The comments made by The Ringer’s Bill Simmons set off a new fire among Houston sports fans who feel like it’s them against everyone else.
Over on ESPN Houston, The Killer B’s co-host Jeremy Branham said that attitude really started forming in the last few years amidst the Houston Astros cheating scandal.
“The fact that the national media are hellbent on thinking that the cheating scandal was all Astros, only Astros and will always be Astros, and that they should be admonished and treated like step-children and all the ways that the Astros get treated because they cheated,” he said.
Branham added that ESPN MLB Insider Jeff Passan’s treatment of the team since the sign-stealing scheme was revealed is something that annoys him to this day.
“The fact that Jeff Passan won’t let it go, and he’s overdone it in the way that he treats the Astros, will always be something that sticks in my craw,” he said.
Co-host Joel Blank asked listeners to weigh in with their thoughts on the one hot take or storyline that drives them nuts.
“The thing that irks me about national media is how they are completely unoriginal,” one listener text message read. “All they do is parrot headlines, and their hot takes are just ignorant and exist as an attempt to be original.”
Blank said the Simmons comments are more than likely just a hot take meant to get a rise out of Houston fans. He said when it comes to the Astros scandal, Houston gets the brunt of the blowback despite other MLB players acknowledging other teams were stealing signs as well.
“It’s like fake news,” he said. “It’s only looking at one side of the story, it’s not covering it all the way across the board, and the players have shed some light on the truth of all that. And most people just ignore it.”