MCAFEE AND THE FANBOYS — SEE THE ATHLETIC — WHO RUIN JOURNALISM
Sports media has taken an ugly hit of late, no one worse than Pat McAfee, who pays seven-figure salaries to show regulars as MLB.com hires homers and The Athletic tells 20-year-old fiction … about me
They once called it “checkbook journalism.” Now it’s Pat McAfee paying Aaron Rodgers more than “1,000,000 with us, for sure,” while also offering the same $1-million premium to Nick Saban. What McAfee has done in promoting his program is give a preposterous avenue to sports figures, who will demand insane finances in the media business while giving interviews to someone in a perpetual black tank-top.
Not only is this deadly to my profession, including ESPN, where Jimmy Pitaro continues to disintegrate the ideal of keeping media independent from talk hosts. What if Rodgers does something ill in life, always possible, given his past political romps and drug memes? Will McAfee ignore it as a supplier to his career funding? It also begs a question to Patrick Mahomes, who might wake up one day and say he wants to do McAfee’s weekday show. At 28, he’s a two-time league MVP and two-time recent Super Bowl winner. What stops him from asking?
“How much are you giving me? How about $1.5 million?”
Or Deion Sanders, whose team blew a 29-0 halftime lead and lost to Stanford in a game that started at 8 p.m. and ended after midnight. Didn’t he spend the week killing the later start times, “Dumbest thing ever. Stupidest thing ever invented in life,” knowing Colorado was next on Friday night/Saturday morning? Wouldn’t McAfee love to put Sanders on? What stops him from asking?
“How much are you giving me? How about $2 million?”
And when they’re told no, haven’t you just cut off your programming tentacles? You’re siding with Rodgers and Saban over Mahomes and Deion?
The demise of sports analysis in this country starts with the people who run media companies. Did it ever occur to Pitaro, the ESPN chairman, to check with McAfee before giving him an $85 million deal for five years? As it is, he doesn’t care that his host swears on the air as he wishes. Didn’t it occur to the possible future CEO of Disney Company, if Bob Iger cedes to him when he finally retires, that he’s inviting interviewers to pay top dollar to subjects?
In my regular review of this industry, McAfee’s open checkbook follows Scott Van Pelt at the same network. He continues to pick games against spreads and flaunt his “Bad Beats” segment while not caring about the National Council on Problem Gambling, which estimates six percent of Americans have reached an excessive wagering phase. Does Pitaro care about anything but making money, even when his methods are villainous? Iger, too, is bound to sports betting because his adult sons are into it. So if they end up in peril, Dad expects the rest of America to fall in a troubled line?
As it is, media companies pay reporters to root for teams, which has become an issue twice during baseball’s postseason. Brian McTaggart works for MLB.com and covers the Astros. When they held off the Texas Rangers on the regular season’s final day and won the American League West title — a major story as they contend for a league championship — McTaggart sounded like a public-relations hack when he wrote, “The Rangers partied last night while the Astros had a champagne toast and quickly turned their attention to Sunday and one more win. Houston’s ‘been-there, done-that’ mentality paid off, it seems.”
Chris Young, general manager of the Rangers, took off on McTaggart like he was a player with a uniform number. And why not? He sounded like one. “I find it ridiculous that’s even a subject, honestly,” he said. “This is the most professional, responsible group of players that I’ve ever been around. We had a very subdued champagne popping, but beyond that there was no partying. There was nothing outlandish. I’m very disappointed in the lack of professionalism of the Houston journalist for putting that out there. It’s classless and it’s not appropriate and it’s completely fabricated. It’s wrong.”
So why is McTaggart acting like an Astros fanboy? He’s told to be that way by a cowardly boss. Same goes for Alanna Rizzo, also with MLB.com, who went off on Jake Mintz of Fox Sports for merely reporting what he heard in a crowded, winning clubhouse. When Atlanta’s Orlando Arcia said of Philadelphia star Bryce Harper, who was doubled up on the bases to end Game 2 of the National League Division Series — “Atta boy, Harper,” he garbled — it was Rizzo who used ballplayer jargon as someone paid by commissioner Rob Manfred.
“And then some jackoff comes in at the end of a season that gets a credential, God only knows why,” she said. “The clubhouse is a sacred space. And, remember, I’ve been in clubhouses the last 16, 17 years. I remember I would go in there, get my job done and get out. That is their space. So for this idiot to go in there and take something out of context just to make him give himself a name is ridiculous. First of all, this guy, Jake Mintz, that’s not even a reporter.”
She later apologized, knowing the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes and the Baseball Writers Association of America were among those defending Mintz. But the “jackoff” line will linger. That’s not fair to Mintz, who merely provided Harper and the Phillies a special reason to deliver in Games 3 and 4 and win the series.
The future of the written media, at the current moment, belongs to The Athletic. The other day, I read a 20-year-old story about the demise of the Chicago Cubs — who won a World Series in 2016 and made the 2003 story old — and had to read about me. I happened to show passion in what I was writing then, a lost art in that city, and showed why fans were angry at Steve Bartman for interfering with a foul ball that lost the pennant. I still show passion — my most recent columns were about another Harptober being upon us, about Taylor Swift appearing for a third time to see Travis Kelce, about Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy accomplishing more at a combined 142 than the 100-victory managers falling short, about a 12-team playoff system serving college football better next season.
I care about sports and the world, every day. My columns are better than what I read in The Athletic, which doesn’t regularly carry columns. But according to the Bartman reporter, who comes off as a fanboy himself, my miffed reaction to a dumb fan ploy made me a “tabloid” columnist. In a world of Stephen A. Smith and McAfee, I’m a … what? “Call it the Curse of the Idiot Fan …” I wrote, not knowing Bartman’s name at the time. In future months and years, I defended him against the city’s rage and twice tried to talk to him, with the agent who still defends him coming close at one point. So Bartman doesn’t hold it against me, I suppose. But The Athletic blames me for understanding why Cubs fans were upset? Meanwhile, the Tribune’s “staid” writer took my Sun-Times column gig when I handed back $1 million — there’s that figure again — and finally escaped a corrupt newspaper. Is he aware I spoke to two top Tribune editors that week at a hotel? Did The Athletic writer call me for my various Bartman stories through time? Of course not, as the parent New York Times should note.
Our newspaper circulation in 2003: 482,421, which the paper later lowered to 382,796, part of its internal corruption and why I left years later.
The circulation in 2023: It’s 58,000 and slumping — and I’m still bothered by daily notations asking me to donate money to “keep the Sun-Times paywall-free.”
There’s nothing but mush-heads in this craft, at The Athletic and everywhere else. If you’re not, they find a way to calm you down or get rid of you. Who knew McAfee, the former NFL punter, would be the worst of all?
“My company went from a valuation of ($2 million to $5 million) to a company valued over $500 million in just a few years,” McAfee told the New York Post. “Everybody who helped us get to this point has reaped the benefits of it, that’s how business is supposed to work. To be transparent, Aaron deserves much more than what he’s gotten for the time and effort he has put into ‘Aaron Rodgers’ Tuesdays.’
“I know there’s an old viewpoint that Billion Dollar corporations have tried to make a standard that players and coaches are lucky to get on a platform and talk. Well, as the human who owns my company and sees the value directly associated with these guys sharing their stories and thoughts, I think that’s bulls—t. ‘If somebody’s making money off of this, I’m making money off of this. If nobody’s making any money, and it’s all for goodwill, I’m making no money as well’ is my mindset for doing stuff and I treat my company the same way. I give rather large bonuses as thank you’s and I genuinely believe it’s the only way to operate.”
No one in the history of sports media, in a daily position, has made more money than Pat McAfee. Seventeen million bucks a year?
It’s just enough to make him wreck journalism.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.