Latest / Your Dark Companion Podcast / Two Decade of Around the Horn & Dallas Morning News | Tim Cowlishaw | YDC Ep 243

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Two Decade of Around the Horn & Dallas Morning News | Tim Cowlishaw | YDC Ep 243 · Your Dark Companion Podcast

• Nobody would have thought that I would be the Wanda. Ryder, sports talk. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. With the big mic. Oh, okay. Alright. Yeah. Okay. Now I get it. We got a lightning strike, boys. What happened over there, Grego? We had a little lightning strike right outside the window. Alright. Alright. Here's a tip for all these Americano league teams. Don't what? You said tip. Yeah. Tip. Okay. With a p. Keep jamming. The the ticket colon, nothing but a big Gen X jerk off set. Is this a cool night or what? I thought somebody would hear that go, bullshit. I'm back, bitches. Find out that they just can't do it anymore. They're not what they used to be. They can't hit the high notes anymore. That's what I'm kidding. More and more you see that. I went to see Rush Yeah. A couple weeks ago, and I was worried about that. I was worried that Geddy Lee would not be what he once was, and I'm not a big Rush guy until recently. Yeah. I never I never jumped onto that bandwagon. I know they have huge huge following. They do. They're special. They do. And maybe they are. Well, I I was I always thought it was kinda music for teenage mental patients and stuff. But Well But over the years, I've come around on them a little bit, and I actually went to see them the other night when they were doing shows in Fort Worth. Is that alright? Yeah. It was really, really good, and I'm really, really glad I went. Okay. And the really encouraging thing about it for me was Geddy Lee can still do it. Okay. He can still sing the way How old would he be? He would be, I believe, 72 or 73. Alright. And he can still do it. Now late in the show, he did make a couple of business decisions Yeah. Where, you know, they called for a high note, and he he didn't attempt it. But he was so good on the rest of the stuff that I can easily forget. I'll say this, Roger doesn't go all the way to the high notes, you know, in in Won't Get Fooled Again and some other songs. But the last time I saw them was when they played the AAC and they had the orchestra behind them. And it was a night Pete had no voice at all and was apologetic about. He couldn't even his little parts, he sounded rough. But Roger in that one, and I know he's canceled concerts here because of his voice, he he sounded really good and he had, you know, he had to be in his well into his seventies at that point. It's crazy how it all works. There you have it. This is your dark companion, by the way. Okay. Yeah. It I I think Is that a soft opening? Is that is that what we did there? Yeah. That's what we did there. Okay. Alright. This is kind of a soft opening where you just kinda ease into it a little bit. I like that. This is Monday, July 20. This is episode number which? Two forty three. Wow. Episode number 243, if you can believe that. You wanna have somebody special on your two hundred and forty third show. And I'd say we've met that. We have met that because with us today is the great Tim Kalashaw. Long time operative of the Dallas Morning News. He has done just about everything in the Dallas Morning News sports section that a guy can do. Close. Now he has been elevated to columnist. You say, now he has. That was the summer of ninety eight. Oh, was. So we're, yeah, we're we're into year 29 of writing columns. Okay. Which in my math, no one at the morning news has ever done. Now, obviously, Blackie was a columnist and I'm not comparing myself. Blackie was a columnist longer, but he was a columnist in Fort Worth and then the Times Herald and then the morning news. Galloway was at the morning news for twenty he was there for thirty years, but he he did columns for roughly twenty and then went to Fort Worth. So I'm gonna say for staying in one spot, I might be pushing toward a record that that no one cares about. I care about it. Thank you. Thank you. And it's it's it's quite impressive. Now you've were not anticipate it. I will say that. You did not anticipate it? No. I was a 42 year old, 43 year old, hockey beat writer and very happy to be covering the stars. I'd done it for three years in the summer of ninety eight when when the world changed and somebody left the morning news and the opening was created and Dave Smith called me that morning and said, I'm giving you the columnist job, don't have time to talk to you about it. I'll see you later this afternoon. And that was that? That was the announcement. And so that that was in July '98. So, yeah, it it has been '28. '28. He's giving you the columnist job. There's none of this I'd like to we'd like to talk to you about the columnist Money, there's anything. It's just like, I'm making you the columnist. I don't have time to talk right now. Come into the office and I'll see you this afternoon. And I drove in and I still remember this. And Norm was on the radio and it was obviously a big thing that Galloway was leaving the morning news. And I believe his sources had told him two people were up for the job, neither of which were me. And I won't say who. It's not their fault, but it was just it was it was a funny day in a strange way that it all went down. Alright. If you're if you're gonna dangle that out there, you gotta tell me who they are when we're done. Okay, I'll tell you. I won't tell anybody. I'll tell you. I'll tell you when we're off. You were on the let's see. Were you the first guy on the Stars beat? You weren't the first guy on the Stars beat. Terry Yeah, Terry Or Terry Egan. That's right. But I came here in 'eighty three and running through it quickly, I covered SMU for a year, football and basketball. In 'eighty four, the happiest moment of my life, no offense Mustangs, but a team under constant investigation, and the Times Herald and Danny Robbins were destroying me and the morning news on that. To get off that beat, to get a phone call from Bruce Rabin saying, I'm putting you on backup rangers to Kirkjen and Southwest Conference basketball. He could have told me, I'm giving you a million dollars cash, and I would have had the same reaction. Then he told me who he was putting on SNU, and I said, He'll be great. Just get me off. Which is funny now because I cover more SNU football games than any other college team. But so I did that for a couple years working with Kirchen, fantastic. And then I was the cowboy beat writer. And I love that guy. 'eighty six. Yeah. Timmy is beloved. 'eighty six, I started covering the Cowboys. So I went from there to covering the Cowboys, covering the Stars. Mixed in the San Francisco Giants as I left for two years and then came around to Stars and then columnist in '98. Now it seems a little counterintuitive that one would leave the Cowboys to get onto the Stars. That's not the word my parents used. My parents were more like, you did what? You're not gonna write about the Super Bowl team anymore? If it'll make you feel better, I did a few things where my parents said that to me, but none of them had anything to do with the Cowboys or the Stars. It was more like yeah. It was more like, dad, you remember that Dallas Blackhawks game you took me to at Fair Park in the in the seventies? Yeah. I'm gonna cover that sport. They have an NHL team here now. And it was a it was a risky move. And I certainly didn't do it thinking, oh, I'll do this for three years and Dave will make me a columnist. But that's how it happened and but I love doing hockey. And I'd cover the Cowboys in two different stints for six years and that will wear you down as you can probably imagine. Yeah, I can, but I'd love to hear you illuminate further on what is so tough about covering the Cowboys. Well, it's very different now, but it's also the same now. It's what people care about. It's the thing people care about. Today, it's different. You're competing with, you know, Adam Schefter and networks and and, Ian Rapaport and all this national stuff and the the rush to get things on Twitter within five seconds of them happening. Back then, it was newspaper against newspaper. Mhmm. Initially, morning news against Times Herald and Fort Worth. And Fort Worth didn't really matter, no offense Fort Worth, until the time Cheryl folded. Yeah. And we had crushed it, essentially. Not me, but we. Oh, I played a role. But but then it was still it was still morning news against Fort Worth. And you might have might have been on a radio station at that point that did a every Monday read my cowboys lead and the star of telegram beat writers lead and had a contest. Who wrote a better lead? Possible. Possible. And even that was like, oh my god, I lost again. And I'm thinking it gets to the point where I'm thinking about that when I'm sitting down to write after a cowboy game. We were in your head. You were in my head. Here's my problem because this was a little story within the business, but, the '93 season began in London. Cowboys went to London Yeah. For the preseason. Played the lions. Final score was thirteen thirteen. I wrote it was the best of ties. It was the worst of ties. I got a big win on your station from that, bringing Charles Dickens into the mix Genius. Of a of a Cowboys game. The best because, nobody got hurt, the worst because they played a full fifteen minute overtime, which had Jimmy going nuts and they don't play that anymore. But I think I set too high a bar and then I started losing. But really, yeah, it was the competition of the newspapers and if you got beat on something, you had no way, there was no internet, you had no way to recover, you just got beat and everybody in the business knew it. Now it's different. You only get beat for a fraction of time till you get it on Twitter, but I would not want to be doing all the social media work that the cowboy beat involves is, you know, everything that comes. With Jerry, you're never off. Yeah. With Jerry, there's never you you could be off and you can be at dinner, but at training camp, but that doesn't mean he's not gonna drop a bomb somehow. Yeah. And and so it's just it's a lot. Cowboys are our man, Levon Helm said about something, the Cowboys are a full dose. He did say that. With social media out there, I mean, a guy like you who gets into the newspaper game and and comes up, you know, like that, Social media comes along and, man, you must you guys must have had to really just re rack your thinking and re rack the way you went about your whole thing. Yeah. And it's you know, it it newspapers did not fare well in anything related to the internet or Twitter, giving the product away and then trying to figure out, oh, you know, how can we charge we've been giving this stuff away for free. How can we charge people something and get some of this back? Individually, I remember, I was in a bar with some friends when, my friend's girlfriend told me about Twitter and I was like, what is Twitter? And she said, oh it's really cool like I follow Lance Armstrong and he's on there and you only have two forty characters or whatever it was at the time and you can follow people and they put their thoughts out there. And so in May 2009 I started doing it. Like a lot of people, I thought it was fun at first and I also thought it was kind of meaningless and a free space to have fun. Right until somewhere in that first year, I had a friend, this is when I'm still drinking, and I had a friend in the bar business who's who's Darrell Rivas' cousin or nephew or somebody worked for him. And he had told me stuff and he told me, Hey, his cousin told me Rivas is signing this week and his holdout with the Jets was a huge thing and they were on hard knocks at the time. And I tweeted something about trying to make kind of a playful around the horn type, you heard it here first, which we say all the time. We would say all the time and around the horn like you heard it here first. The Rams won the Super Bowl 31 to 13. Something you obviously didn't hear first. But I did something kind of foolish saying Rivas was gonna sign this week and the next thing I know, I'm on WFAN in the morning being interviewed. Mhmm. People, who was the worst? Mike Florio is coming after me just destroying me on on Twitter. And the only highlight was Rex Ryan and whoever the offensive or defensive coordinator are sitting there. They're like at a laptop and the other one goes, why is Tim Kalashaw tweeting about Rivas? And Rex goes, I have no clue. And that was the only highlight of a very eye opening experience that writing things on Twitter, putting things online, it's the same as putting it in the newspaper, it's the same as saying it on the radio. You better be ready to stand by it because it's not something to Yeah. You can't take it back. There's no pull up there. It's out there. I can delete it from my screen, but it's out there. So, yeah, social media was a new test. Let's shift gears a little. We'll get get back to you a little bit later on here because you've got more stories I wanna hear. Okay. But I wanted to talk to you about things that are going on out there with these certain teams that we have here in our Fairburg these days. Sure. Certainly. What do you make? The wings are really good. Yeah. They are really good. What do you make of this new regime of the Dallas basketball Mavericks? You know, they're active. And I can't say I've watched enough Hawks games to know why mister Risachet as a number one overall pick has been such a bust, but he's not a number one. He's their most recent acquisition. So that's and it cost him Ryan Nimhard. So and maybe a pick, a two or something. I kind of liked Ryan Nimhard last year. Yeah. Played like his brother at times. Andrew Nimhard is good. It was really good for the Pacers when they went to the finals. Mean, reason to say he comes here, he doesn't have to be a guy who failed as a number one pick because he wasn't Dallas number one pick. He's just a guy who's a good outside shooter and it's got some size and they you know, I guess he's a nice addition. They're they're busy but I would say this, this would be my number one take and has been about the Mavericks. If you said after last spring, okay, they are gonna rip this thing up and start over, which they kind of need to do. And you said at the end of the summer they're gonna have Masai as the team president and this whiz kid as a GM and the guy who wins a national championship from Michigan as the coach, I'd say that sounds like they did a hell of a job putting all that together. Now if you said, oh they're also going to have Mares Johnson with the ninth pick, not one of the point guards, and they're going to use some of their assets to get Santi Aldama from Memphis and now they got Reece Daucher and I know they got the guy from Spain that people are probably a little too excited about. They just haven't there's nothing about this roster that says they're going to the playoffs anytime soon in the West. Now maybe this coach is so brilliant. He's gonna have them playing like Michigan and they're gonna be the five seed. I could be wrong but it's been more interesting in what they've done to get the structure of the organization right, which is important. But I'm not wild about this roster and if you watched five minutes of Oklahoma City playing San Antonio, there's nobody that can play with those two. The good teams, Houston and Golden State, they can't play with those two. And Dallas isn't anywhere near the level of the Hustons and Golden State. So I still think it's gonna be a long, long climb for for Mr. Flagg. What did you think about the coach hiring process? Did you think they were going to to go after, you know, somebody a little bit more familiar to us, somebody we might know a little bit better, or did you think they were gonna roll out a deep cut? I thought it might be more of a deep cut just because Masai, when he was in Denver and Toronto, didn't go after the Jeff Van Gundy or something that's floating around. So I guess this I thought he's gonna hire an NBA assistant. Now this is very different from that. This is a guy whose college presence was as high as you can get. They didn't just win a national title, they destroyed everybody in the tournament. And all of a sudden this guy wants to leave college. You know, still wonder and I don't know that he's gonna answer it honestly because he doesn't have to. How much did he want to get out of this, you know, I gotta pay this guy 3,000,000 now because he had a good year or he's going to North Carolina or wherever and you can't even keep teams together and I'm going to try my hand at the NBA and okay the Mavericks is open fine. I don't know if they're any good but I can always come back to college. So it's a good move for him. I've heard that he was very frustrated with the Michigan AD as was Harbaugh when he left and went to the Chargers. Right. And now they just had a story today that Ward Manuel is either stepping down or this is his final year as the AD. So maybe they've figured some of that out. Nobody here really cares about that half of the story but you know, I think he's a good coach but he's all of this has come about very quickly. Yeah. He's three years removed from being the surprise guy at Florida Atlantic And you're looking at your your bracket and saying, well, hell, how did I how did I get this screwed up? This team's in the final four. And then he does this quickly in Michigan. He certainly knows how to do the college game really quickly. I don't know what he knows that is gonna help him in the NBA other than he's he's had success. Man, how do you even coach in college anymore with it the way it is now? I mean, it's crazy. And and just a couple of days ago, I saw a story about NIL being connected with high school guys. Well, it would have to be. I mean, that you know, going back to Quinn Ewers, if you're that good that you could sit out your senior years, you can go do the Ohio State thing initially. I don't know and I've argued this with I have some some buddies who covered college sports most of their career. I've covered pro sports. I don't do that much with I do a little here and there, but Dallas is a pro sports town and I mostly write about the big four and whatever. And I've argued with them for years that a lot of them would make fun of the NFL or anything. How do you know, it's all contracts and free agents and people coming and going and I was like college is much sleazier than the pros and it always has been. At least pros have defined rules about this stuff and now in the last three years it's gone way beyond anything anybody could have ever imagined. I mean, what is the going rate for a football team? Tech got it to supposedly 40,000,000. I'm sure somebody's paying more than that for players this year and that's football. Basketball players good basketball players are gonna cost you 2 or 3,000,000. And it's not so much begrudging players getting overpaid, which they are. Nobody likes to say that. Everybody likes to, oh, this is what they've always deserved. Because at some point, the balloon will burst and people will realize we're way we're way out over our skates here. We need to come back. But it's the transfer thing. You pay them money and you have no say over anything other than, well, they're gonna go to school here for a year and then we'll see if we can afford them again or if they just wanna go somewhere else. Do they actually go to school? Well, if they I mean, if you're playing basketball and you're one and done, you don't really have to. I think if you play football, some sort of eligibility has to be I don't know what the compliance officer does these days, but they still have them. So there must be something they do Or maybe that's why they end up transferring because they they're flunking out of all these schools. God, it's it's hard. It's hard. Yeah. I mean, it's hard and it's you know, I hate to use the word counterintuitive again, but it's counterintuitive to everything guys like you and me know. And to the people who really loved college sports and thought they were really different from pros and really relished in that. Yeah. These guys play because they love it. They're getting a scholarship, so they're getting, you know, free room and board, but they they are playing because they love being a longhorn or a sooner or a wolverine. And now they're more mercenaries than the pros are. What do you think about the shape the cowboys are in as they head into training camp? I'm flying out there Sunday. I'll be out there for a week. Do you like what they've done in the off season? Mildly. You like Christian Parker? Yeah. The first question I asked him, said, I used to watch you on Around the Horn. So right away I know the man's a genius Okay. When it comes to he's got me in his pocket. No, I thought it was a good hire. Look, the Eagles have had it going. So go get something from them and figure out what they've been doing and he seems qualified and, you know, they get the safety from Ohio State by way of Alabama. Speaking of guys transferring. I don't know that that's enough. I don't know that Rashawn Gary is enough. I think they're better than a year ago. I think the Eagles probably aren't as good as a year ago. I think they'll be interesting. I think they can do better than what seven, nine and one. I don't know if that's eight, eight and one. Maybe it's a little more than that. Maybe they can be a wildcard team, but they got to do something. Doc turns 33 this month or next month, whenever it is. It's always right after camp starts. He's he's not gonna be Tom Brady playing in his forties. No, the meter's running on him. The meter's running on him for sure. Not because he doesn't work hard and he works as hard as anybody, but those injuries when you're becoming one of those guys who's hurt every other year and you've had a series of different things, that's not necessarily a good thing. So they gotta be good pretty soon. They'll be entertaining. I think Parker gives them a chance to be more interesting on defense. So I would say I'm looking forward to it. I, you know, I think the schedule's very difficult and the NFC's the wrong place to be at the moment. That has way more good teams than the AFC. Mhmm. So it's it's a challenge. They're probably fifty fifty to make it as a wildcard team. You think Schottenheimer is the right guy for this? I think he's an okay guy to try for two or three years. I think think there were enough signs that he was different enough. I mean it's not like they started the opener last year and you go oh wow this difference is completely different from Mike McCarthy. A lot of it still looks the same. Nobody is that different from anybody else. The Rams and Shanahan and McVeigh and those guys, I still feel like those guys are a step ahead and the Cowboys are forever trying to play catch up. I think Schottenheimer can catch up to those type of offensive minds faster than McCarthy ever would have. So I think yeah it's worth a chance, but I think the fact that he talks a really good game and he's a very pleasant guy doesn't change the fact that this team did not improve. No. They improved by a tie last year. And they had Dak for 17 games. But he won me over and I'm really pulling for the guy. He seems like a great guy. I think he is a good guy. I think he's sincere. Every coach these days seems to talk a lot about players and loving the players and the brotherhood and all. If you watch some of those in season hard knocks, every coach, even the Giants interim coach at the end of last year was talking about their brotherhood. Man, these players, excuse me, they're not even gonna be here next year. All you players are hurt. What are you talking about? Brotherhood. But I think he is a guy fans can can feel decent about and and cheer for a little bit. Yeah. What did you think about what happened with the stars last year? I mean, I spent most of the season thinking that we were watching a legitimate, no question about it, Stanley Cup contender. And then in the last two or three weeks, something happened. It was like they just ran out of shit all of a sudden. Yeah. And it was very hard all along. They looked, like you said, during the season. But when you've been to the conference finals three years in a row, there's nothing to do. You can either play in the finals or you can crash because that's what's gonna happen. And I wasn't a fan of getting rid of DeBoer. Two years ago he and I had a funny little playoff run-in after a game. They got some fun national publicity. But then he and I got along fine after that And I think what he should have learned is when you're losing to Edmonton, it's better to go after the columnist than to go after the goalie. Because he changed his tack. Instead of going after me again, he went after Ottinger and lost the team then and I guess they didn't have any really much of a choice. I like Glenn Gulletson. I think you could compare him to Schottenheimer, although he looks a lot like Jason Garrett and he has these these mannerisms when he talks. So I think, God, Garrett has just taken on a hockey job and he's kind of changed his hair a little and I don't know if this is gonna work. He hasn't won a playoff series yet And, you know, that has to matter a little. Now he obviously, the players liked him yet. They had a really good regular season. But it's the same thing year after year in the West. There are five it doesn't change much at all considering how much other leagues change. It's Dallas, Edmonton, Vegas, Colorado, and now Minnesota. And those five teams are capable of going to the finals, but if there's five of them, at least one of them is not getting out of the first round. And this year, that team is Dallas. Yeah. And I mean, when the playoffs started, it it was very apparent right right away in the series against Minnesota that this team had just it it just didn't have the juice for this. Minnesota had a they're you know, they have Quinn Hughes playing defense. I think he's better than Mero Highskin, but Mero Highskin was hurt. So you take 80% of Mero against Hughes who just won a gold medal with The US and he's riding high. They just looked they looked more settled the whole time. Dallas looked out of sorts the whole time and just scrambling. And it can be different this year but Jim Nill deserved all the awards he's gotten but he cashed in when he went for Miko. So they've kind of had the no picks, no young guys coming. One of the young guys he traded obviously for Miko, Miko Ranton and Logan Stancovan just had a great Stanley Cup winning ride with Carolina. So it's hard when that's not Jalen Brunson. They got something for him. They got something really good, but it's gonna be hard. The stars have another year or two to hang on and then they're gonna have to restructure some things to to go at it a different way. How much did you know about the game of hockey when you started covering it? That's a great question because less than I wanted to. I was definitely a little scared. I spent a lot of my I didn't do a lot of dating in high school. I spent a lot of my time at Richardson High School going to Dallas Blackhawk games at Fair Park. I think one of my best friends, his dad had season tickets. Nobody had season tickets to the Blackhawks but he had four of them. So I could I think my junior year we went to 28 of the 36 home games. We were regulars. And so watching it on that level, you know, wasn't on it went from being on CBS a few weeks to basically disappearing from American TV screens for about a decade. Wayne Gretzky, mostly his Stanley Cup stuff was on Sports Channel or whatever it was that nobody had. It wasn't until ESPN in the mid eighties. He's a rumor more This than anything team scores five goals a game, he gets three of them. They win another cup, who are they? Until ESPN got hockey in the eighties, it was really a niche sport. By the time the team came here, I was immersed in the Cowboys, in the NFL, I went to a few Blackhawk games and when the opportunity came I thought, I'm 40 years old, this is a midlife crisis moment happening here. But beyond the fact, it's like a breath of fresh air, nobody's gonna care if I get beat on a story if it's the stars. I think I can get up to speed and I know I can write it and not look like a complete fool. And so there were the people in the organization, a lot of them who've gone on Craig Button is a long time now a Canada TV guy and stuff. He was director of scouting. He lived in Ann Arbor. I would go to his house and watch games during the playoffs because we traveled everywhere. Even when I covered the stars, they missed the playoffs. I go to the conference finals and the finals. Now you can say, who cares why are we spending that money? But we had the money and we were spending it. That's way it was back then. We were putting out 24 page sports sections on a daily basis. And it was great. And it was great. It was great to be a part of. And I would learn from him. I'd learn from you know, watching practice and doing things. I'd learn from Gainey and Hitchcock and people and then just being around it. But no, when I took over the beat, there were a lot of holes in my game. I didn't even want to announce to people. It's just like, I'm gonna fake this for a couple months here and get up to speed, then we'll we'll see where this goes. I gotta tell you, it did surprise me when I I found that that you were gonna get on the beat? Because I I figured Did it make the hard line that day? I'm sure it did. It it probably did. I don't remember for sure, but it probably did. But it just seemed to me like they would go out and get, you know, another hockey guy. Know? Somebody who's who's done it before. You know? That would have been the logical thing to do. And don't get me wrong. I'm not throwing this at you because I think you did a bad job. You did. You were great. But I was green. I was greener than Victor. Victory Green. And that would have been the normal move. And Dave could have done that. And he could have hired whoever he wanted to go get from Detroit or Chicago or wherever. But I talked to him about it and I had lunch with him and I said I wanted to do it. And he was all gung ho. He had young riders, he needed to promote and move. And so that helped him with some stuff. So yeah, we had our own depth chart he was working on. So at the time, I believe somebody called it career suicide. Somebody might have been a columnist at the morning news and it could have been for for for our for all I knew, and and it worked out the other way. Yeah. It worked out great. I mean, you were great at it. You it seemed you know, after a while, once I got used to the fact that it was you doing it. You know? Why is he writing about hockey? Why isn't he writing about Barry Switzer? But, yeah, it was it was just great after a while. What do you make of the rangers? Or let me let me rephrase that because there's a better question here. Okay. What do you make of the fact that so many teams in the American League are below 500? There are a couple of really good ones, and there are a couple that are, you know, kinda well, they flirt with being, you know, flirt with being good. The Rangers are one of those. And there's a bunch of really bad ones. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and the conclusion I've come to is nobody's really trying too hard because they've got next year on their mind and what lies ahead and the down the road of this thing. That's an excellent point. And and I think that maybe that brings us to the Seattle Mariners and why they aren't better and why they aren't running away with this division. They have a pitcher and I'm sure you know him at AA, Kate Anderson, who won a college world series for LSU. He has by far the best pitching numbers of anybody in the minors. His strikeout to walk ratio is like 10 to one and it's better than that. It's like 102 strikeouts and eight walks and a 130 ERA and he just kills people. But the Mariners have six rotation pitchers they're paying and so the fact that Kate Anderson would be better right now than Castillo and a couple of those guys. But they're just going to let him develop and they probably have a couple of hitters they could probably bring up too, but they're just going to kind of keep them on their regular path and see what happens this year. Because they don't know when based you know, you bring somebody up and you get them going in a different pace and then they're gonna be shut down for who knows how long Yeah. Next year. So I do think that probably is in play. What I think is bad for the Rangers, I think this overall scenario is bad for the Rangers. The mediocrity of the American League. The fact that they're still what are they? Half game up in first? Fifty and forty nine? It's gonna it's gonna make them for the third straight year, they're gonna be buyers at the deadline when they're very close to being all three of those years a team that should be selling. Yes. And it's risk taking and it's already a team that doesn't have a lot of assets on the way. And I know everybody's gonna think, well, look. Look at '23. They were a wild card team and they won a world series. They were a wild card team but they were the best team in the American League at this point in late July. They had the best record. And their bullpen fell started falling apart in August and they were scrambling at the end. But they were a great team most of that year and they were great. They had an extraordinary hitting lineup and yeah, they did something unprecedented that nobody will ever do again, win 11 road games. Go 11 and o in the road. But you can't repeat that and this lineup isn't all of a sudden gonna hit. Seger's probably not gonna hit like he did that year. Garcia and Simeon and Chaim and and most of them are gone. Evan Carter was a demon as a whatever he was, a 20 year old. Yeah. He was a phenom. Barely get on the field and stay healthy now with no power. I mean, it's just not gonna happen. But because of the standings, I don't know that Chris Young's gonna have any anything to say other than I mean, anything to to guide him other than we have to try to go for it. I can't just pull the plug on a team that's in first or right there. So I just hope they don't do something big. And, you know, Sebastian Walcott's in a reds uniform next year and, you know, for some relief help or whatever they might find that they need. It's just it's a very weird year and as you described, I I don't know, you know, this thing for next year, I normally think I normally put negotiations out of my mind because they've been going on for most of our adult lives going back to the eighty one season where they played split seasons in baseball. So that's forty five years. That's largely going back to when we got into the business of doing things. But this one with one saying there has to be a salary cap and the other saying that we'll never have a salary cap. There's no fix for that and so I don't see how this is anything but a horrible long mess next year. Do you think there's a chance that we won't even see it next year? You know Because I do. I think they've learned they gotta have a world series. They might have a what'd they have last time? A 60 game? They might get down to about a 35 game season. They might have them play two weeks. And then have the 16 team playoff like they had in '81 when just about everybody made the split seasons or whatever. Logic tells me that they're not going to go that far, but there is no fix for if you have intractable owners who say, we're done if we don't get a salary cap. And even though I don't think salary cap would be as damaging as players like to make it out to be I think they're standing on principle They're as much as anything standing on it because that's what they were taught under Marvin Miller and all, and that's all they know in baseball. And they don't think about the fact, well, what if all these teams that don't pay anything for payroll, all all what if Oak what if the A's and the Pirates and the White Sox and all these teams down here at $7,080,000,000, the Marlins, all of a sudden they have to pay 200,000,000. Where how does the money come out then? Yeah. Maybe the Dodgers can't spend 500, but I think there are reasons to think reasonable players would think about a salary cap, but I don't expect reason to ever be a part of the baseball player association thought process. They're just too dug in on it. Yeah. I mean, they've seen it one way all this time. They look around at these other leagues that do have salary caps, and all they think of is, well, they got a salary cap. And that's it. I mean, they they don't Do they do they look at what NBA players make? Do they look at marginal NBA players making $1,520,000,000? And and the 60 and $70,000,000 a year superstars, they don't have to defer the money like Ohtani? I mean, they might want to look at some of those salary cap leagues and see how players are doing and see how their TV contracts are doing and the rise they've enjoyed compared to baseball. But they just hear the word salary cap, and that's it. You know? They don't learn anything more about it. They don't look at all those other things. They don't look at these other sports and see that there, it, you know, it may not be a utopian situation for anybody, but it works. You know? It works. The games go on. The teams do good business. Fans guys feel like their teams have a chance. Yeah. And I know baseball because the base because baseball is such a weird game and because pitching can change things and pitching can be unpredictable and guys get hurt. That you can have, yes, you can have the brewers in Tampa Bay be really well run teams on kind of a shoestring budget, and they can compete. Most of those teams with those budgets do not compete. Mhmm. And you can also have it the other end. You can have the Mets be an idiot spending 300,000,000 and not doing it wisely. In the player's mind, that suggests everything's fine. But it's not fine if the Dodgers aren't whether they win it or not for the third year in a row, they're clearly the best team. And they have the best opportunity to win and I think they probably will win unless they have just a rash of pitching injuries at the end of the year. And maybe they'll figure out this really isn't the best product that we could be putting out there. But I don't think they'll figure that out. I don't think they'll figure that out either. Be nice. I've kind of already given up on the ghost. You know, on the one hand, they're right to to worship at the shrine of Marvin Miller because the stuff they were fighting for then, they were right. Yeah. And the owners were, you know, criminal or just close to it. The stuff they fight for now and the evils of the salary cap in which the average salary would still be well over $10,000,000 a year. I'm not I'm not sure if if that really still applies. Yeah. They just hear it and they think about Marvin Miller and, you know It's the most hard ass sport. Baseball players are much more hard ass. They just don't realize that that was then. This is now. Yeah. Lots changed. You know? It's a different world we live in now. It is. It's good, sir. That's gonna be messy. That's gonna be really, really messy. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. Thanks for bringing this down. Sorry. It's what I do. Here you have in this shrine to baseball, and you have a nice mister Reiner has a nice printed photograph, you can't see on these cameras, of a stadium that he's very jealous of me because I went there, the Polo Grounds. Mhmm. I saw the Mets play there as a second grader in 1963 before we moved to Texas. What a perfectly what a perfect dimension that is to a baseball. Oh, I know. I know. You went to the Polo Grounds. Saw the Mets and Milwaukee Braves. Wow. Wanted to see more it was a Sunday afternoon. Feel like it was ladies day, but I can't remember. Or mother's day or something. Wanted to see Warren Spahn. I knew enough about my baseball cards to know I was a big Warren Spawn fan then, but he did not pitch that day. It could have been Lou Burdette or somebody. I don't know. But yes, the the Milwaukee Braves took the measure of our Mets in their second season at the Polo Grounds. Yeah. And for those who may not know, this Braves team that handled the Rangers over the weekend in Atlanta were the Milwaukee Braves back in the day. Little history lesson. Long time ago, though. '66, I think, is when they moved. So Yep. That's a long, long time ago. Did you ever go to any Cowboys games at the Con Bowl? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Several. Actually, more than several. First one was the sixty three salesmanship game, Cowboys Packers. So an exhibition game sitting in the end zone. Then after they and we went to the end zone, sat there early Bob Hayes games, a great race, with the Giants, some of those games. '66 or '67, my parents bought four season tickets in Section 3, which is about the five to 10 yard line. If you're in the press box down to your right on the press box side of the field, Row 50 or something, we were under the overhang. There was a big pole equal to the right on the goal line. So if you had the fourth seat, my brother and I would fight over it because once they got to the goal line, you were standing up or leaning because stadium construction in those days left something to be desired. But we had season tickets and the seats were $6 So season tickets were $48 You got seven games and a preseason game. So it wasn't like my father was suddenly rich and we were season ticket holders. That's what the game cost back then. Lot of good memories. A couple of Thanksgiving games we went to seeing. I took photographs, again from Row 50 Something, with my parents Kodak camera of Jim Brown. Thinking I'm gonna have these photos like you see in magazines of the newspaper, not knowing, you know, this doesn't have any kind of photo lens. I'm just gonna have a little blur of here's a few cowboys and here's a few pack of, Browns, and that one might be Jim Brown. The one cowboy game that I got to go to in the Cotton Bowl Why did you only go to one? Because my father was he he admired the entrepreneurial spirit of Lamar Hunt. So he's a Texans guy? Yeah. Nice. And and we went to Texans games. Did you? Yeah. Oh, now that's see, that's as cool as going to the to the polograms in my book. Oh, really? I would love to see They weren't cool. Early AFL games. Oh, they weren't cool for sure. Yeah. But one Sunday, we were out there at the fair, and the Cowboys were playing the Cotton Bowl. And I wanted to go in. You know? Let's go in. I probably was about 10 years old. I was trying to get him to go in with me, and my mother wouldn't let him go. And they said, alright. Just go and come back here after the game's over, and we'll be here. They told me where to where to go, and and that was it. So I went up there. Yeah. And the only thing was I didn't have a ticket. Okay. And I went up there and just kind of stood there. The guy said, can I help you, Sonny? Yeah. I said, yeah. I wanna go to the game. And he says, well, you gotta do you have a ticket? And I said, no. He said, well, alright. I think I got one for you. Go on in. And I got to sit there and watch Jim Brown that day. You saw him play the Cleveland Browns. I did. I did. Sweet. Might be the game I was taking photos at from from Row 55. It was 48 to seven. Man. Browns over the Cowboys. That's that's an ugly one. That was an ugly one. It's You sit in the end zone? Yeah. Picking splinters out of your butt? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. On the benches. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it was back They had the benches in the end zone. Loved it. You could get in, I think, for a dollar and a a Cabel's milk carton or you brought something or a Doctor Pepper or something, you gave something away. They had crazy cheap prices in the end zone in those days. That was fun. I hear it's not like that now. No. I don't think I don't think the guys at at AT and T are gonna go, you don't have a ticket? Here, I I got one for you. No. I don't think that's gonna happen much these days. Unlikely. Do you like the new stadium? Do you like AT and T? It's not new. It's 17 years old. That's true. It is. I just got used to calling it the new stadium. It's the new stadium. By by the Maverick standards, it's about eight years from needing to be replaced. Yeah. Do I like it? I don't like driving out there. I mean, these are just sports writer laments. I don't know if anyone cares. I wish they'd have built something in Dallas, the city of that's not the Cowboys' fault. That's the city of Dallas They had their chance. We're about to lose the wings here before long if they don't do something with our beloved Memorial Auditorium. It's okay. It's like a lot of other stuff. I've never seen the artwork. I've never gone to behold any of that. The press box is a million yards up in the air but that's the same as other places. So really nice food. Jerry does a good job with the food. Not in love with the stadium, but it's it's it's a modern it's a modern stadium. Nothing I can do about that. You like the globe? No. Look, I I understand I understand how hot it gets in July, August, and September. I understand the planet's not cooling off anytime soon. So it's going to continue to do that. But the other place was spectacular, as you know. Yes. And you still drive by it. In fact, when I went to a World Cup game with my wife, that's where the trolley, after we parked on the other side of the highway, the trolley dropped us off Old Globe Life and had to walk around that and then get to the other stadium. And just walking through and seeing all the stuff they had in the suites and, you know, the Warren Spawn Suite, the Carl Hubbell suite, whatever they had. All that stuff, just looking through, seeing the grass, seeing the outfield, seeing the lights and then driving up to the airplane hangar corporate office. That is the modern one. I think it makes very boring games. I think it's quiet in there. I think the roof is always closed. I think if you're a fan, would fall asleep or close to it. Yes, you're not going to sweat. Congratulations. Everybody's sweated for many years and they sweat in St. Louis and Atlanta and it gets pretty hot in New York and Washington in the summer. But I know we've lost that battle, So they had to build it. I wish they could have made it something more attractive. I wish they'd opened the roof in May or late September when it's not that hot. Yeah. But they'll say, well, the wind's 10 miles an hour. It blows stuff around on the concourse. Well, fix the concourse. Get some know, get you another Texas Rangers statue and put it on some stuff to keep it from blowing around. I mean, I've been out there one of the few times when they've opened the roof. It's nice when it's open. Yeah. And I I didn't see anything blowing around on the concourse. Well, that's what they say. So I feel I feel bad. I know the fans want air conditioning. I know I understand the modern mindset. So they have that. I just think it makes it feels like I'm in the Astrodome. It's it's quiet and it and it just it just feels boring. That might be one of the reasons for that could be because the team can't hit there. So they play some boring baseball games. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe I should reconsider how much I'm blaming the stadium, and I should look at that lineup card a little more a little more in-depth. I don't know. A lot of people do seem to be blaming the stadium for that, which I think that's crazy too. From year to year, it differs enough that I don't think it's the stadium. It's never gonna be a hitter's park. It's never gonna be the place the last one was. Although very unknowingly, I remember Tom Schiefer taking me and Jerry Fraley to see this mock up in his office at Arlington Stadium and showing us exactly what this thing was going to look like and him having to discuss Juan Gonzalez is going to have to live with the fact that we're going to have a deep left field and this is not going be a hitter's park. Nobody knew it was going to be a tremendous hitter's park to right center. And, you know, this whole thing, you know, they didn't understand whatever Didn't understand jet stream. The jet stream once they closed off the stuff behind home plate. Made for a great park. You know, just so many good memories of seeing games there. And when my son was young, that's where I took him. I I my son was in high school. I bought him the year after the second world series, the the St. Louis one. I bought him two season tickets in the upper deck. He was gonna be a seat before his senior year and those were cheap. Those were like when you bought season tickets it was half price, so it was like $10 a seat. So it wasn't like a huge expense. But I mean he loved it there and you know you deal with it being a little hot. Guess you know you probably never get Degrom and Ivaldi to sign if you don't have a roof and air conditioning. So I get it. I just think it's all terribly unfortunate. Yeah. I understand why they did it for sure. But it's another thing lost in terms of the charm of sports and the whole reason people get nostalgic about the way things were in different settings for different games. Yeah. And, I mean, I understand why they built the new place. I get it totally. And when I'm in there watching a game, I don't mind that it's nice and cool, but it's not the temple. No. It's not. It's not. Never will be. Not going to be. Of all the people you have worked with Worked with. The Dallas Morning News over the years. Okay. Your colleagues there. Yes. Who are some of your more memorable ones? Well, if I name five, whoever's whoever's six is gonna say, where where was I in this mix? Look, I came there in 1983, the summer of eighty three. I was in the seventies both finishing high school, going to college, reading the reading the morning news. I was a big Galloway fan of his of his Rangers work and, you know, he was a columnist in '83. And he's somebody I'd met even when I was working for Corpus or the Daily Oklahoman, which were my two stops after UT before I got here in '83. I was 28 when I got here. So nobody I admired more going into the business than than Randy. As you know, the other people I met, know, we had I didn't know these guys but I knew these names from reading them for a couple years. You know, Dan Barrero, Barry Horn, Mark Blautchen, Gene Wojciechowski. These these people who Dave had assembled from around the country, all good feature writers, all some of them beat writers, Ivan Mazel, all that whole crowd that came through. Jan Hubbard came over and covered the Mavericks, became one of my one of my best friends. So thinking about those guys, it was mostly guys. I should mention Sally Wilson and Holly Kane and Liz Clark and a lot of the female writers we didn't do a good job of keeping because they would go to the Washington Post or somewhere and get better jobs. But just thinking of the staffs of the 80s and the 90s, you know, as I've gotten older, I have great relationships with David Moore, who's now retired, Brad Townsend, who's not retired, others, you know, many of them too many to name. It's still very surreal if I step back and think about what I told you earlier about having been a columnist for twenty eight years. My goal in high school when I was working for the high school newspaper was to come sit in the Dallas Blackhawks press box and think of what if I could be the morning news or time zero guy covering minor league hockey? That'd be a great job. Get to sit up there, probably get to drink beer during the games, get to know the minor league players, get to write about hockey. I had no great thoughts of being here for forty years or any of that or writing columns for any sustained amount of period of time, not to mention the twenty two years of TV that went with that. So it's all kind of crazy to me. So when I think of people I've worked with, I mean, I think of mainly the ones from the 80s that I would just you know, can I I cover the cowboys like Gary Myers did is doing? Those were the kind of things I was thinking about when I got here and I had no I had some self confidence, but I had no real belief that I was gonna tear things apart or anything like that. It's an amazing bunch of guys that they put together. Yeah. And they have sustained it. They've kept it going. You know? I mean, it's still the best thing out there by far that I see any We do it with about 10 riders when we used to do it with about 35 or 40. And we do it without a sports desk compared to having a great sports desk. So it you know, the world has changed for newspapers, not in a good way, but the people that are still there covering the Cowboys or the Rangers or the Mavericks or the Wings or or whatever. Liz. Liz. Jesus. Leah covering the stars in SMU does does a fantastic job. Yeah. We got her coming in here in a couple days. Do you really? Yeah. We do. I love Leah. She's I hope we can hang on to her for a few more years. Usually, if they're good and they're young, they're gonna get out of here. But she does a great job, Sean McFarlane. There's a lot of young people. Yeah. We've had him too. Do you? Okay. So I'm just kind of a fill in in between Sean and You were the main act. You had an open date You're the headliner. For show two forty three. You're the headliner. You had a cancellation from our rodeo rider. So Oh, man. You guys have kept it going. It is it's always been great. It is still great. I know that things are different over there now, and you don't have what you used to have. That goes for probably everything and everywhere else in the media. That's true. But you guys there's a there's a certain thing to be said for an institutional high give a shit level. Yeah. And you guys have that. And for having rules and for having credibility and for certain things you have to do with sources before you can just run with it. Social media has none of that. And I think that's why players or fans both get very frustrated with and lump newspapers in with everything else. That's part of the huge struggle we're dealing with here in the days of 2026. Keep fighting the fight, man. I will. Keep doing what you do. Someone asked if you were on Sports Riders on TV. It was a show. I was on Sports Reporters. Is that what they mean? I don't know. I looked up Sports Riders on TV and it said it was with Rick Tellender. No. That was in Chicago. That was the first that was a funny show. I remember watching it at Louis. Do you remember Louis? Oh, yeah. Is Louis still open? Yes. I still go there. Okay. I never every time I drive by, think, is Louis still have the pizza? Louis is yeah. Louis is still I know. And he very much happening. The pizza is as great as it ever was. It's the only one that I I will eat. I know. Yeah. And I I I love the place. I knew we lost Louis in 2013 and that and I've been since then, but I didn't know. So anyway, that Chicago show with Rick Tellinger, he was the young guy, and some older, very Oscar Madison sports writers with cigars and just smoke curling up in front of them. Joe Mooshall, great name. And and all these maybe Bill Gleeson. I I can't remember who I was on it. They said they said it's Bill Gleeson, Bill Jas, j a Bill Jas. Yeah. Jas, and then Ben Bentley. Okay. And Tellander was on it too. Well, I thought there I thought for sure there was gonna be a guy named Gene in there somewhere I or thought he was gonna talk about sports reporters, which was the Sunday morning thing in New York. I did it once. And I don't know if that was a springboard to my wonderful career or just something I happened to do once. It had to be. In 2001. It had to be. I must have lit it up that day. The powers that be brought me back Well, I'm sure you did. Year later. I'm sure you did. You were great. You're always great. Always great. You're great at the paper. You're great in here, and I can't thank you enough for doing this. I appreciate it, kind sir. I'll do it again if you're if you're ever short of guess. I will take you up on that. We will take you up on that for sure. There he is, the great Tim Kalashaw of the Dallas Morning News with Alright. That's a little YDC for this week. We thank you very much for watching no matter where you are, no matter when you may be consuming this podcast. If you like what we're doing, what we need for you to do is get us out there on your social media. Like us, share us, do all that stuff that I'm talking to you about, but I have no idea what I'm saying. I don't understand it. I just know that we need it, and you got it. So, yeah, like, follow, subscribe. There you go. Thank you, Ashley. Alright. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Becca. Thank you all for watching today. Bye. Alright. I'm gonna go take my pants off. You're Dark Companion is a stolen water media presentation.