A Residence At One Cardinal Way, With Will Leitch

There are some podcast guests who need a little bit of drawing out, or just some guidance into and through the experience of being on this podcast. This is natural enough, given how unnatural it is to be on a podcast in the first place, and the specific unnatural/unholy attributes of ours. But Will Leitch is not one of those guests. He has known Drew forever, and worked with him for only slightly less time than that, and that surely helped. I myself have only met the man a few times, although I have read his writing for many years, but again—that does not matter. Will Leitch comes on a podcast ready to be the guest on that podcast, and buddy was he ever the guest this week.

This is a compliment, of course. Will is a voluble, willing, gifted talker, and it is guests like him that make podcasting fun. And while he joined us at least in part to talk about his new novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride—in stores now!—we did not really talk about that so much as we talked about more or less everything else. A good podcast guest will do that kind of thing, and that is just what Will did. After some opening fanfare, which is to say Drew mentioning his balls before the podcast was even a minute old, there’s a question that’s sort of about the novel, and an answer that’s sort of about how Georgia drivers are bad, followed by a sweet story about Will’s children overhearing Kirby Smart screaming profanities through a megaphone during Georgia practices while on their way to school.

And then I asked a writing question, which was mostly about how Will and Drew manage to produce so much high-quality copy, and then the podcast was more or less about writing for the subsequent 25 minutes. There is an obvious element of inside-baseball to all this, and you’ll be able to figure out pretty quickly whether it’s a conversation you want to listen to. But speaking only for myself, I found it both fascinating and useful. All three of us talked about the importance of repetition, the lessons we learned and bad habits we developed in high-volume blogging situations, and what writing all the time does to help and hinder a writer’s development. We addressed Drew and Will’s specific styles and processes, and how Will’s lifelong nice-guy hangups have kept him from writing as viscerally as Drew. It was, for me, the equivalent of getting to be in a pickup run with some basketball players I’m used to watching on TV, and I was excited to be able to rebound and throw some bounce-passes.

After the break, and after something like 90 incredibly surface-level seconds of discussion of the Stanley Cup Final, I became more comfortable getting some shots up. We discussed the upcoming NBA Finals, and tried to figure out the appropriate amount of awe to bring to an assessment of the Oklahoma City Thunder. We talked a bit about Tom Thibodeau’s firing, and about the very real possibility of James Dolan replacing his topped-out martinet with a new, younger redass. We were moving a bit more like a sports podcast, by then.

It was inevitable, given the guest, that we would arrive at The Cardinals Minute. This one lasted much longer than 60 seconds, but giventhat it concerned the owner-led desecration of baseball’s most (let’s be nice) distinctive fandom, I didn’t mind at all. The Cardinals baseball team is playing extremely well right now; the broader vibe surrounding it is awful in an entirely new way, and involves many more empty seats than at any time in recent memory. Will walked us through the DeWitt family’s catastrophic Ballpark Village retail/residential development, which involved the wholesale replacement of longstanding community stuff around the stadium with national chains and a luxury condo called One Cardinal Way. We discussed the American pastime of suburbanites gassing each other up about how scared they are of cities and the threat of billionaire heirs forcing their awful aesthetics on everyone else, and I guess we also talked about the Cardinals a little bit, too. But the question of whether Bill DeWitt III is more like Eric or Don Jr., which we also assessed, is an indication of how this bit went.

And then, after a Funbag question about which sport would be the worst to spend on a bad team—there was some general consensus on baseball, despite my impassioned case for how unpleasant it is to get your ass kicked at basketball—it was over. The episodes have gotten a little bit longer and a little bit looser as the weather has warmed up, and I hope to keep it that way. They won’t have That Will Leitch Feeling, of course, but it’s worth appreciating the ones that do.

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