Look. It’s not all about the Super Bowl right now. Did you forget that pitchers and catchers report to spring training next week? And did you forget that the World Baseball Classic is back this year – for the first time since 2017? Baseball is just days away from turning its calendar to 2023 and the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast is here to help you get in the mood. The podcast, hosted by Rob Bradford of WEEI, officially launched in October of 2022 through Audacy’s national platform, but it’s set to pick up major traction this season, launching episodes each weekday with some of your favorite players, managers, coaches, front office executives and media members.
“Every single weekday at 6:00 AM, the plan is to have something up,” Bradford told BSM this week. “And it’s challenging because I don’t have a built-in co-host and a lot of this is guest-driven but we’ve done it for about three months, and there hasn’t really been any days where I’ve had to mail it in.
“I’ve been able to get a wide variety of people and honestly, it’s been a blast to do. To talk to Joey Votto about chess or actor D.B. Sweeney about playing Shoeless Joe Jackson (in Eight Men Out), or executives, or managers, or players. It’s been a lot of fun,” Bradford said.
The podcast is just the latest explosion of the “Baseball Isn’t Boring” movement.
It’s the brainchild of Bradford and former Red Sox-turned-Dodgers-turned White Sox reliever Joe Kelly. Bradford has been the Site Editor of WEEI.com and has covered the Red Sox for more than a decade. His relationship with Kelly helped them form this partnership which has morphed into the podcast – and a book, which is set to come out on February 28th.
“Joe Kelly and I knew we wanted to do a book, and we knew that the premise of the book was going to be making people understand how good baseball is and all the things that are good about baseball and entertaining about baseball, all of that,” Bradford said.
While baseball was mired in labor strife during the lockout last offseason, Bradford and Kelly knew they had to get the ball rolling on the project.
“We started the ‘Baseball Isn’t Boring’ accounts with Cooper Leonard helping a ton and then we got down to spring training and we started handing out the t-shirts… The Red Sox players were wearing them all over the place… I think Kike Hernandez wore his every single day.
“Then Joe wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times stating our message and what we were talking about with baseball not being boring. ‘We should love the game. Let’s not forget about that through all the labor stuff.’ So we just kept it going and the more we talked about it, the more we understood how much meat on was on the bone when it came to that conversation.”
With Bradford being around the Red Sox, prominent players like Xander Bogaerts proudly displayed their t-shirts on social media, and Kelly, who was at White Sox spring training in Arizona, helped proliferate the message on the West Coast.
“Everybody wanted a t-shirt. Everybody liked the slogan. Everyone liked the logo,” Bradford said. “The first guy who put it on social media was (former Dodger) Justin Turner and that was because Joe gave him a t-shirt and Justin did this Instagram post where he showed up to spring training, got his equipment out of his trunk, and he is wearing this “Baseball Isn’t Boring” t-shirt. That was because Joe was handing them out to his buddies. It’s just an easy and fun conversation to be had.”
As he continues his work for WEEI, Bradford will continue to cover the Red Sox. He’ll make appearances on the station’s radio shows and write for the website, and he’ll stick with an additional Sox-based podcast called the Bradfo Sho but some of his priorities will change as a result of the national endeavor.
“I have to prioritize talking to people on other teams and other people when I get the opportunity to. “Obviously when the Red Sox play someone, I can talk to them,” Bradford said.
Bradford will be a part of nearly 20 spring training podcasts for WEEI but says on days when he has no Red Sox responsibilities he may take in some World Baseball Classic action.
“Am I going to cover the Red Sox like I did in 2008 when I joined WEEI? No. But you know what? No one covers it that way anymore. You pick the most interesting stuff and you lean into it. It’s not like you have to obsess over the minutiae as much as you used to,” he added.
The t-shirts are popular, the book is coming out, and the podcast is set to get bigger. But Bradford says there’s still much more good news to come.
“Audacy made a commitment to me and I’ve made a commitment to Audacy,” he said. “I think we have a pretty big announcement coming up in March about a partnership and I think we’re going to get into the gambling space at least one day with Jonathan Papelbon as our gambling expert.”
“There’s a lot of different things you can do and I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg here.”