SABRcast with Rob Neyer: C.J. Nitkowski (Episode #27)

September 30, 2019/by Jason Best

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a new weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast will feature insights and analysis of what’s happening in modern baseball on and off the field, plus compelling interviews with figures from around the game — and music from The Baseball Project.

Subscribe to SABRcast on your favorite podcast networks, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play, and listen to each episode as soon as it’s released.

Neyer is a longtime baseball writer and editor for ESPN.com, SB Nation, and FoxSports.com. He began his career as a research assistant for groundbreaking baseball author Bill James and later worked for STATS, Inc. He has also written or co-written seven baseball books, including The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (with Bill James), winner of the Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award, and most recently Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, winner of this year’s CASEY Award.

Current Episode

Episode #27: September 30, 2019

Our guest this week is C.J. Nitkowski, former major-league pitcher and a color analyst for Texas Rangers TV broadcasts since 2017. He spent 10 seasons in the big leagues as a left-handed reliever for the Detroit Tigers and seven other teams from 1995-2005 and also played two years each in Japan and Korea before beginning his career in media. He joined Fox Sports as an in-studio and game analyst in 2014. In addition, he played Dutch Leonard in the Jackie Robinson film 42 in 2013 and served as a script consultant for Fox’s Pitch in 2016.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #27:

What’s Rob reading this week?

“Good teams missing the playoffs is a feature, not a bug, of the baseball season”
By Hannah Keyser, Yahoo! Sports

“It’s the central tension of covering the sport, I suppose, that a baseball season is a long monotonous grind that seems to fly by. There’s time for everything to happen: for bad teams to look unbeatable, for everyone to notice the ball is different and later get bored of talking about it, for all-consuming dramas to fall by the wayside. And yet, before you can even get your bearings, the season’s halfway over. Blink again and it’s almost October. I don’t think this is so much a riddle as a byproduct of the sport’s defining omnipresence.”