Author: Aaron Fischman (Page 1 of 10)

“Moses Malone” Book Special With Paul Knepper

February 21, 2026 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

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Paul Knepper, author of ⁠Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

7:02-7:42: “He realized very early on that these people… were trying to get something out of him. He was cautious and kind of withdrawn before that, and I think that maybe that experience made him add even another layer between him and the outside world or certainly between him and people that he didn’t know well and people that could potentially take advantage of him. So it led him to be very protective in that way going forward.”

14:22-15:07: “It’s always hard to go straight from high school to pros. … I think in certain ways it was harder for Moses as the first. I think he faced tremendous backlash because of that, but also there was no infrastructure in place. There was a lot less money in professional basketball in general then, certainly in the ABA. It was a head coach, an assistant coach, and that was it; they didn’t have 10 coaches who could kinda babysit him and take care of him and make sure that he’s doing his laundry and paying his bills and all that. The other thing I think people forget is that very few people were even leaving college early at that time.”

19:38-20:21: “If you think of more recently maybe a comparison would be a Tim Duncan, who also had no flash to his game. He was better with the media in that I don’t think he was as standoffish, but he didn’t really give the media anything either. … It was almost like on the court and off the court there was no personality to him, and I think that’s how a lot of people saw Moses. Moses played with a scowl on his face. I always say Michael Jordan and Kobe also played with scowls on their face, but then they’d go into the interview room and they’d flash that million-dollar smile and it was like you saw a different side of them; Moses just never gave you that.”

“It’s Like Going Back in a Time Machine” (Mike Donlin Book Special With Steve Steinberg)

June 25, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Steve Steinberg, co-author of ⁠Mike Donlin: A Rough and Rowdy Life From New York Baseball Idol to Stage and Screen⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

8:34-9:55: “Our interest is what was really ticking in the guy’s mind, what was he feeling, what was he thinking. And the years that we write about, and especially Donlin’s years, there were so many newspapers in New York City, more than a dozen of them. And in the early 1920s, by the way, they started merging. … These newspapers had a beat writer. And each of these newspapers had a sports editor, and each of these guys had their own connections. … You can sit at home and go online with some of these, Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, Genealogy Bank. But I found that there’s nothing that replaces going to the New York Public Library and just sitting there with a microfilm, which I think some people find a terribly boring thing. But I find it thrilling and exciting ‘cuz it’s like going back in a time machine; you don’t know what you’re gonna find.”

14:53-15:46: “I’ve heard from more than one person that when they read the beginning of the book they don’t like this guy very much, but by the end of the book they see another side of him emerge. … The fact remains that when you have these people that are more complicated it makes for a much more fascinating story. … I just find that the juices flow more when you have somebody who’s not so saintly.”

“The New York Game” Book Special With Kevin Baker

April 14, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

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As part of our continuing CASEY Award finalists series, historian, journalist⁠ and novelist extraordinaire Kevin Baker, author of⁠ the 2024 prize winner, ⁠The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of a New City⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

6:23-7:28: “I had this contract some years ago. I had to write several other books through it; I kept kind of going away from it and coming back, just trying to keep hearth and home together. But Andrew Miller who came up with the idea…he was very patient through all of this. I really didn’t know how to do this, sort of writing a history of both this incredible city, the leading city in the Western world in many ways for much of the last couple hundred years, and baseball. And in the end, I ended up writing a ludicrously long manuscript. I mean it was close to 2,500 pages altogether, and I finally passed this in and threw myself at the mercy of the good people at Knopf.”

13:30-15:43: “The New York game, though, became baseball, and this was something they did not want to hear about. They did not want to think any of it came from England, so Albert Spalding, of sporting goods fame and early pitcher and early team owner, set up this baseball commission around the turn of the century, into the 20th century there, to determine just where baseball came from. … And Albert Spalding said, ‘Great. Thanks very much. It’s all-American. I told ya. This is wonderful.’ … Pretty much all lies. Abner Doubleday was sort of the Forrest Gump of the 19th century. Fascinating guy. He was everywhere where anything happened. … But he did not invent baseball or indeed have anything to do with the game. He never so much as mentioned it in any of his writings.”

22:02-22:16: “[Tammany Hall] created a New York that was tremendously dynamic, but also oppressive, a place where you could get almost anything as a favor.” Continue reading

“Charlie Hustle” Book Special With Keith O’Brien

March 8, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

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As part of our continuing 2024 CASEY Award finalists series, New York Times bestselling author ⁠Keith O’Brien⁠⁠⁠, author of⁠ the widely acclaimed ⁠Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball⁠, joins the show. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

9:32-11:24: “From a process standpoint, what the records really helped me to do was create timestamps on a timeline. When you’re writing a narrative, and that’s what I’m looking to do any time I do a book, I want to write a narrative, a real story with a beginning and an end and a climax, all of that. … So when you’re doing that, timeline is really important to you. And I already had one timeline that was locked solid; I’ve got the baseball season. … Now, with those federal case files, I have a whole raft of different timestamps, so that while Pete Rose is in Los Angeles and the Reds are on a four-game win streak and he’s swaggering into the clubhouse and giving grandiose quotes to reporters about how great the Reds are, at that same moment, the FBI is knocking on the door of his closest associates in Cincinnati. These are dominoes that are falling. And I think what that did for the narrative was is it built an urgency to [it] in the final half of the book. You can feel the walls closing in around Pete Rose.”

14:29-16:38: “Pete Rose gets away with what he gets away with because he is charming. … The reporters –the beat writers in the ‘60s, ’70s and into the ‘80s – they loved him. … And I do think that Pete’s race did matter. I don’t think that a Black player in the1960s, ‘70s and in the early 1980s could have gotten away with the kind of stuff Pete Rose did on and off the field.” Continue reading

“The Original Louisville Slugger” Book Special With Tim Newby

February 10, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Continuing our 2024 CASEY Award finalists series, writer and historian⁠ Tim Newby⁠⁠, author of ⁠The Original Louisville Slugger⁠, a fun, thorough and important narrative covering the life and baseball career of Pete Browning, joins the show. As one of the best hitters of the 19th century, the deeply flawed but charismatic and pioneering figure has largely been forgotten more than a century later, although Tim’s endeavor has worked to bring much-needed awareness to the man and his influence. Enjoy!

Here are some highlights –

4:40-5:08: “So I took the rest of the summer and just started researching and digging in, and I really found that this story is a story that I could tell. And stories that I can tell are often about overlooked, underrated kind of influential figures or bands or musicians, whatever it may be. And Pete was that to me. Most baseball fans aren’t really in tune with 19th-century baseball. Most baseball fans have no idea who Pete Browning is. But all baseball fans know of the Louisville Slugger.”

22:48-23:53: “There’s a level of thought to it that we need these bats, and he eventually gets the first bat turned by what becomes Hillerich & Bradsby. But it also is convenient for him as somebody who’s odd and eccentric and superstitious like him. Putting so much stock into your bats makes it easy when you’re having a bad day to have a reason for it. ‘It’s not my fault. These bats only have a predetermined number of hits.’ … Pete’s bat was a massive piece of lumber that very few people could swing easily. … Pete’s bat was 48 ounces, and to put that into perspective, Aaron Judge swings, I think, a 33-ounce bat. When Aaron Judge gets on the on-deck circle…the batting donut weighs 15 ounces. So that means he’s warming up with a 48-ounce bat, which is what Pete swung on a daily basis.” Continue reading

“Season of Shattered Dreams” Book Special With Eric Vickrey

January 14, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Nonfiction baseball writer ⁠Eric Vickrey⁠ comes on to discuss his terrifically poignant and inspiring book, ⁠Season of Shattered Dreams⁠, which recounts the deadliest accident in the history of American professional sports, the 1946 Spokane Indians’ tragic crash as their bus was passing over Washington’s Snoqualmie Pass.

Here are some highlights –

12:23-14:45: “No one from that [‘46 Spokane Indians] team is living, or anyone associated with the team. But there are some family members still around; I probably couldn’t have done nearly as thorough of a job without their input and the information they provided. For instance, Jack Lohrke’s son provided me with his military documents that told me what infantry and battalion he was in, so then I was able to kind of really dig into that and kinda track his movements throughout the war, which is how I wrote that first chapter about him. … And then a couple of family matters actually had scrapbooks of old letters and photographs and things that they saved and they were able to share those. And that was really cool ‘cuz I got to kinda get the players’ voices in the book even though they had passed nearly 80 years ago.”

22:29-23:55: “A very fine line to walk. I was able to reach I think 12 families of the 16 players involved, and they had different sort of levels of involvement and willingness. Some were very excited about the project. There were a couple family members who found it actually too painful to talk about even though it’s been this long, almost 80 years…but still were so supportive, I would say. And I got some very nice letters when the book came out from family members saying, ‘Hey, thank you for honoring our relative in this way.’ And that was kind of ultimately my goal of the book. … I certainly kept in mind as I was writing, like the chapter about the accident, for example, that family members would be reading these painful details. … It was just kind of pulling all the information together and telling this story accurately but in a respectful way.” Continue reading

“Not When, But If?” Book Special With Evan Ream

January 13, 2025 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Evan Ream, Communications Manager for NorCal Premier Soccer, comes on to discuss his excellent and colorful debut book, ⁠Not When, But If?⁠, which focuses on the rise of Sacramento Republic FC and how the capital city’s professional soccer franchise became an MLS expansion favorite in short order, only for its bid to indefinitely stall.

Here are some highlights –

4:21-5:27: “Later that year, when it started to become not only a really successful season but [also] sort of a special season that resonated around the area of Sacramento, I decided that I was interested in writing a book. And if you had asked me then, let’s say in September of 2014, where this was gonna go, I thought that Sacramento would probably be in MLS in the next couple of years; that didn’t end up happening. Therefore, the final product ended up being nothing like what I thought it would be. And I kept postponing and postponing ‘cuz I never really had an ending. … It was almost 10 years later, I finally decided, ‘You know what? I’ve been sitting on all this work for such a long time, and I think these people really deserve to have their stories told,’ so I set my own arbitrary ending, which is just the end of the first season, and documented that.”

8:35-9:17: “Nobody really knows what Sacramento is, especially from a national standpoint. The chapter of branding the team there, ‘Well, we need to brand the team, but first we need to brand Sacramento.’ Because what does Sacramento stand for or what do people know about Sacramento other than it’s 90 minutes from San Francisco and 90 minutes from Lake Tahoe? I honestly didn’t know too much about Sacramento when I first started covering the team. Even though I lived in Davis 10 miles away, I had never really went to Sacramento for the most part. And so I had to figure out what Sacramento was.” Continue reading

“The Six Pack” Book Special With Brad Balukjian

September 4, 2024 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

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⁠Brad Balukjian⁠ stops by to discuss his fascinating, thought-provoking and important new book, ⁠The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of WrestleMania⁠. In Balukjian’s continuation of the series – The Wax Pack was his debut book in 2020 – the sports writer and scientist continues his travels across the country in an effort to disentangle fact from fiction, myth from reality, work from shoot while reconciling or at least shedding more light on some notable and a few not-so-notable wrestling and “real human” identities.

Here are some highlights –

5:29-5:49: “The book really is about the line, the border between fiction and fact or myth and reality and work and shoot in Kayfabe terms. … to really find out where myth blends into reality and where that line is.”

9:34-10:09: “I was trained on more of that participatory journalism style, which you don’t see as much of anymore, but I was reading Gay Talese and Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and all these practitioners in the ‘60s of kind of first-person narrative journalism. And that was what I always wanted to do ‘cuz I just think that if you can do it well you put the reader in your shoes, and they can kind of experience things as you experience them.”

25:25-25:54: “I’ve always been more of a process than destination person. So I always knew that even if I didn’t get every person to talk to me, what I could always tell is my own story and the story of trying to get someone to talk to you. And I think if you’re honest and you bring the reader in and you show them what you’re going through, you give them a chance to root for you.” Continue reading

Jason Gallagher: Dallas “Has an Identity” Around Doncic Again

November 18, 2023 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and players, like newcomer Derrick Jones Jr., starring in their roles, have the Mavericks rolling thus far (@DallasMavs/X).

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On the heels of the Dallas Mavericks’ 9-3 start, Jason Gallagher returns, and you bet the head of production at The Old Man and the Three (and ThreeFourTwo Productions more broadly) comes ready with analysis of the Mavericks’ scalding start as Luka Doncic has led the way with 30.7 points per game, the second-most converted treys after Stephen Curry, and the lowest usage rate of his career other than his rookie season. Jason touches upon the improved fit between Doncic and Kyrie Irving now that they’ve had adequate time to jell, teen center Dereck Lively II’s instant success, Grant Williams and Derrick Jones Jr. starring in their respective roles, Tim Hardaway Jr.’s sixth-man brilliance, ultimate team expectations and so much more.

5:05-6:08: “The second pleasant surprise and the second I said was that Dereck Lively needs to become the second coming of Tyson Chandler. Again, he’s not Tyson Chandler. However, he looks incredible. He looks so good that you actually see some of the deficiencies of not having more support in the big area. … But when Lively is healthy and when he’s in and when he’s not in foul trouble, they look pretty awesome. And then the third and sort of final one is some of these role players, they look incredible too. Grant Williams has been Steady Eddie for us, and he’s not only a good vibes guy on the bench, which every team needs; he is amazing from the 3-point line. He’s just a little bit more versatile than role players we’ve had in the past and same with Derrick Jones Jr. Derrick Jones Jr., who is an NBA journeyman, I can’t recall him looking this good, really ever.”

8:28-8:47: “If they’re playing a team, say the Wolves or someone like that, [they have] the ability to be able to speed up but then also grind the game to a halt and make it a half-court contest. I think Dallas has the versatility, offensively, to play both ways.” Continue reading

Alex Kennedy Winds Through the West

October 24, 2023 / Aaron Fischman / 0 Comments

Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards is primed for a breakout season, according to Alex (@Timberwolves/X).

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Alex Kennedy, Chief Content Officer at BasketballNews.com and host of Running Up the Score, a biweekly live sports show airing every Tuesday and Friday night, stops by to wind through the Western Conference just as the league readies for tipoff. The Nuggets are Alex’s leading squad but far from the conference’s only contenders. Oh, and he has firmly taken a seat aboard the Wemby Train. Who’s coming with him?

2:44-4:03: “This is a [Nuggets] team that has been together, this core has been together for years, and they have so much chemistry. And I think that’s one of the most undervalued things in sports. We tend to get excited about these big, blockbuster moves and player movement, but chemistry and continuity really, really help and go a long way when you’re trying to contend for a championship. … There are a handful of contenders: Denver, Phoenix, the Lakers, and then, I think, to a lesser extent you go and look at Sacramento, Memphis, Golden State, Clippers.”

9:52-13:19: “We haven’t seen a player like [Victor Wembanyama], ever. … LeBron James said he’s an alien. He was like, ‘I don’t want to use the word ‘unicorn.’ That gets thrown around too often. He’s an alien.’ Giannis said he could be the best player in the NBA. I mean, these are superstar players that are raving about him and talking about him coming in and just dominating the league. Giannis even said, he was like, ‘I need to start winning some championships now because Victor Wembanyama’s coming.’ … It was interesting; in the first preseason game that Victor Wembanyama played, we saw [Chet] Holmgren and Wembanyama match up against each other, and it almost feels like the future of the NBA a little bit – these huge guys with crazy length that are kind of position-less that can do a little bit of everything and are super-skilled.” Continue reading

Author: Aaron Fischman (Page 1 of 10)

“Moses Malone” Book Special With Paul Knepper

“It’s Like Going Back in a Time Machine” (Mike Donlin Book Special With Steve Steinberg)

“The New York Game” Book Special With Kevin Baker

“Charlie Hustle” Book Special With Keith O’Brien

“The Original Louisville Slugger” Book Special With Tim Newby

“Season of Shattered Dreams” Book Special With Eric Vickrey

“Not When, But If?” Book Special With Evan Ream

“The Six Pack” Book Special With Brad Balukjian

Jason Gallagher: Dallas “Has an Identity” Around Doncic Again

Alex Kennedy Winds Through the West

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