Hour 2 - Jump Ship?

“This is it.” That’s what Milwaukee Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski said when he walked into a postgame press conference and found almost no reporters waiting for him. A reporter from the one remaining Milwaukee newspaper explained: “Packers play today.” It was a preseason game. An exhibition. And it had siphoned away the entire baseball media contingent. The moment went viral, and it became the third and final topic in a baseball-heavy hour of The Ben Maller Show that used three separate stories to examine the same underlying dynamic: the gap between what fans and players expect and what the sport’s economics and attention economy actually deliver.

Paul Skenes and the Art of the Pre-Game Flirtation

The hour opened with Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes, who was spotted on the field at Dodger Stadium before a game, chatting amiably with Dodgers coaching and training staff. The grainy video—Maller compared it to UFO footage—set off a predictable social media firestorm. Was Skenes, a Southern California native who went to high school in Orange County, already angling for a trade to Los Angeles? Was this the baseball equivalent of the famous Kyrie Irving–Kevin Durant meeting in the bowels of an arena during All-Star weekend, where they plotted to play together?