June 25, 2018
THE LIST
1. Upon Further Review - "What if Tom Brady Never Became The Patriots' Quarterback?"
This may be the most niche thing I’ve ever heard in podcasting: two fictional sports casters bantering in a future where one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game never ascended to greatness. It’s like Stugotz and Dan Lebatard wrote a scripted audio sitcom. The fictional podcasting world needs more levity along these lines..
2. Revisionist History - "General Chapman's Last Stand"
Immigrants don’t all want to come to America and stay forever, but tougher border policy leads more and more to the thing it purports to quell. Sensible. Timely. Excellent..
3. We Came to Win - "Mutiny at the 2015 World Cup"
As World Cup action heats up, this is a great reminder that we are far from properly rewarding the hard work and talent that women display on the pitch. An inspiring story of a star player and a rising star of a team that took a stand and made a difference..
HONORABLE MENTION
The Cracked Podcast - "How Global Sporting Events Run On Bribes & Help Dictators"
This American Life - "Unteachable Moment"
Caliphate - "Prisoners, Part One & Two"
SOMETHING NEW
Without any sort of specific tallying, I can confidently say there are a lot of podcasts on baseball floating around out there. But with an equal lack of hard data I'm pretty comfortable saying that none of them do what Rhea Butcher has managed to pull off with her podcast Three Swings with Rhea Butcher. Namely, this entails integrating in-the-weeds baseball talk with comedy, interview, and a unique social conscience around the sport’s more regrettably nostalgic facets. Butcher is a comedian by trade, and, seemingly, a Cleveland baseball fan by birth. Her roots in America's rusty uncle of a city give rise to reckoning her team's insidious racism with her life-long love of the professional ball club. While episodes regularly cruise past the hour mark, the content is broken down into manageable chunks of monologuing and joyously fan-boy-esque exchanges with guests who are fellow baseball compatriots. Through it it, her passion for the game carries each segment through the airwaves with ease.
I'll concede that some of Butcher's opining drifts into soap-box territory, but she reigns herself in with a self-awareness often lacking in the comedy podcasting world. And that's fitting, as this is not just a platform for a personality to blab on and on, nor a vehicle for a talking head to make predictions about goings-on in the league. There is analysis, but it is often wrapped up into exploring a guest's particular history of fandom with a game that, probably, is foundational to many Americans’ experience of sports. Butcher does an excellent job of transcending the traditional bloodlust of the sportstalk airspace. Perhaps the best evidence of this can be found when known Cubs fan Kendra James guest stars to discuss the disparate peaks of euphoria and despondency when the Cubs triumphed over Cleveland in the World Series, all the while composing herself without shying away from her suffering in the midst of James’s triumph.
Every spring, baseball manages to cast a spell on me. I perennially swoon for the sport and all the nostalgia it contains - both in the old-timey semi-patriotic way, and from a personal angle as I fondly recall sunny afternoons with the radio blaring out the play-by-play of Diamondbacks games while doing yard work with my dad. Yet amidst my cornucopia of present day interests it is hard to find the time required of a sport. But the one champion of my free time that wins out over all else is podcasts...and baseball and commentary go together like America and it's so-called national past-time...so it only makes sense that podcasting intersect with the sport many love and (probably) many more really don't care for! Maybe, just maybe, Three Swings with Rhea Butcher is the show that can take me back to the sport that served as a stable backing track to my youth. And thus did podcasting revive a oft-short-lived my affinity for baseball. Time will tell if I can stick it out this year, but regardless of my stamina listeners should head over and hang with Rhea as the season unfolds.
I'll concede that some of Butcher's opining drifts into soap-box territory, but she reigns herself in with a self-awareness often lacking in the comedy podcasting world. And that's fitting, as this is not just a platform for a personality to blab on and on, nor a vehicle for a talking head to make predictions about goings-on in the league. There is analysis, but it is often wrapped up into exploring a guest's particular history of fandom with a game that, probably, is foundational to many Americans’ experience of sports. Butcher does an excellent job of transcending the traditional bloodlust of the sportstalk airspace. Perhaps the best evidence of this can be found when known Cubs fan Kendra James guest stars to discuss the disparate peaks of euphoria and despondency when the Cubs triumphed over Cleveland in the World Series, all the while composing herself without shying away from her suffering in the midst of James’s triumph.
Every spring, baseball manages to cast a spell on me. I perennially swoon for the sport and all the nostalgia it contains - both in the old-timey semi-patriotic way, and from a personal angle as I fondly recall sunny afternoons with the radio blaring out the play-by-play of Diamondbacks games while doing yard work with my dad. Yet amidst my cornucopia of present day interests it is hard to find the time required of a sport. But the one champion of my free time that wins out over all else is podcasts...and baseball and commentary go together like America and it's so-called national past-time...so it only makes sense that podcasting intersect with the sport many love and (probably) many more really don't care for! Maybe, just maybe, Three Swings with Rhea Butcher is the show that can take me back to the sport that served as a stable backing track to my youth. And thus did podcasting revive a oft-short-lived my affinity for baseball. Time will tell if I can stick it out this year, but regardless of my stamina listeners should head over and hang with Rhea as the season unfolds.
From: Foreverdog Podcast Network
Recommended for: Baseball fans of the future, lost fans of the past, and present-day fans looking for something more than the local sports shock jock shtick.
Drop Schedule: Wednesday, Weekly
Average episode length: 50 minutes
Rating: Make It Work
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