The Sporting Class: What You Can’t Control, with David Samson

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Happy birthday, sending best wishes and hoping all is well.

Have you no shame?

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Hey, buddy.

Oh, man.

So you have, I want to be very clear with our audience what's happening here today.

You're going to be out of here.

In an hour, almost literally,

you got places to be.

It is not lost lost on me that you made time to do this.

And I have really missed you.

Thank you.

I was at

a deli, and I lost track of days.

And I was asked by

my daughter's mother, my ex, Cindy, to get a sandwich, bagel, a bagel with Nova and cream cheese.

And I wanted one too.

So I went to Sables,

and I completely didn't understand why there was a line out the door because I had forgotten that it was young Kipper.

And so I am online.

I get to fourth.

It's my turn, almost fourth, and a doctor calls.

And that's my life now.

So when the doctor calls, that's it.

Whatever you're doing, and it's happened during the taping, nothing personal.

That's it.

You take the call because I'm on their time.

I'm on everybody else's time but mine.

So I get offline.

I then do the call, get back online, get to the front.

And before I I can make an order, the guy looks right at me and says, do you know Pablo Torre?

Oh, no.

And I said, yeah, why?

I said, oh, I've seen you on his show.

I said, thank you so much.

Can I get you anything?

I said, yeah, I wouldn't mind a schmear.

Oh, God.

You went to Sables?

Yes.

Was it an Asian guy who asked you that?

Yes, it was.

I met that guy probably two weeks before you had that dip.

It was all octogenarian Jewish women getting ready for Arab Yom Kippur.

Then it was me with a backpack because that's my new thing.

I have shoes that I bike with because I bike all over the city now because I won't sit in traffic like I did today.

And I don't, and I comfortable shoes, and I'm getting food.

And because I'm trying to have my family eat because we're not eating, we're not sleeping.

And the first thing I'm ready to order, I'm late because my daughter has certain certain times that I can see her in between therapies.

And

the delay is, do you know Pablo Torre?

There's a variety of ways that I need people to understand and appreciate what it is that your life is now.

One of them, I hope, is informed by the fact that you're the person for whom normal everyday shit

is fascinating through the lens of of how you see the world.

We've done episodes with you about losing your senses of smell and taste.

We've done episodes with you in which you bring us inside of baseball arbitration against your former employees.

We do episodes with you with John Skipper typically sitting right here in between us.

He is not here today.

He was supposed to be.

Then we said we should just do this, me and you, because the thing that you always bring to the table is a level of candid strangeness that reads as foreign, even alien to so many of our mutual friends.

And now, in what you're dealing with in the present, which only begins to explain why you haven't been on the shows people have expected you to be on, your own show, nothing personal.

I've been gone for two weeks as

my family has been dealing with a critical situation.

I have a daughter who is seriously ill and it came out of nowhere.

And I have been spending the last two weeks trying to figure out how to do the only thing that matters, which is to take care of her and my other children and my family.

And I've made a promise to you all that you've been with me for all these years, that I would not in any way

lie to you.

I would not in any way mislead you.

I would not in any way do anything to break the trust that we've built together over all these years where you know you're going to get it from me straight.

And I wasn't ready.

That's the bottom line.

I wasn't ready to talk about it.

I wasn't ready to think about it other than to do what was in front of me, which was to figure out how to deal with something that is unthinkable, unimaginable, can't be happening.

And you open your eyes 24 hours a day and it happens.

It's in front of you.

There's nothing you can do.

There's There's no escape from the nightmare of a life changing in the blink of an eye.

My struggle is that I can't find the meaning right now.

I can't, it doesn't serve as a distraction to me right now.

And on September 12th, when I got the call about my daughter, out of nowhere, it was out of nowhere, Pablo.

I mean, it was out of nowhere.

This was not,

there is no way to describe what it is when the phone rings and it's someone calling you who

you speak to often, but you knew that was a strange time to call because my brain is keeping track of where people are and what people are doing because I thought that I would always want to be ready for whatever particular call could come at a particular time because I always try to plan for any possible outcome that could possibly happen.

You and me eating at a restaurant, you're already, if you haven't listened to David on this show before, you should know that he's already planning the exit strategies.

You have, as a function of your, your foremost desire, control.

The irony,

I don't have control over anything.

Nothing.

I can't control.

I can't make my daughter better.

I can't put my family back together.

I can't put our lives back together.

I can't do anything.

I can't control when the doctors call me back.

I can't control when test results come.

I can't control one thing.

And

that's why I'm biking back and forth to the hospital every day from where I live because, and I've got,

I mean, I

show this isn't for the best.

You've shown your feet before.

So I've cut some

toe.

I mean, I've got, I'm bleeding everywhere.

You have bandages under your blue dress socks.

I can't deal with the fact that I can't control the outcome.

I've never entered a fight that I know.

So that's that.

So biking in New York is a problem because people are idiots.

You're somebody for whom, again, the piece of tape on the side of the table, whether the water bottle has a label on it, whether this thing got breathed on by somebody else.

You're someone for whom the small things.

have always been comically

frustrating.

They're easy.

No, but they're easy.

Look, there's a yellow sticker here that says control.

Has that always been here?

I have a yellow button.

I didn't, I didn't

notice it, but you are tracing it back and forth with your finger.

You called me on September 12th,

and it was one of the scarier calls that I've received from someone that I care about because I was

almost immediately

informed, not with words, but with tone of voice, that something really scary had just happened to you.

And

look, man, I, I,

in the attempt to, of course, respect and abide by the boundaries that are protecting your family and your daughter, I don't want to say more than, of course, you want me to say.

So I want to focus in, frankly, on just you

as a person that I think we as a show, certainly our audience, but we as friends of yours have just really been worried about and thinking about.

I just wonder if

there is

any degree of zooming out or is it all very zoomed in right now?

I'm trying to gain back some sort of control over something.

So I find myself doing things.

I mean, I've just, my life has changed in a way.

I don't know how it'll change back and it manifests itself in ways.

I can't, I haven't watched a movie.

I haven't watched a movie since September 12th.

And I watched a movie every day for decades before that.

And I can't,

I don't, it's not a time issue because there's 24 hours in a day because I can't sleep because waking up.

brings you back into the nightmare in which I find myself.

So I'm not sleeping.

I thought maybe doing the show would be a distraction.

So I started doing that on September 29th.

After taking, again, two weeks off?

Jesus, the scary, the part of what was scary is that, so I remember talking to Coca.

Coca calls me and he's like, hey, here's what I think my approach is going to be with David, because our assumption would be he's going to want to work day one because that's just his constitution.

That's what he will want to do.

And it'll be our job to push back.

And when word came that, in fact, you could not, would not, did not want to.

do the thing that has always been your comfort zone, the thing that you do for fun,

that provided you, by the way, in the decision to become a media person, some establishment of control over your life.

I'm going to do this that makes me happy now.

I'm going to find out what that is.

When you didn't want to do that, it became very unsettling.

Were you surprised about that?

How you personally responded?

When I got the phone call, my

the

first thing I thought of was that I tried to fast forward to everything.

I tried to do what I do in my brain, which is to go through every pathway.

Where does that end?

Where does that end?

What do I do now?

How does this work now?

What calls do I need to make?

What do I need to do?

And every single pathway led to just another nightmare, led to another maze where

I didn't know how to get out of that state I was in after that phone call came.

And I've never had that before because there's always been an exit.

There's always been a strategy that I've been able to go through my mind faster.

And it's the reason why I have trouble with relationships because I go through all of it way faster.

And all of a sudden, Lebattar will say, slow down, David.

I'm not there yet.

That you see how the story is going to go?

I have it.

And you've sped there

because time

is also something that you are measuring.

The ultimate irony.

The ultimate irony of my measuring of time and

understanding the time runs out and then thinking about that now.

I just,

I've thought a little bit about

God because

I struggle with that.

I always have, but now I'm struggling way more.

I sort of imagine...

God, whatever entity that is, laughing at me because

this is the hell that I would have someone choose for me.

And I've never had it.

I've gotten away with everything my whole life because I've been able to talk my way out of it.

I've been able to maneuver my way out of it.

And I have no play.

It is checkmate.

And

the humor in that that I want to see.

And I thought if I got back on camera, that I'd be able to pull back and enjoy the irony of the fact that everything that I have been able to do, I don't know how to do anymore.

I don't have it yet.

I don't have it yet.

And so my thought was I'd start doing the show immediately.

I said to Coca, it was Friday night.

I'll be back Monday.

And then it just became obvious that

I didn't have the pathways projected right.

I had them all wrong.

And I'm still getting them wrong.

The desire to even see the humor in a cruel and cosmic joke that you, by the way, I want to make this clear too.

The story of you, as I have best understood it, is not of a man who's never experienced tragedy.

It's of a man who has always found ways to shed the inefficient waste of time that attends the rituals of human

emotion.

It's like you don't feel it.

It's just that you're like, recognizing when it's a waste, when it's not.

It's always been a waste.

It's always been a waste.

And it's not that I feel it's still a waste.

And I'm stuck in that waste.

And I've always been able to dismiss the waste.

Maybe now I'm beginning to understand how to say it.

The things I feel right now, they don't help.

They don't move forward anything.

They don't make her better.

They don't make me better.

They don't make my two other kids better.

They don't make my

Cindy better.

I don't even know what I, it sounds so harsh to

the white, the mother of the daughter makes it sound weird.

The mother of my children, it's, it's, we are a team.

The reason I focus on you,

as opposed to your daughter, is not merely because of the privacy and the confidence that I want to protect.

Dude, it's just like, so for people who don't know, like, how close we've become, like, part of,

I was like, explaining to Liz, like, what happened.

And we.

That was a gut-wrenching text she sent me.

But we had stayed with you

and your daughter.

How many weeks before September 12th?

There was nothing wrong.

We were in the same house together

watching movies.

The fucking

earthquake that destabilizes everything that isn't stopping yet.

The reason I turn my focus to you is because I genuinely haven't talked to you enough.

And my hope is that there is something here, as people who live in front of a microphone, to think out loud about.

And

I just don't really know

what's okay to poke you about.

You're never at a loss for words.

You can poke all you want.

I think I'm sharp enough to not allow the pokes in the place I don't want them.

Just tell me, please.

But I may not be.

I don't.

that's the other thing.

And that what scared me about doing the show is my respect for the audience.

And

I've always,

that's been the thing since the first time I did nothing personal is I just, and there was one person listening to my first show in October of 19.

And Coke and I have been together ever since.

I just respect people's time because I want my time to be respected.

And so how can I ask for that if I won't give it?

And I've always been willing to give it.

And I don't want to sit in a waiting room at a doctor's office for 45 minutes.

I just, I can't handle that.

And there is no more on my time.

It's done.

Like, it's done.

What's done?

The ability to have someone respect my time the way that I'm willing to respect theirs.

It's done because now I'm on somebody else's schedule all day.

Every day, no matter what happens, no matter what plan I have.

What's unbelievable to me is that all I'm asking for is like

communication.

It's what we do for a living.

We communicate.

You don't have to lie to me.

You don't have to mislead me.

You can not like me.

You cannot love me, but just tell me what's happening.

And I've had to learn a new language because it's a new language when you're in the world of doctors.

They don't speak English.

And then, of course, the first thing is don't Google anything.

Well, hold on.

I need to teach myself because otherwise I'm at a disadvantage.

And I don't go into conversations at a disadvantage.

I won't do it because then there's an opportunity to lose.

There's an opportunity for me to get something wrong.

The doctors don't sit and teach you all of this language.

The healthcare, you know, I got a call from the insurance company.

Hey, it's the complex case manager calling it just anything you need.

Yeah, there's a lot I need.

All right.

Well, thank you for the time.

Like that was the call.

So it was not, it was a check the box call.

And I'm not impugning the insurance company.

It is what it is.

I mean, big picture, I just feel like you're on a journey through the American healthcare system.

Of course, with various advantages that you are trying to leverage that are not nearly helpful enough, even with those advantages.

I have so many advantages.

I have so many things that other people in my position don't have, which is another source of guilt that

weighs on me like a 2,000-pound weight.

But just listen.

And it doesn't even matter.

Well, that's the irony.

That's the thing is that like you have, you're somebody for whom you've collected real bonds and relationships with people who in the nightmare scenario that you're living, ostensibly, you would absolutely draft in the first round of just like people who might let me cash in a favor right now.

And you've been doing that.

And yet, it's

life.

It's life.

And so, you know, Jeff and Fred Wilpon just

people I competed against for almost two decades,

tooth and nail, the former Mets owners.

And we were in the NL East, and I'm talking in the owners room, on the committees, on the field.

You want to talk about two different ways to look at the same sport you're in?

The Mets and the Marlins are opposite.

There was barely anything we could agree on because they're in a different situation than we were in.

But you live with people and you work with them.

And my show is based on truth-telling

off the subject.

Anyway, thank you to Jeff and Fred, who were great, of course.

But what I was thinking with my show is, I can't talk about Jerry Jones anymore.

I don't even know if I can mention his name.

What if I need Jerry Jones to help with something in Texas?

And I was thinking about, well, I can't call Stevie Cohn because all I do is refer to the chop shops and the fact that he's literally

figuratively, I don't want to use literal anymore,

incompetent,

but

may have great connections to the possibility of the thread of a chance to make something better that I have to see if I can make better.

So, what am I going to go on nothing personal and talk about the Mets off season and the fact that, you know, Pete Alonzo, I just, I can't come to grips with it.

That's part of the process that I'm trying to do right now.

And I don't have an answer to it right now.

My son said to me, you're not going to call Jerry Reinsdorf, right?

I was in Chicago.

Oh, God.

My son was with me when Jerry Reinsdorf in Cooperstown approached and said, oh, it must not be pleasant having him as your father.

That's what Jerry Reinsdorf said to my son.

And it became memorable.

It was the same day that

Derek Jeter and I had a shouting match in the Hall of Fame Museum.

Wait, wait, wait, what was that?

What happened?

Derek Jeter has a problem.

I mean, that's the bottom line.

He has a problem of aptitude.

He has a problem in everything other than being a shortstop.

And I hadn't seen him since the transaction.

So he took over the Marlins.

He got Bruce Sherman to buy the Marlins for a price that Bruce Sherman shouldn't have paid.

And Bruce knows it.

And Derek got Bruce to do it because Derek Jeter was the player and the idol.

And he took over the team.

And it turns out that he's a shortstop, not a president.

So he got fired, of course.

And that was the end of Derek Jeter.

And I had not seen him.

And I saw him in Cooperstown and I approached him with my son.

And I just said, good to see you.

And extended my hand.

And

he just looked at me.

And he's much taller than I am, which so are you.

And

he said, oh, you brought your camera crew, I'm sure.

And I said, actually, that's my son.

He said, sure, it is.

And my son was just standing there.

like

jaw open.

And then Derek started talking about how angry he was about everything.

And I said, Derek, I'm happy I live rent-free in your head.

And thank you for watching the show every day.

He had people listen to our show every day, every day, while he was still employed with the Marlins.

And

I then just said, okay.

And he started walking away.

I started walking away.

And then he yelled across the Hall of Fame store some terrible thing toward me.

And my son was standing right there.

And this is Derek.

So you have to understand from a kid's perspective, who was with his friend who was a huge Yankee fan as am I there's Derek Cheetah like yelling dude I love this at Caleb's dad

it was ridiculous to recap so you I mean briefly because and this was recent I was gonna say because the last time

dude we were just talking about in this studio how Ichiro had shattered you out at Cooperstown you were there as part of the delegation um

and you had taken Caleb I remember you telling me this you had taken your son and his friend to go basically live a dream that any baseball fan would have.

And part of the dream that I don't think I ever considered was Derek Jeter basically motherfucking your dad, which is so good.

Which, of course, and then Caleb's response, hey, what was the highlight of the weekend?

Is we're driving the four hours back because I didn't want to miss a show.

So Sunday after the ceremony, I get right in the car to make it back because I have a show Monday morning.

And

highlight when Jerry Reinsdorf and Derek Jeter put you in your place for him to think about, oh, I guess Jerry Reinsdorf is not on the list of people who you can count on now.

Right.

But the fact is, if I called Jerry Reinsdorf today and we were in Chicago, my daughter got sick in Chicago.

She was there for work.

She doesn't live there.

And we were in Chicago for longer than I've ever been in Chicago without winning a playoff series.

And

I would have called Jerry.

And I would have called whoever.

Anybody.

You could.

Who could help?

Anybody.

And Jerry would have taken the call.

Well, no, I would have had to leave a message and I would have had to say why I was calling because otherwise he wouldn't have taken the call.

I think my last text from Jerry was, you have some nerve wishing me a happy birthday.

That was.

Because I do wish him a happy birthday.

That is another favorite thing you do.

I remind because I don't want.

Anyway, I'm a birthday person.

I like saying happy birthday.

And his birthday is the same as my late sister who passed away way too young.

And they have the same birthday.

So I've always known Jerry's birthday.

So I always text him on his birthday.

And

I have it here.

I mean, it was please read it because it is one of the funnier things about just how you do human interaction is that you are also just like cheerily out of the ether wishing people happy birthday.

When the last memory they have of you is,

I

hate that guy.

Happy birthday, sending best wishes and hoping all is well.

Have you no shame?

Telling you, it's right there.

It's literally right there.

Have you no shame in response to that specific birthday message?

I'd like to tell you, I'm making it up, but as you know, with me, it's just your

right there.

So, I had not seen Jerry, and I saw him in Cooperstown.

And the first thing he did when I said, Jerry, this is, I'd like you to meet my son.

Why, why, why does the first comment was out?

Sorry, you.

Can you imagine hearing that as your as your son?

I have two thoughts.

Two thoughts.

One is that Caleb is used to it.

Second thought.

Second thought is why does Jerry Reinsdorf hate you?

He's very unhappy about nothing personal.

So your show is listened to by the executive class across all sports, but baseball is particularly, of course, interested.

A lot of people listen.

Because you're one of, look, for those who are just meeting David for the first time, former president of the Marlins, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But

the member of the C-suite, the executive class, a guy whose home that I stayed in with your daughter, with Liz, with Violet,

you have a World Series trophy, the real thing, because you are the president of a team.

And so you talking about all of this in the way that you do with me on your show, with Dan, with Lebanard.

Yeah,

people don't love it,

although they must listen.

So

this is it.

So hate, listen, or love, listen to me is the same.

I just want you to listen.

And

the background with Jerry goes all the way back to when Rob was 2014 at a hotel in Baltimore when he did not want Rob to be the commissioner.

And I did.

And we went at it with votes.

We were trying to collect votes.

I was secretly meeting with the Washington Nationals owners while I had someone telling Jerry that the Nationals owners were out of the room because Jerry thought he had the votes to block Rob, and he did.

And there were three or four votes.

And

I actually, you know, it's the way, the way my life has changed before

September 12th, I had gone to the framing store because I had a piece

of my life that I wanted to have framed.

And what it was.

You're a collector of things, by the way.

That's the other thing you learn when you visit your home is that you frame and collect and and honor the various cool experiences i do because i it to me it it shows me i don't do it for others and the interesting thing is people think that i do it like for charge admission but that's not no you're not i do it for me i'm talking about so if you watch nothing personal you'll see david sitting inside of a giant baseball glove and behind him are various artifacts in the way that many people have artifacts the stuff i'm referring to is the stuff that's off camera that you don't actually talk about that i was blown away by um

because you take the time to frame it and put it up and it is for you and those you love so i have here a picture i wonder what date geez september 9th

everything was great september 9th i was i was at a framing store and i happened to have taken very copious notes during the vote for the commissioner to replace bud sealing this was back in 2014 and i kept all the notes and what I have is me counting votes.

And the first vote was Rob 20, Tom Werner 10.

And that means that there's no commissioner.

Is it white smoke or black smoke?

The one when there's a pope?

Oh, white smoke.

So black smoke is when there's not.

I believe so.

So I'm Jewish, so I don't.

I'm Catholic.

I don't remember.

Oh, yeah.

And you don't know the color of Jewish.

Which is the most Catholic thing.

Well, white smoke is what is released when they pick a new pope.

But don't they do smoke at the end of every day?

I believe so.

I think it's the black smoke, meaning we're still going.

We're still in the conclave.

That's what the movie said.

So it was 20 to 10.

So then there had to be another vote.

And I have second ballot with a list of the teams circled who voted against Rob.

You have, this is it.

And then the second vote

was 21-9.

A screenshot of handwriting, of you just keeping tax.

Again, measuring.

And handwriting.

And then the final one is seventh ballot.

Rob wins 23 to 7.

And

what you're showing me is the political process for how to elect the commissioner.

And I was right there,

and Jerry Reinsdorf was sitting directly across from me.

And Jerry Reinsdorf wanted Tom Warner because Jerry Reinsdorf didn't think that Bud Selig or anyone Bud Selig wanted would be hard enough in labor.

Owner of the White Sox, Jerry Reinsdorf, and the Bulls.

Right.

And so during the course of this process, Jerry Reinsdorf is counting to eight because you need eight votes to block in baseball.

You need a final score of 23 to 7 with the 30 owners.

And so Jerry and I were counting votes.

I had to count to 23, and Rob's not in the room.

He's up in a suite in the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore.

Does Rob Manver know that you are doing this?

I'm on the phone with Rob talking about the different teams and which teams, how we're going to get the teams.

What, what, what a thing

to have you, David Sampson, doing all of this.

And the final, final, we had to convert Ted Lerner, the late Ted Lerner.

And to do it, Jerry.

Owner of the Nationals, Jerry Reinstorf had gotten to him.

And Ted Lerner had said that he won't vote for Rob because of some Masson deals, which is the regional sports network that he and the Orioles had been fighting over for years.

And we found a solution, which is we, Ted Lerner is one of my mentors.

And we got Ted Lerner to agree not to vote.

We got him to give his son Mark the vote.

So Ted Lerner could say he never voted for Rob.

But Mark Lerner agreed to vote for Rob.

Ted Lerner allowed for Mark Lerner to vote for Rob.

And Bud Sealing didn't know.

Rob knew because I called Rob.

I said, we got the 23rd.

Rob said, get Bud to call a vote.

Reinstorf said, call a vote, call a vote.

You don't have the votes.

I know you don't have the votes because Jerry was with Ted Lerner.

And we had Ted Lerner stay with Jerry because let Jerry keep thinking.

So when we called for the vote, Jerry was like, hey, you're calling for a vote.

You have no chance.

He's sitting two feet from me.

And I said, call the vote, Bud.

Call it right now.

So Bud calls the vote.

And then it's announced 23 to 7.

Rob wins.

And Reinstorf could not understand his look to me.

I've never been looked at that way by anyone in my life.

In my life, the way he looked at me.

That's the story of how Rob became commissioner.

That's what happened with Cherry.

Have you no shame?

That's what I was.

Apparently, I don't know.

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One of the reasons why we have become close friends is because your stories are not merely, here's a war war story from a thing that happened.

It's the strategy.

We're talking franchise swaps.

We're talking, we're talking just

power plays

that catch people by surprise.

Everyone is surprised except for you.

You found the way to play by the rules and get the outcome that

you were fighting for.

I learned it from George Steinbrenner, by the way.

George Steinbrenner told me, and this is

one of his mantras, is don't

be upset with me for what the Yankees do because I don't break any rules.

It's like what Ballmer tries to say, except Steinbrenner, you know, other than when he got suspended and when he hired people and all

other than the stuff that enabled me

a fruitful childhood as a Yankee fan,

outside of all the things that, you know, got him famously punished.

And suspended.

And suspended from.

I would say, other than that, he's nothing like Palmer.

But the point being,

he always said, listen, I'm going to play by the rules and you take your revenue sharing.

He was so angry when we beat his team in the World Series because he felt, literally felt like the players beating him were the players he paid.

And he would sit in the suite at Pro Player or a Yankee Stadium and we would spend time.

The players he paid because of the luxury tax.

Yeah, revenue sharing.

Revenue sharing.

One of the letters that I have framed that I don't talk about much was the letter of congratulations from George when we won.

And I felt like it could be

signed with blood.

Did it also end with, have you no shame?

No.

It might as well, though.

By the way, so I'm like, we're taping this before game three of Yankees Red Sox.

And I've been watching the Yankees.

towards the end of the season, especially closely.

And

you

one of the things that you told me when we were just on the phone um one of the rare times we've been on the phone like the only time actually before this sit down that we've been on the phone talking and i like forced you to like talk to me because thank you dude it's just but what i told you is what is now clear i think to everybody which is that i genuinely love talking to you and i love hearing about what's in your head and this has been a chapter of your life in which i think you lost confidence in that and that I would feel that way.

So you don't need to thank me.

It's just, frankly, as always, a mixture of total self-interest from me because I think it's good.

But also, I was worried that you were behaving so differently.

This is my very long way of saying that you were telling me about Giancarlo Stanton,

your former employee, or in this case, according to George Steinbrenner's framework, one of his also.

I love Gian Carlo, and we go back

a long way.

And he's a Yankee, and he wants a ring.

And I want him to get a ring very, very badly.

And he's known my kids.

He met

my daughter when she was young, you know,

12 years old, maybe.

And he's known Caleb since he was, I don't know, first grade.

We drafted him, I want to say 09, and I want to say he was in the big leagues in 11.

But I may have it.

I probably have my years wrong, but you forget as the years pass.

Yeah, he made some leagues in 2010.

2010.

So, yeah, Caleb was seven years old.

And anyway, so I was speaking to him and the way we do right before the playoffs start where we have the same conversation each year, like, all right, like, let's go.

Like, it's ringtime right now.

And this conversation was very different when I spoke to him about what was going on in my life.

And

some things are just more important.

Like, all of a sudden, things are more important.

And it was the day

where Stanton hit hit his 450th home run against the orioles the 2-2

fly ball deep right jackson back on the track at the wall see ya a three-run home run over the high scoreboard and the yankees are on the board 3-0

he hit a home run in the first inning and my daughter and i were watching and it was

yes

And

she smiled at the home run, which was amazing because she doesn't even like baseball.

She hates that I'm in baseball, hated it growing up, hated the attention.

It took you from them.

It took me from them always.

So it's always associated with that.

And I just texted Sean Carlo like, hey,

why can't you hit like 162 home runs?

Because if you're thinking of people and sending love and hitting a home run, like just can't you think of someone different every night?

So

to just explain, though, what happened is John Carlos Stanton does the Babe Ruth thing.

He does the thing in the movie when a...

He had just heard news that was a sick young person

has inspired him to win one for the Gipper.

And I just thought to myself, as president of the team, why didn't I line up like 162 sick people?

Like forget like worrying about sliders down and away and a one-two count.

Just line them up.

And

he laughed.

I get it.

It's so ridiculous.

But you think now I went back into my president's mode for a hot second.

And you're like, wait a minute, what if I held Gian Carlos Stan emotionally hostage with an unending series of sick children?

Could this be the new money ball?

It can't be.

It can't be that that was in my head.

It just can't.

But of course it is.

That story in a nutshell, right?

Is

a reminder of two things.

One is that you are always you.

But the second thing is that who you are, we've really pressure tested.

And the thing that I keep on thinking to myself as you sit there and fiddle with the labels that say control on them.

Has that always been there?

I don't know.

I'm sure it has been.

Is that you are, for those who were wondering,

at your core,

Lebanon likes to say, you're a bunch of wires and, you know, circuitry and all that stuff.

You're a fucking dad.

I'm a dad.

And I never thought, am I that cliche that it takes something bad to be reminded?

I mean, it can't be that I'm that.

Am I the guy who on my deathbed is going to say I shouldn't have worked so much?

I don't think I'm going to be that.

But

I'll tell you, it's

control.

It keeps coming back to that.

And I don't want this to sound wrong because

I'm trying.

I can't make it better.

And when I make things bad, it's on purpose.

When I am stirring it or when I am trying to accomplish something that people may not realize that I'm trying to accomplish, I get that I'm that way and I'm fine with being that way.

It doesn't bother me.

You can call me whatever names you want.

The situation I'm in now that I can't wrap my arms around is when I'm in the hospital, I want to be.

out of the hospital.

When I'm not in the hospital, I want to be in the hospital.

And I've always been someone who's so happy and comfortable where I am.

Always.

I've just always loved whatever I'm doing because that is the ultimate and how selfish I am.

I'm always doing what I want to be doing.

You get to choose.

That has been my principle.

You working to get to the point at which your life is one way, and now on September 12th, it's another.

6:42 p.m.

God.

That was that.

And there's no other that to be had.

You have tried for your entire life to transcend,

optimize, avoid, account for,

deliberately

win the game against the human condition.

And

you are stuck, not in control of what happens to one of the people that you would give everything

to help.

It doesn't mean I'm going to stop.

So that's the other issue I have is I'm not giving up the the thought.

My assumption is that I have no control because I haven't found the right path.

So what I spend my days and nights doing is figuring out, okay, that's not it.

Dead end next.

Okay, that wasn't it.

And so I, so I'm going to keep going.

And I can't stop.

So it's causing me to be tired and grumpy and to transfer anger that I have towards something that I shouldn't be angry about because what can I do?

The guy, the guy that kind of just trying to sell you some smoked fish, man.

Right.

And also, like and subscribe.

Do you know Pablo Torre?

If you would have seen me at Sables that day, you would not have believed what happened that day.

Oh, man.

20 people online fighting over the last bit of herring ahead of the holiest day of the year.

Do you know Pablo Torre?

Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

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Hi, it's Sarah Gibson Tuttle, the founder of All of in June.

Can I tell you the one thing that always makes my day better?

A fresh manicure.

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And the best part, it's so easy and super affordable.

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You check your feed.

and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

John Skipper just texted, are we taping yet?

Oh, did you not call them?

Wait, does anyone work for you?

Dude.

With you.

It's, it's.

You tell me you do things.

I don't want to, whatever.

John,

I am.

Sources close to the situation tell me that John Skipper has been informed that we're doing a very different episode than the one originally planned.

Can I give you one more thing to think about?

What you got?

Do you know I didn't know the number of episodes you had done on Balmer until our friend at Sables said, wait, are you recording number six?

And I paused by saying,

I'm sorry.

He said, well, there's been five episodes and now are you taping a sixth?

Think about that for a minute when he's surrounded by lunatic people trying to get food before the fast.

So

I was thinking about the way you are with Balmer, the way you are with investigations, the way you've built this show.

And I need you to teach me because you have to, as an investigative journalist, run into dead ends.

You have to run into, okay, that wasn't right.

That's not right.

What happens?

Do you ever run out of the path?

Of course.

I think the thing.

You can drop the story then?

Well, this is, this is, I'll tell you, this is such a good question.

And my staff sometimes laughs, I think, at what my solution tends to be, which is when you try really, really, really, really hard at something and it's a dead end,

the question I ask is,

is that attempt to try really, really, really hard that doesn't come up with the thing you want, is that attempt now part of the story?

To you, everything's part of the story, though, no?

I've come to realize that that's my way of making peace with this.

I'm not at peace, Pablo.

No, and you shouldn't be.

You really shouldn't be.

And you're the way that, look.

As far as I can tell, as someone who loves you, the way to think about this, and not that I've ever gained the credibility to talk or advise on this,

but the way that I see you intuitively living your life in the way that unsettled me and jarred me and made me afraid is, I think,

exactly what you should be doing,

which is inefficiently

and hellishly and unrelentingly stopping the other that you'd prefer to do to be a dad.

It's the

nothing.

Can you imagine the failures I've had as a dad?

This is the monster of all failures.

I don't, I don't, I mean, I'm going to be the person who says the obvious, which is that, of course, this isn't your failure.

I mean, it's.

But that's, if you're a consequentialist, you're a consequentialist.

So

we had dinner.

You, me, Liz, Kara,

in August or whenever it was that we were together and we talked about consequentialism

and how for you,

drunk driving

is something that you don't grade on a curve.

What was the outcome?

If someone dies, that to me is...

It's not manslaughter.

I mean, the legal code doesn't agree with me, but I'm a consequentialist in that way.

But there's a concept in law called the eggshell skull, which you may be familiar with.

I am not, although this feels like a thing that I should be.

Yeah, so if I tap you on the head and it crushes your head,

but

I didn't realize that it would crush your head.

It crushed your head.

It's called the eggshell skull.

I'm still liable for that.

That is still a crime of a different level.

Even if I argue, well, wait a minute, when I touch everybody like that, they're all fine.

You find your victims as they are.

You're somebody who thinks that the eggshell skull defense is not a defense.

I am.

The people who drop stuff off overpasses on a highway is the example that I often use.

It's fun, just kids having stupid fun.

You drop a little stone, you drop a penny, it goes through a windshield, and the car crashes, and the person dies.

That's that to me should be the end of your freedom.

And so

when you think about your daughter now,

all I want is for her to have health and

freedom.

I just want, I want for her what I've had.

That's the trade I want to make.

I want to take it from her because

if we were doing a show because I was sick, I'd tip my cap and say, my God, I've done a lot.

I've had the most fortunate and amazing life.

And,

you know, I just just don't want why.

I want her and I want my kids.

I want people I love.

I want you.

Like, I want people to have the opportunity to do everything they want to do.

And I've had that opportunity.

And the harsh reality is that opportunity ended September 12th.

It just ended.

And I don't have the path yet to have that return.

As a matter of fact, I'm almost positive that there is no going back ever.

There will always be a new path.

But this path,

it's so dark to me, triple entendre, that I can't see around the corner.

I can't manufacture how to maneuver through it.

I can't control the result of it.

And it's so unsettling that I just have a permanent stomachache.

Anyway, I don't know what we were talking about.

No, we were talking about eggshell skulls.

Yeah.

The consequences that you wish to prevent.

The last thought I have is that how you do this, how you've been doing this, how you've been doing your career, strategizing, scheming, finding the ways to win.

It just makes me think that even if the consequences are not controllable, guaranteed,

any of that.

It's hard to think of someone better to have leading their team.

Your daughter has you doing your best, and I don't know if there's a better draft pick than David Sampson.

And I'm not just saying that.

I mean, you're going to try everything.

Every path.

And you're right.

It's not going to be because you didn't

try.

Thanks.

I got to go.

You got to go.

All right.

Thanks.

I love you.

Love you too.

Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello.

Our studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo, and we will talk to you next time.

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I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

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Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

See site for details.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.