Last month, it was announced that Pablo Torre was going to stop hosting ESPN Daily and make the move to join Dan Le Batard at Meadowlark Media. While he will continue to be a part of Around The Horn and PTI, it marks an end of an era of hosting over 700 episodes of the ESPN Daily podcast.
Torre was a guest on the Jenkins and Jonez podcast this week and he said ESPN was very diplomatic for allowing him to still be a part of the family of Around The Horn and PTI.
“I realized that Around The Horn and PTI, these shows I have done, I’m functionally family with them. As long as it became clear to me that they still wanted me to do that stuff and they had this evolving perspective of ‘There’s this other thing you could be doing with your other time. We love you on ESPN Daily, but you have this offer that’s out there and you feel strong about it’. Diplomacy is really the answer.”
During the interview, Torre brought up what always got him interested in sports and how he enjoys the fact that he is not limited in terms of what he can talk about in sports.
“Sports is the toy department in the classic imagining of a newspaper. To me, it’s also every section of the newspaper. There’s real shit out there. For me, it’s always been the widest aperture of society and life…I was always passionate about sports as a fan and a writer, but my concern was never that it would be too limiting. Where I came up in sports, it was through magazines (Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine), shows like Dan’s and Around The Horn and PTI, there are ways to talk about so much more. I have never felt limited by it.”
When hosting ESPN Daily, Torre mentioned that he enjoyed the challenge of doing high-production audio storytelling and digging into stories that he was curious about, even if he didn’t have a hot take right away.
“I always prided myself in curiosity. Stuff I don’t have takes on from the jump is the stuff that is often most fascinating. As long as I figured out an angle on it that I found engaging, I knew we could do something with it. So much of it is reliant on these guests that we pull from.
“I had not worked in high-production audio storytelling until ESPN Daily. I was essentially the managing editor of the staff. I got to weigh in on every topic. We also had to manage ‘ESPN has this awesome piece/investigation/documentary/feature. Can you guys do something with it?’ I know this is not The Pablo Torre Show. The challenge was ‘Here’s a topic I don’t know about. Maybe I wasn’t responsible for the piece that we are about to discuss, but what’s the way that we can do it that’s substantive and can push it to another level?’”
From June 2018 until March 2020, Torre hosted High Noon with Bomani Jones on ESPN. While he feels no regrets about any part of the show, he does feel some nostalgia looking back and wonders what would have happened to the show if it debuted in a different format.
“I am so nostalgic for the mission that we had and the big ‘What if’ that you think about now in retrospect is was that more of an internet prospect than a linear television property? What if that was a video podcast show? What would have been different about that? I think the trick of what High Noon was it was trying to subvert a medium.
“What we were trying to do was figure out a way to be ourselves and build chemistry and do the stuff in the daily sports news cycle while also balancing the mandate of we are coming on after First Take…It was an experiment. Then, we went to a half hour in the afternoon, which I wasn’t bothered by, but it ends up changing the very premise and it’s harder to build chemistry in that format.
“I have no regrets about that, but I do have mostly nostalgia for the fact that we tried to have discussions that went to levels that sports television in the linear cable television model just never really had time for in the talk media daily setting.”
