Know Your Enemy - Why Conservatives Love Baseball (w/ David Roth)

Matt and Sam talk to David Roth about baseball, why conservatives love it, and why we do too.

Duration: 1h 13m
Broadcast on: 17 Oct 2022
Audio Format: other

At long last, an episode about baseball—America's national pastime, and a sport that conservatives in the United States seem to especially love. To understand baseball's appeal, both to conservatives and the rest of us, Matt and Sam are joined by David Roth of Defector Media, a brilliant, funny writer who also is a long suffering Mets fan. Topics include: the start of the MLB playoffs, baseball's interesting place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more!

Sources:

George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (Macmillan, 1990)

"Foul Ball," New York Review of Books, June 1991

Donald Kagan, "George Will's Baseball—A Conservative Critique," Public Interest, Fall 1990

Tim Marchman, "Did George Will’s Men at Work Anticipate Baseball’s Statistical Revolution?" Slate, April 27, 2010

David Bentley Hart, "A Perfect Game," First Things, August 2010

Greg Hillis, "Quit Trying to 'Fix' Baseball," Commonweal, March 27, 2018

David Roth, "Replacement-Level Billionaires," The Baffler, March 2020

Leander Schaerlaeckens, "Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?" Slate, May 5, 2020

Michael Serazio, "The GOP hates baseball now. But it has always been a conservative sport," Washington Post, April 7, 2021

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 63 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here with my great friend Sam Hetherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. What are we getting into today? We've got a little mid-October special for the listeners. It's a baseball episode, all about baseball and conservatism, you know, what went wrong with baseball this year a little bit. And we've got a great guest. We've got David Roth, one of my favorite writers on sports and politics and the editor and co-owner of Defector, the great website. That's right. We've been promising this episode for a while. The varieties of conservative baseball fans. There's an affinity there. The right likes baseball, at least many conservatives do. People have an association in their head between baseball and conservatism. We try to explain what that's all about. And I'll just warn the listeners, we do commiserate a little bit at the beginning, but never fear that will pass and then we will be talking about conservatism and baseball and not just the Mets' terrible end of the season. That's right. And we really kind of dive right in. So, apologies if you're not a baseball fan. I make no apologies. Well, we owe something to our sports fans. Of all the Know Your Enemy listeners, they get the least from the pod in some way. So, this is our, you know, outreach to them. Thank you for listening. There's plenty of naming some guys in this episode for those who like to hear some guys named. Well, should we get some housekeeping items, Sam? Yes. We always were grateful to our partners at Descent for sponsoring the podcast. One of the things they do is if you subscribe to KnowYourEnemy on Patreon.com, which you can do at patreon.com/ KnowYourEnemy, for $10 a month, you get a free digital subscription to Descent, which is a great magazine Sam and I have both written for it, so please consider doing that. For $5 a month, of course, you can get access to all of our bonus episodes. That's right. And as always, we want to thank our Intrepid producer, Jesse Brennan, and I wanted to mention one thing about our Intrepid producer, Jesse Brennan, is that he has a new album of music out that you can find on Spotify, Apple, whatever, and it's called "Living the Dream." It's a second album of original music, and Jesse's, you know, just fucking incredibly talented in every way, which you will know from listening to this podcast, and you will know even more deeply if you listen to his record. Yeah. I think I've called his project a deranged one-man band, which I mean in the most complimentary and awesome way possible. It's true.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk to David Roth about baseball, why conservatives love it, and why we do too.