Since baseball is an everyday event, sports talk show hosts need to find a way to keep it interesting in order to keep their audience engaged. One personality who has figured out how to accomplish that, especially in Boston, is Jared Carrabis.
After being at Barstool Sports in recent years, Carrabis is now a part of the DraftKings family. At DraftKings, he will be hosting two podcasts: Baseball Is Dead with Dallas Braden and Jared Carrabis: A Red Sox Podcast with Pete Blackburn and Pat Light.
Carrabis was a guest on the most recent episode of the Golic & Smetty podcast with Mike Golic Sr. and Jessica Smetana to talk about the start of the MLB season. He said that thanks to an old colleague at NBC Sports Boston, people started coming to him to get their baseball fix in Boston.
“Over here in Boston, Mike Felger, I love him, we’ve worked together a bunch,” Carrabis explained. “He has it out for baseball. He said I can’t sit here and do an hour of baseball talk. That’s what he said. I was like, you know what, Mike, thank you that you acknowledge that because when you can’t do it, that’s when people come to us. It’s about how you do it.”
As for how to approach talking about baseball, Carrabis said the key for him is to embrace how weird the game can be on a day-to-day basis.
“If you want to do an hour of baseball talk and you are talking about all the geeky, nerdy stats, that’s not going to be appealing to a mass audience,” he said. “What I’ve kind of discovered in doing this Red Sox podcast since 2015 now is that baseball is a weird game.
“You can go to a baseball game every night of your life for 30 years and still see something that you’ve never seen before every single time that you go. It’s really about how you cover it and leaning into how weird it is and how entertaining it can be.”
While Carrabis has had the chance to interview many prominent people, his dream interview is to talk to Barry Bonds. Carrabis interacts on every one of the posts Bonds puts up on Instagram.
“He [Bonds] is my white-whale interview. That’s the one guy out there besides Roger Clemens,” said Carrabis. “Clemens agreed to do it. Last year, he agreed to do it. We just couldn’t link up on dates. That was one of the coolest moments about the day of the DraftKings announcement. Roger Clemens responded to it.
“Barry is my number one, would love to interview guy. We have a mutual friend who said he thinks he could facilitate this. The mutual friend is Christian Yelich… The Barry Bonds interview, let’s bring it to DraftKings.”
Time will tell if Carrabis will land that interview for DraftKings. If he were to get either Bonds or Clemens on the program, it would definitely be a must-listen for any baseball fan.
