Share & Walk Alone & Tell with Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski

Have billionaire owners left us in the twilight of American fandom? Are crying Liverpool fans actually the cure for male loneliness? And is the NFL offseason running out of juice? Would you get married during the Super Bowl on Valentine's Day? Plus: Jim Thome's farm adjacency, Regis Philbin analytics, Gerry and the Pacemakers, institutional investors, the worst pandemic crowd... and feeding a sandwich to Stugotz on Microsoft Teams. • Read "Big Fan" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/778607/big-fan-by-michael-schur-and-joe-posnanski-foreword-by-tom-hanks/ • Subscribe to The PosCast https://pod.link/1595575940 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:19Pablo Torre?

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• 1:24Pablo Torre?

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• 2:08Pablo Torre?

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• 2:33Pablo Torre?

  LeBron's 23-year NBA averages. 27.7 rebounds, 7 assists. He has never had a game in which he has gotten 27.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  Not wild?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Wow, I like that.

• 2:46Pablo Torre?

  But then I went on this deep dive. And it... Thank you, buddy. Probably you want to order? Uh, no, I'm good. Okay, thank you. It turns out that math... It's one of these great things where like mathematically, it's actually not that unusual.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  How is that possible?

• 3:01Pablo Torre?

  I don't know, but there's all these people who like broke down the math and like, he's only had three games of 28, 7 and 7. He's had three games of 27, 8 and 7. He's had three games of 27, 7 and 8.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 3:14Pablo Torre?

  It's weirdly not that... It's... There's only like a... It's like 20% chance that he would get to this point without that actual stat line, but it's not, you know, .004%.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  That's crazy. I still love it's an oldie but a goodie. I still love that Roger Maris was not intentionally walked one time the year he had 60.

• 3:36Pablo Torre?

  That's a great one.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  That's a good one. That's a really good one.

• 3:39Pablo Torre?

  Baseball-wise, Boggs popping up to the infield twice in the season, in the 368 season.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  It's amazing, right?

• 3:45Pablo Torre?

  It's great.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Well, there used to be. The MVP one was unbeatable. You could build an actual full team of players that have won back-to-back MVPs.

• 3:55Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:56Pablo Torre?

  There were exactly nine.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  It was exactly nine and it was on every position, yeah.

• 4:00Pablo Torre?

  For those who are not familiar with what you guys do, this is mostly it.

• 4:06Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for being here.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say though.

• 4:08Pablo Torre?

  I always hang up the phone with my credit card company and I take down a note and then I'm like, you guys are just trading stats.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  That's all we do.

• 4:16Pablo Torre?

  And history.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  That's pretty much it, yeah.

• 4:18Pablo Torre?

  Can you right now name those nine guys?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:21Pablo Torre?

  Okay, Hal Newhouse is the pitcher.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Hal Newhouse is the pitcher.

• 4:23Pablo Torre?

  Yogi Bear is the catcher. Let me see if I can do it, because I know you can. You wrote like seven books about this.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Bear is the catcher.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Garrick is first baseman? No.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, wait, let me think about this. Morgan at second.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Morgan's the second.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Shortstop is, there might be two now, are there two?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  There now are.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Rip, no, A-Rod.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  No, A-Rod didn't win back to back. Maybe there's only one.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  He didn't win back to back?

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Mm-mm.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Then who am I forgetting?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  The guy who had the original.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  The guy who did it?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Actually, it's pretty easy. It's the obvious choice.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Honus Wagner?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  No, no, that's well before MVPs.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Is it up?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Think about, who'd the best shortstop? Think about your favorite shortstop, the guy you had to have his card.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Oh, no, really?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Wait, my favorite shortstop?

• 5:11Speaker 03

  I don't know if he's your favorite shortstop, but I think you got a really cool, like, 1958 card of his, if I'm not mistaken.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Ernie Banks.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Ernie Banks.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  That's not my favorite shortstop.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  No, no. Yeah, but you did get that card. You thought that card was awesome.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I did think that card was awesome.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Third base is Schmidt?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  So, alright, outfield would be, is it, does it, did it break down right, center, and left?

• 5:39Speaker 03

  I believe so, yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Did it really?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  DiMaggio?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Ted Williams?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  No?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Oh, Ted Williams might be left.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mantle?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Mantle, yes.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And he counts as center?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  He counts as center, but it's then the guy who actually played center, but you can put him in right.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Oh, so there's no right fielder, so it's not Clemente?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  It's not Clemente.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Guy who actually played center and you can put him in right?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  And more recent than those guys, an 80s guy.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Jesse Barfield.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Dale Murphy.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Oh, Murphy, right.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Alright, so who did I miss? Who is it first?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  First base was, um...

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Frank Thomas came along and he did it. But I think Thomas is not the original. Maybe he is, maybe Thomas is the original first baseman.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Who else could it be?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  It could be, I don't think Fox won back to back.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  What the [bleep] are you guys talking about?

• 6:58Pablo Torre?

  If you have not turned off your phone already, or your YouTube browser window, it is a joy to have you both here. Oh, thank you, buddy.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 7:07Pablo Torre?

  It's a joy to be here, and I have to say in person now, yes, congratulations.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right.

• 7:12Pablo Torre?

  What an incredible honor for you.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 7:15Pablo Torre?

  Thank you.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  How cool is that?

• 7:16Pablo Torre?

  Well, it's cool because Joe Posnanski, I used to fact-check you at Sports Illustrated.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I remember. I actually really remember this.

• 7:23Pablo Torre?

  And I was just looking through my Gmail inbox, Mike Schur, a guy who has been on the show many times before. And I was looking at like, what did I used to ask Joe Posnanski, one of America's great sports writers and the co-author of this new book you have, big fan that you've written together? And I was asking you stuff like, did Jim Tome literally grow up on a farm? Because you say he's quote-unquote "farm-strong."

• 7:46Speaker 03

  I, one of my favorite things, and of course, this is so long gone, was getting those, those fact-check emails for people. Because, I mean, it was so frustrating because you're like, oh, God, these questions. But at the same time, it was like, oh, I can't screw up. I mean, there is somebody really working hard.

• 8:07Pablo Torre?

  A human being is looking into whether I wrote.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  And look, calling the people, making sure the quotes are right.

• 8:14Pablo Torre?

  Did Tome grew up on a farm or not?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  He did not. No, and "farm-strong" was intended, I think, just more of a, as a, which I believe I told you.

• 8:21Pablo Torre?

  Exactly right.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:22Pablo Torre?

  And for those listening, the Tome's, if they are listening, let the record show, not farm people.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Not farm people. No, they are not. They're Peoria people, but not farm people.

• 8:31Pablo Torre?

  Farm-adjacent. I was also, you gave me Marvin Miller's contact info at one point. Like, it's just funny, man. I'm like, look at this, this is like 2010, 2011, when I was at Sports Illustrated fact-checking. So fractional, fractional Pulitzer for Joe Posnanski is what I'm here to hand out. But actually, the thing I wanted to start and want to start with, and there's a lot I want to get to about fandom and sports fandom and all this stuff. I think I have a take that I'm piloting, that we might actually be in the twilight of the sports fan.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:58Pablo Torre?

  Peak sports fan, but peering over into some sort of an abyss. I want to get to that. But speaking of awards, the thing in this book that made me laugh the hardest, maybe?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:08Pablo Torre?

  As you guys go on a tour of America together, was Joe Posnanski's trip to Hollywood.

• 9:14Pablo Torre?

  A year ago this month.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  A year ago this month.

• 9:17Pablo Torre?

  Because what happened there, Joe?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Because a year ago this month, a guy named Michael Schur was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And my favorite part about all of this was, we were on our very, very first trip for this book. We were in Texas, driving from Austin to Dallas. And we were talking just exactly the way we always do on every podcast. Nothing changes when we're not on air. It doesn't matter. And at some point, he just lets it slip that he's getting a, and he's embarrassed about it, that he's getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And he's, you know, just not, it, it, he didn't, he didn't tell me. He like, it just slipped out. It was sort of like, oh, I've got this thing coming up and whatever.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  And I immediately said, well, I'm going to that and I'm gonna write about it. And he's like, not a chance. I mean, not a chance that you're doing that. And I'm like, oh, I'm totally going. Absolutely. And, and he was not happy.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  As I remember it, it was a, I'm going, no, you're not. I'm, yes, I am. No, you're not. It was basically duck season, rabbit season.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  It really was.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  For like a good 30 miles.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Until I said, okay, I'm not. Yes, you are. Like you switched it up on me.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  I, I did not want to start here. I did not want this to be the topic to be discussed.

• 10:36Pablo Torre?

  As many people are, I learned in this book, I'm on a group chat with Mike Schur.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:41Pablo Torre?

  And the details of it are hard to summarize, but you would attempt to, how?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I would say, and this is true, that I am honored to be the token white guy in, on this group chat, which is how I was asked to join.

• 10:55Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  It was, this isn't me.

• 10:57Pablo Torre?

  We were running affirmative action for white guys.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  There was a DEI situation where you guys, I had to get one white guy. It's, it's you, Mina Kynes, Alan Yang, and me. And we mostly talk about sports and culture and it's a, it's a mini Publatory Finds Out kind of casual friend version.

• 11:16Pablo Torre?

  And, and Avatar, which was thrilling to discover, is attached to my entry in the index of this book. And that'll be a total. Easter egg, I'm not gonna explain it? It's just in here?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  The original point of the thread was to discuss Alan Yang's pending nuptials and the movie Avatar. Those are the only two topics we could discuss.

• 11:38Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And you, and the Avatar part of that is what leads you to show up in this book.

• 11:42Pablo Torre?

  Which we will, again, we will not explain. But I say this all to say that I'm on this group chat with Mike and he doesn't [bleep] tell us.

• 11:52Pablo Torre?

  I'm scrolling through my feed one day and I'm like, "Is this a video of Mike Schur kneeling on the sidewalk? Wait a minute, is he kneeling in front of a star with his name on it?"

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, like he was being knighted. It was truly like he was being knighted. I don't know how it's possible he kept it as private and quiet as he did.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  There's a reason for this, and I said this, I had to make a speech and I said this in the speech and it's true. Like, you go into writing specifically to avoid moments like that. You know, like, everyone staring at you. People who want that become actors. People who don't want that become writers. And so it's a very weird position to be in where it's a lovely honor. I was very flattered. I found it weirdly moving to have people there.

• 12:41Pablo Torre?

  And of course, they read Mike's credits. The Office, Parks and Rec, Saturday Night Live, Man on the Inside, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It goes on and on and on. But the video, I think we should just play the video for a second.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Really? Should we, though?

• 12:56Pablo Torre?

  If we could just, yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, we definitely should, yeah.

• 12:59Pablo Torre?

  Because when they pull off the covering to reveal it is in fact Mike Schur, your look is, it's that of a man who was watching a stripper pop out of a cake that he did not order. Like, I should politely acknowledge what's happened here, but there's a general unease.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Look at Ted, so Ted Danson and Kristen Bell and Amy Poehler and a bunch of other people were there.

• 13:26Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And look at, so Ted and Amy are like, this is old hat to them. They know what to do. I don't know what to do in this moment.

• 13:34Pablo Torre?

  What do you do with your hands? It turns out you will, I class them-

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Class them so tightly as to prevent circulation. Like I'm about to receive communion is what I look like. Ted and Amy are smiling and they look camera-ready and they're happy and I've never felt more awkward in my life.

• 13:50Pablo Torre?

  And, and- Was there merch?

• 13:52Speaker 03

  There was merch. The whole thing was wonderful. My favorite, favorite moment probably was when they introduced Mike. And they were like, producer, writer, showrunner, actor. And as soon as they said actor, everybody broke out laughing. Like, literally, everybody broke out laughing. Uh, but they gave out little fans, actual, like, those little hand, battery-operated fans. And it was like, Mike Schur fan. It was, that was the name of it.

• 14:21Pablo Torre?

  Like, said it on it.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. It said on it, yeah, Mike Schur fan. And, uh, and I, I keep that at a very precious place.

• 14:28Pablo Torre?

  Let's talk about the book.

• 14:34Pablo Torre?

  One of the conversations that I did want to have is about sports fandom as its own category of fandom, though. Because one of the things that is written in this book that Mike actually observes is that, and we don't ever talk about this, but it is amazing that we are here, Joe, with the son-in-law of the late, great, Reed, just filled in.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:53Pablo Torre?

  And his statistics, speaking of statistics.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got a lot of them.

• 14:55Pablo Torre?

  Do you have them committed to memory? Do you need me to help you with this?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Well, he was awarded the Guinness Book of World Record for most hours on TV.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Most hours on TV.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And the total was?

• 15:04Pablo Torre?

  Sixteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-six point five.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then he was awarded that and went, well, that's great, thanks so much. And then he was on TV for like another thousand hours after that.

• 15:14Pablo Torre?

  The great stat you had on this page is that, that is six hundred and ninety-eight consecutive full twenty-four-hour days of being on television. For comparison purposes, the US was involved in World War I for five hundred and eighty-four, yeah, full days.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  He was on TV for a world war's worth of time.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  I mean, there were a million things like that. He started, you know, in San Diego local TV when he was in his early twenties after getting out of the Navy and, and was just, essentially never left. He just started being on TV and never stopped. And that record will never be broken.

• 15:43Pablo Torre?

  But the notion that there used to be on television these stars of this sort of a tonnage and wattage, and now in the fragmentation of everything, Joe.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:53Pablo Torre?

  It's never been more valuable.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:56Pablo Torre?

  And this is both kind of a point of pride for people, I think, who worked in sports. And it's always been popular, but like now it's like, holy crap.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:04Pablo Torre?

  Like, everybody else wants a piece of this.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and specifically. Specifically, the NFL and that, you know, the recent, the schedule release, which now it's so funny.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  What do you think of the schedule release now that it's like competitive comedy sketch writing?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  What are we doing?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  What are we doing?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  It's like, it's a, it's a deliberate, slow drip of information where you're like, the second Sunday night game is Bengals Cowboys or whatever. Like, like they are so powerful that they're able to do that and get news cycles out of so many little moments. But it feels extremely risky to me because they are so cocky. They are so cocky with the way they do it. And at some point, at some year, I don't know when, it's going to land like a thud. People are going to not care in the way that they currently care.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And I just cannot believe the degree to which they dominate the news media with things that are not the sport. Like no other sport, no other institution in, ever in America has been able to do that.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like they keep squeezing the lemon and, and you're like, at some point it runs out of juice. But I don't know that it does ever.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  I don't know, man.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  The, the draft to me is, is fascinating in the same way that the schedule thing is. In that, we can, how often are you going to get fooled by the draft? I mean, there's only going to be a couple of players in this draft that are going to be true, true impact players. There'll be some that will be, uh, you know, successes and most will not live up to the expectations, right?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  That's more explicable to me though, because that's about promise, right? That's about like, any of these guys could be, the greatest thing that ever happened in the NFL was Tom Brady at 199, becoming Tom Brady. Because now, if you're, if you're a true psycho fan, you've got to watch your sixth round pick. Because for the entire sixth round, Mel Kiper Jr. is going to be reminding you that Tom Brady was pick number 199. And, and Brock Purdy.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Brock Purdy was, was Mr. Irrelevant.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  So that's even, now there's whatever, 60 picks later, there's a guy who matters. So I just. Think it's not called the goose that laid the golden eggs and then it just kept on laying golden eggs forever. It's which is how they're treating it. They are trying to kill the goose and still get the eggs. And it's not gonna work at some point.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Only because I think they're gonna make the product worse and worse and worse. They're gonna add another game. They're gonna keep doing things to like make it so that it's.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  They're putting the Super Bowl on Valentine's Day. Do you know that?

• 18:42Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  The Super Bowl.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  The Super Bowl.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Is on Valentine's Day.

• 18:46Pablo Torre?

  It's a bit on the nose.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  The NBA had Christmas, they're coming for that. They've already taken Thanksgiving. They are now going after Valentine's Day, which means that a whole lot of people are figuring out right now, here in May, how to explain to their significant others that they can't do anything on Valentine's Day next year.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Well, and you know that like, Super Bowl Sunday is always right, like the, the, the day with the fewest weddings, right? Like, isn't like, that's like, obviously, people are just never scheduled. So now there's gonna be no weddings on Valentine's, and they're just, we're shunning America down.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  But this is also all, they're expanding their territory, it's empire expansion.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  That's what I mean.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And, and this is because they're already counting on the 18th game that will push the schedule another week or two later.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  But you're, you're, I'm less skeptical that they will conquer the entire world.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I, no, I, I don't think they can. I just think that at some point.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  I think they can.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I, at some point, the product is spread too thin and it collapses.

• 19:44Pablo Torre?

  Before we get to the truly foreboding crystal ball, I do want to explain. So many of the things that you've already mentioned just spontaneously are themes running through this book.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:57Pablo Torre?

  The idea that there are hundreds of thousands of people in real life who will go and fill the streets of a host city for the draft.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:06Pablo Torre?

  The idea that men will leave their ostensible loved ones to hang out and just name some dudes.

• 20:14Pablo Torre?

  The idea that we are starving for something psychologically.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:20Pablo Torre?

  You know, I, I think you can go to certainly NFL stadiums for that, but you don't need to. I wanna actually paint the picture of darts.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Well, start with the fact that darts was the impetus to write the book because a buddy of mine sent me a video and said, you gotta watch this. And it was two stocky gentlemen throwing darts at a dartboard with blank expressions on their faces, just thunk thunk thunk.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  But as they did this, a crowd of what appeared to be thousands of people behind them, with each throw, got like their engines revving higher and higher and higher.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  I've never seen the like. Come on, Spudgy Boy! Yes! Double 12! That is the most amazing lego dance you will ever see in your life! I can't speak! I can't speak! So unbelievable!

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Every throw and every successive throw made them go crazier and crazier. Look at that. Look at that, John. And they dump beer on each other and they throw napkins in the air. And then I noticed as I'm watching the video, I start to notice they're all dressed in costume, these fans. They are wearing Harry Potter costumes. Some of them are dressed like the Jamaican bobsled team. So I had the idea for the book. Immediately, I called Joe and I said, "You gotta watch this video and then I think we should write a book where we go around the world and go to these weird events and try to see if my theory that I'm forming in real time is true, which is these fans, as crazy as they look and as crazy as they're

• 22:02Speaker 01

  acting, are essentially just like us. That they're like, I recognize in myself a passion and a fervor and an insanity that for me is reserved for baseball and the NBA and whatever else, but for these people, it was these two stocky, blank-faced British dudes throwing darts at a dartboard. And he watched the video and he basically said, "Yeah, let's do it." And then that's the beginning of the adventure.

• 22:25Pablo Torre?

  One of the things that I think you guys share in common that I love to tap into, because I think it's really at my core as well, although it's coated with many now poisoned layers of irony. Is the idea of like, you look at this scene at the alley pally in England and these characters, like Ronald McDonald's and all, it's crazy. And on some level, it's like, this seems almost sarcastic or ironic. And then you watch these videos or you attend any given sporting event in which people care, and you're like brought to tears.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Mike loves to talk about one of his friends who became a Steelers fan when he was young, simply because his father was a Cowboys fan. So he did it just to like, you know, just to put up like the middle finger to his father, essentially. And now he's, there's no irony about it. It started ironically.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  But now he's a lunatic Steelers fan. And I think that was the feeling, certainly we had at the darts, but everywhere else, where you go and you're like, this is a laugh, right? This is a joke. But then you're like, no, people truly cared and got into it. And anytime they would, someone would get close to a nine darter, the place would like really light up. And, and it's, it's funny because I do think, you know, like that old line that in order to be happy, you should smile and then that'll make you feel happier. I think there's something to that with fandom. Like it might start ironically, it might start as like a laugh, but then it gets inside you and it becomes something different.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I think, to me, the most important interview or event that we undertook was we talked to a professor of sports psychology named Daniel Wong, who teaches at Murray State. He's been studying fandom in its all its forms for a very long time. And he said something that is so obviously empirically true, but that I had never articulated, which was like, if sports were just like fun and distracting and entertaining. Okay, yeah, people would be kind of into it. But there's a billion or more sports fans in the world of all different kinds. And he said, the way he put it was, if that's true,

• 24:40Speaker 01

  then this thing, fandom, has to be meeting basic psychological and emotional needs. Like, there are needs that we have as a species that are being met by this phenomenon. And when you stop thinking of it as like, oh, yeah, I like baseball. And you start thinking of it as, this is meeting a basic emotional need that I have in one way or another, you start to understand why I, Mike, will cry at any video of a dramatic last-second buzzer-beater NBA shot in which there's a crowd pop. Any video where you're in the back row and it gets quiet, the ball's in the air, you can't even see it because the video's too small, and then suddenly the entire crowd erupts.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I have the instinct to cry every time I watch one of those. And the same is true of walk-off homers. If I see a video of Joe Carter's walk-off homer in the World Series. If I see, like, Jackie Robinson stealing home and safe by a millimeter. I feel tears well up in my eyes. And that is not, and that's when it's not even my team or a big moment or whatever. And then you add on to that, now I have an 18-year-old son. I share those moments with my son. We went to Game 2 of the NBA Finals in '24 and saw the Celtics win. I cried on the plane on the way before the game. I cried during the game and I cried after the game. And now if we watch the video, I'll cry all over it.

• 26:00Pablo Torre?

  All right, it's getting harder to trust that Mike is a reliable witness the more he tells this story.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  The point is, basic emotional needs being met is a better way to think of the power of fandom than just, it's fun to watch basketball.

• 26:21Speaker 01

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• 28:06Pablo Torre?

  So for those not familiar, Joe, for those who are not dyed-in-the-wool soccer fans, don't know Liverpool's whole deal. As Mike is a Liverpool fan and a Red Sox fan, because you have to be.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:18Pablo Torre?

  But it was a coincidence. I became a Liverpool fan long before the John Henry Group ever bought the team. Total coincidence. I just believe you root for private equity. I don't believe you.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  He does that also.

• 28:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and also then I also have my choice of teams. There's plenty of.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  So one of the first things, maybe even the first thing that we said, Mike said, we should each have a dream chapter where we get to do something we've never done, that we've always wanted to do. And Mike really has been a Liverpool fan since 98. And he talks about his origin story and how he became a Liverpool fan. And he's like, we need to go, I need to go, you know, Mike needs to go to Anfield to, to, he'd never been and, and, you know, it's, it's one thing to love a Premier League team and never have seen them, but it's particularly the case at Liverpool, right? Cause Liverpool is, is such a historic, you know, thing. You have to go and, and hear them sing, you'll never walk alone and everything else.

• 29:11Pablo Torre?

  Just, just, so I don't really care about Liverpool at all.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 29:16Pablo Torre?

  But I dare anyone with a pulse.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:20Pablo Torre?

  To go, go to youtube.com or your preferred illegal streaming service and look up, you'll never walk alone.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  It's unbelievable.

• 29:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  So I went with Mike. It was a miserable day. I mean, absolutely just spitting ice and, and, and people are slipping and sliding and it's muddy and, and it's so cold. And we go in and, you know, Mike's really excited. And we went with a couple of people who were also big Liverpool fans, Brandon McCarthy and our friend Matt.

• 30:02Pablo Torre?

  Pitcher Brandon McCarthy.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  The pitcher Brandon McCarthy was a huge Liverpool fan. And we all go and me, and I'm not a Liverpool fan, uh, at all. Uh, and so we all go and you could just see Mike, Mike really was, it was, he was like a kid. It was like, he was vibrating. He was really, really excited about going. And we sit there and I'm like, this is really cool to watch Mike enjoy this. And then they did You'll Never Walk Alone. And you're like, I'm at the center of the world. I mean, that's how it feels.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  It's the tradition. It's the thing that makes that clubs, games famous. Also, you know, the worst day probably in UK sports history was a FA Cup match in which there was a collapse of the stands because of some very bad engineering and bad planning and crowd control. And a lot of people died. And so that has added this, that the lyrics of the song take on a deeper meaning when moments like that happen. So it was a thing I had been thinking about for 30 years of my life. What will it be like to be in that stadium and hear that song and sing it? And then it was exactly the way I pictured it, which is like for a fan, that's like as good as it gets, you know?

• 31:28Pablo Torre?

  So this is a song that started, it was Rodgers and Hammerstein. This was in the musical Carousel from 1945. Then Jerry and the Pacemakers, Liverpool Band. They take it over in 63. And it has become an anthem in which, again, one of the best parts of these videos beyond hearing the palpable goose flesh is seeing the faces of all these dudes.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:54Pablo Torre?

  Who look like, in any other context, they're like brandishing some like prison weapon.

• 32:04Pablo Torre?

  And they're just.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Weeping.

• 32:07Pablo Torre?

  They're weeping.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:08Pablo Torre?

  And so I am not somebody who's here to make everything about the male loneliness crisis. But it's really hard.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  But it's not not about that.

• 32:17Pablo Torre?

  It's really hard to avoid what this makes people who otherwise might be fundamentally uncomfortable, viscerally uncomfortable feeling, like actually free to feel.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Well, a huge part of fandom, and we talked to Professor Wan about this, is where does it come from, right? How do you? You adopt it. And for so many people, it comes down from, from the generation before, fathers and mothers and grandparents and so forth. It comes from communities. It comes from places where there is a sense of you are part of something larger than yourself. And there are plenty of stories about, if you could jump into those videos and ask those crying Liverpudlians, how many of you right now are thinking about your dad? Or how many of you are thinking about your grandmother or whatever? It would be 98.7%

• 33:05Pablo Torre?

  They're not thinking about the musical kerosene.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I love Rogers. I'm a big Rogers and Hammerstein guy. There is a story from 2004 that I think about all the time, from the Red Sox World Series, where a guy was like, you know what I really want to do in the aftermath of the Red Sox finally winning is I want to like, talk to my dad who passed away. And so his dad is buried in, I think, Mount Auburn Cemetery. And it's, you know, 2:45 in the morning, and there's church bells ringing everywhere and whatever. But it's 2:45 in the morning, and he goes out walking, and he's, and he's like, I don't know how I'm gonna get in. I guess I'll have to climb the fence or something. But he brings a bottle of champagne and a Red Sox hat. He's gonna leave it at the grave. And as he's walking towards the cemetery, he starts to see more and more people falling

• 33:49Speaker 01

  into the path. He gets there. Someone has anticipated this happening and has unlocked and opened the gates to Mount Auburn Cemetery. He walks in, he lays a hat and a bottle of champagne on his dad's grave, and sees in his line of sight, 25 other people doing the same thing. So when you think of fandom as something, which you are a steward, a caretaker for your group of friends, your family, your generational line, then you start to understand the weeping at, you'll never, a Jerry and the Pacemakers cover of a Rogers and Hammerstein song. And, and those things start to make a lot more sense. And I, like, I, I'm not kidding that when I say, like, every time for the rest of my life, I see Peyton Pritchard's

• 34:32Speaker 01

  half-court buzzer beater in game two of the finals, like, I will think about my son, I will cry. You are not thinking of just the event. You're thinking of the people in your life that it represents, where you got this from. Going to games with your mom or your dad when you're a kid, like all that stuff is contained in these moments and that's what makes it so powerful.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think specifically talking about the male loneliness thing, a couple of weeks ago, I went to this, like, it was a group of psychologists talking about various sports things and one of the themes they were talking about was this notion that when you ask sort of the typical guy, what movies are you allowed to cry in? There used to be like one answer, like you only could say Brian Song was like the only movie you were allowed to cry. Football, it's loud, it's loud. Yeah, it's loud, it's football and the guy dies, I mean, come on. And, and the, and the other answer, so he was telling us what the answers were and, and Brian Song is still right up there, but the final scene in Field of Dreams, that you're allowed to cry there.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Allowed, sure.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  You're allowed to cry for father playing catch for the son.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I would be such an outlier for this interview. I'd be like Inside Out, right?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Inside Out, yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  And Toy Story 3.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  How about the beginning of Up?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Oh, the first half of Up, are you kidding me?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  It's crazy. But, yeah, but, but, but the point that they were making was that, that they, they, they were doing studies on what women talk about when they get together and it's relationships and it's, and it's, you know, love and it's, it's, it's books and it's this and it's this and the, and what do men talk about sports? Like, that's like, I mean, it's a cliche, but there's some real data behind it.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Is the theory that because they're talking to their friends about sports, that like them seeing sad moments in sports movies makes them connect to their friends and so forth?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  The theory is that, that sports and fandom allows you to feel real emotion.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I think I buy that.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that like when the Cubs finally won, the emotion that poured out of people, that would not normally be emotional, right? Like people talking about their grandfathers and, and, and all of this and, and, I mean, the argument that, that the psychologist was making, which I thought was fascinating, is that we as a society need to do a much better job of letting men feel emotion? Like, that, that was the larger.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  It's a hell of a monopoly that sports is running right now. It really is. An incredible moat, as they say in the world of business. But I want to get to that mode, actually, because it's so interesting to think about fandom coming out of the pandemic. Because in the pandemic, of course, this experiment that was unprecedented and otherwise impossible was run for the first time, in which fans were not in the building. Right, yeah. And so if you're isolating the variable of like, so what's this business all about? It's notable that the ratings went down, everyone was just like, this is worse. Yeah. Right? And the games were happening with the same guys on the same courts and fields. But it was the lack of the reaction. It's the reaction video without the reaction.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  It's just like, oh, we're just like watching this in a vacuum. Yeah. And I thought that was so telling about like what we're also even primarily maybe here for, even if we don't tell ourselves that, we're here for other people to be here with us. Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  I think, I think that I'd be really interested to hear Mike's thoughts specifically on this, because I've thought about this. That seems very spoilt, like it wasn't the same watching it without the cheers, without the people in the stands. But there was a moment that Mike was right there on the cusp where they stopped putting laugh tracks on comedy.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  And it was still hilarious to people.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Well, not immediately.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  No, I mean, The Office US pilot was, by some measures, the lowest testing pilot in the history of the National Broadcasting Corporation. Now, Greg Daniels, who adapted the show, had told NBC, this is such a revolutionary thing, it's completely different from, you know, Will and Grace and Friends and Seinfeld and you, it's not, no one's gonna like this, you just have to be prepared for that. Now, some of that was just him being smart and sort of prophylactically defending his work, but he was 100% right. And it's not like The Office was the first single, what's called, single camera comedy, where it's shot sort of cinematically, where there's no studio audience and you're not in a proscenium set with like, you know, think of the Friends coffee house, right? Where like, one of the walls is missing because that's where the audience is, and

• 39:04Speaker 01

  they laugh at all the jokes. There had been other single camera shows before this certainly, but The Office had a double layer between the audience, which is that there was no laugh track and also the actors were aware of the cameras. It was, for the time, extremely experimental. And no one liked it. If you go back and watch, read the reviews, they're very fun to read. Everyone hates it. This is terrible, it's so boring, it's obnoxious. But what Greg said was, "We have to retrain the audience to understand this visual language and this comedic language." Thanks to the comedic genius of Steve Carell, and John Krasinski, and Rainn Wilson, and Jenna Fisher, and all of the people on the show, the show managed

• 39:47Speaker 01

  to break through and obviously became what it became. But those sorts of moments in TV history are very difficult to get through because people don't like being retrained. They like what they like. And at that time, in 2004 in the US, what they liked was Friends and Will and Grace and Seinfeld and everything else.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  But do you think that, I don't think that could ever happen in sports, no matter how much you retrain.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  No. So the difference, I would say, is that you can retrain people to some extent if you just are really good and people start to slowly learn. You know, Steve Carell was in The Forty Year Old Virgin between season one and two. So people were like, "Oh, that guy. Oh, that guy's funny." Now their brains have been rewired and they're like, "Oh, that's a funny person. I will now watch this show." Things like that can happen. Sports is just sports. Baseball's baseball. Basketball's basketball. The weirdest sport to me during the pandemic with no crowds was baseball.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  It was unholy. It was horrifying. And partly, I think that's because a home run being hit, like a deep fly ball, outfielder going back, gets to the wall, tink, donk, tink, dunk, just the ball just rattling around the metallic outfield bleachers was just so disorienting and weird. But it was so weird in the NBA that in the bubble, they had to put like giant monitors in with giant heads.

• 41:08Pablo Torre?

  I was a virtual fan for a Heat game. It was, it was.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  In playoffs?

• 41:16Pablo Torre?

  No, this was just in the bubble.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:18Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, like I think during, actually, you know what? It's telling that I can't recall. It might have been a playoff game. It was truly flattened into being totally unremarkable.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  So, set the scene for me. You're in your home. I am in, I'm on a, I'm on Long Island in a rented house during the pandemic.

• 41:35Pablo Torre?

  Sure.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  And I am watching the Miami Heat play on Zoom. Or rather, maybe it was like a Microsoft platform. They had some sponsorship to me.

• 41:43Pablo Torre?

  Sure, Teams. You gotta get Teams.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  It's important, it's important that Microsoft Teams gets credit for this.

• 41:49Pablo Torre?

  I was a fan, I think Stugatz was a fan.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:52Pablo Torre?

  And we were like, kind of like Brady bunching each other. And it was, that was it.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Because that, look, watching TV is an individualistic thing, for the most part. Maybe there's a Survivor watch party or that you go to or whatever. Generally speaking, you're home alone or you're with your spouse or your family, whatever. But you're watching individually. Sports is collective. Even if you're at home watching it individually, you're, the sense you have.

• 42:18Pablo Torre?

  You want to be watching other people watch collectively if you're alone.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  You want to feel vicarious happiness for the people who jump up in the air and do this when someone hits a buzzer beater. Like, it's not the same as TV. That's a, it's a much different relationship people have. By the way, I have to ask, did the Heat win or lose?

• 42:33Pablo Torre?

  I'm pretty sure they lost.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Great.

• 42:36Pablo Torre?

  I also remember, I think I tried to feed Stugatz a, Stugatz a sandwich, like through, it was, it was diet, it was like.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Wait, like you made a sandwich and he made a sandwich and you did this?

• 42:45Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I think we were trying to like feed each other. It was bleak, man. The pandemic was a real bleak time.

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• 44:04Pablo Torre?

  Sports fandom at this moment of definitively unprecedented but seemingly infinite sort of economic power amid all this fragmentation in which you can't make stars in entertainment the same way, you still can get these communities, especially around the NFL, to care about these games such that the evaluations of these teams are... I mean, Joe, the idea that, hey, guess what? The Lakers are a $10 billion franchise and we all just like nod along. Sure, why not? What's happening, my theory of the case, as we look into the, again, the foreboding crystal ball, is that because the only people who can afford to buy these teams, once we reach that threshold, are not people but institutional investors,

• 44:49Pablo Torre?

  Right. like private equity firms, we are entering a period where that humanness that we've been talking about for an hour, that...

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Ineffable but palpable fandom will never be less important

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  To them.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  To the people who actually will own sports.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  This is exactly the problem, I think. If you owned the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934, you need to go sign a bunch of good players so that people will take a dime and buy a ticket to the game and then buy a hot dog and a soda or a beer because that's how you are making money.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  It is literally like you have expenses, which are your players, and you have revenue, which is tickets. And we are so far away from that now. Why is the NBA showing a game seven on Amazon Prime? Because Amazon Prime gave them a ton of money.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And the degree to which fans attending games matters to the people who own these teams has never been lower. And it's only going to get lower as the NFL renegotiates their TV deals and they break their season into 50 parts. And they sell one piece to Netflix and one piece to Peacock and one piece to CBS and one piece to Fox and on and on and on. The people who are sitting in the stadium and paying money to be there are a complete afterthought.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  And that means that the product that they are presenting to the people is almost completely divorced from the people who made it valuable to begin with.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Across the board, it's not just the fans that go to the game. It's we don't care if you don't have Amazon Prime. The game seven is on Amazon Prime anyway. We don't care. They gave us the most money. So the fans' consideration, I mean, the NFL is far and away the leader in this world, but across the board, the fans are not considered at all. And that's for their home experience, that's for going to the game experience, that's individual teams trying to win. That's not important to them. You know, we were having this conversation about your good pal Steve Ballmer. He wanted to win.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  He wanted to win.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  The nicest thing I will say about Mr. Ballmer.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Is that that guy is a super fan.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  A super fan.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  He will spend. According to my reporting, more than allowed to win on what it is to get the thing that you thought sports could deliver you as a billionaire, which is this feeling of, I get the trophy, I get the thing that every fan also wants. And I dare say that we will get to a point amid all of these private equity firms and institutional investors owning everything, because they're the only ones who can afford it, that we will long for the unhinged, rule-breaking billionaire.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  I think we already do.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  We already do.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  I think we already do.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Mark Cuban's loss is already being felt, right? Like, you already feel that. We got Steve Cohen, a man so insanely capitalistic, it doesn't matter, who cares? But you can count the number of these people on one hand, and a great irony, the world's most virulent capitalists bond together in a socialist collective in order to remove competition and maximize profit for their leagues. And they have a split intention, right? One intention, you would think, if you own the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh Pirates, your goal is to win a championship and hoist a trophy. That's not really their goal.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Their goal is to maximize franchise value. That's the side of them that's virulent capitalist. And then the side of them that is collective is like, let's protect ourselves from the world by getting non-compete clauses and antitrust exemptions and keeping away all of the vultures who... And part of that is imposing limits on themselves of how much money they can spend. And it is the rare Steve Ballmer superfan where the side of him that is a fan and wants to win kinda goes rogue and overrules the socialist collective side of him and is like, I don't care if these are the rules, I want to win a trophy. And this thing, this sort of like dark crystal ball, again, that I'm looking into...

• 49:11Pablo Torre?

  It makes me think that we are in this twilight of the fan. Because they, private equity firms and the hedge funds and those institutions, man, they are motivated entirely and exclusively by the green arrow.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 49:28Pablo Torre?

  Is the asset improving year after year? It's not, are the fans mad at us?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:34Pablo Torre?

  Are the, did we win a title? And, and it makes me go back to the country that we've been exploring here today, which is England. Because I look back, Joe, at April of 2021, when there was this, this idea to both replace and/or disrupt the Champions League.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:53Pablo Torre?

  Because 12 of Europe's biggest soccer teams decided, we're gonna form a super league.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Green arrow will go up. That's what it was.

• 50:01Pablo Torre?

  The, "Think of the media rights deals," JP Morgan Chase said as they provided $4.5 billion in financing at the time. More revenue, higher quality matchups, all that stuff. And what happened?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  The fans lost their minds.

• 50:16Pablo Torre?

  And wouldn't let it happen.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And essentially stopped it with just protests, a number of protests that occupied the stadiums.

• 50:24Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 06

  Here they are in their thousands. The ill-fated European Super League has started a fire and it's ripping through the game. These protests had been well-publicized, but the scale and ferocity surprised police and security at Old Trafford.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  There are fans who have made their way into the ground and they are now protesting. They've come through the bottom end, the Stretford End is away to my left. They're now heading out onto the pitch to let their feelings be known. This is obviously not what we want to see and the security here at Old Trafford has failed.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Hundreds of fans breaching a cordon around the ground just hours before Manchester United were due to play Liverpool.

• 51:07Pablo Torre?

  It's so remarkable that within 48 hours.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  They shut it down so fast.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  So fast. 48 hours! Crazy, yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And that is like the obvious question that you're implying here is could that happen in the US? And the answer I believe is no. I don't think that fans would rally that way. There might be protests or whatever. The question is would Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft listen?

• 51:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  I don't think they would.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  No, and they wouldn't be, and they wouldn't have to.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  They wouldn't care.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  The utter disdain that Rob Manfred showed for Oakland literally protesting just like, you're taking the team away for no reason. And just the disdain like, oh, it's good to see you have a nice crowd out there or whatever he said. I mean, they don't care.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  The same guy, by the way, who referred to the World Series trophy as just a piece of metal.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Piece of metal, right.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  These, the, there is a real amorality, not immorality. Steve Ballmer, allegedly immoral, knows what the rules are and breaks them. Hedge fund money is amoral. It has no skin in the game either way.

• 52:18Pablo Torre?

  It's actually telling you.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:20Pablo Torre?

  We exist with a profit motive.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are, the hedge fund money is a plague of locusts. It just swarms over a field. It devours the field and it moves on to the next field. It does not care about the farmer whose field it destroyed. It doesn't care about all the other insects living in the wheat. It just eats and moves on. And so when you have Jeanie Buss, the last essentially like mom and pop shop.

• 52:43Pablo Torre?

  Family business.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  In the NBA, saying, getting, the valuations get to a point where even she is like, this is my entire family legacy, but like, I can't say no any, I can't do this anymore. Like, I'm gonna sell. Now, the same people own the Lakers that own the Dodgers and they're gonna do to the Lakers exactly what they did with the Dodgers to the extent that you can in the NBA. And the green arrow will go up and the, and the relationship between the fans and the team will deteriorate forever.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  I think that one of the fundamental aspects of sports used to be that these owners.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  They want to win. They're competitive people. Like, they're competitive in their business. They definitely want to win in their sport. That was like at the very heart of what it was. And now, these owners aren't human in the same way.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Well, the definition of winning has fundamentally changed. The definition of winning now isn't hoisting a trophy.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  It's signing a record-breaking media rights deal for the NFL. And so, and they all get together and cling champagne glasses.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Because they all won. And to me, getting back to your earlier point, Steve Ballmer, if he allegedly did what he allegedly is supposed to have done based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 10-part series on this very program, would you rather have that guy? Or would you rather have a guy own your team? Who, the guy who owns a baseball franchise, who looks at his revenue? Looks at his expenditures? Looks at his payroll? And thinks to himself, "Well, why would I increase my payroll? All I'm doing is eating into my profits, and all I have to do is nothing? And I'm guaranteed 178 million in revenue sharing? And then, and the valuation of my franchise will go up because I know what the media rights deal is again next year? So, I'm going to go 78 and 84?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And fly around on my private jet? And everything's fine? Like, that's, to me, that is the immoral owner in sports.

• 54:42Pablo Torre?

  I dare say, Mike, as you impose this binary choice,

• 54:49Pablo Torre?

  that maybe door number three exists.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Pablo Torre?

  Now, granted, door number three pretty much got barricaded.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:58Pablo Torre?

  And there's police caution tape over it.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Harder and harder to get into that door.

• 55:01Pablo Torre?

  And no one is walking, to quote your favorite team, the coach, no one is walking through that door, actually. There is no, there is no.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  I'm a huge Patino guy.

• 55:12Pablo Torre?

  There's so many jokes.

• 55:15Pablo Torre?

  So many jokes that I'm not going to make.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:17Pablo Torre?

  But yeah, if those are the choices, then I dare say things will get worse. And we should be so glad that we got to see fandom create an economy that got so big that, of course, the financialization of everything came to burn down the Field of Dreams.

• 55:35Pablo Torre?

  Joe Posnanski, Mike Schur, this was a total delight. Congrats on the book and thanks for coming in.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 55:40Pablo Torre?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 55:49Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 55:55Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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