Know Your Enemy
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Why Conservatives Love Baseball (w/ David Roth)
🕑 Added 2022-10-17 18:50:43 +0000 UTCAt 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
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
Comments
Leslie
Honestly, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the baseball scene from Ragtime during certain parts of this conversation.
David Cruz
Would love for y'all to do a deeper dive on First Things contributor, sometimes DSA member, and prolific theologian David Bentley Hart.
Scot Sedley
As a Phillies fan, this provided a much needed tonic to too much gin over the past several nights. Thanks for the laughs and great episode. You've moved jussssssst behind my wife as my favorite Mets fan, Sam.
WGM
The Interview with an 'enemy' episodes all have a good justification for being done. But are also very perfunctory, with a smoke up the guests ass quality. I don't know if there is a good way to do them. Just see them as necessary and move over to better episodes.
My comment is not related to this episode, but I want to say that given your episode with Nate Hochman, where you platformed him as a reasonable person and a friend, you should probably publicly reassess that. He’s since outed himself as sympathetic (at least) to white nationalism and totally down for the bad faith of any conservative media outlet. Hold his feet to the fire as his “friends.”
