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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all the podcasts at foxnewspodcasts.com. And I encourage you to rate and subscribe to this podcast wherever you download yours. Today, we are talking with one of the most influential people in the world of sports, Ben Domenech.
Bill James had an enormous impact, not just on the world of baseball, but on the world of sports as well. His approach to data-based analysis, sabermetrics, is something that has been adopted by teams across the various sports worlds. He's a fascinating figure, a genius.
He was a graduate of the University of Kansas. He was the last person in Kansas who was sent to fight in the Vietnam War originally. And after he returned to Kansas, he started to write about baseball in a way that had been different from really everything that you'd seen before.
He began compiling statistics and data, self-publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract, beginning in 1977. He looked for statistical information that would solve certain questions, answer them in ways that hadn't really been answered before by writers who had looked at games in a very different light.
And in terms of his approach, this was something that was pretty revolutionary. He really changed baseball in a number of different ways.
I went on to write many, many books on a number of different topics, including Popular Crime, a book that I've recommended to an enormous number of people because it takes a contrarian look at a number of different popular criminal cases, and along with his daughter, a book called The Man from the Train, which looks at potentially the first American serial killer.
He was one named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. And in 2003, he was hired as senior advisor on baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. You may be familiar with his book for its frequent mentions in the film Moneyball. It's a situation where he really did inspire an entire approach to the game that bled out of baseball into a number of other sports.
But it is not without controversy in terms of the effect that it's had on the way that these sports are played and the way that teams are built. There are many people who feel like sports is perhaps less entertaining in certain ways because of the effect that Bill James and his disciples had.
had on the game. He is one of the smartest people to deal with sports, but he's also someone who loves baseball deeply. And because of that, we wanted the opportunity to have a conversation with him.
In the context of the current politicization of baseball, which has seen Major League Baseball make the decision to move their main all-star game from Atlanta, from the state of Georgia, to the state of Colorado in response to the passage of a bill that changed a number of different rules related to voting in the state.
This bill has been decried by President Biden as a new Jim Crow. He has repeatedly criticized the state for taking this step, and he criticized it from the White House in this capacity and called on baseball to make this decision.
He since has walked this back a little bit. We heard in response to a question regarding the Masters, also obviously played in Augusta, Georgia, that Joe Biden was sort of trying to maybe suggest to people that, no, I'm not really targeting a state economically or this is up to them. But the reality is that this is not a decision that would have happened without the White House.
and it's one that certainly speaks to the politicization of sports in America in a dangerous way. Bill James was kind enough to talk to us at length about this subject and about his approach to looking at the game, potential reforms, and the season that lies ahead. You're listening to the Ben Domenech Podcast. We'll be back with more right after this.
This episode is brought to you by Honda. When you test drive the all-new Prologue EV, there's a lot that can impress you about it. There's the class-leading passenger space, the clean, thoughtful design, and the intuitive technology. But out of everything, what you'll really love most is that it's a Honda. Visit Honda.com slash EV to see offers. Bill James, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It's a pleasure to talk to you again.
Thank you for having me on. I want to, uh, run through a number of questions for you. And I had already been looking forward to having you on at the beginning of the major league season. Uh,
But I obviously have to start out with this incredible political element that has happened here with the moving of the All-Star Game, the interactions between both Faye Vincent and Rob Manfred over it, and a number of other factors. I'm just curious what your impression is of this whole story.
It's hurting baseball. This is not a story that can help baseball in any way. And the calculation on the commissioner's office is, in what way are we going to be wounded less by this event? And I would join with those who are inclined to think that he
may not have made the best selection in answering that question. There is this element here that was being talked about actually today by CNN's Jake Tapper where he
from my perspective, was saying the quiet part loud, which was, you know, MLB really got ahead of this because if they hadn't done this, then there would have been a pressure campaign from the media to make players and owners make a push to move the All-Star game themselves.
What do you think about that? Because to me, it seems like that's a telling element of this whole approach to politicization of sports that incentivizes that kind of coverage of it, which really isn't about the game. Well, it certainly is not about the game. That's a way of thinking about it. It seemed like
Mr. Manfred had rushed to the end of the diving board and jumped in. But it may be that he was looking at it as you just did, that if I don't run to the end of the diving board and jump into the cold water, somebody's going to chase me down the diving board and push me in the water. Maybe that's right. I don't know. I think it's a very poor form of politics to be doing this, but nobody asked me.
Well, before I move away from this, I do have to say baseball, from my perspective, along with many other sports, but primarily baseball, has been one of the great unifying elements of American life. When my mother sits at Nationals games and tracks a score by hand and talks with the people who are around her, it's a multi-ethnic conversation.
not class-restricted collection of people who are there. It's one of the few things that seems to unite us in a period of real fractiousness in American life. To me, seeing this type of politicization of the game feels like we're losing something that unifies us. Do you feel that way? I think that's a solid analysis.
I would say that the people who are seeking political advantage by this road are not asking themselves and do not care what damage they may be doing to other organizations by seeking political advantage in this manner. I want to ask you a number of questions about the game as it currently stands, but as it happens,
I got an email the other day from a friend of mine who's a big fan of baseball, but of sport generally, totally unrelated to interviewing you that I wanted to read to you. He wrote to me, "Data-driven efficiency is killing sports
Making baseball monotonous and necessitizing boxing on the cusp of doing the same with golf already did it with soccer. Basketball and football are different because they used to be so plotting that efficiency is opening them up. Another decade of three-point contests and 20-foot rebounds will kill hoops too. At least football recognizes they're in the football business, not the TV business, so they change rules every year to make the game, not the show, as fan-friendly as possible.
What do you think about that in terms of data-driven efficiency actually serving as a negative in terms of the entertainment value of sports? That's something I worried about a lot of years ago, whether the changes that might result from these new understandings would be positive or negative.
I think that people are making a superstitious connection between analysis and changes in the game. Most of the changes in the game that people complain about don't really have anything to do with analysis. The real problems are analysis.
For example, the ever-increasing use of relief pitchers and stopping the game for relief changes, that has been going on since it started about 1898. And the ever-increasing numbers of strikeouts, as people try more and more for home runs, and that started in 1920. Strikeouts have been going up almost...
constantly, with the exception of one little blip. Strikeouts have been going up since 1920. The number of relievers used has been going up since 1898. These changes are not driven by analytics. They're long-term problems that have manifested themselves in the
in an extreme form in the current era. And people associate one with the other in the way that when two things happen at the same time, people will always say that one must be causing the other. But it's not.
is not actually true. My friend George Will has told me that his next book is going to be about baseball, and he believes that there are a lot of problems with the game. He's obviously one of the more old-fashioned fans for obvious reasons, but it seems to me that there are a number of fans who feel like the extension of time, these long games that
That, you know, they're just a number of different factors that are leading to less exciting play and to, you know, just a game that does not attract as much fandom and as much excitement as it did in the past. Is that really true? Or are they kind of just, you know, operating off of overarching narratives that aren't necessarily reflected in the actual game?
There's no question that that's true. I mean, the game has massive problems, and you could compare it to a 180-pound man who's put on 170 pounds in the last few years and also has cancer. The game has very serious problems of a number of different types and no real focus on solving them. I mean, there's some hope that in the last year or two years there's been a focus on solving them.
This isn't exactly what you asked, Ben, but the solutions to the time problem are blindingly obvious. You need to stop calling time between pitches, period. Not slow it down, stop it. You need to limit the number of throws to first between batters, and you need to limit the number of pitching changes. If you do those three things, you take an hour out of the game. If you don't do that...
do those three things, you are not going to solve the problem. And what baseball has tried to do in the last few years is, how can we solve this problem without doing any of the things that will solve the problem? And it's, you know, it's a question of when does the fan reaction to the problems within the game become so serious that everybody gets on board with the obvious solutions. So what are the main objections to those top three pace of play recommendations that you have?
And I think related to them is the economics of the game. The economics of the game are not fan friendly. I'm not sure what are the objections of the fans or the objections of the game to the solutions. If these recommendations are so blindingly obvious, why haven't they been done? What's the force keeping them from being done?
The sort of parallel to the political problem, you will, I think, agree that in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, there are many, many, many things that could be done and which everybody would agree to do, except for the fact that they don't like each other and don't trust each other and can't do that. Absolutely.
It's the same thing in baseball. The things that could be done are really blocked by mistrust and lack of vision. If baseball were to announce that there will be no more stepping out of the box between pitches and ask the players union to agree to that, they would not agree to it. Probably. Yeah.
But in fact, if that were done so that the games were length of the games were cut from an average of, I don't know what it is. The, if it were cut to two and a half hours, the average is long. Yeah. I started to say seven hours, but I know it's not actually the, but,
But if the change was actually made, the players would love it. I mean, the players get home to their wives or get home after the game or get to the airplane. Players would love the fact that the games snap by more quickly. It's just each individual player pursuing his own interest wants to step out of the box and gather his thoughts and focus before the pitch. But if everybody stopped doing that, the collective result would be to the benefit of all of them.
Are there changes in addition to the ones that you would recommend on this that would increase the number of balls in play and really emphasize speed?
Yes. For example, but they're not obvious and people can't really see why they need to be done. I congratulated the commissioner's office on putting through one of them this year. They reduced the resiliency of the baseball a little bit or increased the steam. So the ball is not jumping quite the way it did last year. And that ultimately will be a good thing. Another thing you could do, it's not obvious, but if you put a minimum thickness on the bat, then you slow down the
the speed of the, of the head of the bat when it comes through the zone. And it, you make it more of a ball in play game and less of a home run or strikeout game just by when I was a small boy, the average thickness of a bat at its thinnest point was a circumference about an inch and a half. Now the circumference less than an inch, the handles have gotten very, very thin. And that makes the head of the bat move faster and,
but it results in more strikeouts and fewer line drives. A similar thing to that, but people don't believe it would work, but when you think it through, you realize it would, is if you move people off the plate. And I'm not talking about moving people eight inches off the plate, but just move the batter's box an inch away from the plate and another inch in a few years and another inch. So you move the batter's about three inches further off the plate. That would...
make it more difficult to launch a pitch a long way in the air and would make the smarter strategy into slowing the bat down and putting the ball in play, you know, which you could still do. I mean,
Tony Gwynn and Yitro did that very, very successfully, not generations ago, but relatively recently. You can still do that. It's just not the way that people choose to play. But if you move the batter's box back a little bit, that becomes harder to drive the outside pitch to the opposite field.
And that forces you to play more the way we used to play. Another thing you could do is you could inch the pitcher's mound backward. And you can't move the pitcher's mound back by two feet, which people talk about doing that, but you can't do that because...
If you move the pitcher's mound back two feet at one time, then every breaking pitch is going to break at the wrong time. And every good slider is going to be a foot outside. You can't do that. You have to give the pitchers time to adjust. But you could start sneaking the pitcher's mound back an inch or two at a time until eventually you reach a better point for it. And
Another thing you could do is actually enforce the regulation about
keeping your foot on the pitcher's mouth. And, you know, Bob Gibson is an icon of the game, but I blame Bob Gibson for this more than any other one person. Yes, absolutely. There have always been pitchers who threw what we call 55-foot fastballs. But if you threw a 55-foot fastball now, I mean, the norm is like 53, you know. Everybody comes off the mound fast.
on every pitch more or less. The foot is never really in contact with the pitcher's mound at the moment of release as the rule book says that it's supposed to be. So if you could figure out some way to enforce that rule, that would make a huge difference. So to answer your question, yeah, there are a lot of things you can do. There are a lot of little ways you can tweak the rules so that the difference would be totally invisible from the seats, but it would make a difference.
Well, that seems to me to be the best kind of way to go about tweaking it because you don't want to change the game in such a stark manner, but you could, I think, nudge it in different directions in ways that would lead to
you know significant alterations in the way that it's played you know again i guess i go back to is this just is is this once again a problem of distrust or a problem of a lack of vision what is the the main factor that prevents them from doing some of these small tweaks like we see in in the nfl all the time designed to make the game uh more entertaining and make it more of a fan-friendly sport
I think that there has been a lack of vision, but you and I are as much responsible for the lack of vision as anyone because unless we point out the things that can be done, people won't see them. Yes, there is a lack of vision, but also baseball's decision-making process
There's no power center that can say, okay, we're just going to do this. You have to negotiate everything and you have to negotiate between people who don't really trust one another. I want to ask you about COVID and its effect on this season. Obviously, returning to a normal season after a year like last year has got to have some effect.
Do you expect more injuries than usual going back to 162 games? How much damage do you feel like has been done to player development and the like in terms of cancellation of last year's minor league season? What do you feel like the effects are going to be in terms of what people see?
Well, as to more injuries, that could be, but I don't see it as likely because there are a lot of injuries in baseball that take time to heal, and giving people an extra time to heal may actually do as much to prevent injuries as cause them. I don't know, but it's possible. I think this year we'll see an explosion of young players.
young players taking over, which is always a theme. I mean, the game is always young people taking over. But I think that may be a big year for that because a lot of the established stars are two years older than they were last year, in a sense. And I do think that there will be a noticeable turning of the calendar in the course of the year. Mm-hmm.
There's been such an emphasis of late on pitching high in the zone after decades when people were told to keep the ball down. It's a pretty radical shift. Tell me a little bit about what you think about that, but also are there any kind of similar radical shifts on the horizon for you, things that you're paying attention to that could have that kind of effect?
I hope this isn't too long an answer to be useful to you, Matt. The problem has always been that...
that good pitchers strike out more batters than bad pitchers, right? But good hitters historically strike out more than bad hitters. And if you go back, I mean, Babe Ruth led the league in strikeouts and Mickey Mantle did and Jimmy Fox did and Greenberg, the greatest hitters in history, most of them led the league in strikeouts. So you have a situation in which the...
pitching part of the organization is always looking for more strikeouts, but the hitting part of the organization has no resistance. The hitting part of the organization is not saying we've got to get fewer strikeouts. So there's a one-way push going on, and that's why strikeouts have been going up for 100 years, because there's a push forward but no push back. But if you think about it, sooner or later that has to come to an end. I mean, at some point,
It has to become true that if everybody is trying to swing for the seats, that it can no longer be true that strikeouts are not a negative for hitters. At some point, they do become such a large negative for hitters that you have to start to push back. I have seen in the last six or seven years when strikeouts have been exploding that there is some evidence that we're near that point at which
you can no longer say that good hitters strike out more than bad hitters. In fact, I'm sure we've reached that point. You'd no longer say that. The guys striking out, leading the league in strikeouts now, mostly are not that good. So there is some evidence, I think, that the wheel is starting to turn on that and that we could go back to a place where pitchers –
work the zone that they, the pitchers try to move it up and down and in and out rather than trying to see if they can throw hard enough to get the fastball by you at the top of the zone. Another question on, on pitchers. Is there any reason to be optimistic that there's something viable on the horizon to cut down on the number of pitchers who blow their arms and elbows out, but there's been so much work done on this over the past two decades in terms of
workload reduction, biomechanical analysis, et cetera. But is there anything, you know, that you've seen in terms of improvements that can cancel out the stress placed on the arm and elbow by increased velocity and everything else that's going on with that? No, if there is something I have not seen, it's what it's, you know, the only thing I've seen along that line is self-delusion. I mean, people talk about, you know, I've,
People talk about they've figured out some way to get pitchers to throw 105 miles an hour without hurting their arms. It's just self-delusion. So it's as fundamental to the game, basically, as concussions for the NFL. Right. That's right. In order to really prevent concussions in the NFL, you have to make some serious changes. And really, you have to make them not so much for the NFL, but for the lower levels of football.
of competition, which are just going to dry up if mothers don't let their kids play football. I am curious about the tests and measures that teams use to evaluate talent that teams find essential or important, but most fans have probably never heard of. I have only passing familiarity with this, but it's one of these things where it's like,
you know, teams clearly like somebody and the fans are sort of confused as why they like them. What's going on there? Well, there isn't anything that an organization won't do to try to get more information about a player. The, the,
The scouts are not monolithic, and they don't all like the same thing. But some scouts will talk to everybody they can find who has known the kid since he was five years old. And other scouts think, well, I'll talk to him myself and make my own judgments, but I'm not going to go talk to his former girlfriend. But there isn't anything...
There isn't any way of measuring a player that we won't use if we think we can get an edge by it. And as to what is used, it's a wide range. And, you know, none of us are that smart, Ben. The truth is all of us think we know
what to look for in a player. And we're all wrong some of the time. I always got along with the scouts really great. And part of it was that the scout intuitively understands that, whereas I learned the same thing by trying to project players forward based on what's in the book. And no matter how often you try to do it, you get it wrong a lot of times. And the scout's experience fundamentally is one of being wrong a lot.
And there's an inherent modesty that is driven into the profession by the fact that we all know, we're all trying to do something that we all know none of us can actually do, if that makes any sense. It does, especially within the world of media and journalism. What's an example of a moment where you were most right and
the impulses of others were wrong about a player and the opposite, where you were most wrong and the impulses of others were right. There's a very current one with the Red Sox, and I don't work for the Red Sox anymore. I left them a year and a half ago. But the Red Sox acquired Franchi Cordero, who's one of those players
A guy who has tremendous talent but swings from his heels and strikes out and never really has been a productive player. He's had a lot of injuries. But just watching him since the season started, I realized that there's something there that
that we hadn't seen before. He's had several at-bats where he was able to slow down his bat and punch the balls at the opposite field or foul off a pitch so he got a better pitch he could hit. And I really, until seeing him do that, I didn't realize or believe
that he could do that. But in watching the last five days, I do believe he can. So that's an example of a time I was just completely wrong. A time I was right about a type of player. You'd probably have to go back to the 1980s for one of those. Well, but you've been vindicated so many times. I mean, I just would think that that would be something that you would be proud of in the sense of baseball's
an old established guard going the wrong way on someone. Yeah, there were some of those, but I don't keep a list of them. Like all intelligent people, you have better recollection of the things where you were wrong than the things that you were right. That's right. I wanted to get your perspective on the Astros.
and what they actually did in terms of crossing lines as understood within the game in terms of, you know, engaging in behavior that, you know, leads people to make asterisk hats that have an asterisk instead of the star behind the H. Uh, what are your thoughts on what they did and do you believe it amounts to cheating? Well, uh,
I think it was cheating, and I think you have to react to that and acknowledge that. I was not pleased that baseball chose to handle it quite in the way they did. Well, first of all, they punished people who had actively opposed what was being done. I mean, the manager had been so adored by his team.
players doing that, that he smashed the TV that they were using to do it and quite distinctly told them to stop it several times. Nonetheless, he was the one who was punished. And I don't think Jeff Luno had any specific knowledge of it or in any way encouraged it. And while he may have perhaps been subject to some action for
failure to supervise, the actions that were taken against him and his manager were not the things that should have been done, and we didn't have to make quite such a big deal about it. Look, players search for an edge, not always respecting the rules.
all the time. This is the nature of the game. Ralph Howe famously said that if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. Yes, you have to prevent that. You have to enforce your rules. I felt that to me,
the championship in the way that it was done was not the right thing to do. And I'll give you this reason for it. Whenever you win something in a tournament,
in a competitive environment. And, you know, I'll claim the Jayhawks and claim the Royals as part of my property just to make the point. Whenever the Jayhawks won the national title in 1988 and 2008, there's always some reason. There's always something that somebody can say that takes it away from you. There's always something. It's not right to do that. I mean, after the season is played, you celebrate the winners or shut up.
And I felt that the baseball should have done much more to celebrate the winners and much less to make it appear that they'd only won because they were cheating, which, you know, it's not true anyway. It's a heck of a team. And they might have picked up a game somewhere because that's about the limit of it. There is a general impression that
Among the many fans of sports who are conservatives, Republicans, that sports media has become dominated by a group of woke leftists who inject race and gender and other issues into their coverage constantly and care a lot less about the games and the actual results of what's going on.
I don't think this is necessarily a problem that is unique to sports media. I think that it's broader than that. But to the degree that fans complain about it, do you think that it's justified? And why do you think it's become monolithic, if you think that? I don't know that it's monolithic. And, you know, I don't want to get into a political discussion, but I'm a relatively progressive person, to be honest. But I can't stand the way that...
The less behaves. Can I interject something here? I, I, my way of thinking about you has always been as an old guard liberal. In other words, someone who was a liberal in the 1990s and then didn't change.
versus the people who have changed in the last 20 years from being in favor of free speech and a lot of liberal ACLU kind of freedom-based values to being people who are kind of puritanical and woke in really aggressive ways. And I don't know if that's an accurate reflection, but that's just my impression of you. So, and it's something that I really respect because I think, I think if it is true of a lot of people, you know,
Steven Pinker is like that a lot of smart people are like that yeah I'll have to let other people draw the generalizations they will I I don't know that that's more true of sports media than it is a media in general uh I do know that there are a lot of people who started out as uh huge fans of my work who now send me nasty emails because I I won't condemn something the um
because I believe in forgiveness. I just said about the Astros, I think you don't exaggerate people's failings in order to make a point. But I do know that the environment has become so toxic that the other day on Twitter, I made some joke about Gads, a guy from Florida who's having problems. What's his first name? Matt Gates. Matt Gates, yes.
Yeah, I said the next person who would resign there was his barber. Anyway, people get angry. I mean, it's not a political joke. I mean, it's a joke about a politician, but he's kind of an idiot. And it's not an anti-Republican joke. It's just a joke about this politician who's kind of an idiot. He's got really big hair. That's just a fact. I think he would admit it. So I get, you know, people react to that as if it was a joke.
political diatribe. You know, it's not a political diatribe. It's just a little joke. The environment has become so toxic that one's ability to make little jokes, even about people that you like and people that you respect, has disappeared. I get emails quite regularly, I will tell you, from people who work within sports media and
who find some of the posturing, let's say, from different figures to be very offensive. I got a lot of them because I was in Hong Kong covering some of the riots and demonstrations that were happening there at the same time that the NBA was doing their thing. And so a lot of NBA reporters were kind of quietly reaching out and saying, you know, this is
offensive and, you know, we can't stand what Popovich and what some of these other people are incur and some of these other people avoiding questions about this are doing. Is there a reason why you think that
so much of this emphasis has moved into the arena of sports or is it just of a piece with the kind of broader culture wars that they now infect everything as opposed to being something where sports was, you know, always something that had cultural significance was not really a place where policy debates were at the center of, of press conferences and the like. Right. The, uh,
I mean, you must have noticed this as well, but politics now has the place that religion once had in our society for many people. Religion was not really a belief about what the face of God looked like. It was a debate about values. It was a system of values and a way of propagating those values.
As religion has declined tremendously in the last 40 years, people have come to see politics as the system in which we propagate our values and protect our values and advance our values. And what is being pushed into baseball now is that moral dimension of politics that was pushed into sports and many other things is that
that sense of moral superiority that religions are often accused of fostering, although religions are not really more prone to fostering that than there are other ways of thinking, other ways of establishing values. I'm a libertarian personally, and it turns out
that one of the flaws in my assumptions as a libertarian is that corporate motives, including those of Major League Baseball but other sports as well, would be agreed as the primary motivation. That the profit motive would prevent them from engaging in these kinds of things. But the new attitude seems to me to basically be, you know, Republicans buy sneakers too, but should they?
You know, it's much more kind of limiting. Is there a way to get out of this spiral? What would it take from your perspective to get out of it? Well, as to what would take you out of it, I hate to answer it. We all pray that we get out of it without a civil war, but it's not that clear that that's going to happen. But a way to address the more specific problem that you started with in that discussion is to...
re reform the laws about, uh, boards of directors and, uh, reestablish boards of directors were set up to protect the investors in the company. And that is legally their function of a board of directors is to protect the interest of the investors in the company, but they don't really do that anymore. Boards of directors now are buddies of the, of the, of the, uh,
Totally. President or the CEO.
If you could reform the laws about, well, if you could put in place a system of oversight to make sure that, in fact, boards of directors do protect the interest of the investors, that would go a long way toward limiting the political activism of a few large companies. So let's go out on this. I don't know if you can hear her, but my little six-month-old daughter is...
upstairs wailing away. No, I don't hear it. Do you hear my dog scratching at the door? No, I cannot. I have discovered, much to my pleasure, and what would have been to the pleasure of her grandpa, that she loves to watch baseball and football. And I think...
it has something to do with the contrast of the colors and the bright green and the different colors of the players' uniforms because she didn't have the same attitude towards March Madness. She didn't seem to like that as much. As I'm raising her, what stories ought I tell her or things that I ought to engage with her in order to ensure that she is a fan of baseball? Yeah.
Well, I don't know, Ben, but I tell you, I took all three of my kids to hundreds of Major League Baseball games while they were growing up and quite a few basketball games. And one of them loves sports and still follows the Red Sox and follows the Jayhawks. The other two could care less. So I may not be the person you should be asking about that.
Well, I will just tell you that I think, you know, her mother did not inherit the love of sports that her dad had. And I'm very invested in making sure that my little daughter is able to accompany me to games while mommy goes off and has her mani-pedi or whatever. Yeah.
I wish you the best of luck on that. Thank you. Well, thank you, Bill. It's been a pleasure to talk to you as always. And I just appreciate so much your brilliant insight on America and the game. Thanks for having me on, Ben. I'm very happy to do it anytime.
I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. As always, I really appreciate some of the feedback I've gotten from listeners, and I hope that you'll continue to give it over the coming months. The readers have also made note of the fact that
or listeners have also made note of the fact that I've been offering you a number of different articles and other things to read. And I wanted to recommend a couple of those today. One is related to the discussion that we've just had. Christopher Bedford writing at The Federalist a few days ago. It's high time we make woke corporate America feel real pain. Here's how we can start.
He makes the argument that really the right has done a poor job of holding American corporations responsible when they take fundamentally anti-American positions. And he looks at this not just through the realm of sports, but through the lens of other factors that have gotten involved here. I also wanted to commend to you a piece by Raphael Manguel.
who writes at The Hill. He's a Manhattan Institute senior fellow who concentrates on criminal justice and legal policy.
He has a piece that ran also last week on the spike in crime in America. Cities got deadlier in 2020. What's behind the spike in homicides? He looks at a number of different factors here in New York, Chicago, LA, DC, Philadelphia, Louisville, Cincinnati, Detroit, Providence, and numerous other cities that saw massive increases often on the level of
50% or more in terms of the level of homicides and shootings that were seen in 2020.
There's not just one reason for this. There's a lot of reasons for it. And I encourage you to check out his article as it looks at a number of reasons why. And then I'm also going to recommend to you a political legal opinion that has political ramifications. Clarence Thomas had a, an interesting concurring opinion in the case of president Joe Biden versus night first amendment Institute at Columbia university where
It's a ruling on a question regarding Twitter and President Trump's ability to block various users. It was dismissed as moot now that Joe Biden is president, but it's
Thomas saw fit to write a full opinion that looked at both Twitter, the platform and social media giants generally and raised significant questions about the difference between private space and public space and how those are adjudicated in a social media era. Following on his earlier comments regarding section two 30 and it's broad into interpretation, defending social media giants, uh,
Thomas is basically signaling to everyone who will listen that
He's fed up with the current state of affairs, that he believes that these social media giants have gotten away with far too much, and that whole question needs to be looked at in terms of the Supreme Court going forward. I encourage you to look up the opinion and to read this. It's a legal roadmap, effectively, to tearing down social media censorship, but it's also something that is going to rile a lot of people up, including not just the companies themselves, but
but a lot of other people out there who have seen fit to defend these companies far after they've revealed themselves as the enemies of free thought and free expression in America. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be back next week with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
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