The Other Side of the Deadspin Saga
In the 1960’s, baseball stadiums were built so they could also be football stadiums. Many of them, from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, turned out to be generic, spherical bowls, devoid of personality.
Busch Stadium II in St. Louis outlasted them all. By the time I was growing up in the late-90s, it had plenty of personality. Natural grass replaced Astroturf. Dark-green, manually operated scoreboards and flagpoles commemorating Cardinals World Series titles and retired numbers adorned the upper deck. The outfield walls were repainted with the same dark-green, complementing the dark-red seats. It was my favorite place in the world.
When the Cardinals’ owners had a new stadium built, I took it as an affront to morality. A franchise as storied as the Cardinals deserved to play in a storied baseball temple like Wrigley Field in Chicago or Fenway Park in Boston.
In an attempt to make my viewpoint financially viable, I created (and still believe, to an extent … how often we start with the conclusion we want and work our way back, eh?) this argument: “Maybe right now, Busch Stadium II isn’t as profitable as it could be. But if the owners simply invest in it further — improve the plumbing, add luxury suites, and so on — eventually, it will pay for itself. People will come to the ballpark just because it’s old and historic. The ballpark will be insurance against a losing season. Even when the Cardinals are out of the playoff race, people will come. All we have to do is keep it alive for long enough.”
To this day, I consider the Cardinals’ move from Busch Stadium II into Busch Stadium III (and the razing of the old ballpark) one of the defining events in my life. My childhood, in a way, ended when that stadium came down. Catch me in the right mood and it brings a tear to my eye, even 15 years later.
It was not until recently that I began to see the other side.
For the first 10 years of my driving life, I drove a 1999 Nissan Maxima. At last check, its odometer read 240,393. To keep the car in decent condition — that is, the bare legal minimum—I usually had to pay for one significant repair per year, each of which cost me about $500. But it always seemed to me that the cost of keeping the car drivable was less than the cost to: A) buy a different car and insure it and B) keep that car in decent condition, which might eventually require significant repairs too.
During the summer of 2019, however, I brought my car to a mechanic and got bad, though not unexpected, news: I needed new brakes and a new exhaust system. It would cost more than $700.
It was, truly, one of the most difficult decisions of my life. Should I maintain this thing I loved — this huge part of my life, a source of consistency that’s been with me through good times and bad … often both at once! — despite the fact that it would cost me more than car was worth?
I mean, it’s possible I would get the work done, drive it off the mechanic’s lot, and BAM, need another repair. With each mile I drove that 20-year-old car, the need for more repairs became more likely.
The mechanic offered to find a scrap yard that would take it off my hands for $100. He also said I could donate it to a local firehouse, where emergency personnel could practice cutting cars apart. I wanted nothing more than to keep driving it. I wanted so badly to believe that it could run forever — and that therefore I could, too — and just gut out both cross-country road trips and trips to the grocery store with willpower and duct tape. I wanted so badly to believe that it would become a prized collector’s item in 50 years, and would therefore justify my investment.
But $700 is a lot of money to gamble on what I had to admit was a nostalgia-infused pipe-dream. I made up my mind: I would drive it until the end of the summer, then donate it to the local fire department.
When it came to my car, I had skin in the game, as Nassim Taleb would say. There was a real difference between the hypothetical $1100 in my bank account, (without the repairs, plus $100 from the scrap yard), and the hypothetical $300 in my account after repairs. With Busch Stadium, none of my own money or reputation had been at stake.
This distinction popped onto my radar back in October of 2019, when longtime Deadspin writer and interim editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky announced he had been fired. The next day, practically the entire writing staff resigned. That drama came about two months after former editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell’s resignation in August of 2019.
Since 2005, under the guidance of Petchesky, Greenwell, founder Will Leitch, and dozens of great writers, and under the mission statement of “Sports News Without Access, Favor, Or Discretion,” Deadspin had cultivated a reputation as the best, most honest place to find objective sports coverage—including coverage of the sports media.
I admired its writers because they were irreverent, informal, and really fucking funny. I also bookmarked this philosophical piece by Petchesky the second I read it, more than five years ago. Deadspin broke big, investigative stories, too: It blew the cover off the fabricated Manti Te’o-dead girlfriend hoax.
As Petchesky said about it on the Hang Up and Listen podcast after his firing: “That was a story puncturing the lazy mythmaking that was common in sports writing, and still is to a lesser extent. The Manti Te’o story was perfect for some Sports Illustrated writer who thought he was going to win an award for this perfectly maudlin story about a college football player’s girlfriend dying the week before a big game. Oh, but he played for her memory. Deadspin showed it didn’t exist. It was made up.”
I applied to work for Deadspin multiple times. To this day, the best cover letter I’ve written (and the hardest I’ve worked on one) was for them. And for a long time, my reverence for the site was universal — at least, as far as my small universe was concerned. It was the go-to sports site. If ESPN was your dad and CBS Sports was your mom, Deadspin was the cool older kid who used curse words while standing up in the back row of the bus.
When I started hinting at the idea that I might write a book someday about my “career” sneaking into sporting events, one friend responded, “Whatever you do, get it on Deadspin. They love that anti-establishment stuff.”
At The Outline, Jeremy Gordon wrote, “No other publication has turned such a consistently critical, interrogative, moral, and necessarily cynical eye toward an industry rotted through with bullshit, while also maintaining the levity and humor sometimes required to think seriously about what many people see as children’s games, and more importantly, provide an enjoyable reading experience.”
Neil deMause, crusader against public subsidies for sports stadium, put a finer point on it: “If you’re a sports owner who depends on doing business beyond the reach of journalistic scrutiny, your job just got a little easier [with the ousting of Deadspin’s staff.]”
Deadspin was never just about sports, though.
Starting in about 2016, it’s felt as though the site had taken an increasingly political slant—a far-left slant. And because most of my friends are pretty far to the left, I was surprised when, recently, I heard one call Deadspin writers “entitled brats.” Another friend, when I mentioned an article on the site, wrote back, “Fuck those guys.”
Some of that had to do with growing older. Deadspin’s schtick surely had gotten stale for our taste buds after reading it for a decade. Some of it might’ve been fatigue at having politics — even politics my friends typically agreed with — stirred into articles like a ground up Tylenol capsule in a cup of pudding.
I also thought the quality of the site’s sports coverage was dropping, although the numbers that surfaced after the resignations tell another story. LA Times writer Kim Janssen did the math: “I totaled the traffic to all of the stories Deadspin published in September: 41,404,600 page views. Of those, 1,629,800 were to those 18 non-sports stories. No need to get the calculators out — that’s 3.9% of their total traffic to stories from 3.5% of their stories. The average non-sports story got 90,500 page views, which is 10,000 more than the average sports story.” And Petchesky wrote that “the site was driving the conversation in sports coverage and had the highest traffic in its history.”
Greenwell’s resignation that August and everything that followed were the result of frustration over editorial direction. Deadspin had been boughtin April of 2019 by a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners for approximately $33 million. On her last day, she published a scathing story that tore the new owners of Deadspin — and particularly Great Hill CEO Jim Spanfeller — to shreds over their desire for Deadspin to “stick to sports.”
What has in any event been made exceedingly clear is that the owners’ vision involves narrowing the scope of Deadspin’s coverage. During my first real conversation with Spanfeller, he told me he didn’t understand why the site covered other media companies. During my first real conversation with Spanfeller’s hand-picked editorial director, Paul Maidment (another Forbes veteran), he said he didn’t understand why we covered politics. My responses — that we cover those things because our readers like them, a thesis that is supported by traffic figures — have failed to make an impact.
…
The numbers apparently do not matter to my ostensibly numbers-obsessed bosses, for reasons I can’t quite understand. When I have told them that the data show that non-sports content brings more traffic and more revenue opportunities, I have been ignored. When I have told them that the data show that readers prefer publications with a distinctive point of view, that Deadspin succeeds precisely because it doesn’t try to be all things to all people, I have been told that being all things to all people is in fact exactly the way to grow pageviews. The reason my colleagues are not going to suddenly start sticking to sports is not about editorial purity, it’s about the opportunity to grow the audience and make more money for Great Hill Partners. But the adults in the room know that we’re wrong, despite all evidence, because they just know.
Before resigning, Greenwell also oversaw this in-depth takedown of, again, the new owners of the company. Publicly criticizing their own bosses was a bold move on the part of Deadspin’s staff, but a move that probably deepened the staff’s credibility in the eyes of the public.
Since the mass exodus, the former Deadspinners have been, as you might expect, outspoken. Via the Hang up and Listen podcast:
Petchesky: “You buy a brand that has some value, whether or not you understand why it has value, you strip it for parts, you turn around and sell it to someone dumber before they realize that all the value is lost. I would not be shocked if that was what was going on here.”
Greenwell: They were clearly focused on scale above all else. In my very early conversations, I said at one point, you know, the goal of Deadspin is not to be bigger than ESPN, and they were horrified by that. In some ways, I don’t think I ever redeemed myself in their eyes from that comment. They wanted to put AP recaps of every sporting event on the site because they wanted it to be a one stop destination.
Others, including Deadspin founder Will Leitch absolutely teed off on Great Hill Partners: “The Hulk Hogan/Peter Thiel lawsuit pried it away from Gawker, which led to it being owned by Univision, which had money issues elsewhere and thus had to sell it to a venal private equity firm, who hired a unique gaggle of dipshits who were constitutionally dedicated to stepping on their own dicks. (It is difficult to destroy a beloved website in six months, which is how long it has been since Great Hill Partners bought the place, even if you are steadfastly trying. Yet here we are.)”
For Paste Magazine, Jacob Weindling went further:
Journalism Faces an Existential War against Private Equity
In every single industry the exact same thing is happening: corporations are consolidating into ever larger corporations, following the exact pattern the laws of supply and demand say capitalism should follow, and they are flattening our culture in their insatiable pursuit of perpetual profits.
But here’s the thing: Just as I had no stake in the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball stadium other than emotions and nostalgia, as far as I can tell, other than the relatively few staffers who were fired or quit, none of the people on the world wide web bemoaning the loss of Deadspin had anything to lose—other than a website they liked to read. They did not have skin in the game.
That doesn’t invalidate their their thoughts. Emotion matters. But it does place the value of their thoughts on a lower plane than the actual decisions of the actual people who stood to lose millions of dollars.
Quite simply, Great Hill thought Deadspin would be more profitable if it “stuck to sports” (or at least some sports-related angle).
It’s hard to disagree. As much as you, I, and the former Deadspin staff might hate to admit it, their political posts alienated millions upon millions of people (and not just conservatives, either.)
As Deadspin’s staff itself once covered, and has now discovered for itself, Republicans buy sneakers—and visit websites—too. And appealing to the not-exactly-huge demographic of uber-progressive, snark-loving sports fans has limitations.
As former Deadspin writer Tom Ley said on Hang Up and Listen, “If management’s idea was that you can just put whatever sports content you want under the Deadspin name, and that will get you all the traffic and readers and ad revenue that you could possibly want, they’re free to figure that out. If that’s the site they want, they can make it. We decided we didn’t want to help them do that. So, they can go nuts and they can see if it works or not.”
They paid millions of dollars to be able to do exactly that.
More than a year on, and with the drama and bad blood having simmered down, where are we?
Busch Stadium III hasn’t hosted fans in quite a while, but when it does again, it will still be the same profitable and pretty but soulless and sterile ballpark it was on Day 1.
My car was saved by a miracle: At the end of summer, 2019, a friend offered to store it in his garage, and occasionally drive it around the block, for free. When I came back from Spain, I drove it for another few months before swallowing my pride and selling it — for $600. It was time.
Deadspin … went dead … for a while, after the mass exodus of its staff. No posts, no Tweets, nothing. They lost a bunch of social media followers. Many of the writers joined forces to create a new site: The Defector, which is pretty much the same in tone and style as Deadspin was.
Slowly but surely, the original Deadspin began hiring new writers — Jesse Spector is a credible voice; Sam Fels ran an underground hockey paper in Chicago; apparently Julie DiCaro wrote a book.
For a while, the main response to their content was: “SCABS!” Now, it’s closer to disappointed indifference. Deadspin is no longer a beacon of sports coverage. It’s no longer authoritative. The Defector never really was. Barstool — Deadspin’s longtime content rival, not to mention ideological enemy — is now the cool older kid standing up in the back row of the bus. It’s also, ya know, actually doing something to help people instead of just whining about the state of the world.
Maybe Deadspin still makes money. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s far from the content farm that loyal readers feared Great Hill would turn it into, but then again, content farms are popular and profitable. And if we have a problem with what is profitable, as I did about the new Busch Stadium, or what is feasible, as I did about my car, then the problem is not really with the people profiting. Our problem is with what people like. Our problem, then, is with humanity itself.
If you enjoyed this story — and even if you didn’t — you should check out my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
