FanGraphs Audio: Celebrating Opening Day With Matt Bowman & Craig Calcaterra

by
April 7, 2022

Episode 969

FanGraphs Audio is here a day early this week in celebration of Opening Day, and we have a pair of great interviews to ring in the season.

  • At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Matt Bowman, a former Cardinals and Reds pitcher who is now in the Yankees system. The pair first talked years ago, and the right-hander shares how he has evolved both as a pitcher and as a student of pitching in the time since. Bowman also discusses his first Opening Day on a major league roster, talking to Amir Garrett about his slider, recovering from Tommy John surgery, and how impressed he is by Yankees pitching development. [2:59]
  • In the second half, Jay Jaffe welcomes long-time baseball writer and friend Craig Calcaterra, who recently published his book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. He and Jay talk about how the challenges of authoring a book compare to daily writing, as well as how the book came to be. The pair also discuss how our fandom changes as we grow as people, the inherent conflict of criticizing an industry you work in, and the occasional value of embracing being a fair-weather fan. [31:38]

To purchase a FanGraphs membership for yourself or as a gift, click here.

To donate to FanGraphs and help us keep things running, click here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @dhhiggins on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 62 minute play time.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS





 

Dylan assists in producingFanGraphs Audio, Effectively Wild, and the FanGraphs Live Twitch channel. He also enjoys the Waxahachie Swap (RIP), the Air Bud principle, and the Oxford comma. You can Tweet him about any of those things @dhhiggins.

Comments are closed.