Last week, the sports world experienced a whirlwind. Team U.S. advanced to the finals at the World Baseball classic, Cameron Young wins the Player’s Championship (golf), and Jannik Sinner bested Daniil Medvedev in the Indian Wells final (tennis). Thankfully, Pablo Torre is here to help us keep track of it all.
Together with Jen, Pablo reports the latest on the ever-looming cloud of sports gambling the fun of rooting for the underdogs in college sports, and much more. Tune in and hear all about it!
Pablo’s podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out has been nominated for Podcast of the Year by iHeartPodcast Awards. Congratulations, Pablo!
Pablo Torre is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He contributes to various programs at ESPN, including Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn. Keep up with Pablo on his Substack and podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out .
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. If it’s Monday, it must be Pablo Torre. Welcome, Pablo.
Pablo Torre
Thanks for having me back. As always, Jen, a lot to get to.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, but first, some kudos are due. You have been named a finalist in the Podcast of the Year and the Host of the year. Tell us about that. Is that going to be, like, an awards ceremony? Do you get to put on a tuxedo and go up to get the golden, you know, mic?
Pablo Torre
You know what? Unlike the Oscars, which I did watch, for better and for worse last night, there will be no tuxedo. These are happening at South by Southwest that we speak in Austin. I am in New York, which is to say, if I win, I will be like Sean Penn, except plan to be conscientiously objecting to anything, I just couldn’t be out there to be nominated alongside, like, Amy Poehler and, the Call Her Daddy empire, Alex Cooper. So, yeah, it’s strange, but thank you for acknowledging external validation, which does feed me.
Jen Rubin
And it just shows that good journalism still pays off, because those other people are amusing and interested in your real journalism.
Pablo Torre
It’s a funny bit of company to be in, given that I do documents, and they do lots of very different things.
Jen Rubin
Funny things, yes, exactly. We need both in this world. Let’s move on to something that was really, at least from my perspective, unexpected and entirely joyful, and that was the World Baseball Classic. How’d it come about, and why is that proving to be so much fun this year?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, so the World Baseball Classic was, at first, when it was born, like an imposition, you know? When you start a new tournament, the thing is always, will you get the best players in the world to really care about it? And I would say that the Americans really took the longest to care about it, because baseball, as anybody now who watches the majors knows, it’s beyond, obviously, international, right? Japan, the Dominican Republic, the Dominican has always been a feeder system for some of the greatest players of all time, but you go down the list, and it’s… it’s the growth of a truly international game.
So the stars of baseball in America, domestically, there’s always just like this, yeah, but, you know, whatever. And so, funny enough, this tournament, the World Baseball Classic this year, it started off by kind of establishing a bit of comeuppance for the Americans. Mark DeRosa, the manager, said something that basically assumed, by implication, that of course, the US would be there in the end, and in fact, they were sort of teetering on the edge of even making it to the next round in the elimination part of the bracket. They had lost to Italy, which is a bit embarrassing, and so immediately you went from, wait a minute, so America as this goliath that’s too cool for school, ends up becoming this power that is being threatened by lower-level countries. And then—spoiler alert, you know—America, with this new rejuvenated sort of pride, ends up running the table, and we end up winning it over the Dominican in ways that are, yeah, incredible.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, we’ll either play Italy or Venezuela. Not that I don’t love Italy, in fact, it’s one of my favorite countries, particularly to visit to, but the Venezuela-U.S. matchup could be fascinating from a geopolitical standpoint. That could really be, quite, extraordinary. Do you have any insight into the Italy-Venezuela game? I would think Venezuela would be the favorite, but Italy, as you said, has proved its mental a few times.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I would bet on Venezuela if I were a wagering man. But it’s, look, it’s one of those things where the three biggest favorites in this whole tournament was Japan, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, probably in that order, reverse order. And so, the US just knocking off the Dominican, it does set up a possible trap game. Where Italy, of course, Italy already beat the US, and Venezuela, you’re right, like, the, again, it’s hard not to think of the geopolitical context of the United States and Venezuela over the last year, although the, of course, kidnapping of Maduro seems like it was a century ago at this point, but I would say Venezuela is the country that I would be worried about in the baseball context here the most.
Jen Rubin
Fair enough, fair enough. Of course, the NCAA bracket was announced, both the men and the women. This is always one of those instances, like the college playoffs now, where everyone has a gripe about everything. But this doesn’t seem to be all that controversial. Do you think there was any major snub, any major give-me for a team that really shouldn’t have been ranked as high as they were?
Pablo Torre
I’m not fainting… I’m not collapsing onto my fainting couch at this bracket which I’m looking at. I think, look, and every year, there will be some team, if we’re lucky, that will make a Cinderella run, and everyone will think, oh my god, how did they end up being seeded so low? But right now, I mean, look, if the smart money, you’re looking at Houston, right? I look at their path, and I’m like, okay, that seems reasonable. You look at Arizona, you look at… I mean, gosh, you go down the list of one season, okay, I’m like, you know what? How do I feel about Duke? I just don’t see any team here that has an outstanding grievance—to borrow the language of the pros, and those labor negotiations.
I do think, as always, that my attention is with the possible Davids. The NCAA tournament, for the time being, is still the foremost case study in small, tiny, little bitty schools coexisting with those powers I just mentioned. And there may well be a time where the economic incentives of those powers, of the big schools, those big brands, are such that they don’t want to have to share in the money with the Cinderella’s, with the 16 seeds. But for the time being, prior to the birth of a Super League potentially to come, they all gotta hang out in this same cafeteria, and I am somebody who thinks we should not take that for granted.
They don’t need to include them, frankly, but the tradition is such that they do, and I think of the 16 seasons, I’m looking at Howard playing UMBC in that 16 versus a 16 playing game. That’s the part where I’m like, yeah, I’d like to root on, you know, Howard, the Howard Bison, to see if they can make her run.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Now, Duke has this love-hate relationship with the tournament, of course. They’ve won a lot, but they’re also infamous for washing out early. You have any inside take on which it’s gonna be this year for Duke? They do seem solid.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I mean, it’s the mistake to make here is always confusing, having even the best player in the country. And for people who’ve slept through the entire college basketball season, Cameron Boozer is the best player in the country. This is Carlos Boozer, former Duke alum himself. This is his son, one of his two twins. And so, for me, Duke has had a long history of having incredible NBA-level talent that just ends up getting knocked out, if not choking, in the tournament itself, oftentimes because there are these smaller schools that end up playing a style that flummoxes them. So, on paper, Duke is deserving of its seed. In reality, I’m not taking them to win this thing. I’ve just seen too much. That’s how I pick brackets also, is emotional scar tissue.
Jen Rubin
Do you do the super analysis on the bracket? That’s one extreme. The other extreme is picking teams by the color of the uniform that you like. Where on that spectrum are you?
Pablo Torre
You know what, I was talking to one of the… and I do this on my show a lot, I want to find out, how are Americans losing their money to legal gambling operations and prediction markets? But then, who are they losing it to? Because the people who win these things… I just talked to a gambler named Galen Hall, who’s won $15 million in his lifetime on these legal contests. He is otherwise a partner at a quantitative hedge fund. He is the guy who has 100 brackets, and he’s entering into all of these pools. He has models. He has a whole strategy for how you can’t just pick chalk, because what you want to do is engineer a pathway such that if a favorite, if one gets toppled, there is a pathway for you to be one of the few remaining, you know, entries left standing, so you don’t want to go with the herd, you want to be contrarian a bit. And so all of this is to say that I hear all of these strategic points of emphasis, and I think they’re, of course, analytically rigorous. And I think that for him, there is a real portfolio management of how to do this, and then I think to myself, my god, I am not gonna put in any of that work, I’m going to pick based on vibes, I’m gonna pick based on what I’m rooting for personally, what would be the most fun for me to see. I mean, Jen, I’m the guy who’s picking a 16 seed to upset a 1 seed. year after year after year on national television before it ever happened, because it just felt like that was the most fun thing to root for. So I am not quantitative in my analysis. I recognize, though, that there are people who are, and we’ll probably lose our money to them, especially in this era of increasing sophistication.
Jen Rubin
Right, and this is the truism, of course, of the tournament, which is there will be a 16, you just don’t know which one. And, if you pick, a really outside-the-box team to go all the way to the Final Four. probably going to be disappointed, because there is a reversion to the mean. At the end of the day, there’s usually two or three, if not four, of the top seeds that make it, because these people actually do know something about ranking, and over the course of the tournament, it usually settles down a bit.
But, we always remember those years. I remember the year that George Mason went all the way. You know, there’s always that year, and that’s what makes it fun, what makes it memorable. And there are those teams that you only really get to watch during the tournament. How many great Gonzaga games has the rest of the country gotten to watch because they’re on the West Coast and it’s too late to stay up to watch Gonzaga on an average basketball day?
Pablo Torre
Yeah, there’s a lot. It’s the all-you-can-eat buffet of college basketball. It’s one of the great events we have. I just continue to warn that I don’t think we’re gonna get this version of it forever. I think there’ll be tournament expansion, because you follow the money, they want more teams, you follow the further economic incentives, it’s gonna be big conferences taking up ever more of that pie, so, you know, enjoy it while it lasts.
Jen Rubin: In other words, there is nothing good about college sports that can’t be ruined? Is that what you’re telling me?
Pablo Torre
There are active conversations all of the time in college basketball about why are we going to let you know, a 16 seed eat at this banquet table with us when we are the ones who draw ratings, you know? That’s… that’s… an economic imperative that, on paper, I understand, but in practice, the whole point is that the rich kids gotta hang with the poor kids. You know, that’s why it’s fun. And so whether that matters, I become increasingly cynical about that.
Jen Rubin
Yeah, very good, very good. Well, this weekend, we had two marvelous tournaments that were in the individual sports category. One was in golf, and the other in tennis. And the golf, which was the players’ tournament, which is one of, really, the most beautiful courses. It has that very famous 17th hole, it’s a little island out in the middle of the lake, and you get a few people who wind up in the drink every time. And you had a guy, Oberg, a Swede, who everyone said was coming into his own, he was in the league, and he just kind of crumbled. And you had a journeyman who hasn’t won a lot, Cameron Young come up and play amazing. And what was so fascinating was that on the day before, in the third round, he was, like, all over the map. He would hit on one side of the green and then the other side of the green. But he kept his cool. And that seems to be the superpower of golfers.
Do you come undone, or do you steady yourself and keep going? And he really did. I mean, he had some really hair-raising holes where he wound up saving par, but it was kind of nail-biting time.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, this is a guy who needed 94 starts to get his first Tour victory, right? And so, as always, and we’ve seen this over and over again with the superstars in golf, Rory McIlroy included. Until you do the thing, you are liable to be labeled the guy who will never do the thing.
In this case, you know, Ludwig Aberg, this 26-year-old, I mean, yeah, he had a 3-stroke lead. He was ahead. He was ahead, you know? And then, on 11 and 12, Things fall apart.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, exactly. You know, one of the things that you kind of look at when you look at golf, and maybe this is true of every sport, is that you get used to certain people so dominating that when they don’t, you say, what is wrong with X? So, you know, Scottie Scheffler hasn’t won every week, he didn’t win the players, what’s going on? Do we get into the syndrome that you can’t possibly win 5 tournaments a year for your entire career, and so we invest these expectations that are ridiculous? He’s not gonna win every tournament.
Pablo Torre
Yeah, I think my big picture view of that is that we were spoiled, at least I was spoiled, by Tiger Woods. And there was this notion that he’s going to dominate. He should be penciled in as a winner until proven otherwise. And golf, in the absence of a transcendent all-time talent like that, has reverted to what it really is, which is a test of mental fortitude in great, unpredictable chaos. And it’s true up and down the leaderboard. Every golf tournament. There’s a reason why we’re always contemplating Was this, psychological weakness?
I think, to be sure, there are case studies of that, but just as well, there are examples in which someone is going to have to lose this tournament! Yes! And in golf, it tends to be heartbreaking, yeah.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. You know. One of the things that I do love about golf is, and as you said, it’s always this search for the next Tiger, because he was a singular figure. It wasn’t like in tennis, where you had, like, three guys at the top. It wasn’t like you had two guys, or three guys, there was one guy. That there’s always this expectation, which I think works against each person who comes up. Remember, we were gonna have Spieth, he was gonna be the next Tiger Woods, and he won a couple majors, and then… you know, he’s a very, very good golfer, but he’s not the next Tiger Woods, and maybe there just isn’t a next Tiger Woods.
Pablo Torre
I think the only plausible next Tiger Woods is literally Charlie Woods, Tiger’s son, and I do not envy, I do not envy the pressure by implication that is on Charlie Woods right now.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, one of my favorite sports, tennis, lived up to expectations. This is a tournament that we all love because it comes in the middle of winter, and everyone goes out to the desert in Indian Wells, California, where it’s 97 degrees. And whether you’re there or whether you’re watching, you just feel warmed by the relief from the cold. And they had two Remarkable finals. You had, Sabalenka in… going 3 sets against Rybakina. She had it, she almost let it get away, and she came back. The women’s game, to me, is fascinating, because you have two or three or four of these players who, on… a particular tournament with the right matchup can really win. And I think this is proof that you don’t have one superstar on the women’s side, you have a few of them, and every tournament is gonna kind of come out a little differently?
Pablo Torre
There is, on the women’s side, a mix, right? And so, Świątek is also… So, what is happening in tennis right now? You’re seeing the cream rise to the top, you’re seeing these established groups of possibilities, and also, at Indian Wells, you have, in center, on the men’s side, and Sabalenka on the women’s side, you’re seeing, again, a… what is the term? An oligopoly of contenders, who are realizing, oh, wait a minute, it may not be us every time, but you are going to be familiar in tennis, unlike golf recently.
That these familiar faces tend to be there, and that’s the power dynamic of the sport right now.
Jen Rubin
And that was what was fascinating on the men’s side, was the semifinals, when he’s human, Carlos loses to Medvedev, who is, let’s face it, playing out of his mind. . He is a guy who… he’s quirky, he’s odd, he has a love-hate relationship with the fans, but when he’s on, he is startlingly amazing, and we all remember that finals, his only Grand Slam, that he beat Djokovic at the US Open. He can be spectacular, he’s just not spectacular all the time.
Pablo Torre
Yes, he also has the capacity, unintentionally and not, to be entertaining. And so the fact that he is a bit of a spoiler, and it’s funny to say Alcaraz, you know, fell short, he only made it to the semifinals.
Jen Rubin
I mean, is that why?
Pablo Torre
But that’s it, right? It’s Sinner and Alcaraz in interchangeable order, and then some other stuff underneath, and Medvedev might be the most entertaining of that other stuff. We’re not gonna say that he’s in… because again, Djokovic’s still kicking around. I’m not saying that he’s on that top tier at all, but he has the ability to ruin those guys’ day, and that’s what he did.
Jen Rubin
And to some extent, it’s not all that fair, but Singer and Alcarazz are so good, so consistently good. And so consistently contained within themselves that they get the rap that they’re a little boring. And that just means you’re a good sport, you’re consistent, you get along with your team, you don’t argue with the umpire, you don’t insult the crowd. So it’s everything we should want, and yet, when a bad boy comes along, there’s a little bit of mischief. He is a character, and he looks different, and he behaves differently than just about any other tennis player out there.
Pablo Torre
Yes, yes. And look, Sinner, in his way, when you say, you know, what are we watching here? Alcaraz, you refer to him as this sort of, like, automatic, contender. Sinner is the most mechanical of all.
And so I want that, I want those doses of humanity, just like you.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, exactly. Well, we are into the beginning of the clay court season, they’re gonna go to, that was hard court last week, they’re gonna go to Miami, and then pretty soon, they’ll be in Europe for the clay court. So for tennis fans like myself, we are just warming up, and I will be in Miami next weekend, so I’ll be there Monday and let you know exactly how it is, because, as I said, in the dead of winter, and it’s still the dead of winter, it is pouring outside.
You gotta get out, and there’s something like the California sun or the Miami Sun, so that’s a lot of fun. So next week, we’ll have that marathon week of… the first week of the tournament, in which the productivity of the American economy way down, because, like, who’s doing work? I always love to see, talking about a data person, like, try to measure the economic drop-off on the first week of the tournament. And I gotta be honest, I kind of have a little bit of relief after the first weekend, because you’re overloaded, and it gets manageable, and then you can say, okay, I can figure this out now. At the beginning, it’s kind of overload.
Pablo Torre
Oh my gosh, yes. And God bless everybody in an office who’s, like, you know, trying to hide windows behind Excel spreadsheets.
Jen Rubin
That’s one of the benefits of the post-COVID world, is we all just do it at home, and we’re out in the open about it. But I will say, there’s a terrible joke that God made wars so Americans can learn geography. I think God made the tournament so Americans can learn where places like Creighton really are.
Pablo Torre
It’s so true.
Jen Rubin
I always love looking up, where are these schools, and why is something called Wayne State? We don’t have a state of Wayne, you know?
Pablo Torre
It’s a good question.
Jen Rubin
It keep us up at night. It is a great week of sports. This is probably the best time of year, because you’ve got everything going. But, thank you so much, Pablo. Congratulations again.
Pablo Torre
Oh, thank you.
Jen Rubin
Well-deserved recognition, and we’ll be back. In the meantime, let’s see if the Bisons can kind of surprise a few people, that would be awesome.
Pablo Torre
And let’s find out how many other universities like Wayne State occupy the state of Michigan, because it turns out there is a lot more than you realize.
Jen Rubin
Exactly, exactly. Take care, Pablo, great seeing you.
Pablo Torre
Thanks, Jen.
