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k3nd477 (00:00) Today on the show, we’ve got Craig Calcaterra who is the author of a daily baseball and other things newsletter called Cup of Coffee. Craig, thanks for coming on the show.
Craig Calcaterra (00:09) Thanks for having me.
k3nd477 (00:10) Yeah, so first of all, just want to check in and see what’s going on with you today, what’s going on in that bald, beautiful head of yours.
Craig Calcaterra (00:19) just ⁓ barely hanging on like all of us are right now, I think. But I did take an hour and a half nap before we came on, so you’re getting me at the perfect time to deal with the fresh horrors of the world.
k3nd477 (00:24) Yeah, for sure.
Amazing. Yeah, it’s interesting. So when I started this podcast, it was like last initially I was like are people gonna want to come on to a show and just talk about whatever when the world is falling apart and I Basically was like yeah, we got to keep creating and doing I think something that so I subscribed to your newsletter have done for years and one thing that I appreciate about
you and how you approach writing and doing those things is you don’t really filter ⁓ the horrors of the world or life or any of those things that kind of is woven in between talking about somebody’s ERA and somebody’s baseball statistics or whatever. is that, that seems like a very conscious approach, but how did you come to that?
Craig Calcaterra (01:23) I think a lot of it is that I’ve worked alone for 16 years. I haven’t been in an office or had co-workers in person with me since And I’m not the chattiest Cathy in the world, but you you got to kind of talk and…
k3nd477 (01:32) yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (01:39) I work my way through all the stuff that’s in my head in my writing. That’s just how I do it. I’m not writing about crazy things that are happening or good things in my life that are happening or my kids driving me crazy or whatever it is I talk about, I don’t have anywhere to put it. So, you know, my wife will listen for a little while, but only she can listen to me rant about things so much. And at some point she wants me to turn off the politics and everything
k3nd477 (01:52) Yeah.
Right.
Craig Calcaterra (02:03) Just, it’s the way I would talk with someone. Well, maybe a little bit more intense than the way I would talk with
k3nd477 (02:09) and we’ll get back to the origin story and all of those things. But I think that that that is for me something that is unique in your writing and how you approach things, because this is this isn’t just Twitter or blue sky. This is your, your primary income is writing this newsletter. something that
I a lot of people or lot of writers might be a little afraid to go as hard as you do on your politics. And so does that ever enter your mind in terms of editing yourself or kind of not going into certain areas that you feel the need to or want to?
Craig Calcaterra (02:54) Not really. part of that goes back, not to jump around too much, but part of that goes back to how I started is I got noticed because I was writing about within baseball, controversial issues. This is when I was still working my day job as a lawyer. I was part-time blogging under a pseudonym for a long time. And the way I sort of got noticed was I was talking about steroids in baseball, labor in baseball, politics as it relates to sports, things that
k3nd477 (03:19) that
Craig Calcaterra (03:21) there was a niche for because your standard AP writer or
k3nd477 (03:21) work.
Craig Calcaterra (03:24) ESPN writer or whoever was not really talking about much. So that got me noticed. ⁓ And then I come from that blog 1.0 conversational confessional style that everybody was doing in 2004. So it’s just always there. ⁓ Have there been some political things that I don’t talk about so much? Occasionally. ⁓ Mostly though, that’s not because I’m afraid to talk about it. It’s more,
k3nd477 (03:27) Yeah.
Thank
Craig Calcaterra (03:51) I have a community I have a pretty good handle on and I don’t want to throw a bomb in the middle of my comments section and ⁓ make everybody mad at each other for so much. So if there’s something that’s truly, truly divisive, ⁓ I won’t avoid it out of principle, but I will be careful in how I tread.
k3nd477 (04:02) Yeah.
so you mentioned that community. So I know that you initially on Twitter and then now more on Blue Sky ⁓ have like a social media following, but this the community that you’re talking about is the subscribers to your newsletter. Is that right?
Craig Calcaterra (04:25) Yeah, right.
Right, I have a comment section on my newsletter. ⁓ It’s probably only used by a small fraction like any comment section is of my subscribers. ⁓ But I feel like I know them and a lot of them feel like they know me. I have one commenter who met his wife who was also a commenter several years ago and got married because they were in my comment section together. So I’m very aware of ⁓ those people. And when I’m writing, I don’t feel like I’m writing to however many thousand
may read it, I feel like I’m writing to like the 200 people that are really actively commenting all the time.
k3nd477 (04:59) Yeah,
did you get an invite to that wedding? That’s my big question.
Craig Calcaterra (05:03) I did not,
but when she packed up her housing and moved in with him cross country, they stopped here where I live in Columbus, Ohio, and they bought me a beer.
k3nd477 (05:12) There you go. That’s awesome. That’s Okay, so maybe let’s go back a little bit. Rewind. You mentioned a couple things of your past. I’ve read that when you were a youngster, a young Craig, you wrote about baseball. You wanted to write about baseball. That was something that was very present in your life. Take me back to whatever, 14-year-old Craig and what you were doing and thinking.
about baseball.
Craig Calcaterra (05:40) Sure. ⁓ I got into baseball with my older brother through baseball cards. And this would have been in the late 70s, maybe early 80s. My parents are not sports people. My dad kind of became a college football fan later, but he did not grow up as a sports fan. My mom is not a sports person. I did not inherit sports fandom the way so many people do. We just thought baseball cards were cool. And so we got into them a lot and I would be fascinated with the backs of them and the stats. And I just sort of immersed myself.
and all of that. I can’t even say what it was about it that got me into it, but by the time I was eight years old probably, I was a huge Detroit Tigers fan. My parents started taking me to games just because we wanted to go to games. So it was an obsession of mine probably until I was…
k3nd477 (06:21) Thanks.
That’s not my problem.
Craig Calcaterra (06:28) you know, well it still is, but it was certainly
k3nd477 (06:30) I’ll look at it later.
Craig Calcaterra (06:31) an obsession of mine when I was a young kid. And then at the same time, I was a big reader, I was an early newspaper reader, I was the dork, like 10 year old who was literally reading the newspaper. Again, I don’t know how that happened, it just did. Well, yeah, some people are like that, And ⁓ so it just occurred to me, I did play sports, but I wasn’t good, and I knew I wasn’t good. I was good enough to play, but not good enough to go anywhere with it. But I really did want to be a sports striker, I just got it my
k3nd477 (06:46) Same.
Craig Calcaterra (06:58) head, hey, I’m reading about a guy who is writing.
the stuff that I love. I could do that. I was thinking that when I was 11, 12 years old. And I think like a weird tipping point for me was I lived in Parkersburg, West Virginia. And this would have been, I don’t know, 86, 87, was maybe 13, 14 years old. And my dad happened to know a sports writer for the Parkersburg Sentinel, which was the local paper there, and told him, hey, my kid likes sports too. You should talk to him. And the guy didn’t take me seriously at all, but he was like, hey, why don’t you write a
k3nd477 (07:28) I think we’re.
Craig Calcaterra (07:32) your predictions for the 1987 season or something. And I wrote like on a Commodore 64 word processor, I wrote like 2000 words, like setting forth the season, like a formal season preview. And he like did something on hand. The idea, I think he had this conceit that he was going to, hey, can I outpick a kid? You know, that was going to be like his preseason column. And he sort of tossed his off. And mine was like this huge thing. And then he didn’t run it, I think, because I think either he thought it was too much or he didn’t know what to do with it. But I kept that.
k3nd477 (07:32) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (08:02) And I also kept his handwritten one because he gave it to me. I was way better about what was going to happen in 1987 than him. Give a 14 year old boy a little bit of an ego boost and it’s going to kill him for the rest of his life.
k3nd477 (08:07) You
Yeah, for sure, you have that and then you grow up, go to school. Do you go to school for journalism or anything like that? what what what path did you take there?
Craig Calcaterra (08:26) No, I completely then forgot that that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t forget it. I got to college, late high school, early college. You I marinated in Reagan’s America for a long time and I just decided, well, I got to do something that’s going to make me money and I need to do something that’s important and I need to do something where I wear a suit. I don’t come from an educated background either. I don’t have like white collar workers in my background either. So it’s like, that just seemed like an interesting thing to me. Well, look at those people. That’s the important people.
k3nd477 (08:30) You
.
Craig Calcaterra (08:56) who
go into the tall buildings downtown. And so I got into college and I was doing the thing that people who aren’t good at math do. You study political science and English and stuff and then when you do that and you think you can’t get a job, you go to law school. So somewhere in college, I’m like, well, I’ll be a lawyer because I’m good at writing and I’m good at arguing and I’m good at speaking and all of that. ⁓ you know, a few years of not knowing what I wanted to do except bad things like make money. ⁓
k3nd477 (08:58) Yeah.
Thank
Craig Calcaterra (09:24) that sort of dictated where I went, I ended up going to law school.
k3nd477 (09:27) did you have a, other than that seems like an important career or something that would be good, was there any sort of…
Craig Calcaterra (09:40) idealistic-ness to it.
k3nd477 (09:41) Yeah, like
I like sort of like okay, I’m gonna do this. gonna help people I’m gonna do this I’m gonna just make a ton of money. Like what was your thinking around? Maybe both, but I’m not
Craig Calcaterra (09:51) Like a lot of people who go to law school because they’re not quite sure what else to do, which was definitely me, we all delude ourselves into thinking, well, I’m gonna go and work at a law firm for a few years and pay off my loans and make a little bit of money and establish myself, and then I’m gonna do good things for good people. I love the people who do that. I wish I could have been one of the people who did that. I was not one of the people who did that.
⁓ Mostly my decision to go to law school and become a lawyer was, well, this seems to fit my skills very well and I could make a living. So I went into litigation, private practice, working for law firms and I did that for 10 years. And early on, it was fine. I was learning. It was interesting enough. I’m messy. I’m gonna gossip. I love seeing other people’s problems. So I really liked that part of it. I’m like, ooh, look how much trouble this guy’s in. I’m gonna help him. But then I had kids.
k3nd477 (10:22) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (10:45) I
got a little older, hit my 30s, and ⁓ it was one of those things where I was really increasingly thinking, boy, I’m not doing good things. And it wasn’t some moment where I stopped and I said, look, I’m the bad guy. I’m the bad person. But over time, you just realize you’re doing things that aren’t, at best, they’re neutral. At best, they’re helping rich people stay rich, protecting the powerful.
k3nd477 (11:00) Right. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (11:11) ⁓ increasingly in my career, given the sort of cases I had and stuff, was defending like some bad people, not criminals, not like, you know, violent people or anything, but like white collar criminals and political figures and people like that, that I did have no respect for. And, ⁓ it created this thing where I just went into a burnout mode, a sort of premature crisis when I was, you know, in my mid thirties.
k3nd477 (11:23) Yeah, yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (11:38) of what am I doing with my life? And I didn’t like it. Yeah, so what I did was
I grabbed for something that I knew that I would enjoy and I started a baseball blog, like on the side clandestinely while I was at work because damn it, I was gonna spend at least a little bit of time every day immersing myself in something that I liked and that was positive.
k3nd477 (12:00) Yeah, what was your relationship with baseball between Whatever 12 14 when you wrote that prediction column to when you started the blog
Craig Calcaterra (12:12) I was like, I mean, I maintain my baseball fandom pretty strongly that entire time. ⁓ there’s this thing, it’s been studied where people are huge baseball fans when they’re kids. And then when they get to their late teens and into their twenties, they sort of fall away from the game a little bit. You know, you get interested in your career and girls and whatever. And I did fall back a little bit, but I would not as much as a lot of people. I was still a pretty big fan. I would watch, you know, a hundred games a year, maybe more on TV, just a lot of baseball. ⁓
k3nd477 (12:39) Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (12:42) What really juiced it and jazzed it though for me in ways it might have fallen apart or fall into the wayside but the sabermetric revolution happened.
Late 90s, I was, you know, reading Bill James and I was on rec sports baseball and all those websites where people were really getting into sabermetrics and stats and things. ⁓ And though I’m not a math person myself, I’m a fellow traveler as my fellow baseball writer, Jay Jaffe says, I’m in the liberal arts wing of the sabermetric movement. ⁓
And ⁓ so that stuff really fascinated me. So I got really immersed into that and I was part of websites and groups and things like that. So that really took it to a new level because I could appreciate the game in a new way. ⁓ I would right now, if not for the Saber Metric Revolution and Moneyball and all of that, Baseball Primer was a big sight for me. Baseball Prospectus in the early days. I would be one of those just sort of casual Joe fans who would sit back and have a beer and say, those guys make too much money and not think too deeply about it.
k3nd477 (13:41) Yeah, what about it was like what I kind of was the same way what about it for you? Got into your brain with saber metrics was it? for me it was like this was a deeper understanding of the game that
that is not face value. don’t necessarily, when you’re watching a game, you don’t necessarily see all of these things. And that was interesting to me. Was there something similar for you or what drew you to that and made that enhanced baseball for you?
Craig Calcaterra (14:16) That was a big part of it. you know, pull the curtain back and understand things on a new level or, you know, it’s almost like seeing the game with new eyes, understanding it differently. That was a huge part of it. ⁓ And there was also a part of it that is not necessarily flattering for me, but I know it’s part of my psyche. It’s the way I work. ⁓ I have a real hard time with sort of gatekeeping and ⁓ with people who make arguments from authority.
And there’s a huge thing, especially in sports, where, you know, hey, young man, you don’t know what I know, so you don’t get to have an opinion. You know, that’s a bit of a character of it, but it kind of works that way. ⁓
k3nd477 (14:55) If you work that way. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (14:58) I didn’t like being told
either in my reading or in actually talking to people that you didn’t play the game so you don’t understand. And those answers that athletes give, those pat answers or coaches when they’re talking on the TV shows or whatever about how, you got to understand this is how it works. Those never sat well with me because that’s not how anything else in the world is described. You don’t hear a scientist say, hey, until you’ve looked at a telescope, you don’t know anything. They actually have to explain themselves. so Saber Metrics
k3nd477 (15:02) Right. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (15:28) sort of gave me a way to understand the game that did not require me to have played, you know, organized sports for 15 years and did not require that I was in the cool kid group, ⁓ you know, of all of that. And I’ve always been attracted to that sort of thing. It was not forbidden knowledge, but knowledge that I was supposedly not supposed to ever have or ever be able to have. And, you know, it just appealed to me and that happens in anything I get into.
k3nd477 (15:28) Yeah, yeah.
Interesting, like about the gatekeeping piece, because I know that some, and this is fast forwarding years and years. So initial sabermetrics, like you said, was in late 90s and things like that. then there became this, ⁓ you don’t really understand the statistics. You don’t understand the sabermetric pieces of it. And so I think that there’s been this evolution of like,
for lack of a better phrase, like the nerds were like, hey, now we have all the information and we’re gonna gatekeep. And so like, have you experienced that? What’s your relationship with that?
Craig Calcaterra (16:32) yeah.
Oh yeah, that definitely happened. And that happens everywhere. We’ve seen that in tech. We’ve seen it everywhere. The nerds won. And then all of a sudden the nerds are the bullies, right? I mean, it happens that way. It’s happened in Saber Metrics with baseball as all the teams started to… I watch teams hiring my friends, you know, because I was really active in this stuff as Michael Lewis was writing Moneyball and guys would come into the forum and be like, hey, I just talked to the guy who wrote the book about business and stuff. And then they get hired by a team or something. It was weird.
But as that world matured, it’s become a little reductive. It’s becoming, we’re talking 10, 15 years ago, it started to become reductive. ⁓
And then there was a way of taking joy out of it because you get to this point where you know everything and like, I know why he threw that pitch. know why he’s not swinging there. I know why this guy’s playing and that guy’s not playing. But you know what? I like that real fast guy who strikes out a lot because he’s fun to watch. that every, think everybody who was immersed in that stat head world had some moment, hopefully, you know, after 2003, where a thing they liked aesthetically wasn’t the optimization thing for baseball. And I
k3nd477 (17:30) right
Craig Calcaterra (17:46) started noticing it all the time. I love a stolen base I love a triple. I love, you know, a starting pitcher who goes after he’s tired and keeps going because there’s just something cool and gutsy about it. And so you have to come back to the, the idea of, wait, that thing they used to talk about back in the eighties isn’t totally wrong and I can appreciate it. So yeah, there’s definitely been this, you know, back and forth sort of thing to it. And while on a very basic level, I still understand and appreciate baseball from a broadly speaking, saber metric.
k3nd477 (17:58) I’m
Great.
Craig Calcaterra (18:16) point of view. I have left the church as, you know, to be dramatic about it, I guess. But yeah, you see that with any subculture with any bit of sort of knowledge base or authority base kind of a thing. And, and then again, my problems with authority kick in now all the stat heads are the people in charge of the discourse and in charge of teams and everything. You know, I don’t trust that either.
k3nd477 (18:20) Yeah.
Right. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, I mean, I so I worked at baseball prospectus for a few years and I ⁓ kind of was like, this is too much. The like knowing, knowing what I know, like kind of took the joy out of watching baseball. And so I didn’t watch baseball for like three years. And I got into it last fall when my buddies were talking about the Mariners, the
Craig Calcaterra (18:45) okay.
k3nd477 (19:07) Seattle folks and so it was like a pretty fun time to jump back in but ⁓ But yeah, like there is definitely that okay. I just I’m gonna I’m gonna try and watch baseball to watch baseball not to like figure out the game or whatever and in something that that I know that we both share is an appreciation for football or soccer ⁓ and I’ve delivered I don’t know if you have but I’ve deliberately not learned anything about any sort of these like
analytics or advanced like I’m like I don’t want to know what XG is. don’t like I don’t want to know that because that would.
Craig Calcaterra (19:37) Completely.
For
me, it was a conscious choice with soccer to not know that, because I was not like a football fan, soccer fan ⁓ at all. And I was writing a book ⁓ that came out a few years ago about sports fandom.
k3nd477 (19:48) 100%.
Right. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (19:58) And
I realized, and part of the book is, it’s good to be a casual fan. You don’t have to know everything. Sports is a good, it’s background noise and everything. And that was never my experience. But I did come to this place where I’m like, that’s a good thing. And I realized that I didn’t have experience with it. And I was sort of interested in football and I was kind of watching the games on Peacock or USA or whatever, the English Premier League games. ⁓
k3nd477 (20:11) Yeah.
Okay.
Craig Calcaterra (20:25) I made a choice, you know what? I’m just jumping in, but rather than jump in like I would
have with baseball 30 years earlier, I am going to jump in and just enjoy it. And I’m not going to understand it on a real deep level. And so that’s what I’ve done with English football, European football or whatever. And, ⁓ you know, I know the rules and I can tell you who’s good and I can tell you who’s not so good. Barely.
k3nd477 (20:37) Yeah.
Yeah, yeah
Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (20:48) ⁓
but I, I don’t know any of the metrics or the, know, advanced metrics or anything like that. I couldn’t, I’m totally lost with all of that. And it’s good because I could just turn on a game, enjoy it, and then turn it off and not care.
k3nd477 (20:56) same. Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah, I took the same
approach. Like I’m a Man City fan. I know you’re a Brentford fan. ⁓ How did you land on that?
Craig Calcaterra (21:09) Again, part of it’s my contrary nature. ⁓ Every American who picks a Premier League team usually goes with one of the big six. ⁓ I wasn’t going to do that because I’m not a joiner. so I started just watching, I think this would have been 21, fall of 21. It was the first year that Brentford was promoted to the Premier League. So I think that was 21.
k3nd477 (21:18) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (21:33) And the first game opening night of the Premier League that year was Brentford versus Arsenal in Brentford’s then brand new stadium. They had played a season in it with no fans because of COVID, but this was the first time in their new stadium at G-Tech where they had fans and it was the night game to open Premier League and mighty Arsenal and little Brentford. And I’m like, I know who Arsenal is. I know their whole deal. I can’t root for them. Let’s hope Brentford wins. And Brentford won. It was a huge upset. So that was like, wow, that’s great. And I didn’t immediately glom onto them. was like, I was going to watch Premier League football for a few months.
k3nd477 (22:01) What? ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (22:03) and then just find a team that spoke to me. But I kept going back and I kept going back. And then Brentford sort of has the Sabermetric thing going on. mean, the reason that they have done as well as they’ve done being a small team is, you know, in football it’s all because it’s gambling based, but whatever. ⁓ You know, they’re like the Tampa Bay Rays or the old Oakland A’s or something. They punch up and I sort of like that. So they just appealed to me and now I’m stuck with them.
k3nd477 (22:05) Yeah. ⁓
Yeah, that’s what.
Craig Calcaterra (22:29) And I saw
them in person last year, Thai Man City in Brentford. That was my first Premier League game in person. And it was great with that equalizer and stoppage time and sorry about that.
k3nd477 (22:42) That’s all right. Yeah, that’s amazing. yeah,
I think that the pursuit of that kind of fandom is so interesting. And like, some people are like, who should I be a fan of? Like, they’re just getting into the Premier League or something like that. And I’m like, the team that resonates with you, you know, in a way. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (23:04) tried to do the traditional thing, right? Like, you know, if
you’re from England, you’re local, right? I mean, it’s easy. But if you’re from America, you don’t have that. So I’m like, well, do I have any sort of connection that would be like a traditional fandom connection? And the best I could do is my great grandmother was born in West Brom.
k3nd477 (23:09) Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (23:22) And I thought, okay, well they have a team and at the time they were in the Premier League, so maybe I could be a West Brom fan because I at least have a family connection to that town. And I watched like two West Brom games and they were the most boring, unappealing brand of football I’ve ever seen in my life and I couldn’t do it.
k3nd477 (23:25) Yeah.
Yeah, ⁓ man, okay, so let’s jump back into your progression. So you’re lawyering by day, writing about baseball. Is this still under a pseudonym? Or.
Craig Calcaterra (23:51) It started with a pseudonym.
I actually started a legal blog in 2006. I started a legal blog ⁓ because there’s just all this stuff I was seeing and I felt like I needed to put it somewhere and the whole world was starting blogging then, so why not? And I called it Shyster
which ⁓ why not? I needed to have a pseudonym for that. I’d get fired if anybody knew that I was writing about legal stuff. ⁓ And I was only interested in that for like six months and I started to lose my interest. But then I was like, well, I’ll write about baseball. And there were, you know, a hundred people maybe that read that blog and I didn’t want to alienate them. So I called the baseball blog Shyster Ball. I don’t know. It was dumb. ⁓ And ⁓ I just used the pseudonym Shyster because again, I felt
k3nd477 (24:13) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (24:36) I might get in trouble if someone finds out I’m writing. And I used the pseudonym for a year. And then I went to my real name, because I starting to get readership. ⁓ Rob Neyer, who was then at ESPN, stumbled on the blog somehow. I don’t know how. And he linked it in his ESPN column at the time. And that blew up traffic for me. And it was starting to get popular. So I’m like, I want some credit for this. So I put my real name on it. And that’s when trouble started to start
k3nd477 (24:37) Yeah. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (24:59) at my law firm and everything else. ⁓
k3nd477 (25:00) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (25:05) someone at the the ABA journal, the American Bar Association journal, found it, read it, knew it was some lawyer. and he works for a firm that people know. And so they did a little interview of me, which I stupidly agreed to do. And so there’s an interview of me in the ABA journal about my little hobby of writing about baseball on the side, which no one at my law firm knew about. And I played it down enough to where
k3nd477 (25:16) Okay.
Okay, bye.
Craig Calcaterra (25:30) I wasn’t in trouble, but you know, if you’re at a law firm and I was like right up to the point where I was getting ready to make partner maybe, so you can’t upset anyone if you’re doing that. So of course I upset people. This guy’s not 100 % committed. ⁓ In hindsight, it was, you know, complete self-destruction on purpose. It was, you know, self-sabotage. ⁓ I didn’t think that’s what I was doing at the time, but that’s probably what I was doing.
k3nd477 (25:38) Yeah. ⁓
Thank
Yeah,
so sabotage because you didn’t want to be a lawyer or you wanted to write about baseball or both.
Craig Calcaterra (26:00) Yeah. Both. Both.
I didn’t have an idea of what to do if I wasn’t a lawyer. I knew I wasn’t enjoying it. I never sat down and had the conversation, I can’t do this anymore. I got to find something else.
it wasn’t doing anything for me and if I could find something else to do, great. And then when the blog originally was just an outlet to give me something positive to do, but then it started to get readership. And then I was like, this was still at a time where big major media sites were hiring blogger types to come work for them. And I thought, well, maybe I can get popular enough to where that’ll happen. So it was a bit of both going on.
k3nd477 (26:24) Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah. And so tell me about the move that actually made that happen. Tell me about the situation where that shift took place for you.
Craig Calcaterra (26:43) and
Sure. So my readership really took off around the time of the Mitchell Report.
steroids in baseball and then like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were getting prosecuted for perjury and whatever. So this would have been late 2007 into 2008 maybe. And no one in organized sports media was really covering that well. ESPN had a legal expert that they would use and I don’t care about using his name because he hates me and I hate him even if he’s still around. name is Lester Munson and he was completely he was completely mishandling
everything. Like he was, he was a lawyer, but he was like completely missing the boat on both the Mitchell Report, on the grand jury investigation into Barry Bonds and his indictment. And I was writing like stuff about it. I was analyzing it. I was taking time away, totally breaking down in 2000 words everything about the Barry Bonds indictment, for example, or the Mitchell Report. And it got really popular because a few sports writers found that and I was like a resource for them because then they could understand it better.
k3nd477 (27:46) Right.
Craig Calcaterra (27:48) At the end of 2008, my law firm, ⁓ well, the financial crash hit.
k3nd477 (27:49) Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (27:54) Right. The financial crisis hit in that fall and I was supposed to be up for partner and I wasn’t and they were going to cut costs and I was easy to cut because that guy’s interested in other things. So I got laid off from my law firm. ⁓ Luckily, I landed on my feet and I worked for the Ohio attorney’s general’s office. I got a job in early 2009 and I made a decision that I was going to tell them that I do this and I was going to actually try to make a go of it. So I did.
And by that spring, NBC Sports was redoing their whole website. ⁓ They didn’t really have
k3nd477 (28:23) website. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (28:24) a modern sports website. was all just like wire copy and stuff. And the guy who took over mbc sports.com, Rick Cordella, wanted to launch a blog and they had a couple writers there. Aaron Gleeman, who’s now a twins writer for the athletic, Matthew Pulliat, who is still at NBC and launched and founded Roto World, which is a major road history website. They hired those two guys to start the website and they thought they needed someone else and they both knew my writing and they just asked me if I would contribute part time. And I was like, my God,
k3nd477 (28:52) like ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (28:52) totally. So I was getting like, you know, a hundred bucks a week.
or something like that to write a few posts for them in early 2009. And then that summer while still working at the Ohio Attorney General’s office, I think it was either my birthday or the day after I had a couple of bourbons and it was late in the evening and I sent an email to Rick Cordella at NBC Sports and I said, you know, this has been really fun. But ⁓ there are a few things we could do to fix this website. And I put some bullet point down and I sent the email and I didn’t hear anything for three days. And
I thought, ⁓ he’s just going to fire me because I’m a jerk.
⁓ and the, email that came back was what would it take to get you to quit practicing law and run the website full time? And it was like a Hollywood moment. It was crazy. Like that doesn’t happen, but it happened to me. And, ⁓ after, you know, it took a couple of months to get it all straightened out, but by November, 2009, I was full-time writer for NBC sports and I’ve not looked back.
k3nd477 (29:45) Wow, that’s great.
Congratulations on that, that, I mean, it is, it’s like a Hollywood story. That’s great. That’s super.
Craig Calcaterra (29:49) Thanks.
And I don’t do
things like that. Lawyers are jerks, but I generally am not assertive like that at all. ⁓ So I have no idea what got into me other than a little bit of Evan Williams Black or something, I’m not sure.
k3nd477 (29:59) Yeah.
Yeah. And then, so you were at MEC. tell me about maybe the, like, that shift for you going from lawyering to writing. How did you adjust, like, from a personal level on your own, like, from your day to day? I’m sure it was drastically different. What things came up for you, like,
Craig Calcaterra (30:13) you
k3nd477 (30:35) kind of just more on a personal level than like the work that you were doing.
Craig Calcaterra (30:40) ⁓ it wasn’t as drastic as it should have been. Most people would have taken advantage of that and been like, all right, I’m a full-time blogger. I’m going to wear my pajamas all day. I’m going to write from bed. I’m going to write at two in the morning. I’m not wired like that. At the time I had two little
You know, like a four-year-old and a six-year-old. So my life was pretty regimented. And I just decided I’m going to approach this the way I approach my legal job. I woke up in the morning, I would go down and sit at my desk. I take a shower. I don’t like do that first thing in the morning now these days, but back then for the first couple of years, wake up, take a shower, put clothes on, sit down at my desk and work like nine to five. ⁓ Which is psychopathic for being a internet writer, but it worked for me.
k3nd477 (31:02) Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (31:23) because
regimen and structure are what I need. Then the biggest thing was just… ⁓
you dealing with childcare and, you know, having to stop in the middle of the day to take your kids to, you know, wherever they got to go and stuff. But ⁓ it wasn’t that big of a difference. I approach and I still approach most things I write about the way I would approach things when I was a litigator in that, okay, there’s an interesting thing. Let me understand everything I can understand about it. Let me form an opinion about it. ⁓ You know, you have to be an advocate some way for everything when you’re a lawyer. So as a writer, I decided I’m going to be an advocate. ⁓
k3nd477 (31:46) Okay.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (31:58) Now, that breaks down at some point. Not everything in baseball lends itself to that. for the most part, certainly on big issues,
don’t write about it if you don’t care and if you don’t have a dog in that hunt. The best way, people don’t blog as much now, but you’re seeing it again with newsletters. The best way to tell if a newsletter or a blog is going to die is when the writer says, well, I suppose I should weigh in on this. And then they start writing.
k3nd477 (32:19) Yeah. Right.
Craig Calcaterra (32:22) If you don’t have an opinion or you don’t care about it, you’re not going to write about it. You’re not going to write anything good about it, certainly. ⁓
So I just have always made sure that I pick things that I care about, or at least have some opinion or something I can make a joke about or whatever. ⁓ So it didn’t really change from that point of view. know, reject bad arguments, find the evidence to support your arguments. There’s a reason a lot of lawyers end up being writers or media people. It’s very complimentary skills.
k3nd477 (32:30) Thank
Craig Calcaterra (32:52) certain ways.
k3nd477 (32:53) Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. What are the complementary skills? It’s just what you just outlined like Kind of structuring your writing in the similar way that you would structure writing in a loft context
Craig Calcaterra (33:06) Yeah, pretty much. they teach you in law school, there’s this thing called IRAC, I-R-A-C. When you get a case or you get a problem presented to you, it’s the issue, the rule, the analysis, and the conclusion. That’s how you write a legal brief. That’s how you write an essay answer for a law school exam. And I still sort of think that way because they do change the way you think when you’re in law school. So anything that comes up, I’m like, OK, what is the issue here? OK, what are the relevant rules? Or more broadly, what is the conventional wisdom? ⁓
k3nd477 (33:26) No.
Craig Calcaterra (33:36) let me analyze that to make sure it works or it doesn’t, and then here’s what I think. And that just is wonderful for advocacy writing or opinion writing in any sort of way, which is pretty much what I do.
k3nd477 (33:47) this baseball season is long you write a newsletter that comes out daily Year-round like I know that there may be been a few little breaks here and there but it’s pretty much five days a week year-round, right?
Craig Calcaterra (34:01) Yep, pretty much. Other than, you know, I take a couple days off for holidays, I’ll take a trip once in a while, but it’s five days a week, 365.
k3nd477 (34:09) Do you care about
all of those things that much? Like you said, write about what you care about. And just for those folks who haven’t read it, first of all, go read it. ⁓ But second of all, these are fairly long newsletters. Do you have a, what’s your average word count? I don’t know if that’s a metric you keep track of or not.
Craig Calcaterra (34:30) It’s No, I mean, it’s
it’s in the little corner of the CMS that I use, so I see it ⁓ during ⁓ during the offseason like right now.
k3nd477 (34:35) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (34:40) It’s like 3,000 words. Now that also includes like block quote text and things like that. But you know, the final reading product is around 3,000, sometimes 3,500 words in the off season. It could hit 4,000 or more during the regular season because I recap every game. ⁓ So it’s a lot. I once did the math. It’s, you know, how many novels a year, obviously. It’s not equivalent because you’re just rattling off words, but. ⁓
k3nd477 (34:44) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (35:05) Do I care about it as my not every one is you know, there’s a lot of tossed off stuff There’s a lot of hey check out this movie. saw yesterday. There’s a lot of that kind of thing um But i’ve never lost my interest in talking about these things because like we said at the outset I don’t work with anybody um a lot of i’d say during the regular season a good third to a half of what I write in a newsletter is the kind of crap that I used to go to the guy who had the office next door to me and I’d lean in his doorway and talk about it nine in the morning before we really got working um
k3nd477 (35:10) Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Inward.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (35:35) So on that level, it’s,
you know, again, it’s conversational. I do care about that stuff. The bigger thing is not every day, do I find something to write about or am I forcing myself to write about anything? The bigger thing is that baseball season’s cyclical. The same thing sort of happened every year. And I’ve now been doing this for like full time, like 16, 17 years. And so.
k3nd477 (35:40) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (36:00) Every early spring there’s like that one guy that goes crazy in the first six games and everybody writes columns about is this guy free? Like I can tell you I’ve seen so many of those things. ⁓ The battle is okay, don’t get overheated about this because you know it’s gonna happen. Last year for example the first week I think it was the Yankees just beat the hell out of the Brewers.
k3nd477 (36:15) Right.
Craig Calcaterra (36:21) ⁓ In the opening weekend or the opening series with tons and tons of home runs and it became this thing they were using what if you forget what they call it like the bat with like the the torpedo bat Yeah, that that was a big talking point for the first week And if you were just coming into it, you’d say torpedo bats has it changed the game is this controversial? Should they change the rules and I look at that I’m like there’s something like this every year
k3nd477 (36:29) With torpedo bats? Yeah,
Craig Calcaterra (36:45) Every this is going to get talked out in seven days So the battle is like finding where you’re going to land on these things that you’ve talked about 10 times before or they’re similar to other things you’ve discussed i’m
k3nd477 (36:54) Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (36:58) boring person at heart. Like I am not someone who lives off of know dopamine hits. ⁓ So it’s easier for me to be measured about things. I could say I’m in my early 50s but I act like I’m in my 80s and I can be like yes I’ve we’ve seen that before this is nothing new youngster and stuff like that. So that that really helps is just sort of finding that connection to the real world and making sure you don’t get over your skis on things.
k3nd477 (37:00) Haha
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and it seems like, and correct me if you view it differently, but it seems like you, like you said, you know your audience, you know the people who are subscribing or at least the the core group and they don’t expect the hot takes from Craig. It’s like that’s not your vibe. And so I think that I wonder if you feel like that gives you latitude to not have to chase the torpedo bat story or
the axe handle bat story from a few years ago or whatever. Same story, yeah. Whatever it is this year, whatever it’s going to be. And so it seems like your audience is maybe more measured or more like the expectation isn’t, what’s the latest pop thing that just happened or whatever. It’s more, a little more thoughtful maybe. I don’t know.
Craig Calcaterra (37:56) yeah.
It’s the same story? Yeah.
yeah, for sure.
I mean maybe, that’s a nice way to put it I think. It’s probably a bit inflated way to put it. But ⁓ when I worked at NBC, I was a hot take guy for a while. I wasn’t like an extreme hot take. I was like a meta hot take. Like I would say, this is the thing everybody’s having a hot take about. And I would have my hot take.
and I would act like I’m too good for the hot take. But you had to do that because at NBC I had to get clicks. I had to get numbers. And towards the end there, new bosses came in. They’re like, go to Google Trends. And if you’re not writing about the thing, say, I had to do stuff like that there. So I’ve lived in that world. I find it very unfulfilling. A lot of my readers, even when I was still at NBC, I could tell who my
k3nd477 (38:47) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (39:08) Hardcore readers were versus the people who just skated over because my stories got linked on the front page of NBC News or something ⁓ And when I moved over and started my newsletter ⁓ The people who followed me were following me because they liked the way I wrote about things not because they were looking for hot takes And I’ve used that to my advantage. I don’t have to have those hot takes ⁓ I publish every when I was at NBC. I published like every 20 minutes or every hour or something I’d write 12 things a day all day long now I publish once a day in the morning so I could let
k3nd477 (39:27) Yeah. ⁓
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (39:38) things sit for a few hours and think about them a little bit or try to find like a secondary or tertiary sort of take on them ⁓ or find more jokes about them or maybe walk away come back and realize that’s not important at all actually or you know it’s it’s a lot better pacing now. ⁓ My readers are I don’t want to stereotype them because there’s a lot of them and they’re all over the map I have young women readers I have old men readers I have everything between but
k3nd477 (39:53) Yeah.
Thank
Craig Calcaterra (40:08) When I started doing
this, I started thinking of a reader who was like me in the sense of not that they were just a mediocre white man, but they were someone who has a job and who has life responsibilities and who has other things that they’re doing. They like sports and they would like to catch up on it, but they’re not going to spend all day like someone at the bar stool site or something like that. That’s not my type of reader. ⁓ So I write for that person.
k3nd477 (40:13) Yeah. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (40:36) to who loves sports but doesn’t make it their whole life and their whole personality. And that really
reigns in the whole hot take thing. My readers have memories. My readers, you know, are not goldfish. ⁓ If I started going all hot takey every day and jumping on whatever was big, they would think that I’d been taken hostage or something like that and I was trying to cross for help.
k3nd477 (40:44) Great.
So I want to talk a little bit about the, guess it wasn’t a decision. Well, it was a decision ⁓ to start your newsletter. That’s a shift in business model, for lack of better term. You’re not getting paid by somebody else. You’re getting paid by everybody else who wants to pay you. ⁓ Like from a
I don’t know if I want to say business point of view, from a making an income point of
Like, what was the thought process that you went through to say, OK, I don’t want to go get another writer job. I want to start this newsletter. What happened there?
Craig Calcaterra (41:40) So in some ways I’ve been very, very lucky in terms of when catastrophes have hit. I mentioned that the financial crisis is what caused my law firm to kick me out and made me think harder about blogging professionally. Well, COVID hit in 2020 and that
basically caused NBC to shutter my website and lay me off after a while. It was August of 2020 when they were like, okay, we’re hemorrhaging money. Let’s get rid of all the people who aren’t Mike Florio in pro football talk. And I was one of the ones they got rid of. So horrible timing to be thrown out of a job again.
But I, by that point, had been doing it for 11 had a lot of autonomy at NBC. That was one thing. Unlike most other people who work for media companies, like I didn’t have to send my stuff to an editor. I was the editor. I could write about whatever I wanted to write. It was a very unusual job for a major media company. And I was spoiled rotten for it. And I had friends who worked for other companies who had assignments and editors. And it seemed like work in ways that my job wasn’t work. So I immediately thought, I’m not going to go try to go work for a media company.
One, media is dying anyway. It’s like a horrible world to be trying to get into. But also, I can’t work under that sort of structure again. And if I was going to work under that sort of structure again, I’ll just go back to a law firm because at least I can make real money doing that and what I’m doing. ⁓
k3nd477 (42:52) Yeah, right.
Craig Calcaterra (42:59) So at that point, the newsletter thing in the subscription model was still relatively new. There were people doing it and like politics and, and other stuff, but it wasn’t really big in sports yet. ⁓ and I, NBC gave me a decent enough severance to where I had a few months to play with before I had to find a real job. And, I thought, well, I’ll give it a go. If I can do this, it’ll be perfect because I will be autonomous. I can do what I want. can continue doing what I was doing at NBC, but you know, whatever. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll go find a real job.
k3nd477 (43:24) Okay. Okay. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (43:29) And I think I just hit the timing right because right now we’re in this world of sort of subscription fatigue Where you know, there are only so many newsletters or websites or pay walls that people will pay for But at the time I think I got in under the wire ⁓ It also helped that I was fired rather publicly In that NBC laid off a bunch of people all in one day and one of those
websites I can’t remember which one was the big lead or awful announcing or one of those Did a whole thing Calcaterra out at NBC. I did not deserve a story with my name in
k3nd477 (43:51) I’m to let you take care of yourselves. I’ll talk to you later. I’m go ahead and I’m going to ahead I’m go turn this off.
Craig Calcaterra (43:59) the
headline. I was just a little freaking blogger, but why they did that. And so a bunch of readers immediately were like, what’s Craig going to do next? If they quietly laid me off and I said nothing, no one would have cared and no one would have noticed. But the next day I started the newsletter and a bunch of people followed me over like immediately because it was sort of portrayed in the story as if I had been done wrong. I wasn’t done wrong. It was a pretty straightforward business decision. ⁓ But there was like this rallying to me that made it work. so within like a few months, I gave myself like a year if in a year I could
k3nd477 (44:14) Okay.
Yeah. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (44:29) support myself, I’ll keep doing it. And I was to the point where I’d like match my NBC salary and then some like within like six months. So ⁓ again, outrageously lucky, ⁓ would not have been able to do it if it wasn’t for readers who have been with me since, you 2007. And yeah, ⁓ so just happened that way. I’ve been the beneficiary
of very, very good fortune on a number of occasions doing what I do.
k3nd477 (44:53) Well, I think it’s a very interesting story from a lot of different angles in terms of media, sports media, tech also, from ⁓ a, just the shift in, you were saying, like subscription fatigue and those kinds of things. that’s, all of those things are kind of
in the water right now still even and I think that that’s interesting. So a couple things that I wanted to touch on you’ve been very public in your newsletter in on social media about your family and your family
How have you managed that within your family, with the relationships within your family, but then also how do you decide what you want to put out onto the internet and not, and those types of things?
Craig Calcaterra (45:52) It was a very conscious sort of, it wasn’t a decision, but I’ve approached talking about my personal life and my family life.
very consciously because on the one hand my writing style is very personal, very conversational, and so it makes total sense for me to be like, you know, I didn’t see the seventh inning because my son had a fever and I had to get up. You those are just, that’s how I write and that’s how I always did. ⁓ And then when I, especially when I got into the newsletter, I was doing a little bit of this before, but, ⁓ and I could write about whatever I wanted and enough people are sort of interested in dumb things that I do in my life that I felt it was, you know, okay to write about.
k3nd477 (46:22) I’m glad you wanted to. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (46:30) wanted to make sure, one, I’m not exploiting my kids and I’m not sharing confidences, say with my wife or whatever, that shouldn’t be out there. ⁓ And it could be hard to balance that. ⁓ I guess what I would say is I probably give off the impression that I’m sharing far, far more than I really am. I’m not misleading. I don’t lie about my family. None of that is made up. ⁓ But
It’s selective. People hear the good things. People don’t always hear the bad things. ⁓ When my kids were old enough to understand what it was I was doing, ⁓ I think there’d be a few times I’d say, hey, do you care if daddy writes about that?
because they were somehow bright enough to understand that I wrote things and it showed up on the internet, which they knew what it was. And, you know, I wasn’t going to just leave it to them because they’d say, sure, even if it was something, you you got to have parental judgment. But they started to like it. And so I would share little things about them. And then I started to understand where the limits were. And now I don’t write about them that much at all anymore. My daughter’s 22. My son’s almost 21. And, you know, they’re adults and they have their own lives. So I’m not like sitting and using them all the time as content anymore because
k3nd477 (47:13) Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Craig Calcaterra (47:42) It’s not my business to. But I know, I just find the comfort level with it. I am someone who, though I share a lot, I’m very self-conscious about certain things. I have a pretty low threshold of embarrassment on the dumbest little things. Like I don’t like to look foolish or whatever. So like I’m very conscious. Like if I say this about myself, is that gonna make me look bad?
k3nd477 (47:43) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (48:10) So I apply that to someone else and that’s kind of how I decide ⁓ if I’m going to share something. But it’s worked out. I haven’t had any real blowback yet. ⁓ Even, I got divorced like 15 years ago and ⁓ my ex-wife, I don’t think I’ve even upset her on things I’ve written about and ⁓ that’s quite an accomplishment.
k3nd477 (48:23) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I’m sure.
I’m sure it is.
Yeah, I guess maybe a last question would be like, you, so we talked about the newsletter Cup of Coffee. That’s been cranking along for almost six years now. Five and a half years. What are your plans with it? Just kind of keep on going? Is that like, yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (48:51) Yeah, about five and a half years, yeah.
Pretty much.
Yeah, that’s it’s a I’m in a weird place. Every few years of my life, I’ve had a change or I’ve had a new thing. I don’t really have that right now. There’s not an imperative of, oh, I’ve got to find the next thing or I’ve got to find the next level. Like I could hum along like this for a long time. So I don’t know. I could do this until I die. You know, someone at my mom asked me about my retirement plans. I’m like,
I know, I’ll do this until I can’t write anymore. I enjoy it. ⁓
k3nd477 (49:31) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (49:33) I’m somewhat conscious of the fact that, you know, the idea of the written word long form on the internet thing is not exactly the hottest business model. I have completely and intentionally missed the boat on short form video because, I mean, look at me, I am not made for this. and I don’t have the attention span or lack of attention span for it. So I don’t think that, you know, pushing myself into the new thing that everybody is doing in the creator community is, is, is necessarily wise for me.
k3nd477 (49:50) Thank
That’s something that’s.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (50:03) So I think I’m just gonna do this until I either don’t want to or it becomes, you know, unviable. ⁓ Kind of happy where I am. It’s a very strange thing to be content.
k3nd477 (50:09) Yeah.
I love it. I love to hear the question that comes up for me there is how do you stay fresh in it because like you say it’s cyclical and there are kind of the ups and downs of the baseball season but how do you stay fresh and excited about writing a three thousand word newsletter every day a year.
Craig Calcaterra (50:35) I think very often and remember very often what it was like to not be doing this. ⁓ Having worked in the real world for 11, 12 years, ⁓ seeing my peers that I still talk to from that life, ⁓ I never want to go back to a situation where I’m not.
doing this. am extraordinarily lucky to be able to wake up every day and just empty my brain onto a page and have people pay me for it. ⁓ So the best I can say is even if a baseball season gets cyclical, even if I’ve written the same story eight times because things come up that way, ⁓ it sure as hell beats working. And I am very grateful for doing what I do and it also just helps that
k3nd477 (51:12) Thank
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (51:24) even if I wasn’t writing a newsletter or making a living off of my writing, I’d be writing anyway, because I’d just like to. I’d be writing journals,
I’d be writing stories, I don’t know what I’d be doing, but I just enjoy the process of writing because it feels like problem-solving to me, and that’s very satisfying. ⁓ knowing what you have and being grateful to have it goes a hell of a long way for that sort of thing.
k3nd477 (51:39) Thank
Yeah, I can imagine. can imagine. we talked a little bit about this, but you’ve written the book about fandom. Can you remind us of the name of that?
Craig Calcaterra (51:55) Yep, it’s called Rethinking Fandom. It came out in 2022. And it was sort of, it’s more of a manifesto and a rant.
about sports fandom than anything else. think I got really tired of hearing about the right ways and the wrong ways to be a fan. The whole Bill Simmons school of, that’s not allowed, this is how you have to be, you have to be loyal to the… I hate that. I hate rules like that. Sports should be enjoyable. So I just wrote kind of a long manifesto about how you can be any sort of fan you want. You could be a casual fan, you could switch teams. If you’re tired of rooting for your team or the owner’s a jerk, you don’t have to. There’s no law that says you have to be a Jets fan for your entire life just because you’re from Long Island.
k3nd477 (52:15) Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (52:33) or something. That’s ridiculous. The Jets haven’t done anything for you. So I wrote a big long thing that gave people a permission structure to be bad fans.
k3nd477 (52:34) Right.
Yeah.
That’s all. You know, it’s funny. I have not read the book, but I would like to because I so I grew up in Chicago, Cubs fan. Long suffering, excited about 2016, but then I’ve kind of lost touch. I live in the Pacific Northwest, have done for the past 20 years, and I’m like, OK, am I more a Mariners fan now than I am a Cubs fan? It’s like, well, I haven’t been to a Cubs game in 20 years. I don’t know how long it’s been a long time.
Maybe I am. And so I had this moment of like, is that OK? Am I a bad Cub fan?
Craig Calcaterra (53:18) And the only reason
you had that moment is because I tongue in cheek use the term sports industrial complex in the book.
But it’s real. It’s this idea that we’ve been communicated to us since we were children that loyalty is all that matters. That’s your team. Love and relief. It’s sports. It’s entertainment. No one would say that you have to be loyal to like the Bugs Bunny cartoons your whole life just because you love them when you were eight. But we do that with sports, even though sports is essentially just entertainment. ⁓ And it’s just amazing how deeply that feeling is in every American sports fan. ⁓ Well, especially European sports fan.
k3nd477 (53:43) Right. Right.
Craig Calcaterra (53:58) I was in England and I tried to explain the premise of my book to a guy there and he just thought I was like an apostate. It was crazy because like, if you grow up a West Ham fan, you are not changing that in your life. You might as well just like, know, leave the country or something. But you know, screw that. I hate that. So yeah, that’s what it was about. ⁓
k3nd477 (53:58) Yeah.
He’s like, what are you talking about?
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, I agree. Yeah, but it is. Yeah, like, for example, like I like Sandra Bullock. She’s great. I don’t like every single one of her movies and I don’t feel the need to have to like every single one of her movies. And it’s very similar, like in that way. So.
Craig Calcaterra (54:32) Well, the moving
thing is what did it, because I lived in Michigan until I was like 11, and I was a Tigers fan when I was a little kid, and we moved to West Virginia when I was 11. And the only baseball I can get in West Virginia was either the Cubs or the Braves, because they were on the Superstations in WGN. And I just became a Braves fan, because I could watch 140 Braves games a year for all of my teens.
k3nd477 (54:47) Yeah.
Yeah.
Craig Calcaterra (54:56) Why would I still try to be a Tigers fan? And then I’ve moved away from there and then the Braves aren’t on national TV anymore. And my wife is a Tigers fan and I’ve found myself drifting back to being a Tigers fan. I’m three hours from Detroit. We go to Tigers games a year. So now I’m like sort of going back to it. That’s, know, complete sports fan infidelity, but I don’t care. There are no rules.
k3nd477 (55:12) Right.
Yeah,
yeah. Well, maybe we can share a moment here because the Tigers, I grew up in Michigan and then Chicago, but so the Tigers were my first baseball game in 1982. My dad took our, yeah, my dad took us to the game and it was super fun and that kind of fell in love. I loved Tiger Stadium. It was like crazy and weird and kind of a dump, but it was so, yes, yes. I loved it.
Craig Calcaterra (55:26) ⁓ yeah, might have been at that game.
Mm-hmm.
See that picture? That’s Tiger Stadium. Yes, that was where I learned about
baseball.
k3nd477 (55:46) Yes, and the dugouts that were like, or the bullpens that we had that were like in the locations.
Craig Calcaterra (55:49) the bullpens that were like dugouts with a little cage on the top,
they look like caged animals in the bullpen. The thing I liked about Tiger Stadium was because it’s, Comerica is a great park where they play now. You can see the skyline and that’s obviously the big thing. But Tiger Stadium was completely enclosed because they enclosed it over the years with additions. And you sort of could suspend your disbelief.
about the world. The whole world was gone. It was this little gem of a stadium with tall walls around it and you didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. And something about that just like sort of grabbed me.
k3nd477 (56:18) Yes.
Yeah, yeah, I loved it. loved it. ⁓ All right, so now it’s our time to go to the question of the week. Craig, do you have a question for us today?
Craig Calcaterra (56:35) This is a question without an answer though. ⁓ I think it’s a question without an answer because you’ve asked if I’ve like, say, been struggling to, you know, write about the same things over and over and things like that. I am having a very, very difficult time focusing given what’s going on in the world right now. ⁓ And I’m lucky because my job doesn’t matter, right? My job is whatever I make it to be. And if I decide tomorrow, I don’t feel like writing. I’ll just set a little note that says, sorry, I took today off.
k3nd477 (56:38) That’s great. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (57:03) But everybody has something they’ve got to commit to every day, whether it’s raising their kids, whether it’s going into the office or whatever.
Anyone has any ideas of how you tune out what’s going on in the world and focus on what’s going on? I’m not a young man. I’ve lived through lots of things. ⁓ It’s never been a problem like it is right now and I am having a hard time focusing. So if anybody has advice on how you tune out the world and then just sort of, you know, apply yourself to the task at hand, I am all ears because I don’t know what to do with myself half the time these days.
k3nd477 (57:37) That’s a great question. I have an answer. It’s my answer and it’s having conversations like this.
Craig Calcaterra (57:40) great.
k3nd477 (57:45) human connection. It’s ⁓ kind of seeing the humanity and the people around us and the communities that we live in. And so that’s my answer. ⁓
Craig Calcaterra (57:45) That helps.
That’s a great answer, by the way. That’s
a fantastic answer, and it’s probably the reason I’m having a problem doing it. I work alone, I’m on the internet all day. That’s not a good recipe for that sort of thing.
k3nd477 (58:07) Yeah,
well Happy to talk anytime Craig. This has been wonderful ⁓ I appreciate you coming on and taking the time today. So is there anything you want to plug anything? Obviously your newsletter will link up but anything else you want to plug promote talk about share anything
Craig Calcaterra (58:26) No, that’s about it for now. I’m just sort of getting the ideas of maybe writing another book, but we are far, far too early in that process. But read Cup of Coffee and ⁓ help put my kids through college.
k3nd477 (58:39) Very good. Well, we will stay tuned for that book and also for a cup of coffee. Thanks, Craig. I really appreciate you coming on.
Craig Calcaterra (58:47) Thanks for having me.