The Press Box - The Myth of the Liberal ESPN, the Death of TrueHoop, and Baseball Activism (Ep. 302)

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis brings on author James Andrew Miller to examine the notion that ESPN has a "liberal agenda" (5:00). Then, The Ringer's Danny Chau joins to discuss the destruction of TrueHoop (25:00). Finally, essayist John Lingan joins to offer his thoughts on why baseball has no athlete activism (39:15). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. The Ringer is very excited about our new podcast that went through a lot of name iterations. What did you decide on Larry Wilmore? Larry Wilmore, Black on the air. What was the runner up? Well, the Bill Simmons idea was, was it Larlarland? Was that what it was? Larlar land. You think people are going to subscribe to Larlarland. That joke was that it would be the worst idea for a podcast. No, it was horrible. You don't want people thinking worst when they're signing up to a puck. No, I wanted you to have a good one. This is a very good name.

So what's going to be on this podcast? It's going to be me kind of weighing in on some of the issues of the day with my audience. And then I'll be interviewing some really cool people during the podcast. Each week, it'll be somebody different. Sometimes with culture, sometimes politics, sometimes sports, sometimes maybe an interest of mine, sometimes television. I've worked a lot in television. Yeah. We got Norman Lear coming up, Bernie Sanders, Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

So lots of great guests. Awesome. Welcome to the podcast in World, Larry Wilmore. Subscribe to Larry Wilmore's podcast wherever. you get your podcast. Hey, it's Brian Curtis here, editor at large of The Ringer. This is Channel 33, and this is our newish podcast

where we talk about stuff within the political sports zone. We have three quick segments here. First up, I'm going to have James Andrew Miller, author of The Great Oral History of ESPN on whether ESPN is quote, unquote, a liberal network. You've probably read about that on Twitter.

Next up, the Ringer's very own, Danny Chow and I are going to have a funeral for True Hoop, that oasis of basketball writing. at ESPN that fell victim to the layoffs. And finally, John Lingen, a great writer and SAS, and I are going to talk about why Major League Baseball has so little social activism in the age of Trump. We'll try to come up with a solution. All right, let's go.

All right, first up, James Andrew Miller, author of Oral Histories of Saturday Night Live, CAA, and ESPN, for which he is the chief criminologist we have in the media. Jim, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I don't know if you heard about this, but Jason, Whitlock wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal the other day. This may have come across your desk. I was just eating, eating breakfast, reading, you know, looking for some trickle-down economics tracks. And boy, ESPN in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And he wrote,

The channel has become too handcuffed by politics to protect its most experienced and loyal employees. It's a massive symbol of everything that fueled Donald Trump's bid for the presidency. So I think in any discussion of is ESPN a quote-unquote liberal network, there's a bunch of things that kind of get smashed together, arguments that get smashed together? And I want to actually ask you about a few of them. So one, is ESPN a liberal network? You know, look, are there liberals at ESPN? Yes.

Are there conservatives? Yes. I just think that this whole dialogue has just gotten mashed together. I mean, it's bizarre. I really don't understand. If you really take time to trace the pedigree of what people are saying, it doesn't add up. I mean, I did read the Whitlock piece. And he says that, you know, okay, yeah, there's, you know, expensive live sports and subscribers.

Truly impeded ESPN from overcoming its financial mistakes is the decade-long culture war. It lost a deadsman. So it reminds me that Seinfeld episode where, like, the mom and pop store take Jerry, you know, they closed down. And Elaine saying, wait, it was mom and pops theory and their plan to establish trust in the neighborhood for 40 years just so they could steal all of Jerry speakers. I mean, this idea, this idea that we're talking about significant, significant losses. ESPN had 100 million subscribers. Now they got 88. People are paying more than $7 a household.

They spent an enormous amount of money on the NBA, Big Ten, NFL, on and on and on. And what their real problem is, is that they've lost a culture war to deadspent. I mean, I listen, I have a lot of respect for Jason, and I think that, You know, back in the day, he was maybe justifiable in thinking that ESPN should have sued deadspin. I'm sorry, at the end of the day, this just doesn't add up. Yeah, and it's two questions getting smashed together, right? Which is one, is ESPN liberal? Is it more liberal in character than it perhaps was 20 years ago?

And then the second one being, does whatever its political character is, did that cause the layoffs two weeks ago, right? Or was that something? Every time I give a talk or, you know, speeches, everybody in there, there are, there, Q&A session, and usually somebody says, you know, I can't believe ESPN fired Kurt Schilling because he's a conservative. And just that question alone makes me car sick, because here's the deal. It's like Kurt Schilling was not fired because he was a conservative. Kurt Schilling decided to say things that basically, I'm sorry, but Jason is at FS1 now, if Kurt Schilling had said certain things, the same things about his colleagues at FS1 that go against the heart of inclusiveness, which, by the way,

is not something that's just particular to Bristol, Connecticut. I mean, these are publicly held companies. This is, I mean, ESPN is part of Disney, the idea that in 2017, if you can, you know, if you decide to, you know, denigrate your colleagues who may be Muslims or transgender or anything else, and this is all of a sudden a conservative issue, no, it's a workplace issue, and Jamie Harwoods would have fired him, too. And Jason should ask Jamie. He should go into Jamie's office, sit down and say, here's some of the things that Kurt Schilling said. What would happen if, you know, or Eric Shanks? What would happen if he said them here? I'd be very surprised. I'd be very surprised. I mean, that parent company that Jason works for

just, you know, say goodbye to several key employees. This idea that ESPN is doing this, and then somehow it equates the conservative. I mean, do you remember when Kurt said that Hillary Clinton should actually be buried under a jail? Right. Kurt Schilling went on baseball, Monday night baseball, as planned. Now, I mean, they talked to him because they don't want to do overly political, but this is getting crazy. Yes. And I think when you talk about FS1, by the way, I think there have been people that have come to executives there and said,

let's make this into the Fox News of Sports. Let's do what Fox News did to MSNBC and CNN. And the response has been absolutely not because they want all sports fans. And so does ESPN. I mean, there's another line in here. He said that Dead Space exposure helped ESPN, you know, and ESPN. And here's the little key line. But it also extinguished the network's risk-taking culture and infused it with strict obedience to progressive political correctness.

I think that's, you know, he mentions March of Hero, and I think that's incredibly insulting to Mark Shevero. Because the subtext is somehow, you know, if Mark had stayed there, then this wonderful, progressive, you know, political correctness would have still, you know, it just, it would have run wild. Mark is running to IMG right now. If anybody were to play any of these games at IMGWME, Ari and Mark would, and Patrick, they would have them on a bullet train out of there. I mean, what does he think of what is going on? I mean, what really happened was that a lot of, I mean, Skipper came in and he bought a lot of live product. And that's what made the moat around ESPN for years and years bigger. That's all, it's as simple as that.

I mean, we're complaining so many different issues here. Yeah, and another funny thing about the op-ed is that he says that to Shapiro, what he characterizes as a risk-taking era in terms of programming, he lists some of the of the things, PTI, Skip Bayliss and Colin Coward, Mike and Mike, the NBA package, the World Series of Poker. All of those risk-taking ventures are still part of ESPN, with the exception of Skip and Colin, whom ESPN labored mightily, did they not to keep. So if you think that's risk-taking, it's still there. It's still ESPN. I mean, not only are they still there, they run about the flagpole every morning and salute them.

I mean, they didn't turn their back. I mean, listen, Mark Shapiro deserves enormous – Jason's right. He deserves enormous credit. He came at a time when ratings were hemorrhaging, and he brought to the network without a doubt. But to say that they've turned their back on that is, you know, as you point out, I mean, it just doesn't – I think I tweet the other day that Senator Warnahan had an axiom. Everybody's entitled to this idea, by the way, inclusiveness, which is so important to John Skipper, and which he says to everybody, that's not a conservative issue or a liberal issue.

I mean, I don't think so because, look, I have a lot of conservative friends who are very, very inclusive, or at least appreciate inclusiveness in the workplace. I mean, certainly conservatives don't want liberals to just own the idea that everybody should be treated fairly in the workplace. I don't know any of my conservative who think that. So somehow it's getting twisted into that and it's just wrong. And I don't think you can talk about this or have this argument without understanding how the political world has changed around ESPN, right? ESPN like any company is reacting to the way the world has changed. Barack Obama in 2008 ran for president being opposed to gay marriage, right?

Four years later, he was the opposite. The world has changed so much in this idea, you know, there were certain things that maybe a company could not have come out And pick sides seems like a strong way to put it, but pick sides on, right? And we live in this, we live in a different universe today. And to not stand up for values like inclusiveness or civil rights or, you know, equal treatment or LGBT rights. I just, I don't, I don't understand what, I don't understand what they would think ESPN would do in the face of, in the face of some of these things. I just don't, I just don't understand. Or by that, out of 21st century fox.

There you go. Where is the outlier here in terms of ESPN? I mean, why? I look, I mean, I can always convict or quit with ESPN. It's a huge company, and there's many different facets to it, and every day is dynamic. So there are things that you can applaud them for, and you can criticize them for, and I actually enjoy both. But the truth is, to make them some sort of outlier here where all of a sudden this liberal bastion

be decided that inclusiveness and equality in the workplace, no other company is doing that, and therefore it's a liberal agenda. And then to go to step further, which is, I'm sorry, it's just whacked. The idea that that's what, you know, I mean, it just doesn't make sense. You can, just let's play deep throat and file the money. 12 million households that they lost. Those are people that are looking for a skinny bundle. Those are people like my mother who, you know, spend $7 a month on ESPN and never watches it.

they're getting rid of it. People don't want to pay for something they don't use anymore. ESPN is suffering for that, and they're going to continue to suffer in some way until they figure out a way around it. And they're trying with the SEC network, and they're trying with a host of other things. It may and may not be enough, but to literally take that extra step and say,

oh, yeah, that's why. It's like it's just wrong. Where, as you've looked at it, what is the event that causes the liberal E.S. SPAN narrative to start. Is it Michael Sam kissing his partner on TV during the draft? What is, what is the thing that launches this whole strange thing? I mean, Michael Sam, that was a pretty big Mots of all. But I think that, you know, the truth is that Caitlin Jenner, here's the irony. So Caitlin Jenner gets the SB Award, the Arthur Ashe Award. People say, oh my gosh, you know,

this is, this is the ESPN becoming very, very liberal. Well, let's for a second, just point out that Caitlin Jenner's are conservative. But again, does this mean then that only liberals recognize and have appreciation and want transgender people to have equality? I just, again, I just know so many conservatives. They're conservatives because of their economic orthodoxies about lower taxes and getting government out of our lives. And, you know, they have a certain approach to foreign affairs, which they think is different than the Democrats. But this idea that all of a sudden if you're, you know, if you celebrate or if you want to applaud Caitlin Jenner for her journey, then that makes you, I think that's a dangerous slope for people

to pursue. Yeah. But I think that's the big, that's the biggest blip on the radar. I mean, Michael Sam was there too. But, and then the other thing, of course, is that they start to think that everybody who's on air is, on ESPN is liberal, which a lot of the conservative voices at ESPN, may not necessarily in politics as much as some of the other. But it's not like every day, you know, ESPN sounds like MSNBC. I mean, I literally challenged the guy in a Q&A after him.

I said, please, let's go through it. Give me your examples. He said, well, you know, Michael and Jamel are liberal. I said, okay, well, first of all, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but, you know, I watch a show from time of time. When was the last time that they literally spoke about? You know, he couldn't come up with it. I mean, maybe they are, but that's not a de facto branding of the entire network. Yeah, and I think a part of this is, too, we have access to these people's Twitter accounts now, too. Can you imagine Heath Olderman's Twitter account in the heyday of the Big Show Sports Center? I mean, he was going, if I remember correctly, he was going on ESPN's air and calling Arco Arena,

where the Sacramento Kings played greedy Will Profits Arena until the king said, knock it off or we take the highlights away, right? I mean, this is part of it is we know more about these people. I think part of it is, as you say, I would read the Caitlin Jenner thing as much as ESPN's infatuation with celebrity and famous people as having as kind of a statement about civil rights. I mean, I just think that's, you know, that's a true line. That's a really interesting. That's a really interesting take. But I think so many people forgot about the fact that Caitlin herself is conservative.

I mean, look, the people at ESPN, by the way, we're talking about the NFL's ratings trouble, upset about the Colin Kaepernick issue, because they believe that sports is a sanctuary, that when you turn on Monday night football, you want to get away from coarseness of our political arguments in the country. And so, if anything, I think that there's been some effort on the part of people at ESPN to make sure

that sports is still sports. I mean, they believe the audience did not like the whole Kaepernet stuff, whether you're forward against it, because it was bringing politics into that world, and that world they wanted to be separated from politics. Let's talk about for a second, the deadspin

piece of Whitlock's article. A few months ago, I wrote a piece about how I thought sports writing, sports writing, has become a more liberal profession than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. And I didn't say, I don't think enough in there about how deadspin is not only carved out this kind of liberal clubhouse for sports writing, but put a lot of pressure on writers by blowing them up if they have bad political texts, right? According to Deadspin,

that is. But when Whitlock says that Deadspin has pushed ESPN to the left politically or made them more politically correct, I don't actually know of an example of that. I mean, it's certainly they've done a lot of reporting on ESPN. They've made changes there. They've been, you know, effective at muckraking and things like that. But do you know of any evidence that, Spinn, has that any effect on ESPN's political character? Part of it is, if you examine, if you really deconstruct what Jason's saying in this op-ed, and you think about it, it's about ESPN making priorities about their workplace and establishing further guidelines about their workplace that is wholly independent of Deadspin.

I mean, Deadspin is a really interesting site. It has a pretty interesting batting average in terms of, provocative and compelling stories. I think that there are, it's clear that you know, some of the people who have worked there are really, really talented and, you know, to

very, very, you know, established jobs in journalism. I mean, this is, this is not the junior varsity. But I'm sorry, if there was never a dead spent, if there was never a dead spent, these things that Jason cites in the op-ed piece that happened at ESPN would have still happened at ESPN would have still happened

at ESPN. And you know why? Because ESPN is part of Disney. Disney is a public company. And in this day and age, public companies are supposed to operate in certain ways. That's not because they're being pushed by a website. It's because that's what the public and that's what society expected them now. And so if you are an employee at Johnson & Johnson or General Electric or 21st Century Fox and you say some of the things that Kurt Schilling said, you're going to get suspended or you're going to get fired and has nothing to do with some column that somebody at Deadspin may have written to put pressure on that. If there's one place, I'm sorry. I don't think that, I can't imagine John Skipper wake it up in the morning and reading Deadspin to say, oh, yeah, that's got to be part of my

agenda now. And, oh, yeah, okay, they've really influenced me now. I mean, if there's one place made a commitment, I mean, besides buying a lot of live sporting rights, it is on the way ESPN care for each other, that if you decide to do something and say something, you're going to pay for it. Yeah, and I can even look at the specifics and say, you know, when ESPN hired Will Kane, conservative commentator used to work for Glenn Beck's The Blaze Network, you know, and criticized him for his views. I think it was on global warming at the time. Will Kane just yesterday, re-signed with ESPN for a new contract, right? I imagine that.

Yeah, Deadspin was all over Skip and Colin, and ESPN offered them millions and millions of dollars to please stay at ESPN, right? So I think, you know, that's... And by the way, either who else signed yesterday? I mean, I called it just another Red State Monday for ESPN, but you know who else signed? Tidivo. Right. I don't think you're going to be seeing him at any Hillary Clinton rallies or you've seen it. It's just, you know, at some point, it just becomes a joke.

I just don't get it. And there's something more elemental underlying this. I mean, when you, if you tell, if you're saying to the world, ESPN is a liberal network. Of course, you're signaling to conservative sports fans or moderate sports fans or people like you say who don't want their politics and sports mixed up. That's not the network for you. But I think there's also this other thing, which you're saying, Colin Coward told me this once, was fascinating to me. He said part of his, the way he is a sports guy, a talk show host, a pundit, whatever you want to call it is, everybody's lying to you but me. And so if you, Jason Whitlock or Clay Travis or whomever, say ESPN is in the thrall of liberal orthodoxy, right?

They're pushing a political agenda. You are saying, I'm the honest guy, right? I'm telling you the full story. Those guys over there, that Dan Lebitard, all those guys on that network, they're not honest with you. I'm telling you the full story. I'm giving you the truth. And I think that's a powerful, you know, advertisement for oneself. And I think that's part of what's going on here, too.

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why ESPN wanted to keep Colin and wanted to keep Skip, as you referred to earlier. I mean, by the way, there's one other head scratching line, no offense, because Linda Cohen is a, you know, dedicated in that ESPN. But she says the old school viewers are put in a corner and not appreciated with all these other changes. Context, what she's using is evidence. Yeah, the word old school is doing a lot of work in that sense. one for you, Jim. You're an ESPN executive, and let's say you don't believe that liberal ESPN, quote, unquote, is a thing, is a real thing, but it's out in the universe. It's a stigma. It's being pushed by your competitors and by other people. What, if anything, worries you about that? Look, I think that they have, I think that you got to, you just got to, you can't be op edged that a lot of evidence behind them. You have to focus. I mean, their problem right now, I mean, for people like you and me, we read, you know, know this and people talk about, oh, my gosh, ESPN's getting liberal and, you know,

there have been some pieces on the networks about it. But it's in the largest scale of things. This is not one of ESPN's biggest problems. And I think that they should just continue, they have to continue their commitment to workplace equality and to about it. You're not going to let somebody all of a sudden start to say stuff just so you can avoid criticism. And hopefully you'll get a chance to point out to people that the things that the things, things that you're doing about the workplace are not about policy. You know, they really, they have to, they have to, I would, if I was an ESPN executive, I'd focus just on the best programming, the best financial model, the best arrangements that are going to safeguard the network's future,

and not even kind of, and not try and get into a whole big thing. I certainly wouldn't change anything in terms of, well, let's do this, because then it'll make people think that we're really not liberal. I mean, that's just... Jim Miller, thanks for joining the liberal conspiracy today. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Brian. All right, next up, Danny Chow. Hello, Brian.

How are you? I'm great. So we've just been through the CSPN layoff carnage, and I feel we're sort of having funerals for every part, every person and every part that has gone away. And one thing we may not have had a proper funeral for yet is True Hoop. True hoop. Yeah, True hoop has a very, very close place in my heart. It was a, well, first of all, it was a blog on ESPN. I think it started in 2005 and was later acquired by ESPN in 2007. It was created by Henry Abbott, who was a longtime editor at ESPN, just a very, very smart man who, who, who truly, who, who truly. tried to push NBA coverage at ESPN to, you know, start breaking, you know, smarter news,

trying to fix the game and all of that. Sure. But what I remember about True Hoop and what will always be the most important thing for me is how it kind of started this community, maybe even before the real rise of NBA Twitter, which is, you know, just the, you know, the leading example of, you know, how fans engage with sports now. There was one thing that he did every day. It was called The Daily Bullets. And he would, it was basically a post that was just a link dump of all of the smart things that he'd read every day.

And it ranged from, you know, columnists from leading news. papers to just obscure blogs from people you'd never heard of before. And this is cutting edge for its time. Exactly. Someone reads the internet and gives you the good links in the pre-Twitter age. Just, yeah, and that was a really cool way of, as a reader and as, you know, MBA junkies going to the site and finding out that there are other people on the internet publishing their thoughts that think exactly like you, that think, you know, in a way that, you know, in a way that

you couldn't really talk about like in a barbershop discussion or something. You know, finding fellow nerds, finding fellow, you know, wordsmiths. It was a really cool way of realizing that there was a community here of people who thought similarly and it kind of grew from there. One of the cool things that Henry was able to create was the ESPN True Hoop Network, which was a loose network of 30 team-based blogs. So each team had their own affiliate blog. And around that were a bunch of general interest NBA blogs. But they all covered the sport from a fans' perspective.

But, you know, Henry was really good about finding people who were smart and finding people who wanted to challenge the way that these, these teams were being covered because obviously you there's you know the the regular old-timey kind of newspaper's perspective and then there were you know people who wanted to get into the analytics of things who wanted to get into stronger narratives sure stuff like that you know and I think it's funny because people often ask it's like what why has NBA writing blown up in the way it has and one thing I say is that 10 years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago there was no such thing. There was no line, right? Somebody covered the NBA and it was written about it every

newspaper in the country, but it wasn't like the NFL and the MLB were the two big jobs. You know, and there wasn't like, it wasn't this kind of thing where, well, if I want to be what really big NBA writer or have a national following or even, you know, go really local on my team and do all these things. There was not a crowd of people waiting to do that. It was the lowliest big job at a newspaper. Right. So into this vacuum, you could, you know, you could do a lot of lot of things, right? You could have it be like the NFL kind of writing, which is a lot of it's kind of soulless and, you know, and hard charging, right? Or what you're talking about is you could fill that vacuum with a bunch of weird people, and then I mean weird in the best possible way, right?

People that are coming at it in their own strange, unique, local, bloggy sort of way. Right. And something that I hit on a lot in my writing is that there's something special about basketball in watching the NBA that, you know, these players aren't hiding behind anything. They're not hiding behind helmets. They're not hiding behind hats. You see these players and their charisma kind of comes off, you know, through the screen. And it felt like a way, it felt like something that a lot of us weirdo writers could kind of relate to and kind of attach ourselves to certain players. And that's definitely how I got into sports writing.

I didn't know this was a thing. I was just a, you know, a board. college freshman who somehow stumbled upon True Hoop and Free Darko and all of these other weird NBA websites and just kind of went from there. So on ESPN, True Hoop becomes kind of a larger brand in a way. And first you have the recruitment of actual beat writers, right? So we're now moving a lot of people out of the loose blogging network into the title of more or less formal beat writers, to cover all these teams. Henry is huge in recruiting, those kind of people. And then you get this kind of cool thing late in the game, which is the True Who Presents magazine pieces. Right. And this was always kind of Henry's ambition. He wanted to pursue these stories on a more, you know, wide scale kind of long form type presentation.

Yeah, and I would think of like some of the big ones being Ethan Strauss on Steph Curry's shoe deal. Yeah, that was huge. That was a gigantic NBA story. Kevin Ardivetz on the referee, Billy Kennedy, which I think was branded as a true hoop thing. A lot of Jackie McMullen's pieces as well. Yeah, and pieces that are, how would you describe very, I would say, like socially conscious.

Yeah. You know, some straight basketball-y stuff, but a lot of things that are very socially conscious that are interested in stuff like how players sleep. Right. You know, how the schedule, Tom Haberstro wrote about a lot about this, how the schedule kind of grinds them in the dust, how players get laid.

in 2017, I think was a Haberstro special. The Tenderization of the NBA. They were both getting laid and getting a lot of sleep. Which was kind of an amazing story. But that strikes me as part of True Hoop too. Yeah, it was expanding the purview of what basketball discourse could be. You know, I think before True Hoop and before True Hoop really introduced us to these differing voices and these very singular voices,

we thought about basketball a certain way. You know, Henry was very big in bringing in guys like John Hollinger, who, you know, revolutionized analytics for a while. And that was really big in kind of, and it was almost like an enlightenment period for basketball writing, for sports writing. That's a good way to put it. Yeah.

So the other thing that's really interesting for us, so two of us sitting at this table, is that they were their own little walled garden within ESPN. A little oasis, you might say. Similar to the way we were. And what's interesting about that to me is I don't want to horn in on anybody else's funeral. We already had ours. It's probably still going in some corner of the internet.

Should be noted that I'm wearing a Grantland hat right now. We're not wearing a Grantland hat as we're having this discussion. But what was interesting is, like our old shop, True Whoop had a lot of people who did not dream of growing up and working for ESPN. They really liked working at ESPN under certain circumstances, right? And it also, I won't say it existed in opposition to ESPN, but it certainly existed in opposition to a lot of the larger culture and a lot of the larger way things were done there. And that had to be some of the appeal as a reader and everything. Similar to the way ours was, it was like, this is really different,

this is moving to its own beat. It doesn't feel like it's being that Bristol is programming everything. It has a kind of a funky sort of beat of its own. Yeah, so early on when the network was still around, I mean, there's such a long list of alumni who came out of the True Hoop Network and became mega successful. I mean, Zach Lowe, you know, who many would say is the best basketball writer writing right now, came from the Celtics blog on True Hoop. Ethan Sherwood Strauss came from Warriors World. There are plenty of people who work for CBS, Sports Illustrated, ESPN Now. I was a True Hoop alumni, alumnus. You were birthed by True Hoops.

Yeah. And so when, so obviously we've, you know, the True Hoop Network has cultivated all of these great voices. And once it kind of became more formalized, once, you know, the network kind of died because the idea was always to find a way to monetize it, but it just wasn't very feasible. And at the first sign of resistance, Bristol basically kind of cut the court on that. And so when it became more of a focused affair with Ethan, with Kevin Arniewicz, writing majority of these long, great features. Yeah. Yeah, it really did feel like it was a smart,

smart way of, you know, matching both, you know, the smarts and the writing ability of these great writers with really high concept ideas that you wouldn't otherwise see in kind of, you know, the gamer area of coverage. Sure. Yeah. And I heard from people inside there that I said, you know, the told me it's like, this was a little bit like Grantland. This was kind of our version of Grantland going away.

Not just because it was sad and because a lot of people lost their jobs, which really sucks, but also this thing we built, this culture within a culture that we built, you know, is kind of gone now. And True Hoop TV and the True Hoop Podcasts that they were doing were just so wildly popular. They were able to bring in a bunch of, you know, very interesting characters to talk about, you know, how they saw the sport. And it was very, very similar to what we were trying to create at Grantland. And similarly, it felt like a very intimate connection with these writers and these personalities. Like, it felt like, you know, just... They were your pals.

Right. A living room discussion. Right. Rather than, you know, that beat writer guy on the Internet, that they were your pals, that you knew a lot about them in addition to basketball stuff. Right. So what ESPN's doing, reportedly, is bringing in Woge to be their basketball guy. and the basketball, their basketball universe will revolve around him, again, reported with a bunch of people that he's bringing over from the vertical to replace some of the people we're talking about here. How do we keep basketball writing weird?

You know, there's that old bumper sticker, keep Austin weird, you know, how do we, how on the internet, has it been, was True Hoop and Henry's vision so successful that that will keep on, keeping on no matter what happens at ESPN, do you think? it's interesting because the true hoop network depending on how you saw it was or was not successful i mean it launched the careers of of a lot of you know current writers who you know have a lot of clout in in this kind of bubble that we have but at the same time you know they were trying to make this a real thing a real money-making thing and that just completely blew up in their faces and so I don't know if there is a real route in terms of keeping it weird. Like at a certain point, all of these blogs, you know, they're created by people who have, you know, main gigs and actual day jobs.

Probably for them, yeah. Right. So, like, at a certain point, it just wasn't feasible for them to continue this. when it wasn't making any money. And so I feel like in the last couple years, in the last five years or so, the whole idea of having these independent blogs, it's died down a bit because of what ESPN

and places like SB Nation were able to create out of these team blogs, you had a sense that maybe through working at one of these blogs or writing at one of these blogs, you'd have an opportunity to become a real capital J journalist. And there just aren't that many jobs there. And so at a certain point, people realize that, you know, it's kind of a dead end. Right.

So I don't know. I mean, I would hope that The Ringer is one of those bastions for, you know, weirdo writing and weirdo opinions. Judging by the two people at this table, I think it's safe. The legacy is safe there, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the weirdo writing also has kind of trickled into the mainstream, too. So I don't think we have to search very far to see the influences of Henry and to see the influences of Freedarko or other weirdo blogs like that in just common sports writing now. And I think that's really cool. How much we can we get?

I have no idea. But I think, I'd like to think there's some DNA in the discourse today. Yeah, we are all true hoop networkers now. Yeah. That's the best legacy of all. Danny Chow, thanks for doing this. Of course, thank you. Hitting in the three hole, John Lingen.

I've been a fan of yours for a long time, and now you're writing a baseball column for the Canadian magazine Haslett. Who says Be Writing is dead? John, welcome. Thanks very much, Brian. Appreciate it. So your first column was called a season of reckoning for a, quote, white man sport, those quotes belonging to Adam Jones. We have athlete activism now in the NFL. We have it in the NBA all the way down to Greg Popovich giving a lecture on white privilege.

Why is there little to no activism in Major League Baseball? I think it's built into the sport itself. I think watching for the first month, I'm always intrigued watching some of these. big highlight real play. Which are within baseball, the guy will lay out for a huge catch and then pop right up and just, you know, make the two out sign like nothing just happened. And I don't think that there's really an incentive for anybody to share or reveal anything personal whatsoever.

One of which being, I think that the very diversity of baseball clubhouses and, you know, Major League Baseball, you know, you have people from many different. races sort of, and I've read some things that sort of highlight the fact that that can have a chilling effect. You know, if you have that many different points of view, it's not a great idea to sort of that's interesting. So you have the prospect from the Dominican Republic and you have the guy from rural Nebraska and it's part of what makes baseball really exciting, but then at the same time it makes it

dangerous because you figure any political discussion will just go off the rail so nobody says anything. Yeah, I think so. And, you know, the, it was interesting. I pulled that one quote from Adam Jones because, you know, it was one of the feasts like that that I can, you know, obviously incidents, Adam and that kind of thing. And, you know, what was interesting about that, to me, wasn't so much a few black athletes, including CCC. The interesting thing there was the fact that Jones spoke about it in public. Like, that is the odd.

That is the odd thing about that figure. You know, the example that I gave in that bed off when he refused to stay. And apparently, he didn't make a big deal out of this. And it was only, you know, revealed it on a blog or something like that. But he, and when he was asked about it, he gave all the sort of right to say. He didn't want to make a political statement. There's just, yeah, I mean, I remember a couple years ago when Arizona enacted those draconian anti-immigrant laws. And baseball is, of course, sending half of its players to Arizona for spring training.

you know, that spring. And, you know, it was, you, you could find a couple of people to really go out and talk about it. And I believe Adrian Gonzalez said something and then really took it back because he didn't want to go down this pass similar to the way he did with the Trump Hotel. But it was really hard to find anybody to talk about. And, you know, here they were in Arizona. I mean, it was, it was not a, you know, it was not a thing that was some kind of, you know, a problem that was in some faraway place. it was something they were, you know, could have been confronting every day every time they went out to eat. The perfect example.

And again, I'm going to focus on him, obviously, because he had this incident because I'm an O's fan. But, you know, he, like the absolutist and ball player. You know, he is a, he is active in his community in Baltimore. He gives, I believe, mostly to the girls and boys club, boys and girls club. And, you know, he has tailgates outside Ravens games. It's done more than any other player to sort of build. connections between those two teams. You know, he happens to be essential.

And even he, like, you know, there is gone down a little bit over the last few years, but, you know, a couple years ago, you would still find fans complaining about, you know, he chewed gum and blue bubbles while he played. You know what I mean? There's just like no, any degree, you know, upon in baseball. I mean, I think it's more than other on the back of, you know, support my guys. I'm leaving it all incentive for a player to do anything beyond that. Yeah, as we're reminded every time somebody flips a bat.

The other reason I was thinking when we say, why doesn't baseball have any activity? And the old slur about baseball players is that a lot of them don't go to college. And they come straight at a high school. And they're just, you know, for all of us, even people that spend a year in college, right? It's a place where you learn a lot of stuff and you learn a lot about, you know, activism just by walking through whatever. quad you're walking through, right? You just learn a lot about the world and that baseball players, you know, through no fault to their own because they're smart to take the money when they're 18, if only football players could do the same thing or basketball players. But

they go straight to the pros. And, you know, a lot of them just haven't really, and they go, as you point out in your piece, to really, really small towns on their way to the pros. And then suddenly they wind up in this major league locker room and they just never really thought about this stuff all that much. Yeah, this was one of my favorite things to the, I idea, not only that, you know, the minor league farm system, any sport, and think of in the United States, that, you know, many of them don't go to four-year colleges, many of them go to these sort of two-year juniorers tend to be in really tucked away places, too. And that's, it's not only, you know, quote-unquote homegrown players who do that, and many other immigrant players do this

as well, but these guys go to these little like 2,500, 3,000 person campuses or leagues. You know, I don't want to be condescending at all, but they're all, all the major league baseball teams are, you know, or propolis type areas. And in the meantime, by the time guys arrive there, they could have played in, you know, for, you know, four, five, six, sometimes many more years. So that is like a sort of, I think, a cultural diversity. a nationalistic diversity of, like, people, you know, the people that, even if people's experiences and what they've seen in the United States.

How much of this, too, is the fact that Spanish-speaking baseball players just remain out of reach of the vast majority of sports writers, you know, in terms of being able to walk into a locker room and have a conversation with those guys that doesn't involve an interpreter? I would have to say, I mean, just imagine, you know, what would be different if, you know, more beat writers, more national sport, you know, and this becomes an even bigger issue as, you know, more Asian players come in as well. Yeah, I think that that has to play a huge part. I mean, I know for a fact that, like, you know, even the lack of racial diversity among

English speaking or something like that, so, you know, any type of doubt people to, you know, it would just, you know, I know this is not the right term any long. but what locker room talk is. You know, it would just expand the idea of, like, what do you talk to that? You know, any way we can get to expand the number of topics, I think would be great. Well, and I think it's also the low-key conversation off-the-record conversation you have with these guys, right? Because you can talk to these guys, if you don't speak Spanish, you can talk to these guys, but it's a very formal exchange, right?

And you can't do what you can do with another athlete, which is just sidle up to their locker and say, let's just talk for a minute, right? And that leads to a kind of rapport, and then you can build a story of that. I grew up in the other side of the American League from you, rooting for the Rangers. And there was this incredibly bad tradition of whenever Ruben Sierra or Pudge Rodriguez or Juan Gonzalez would come to town, you'd hear sports writers and radio guys go, gee, why doesn't that guy make a better effort to learn English? And these are from writers who never made any effort to learn anything. And I just, this is just to me the great shame of sports writing that you could have, you know, that many.

And again, I don't want to indict anybody. And there's certainly been good stories this year about, like, talking to players from Venezuela, for instance, about what they think of, you know, deteriorating conditions in their home country. But that to me has got to be a driver of some of this. Especially because of baseball, you know, is so informed by the fact that these guys have such variety in their background. You know, there was incredible reporting that came out of L.A. and elsewhere when, you know, the sort of Yassiel Pueg phenomenon happened a few years ago. And, you know, talking about, you know, I didn't know much about what the realities of, you know, the Cuban baseball system was and, like, what those kinds of players had to do to get here and, you know, how the leagues were run down there. and then, you know, there was a bit more attention paid to it, of course, last year. If you want to talk about it and, you know, what sports mean in a global context, what they mean in terms of, you know, a problem and a reason why people come here,

understanding some of the backstories of these Latin American and Central American players, I think, is essential. And, you know, I think we saw that, too, with the death of Yordano Ventura over the city going. down to his incredibly complex. You know, it's just this, you know, he had an uncle parent and he was giving money to his uncle, you know, possible. The exploitative, like this is a fascinating thing to be able to watch a sport on your couch and know that, you know, the people playing it went through these things to get to where it's one of the things that are standing that and reporting on that. I think the greater service we will do to the game, what the game is now. One last thing, John, before I let you go, the, let's imagine a

Colin Kaepernick figure emerges in baseball, right? Somebody who says, I'm going to talk about police violence or some, you know, component of the Trump administration. I'm going to go after it. I'm not worried. I'm all in. Can you imagine this guy talking about this for 162 games? I mean,

remember what it was like for Kaepernick who had like one media availability during the week and then got asked about it, you know, like maybe after game in the locker room or something? I mean, that's a lot to talk about. And I just can't, you know, for somebody. just because everybody would want to write that story. Everyone would want to go in. And a lot of well-meaning reporters, right, want to go in and talk about that thing.

But I just can't imagine somebody keeping that up over 162 game season. It's just mind-blowing. No, I can't see it either. You know, and it's the same reason why, you know, there's not a Popovich figure. Like I say, I think that the sort of non-stop, you know, it's just in a distraction. And, you know, like, for example, example, if someone decided I'm not going to stand. And like you say, doing that, you know, a dozen times in a year, 16 times a year, that many, you know, like, you know, doing it 25 times a month

for six months. It's just totally, yeah, in all cities. Yeah, it's just a completely different type of thing. And that's why, you know, I think I don't bring for it, but, you know, Jones, then I think is one thing. You know, he did not make a big stand. necessarily when asked and, you know, when it was in a garish display in any way, he was just sort of using a platform to call something out and he didn't stay on it. And he brought forth a lot of other players who backed him up. And he brought forth a lot of discussion in the media. And he sort of forced some level of reckoning, I suppose, among Boston fans. I think that might be the kind thing were to panic equivalent

of that if it were to come you know to pass he commented only on something that happened which I think is just you know see yeah and some horrible act that was as ancient and awful as the stuff that happened to Jackie Robinson John Lingen thanks for joining us I really appreciate it oh I appreciate it

very much Brian thanks again thanks hugely to James Andrew Miller to Danny Chow to John Lingen we'll be back soon and listen all the other great stuff on Channel 33 see ya