FanGraphs Audio: Largely Nothing with Jeff Sullivan
Episode 517
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the official guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 44 min play time.)
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Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.
Only one missed episode, and I was starting to get the shakes.
I feel like a mouse in one of those methamphetamine studies. If there was a lever I could push anytime to get an instant dose of Cistulli, I would do so continuously at the expense of sleeping, eating or maintaining basic hygiene.
To throw some must deserved cred on “noob” Sullivan, how about this kewl_komment: Over on BP’s “daily” podcast Effectively Wild Episode 592 (12/24/14 by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller) they discussed what the best tweets by Jeff Sullivan were. I had no idea that Sullivan was a deft twitterer, but apprently industry people think so. My favorite of the top 3 was the following:
“Dombrowki’s son is wearing a jacket of dead chameleons that in their last living moments were standing before the world’s ugliest jacket”
@based_ball (jeff sullivan)
“So here’s an arrangement of facts which nearly form a thought.”
I love you, Carson <3
Are you guys saying Dave’s cancer is back? He has been noticeably absent from the site.
They said he was on vacation.
All the winter meetings trades forced him to do three podcasts in a week and then he had to take an extended vacation from all that Cistulli.
Credits exist due to some bizarre cultural baggage related to unions and the TV and film industry.
I have suggested once or twice to young people on the make in the film industry that perhaps credits are a little silly/anachronistic and waste the audiences valuable time in an era when each film could simply have a web page of credits somewhere. Heck the major unions (actors/writers) could maintain a web archive of all credits so there would be a unified place to go if someone wanted to know who worked on a film.
You would think I had suggested that no one be paid for their work. “But how will the audience know who was the second assistant grip if it isn’t on the film?!?!?!”
I came to the conclusion that for the type of people working in film and TV seeing their name on the screen is a large part of their compensation, as odd as that sounds.
I do think it is funny that they think anyone cares who staff person number 100 is on a film when they likely don’t know the name of a single person who made their car or house, or the name of anyone but the author of their books.
I still resent having to sit through credits, such a waste of time and so rarely are they entertaining.
I’m not surprised you’re resentful if you’ve been forcing yourself to sit through the credits alone in an empty theater rather than getting up and leaving as soon as they start rolling like everyone else in the audience.
You know how when you listen to a podcast and get used to hearing a person’s voice but don’t know what the person looks like at all, so you assign that person a face that is not their own in your mind and picture that face when you are listening to the podcast? Well I do that all the time with podcasts and I assume everyone else probably does too.
Anyway, for some reason whenever I hear Cistulli’s voice I cannot help but assign it the face of Michael Ian Black, because in my mind Carson Cistulli has the head/face of Michael Ian Black.
With Mike Podhorzer I couldn’t help but assign him the face and head of Eric Karabell in my mind when he was hosting the Sleeper and the Bust, which is probably a less fortunate situation than Cistulli’s.
I actually just found out that Jeff Sullivan is not in fact Rob Neyer’s doppelganger. I have no idea why I had that mental image of him.
“You can’t help but get philosophical, because there are so many goddamn games in a year, and things you’ve got to write.”
No joke, I’d love to read a lot more about this and the whole growing-out-of-fandom question discussed around 7-8 minutes in. Is it just a sportswriter problem (as some of Sullivan’s comments on other podcasts have suggested — wasn’t it him on a previous ep talking about wanting to keep his hockey-watching “pure” and unsullied by analysis?) or is it really a growing-up problem? Is it (as it seems to me) connected to other sort-of-unhealthy aspects of the way we, the online info-junkies, often consume media?
I’m obviously not a sportswriter, but I’m a fairly compulsive fan, and I have in past years been a very heavy baseball-blog commenter. And this past year I made a concerted effort to drop all that and just enjoy watching the games without the constant backseat driving and carping and arguing about in-game and roster decisions that I have no power to affect in any case. It felt a lot like what people talk about with going on a “media diet” in general, trying to really detach myself from the hamster-wheel of aggro that is the 24-hour news cycle — and it really did succeed in restoring a lot of enjoyment to my baseball-fan experience.
I know this is not the kind of question Fangraphs really exists for, but it’s a question I and (I’m guessing) a lot of other Fangraphs readers might want to do some thinking about.
You could read this, or perhaps you already have http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/i-am-trying-to-break-your-eyes-a-lengthy-meditation-on-baseball-and-the-science-of-happiness/ by Cistulli. Not exactly what you are asking, or really even that closely related, but tangentially none-the-less.
Thanks for the reminder, yeah — I’d read that back when it was posted but it completely evanesced from my brain somehow. And yes, it’s exactly the kind of writing about baseball that I find myself looking for right now.
Dear Misters Cistulli and Sullivan,
Fart.
Sincerely,
Mr. Winded