I wish this headline surprised me, but if we are being honest, it really doesn’t.
Sports networks like ESPN and Fox Sports are now just paying their top two or three on-air talents, and then those individuals talk about any and every topic the station covers, whether they actually know the sport or not.
The “world-wide leader in sports” just laid off a staggering amount of employees, leaving Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenburg (the less interesting half of the long-running Mike & Mike radio show) to spend an inordinate amount of hours a day in front of a camera. For Fox Sports, that “workhorse type” is the hot-take machine known as Colin Cowherd.
Cowherd and Jason McIntyre were discussing potential landing spots if the generational talent for the Los Angeles Angels (translates to “The Angels Angels” if you didn’t know that) Shohei Ohtani were to get traded.
If you don’t know how good this guy is, he’s the team’s leading hitter and the team’s ace, meaning he could go down in history as the game’s best ever hitter and pitcher, and hold baseball’s “G.O.A.T.” title.
One of the theoretical landing spots is the struggling New York Yankees. Colin and Jason were “showcasing their baseball knowledge” and having a back and forth about how the Yankees could land Ohtani, and what they would have to give up to get them.
Cowherd asks:
“Do you know how much you could get for Ohtani? I’m guessing, I’m a casual, five first round picks, your best prospect, your third best prospect, and two solid starters.”
Sounds good in theory, though there’s one tiny little hiccup with that proposition that the two will stumble onto in just a second. Colin at least prefaced the question by saying he “is a casual,” but McIntyre fired back as if he knew all about it, saying:
“Well given how poorly the Angels have done in the draft recently, I would rather just take best prospects. Give me your best three guys in the farm system, give them to me now, Ohtani is yours.”
Cowherd takes a weird pause to gather himself (I think there was a producer in his ear trying to tell him some important information), then throws back a rebuttal to Jason:
“You’re not going to take any draft picks?”
McIntrye responds:
“Yes I would take a couple of picks, but I want immediate prospects that can help me now.”
Oh, you would take a couple of picks, would you? That’s interesting, and could even be a monumental move in the MLB, considering it has never been done before…
Cowherd resets and asks:
“Alright, three best prospects, three number one picks, would you move him?”
McIntrye gets a little ways into his thought, then gets cutoff by Colin:
“I would certainly, yeah, but I’m like you, I want to win…”
The face that Colin Cowherd makes as he cuts his counterpart short and reads some pretty vital information on his computer screen is priceless. Looking defeated as ever, Colin clears the air and says:
“Wait, you can’t…it says here you can’t trade draft picks. I’m a baseball casual, so you can’t trade draft picks.”
Who knows how long they would have gone if no one ever told them? Yeah, for those who watch baseball, many know that you cannot use future picks as trade capital like you can in another professional sports.
And don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this and you call yourself a baseball fan, it happens to the best of us. Even people who get paid to talk about sports for a living. For the record, the MLB gives out several (14 to be exact) competitive balance picks each year, which are essentially extra draft picks given to teams in small markets and/or ones who earn the lowest revenues. These are the only draft picks that can be traded, and even those have some specific rules surrounding what they can be traded for.
The lack of information didn’t bring the show to a dead halt though, because Cowherd quickly pivoted and threw back out a modified question based on what they had just learned together on air:
“So you get the Yankee’s three best prospects? I’m not doing it for that. I’m gonna get three prospects and you get the best player in baseball history?”
And THAT is why Cowherd gets paid the big bucks.
A class act in deflecting attention away from a mistake and moving on to a similar but slightly different question. Well done Colin, very well done.
Take a look:
