You know how it is. Someone asks how you're doing—in a casual setting, or at the top of the podcast you do every week—and in that moment you must decide just how honest an answer is appropriate, or kind, or just reasonably in keeping with the intention behind the question. If it seemed like I was stuck for an answer this week, it's because I truly was. There's a lot of bad stuff happening, enough that the usual "I'm good" kind of stuck in my throat. This is not the only reason why we have guests, but it is a good one. I was determined not to get up there and filibuster and fret in front of Justin Halpern, returning champion Distraction guest, on-call Padres magus, and executive producer of Abbott Elementary and Harley Quinn. Not right away, anyway.
For the most part we kept it together. The concurrent and ongoing bummers of the moment meant that even the preamble couldn't help but address the C.H.U.D. singularity of Ohio State's unusually sour National Championship and Trump's predictably brutish inauguration happening on the same day. The idea was to talk about sports—the idea, generally, is to talk about sports—but the world is too much with us, which explains the round of spirited wildfire chat that preceded the NFL and MLB portions of the pod. We talked to Justin about his family's experience of the fires in Los Angeles, the slippery grip on civilization once power and water are at risk and how L.A. stepped up and got less lonely in the face of terrible trauma, and why his young son stashed a Shohei Ohtani rookie card and his Bop It in his go bag.
Passionate and articulate as Justin was about the recent experience of his adopted city, he was notably more heated on our next topic, which was the Los Angeles Dodgers going around signing everyone, including Roki Sasaki, and further improving what was already a pretty imposing World Series Championship team. Justin, who really does know ball and also really hates the Dodgers, runs down the Sasaki signing—why Sasaki took the unusual approach to his stateside debut that he did and why it was always going to be the Dodgers. This was not (just) a rant from a wounded fan of a rival team, either, and we talked about the real annoying thing with the Dodgers, which is that they really are a step ahead of everyone else, not just because they're richer but because they're smarter and more refined and more cynical in their business processes than any other team, and also because other teams aren't trying nearly hard enough.
As annoying as the Dodgers can be to those who aren't fortunate enough to cheer for them, they really are an interesting team to talk about. Their relationship to the rest of the league is unique even outside their reliable dominance—they throw off so much revenue and attention, and deliver so much in terms of road gates, and set so many trends—and we discussed that, as well as their unusually fungibility-forward approach to building a pitching staff entirely out of the sort of max-effort, high-spin guys who tend to get hurt most frequently, but stockpiling them in such a quantity that they can just replace one with another. Justin is a pitching head, and this was both about as technical and as macro-scale a bit of baseball analysis as we've ever done on the pod.
After the break, we turned to a much less technical assessment of the remaining NFL field. This was much more vibe-driven, and we explored our dread of the Chiefs—"a sentient State Farm commercial," as Justin put it—the thrill of the Commanders, the sorrow of the Lions, and the vexation of the duffed two-point conversion that ended the Baltimore Ravens' season. This was more of a fan-brained exercise, although it was deeply felt especially where the Lamar Jackson portion is concerned. I talked some about my former habit of bleary/drinky late-night eBay jersey shopping, which led Justin to posit the arrival of "a Joey Harrington jersey you don't remember purchasing" as a potential hitting-bottom moment. I wouldn't know, of course, because I never had that experience. (It was a David Boston Cardinals jersey in my case.)
That's a lot of sports, and left time for just one dip into the Funbag. A listener question about whether humanity has been moved forward more, on balance, by things done on purpose or by happy accidents impressed Justin, who was more accustomed to fart-intensive Funbag fare, and led me to finally Get Dark in the way I was fighting at the start. It didn't completely derail a conversation that was already about the extent to which every good/bad thing invented has to do with trying to kill other people, and it was maybe inevitable. There's maybe only one answer to give at this moment, but it was a relief—a real and welcome distraction—to have something else to get upset about for a while.
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