SABRcast with Rob Neyer: Todd Radom (Episode #48)

February 24, 2020/by Jason Best

Baseball fans, tune in this season to SABRcast with Rob Neyer, a weekly podcast hosted by award-winning author and longtime SABR member Rob Neyer. SABRcast features 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 #48: February 24, 2020

This week’s guest is Todd Radom, an independent graphic designer who has created logos for professional sports franchises and events for the past two decades. Todd’s work includes the official logos for Super Bowl XXXVIII and the 2009 NBA All Star Game, the graphic identities for the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Angels, and the SABR 49 and SABR 50 convention logos, among many others. He is the author of Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn and in 2017 he designed a highly acclaimed season ticket package for the Chicago White Sox that is now preserved at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He has contributed articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Sporting News, MLB Network, and ESPN.

Click here or press play below to listen to Episode #48:

What’s Rob reading this week?

The Cactus League: A Novel
By Emily Nemens

Jason Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming apart at the seams. And the coaches, writers, wives, girlfriends, petty criminals, and diehard fans following his every move are eager to find out why―as they hide secrets of their own. Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League unravels the tightly connected web of people behind a seemingly linear game. Narrated by a sportscaster, Goodyear’s story is interspersed with tales of Michael Taylor, a batting coach trying to stay relevant; Tamara Rowland, a resourceful spring-training paramour, looking for one last catch; Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent grappling with his decline; and a plethora of other richly drawn characters, all striving to be seen as the season approaches. It’s a journey that, like the Arizona desert, brims with both possibility and destruction.