We’re Back! The Former Staff Writers Of Deadspin Return With New Website And Podcast

“WE’RE BACK! WE’RE BACK!”, yelled Drew Magary on Twitter announcing, if not quite the return of the old Deadspin website, the return of most of the staff writers that made up the cast of the world’s greatest sports blog under a new banner called Defector that will be collectively owned by all of them.

The news was broken this morning by the New York Times
NYT along with a joyous-looking photograph of the writers/owners meeting on Zoom to discuss the new site. If you head over to defector.com you’ll see that it is a paid site with no ads at $69 a year for the website or $99 a year for the website plus commenting privileges, Q + A with staff members, and other goodies. Also today, writer Luke O’Neil caught up with most of the old gang for an interview on his Substack blog.

The site launches in September, but you’ll only have to wait another two weeks until August 13 for the launch of their new sports podcast called The Distraction: A Defector Podcast that’s hosted on the Stitcher network. I jumped on the phone with my onetime editor at Deadspin, David J Roth, to talk about the new podcast.

Back in the old Deadspin days, Drew Magary and David Roth headed up a sports talk podcast called Deadcast, and Roth told me that ever since it ended he wanted to do another podcast like it. Even though they had a lot of fun, he says that the podcast was never a priority for Deadspin because they were short-staffed, and the gang had to get help to edit and produce it.

But the new staff of Defector has offered him their full support for the new audio venture. “Being someplace where they’re optimistic about it finding a big audience and working to help it find a big audience makes me feel like a total rube,” Roth says. “It’s extremely exciting to get these emails where they’re like, yeah here’s something we’re trying to do. I never got those before.”

They also released a one-minute teaser to get people excited, which Roth says helped him in keeping quiet about the exciting news because without something concrete to show there was no sense in getting fired up about it.

It’s such a cool thing to get another shot at this; by no means was it a sure thing.

It’s an interesting time for sports cautiously trying to come back as several members of the Florida Marlins baseball team came down with COVID-19 and other sports leagues are experimenting with interesting ways to come back.

You joked on Twitter about having to learn about hockey.

David Roth: We’re running out of sports man. Sports always mattered to us, and yet, it’s always been an easy point of departure for other things that we care about. Having sports, in general, makes me happier and makes my life feel more normal. I don’t know how much longer baseball can make it in its current state. I hold out some hope for the bubble leagues. I think that as weird and creepy feeling as they are, is they seem like they have a chance to work. Baseball has just been hard to watch. I’m still watching the games, but it feels off.

Are there any lessons that MLB can learn from pro wrestling leagues like AEW who have used wrestlers in the stand to create crowd noise without an audience?

DR: There’s probably only so many lessons that MLB can take from pro wrestling, but I’ve been struck by the way they changed their approach to filming and promos to minimize the lack of audience.

Baseball is shooting it like normal. Some places will put cutouts in the seats, so it looks like there’s people there and some are adding fake noise. I was watching the Mets vs Red Sox at home yesterday. The Mets hit a bunch of homers and it was dead silent because Fenway is not going to pipe in crowd noise for the visitors and it felt like some guys playing softball in the park.

What’s the format of the new show going to be like?

DR: I think we’ll go with the format that has worked for us in the past, which is, a couple segments of us talking to each other and whatever guests we have on. Also, we will be bringing back Drew’s mailbag which he’s been doing for about a decade. The reader questions are generally the funniest part of the show and the questions are always funnier than the answers. I’m really looking forward to hearing from all these weirdos again.