Welcome to The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter where you’ll always find the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis.

Did someone share this newsletter with you? Sign up for free to make sure you never miss it.

⚽ Goooaaaaal! With the bad vibes of Folarin Balogun’s red card lingering in Wednesday’s USMNT-Bosnia match, Malik Tillman curled the ball into the top corner for the USA’s second goal of the game, sending Levi’s Stadium and the announcers into delirium. You gotta listen to the English and Spanish calls.

🦚 NBC conversations. According to a report by Austin Karp in Sports Business Journal, NBC has “had conversations already” with FIFA about securing both English and Spanish-language broadcast rights to the 2030 World Cup. NBC-owned Telemundo is the current Spanish-language broadcaster for the event and, similarly, has its contract expire after the 2026 tournament.

🦊 Lalas forever. Meanwhile, whether Fox is able to re-up World Cup rights or not, the company is standing behind Alexi Lalas for the foreseeable future, despite the criticism. Actually, it might be because of the criticism. “He’s the straw that stirs the drink, and he’ll be the cornerstone for many years to come.” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks told Puck’s John Ourand.

💔 Bad vibes. We don’t know about you, but we just keep refilling our big ol’ bucket of popcorn to see what’s next in the weird tension between The New York Times and The Athletic that Dianna Russini has become the avatar for.

🏈 Keeping up with Jones. CBS Sports’ lead NFL insider Jonathan Jones is closing in on a move to The Athletic, Front Office Sports reported Wednesday, a deal that would end his six-year run at CBS. According to FOS, Jones would not fill Dianna Russini’s old position if the move to The Athletic goes through. His role would center on features reporting and behind-the-scenes coverage rather than daily insider work.

✍️ ESPN errors. ESPN has walked back its reporting on free-agent defensive lineman Mike Pennel and a homicide investigation in the Dominican Republic, admitting the most recent story “contained errors.” ESPN initially named Pennel a person of interest in the case in April and followed that with a more detailed investigative piece in June.

Read more of today’s top stories at Awful Announcing.

The San Francisco Giants’ Pride Night controversy and all the subsequent fallout can be blamed on many things (and, quite frankly, have been). But if there is one throughline from the seeds of discontent that sparked it to the interactions among media members attempting to make sense of it, it’s that the entire episode can be traced back to a lack of direct communication.

From the jump, there was a miscommunication, or lack thereof, that led to three pitchers, Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, writing a Bible verse on their Pride Night hats, which featured rainbow versions of the Giants’ logo. The organization should have made it clear to the players that they are not required to wear the rainbow-themed hat, per league rules. And if the team did communicate that, the players decided to speak past them. An inciting incident based on a lack of communication.

Major League Baseball attempted to smooth things over with a statement too generic for its own good, and the lack of clarity gave politicians and pundits a chance to turn what was supposed to be a fun evening of celebration into the latest culture-war salvo. While many of those missives targeted the Giants and MLB, they were directed at others as political red meat rather than attempts at rational conversation.

The Giants’ lack of direct communication made things even worse. GM Buster Posey refused to answer questions about the event and controversy, and KNBR hosts were barred from asking Giants CEO Larry Baer any Pride Night questions during a team-sponsored radio show. It would have been so easy to just speak clearly about what happened, what the intentions were, and how the team would move forward. Instead, engaging in conversation was the last thing they wanted to do, which only fanned the flames.

Eventually, Baer was willing to talk, saying the team could have handled things better, adding that “we take pride in being industry leaders in that effort with the LGBTQ community” and that the team “received floods of complaints” after “failing to address the issue with more than a statement.” In other words, their inability to communicate directly with fans and others created a vacuum that they allowed to be filled, rather than filling it themselves.

Perhaps the most direct example of this breakdown in communication came last week when longtime Bay Area baseball beat reporter Susan Slusser appeared on KNBR and was asked directly by host Larry Krueger for her thoughts on the long-term impact of the controversy.

“Susan, you’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve covered teams beyond the Giants, and you have a good sense for baseball and the players because you talk to them routinely,” said Krueger. “We were getting into the details of the Giants’ decisions, Pride Night, the communication, and all of that. But if we back away a little bit, has the Giants organization done real damage in the eyes of players?

“Are they going to have a hard time attracting players because other players are looking at these guys being called bigots and attacked in the media for either not wearing the hat or writing biblical verses? Do you think, long term, the Giants are going to have a hard time attracting free agents because of what happened this year?”

“I mean, bigoted free agents, maybe, I guess,” Slusser replied.

“… Certainly, it’s not a secret that San Francisco has a huge gay community, many gay fans. To me, this is a little bit on the players. If you don’t want to be a part of that, A, maybe don’t openly insult your paying customers after a game, but B, don’t sign here.

“Maybe that will happen. I don’t know. But that just seems honestly kinda crazy to me. You know where you’re coming. This is San Francisco. It’s not a secret.”

Whatever you think of Slusser’s answer, it was a direct response to the question she was asked. If Krueger didn’t like the answer, or wanted to dig deeper on her choice of words, he had the perfect opportunity right then and there. Sports talk radio is made for conversations like this. But Krueger did not offer a response.

A few days later, however, he did. Instead of responding to Slusser, he responded to a stranger on social media asking about it, saying that while he respects the Giants reporter, he couldn’t believe what she’d said and strongly inferred his disagreement with them.

Slusser, not one to shy away from direct communication, called Krueger out on the spot.

“It was in answer to YOUR QUESTION – and my response was ‘I guess maybe bigots.’ If you had a problem with the answer, say it then. On the air. This is utterly unprofessional,” she wrote on X, tagging KNBR.

Shortly thereafter, Krueger deleted his post.

Here we were, once again. Instead of two sides having a much-needed conversation, everyone was talking past each other, only further inflaming the situation.

There’s no time like the present, however, and Krueger did offer an apology and clarification earlier this week on X, saying “while I do not believe that exercising your 1st Amendment rights makes a player ‘a bigot,’ I should have challenged her in real time w/a pointed follow-up question. My error was taking it to social media, and thus I’ve deleted that tweet. It was unfair to Susan and brought X vitriol to both of us. I do appreciate Susan’s candor and intellect and that she is open to harsh disagreement or direct pushback. I pride myself on being right, and yet I can also admit when I’m wrong.”

Slusser reiterated that her choice of words there was directly related to the fact that Krueger had said it, attempting to drive home the point that she had used it because he had. It’s semantics, but her adamant concern about making that clear also speaks to the heart of how we all got here.

The communication tools of our time want breakdowns like this. Social media wants us to stop talking to each other and instead direct our conversations outward towards strangers. Political points and scorecards drive the language so many people use instead of talking to one another like humans. Fears over admonishment from authoritarian overreach or public lashings make it harder to feel like you can speak freely and honestly.

Hopefully, this whole drama is winding down, at least until next year’s Pride Night. When we look back on it, hopefully we can see how what happened didn’t occur because everyone was telling one another what to do. Rather, it all happened because no one really wanted to have a conversation in the first place.

“First of all, I’m happy for him. He’s earned it, and I truly mean that. I do believe, even though it makes people uncomfortable, as a Black man, that I don’t believe that’s an opportunity that would ever come to us first. In our society, we can say that’s fortunate or unfortunate. But the reality is that there usually has to be a precedent set before somebody is in a position to capitalize off of that.” - Stephen A. Smith on Pat McAfee’s potential $60-65M ESPN extension.

“Ultimately, the reason I couldn’t do it is because that’s not me. I can’t get up there and mimic a talking point that I don’t believe, and I believe to be patently false. That’s exactly what you have to do. … Win or lose, and I do believe we would have won. I would have sold my soul and given up something I worked hard to ascertain for what.” - Paul Finebaum on his brief Senate run considerations.

“No-brainer, if she wanted to work here, we’d do it.” - Dave Portnoy on whether Barstool would hire Dianna Russini.

“I just want to address, you know, what’s going on with [Alyssa Thomas]. You know, I think as a league, as a whole, there’s been so much more toxicity, racism, homophobia, straight-out nonsense, and it is absolutely unacceptable. Most of this coming from the online community. … I believe that this is people who are using our league, using our players to further divisive agendas. It’s not acceptable. Yes, we have to continue to protect our players.” - Fever coach Stephanie White reacting to Alyssa Thomas receiving death threats over Caitlin Clark situation.

“Where the hell do the Los Angeles Lakers think they’re going with a bunch of white dudes? Your three top players are white dudes? Really? This ain’t golf. This ain’t baseball. Hell, it ain’t even soccer. What you all think this is?” - Stephen A. Smith on the state of the Lakers roster post-LeBron.

Matt Miller of ESPN faces allegations of misleading fans about charitable contributions and fantasy gaming payouts over a period of up to a decade. As Miller also recovers from a severe car accident, Brendan Kleen and Drew Lerner discuss what we are watching for next from the NFL Draft analyst and ESPN.

We want to know what viewers like you think of Fox’s announcing squads. You can offer your grades for each broadcasting team here.

Watch the latest episode of The Play-By-Play on YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple.

For the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournament, Fox Sports employed nine broadcast teams, led by its lead announcing pair of John Strong and Stuart Holden. However, Fox also built out a deep bench of commentators, led by longtime American television stalwarts like Ian Darke, Derek Rae, and J.P. Dellacamera, as well as those with plenty of Premier League and Champions League experience, such as Darren Fletcher, Owen Hargreaves, Rob Green, Ian Crocker, and Danny Higginbotham. There were also additional American voices like Lori Lindsey, Maurice Edu, and Landon Donovan.

We want to know what viewers like you think of Fox’s announcing squads. You can offer your grades for each broadcasting team here.

When a viewer presses play on an episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, newly available on Netflix since January, they are quickly hit with iconic catch phrases popularized by The Sports Guy over the course of his career:

“Tyson Zone”

“Body Language Doctor”

“Ewing Theory”

From Simmons’ early days at ESPN’s Page 2 and into the launch of his podcast, he developed a new dialect for talking about sports. Through the sheer force of exuberance and a slice-of-life style (and sure, the fantastic fortune of Boston sports becoming monoculture at the precise time he made it big) — made more approachable by the internet — Simmons informalized sportswriting and connected more intimately with readers than almost anyone before him. Many of them were also in the industry. The slogans highlighted in the podcast’s intro seeped into other writers’ work right away.

When Simmons later launched Grantland at ESPN, the best websites often aimed to set the conversation around sports and pop culture. A great package, theme week, or list would engage readers, but, more importantly, it would also flow downstream into the rest of culture, inspiring late-night jokes, radio debates, and lunchroom chatter. By design, early bloggers and online writers were often speaking to one another more than an audience; if the gen-pop happened upon the work, it was a happy coincidence.

In the 10 years since its founding, The Ringer, Simmons’ follow-up to Grantland, has succeeded in the far more difficult task of instilling takes and tastes in its audience within an even livelier content ecosystem. Early viral stories, particularly on the NBA desk, showed the way. With the Brian Colangelo burner story, The Ringer broke a uniquely online scandal that quickly distinguished it as more firmly a creation of the internet. Later, the site’s package forecasting James’ move to the Lakers proved it could move faster than more scrupulous competitors.

Click to read more from Brendan Kleen on how, on its 10th birthday, The Ringer has doubled down on its ties to its audience and the spirit of Bill Simmons' early work.