“We contain multitudes, man,†said Pablo Torre when we spoke about the design of his new sports-ish show, Pablo Torre Finds Out. “I’m this guy who did a bunch of magazine writing and gasbagging on TV, and I wanted to create a show that could channel all of it.â€
The word gasbag is one of Torre’s favorite descriptors, which he self-deprecatingly applies to both himself and the nature of his profession. He likely inherits his affinity for the word from his boss, Dan Le Batard, the towering sports-media personality whose appeal stems in part from a wry self-awareness that isn’t particularly common among his peers. As a métier, sports broadcasting seems like a field that can punish self-awareness, given that it’s premised on the profligate filling of space; each day, its practitioners confront hours of airtime into which they must pour takes, opinions, and observations on whatever’s going on in the sports world. It’s a hard job to do well, even harder if you’re the type to overthink things.
Torre is, among other things, a voluminous thinker, but he makes for an excellent gasbag nevertheless. He tends to speak in long, heady, idiosyncratic paragraphs. When we chatted earlier this week, he (almost) unironically quoted Walt Whitman, before further gasbagging around the lameness of quoting Walt Whitman on the record. There’s a theatricality to Torre’s oratory style. In another life, perhaps he would have been on Broadway.
For now, though, he’s still gasbagging about sports. Pablo Torre Finds Out serves as his anchor commitment at Meadowlark Media, his new professional home. Meadowlark is the nascent sports-media company founded by Le Batard after the newspaper journalist turned broadcaster left ESPN in 2020. Partnered with him on the venture is fellow ESPN émigré John Skipper, who as president had shepherded the worldwide leader in sports through a modern golden age until his abrupt departure in 2018 owing to a cocaine-related extortion threat (long story). Torre had joined the company back in March following a decade-plus-long career at ESPN, though as press reports noted at the time, it wasn’t a complete break. Unlike Le Batard, who made a clean departure, Torre still features as a contributor on mainstays like Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn, where he gets to continue gasbagging at the still sizable but nevertheless declining cable audience. It’s a sweet arrangement, frankly.
Torre did a bit of everything during his lengthy tenure at ESPN. He wrote magazine stories, served as a frequent talking head on mainstay shows like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption, and co-hosted a short-lived show with Bomani Jones called High Noon that was considered a younger, more cerebral counterpart to PTI. When he left ESPN, he had been hosting the network’s daily news podcast, ESPN Daily, a role that he served in through most of the pandemic era. Torre’s stewarded that show through more than 700 episodes, and he was as physically exhausted as you would imagine — not great for a guy who seems to pride himself on being an energetic entertainer. “I found myself feeling a little bit like a cruise director,†he said. “I kept up the same mood and energy level, but you could probably hear that I was ginning up my enthusiasm.â€
So when Skipper brought him in for a meeting about working together, Torre leapt at the opportunity. It helped that what was on offer was a chance at complete autonomy. (Also, a small equity stake in the company, per Variety.) “They handed me a blank piece of paper and basically said, ‘What do you want to do?’†said Torre. “It was a truly terrifying thing.â€
Turns out what he wanted to do was everything. Pablo Torre Finds Out is published three times a week, toggling among a roundtable chatcast with rotating guests, an interview show, and occasional documentary-style one-offs like the stuff he learned to make at ESPN Daily. A recent example of the longer-form material was an episode that saw Torre travel to northeast Ohio to profile a transgender teenage athlete at the center of a culture war. In essence, it’s a variety show reminiscent of The New Yorker’s Political Scene, where the feed is wielded more like a television channel housing an array of different thematically linked experiences.
For Torre, the hope is to lean hard into idiosyncrasy, and by this he means leaning hard away from the natural tendencies of conventional sports shows. “So much of sports media is trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm,†he said. “We launched during NFL season, which is maybe the last monoculture left in America, but we didn’t launch with a football show that covered the sport in a meat-and-potatoes way.†Meaning: going over the latest storylines, projecting the fortunes of certain teams, etc. Rather, where there has been football coverage, the interest is to be offbeat, as in the case of an interview this week with a former roommate of Russell Wilson’s who’s able to speak about the Denver Broncos quarterback’s weirdness as a person.
Meadowlark had originally wanted him to do a daily show, but after his experience at ESPN Daily, Torre requested to scale back the cadence a bit. What he now publishes is a show that runs almost daily, but the slack is meant to give him enough space to develop longer-form pieces. In keeping with recent shifts in podcasting, the conversational and interview episodes also double as a YouTube show, which Torre records from a psychedelic set designed by former Desus & Mero production staffer Patrick Kim, who also runs the YouTube channel.
Torre tells me that the initial feedback is strong — or to use his phraseology, the “hypothesis has been validated metrically.†The team seems satisfied with its opening numbers, it’s charting well, and it has picked up a few buzzy moments, as when Torre’s interview with Stephen Glover broke news around the current state of Disney’s Lando Calrissian project. (ICYMI: What was originally developed as a series now may become a feature.)
Still, it’s a weird time to be launching a new sports-media venture, especially one that bets heavy on the audio format. For one thing, the sports-media landscape is currently going through a generational upheaval amid the secular decline of linear cable, the rise of athlete-driven media enterprises that cut into the function of many such companies, and the looming fight over live-sports rights, which may well transform the broader media landscape in its entirety. More to the point, it’s not even clear what ESPN is going to look like in a few years, depending on what happens with Disney. And with respect to audio, I don’t think I necessarily need to go back over the ass-whooping the podcast world has faced in the past year.
Torre, who claims to be risk averse, responds to my question about these volatilities by expressing faith in his new business partners. “I like the chances of this specific iceberg,†he said. Which makes sense. Since breaking off in 2020, The Dan Le Batard Show has continued to thrive in its independence. Torre calls it a “monster†and regards its sizable following as being powerful enough to support an entire company. For now, at least.
He also expresses faith in Skipper, who’s fashioning Meadowlark to be something of an illustrious next act. “Skipper is the guy who literally redrew the map of sports media and sports itself when he was at ESPN while always maintaining an editorial mind,†said Torre. “To see out where all this is going from the vantage of being inside the next thing this guy is building? I’ll roll those dice, sure.â€