Sweet Card Season, with Maitreyi Anantharaman

It’s the nature of a podcast to unravel, or at least that’s largely how ours works. We start out trying to be normal, with an outline of what we’re going to cover and an idea of ​​how much time we’ll have to discuss it, and then everything goes off the rails and malfunctions and by the end, I’m singing the “they’ve got a pepper bar” song from those weird Quiznos commercials while Drew names off various Vikings interior linemen while our guest feigns technical difficulties. Listeners know this; some of them probably even appreciate it. I mention it only because this week’s episode, in which we’re joined by Maitreyi Anantharaman of Defector, is pretty much the other way around.

I mean, it always starts with Drew honking “we’re back” and ends with Funbag’s response abruptly cutting to the credits. But the episode also begins with a Drew-inspired digression about being impressed by Maitreyi’s extremely clean kitchen, meanders through a discussion of suburban clutter and damned anti-yard sale finds, and then finally starts talking about sports after six and a half minutes of high-intensity untangling. At this point, it’s honestly pretty normal.

By distraction standards, I mean. There are side quests and nonsense; at one point I call Bryce Young “Bryant Young,” which is probably the biggest possible difference in body size between two people who could be mistaken for each other. But within seconds of saying the name “Pazuzu,” we were talking about the goddamn NFC North. Most of this NFL talk, invariably, was about bigger things than the Lions’ initial stumbles. We talked about Tua Tagovailoa’s latest concussion, which became more of a conversation about the conversation surrounding it, the strange spectacle of former players pushing the “It’s his decision” line, and the larger, frankly intractable problem at the core of all of this, which is the fundamental risk inherent in sports and the absurdity of “playing football in moderation.” We also talked about the Panthers benching Bryce Young, and how dark and decisive his fall to the chest was. The eternal question of how to evaluate anyone or anything caught in the vortex of David Tepper’s Carolina Panthers’ suction proved, in this case, fairly easy to answer.

After the break, the unexpected sequence of narrative discipline continued. We talked about the American League Central, and how Maitreyi is or isn’t handling his Detroit Tigers’ sudden arrival in the Wild Card picture, and a little bit about how I’m handling my stupid, wonderful Mets trying their luck in the National League. We agreed that baseball’s unique time scale and the insignificance of anything that happens in July or August made it a little easier to be normal about it, but I wouldn’t say that any of us were entirely normal about it either. There was also some discussion of the White Sox, including a semi-appreciation of the White Sox’s polarizing play-by-play man John Schriffen; I spoke my truth about watching a White Sox win and being denied his “South Side Stand Up” slogan, and Maitreyi pointed out his odd tendency to make a Thundercat noise every time Luis Robert Jr. hits a home run. I copied a joke from Drew about Pantera, which I was proud of at the time but now seems a little unfair. He’s more of a Ratt type.

We also reviewed the WNBA playoff picture in anticipation of that league’s postseason, with Maitreyi discussing the true appeal of A’ja Wilson’s understated greatness, the freshness of the Minnesota Lynx, and the benefits of a relatively comfortable league size. And then, after a brief appreciation of the unique threat that only the toughest coaches provide, inspired by Becky Hammon’s unusually forbidding vibe, we moved on to the Funbag. A listener’s question about whether the bases total is a bit of a misnomer had me melting briefly over the word “whole,” but also over an unusually decisive answer. A question about the most ideal and blessed type of sports fan to be, prompted by a Portland Sea Dogs superfan, got us started on Maitreyi’s weakness for fans who have never been to a game before and his disdain for stadium know-it-alls who barely make it to know-it-all level. I also got to introduce my family’s Mr. Restaurant concept; after Maitreyi greeted a kid who had the benefit of being able to identify Cionel Perez by sight, I elaborated on my extremely unsurprising background as such a kid. By the end, with a salute to the backup catcher who once threw me a baseball at Shea Stadium, we were pretty much back to our usual starting point. We’ll do our best not to hold ourselves back quite as well in the future.

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