or if I can include we among the angry baseball writers,

is that Mike Trout's hurt. We're not really mad at Stephen A. We're disappointed because Mike Trout's hurt and we don't get to watch him play baseball and this sucks and it keeps happening. Yeah, there's a frustration of like, you know, there's a kind of a meta frustration that this is how baseball is presented on, you know, the sort of major programs of ESPN because, you know, baseball does not include LeBron, the Dallas Cowboys, or LeBron or the Dallas Cowboys, essentially.

And so, or the Pittsburgh Steelers? Sometimes I go to the gym and I'm like on the elliptical watching first take on mute. And they're always talking about the Steelers. Yes, they sneak into that A block more than you think. There's a lot of Steelers content. I don't know what they're saying because it's on mute, but they talk about the Steelers a lot. So I don't know. If baseball could find a way to incorporate the Steelers into what they're doing, they could get on ESPN more.

If Dag Prescott could play for the Angels, we'd have a lot more A-block Angels talk. Two elements of that that I just loved. The obligatory buildup Stephen A had to do before criticizing Mike Trout. Now, Mike Trout is a great baseball player. Thank you. I'm sure you've been a lot of time. Thinking about how great Mike Trout is the baseball. We must build somebody up before we tear them down.

That's the law of the opinion show. And the second thing you mentioned is Mad Dog Rousseau's face in the other side of the block. So I'm fascinated by this because it used to be, and maybe this is just when Skip was still on first take, but that if you were being quiet and letting your debate partner go off for two minutes, and if he was really going off, you would do nodding face. Right, right. pursed lips, I'm, I'm disagreeing with you, but I am nodding and indicating that you have a right to speak right now. We have replaced that with frozen smile. So you get a guy, so you know,

Stephen A. saying something, you know, it's pretty out there and you just, you know, bad I agree with her. They do that. They do frozen smile now when you're in the split screen and you're not talking. And what do you think that is meant to convey, like a comedy or with an eye, like K-O-M-I-T-Y, but they're all sort of an agreement or do they not want to make it seem like an argument? Like, what do you think explains that change? I have a feeling that in their head,

they're like, this is going to be aggregated. Sure, yeah, yeah. Everybody's going to be looking at this. Those self-serious baseball writers are going to be pissed off. Right. And all of a sudden, you become very aware of your own face. And I can't look mad because then I'm kind of,

I'm not, you know, going, in with a bit of first take, right? I'm not committing to the bit. So I just going to do frozen smile like I'm entertained by the take. Sure. Okay. And it's also kind of a just a neutral face. Yeah. I mean, it seems like the point of the shows are to like try and go viral at various times, which is like a very, yeah, it's like a very like, you know, 2014 news media type of approach that, you know, I find sort of charming, I guess, in a way. So yeah, that makes sense. So glad you brought that up, Andy because I've been fascinated by the rate with which various opinion programs get aggregated. Stands to reason that I would see in my Twitter feed nine different Stephen A clips a day.

Ben Strauss was, had a piece about this Washington Post today. He's now doing SpongeBob. He's doing sex on his podcast. He's just talking about everything. So every one of those things will be aggregated. How did Dan Lebitard get into the nine times? a day tier? I don't know. I don't know. My feed is just like, you know, it's cats and poker. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not getting as many stuff like sent to me. I got that.

That's not in your feed? Because I get like Dan Levitard nine times a day. And I'm like, what? Did, did a button get pushed? No, is he doing stuff that is like designed to be spicy? Or is just like him kind of doing the show. He's a pretty reason. He seems like a pretty reasonable fellow in general. He's doing, he's just doing the show. But it's like there was a meeting of the sports media aggregation committee that I missed. And we decided that he was now in this tier. And by the way, in the last month, somehow Jeff Perlman got in this tier. Okay. I see Jeff Perlman, colon, Pete Rose is a bad guy. It's like, well, I'm sorry.

What button got pushed? Well, you know, there's, yeah, that, that was a tape. That's a take. I mean, yeah, sure. It hurts like Reggie Jackson was a big jerk. I'm sorry. Did my settings get changed? Yeah, we, I don't know. You got to start following more, you know, cat picture accounts and professional poker players. Speaking of guys that get aggregated, the aforementioned Charles Barkley. He and the inside gang were doing the playoffs last night. Charles Barkley had a very, very tweetable opinion.

Also, you said you wanted to say something, coaching. Yeah, you know, part of our job, we watch all the games and we watch all the talk shows. You know, a lot of these people on television, they're cowards, because they want the players to like them. They don't want to do their job,

which is to tell the truth. And I just want to say it's about coaching. Anybody who thinks the reason the Lakers suck is because of Darwin Ham or the reason the son suck is because of Frank Vogel, you don't know what you're talking about. Frank Vogel is a hell of a coach.

Darwin Ham is a hell of a coach trying to get his career started. But for all you punks, idiots, and jackasses on other networks who want to be media who want all the players to like y'all. Do your damn job. The Lakers suck and the son sucks because of the players.

Has nothing to do with the coaches. I feel better now. I can tell. Looks like you are like getting that off your chest. I did. I hate it, man. You sit there like, Darwin Ham needs to get fired. Frank Vogel needs to get fired.

Who put them teams together? Them trash-ass teams put together need to get fired. Them guys, they didn't just all of a sudden suck as coaches. People who put them team. together to get they start packing up their stuff. Did you catch Shaq doing Frozen Smile there? Yes. Yeah. I think, I don't think it was frozen though. I think Shaq just enjoying it. So he's he's poking at something up, which I believe our mutual pal, Stephen Roder, called the cult of the general manager here too within that take.

Mm-hmm. That the GM gets exempt sometimes from the TV, you know, throttling. because there's maybe a little bit of a conduit between the reporter in the GM in some cases. What did you make of what Berkeley said? Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I mean, it's something that I think about a decent amount in terms of covering baseball. And specifically, like, you know, in thinking about someone like Clayton Kershaw, who obviously has had a pretty, like, tumultuous stretch in the postseason over the years, right?

Like, has been there a lot and has, you know, lost his share of games and tends to get, you know, ripped for it. Like, oh, you know, Clayton Kirshod, it couldn't do it again or whatever is the general sense. And there's very few other individual players who are actually subjected to that same sort of criticism I have found. You know, at least in baseball, there's not like headlines about specific players. It's more like team did not do, you know, X or, you know, the manager. Like, I remember the game last year in the postseason with the track. Toronto Blue Jays where there was a lot of consternation about John Schneider's like sort of bullpen maneuvers that, you know, led to a run in a game they lost two nothing when like a couple

innings later, the purported face of the franchise, Vladimir Guerrero was picked off second base to like end an inning. And there was more criticism for the manager than for the player. And I sort of understand why this has happened in some ways. I think that if you like, like if you read biographies of older, you know, uh, athletes, you know, whether it's like, Howard Bryant's book about Ricky Henderson or, you know, just very, like, inevitably, the sporting press is presented as something of an idiot chorus, sort of criticizing an obviously great player for things that don't seem fair in retrospect. And I think a lot of folks of our generation have sort of taken that in and been like, okay, like, can I really critique LeBron James for his

basketball playing. Like really, do I understand enough about the sport to critique, you know, this specific player? And then there's the idea of like, well, I can kind of be a GM. Like, I play fantasy baseball. Like, I sort of, you know, you more identify with the executives or you more understand the decisions of the managers. And so those are the ones that you can more easily, like, sort of stand and defend. It was like, well, you know, you should have done X, Y, and Z. You can't really tell a baseball player, like, well, you should have, like, thrown a better pitch, you know? And so, like, and what makes, you know, again, coming back to Charles, like Charles is able to put it on the players in part because he has been one of the best basketball

players of all time. And he has that credibility in a way that a lot of people in the media don't. But it is refreshing, like, be reminded that the athletes on the floor are kind of the ones responsible for the outcome. You know what I mean? Yeah. And just be like, you guys suck tonight. you guys suck during that series. And I completely agree with what you said because I feel like I grew up and you grew up in this business in a generation where there was this big thing

about don't be a 90 sports writer. Don't be like that guy because they were mostly guys, at least the columnist of the papers. Because there's not enough nuance. There's a lot of hot takes. There are all these things that we would, and there was, by the way,

and there were a lot of things that needed to be flushed from the system if we went back and read those. Totally. Yeah. But giving up this idea that you're going to sit there and be like, I can have an opinion about a thing I just watched. Right. And I have to tiptoe around this, you know, come on now. Like that, that's ridiculous. And by the way, I think that is why Stephen A and some of these guys have as much juice

as they do because they've replaced in a lot of ways that part of the sports media take system. Absolutely. Yeah. You used to see, like, In another era, there would be a column in a newspaper in Southern California that's like, Mike Trout needs to get his act together, you know? And like, you read that now and you're like, are you what the? What are you talking about? Right.

But there is an element of, you know, like that is one possible reaction to the situation. You know, I'm not saying it's the correct one, but you like go through the sort of layers of nuance. And at the top level, sometimes it's like, wait, why is that guy hurt all the time? maybe he should, you know, train harder, which, you know, okay, go down another level. You'll see there's, you know, reasoning and stuff like that. But yeah, it's a great point that, like, the ecosystem has, the ecosystem has sort of flushed that out, I think certainly for the better. But it's been replaced by the idea that, you know, the athletes are always trying their hardest.

We're positive of that. and any suggestion otherwise or any critique of their performance, like we're not in a position to give it. You know? And I don't know, like, it's a really hard line to, you know, to balance. Like, it's very challenging, especially, you know, for something like baseball. It feels like basketball effort feels more like palpably visible, you know. And so you could probably, you know, you can kind of make that.

And then with like football, it's like, I have no idea what happened, you know. And the coach, like accountability is baked into the sport. So the players tend to know when they screwed up and be more open about it in a way that in some other sports is just not as apparent, I guess. I think it was it was it Eric Name of the Athletic who had that conversation with Janus when they got bounced in the first round of the playoffs. That was the year after they won the title. If I'm not totally misremembering that. That was one of those things. It was just loaded with this thing.

And of course, everybody. And it was actually a really interesting exchange. If you listened to them both. But it was like one of those things of like, yeah, he lost in the first round of the playoffs. They won the title last year. Like right. Of course. Of course.

Yeah. Of course that. That's bad, right? We can look at this with different ways. But of course that sucks, man. What was interesting to me about that question was that one, it's a totally fair question, as you were saying. Like, it's 100% legitimate.

And look, you can agree, disagree, feel however you want to feel about Janus's answer. but it was very revealing in terms of how he thinks about the game. And you learned more about him because of that question. And so, like, I know that Eric got a good bit of heat, you know, for asking it. And I think another big part of this is in the idea of being confrontational, specifically with the athletes in an era where so much is, you know, so many of these interactions are like live streamed or whatever, like in press conference settings is there's a concern about, you know, not wanting to be like the main character

getting yelled at, you know, and not wanting to, you know, just sort of have to deal with that nonsense. You know, there's like, there's a, there's definitely a, you know, it's a little bit less prevalent as social media sort of like recedes from in the importance of what it is we do. But definitely for the majority of my career, like that was a thing where, like if I was covering the royals and and you know they lost like I would be getting messages like at the end of the game like tweets are being like you need to grill ned yost about this or like you need to bo-bo-d-da and then the press comments will be live and whether however i asked the question whether it was you know like soft or whether it was tough like you know you'd get you'd get like you need to be

tougher on it and it's stuff like look guys like i appreciate the interest but like i'm not working for the live stream i'm working for the newspaper so like let me actually let me let me actually provide you with the information, you know, like, let me actually write this story, and then we can have a discussion about what's going. Like, I'm doing what I need to do to get you my actual product, I guess. But there's like a middleman there that sort of airs out, you know, a lot of the sausage making. And I think it's made the sausage taste worse. Does that work? Probably not. I think I followed you. By the way, I see that on my college football message board all the time. why won't the media have the guts to ask the coach this?

Yeah. And you're like, no, actually, we did ask. And the fact that we asked doesn't mean that Greg Robinson's going to start, you know, going to put in a blitz package. I tell you what, I did ask, when are you going to start blitzing? And he was like, oh, that's feast or famine. And I'm like, you've chosen famine. Yeah, yeah.

Viewers and readers have that thing like political writers. I didn't get the desired outcome I wanted. So it's your fault for not asking enough about it. I'm going to ask you a little bit about baseball writing here as we roll into your book. Sure. So your life got changed as a baseball beatwriter. And we should fill in people here. Your beat writer for the Royals, the Dodgers out here for the LA Times.

Your life got changed by live streams. Your press conferences being on television and online. I imagine they also got changed in the 2010s by the rise of the national insider. People like the aforementioned Jeff Passon and. Kenny Rosenthal, who's now your colleague at The Athletic, how did insiders change your life as a beatwriter? Let me tell you, working with Ken Rosenthal is a lot better than dealing with him as a competitor. I think, I don't think it's as prevalent in the NBA where it feels like the local guys are completely shut out of news breaking. I have no influence whatsoever. And we're

everything feels pretty stage managed in a variety of ways. I think baseball still had, like, it created a situation where, um, with insiders and stuff where the, the number one thing that readers really wanted was transactional news. They wanted to know, like, what trades are coming, who's going to be available at the deadline, is my team going to sign this player? what are they willing to do? And in general, the people reporting those types of stories were from a national level, in part because in order to connect with as many readers as possible, you needed to kind of look at it from a transactional way.

And so it created this really intense pressure to keep up with them and try and be relevant knowing that, like, Ken is just going to win. Like, Ken's going to have this, you know? And I need to be in a position where when Ken has this, that I know people, you know, in the organization, agent, whomever, you know, that I'm dealing with can confirm it so that I can, like, get something together as soon as, you know, yeah, as soon as, you know, Ken drops the story.

And so created a lot of stress. I created a lot of anxiety. It took me many years to stop being rattled by my phone after I got off the beat. So, yeah, it's made life tougher for the beat writers for sure, but I don't like fault the reporters. Those guys work their asses off. I mean, like Ken is a freak, like a freak of nature with his work rate. And, you know, so I don't like begrudge those guys. They all work incredibly hard, you know, to get the information they do.

It's just, you know, it just makes it tougher on the quote unquote little guys. Your days on the beat, you wrote Fantastic Gamers, which is the sports writing term for game stories, written in the press box and sent to the desk after the final out. How did you approach writing a gamer? Yeah, I wanted to be great at something obsolete, you know, and so that was kind of what to focus on. Yeah, I mean, I just, I looked at it. is like I thought it, um, I tried to like study the people who I, I really enjoyed reading, you know, when, uh, when I was younger. And so, you know, a lot of those like to happen to be

the Nationals beat writer at the Washington Post for a variety of years. So Barry's Verluga, uh, Chico Harlan, you know, Adam Kilgore, um, you know, Dave Shinen when he was covering the Orioles. And so I just kind of tried to rip them off for as long as I could. And then in time sort of figured out my, you know, own way of, you know, what worked for. me and what didn't. But yeah, I mean, I looked at it as like it was a way to that I think I try, I was I was writing, I was really focusing on game stories. I was fortunate that the teams I covered were good.

That was the reason that I was focused on them is because the teams I covered were good. And so people really wanted to read about the team. And I looked at it as a way to tell a story every day that had a clear beginning and an ending. And you get a lot of different information in there. And so, yeah, I just tried to make it as interesting as possible. And I was just very fortunate that I happened to cover some very, very good teams for a while. What do you like when you're on deadline in the press box, 11 o'clock at night? I'm okay.

I'm okay. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of the, you know, the 10,000 hours thing. Like, it takes a lot to rattle me at this point. I mean, my laptop shut down in the 80s. inning of game five of the 2015 world series in New York. And I lost my entire running. And so I had about a thousand words on the page and it just disappeared. And that was, yeah, that was the closest I've ever come to a meltdown in the press box. I was pretty upset. And, you know, and Sam Mellinger,

my former colleague, the Kansas City Star was kind of like, you know, kind of coaching me back up, you know, and he was just like, all right, you just got to rewrite it. You know, hey, remember what happened in the third inning? Maybe write a graph about that. And I'm like just, I'm, you know, just swearing and, you know, just kind of cussing and spitting up a storm. And someone from the other end of the press box, whoever it was, it's kind of lost the time, but they just shouted down, it's only a game, buddy. And Sam still will text me that on occasion, you know, from time to time. But yeah, these days, I'm pretty, you know, I'm fortunate enough, the athletics sends me out to do the postseason. And so I still do that kind of a bunch of gamers in October. And I'm,

I'm pretty calm with it because I've covered some really crazy ones. And so I kind of know some little tricks to like how to be in a good position, kind of no matter what happens and be ready to go. Are we going to share the tricks here? Are these trade secrets? Well, yeah. All those young Syracusians that want to be the next Andy McCullough? Sometimes it's helpful to have a concept at the top, you know,

whether it's an opening paragraph that can work no matter what the score is. And so some sort of, you know, my friend Dylan Hernandez describes it as, you know, me saying, oh, baseball is good, but also baseball's bad. You know, and so some sort of, you know. On the one hand, yeah, you know. Baseball is a study in contrast. Yeah, oh, baseball can break your heart. Oh, geez, and fans were subjected to that again, you know. So just having, sometimes that is effective.

But just, you know, trying to think ahead, you know, not to be caught off guard to, you know, it, it, it's, it. It really makes you, I found covering games specifically, you get really locked in on the actual game. Like you're really paying attention and you're really thinking ahead with the manager. And so it makes you ask more effective questions because you've had to like be keep looking at the lineup and you're like, all right, it's the fifth. When this guy comes up in the seventh, what's going to happen? And so you're sort of prepped. And so it's just, yeah, it's just kind of repetition and doing it over and over and over, I feel like. Two years ago, you took Clayton Kersha, Dodgers pitcher, former National League MVP.

certain Hall of Famer that you wanted to interview him for a book you were going to write about him. How did you approach that conversation? Yeah. I had had some conversations with him the previous October when he was dealing with an arm injury and wasn't pitching in the postseason where he sounded a bit just like a little more reflective than he had been in years past. And so I thought maybe there'd be an opening. And so I was pretty straightforward. I mean, I, you know, I live in New York now. So I flew to L.A. and, you know, set up a few minutes with them. And, you know, we were out by out on just like in the, uh, out by the, uh, the left field pole in the Dodger Stadium. And just I said to him was like,

hey, man, like I, you know, I want to write a book about you. Like, I think, you know, the things that you've accomplished in your career and the way you've, you know, done it, I think it's really fascinating. And I, you know, someone's going to do it some way. I think someday, I think I should be the one to do it. And I think the book will be better if you participate, you know, and he, was like, oh, yeah, okay. You know, like, it was a very short conversation, you know, five, ten minutes. We, you know, he said he would check with his wife, Ellen, and, and, and, uh, but otherwise, yeah, you know, go for it. And so we made plans to, uh, to, um, to talk in the winter of that year. And then, you know, then I kind of really dove into like the rest of the reporting. Like,

I talked to, you know, 200 some other people. And, uh, that was during that process is when he got a sense for how intense it was going to be because the next time I saw him, he's like, are you texting every person in my life? You know, because they, you know, a lot of times when you reach out to someone, they're like, hey, this, you know, they, let's tell the person, like, hey, this guy just told me his writing book about you, like, what is this? And, you know, and he had to keep telling people, yes, so yes, yes, you know. And he was like, you're doing a deep dive. And I'm like, I told you I'm writing a book, man. You know, like, it's a book. And so, but, you know, he was incredibly generous with his time throughout the process. And I think the book is much, much better.

because of it. This is after the 2022 season that where this book opens and you're in his house in Highland Park. This is around Christmas time. Like his kids' stockings are actually hanging from the fireplace. How long did it take him to agree to let you in there? He like he was really open about it. I mean, we left it at let's connect during the winter. And so I texted him at some point in, I want to say November and said, hey, what time works for you? and he was like come, you know, I think it was like two weeks before Christmas. That was the period of time. So he was very open about, you know, setting it up. I think it's more challenging kind of trying to get him to open up in conversation sometimes because he's very controlled. He's very,

like he doesn't say more than he wants to say, I think. He's very, very, like, disciplined with that. And so, yeah, what again, it was, you know, pretty straightforward. Like, there was, and I think some of that, you know, like I kind of, like I've known this person for, you know, almost 10 years at this point. And we've had a lot of conversations and, you know, it's not like he'd invited me to his house before. But like we've talked for lengthy amounts of times. And so I feel like at the very least he had a sense of like what sort of things I'm interested in, the way I, you know, go about my job. He knows the sort of stories I write. And so I imagine there was some sort of, you know, comfort there. I don't know if comfort's the right word,

but just sort of understanding of how the process would go. So it really, like there was no handlers, no agents. It was just kind of me and him the whole time talking through it. Two topics I wanted to ask you about pulling out of it. One is his childhood. His dad kind of faded out of his life fairly early on. His mom went into debt because she was trying to live in this exclusive community Highland Park, which is in the greater city of Dallas there.

What was Kershaw like talking about that stuff? Yeah, it's not a topic. he likes getting too deep on. I think understandably, I mean, in a lot of ways, like, it's a, you know, it's a painful thing to have to revisit. And I think that he has made a lot of choices in his life to be a different, you know, sort of parent than, you know, his father was, I guess. And so, you know, some of it is just, yeah, I mean, it's, from my perspective, it's like trying to, to be polite when asking about these things, but also kind of having to push and prod to, like, get him to go, try and go a layer deeper. And there were times when I would ask him stuff. And he was just

like, man, I don't remember. And I'm like, really? And he's like, yeah, I don't. He's like, I'm like, you don't, you know, you like, you don't remember what they said to you, you know, when your parents were getting divorced. He's like, no, that's not how my brain works. Like, I remember where the chairs were in the room. He's like, I can see the image, but I don't, you know. And so it's just, it's even in the things that he does remember, does want to share compared to the things that he either, you know, is keeping inside or that things that he is sort of is cast aside and doesn't have access to anymore in terms of his memory. I think that's all sort of revealing in terms of, you know, the person he is. And so, yeah, I mean, I just tried to be like polite about it because

it's not a subject that he likes talking about for kind of obvious reasons, I feel like. That moment popped out to me too where he's like, I can tell you the arrangement of the chairs, one of my parents were telling me they were getting divorced, but I can't tell you a single thing they said. And I think that is really revealing about how his mind works. The other topic I wanted to ask you about is this burden of greatness that you talk about in the subtitle of the book, because you set this up, right, that he is carrying around this thing. And this is a topic that sports writers are interested in, whether it's Michael Jordan, right, whether it's whoever it is, right, wearing the mantle of being one of the greatest

pictures of all time, one of the greatest lefties of all time. Was he able to articulate what carrying that around is like? In some ways, I mean, I think what makes him interesting is that so much of it is internal as compared to external. Whereas, like, someone like Jordan, obviously there's internal motivation for Michael Jordan, but he's so clearly fixates on slites and things like that and, you know, as that clearly is motivated that that feels like a more common sort of, you know, way that that combustion engine is built. But, you know, it was more like he had at some point at a very young age had sort of set this standard for himself that kind of exceeded what the modern expectation for greatness even was. And he just kind of refused to, you know,

to accept anything below that. And what always, like, I talk about this a lot. Like, if you go into Dodger Stadium at 2 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game, you're sitting alone in the press box or while you're sitting alone with Ken Gurneyk from Mowlb.com of the press box, the two of you were there. And you look out in left field and Kershaw's running, his sprints every day. He's doing his thing. He's, you know, dragging of, you know, he's doing, like, calisthenics and all of his, you know,

running and cardio stuff every day, no matter how well he's pitching. He had a great game, bad game, day game the day before, night game, whatever. And you sort of are like, why are you like this? You know, like why, you know, and everything, what people say about him is just like he never takes a day off. He never, you know, everything is regimented down to the minute. You know, what, you know, everything is, there's nothing left at chance, right? Which is not necessarily unique, right? I think great athletes often, you know, succeed through regimentation. But what was fascinating to me was just like, okay, so tell me why this is. Why can you, why do you have to be there at 635 as compared to 638? You know, why do you have to eat this sandwich, you know, rather than just eat this?

And the answer was almost like, if I don't do that, I will worry that that is the reason things go wrong. And if I let up, if I take a day off, if I skip a, you know, a set of reps on the squat rack that I worry that I won't be, won't have the armor I need to go out there and be what I feel like I need to be. And I just thought like, you know, it's like living in the pressure, it's like living in the hull of a ship for like 20 years, you know, like, and I just, I found that to be fascinating. It's something I really tried as hard as I could to try and, you know, expand on through the, through the book. I'm pretty immune to the idea of what was it like to interview so and so, because you and I have interviewed famous people

sure from time to time but what was it like to interview Sandy Kofax? Yeah, that was a cool one. That was one that was very fortunate to be able to do and I think speaks to the level of admiration that Kofax has for Kershaw that he was willing to do it

because you know, as you and probably a lot of listeners Sandy doesn't do like Zoom calls you know with the media like Sandy's not you know calling press conferences very often. So just even his willingness to, you know, take 10 minutes, I think speaks to, you know, his level of affection for Kershaw, who's actually his friend, despite the 50-year gap in age. And yeah, I mean, you know, it's the, he walks in, you know, he's 87, he looks 65.

He's got the biggest hands you've ever seen. Like his hand, like, I have big hands. And he, like, swallowed my hand with it. You know, he's just, he's such, you know, just, you know, just such a sort of freakish physical person. And, you know, he did the interview, like he's sitting underneath a poster of himself at Dodger Stadium. And I was just sort of struck by the image of just like, this guy, like, he just, like, it's Sandy Kofax, you know, like, and you're a little, I was able to, like, get through the interview. And, you know, I was probably a little rushed and a little more nervous than I would be, you know, talking to, like, Randy Wolfe or something like that. It was great, you know, but like, but you know, you call like a normal baseball player and you can

kind of have a conversation. But yeah, I was, I was, it's probably, besides the time I like, met Gary Smith, it was probably like one of the times where I was really sort of awestruck, I guess. Sports Illustrated writer in case. Yeah, sorry. People are searching baseball reference right now. Right. I said to Gary Smith, I said, hey, you probably don't hear this all that often, but I'm a big fan of your work. And he laughed. And I was like, yes. Let's go. Got a smile out of Gary Smith. He's a very, very nice man.

A very nice man. Did I see you tell this to Alana Rizzo that you sent a copy of the book to Kershaw and that he's not going to read it? Yeah. Yes, I did. I did. Yeah, I don't. I sent him a copy, you know, because I wanted them, he and his wife to have a chance to read it. And, yeah, I mean, he conveyed that he just wasn't.

going to read it not not in a rude way but just more and a like it feels very strange to read a 400 page book about yourself and so um i know his teammates have been kind of teasing him about it to an extent and so he's kind of annoyed about that i i walked into the uh was in the dodgers clubhouse uh last week when they were in dc and i was talking to austin barnes the catcher and i was trying to like work i was trying to do my job and barnes just interrupts our conversation and uh pulls out his phone and shows me that he's facetimed Kershaw, who was rehabbing in Texas. And Barnes is like, hey, I'm here with your JK Rowling, which is, you know, that's me. So, you know, good times, good times.

Your JK Rowling. Yeah, yeah, it is what it is. So, yeah, he has said that he does not plan on reading it. And that's, hey, that's fine. Do he read your stuff at the LA Times? I don't, you know, I think a lot of times the players don't necessarily read it, but someone in their life does, you know, often a spouse or, you know, their brother or, you know, and for some of this stuff like, yeah, I think they're often aware of what you've written.

Maybe you don't know the details. I think, you know, if you have like tweets that are a little spicy, those they're reading because they're being shown. Like, look at what this guy said about you. You know, whereas in a story, it's a little bit different. All right. The book is the last of his kind comes out on Tuesday, on Monday, Wednesday, and all the other days Andy's writing is available in the athletic. He also does a podcast.

He is not comfortable plugging here, Andy. Thank you so much for coming on the press box. Thank you for having me. This was awesome. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition. David Shoemaker, guest is a strain on headline. Yeah, so flying high off of Monday's success. Yes, Monday's headline, David, was about.

a buoy that washed up on the beach and it was buoy meets whirl. And you just asked me that one again? Can we just do that one over and over again and just wait and see how long it takes people to complain? Yeah, Portland Press Herald every week. Today's headline, David, comes to us from Andrew Ungvary. It's from the Atlantic.

A Charlie Worsal joint over in the Atlantic. Charlie Worsel's been writing multiple articles about Sphere, sphere, that awesome concert venue in Vegas. Oh, yeah. You remember he had sphere and loathing in Las Vegas? He went to see the fish show, David. And not only did he get another sphere pun, he got a quote from Dune.

Quote from Dune. You might want to think about the word fear here. What was the Atlantic and Charlie Worsel's strain pun headline? Oh, man. Fear is the... God, it's been so long. Fear is the mind. Oh, Sphere is the mind killer?

Sphere is the mind killer in the Atlantic. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Eduardo Ocampo. Thank you, Eduardo. All right, we got lots of great stuff coming up here on the press box. And if that sounds like a very generic statement, it's because I'm still putting together the May schedule. I will tweet that out in short order.

I can guarantee you, though, that David Shoeaker will be back. Monday with more lukewarm tastes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.