If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre!
So much has happened since Jen and Pablo last spoke. The Blue Jays and the Dodgers have begun their battle for the World Series title, the NBA has been swept up in gambling scandal, and Bill Belichick has every Tar Heel covering their face in shame. Watch this week’s episode of “Offsides” to get the inside scoop on it all!
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out .
Transcript has been edited slightly for clarity.
Jen Rubin: Hi! This is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre. Welcome, Pablo!
Pablo Torre: Ben, the world has once again exploded in the time it took for us to talk since last week, so glad to be here.
Jen Rubin: Exactly. I am in a bitter mood after Saturday night than I was after Friday night. So, World Series. So, doctors come in, like nobody’s business, swept the series, and they get blown out by Toronto in Game 1. Were you surprised by this? Were you kind of expecting maybe they were gonna get a little comeuppance here? What was your sense of Game 1?
Pablo Torre: You know, I used to work for an editor at Sports Illustrated, Dick Friedman. He used to always tell me that it’s not an upset if you win on your home court. And, Look, the Blue Jays are playing at home. I’ll give a caveat to that truism, though, which is that, dot dot dot, unless it’s these Dodgers, they’re supposed to just blow out the Blue Jays, and I still, for the record, believe that they will win this series, which might be cold comfort to you, but.
Jen Rubin: Yeah.
Pablo Torre: I think that stealing Game 1, so to speak, to borrow the language of being a, you know, a non-upset. Stealing Game 1 makes sense for the Blue Jays. their work is just cut out for them. I mean, Game 2, you see the Dodgers return to form. You see the best pitching staff, in recorded modern playoff history once again dominate. And that is the problem, is that there is a top-to-bottom rotation, and look. it’s gonna be Glass now and Ohtani, it’s up to them to hold the line here, against Max Scherzer. I, I think that… The Blue Jays remain a heavy, heavy underdog, even though they took game one.
Jen Rubin: I will say, however, after being masterful earlier in the playoffs, seeing Snell really get pounded, raises some concern. And although the Dodgers, rotation is quite strong. You wonder, like, what happens Game 5? What are they gonna do if we get to that point? Well, we will get to a Game 5. What… what do they do? Do they go back to their usual? Do they try to sub in some relievers and kind of hold over? It’s kind of an interesting managerial choice on the pitching staff. As you get deeper into the series.
Pablo Torre: Totally. I mean, look, the whole thing about the Dodgers, the throwbackness of the way that they’ve been rolling to the World Series has been that they got starters who go deep into games. And so the whole idea of we’re gonna piece together our, plan using what has been called, in more recent years, you know, like, relief aces or openers instead of starters. Dodgers have gone old school, they’ve been doing the stuff that I remember from my childhood, like these aces, these true aces. That said you know, the question of Otani is a fascinating one, and I think you’re gonna see him pitch. I think you’re gonna see him start, because that’s worked, and I would not change anything the Dodgers have done based on the Blue Jays winning Game. But the premise of maybe using a starter as a reliever, when you need to win an elimination game, the question is, of course, which and when, which pitcher and when is the elimination game? Because you’ve seen it before, I remember, gosh, to be ancient here for a second, I remember discovering David Price from the Rays when he was pitching against the Yankees, and he was then this young hotshot pitcher who came in in relief, turned out to be an excellent starter, but They… they do this. Teams do this all of the time. the Dodgers have a staff in which all of those candidates would be terrifying to face as, like, a… basically, like, a long reliever. So it’s a good problem to have. I think creativity is not yet needed, because the straight-ahead, old-school nature has been so effective.
Jen Rubin: Fair enough. Are we gonna see Kershaw?
Pablo Torre: That’s… that’s…
Jen Rubin: We’re not.
Pablo Torre: Pure sentimentality point of view. Like, it would be perfect if he got to be that…
you know, that reliever that I mentioned. I think the reality, though, is I don’t trust him.
Jen Rubin: I don’t either. That’s the guy that I don’t want him to pitch!
Pablo Torre: Yeah, there’s a whole lot of, like, please be… you know, they used to call it in basketball the human victory cigar. When the guy is in the game, it’s because you’ve won. And I think there’s a world in which Clayton Kershaw gets to throw a couple of innings when the game is out of reach and gets his applause on the way out of Dodger Stadium, but in a hot…High leverage, I’m not… I’m not trying that, yeah.
Jen Rubin: I think we also have to appreciate the Dodger pitching in Game 2. Yamamoto, once he gets into that groove, is amazing. Always takes, you know, an inning or two to settle down, but once he is, and he is zoned in, his level of focus and his variety of pitches is really remarkable. I think if it wasn’t for Ohtani and all he’s doing, you’d get a little bit more attention on, on his teammate. But it really is remarkable.
Pablo Torre: Oh, yeah, I mean, look, the guy is one of the highest-paid pitchers in the history of baseball for a reason. I like to joke, as I often do, that Japan has just become a farm system for the Dodgers.
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Pablo Torre: There… there is Exhibit B, you know? They didn’t get Otani out of Japan, they got this guy, perhaps because they got Otani from the Angels, and so now…It’s a pipeline that is, yeah, Japanese pitchers tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of the variety of pitches, especially. They throw.
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Pablo Torre: that Americans are a bit unfamiliar with. And so the idea that at the end of the season, he’s still catching people by surprise, says quite a bit about how good his stuff is.
Jen Rubin: Got it. So, from the sublime to the horrible, we have yet another betting scandal.
And this one hits hard, because the NBA was a big proponent of sports betting, and you have actually two scandals. We’ll talk about one first, which is the primarily sports one, and those sports people were involved in the phony. Poker games. But this, again, is prop betting. And you have a coach, you have a player, how deep do you think this goes, and what kind of problem is this for the NBA?
Pablo Torre: So, big picture for the NBA, Adam Silver, when he took over as commissioner, he did two things of note. One was assured the transition of power from Donald Sterling to Steve Ballmer. That story is one I’ve talked endlessly to you about at this point, the Aspiration Clippers scandal. The other thing he did, though, which people maybe don’t remember quite so vividly, is he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that said that gambling needs to be legalized and regulated, and that the NBA was going to be a leader in advocating for that. No one, no other commissioner had done that, and that was one of Adam Silver’s first two major decisions.
And so, what has happened since, in terms of taking the money from gambling operators, which, of course, now all of the sports have done, following his recommendation in the New York Times, has been Create an incentive structure that is really, really hard to control. And the incentives around prop vetting, in which this is the instrument of choice, right? Because you don’t…need to, as you would back in the day, fix the outcome. Right. Of the game. You just need to get one co-conspirator as it were, on the court to underperform, so that you can take the under, the underperformance, on whatever his projected line was for rebounds or assists, or any other non-point category, even. And so, that’s what happened, according to these indictments. It happened with Jonte Porter, who was the player who was banned for life. That happened last year. It has happened now, allegedly. Certainly with Terry Rozier, who has been, of course, the new face of this, it’s been happening, according to the indictment, thanks to information fed by coaches, such as Chauncey Billups, allegedly, the coach of the Blazers, as well as assistants like Damon Jones, who was working in an unofficial capacity with the Lakers, feeding, allegedly information about whether LeBron James was gonna play in a game, so that bettors could then capitalize on the underperformance of the Lakers. So. What do you do with this? The only solution that seems obvious to everybody is you figure out a way to heavily restrict prop bets.
such that unders are restricted, at the very least, restricted to the biggest name players, perhaps. I think…I’m somebody who’s in favor of legalization and regulation as well. What I think has been underweighted is the vastness of the menu being provided, which has created, Jen, legal markets for things like Jonte Porter under rebounds. Which is so bizarrely arcane as to seemingly only exist for bettors to try and manipulate it, and so I think that…
Jen Rubin: Exactly.
Pablo Torre: the conversation.
Jen Rubin: Or someone limping off the court, for example, at a certain time, going out injured.
Pablo Torre: Yes. It does seem that.
Jen Rubin: At least for those involved, if in fact the allegations are true, and they’re allegations, the league will have to come down very, very hard. These people will have to be banned by life, there’ll have to be some very serious ramifications. That gets rid of the immediate problem, but as you said Adam Silver’s gonna have to eat a little bit of crow, at least, in trying to pull this back, I think.
Pablo Torre: Well, and it’s also the question of how good does the league want to be at investigating itself. So this is another through line between the Clippers stuff I’ve been looking into, and now this one, which I’ve been looking into since July. We published an episode Unmasking the NBA gambling scandal was the… was the title on YouTube, and we pointed to the fact that this all goes back to the Jonte Porter group chat that got him banned for life, in which there were a bunch of guys associated with the world of poker. who were trading inside information to make these bets across a network of straw bettors, essentially, all around America. And so, for the NBA, the… the thing you just alluded to before, which was that Terry Rozier feigned an injury, allegedly, and took himself out of a game when he was with the Hornets under 10 minutes. He got out of that game. The question is, like, okay, so when the gambling operators flag the suspicious activity that was made on that game for the under, which hit and paid off. The gathering operators flagged that. The league was informed of that. The question is, what does the League do? And the problem, the mess that happened is that the league ultimately decided to let Terry Rozier keep playing, and they did not publicly announce this, they did not announce it or communicate this privately, according to reporting, to the Miami Heat, for instance, which traded for Terry Rozier after that. And now, Terry Rozier, of course, is sidelined because he’s been indicted by the federal government, and so now the Miami Heat is asking, what happened to the NBA investigation, which cleared, reportedly, Terry Rozier? And so, now you get to this problem of the NBA having to say, Adam Silver has now said, Jen, in interviews, well, the NBA investigations are very limited, we don’t have subpoena power, the federal government can do so much more than us, and that is, on some level, okay to say. If you’re not simultaneously gonna claim, when convenient to you, that the NBA investigation got to the bottom of anything. You can be a lot better at investigating your scandals if you really commit resources and intention to it. This is an example of the NBA seemingly not really wanting to know, and hoping it went away with their fingers crossed, only for the government to come over the top and say. actually, we’re going to arrest a number of active participants in your league, coaches and players, because we have found things that seemingly the NBA allegedly, did not.
Jen Rubin: The other aspect, of course, is the journalistic aspect. The people who are covering this are heavily invested in the whole gambling bracket, and there was a mini flap when ESPN took off their little bug, that they have, to advertise their sports betting. How does ESPN, and the other outfits that are playing so heavily into the sports betting cover something like this? Aren’t they really pretty conflicted at this point?
Pablo Torre: The conflict is apparent to anybody who realizes, like, the macroeconomy of sports, in which everybody… I mean, LeBron James is doing DraftKings ads, ESPN has ESPN Bet. Every broadcast, you see commercials and licensing deals with gambling operators. And look, on some level. That is okay if you can plausibly claim, find a way to plausibly claim, that you still care about the integrity of the competition, which on some level, must be more than merely the theater of caring. But I would say that right now, the theater of caring isn’t really present. And that’s what’s interesting to me. So when logos are taken down during segments, and when people have to basically almost hang their head to any degree about how this business that we got into with gambling operators has conflicted our ability to cover these stories, because we are some of the biggest pushers of this business. For them to be held to any sort of account for that is… It’s progress along that spectrum of shame, the Overton window, so to speak, of this story, that wasn’t the case before this news broke. And so there… there’s a lot going on, right? So Tash Patel showed up at this presentation of findings, right? And so we…
Jen Rubin: Find something that he wasn’t in trouble for doing, yeah.
Pablo Torre: And so lots of… this is a yes-and story, right? Yes, the story was started, by the way, under the Biden administration. Yes, it’s true that Kash Patel’s FBI is now clearly steering it in some way, and yes, it’s also true that by the end of the month, Adam Silver is being called to a hearing on Capitol Hill by by Bartison Group of, Energy and Commerce. Congressmen, members of the House Committee. And so, it’s a yes-and story, and one of those yes-ans is the fact that we are finding it incredibly difficult in the modern era to find credible critics and journalists who aren’t themselves conflicted. And on some level, of course, That is inevitable, because the macroeconomy is such that the gambling operators have money at a time when the cable Television industry no longer is funding the sport. The Middle East has money at a time when the old ways of doing business in sports media are changing, have already changed rapidly, and so we have to navigate this all, too.
Jen Rubin: And, of course, the independent guy, Pablo Torre, now can say whatever he wants, investigate whoever he wants, and that’s really…incredibly important. And as we’ve talked so often, the intersection of sports and politics, the consolidation and the ideological transformation of political news coverage is similar to the sports. Who’s gonna own you? Who’s gonna speak to you? How do you trust what you’re getting? Who’s really interested here? And that’s gonna be a problem, so long as we have billionaires, and so long as we have a system that Kind of allows them to push the pieces around. Yeah, look, there are ways… I remember… look, I worked at ESPN, and ESPN was literally in business on the television rights deal side, the most valuable part of the company, with the leagues. They were literal business partners. But the thing that ESPN committed to when I was working there, I cannot speak to its inner workings with the same intimacy that I can about what it was like back then, they committed to funding seemingly a rare degree of adversarial journalism that was, to me, a point of pride, because it did make their business partners often unhappy. So, I believe that there are ways in which you can construct a newsroom to be protected by the interference, from the interference of the federal government or your business partners. What we are seeing, though, across media. Look at CBS as the most recent example, you are seeing the shedding. Of even the theater, that that’s a priority. Like, before, at the very least, you would, want to claim that you had it, let alone fund it.
Now it seems like the jig is up! And so, why even bother? And I hope that, if nothing else, this nudges us again towards a corporate incentive to fund journalism, because when there’s a real news story, and you gotta cover the partners that you otherwise have, because you’re also claiming to be a news operation. I hope that there is a pang of shame that you can’t credibly do that, because you didn’t even pretend. And once we get to that point, Jen, of people pretending again, we can talk about actually funding this stuff rigorously, but it’s really just, like, can we pick the bar off the floor, like, 2 inches? And then we can move ahead in something resembling a fourth estate.
Jen Rubin: That is the best analysis I have heard of late of the media landscape, CBS, ESPN, and the rest, which is why I love these conversations. Now, from the divine to the terrible to the ridiculous. Bill Belichick. Is there any team he can’t lose to? I mean, what are they going to do with him, and what, does this mean for North Carolina?
Pablo Torre: Yeah, we published an episode last week, late last week, about Michael Lombardi, who was the highest-paid general manager in college football. He is Bill Belichick’s Conceiglieri, the guy running the football program. The episode was basically fact-checking his resume. He claims to be a three-time Super Bowl-winning strategist and executive. Spoiler alert, listen to the episode. It turns out that he is not quite that. That said the reason why North Carolina has not won a game in 6 weeks, and is paying Bill Belichick, to be the highest paid public employee, $10 million a year in North Carolina, and the aforementioned Michael Lombardi, by the way, to be the 6th highest paid public employee in the state of North Carolina, all of that Begs the question of why is any of this worth it? So, to me, From a pure what-happens-from-here story, why is this going wrong? It’s a story about a…Greatest of all time level Football genius who has failed to pick the people to work in his program that can accommodate the deficiencies he has as a manager. The Patriots. I’ve never had more respect, frankly, for the people they surrounded Belichick with, such that none of these controversies… they had scandals around, like, being too good, or having too many competitive edges, spygate, deflategate, but it was never about rank and competence.
Jen Rubin: Yes.
Pablo Torre: And so, I think you’re seeing here a bit of a case study in bureaucracy, frankly. They have a guy in charge who doesn’t have the people around him to be his best self, and now his ass is being shown to the world. Like, you’re seeing exactly what he cannot do, and what he can’t do is…what the Patriots didn’t want him to do, which is be in charge of the whole thing. Right. And not merely just the greatest coach, which is not the same job.
Jen Rubin: And I think the point is so well taken, which is we’ve made coaches, like quarterbacks, into these superstar figures, and in fact, there’s an army behind them, it’s like those phone ads, you know, and it is those people. You’re not going to have a successful program unless you have the best offensive coordinator, unless you have the best quarterback coach, on and on and on. And again and again, we’ve seen that just because you’re a big name and a big head coach, you know, reputation doesn’t mean you’re gonna go there. I would also say that I think they have a little bit of a numbers problem. Now that we have had such consolidation, and these Conferences are so large, not everyone can win. And for all of these people to be running out paying millions and millions of dollars, a lot of them have to be wrong.
So, there are not as many opportunities to win your conference, to shine, so a lot more of these investments are going to go south, just because of the numbers game. You know, how many coaches can win in the SEC? Like, one, or maybe a second gets in the playoffs, and that’s it.
So, I think you’re gonna have to have people, whether it’s general managers, ADs, who are a lot more discerning in how they spend, the money. And maybe those universities should question just how much money they’re spending, you think?
Pablo Torre: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The incent… again, what’s the story of today’s, conversation with you? It’s the story of incentives. in college football, in college sports in general, this is a market in ways that isn’t fully, honest with itself. about, to be clear. But you’re right, like, being Bill Belichick, just that guy, that figure, only goes so far. Kids wanna get market value for what they do, which means that they’re gonna go to a place that will pay them, and now everybody can plausibly pay you if they have the right financial system behind them, which means that we’re in an era of unprecedented parity in college. And therefore, unprecedented unpredictability, and the old methods, the old guard, to now draw parallel to what we’re seeing broadly in our country, they’re in need of cabinets full of people who are actually competent. Otherwise, you’re gonna see the ways in which your age-old institution actually just falls apart.
Jen Rubin: Exactly, and boy, is that the case. Or gets knocked down for a. Ballroom.
Pablo Torre: It’s literally demolished, yes.
Jen Rubin: Yes, exactly. Well, we will be back next week, as always. Always fun talking to you, Pablo. By next week, we’ll know if the Dodgers have figured it out or not, so I will either be all in black, or all in blue and white, one of the two. But, I appreciate your indulgence, and I know you’re still mourning, the Yankees, which.
Pablo Torre: I was gonna say, I remember feeling like that. I remember those feelings of just optimism, and I am jealous that you still get to experience them.
Jen Rubin: Well, my heart can still be crushed, so we will see. That’s what’s great about the World Series. Take care, Pablo, have a great week.
Pablo Torre: Thanks, Jen.
Jen Rubin: Bye-bye.
