Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,

with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.

We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

So search for rapid response in your podcast player

and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.

I'll see you on the other side. My grandfather, my father's father, who was born in the deep south in the late 1800s, literally the son of a slave

was a Negro League Baseball player.

Some of my earliest fondest memories were sitting at his foot and listening to him

tell stories about pitching against Satchel Paige.

We would sit and watch baseball with him on TBS back when the only

sports they showed were the Atlanta Braves games.

It sounds like the start of an indie biopic that hasn't been written yet.

But that's actually Franklin Leonard, founder of the Blacklist.

You might know some of the films his list has helped bring to light,

like Slumdog Millionaire, juna the king's speech but right now

Franklin is talking baseball I was obsessed with baseball like I worked at the minor

league baseball park in my hometown

probably before it was legal for me to even have a job running the scoreboard.

As Franklin's love of baseball grew he paid extra attention to the sports statistics.

I was a kid at like eight or nine who was asking for the Bill James Baseball

abstract every year, which is this thousand-page tone of the history of baseball

told through numbers. I still love a good

...