Matthew
Welcome back, sports fans, to the Superhero Ethics podcast. And yes, I know most of you may think, sports ball — what are we talking about? But we are just a few days past opening day of the Major League Baseball season. The World Baseball Classic certainly captured a lot of people’s attention. There’s a lot going on in the world of sports. We have some NBA news that’s happening that’s raising some ethical eyebrows. I am wearing a shirt for one of my Mets heroes, Bo Bichette, of the rental variety.
Paul
Bo Bichette, where? (said like Han saying, Boba Fett?? where? )Oh, I’m holding up a blue notepad next to my orange shirt.
Matthew
In solidarity. For the New York Mets — because the only ethical choice to make in baseball is not to root for the New York Yankees. There’s a lot of places where people can go and talk about sports, and eventually there is going to be a place where Paul and I do it, because podcasting is like a singularity — it should keep sucking you in more and more. But there are a whole bunch of ethical questions that surround baseball and surround sports in general. So Paul, let me just ask you — we’ve talked about this topic before and you’ve often made very clear that you are not a fan, you are an observer, an enthusiast, I think. How do you describe your relationship to baseball this year?
Paul
I am an enjoyer of baseball who actively follows the New York Metropolitans, as two of the people I love the most and talk to the most do as well. And I have a long history — some of my fondest memories are Mets memories or baseball memories as a kid. So there’s an indelible mark that has been left on me by baseball. Not by the one that hit me in the chin on an inside-the-infield grand slam that my team gave up, because I got knocked out playing third base on a hot grounder and all the runners just scored, and everyone was like, are you okay? I’m like, where’s the ball? Where’s the ball? My chin says, and that’s actually in scars. True story.
Matthew
Kind of, yeah. At the end of every year, you always say you’re not really going to be involved and I talk to you a lot about it. So I’m glad knowing that your mother also does, so I’m only one of your two dealers in this year’s addiction — I’ll only take half responsibility there.
But there’s an incredible amount of money that is spent on this, money that an awful lot of people think should be spent on different things. Why are we fans of this? How do we justify it?
Paul
Well, first of all, I don’t spend any money on it. I allow other people to spend money on it and share the benefits with me. That’s my sort of soft boycott.
Matthew
So you’re still living in your mother’s house and your mother’s paying for your baseball — but you’re mostly paying for the house, so maybe that doesn’t quite work.
Paul
Yes, my mother is living in my house, although we’re all buying it together as a family, really. And yes, she is supplying me with my baseball, but we had an alternate vendor last year that supplied it and got her hooked. And then this year she said, well, I’m not going to go without baseball. That was me last year. Which I will say — at the end of last year, I wasn’t the only one who was like, well, actually, when you look at it on
Matthew
paper. And that’s what we’ll get back to — there’s an emotional masochism that sometimes goes into being a fan that we’ll discuss as well. But yeah, just in terms of what the benefits are, given that there is an incredible amount of social and economic resources that are rightly pointed out by a lot of people to be kind of too much — what do you think?
Paul
Well, if we look specifically at Major League Baseball, it is a cartel of billionaires who have a monopoly on the highest level of the sport that is actually enforced by the government. There’s an exception to the antitrust laws.
Matthew
Yeah, baseball actually has a special antitrust exemption that the NFL does not have, that the NBA does not have, that no other sport has.
Paul
Oh, that’s why you got the XFL.
Matthew
Yes, we get the XFL. That’s why you had the American Football League — a completely separate league from the NFL — and then they merged, and now you have the NFC and the AFC. None of that can happen under baseball because they have a legalized monopoly.
Paul
Yeah. And there are independent leagues. In fact, where I’m living, there are the Lancaster Barnstormers, which is funny — and their current pitcher is Huascar Brazzavon — which is kind of funny. There are these little leagues, but not little leagues.
In terms of the money, I see it a few ways. Obviously these are large entertainment corporations, really. But they also function like regional religions, the way I see it.
And I think the economics of that are extremely messed up, particularly in terms of the way they basically blackmail cities into investing hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into building stadiums for these private owners. So I think that’s all very messed up.
I will say, though, that a ton of the money goes to the players. Which doesn’t necessarily go to players in a way that is distributed equitably — tons of it goes to the highest-paid players. But out of the money going to players, I think a lot of them, especially players coming from Latin America or from less affluent areas of the United States, have a tendency to give a lot back to their communities — establish academies, and so on.
Matthew
The amount of money invested in the Dominican Republic by Dominican baseball players was like five times the single largest source of U.S. money going there — including direct aid we were giving before Trump cut that so dramatically.
Paul
And I think that is great. I think it does create economic opportunity for people who grow up in areas where they don’t have a lot of it. The opportunity being: you can play a game you love for a lot of money. I think that’s cool — as somebody who plays a game I love for less money, but enough to live on.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a baseball player. That was my dream. I wanted to be Dwight Gooden — an 18 or 19-year-old rookie sensation. And by the time I was 20, I felt a little bit like I had failed because I hadn’t been super successful, because the person I was most looking up to as a little kid had been amazingly successful at 19 and 20.
There’s an interesting quote by Naomi Osaka — the Japanese American tennis player — she has a Netflix special, actually. When it came out, I was thinking we could maybe do a podcast on that, but we didn’t. She has a quote about feeling, at like 22 or 23, like a failure, like she was washed up, having only won one or two majors. When you think about how few people win any majors — yeah, I think it’s a mixed bag when it comes to the economics.
Matthew
For sure. And it’s funny — you said Gooden, and my whole mental train derailed, because my first thought was to make a joke about how I’m kind of glad you didn’t become him, because that means you didn’t get addicted to cocaine and have terrible things happen in your early 20s. But then I was like, I don’t like that joke. There’s a lot of social circumstances that went into that. If you want to understand race in America in the 1980s, look at the careers of Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens — what they were both exposed to and the way they’re both talked about. There’s a whole lot of sociology there.
But Dwight Gooden wound up having a lot of drug problems, fell out of the league for a number of years, never quite reached the potential he had shown — kicked around the league for a while. And then actually came back, yes, with the great Satan of the New York Yankees, where he threw a no-hitter and was part of a World Series-winning team. But beyond that, I know a lot of people who’ve told me that in Narcotics Anonymous, people like him are often held up as an example: look, there’s a road back. There is life with addiction — not after, but with addiction. And obviously that’s an extreme example.
And there’s a lot of controversy with 12-step programs and all that. But when I went to the Dominican Republic, there are statues to Sammy Sosa, because so much of his money was spent investing in baseball fields and high schools so more kids can learn — but also building hospitals. That money has done some really good things. I’m not saying cut national aid and give it to Dominican baseball players instead — these things should just be funded directly. But my point is that Sammy Sosa is a role model for a lot of people for that reason. Which is all more complicated with steroids, which is another issue. So I used to be in a place where I was like, for all the problems professional sports has, it’s still okay because of these reasons. And I think I was being pretty defensive. Part of why I want to check back in on this topic once a year or so is that I think it’s better to have the kind of approach you have — yeah, there are a lot of problems, and it could be a lot better.
Paul
Yeah. Like most things, there is positive and there’s negative. And there’s a tendency to try to weigh one against the other and decide which wins out. Like the Superhero Ethics logo — there are some scales, scales of justice. But that’s never really been the way I try to evaluate things. When it comes to decisions — do I want to put my money into this, do I want to put my time into this? — that’s fair. Deciding whether the sum of it crosses a threshold where you say, no, I don’t want to invest in that. But just in terms of evaluating something, I think it’s always important to acknowledge the good and the bad, or what you regard as good and bad. They don’t cancel each other out. Just because there’s a good side doesn’t mean the bad side isn’t real, and vice versa. Both are happening at the same time. And the only way to have a clear picture of reality is to accept all of them.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. And it’s nuanced. I do like that image — and there’s one way of seeing my logo of the guy bursting through the wall, but I also kind of see him pinned to the wall sometimes. Which I think is part of it: if you see things purely in terms of justice, good or bad, right versus wrong — the reality is it’s so much more complicated than that.
And I want to get into some of those complications. One interesting note: we’re recording this on March 31, and one of the big news stories in sports — not baseball, but still — is that the Chicago Bulls cut one of their players. He’s off the team in the middle of the season. He’s not one of their best players by any means, and the Bulls aren’t one of the best teams. But they made very clear it was because he made a whole bunch of anti-gay and anti-Catholic statements.
Is this the victory we’ve all been looking for on queer rights? Absolutely not. The Supreme Court made an anti-trans decision today that is much more important to what we should be talking about. But I do think sports are an interesting barometer. Twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have ever seen a person literally kicked off a sports team for that. What was done to Colin Kaepernick — Colin Kaepernick was screwed, absolutely. But he got to finish his contract. This guy was cut the day after he made those statements. That is a form of progress, even if it’s not the progress.
Paul
Yeah. I don’t know the exact specifics of this situation, but those sorts of things I have a lot of mixed feelings about, particularly around the relationship between employers and employees. But let’s not pursue that tangent.
Matthew
Yeah, it’s an offhand comment and I don’t know too much about it. And I’ll admit — if he were the top scorer for the Bulls and carrying them to the playoffs —
Paul
Yeah, would Colin Kaepernick have ended up the same way if he had been the best quarterback in the league?
Matthew
And the flip side is, this is a guy coming to the end of his contract — and now a whole bunch of people on the right are demanding their team sign him.
So, Paul — let’s go back to the stadiums example. I was reading a story about a team dear to your heart: the Kansas City Royals. And the way it was framed was interesting. It was, I think, an ESPN piece, and the headline was something like “Royals Worry as Their Lease Comes to an End.” And I read further — their lease is ending in 2031.
Paul
That’s not too soon. Though it does take a while to build a stadium.
Matthew
It does take a while to build a stadium. And I guess their current home, Kauffman Stadium, apparently can’t be extended — I don’t know all the details. But five years may not be that long. Part of why this is happening is — and I think this is a really positive move — they had a plan to build in a certain part of the Kansas City area. They’re in Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri. And there was a vote because the city would basically have to put in a new tax to pay for this.
Paul
Yeah. Basically there’s a Kansas City, Missouri and a Kansas City, Kansas on both sides of the river, and they were considering going to both. But the people voted no. And ESPN was framing it as if the poor Royals are in this terrible situation.
Matthew
The Royals are one of the least monetarily successful teams in baseball — they don’t get to pay for the big stars. But they are still a corporation bringing in billions of dollars, owned by billionaires making incredible amounts of money. To me, I looked at that vote and thought: that’s a victory. I’m glad citizens are starting to stand up and say, yes, we like having a team, and sometimes stadiums can be economically beneficial — but making us automatically pay for it isn’t necessarily the way to go.
Paul
I do come from the default position that a city shouldn’t be buying things worth hundreds of millions of dollars for a private corporation that basically makes its money off the goodwill of the constituency. At the same time, Kansas City, Missouri is the real Kansas City. Kansas City, Kansas is more like the suburbs. If you didn’t grow up there or visit often, you’d probably think it was in Kansas — it’s in the name. But it was probably named because it was the city on the edge of Kansas, in Missouri. And there’s literally a road called State Line Road — you just drive across it.
Matthew
I thought the river was the divider.
Paul
There is a river, but there are also areas where it’s just State Line Road. North Kansas City is separated from Kansas by the Missouri River. But the Missouri River winds, and I think it’s a tributary of the Mississippi, which divides St. Louis and East St. Louis. Enough geography — but the point is, you just drive across State Line Road into Kansas City, Kansas.
Matthew
And these things generate huge amounts of tax revenue. There are probably a lot more Kansas City Royals fans living in Missouri. If the team moved across the river, Missouri’s tax base takes a hit and Kansas gains it. So yeah.
Paul
A lot going on. And also — Kansas City has a long baseball history. The Kansas City Monarchs were one of the most successful Negro Leagues teams. Then there were the Kansas City Blues, who were basically a Yankees farm team. Then the Kansas City Athletics, who had moved from Philadelphia, also basically a Yankees farm team — that was always the joke. And then the Kansas City Royals, who have been around for a while now.
So baseball in Kansas City is a big deal. And moving the team from Missouri to Kansas is also a big deal. It’s not like moving from Oakland to Las Vegas. And the Oakland situation — the owner basically wanted to move all along. He was trying to get them to build an expensive stadium, but I think he never really wanted it because he always wanted to go to Vegas. Everything fell through until eventually they’re in West Sacramento for however long, and then theoretically moving to Vegas. They’re playing in a minor league stadium now. So the Royals, seeing this five years out, are thinking: we don’t want to be them.
Matthew
I do want to talk more about the Oakland situation, because I think it’s a great example of the worst of the worst. He wanted to move. He was told no. Oakland is part of the San Francisco Bay Area but has traditionally been separate — kind of like if Brooklyn hadn’t united with Manhattan.
Paul
Brooklyn was its own city before it joined.
Matthew
Exactly. And Oakland is also one of the largest Black communities outside of New York and the South. It was the home of the Black Panthers. And if you think about all the money in the Bay Area, the fact that Oakland doesn’t have a proportionate share of that money is a very political thing.
But for a while, there was a very dedicated fan base. Go watch Moneyball. The Oakland A’s fans loved that team and loved that stadium. I went to that stadium 20 years ago — it was horrible. It was directly in the sunlight for day games in really uncomfortable ways. And the owner made a conscious choice, on the record, to not improve the stadium in any way. He went to Major League Baseball and asked to move, they said no — Oakland is a great place to have a team, there’s great history there, Reggie Jackson, so much history. So he basically let the stadium fall apart. He let the team fall apart, refusing to spend money on good players or keep the players his team was developing. It became much worse than Moneyball. Attendance went down until eventually he was able to say: look, there isn’t a fan base that can support a team in Oakland, let me move. If you’ve seen the movie Major League, this is literally the plot of Major League.
Paul
He just ripped it right out of the movie.
Matthew
He did. He just did it over five years instead of one season, so it wasn’t as obvious. And when you think about it, there is a connection between a team and its area, and there’s a responsibility there. That was heartbreaking for people. Talk to people in Baltimore — it’s been about 40 years since the Baltimore Colts left in the middle of the night to go to Indianapolis. The moving trucks had to show up in the middle of the night because there would have been so much anger otherwise.
Paul
Yeah. It’s funny — the Athletics owner, John Fisher, wrote something like, “Thanks for everything, we’re moving, the Athletics have a long history of moving cities — from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland.” Like, yeah, you made people mad every time.
People in Kansas City were mad when they moved the Athletics. I think that might have been Charlie Finley — was it Finley?
Matthew
And that happened in the late 50s, early 60s, when a bunch of teams were moving to California because plane travel made it possible. The A’s were winning World Series in the early 70s in Oakland.
Paul
Yeah, they were very successful there.
Matthew
And 80% of today’s fans have no memory of the A’s anywhere except Oakland.
Paul
Right, today’s fans — yes.
Matthew
So the stadium issue is one major ethical question that comes up with baseball. I just wanted to mention — you had asked me recently about Satchel Paige’s last professional appearance, his last Major League Baseball outing, which was in 1965 at the age of 58.
Paul
Yeah, so Satchel Paige is one of those people — and recently baseball has made some changes to accommodate this — where some of the greatest baseball players in history were not in the record books because they were playing in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson and before integration.
Satchel Paige was someone who eventually did come to the major leagues. He was 41 when he made his major league debut, and he pitched for four, no, five seasons. And then he came back 12 years later.
Matthew
Yeah, talk about what happened when he came back.
Paul
He had pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs for a number of years — I think he ended his Negro Leagues career in Kansas City. Then he played for Cleveland, then the St. Louis Browns. And then I was talking to my mom about it because she had this memory of her dad being like, that’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived — and her dad had been a semi-pro pitcher when he was younger. We figured it out: my mom was at Satchel Paige’s last appearance in the major leagues, at age 58 in 1965. And, by the way, he pitched three innings and gave up no runs. Which is phenomenal.
Matthew
And I think he was pitching against the Carl Yastrzemski Red Sox — a really good team.
Paul
Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure I have the game log right here, but I looked up the box score recently, and it just says 58. And I’m not trying to say 58 is old for a human, but for a professional athlete — let alone a pitcher.
Matthew
41 is ancient for a pitcher. Let alone 58. It was 100% meant to be a publicity stunt.
Paul
And then he got a bunch of people out. So anyway, that’s the history of baseball in Kansas City. The Negro Leagues Museum is in Kansas City, I believe. So moving from Missouri to Kansas seems like it shouldn’t be that big a deal. But how did people in New York feel when the Jets and the Giants moved to the Meadowlands in New Jersey?
Matthew
There were definitely people who were upset. Though I think it’s somewhat different because a baseball team plays 81 home games over the course of a year.
Paul
81 home games and 81 road games. And a football team plays eight home games, which is part of why building a football stadium is so hard to justify on its own. The only way to make a stadium make financial sense as a football stadium is to also use it for big national tours — Taylor Swift, whoever — that’s the place they’re going to go.
When our friend was playing with Taylor Swift in Vegas, they were at the Raiders stadium. The Raiders are only there like eight times a year.
Matthew
Right. And I think it’s worth noting — we don’t really know exactly what we’re going to cover today and we don’t come up with a set agenda, so we’ve only focused on the stadium issue, but it covers so much of baseball. Any conversation about this is really hard to take to social media because the overall practice of teams using emotional and financial connections to blackmail cities into paying for stadiums is a terrible thing. And when I say financial connections — it’s not just that players are spending money in that city. Think about how many people make money on everything around it: every church and school that turns their parking lot into paid parking on game nights, the people who sell hot dogs, t-shirts, whatever.
That said, there are ways in which putting a stadium into a particular part of a city, particularly when the team is willing to invest, can actually be really good for that area. San Francisco is often held up as an example — I was living there around the time the new stadium opened. It was a pretty rough part of town. There was a lot of economic redevelopment, the city paid for some of it and the team paid for some of it, they built new public transportation to the area, and it’s a much better part of town now. But the flip side: if that sounds like gentrification — yeah, it is. In San Francisco, they worked a lot with existing local businesses to try to mitigate that. That’s not always the case.
And there used to be a trend of putting stadiums out in the suburbs. There’s now a trend toward putting them right in the middle of downtown, which — think about it: if 10,000 people drive cars to a game 81 times a year, versus those same people taking public transportation because the stadium is in the middle of the city, that’s not an insignificant reduction in traffic.
So there are all these different factors. But to me, the stadium discussion highlights the way the economics of baseball are really built around the idea of a public trust. When you read the discussions around that monopoly exemption being passed by Congress, there was this idea that baseball is part of our traditions and local cultures, and that teams have a responsibility to that. And I think that’s what the Kansas City situation is illuminating: when you think about how much goodwill — multiple generations of fans, from grandfather to mother to you — has been given to these teams, can they just do what Oakland did and leave in the middle of the night?
Paul
And just a brief aside — I went to a game with you in San Francisco at the then-new ballpark. Beautiful ballpark. And I went to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City — also a beautiful ballpark. One of the things that does strike me about stadiums is that when they’re nice… I grew up going to Shea Stadium, which was not a cathedral. But it had the grit of New York.
Matthew
It was like a broken couch you’d fallen in love with, and every time a guest comes over they’re like —
Paul
Yeah, they’re like, this is the place? This is the place. And you’re like, just wait till the upper deck is shaking from everyone cheering, and the Sandman is playing for Billy Wagner coming out.
Yes, Billy Wagner had the Sandman — it wasn’t just Mariano Rivera. But there’s also an architectural component. When you have big public venues — which for a stadium is kind of private, but still something that defines the city — that matters. There was recently a Jeopardy question about the Beatles’ first really big stadium concert. Nobody got it, which — how do you not know that?
But that’s just an iconic moment in music history, and I think stadiums can be really interesting feats of architecture. The economics are tricky. I kind of wish stadiums were owned by the public and leased to sports teams, with the teams not being allowed to move. I don’t think the Oakland A’s should have been allowed to move. If you wanted a Las Vegas team, you should have said, I want to start a Las Vegas team — let’s do expansion. And by the way, this is the longest that Major League Baseball has gone without expansion since expansion started. If you divide the U.S. population by the number of teams, the ratio of people per team is probably higher than it’s ever been. So if you want a team in a new place, put a team there. A Las Vegas team would be lovely. It just shouldn’t be the Athletics. It should be the Las Vegas — Coolers, or something.
Matthew
We’re also coming up on the collective bargaining agreement between the players and the owners at the end of this year. There’s a lot of discussion that there might be a work stoppage again. Part of the issues are around salary caps and salary floors. The Los Angeles Dodgers are pretty clearly the best team in baseball. And it’s not just because they buy the best players — they are phenomenally run. They have a very good farm system. And they buy all the best players.
Paul
They do everything right, and then they have extra assets to cover anything that doesn’t work.
Matthew
Part of that is because they’re more willing to spend. Teams in Oakland, Kansas City, Tampa Bay could spend more money — but the Dodgers make a lot more money than the Royals ever will.
Paul
And the Royals do spend more than some smaller-market teams.
Matthew
And they’ve been more successful for it. That’s another part of the discussion: salary floors. Like I said, John Fisher intentionally tanked his team so fans would lose interest, as a way of proving there wasn’t a viable fan base. And to me — I’m a fan of other sports too — I think Woody Johnson wants to be a good owner for the New York Jets. I don’t think he’s intentionally tanking the team. But he’s doing more to hurt Jets interest than John Fisher could ever imagine.
Owning a team should be more of a public trust. There should be more accountability — if you’re not running this team in a way that the local fan base supports, this isn’t just a business. Technically, I think all the major leagues are nonprofits — no, wait —
Paul
MLB itself is a nonprofit. Or it was. It’s a nonprofit, which is a ridiculous thing.
Matthew
Which there is one professional sports team that actually models this: the Green Bay Packers. They are publicly owned. I have friends who own shares. It’s a nonprofit — you can’t buy it on the stock market, there’s no equity value. But —
Paul
Yeah. I mean, that raises its own questions. If they were owned by cities the way the Green Bay Packers are, that makes some sense —
Matthew
But the fans do get to vote on leadership. They don’t vote on who plays second base tomorrow, but they vote on the leadership group. When the team has done badly, the owners have come together like a shareholder meeting — which literally it is — and voted out team leadership and voted in new people. That’s pretty cool.
Paul
It would be nice if more teams were run that way.
Matthew
It might mean Steve Cohen got voted out, which I think would have been a bad thing.
Paul
As a Mets enjoyer, he’s the benevolent billionaire — who may or may not have had some SEC violations for insider trading or whatever. But as long as he’s spending those billions on the Mets roster —
Matthew
Our last owners were spending their billions with Madoff. So this is an improvement.
Paul
And he does say he views owning a team as more of a philanthropic stewardship — for the city, for the fan base — not as something he’s trying to extract money from. The Mets might be one of the few major league teams that are actually losing money. We don’t really know because none of them open their books. Only the Atlanta Braves, I think, have open books because they’re a publicly traded company.
Matthew
Well, and it also comes down to short-term versus long-term investment. Part of why the Dodgers make so much money is because everyone knows the Dodgers are good, so people around the world are buying Dodgers merchandise. I’m buying Mets merchandise because I believe the team is investing in itself and I’m willing to invest in the team.
Paul
And you know, if you’re paying part of Bichette’s salary —
Matthew
If the Kansas City Royals became the dominant juggernaut in sports for the next 20 years, you’d see people walking down Hollywood Boulevard wearing blinged-out Kansas City hats.
Paul
Yeah. I mean, Taylor Swift was at some of those Kansas City games with Travis Kelce because —
Matthew
Oh yeah, she was at all of the games. The playoff games, the regular season games. And then — as a whole other issue — there were people yelling and screaming about it being such nonsense because the cameras kept focusing on Taylor during the games. The most I think the cameras were ever on her was like 47 seconds.
Paul
Right, right. Yeah. Amazing. Though I meant the Royals games, not the Chiefs games.
Matthew
Oh, I think they went to Royals games too, during the playoffs a couple of years ago.
But one of my favorite tweets I’ve ever seen was: congratulations to Taylor Swift on her Super Bowl victory in her first season in the NFL. You gotta do what you gotta do. I love it.
All right. I have another podcast and we’ll start recording in just a few minutes. Any last things you want to say, Paul, on the small, minor topic of baseball ethics?
Paul
I didn’t think we would talk so much about Taylor Swift. But I like watching baseball. I don’t always like liking watching baseball. I try not to get my sense of self-worth from how the team I enjoy is doing. I think like any kind of media, yeah — be conscious of what’s going on in the production of it, think about that, and voice your opinion when you think something’s not right. But also, it’s okay to enjoy things.
I feel like the sort of defensive thing is a little weird to me because I don’t feel like I’ve usually done that. I understand the world we’re speaking in. But the main thing to me is: observe the good and the bad and call it like it is. And — oh, yeah — the Texas Rangers apparently put up a statue for some Texas Ranger who is famous for having helped enforce segregation after being ordered by the Supreme Court to end it. So there’s a new statue in the Texas Rangers stadium, which —
Matthew
And I think he was involved in a police shooting that is looked at as very, very questionable, and that part sounds quite likely.
Paul
Yeah, there’s all kinds of terrible stuff about it. I’ll link to an article and I’ll correct that if I’m wrong. But it’s not a good thing by any means.
It was a statue that was taken down in 2020 from an airport due to complaints about who it depicted, and now it’s supposed to represent the Rangers — which also raises the question of naming your baseball team after a law enforcement organization.
Matthew
Yeah. And I think for both of us there’s probably a red line somewhere — if the Mets did something like that, we might be like, I don’t know if I can do this. And that’s an important thing to have.
I’ll also say — beyond the ethical side, there’s the emotional side we talked about. A lot of sports fandom can get to really problematic places. I’ve certainly been there. Paul is emotionally steady all the time. He’s a monk. I’m kidding. But if you want to know more about that, there’s a great movie called Fever Pitch — the English version. I think the American version is fine, but the English version really dives into it. We did a podcast about that a couple of months back, so I’ll link to that episode, because we were in a somewhat emotionally compromised state at the time.
Paul
Oh, it was right after that. Yeah.
Matthew
I was like, I’m never watching sports again.
I made a joke recently that the Oscars make me feel the way Republicans feel about the NFL — every year the wrong person wins, and I’m like, the Oscars are so biased, I’m never watching this again. And then next year they do something else and I’m like, I’m never watching this again. And someone’s like, but did you — no, shut up.
There are so many Republicans saying now they’ll never watch that basketball — well, that’s a different kind of cut. But you get my point.
Paul
I do. And I feel that way about the Oscars — but I have genuinely never watched them again. The last time I saw anything was when my wife had them on and Moonlight won. Well, La La Land got the thing and they were like, can’t we just give it to both?
Matthew
Yeah, I don’t watch it anymore, but I still follow it.
Paul
I keep saying I’ll stop caring, but I can’t. Sinners was the best movie of the year. End of story. I saw it and it was great. I don’t know what else was even nominated.
Matthew
With that — thank you all so much.
Paul
LFGM.
