Baseball Prospectus Radio Review: For It’s Root, Root, Root for the Statistically Superior Fantasy League Team

It’s not easy being a casual baseball fan these days.

Look to your right and you’ll be distracted by an enormous fuzzy mascot shooting jerseys from a t-shirt gun. Look to your left and some guy who worships at the temple of sabermetrics will tick off the starting pitchers’ WHIP stats to the nearest ten-thousandth before philosophizing about the consequence of that particular number.

It’s all enough to make a regular fan die a little inside—if the cockroach-infested brats and beers don’t do the job first.

America’s pastime has gotten immensely more complicated, stats-driven, and commercial. Baseball = big business. Still, podcasts like Baseball Prospectus Radio are a good reminder that you can still find plenty of passion, quirkiness, and warmth in the game.

The small amount of baseball geekery is tempered by the good humor and insights of host Will Carroll. He seems just as comfortable grilling the guy who makes Barry Bonds’ (allegedly performance-enhancing) elbow brace as he is talking to the GM of the independent league’s Laredo Broncos, who swapped ten bats for pitcher John Odom.

The interview-based podcasts are generally short (less than 20 minutes), and feature a good mix of players, authors, front-office stars and notable fans—including Alyssa Milano, who, um, designs a line of women's baseball clothing.

Though the interviewees sometimes slip into exasperating sports clichés about taking things a day at a time and going after it and learning from your mistakes, Carroll is quick to steer them back from Platitude Land to encourage some genuinely thoughtful responses.

Take this exchange between Carroll and the new assistant general manager for the Cardinals, John Abbamondi.

Caroll: “You didn’t grow up a Cardinals fan, you’re moving from New York…does it feel like ‘your’ Cardinals yet?

Abbomondi: “It’s just a completely different way of looking at the world when you go from having an affiliation with a team that’s based on geography—where you grew up or who you rooted for as a kid. But now actually being part of it, having it be your career and your life and what you do—it’s an amazing transformation. It happens very quickly and it happens for everybody in this business.”

If you’re looking for baseball coverage that’s deeper than the front page of the sports section without relying solely on numbers, check this podcast out. You won’t be disappointed.