#171 Baseball in Context w/ Jayson Stark
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2020
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Baseball is part of America's cultural fabric, and few people know the game and its place in society as well as Jayson Stark. As a celebrated sportswriter, Jayson has witnessed baseball's transformation for more than four decades, and has had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in the sport's history. In this episode, Bob & Ben talk with Jayson about baseball's place in American culture, how the scandals in the sport reflect moments in American history, and how Major League Baseball has persevered through some of our country's hardest times. Jayson also talks about his path from beat writer covering the Phillies to award-winning sportswriter, what he considers important when casting his vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame, and why nobody wants to visit the National Baseball Hall of Purity.
Jayson Stark covers Major League Baseball for The Athletic. In 2019 he received the 2019 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, for which he was honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is the author of three books on baseball, has won an Emmy for his work on Baseball Tonight and is a two-time winner of the Pennsylvania sportswriter-of-the-year award. He's so good at covering baseball that Topps honored him with his own baseball card in 2017.
Thank you to everyone on Patreon who joined us for our live zoom recording!
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Across the margin of the podcast is a show that brings you in-depth interviews with notable authors, artists, musicians, activists, filmmakers, and introspecticentrics of all kinds, diving deeply into topics that demand deeper examination, and illustrating the notion that there are captivating stories to be found everywhere. Across the March in the podcast is proudly in the loop. I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:44.1 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now. |
| 0:47.8 | Ben, this week we had a wonderful guest, Jason Stark. |
| 0:52.4 | He is a writer for the athletic, and he's also a member of the MLB Network |
| 0:57.1 | where he won an Emmy. He's the 2019 winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. He's been honored by the |
| 1:03.9 | Baseball Hall of Fame and you just can't get better credentials than that to talk about the |
| 1:09.8 | sport of baseball. |
| 1:11.4 | This is sports journalism's egot. |
| 1:14.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:14.5 | You know what I'm saying? |
| 1:15.3 | I mean, like you couldn't win more top honors. |
| 1:17.8 | And Bob, I didn't know him that well before, you know, you scheduled him. |
| 1:21.4 | And it felt like when we were talking to him, it felt like an angel had descended upon us. |
| 1:26.2 | Like, he's so amazing. Yeah, on top of all |
| 1:29.0 | the credentials he has, he's one of the nicest guys in the world. He's just a sweetheart of a man and |
| 1:34.1 | just a real pleasure to be around. And I love people who have been doing what they've been doing |
| 1:39.9 | for so long that they have stories on stories, on and it's it's more about you know it's the |
| 1:47.9 | guy he's the guy you want to have a beer with you know you just want to sit there and and listen to |
| 1:52.4 | him talk you want to hang out with him for four hours have a beer and you don't say a word and he just |
| 1:57.4 | goes and that's that's the kind of people that I miss in the quarantine. |
| 2:03.6 | I know. Just being able to ask him, you know, things that we would say, what was the history of the Phillies? |
| 2:10.1 | You know, what did their organization look like in the 1980s? You and I would approach that, even though we were alive then, we were young, we'd approach it as a scholarly question. And you could ask Jason and he was like, well, let me tell you I was there. |
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