There are plenty of baseball Podcast these days, and Talk Nats has always wanted one if it was done professionally, and we turned down several offers in the past until we hit the proverbial booming Home Run when TalkNats regular readers Kevin Nibley and Bryan King wanted to do one as an adjunct to the blog. This is really such a great medium when done right, and Nibley and King accomplish that as you can do what the written word sometimes cannot when you bring out good banter, emotion, humor and other human feelings. When you hear Trea Turner‘s four-year High School coach Larry Greenstein speak of him with such adoration, almost a kinship, as if they were related which they will always be, by mutual admiration and not by blood in the way a great coach and accomplished player will always share.
Our own Talk Nats community member, Coach Steve Mahaney (sjm308), who was a long-time swim coach at the University of Maryland can tell you that the athlete doesn’t have to turn into Michael Phelps to create that special bond. Greenstein has relationships with hundreds of his ex-players he coached.
Here is a listen and link into the Talk Nats Podcast and listen to not only the part about Trea’s teenage years and breaking aluminum bats and hitting 100mph pitches and running 6.3 sixties, but also hear John C. and Draz get into the discussion about Ryan Zimmerman. You will also hear the story how Trea Turner snuck back into his High School to watch his alma mater play a game recently.
Kevin Nibley is a television editor and producer and does most of his work in the genre of reality TV and sports. He has worked on Deadliest Catch, Real Housewives of NJ, Pawn Stars, Vice, Sport Science, and many more obscure shows. Right now, you can see his current work on Live PD on the A&E channel, Friday and Saturday nights from 9pm-Midnight.
Nibley met Bryan King while they were working with John Brenkus on Sport Science in 2007 (now on ESPN, back then it was on Fox SportsNet) and bonded over their shared D.C. heritage and sports fandom for the Washington Nationals. King has gone on to work on TV programs such as Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, The Dog Whisperer, Deion Sanders’ Family Playbook, Lala’s Full Court Life (featuring the wife of Knicks star Carmelo Anthony), and 10 Things You Don’t Know About with Henry Rollins. Currently King is the Supervising Editor and a producer on TLC’s Outdaughtered, which begins its third season in July.
These are two accomplished TV veterans who we are very lucky to have and their stewardship to lead us in this new medium. They have plans for many more episodes of unique programming including an upcoming show that will have some of your favorite Nationals players from 2005 to 2010.
“I was an O’s fan growing up, but was from DC and had no real connection to the city of Baltimore other than going to a game there or the aquarium every so often,” said Kevin Nibley of his transformation into a Nats’ fan. “So when Angelos ruined the team, and let Mike Mussina go to the Yankees, and sent Rafael Palmiero and Roberto Alomar away and signed Albert Belle, I was bummed and tuned out of baseball for a couple years.”
That seems to be something you hear often from ex-Orioles fans. Seeing just so many years of the Angelos system, it turned Nibley away from following baseball.
“I ended up going to college at Boston University,” Nibley continued. “And some of my buddies would want to go up to Montreal because you could drink at 18, and it was only a 4 hour drive. We started doing that every couple months, and usually on Sundays hungover, we would go to Olympic Stadium on general admission (at the time was $5 Canadian/$3 American). No one went so you could move down to great lower bowl seats. I became a fan of the Vladimir Guerrero/Jose Vidro teams, etc, and followed them. So a few years later when it was announced that the ‘Spos were coming to D.C., I was thrilled, as I already knew the players and it was easy for me.”
Nibley has followed the Nats ever since, and his postseason disappointment of 2012 ratcheted up his fan intensity level as he thinks you need to have your heart broken badly to really become a super fan on some level, and he is probably right so you can savor the good times and great times.
Bryan King was also an O’s fan growing up in DC, and like Nibley soured on that team when as King said, Angelos ran it into the ground in the late 90’s. Years later, King headed to college at the University of Virginia.
“I got back into baseball in college at the University of Virginia, where one of my first jobs in the TV industry was producing and editing the UVA weekly sports news-magazine show Cavalier Sports Weekly for Comcast SportsNet,” said Bryan King. “While working on that show I became familiar with Virginia stars and future major leaguers Mark Reynolds, Sean Doolittle, and some guy named Ryan Zimmerman that maybe you’ve heard of. When Ryan got drafted by DC, it drew me back to pro baseball and got me to start following the Nats, and the rest as they say is history.”
Nibley and King have received some wonderful feedback so far and some great suggestions and even some constructive criticism. They said they expect the Podcast will continue to evolve, but like any good TV shows, you need hosts that can inject their own personalities into their shows, and they have done that with their own fandom, humor and just being themselves. Maybe one day they will do direct-to-video given their expertise of TV and create some YouTube for us as I believe the bar is set so low that they could blow away the MASN non-gaming programming.
The skies the limit. Please give them a follow on the Podcast and also follow them on Twitter on this link.
