Chapter 1: What inspired Katie Woo to pursue a career in sports journalism?
How are you?
I am well. I'm thrilled to be on the podcast for the first time. Long time since our first time appearance.
Well, you know what that means. We paint t-shirts and smiles. That's right. So, but we're honored to have you. Thank you so much, Katie. You do such an awesome job for The Athletic. There's a ton of stuff we can talk about. First of all, it's the second time I was thinking about this. This is a podcast first where you went to Arizona State, correct?
Correct.
Okay. Second time that we've had in the course of two weeks, two people from Arizona stayed on. And coincidentally... You probably finished near the top of your class, and the other person we had on absolutely finished at the bottom of their class. So, yes.
Do I want to know who this person is?
Yeah, you can guess. I don't know.
No, I can't guess. Now that I can't, because bottom of the class, they're going to come after me.
It's not Cam Scataboo. It's... uh dustin pedroia dustin pedroia was on oh sun devil legend you can finish bottom of your class when you are dustin pedroia yeah and and he made it very clear that he was not there to uh he was there to learn under the the ways of the world under pat murphy and not necessarily his economics teacher so yeah that's fair we love transparency on this podcast
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Chapter 2: How has Katie's experience at The Athletic shaped her career?
later today and rant and rave about this to some students. But how it's changed, it changed. It's crazy. And I do think that so when you start the athletic, it was COVID. It was right around COVID, COVID, COVID.
It was the first it was the full COVID season. So no clubhouse access.
Right.
The limited travel.
Okay. So obviously like things changed after COVID, but in your time, what are some of the things that you've noticed? Cause I think even the athletics, people, the athletic will say, you know, it's changed and we're just fine. I mean, things change. How has it changed for you in some ways?
Well, sports media is changing constantly, and we know that. And I think with The Athletic, there is change that we can see right away. I mean, we were sold to The New York Times, which completely changed our operations. And we changed how we cover teams because The Athletic has when we traditionally launched, we didn't write every day. We weren't necessarily game story publications.
It was, you know, if you have a long term or a long form story that's going to take you a week to write, but nobody else will have. That's fine. Don't write for a week. And that, I think, worked when we were very early on as a startup company.
But now as we've kind of grown and we keep recruiting some very high writers across the board, I think there's more of a demand for readership, which is great in a time and age where social media influencers and TikTok and aggregation rules rampant with sports media. The fact that there's still such an interest in traditional outlets makes me happy, at least. But it also increases the demand.
So I know for the Cardinals beat, from year one to year five, I wrote a lot more. And that coincides with three consecutive very bad down years for the Cardinals where there is less to write about. But we're seeing that a lot where it's more about getting information out and getting information out in a continuous matter
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Chapter 3: What challenges has Katie faced in sports media during the COVID-19 pandemic?
So that was interesting to me. From the Red Sox perspective, I think I've seen a lot of discourse about whether Sonny Gray is a number two or a number three. I think that's totally fair to debate. Perspective, the Cardinals had him as a number one, which I think says a lot about the state of their rotation.
But when you're looking at what Sonny Gray can bring to Boston, I thought he made a lot of sense. He's not necessarily an Indians eater, but he is a strike thrower. He has wipeout stuff. two consecutive years of 200 plus strikeouts. Once I got over the shock, because I really just thought it'd be Atlanta, I was like, you know what, I think this makes sense for both sides.
And I think it's a really good trade for what both teams are trying to accomplish.
Well, you kind of hit on what I was going to ask you. The last thing about Gray is, you know, our good friend Julian McWilliams does this podcast for us, The Eye Test. And ultimately, when a guy is traded, we dig into baseball savant. We do all this stuff. But your opinion is one of the most important opinions. You have the eye test.
And you see, like, okay, that guy, I see him as a potential guy who can pitch a meaningful World Series game. Because this is what they're saying, right?
Right.
When you see him, and this is no knock on him, he could be a very, very good pitcher that's just outside that world. Do you see him as one of those guys?
In a best of five, absolutely. Obviously, the Red Sox have Garrett Crochet, so they're not going to expect him to start a playoff game.
No, but they were talking about, not to interrupt, but they were talking, this is one of the things, we are going to prioritize a guy who can basically walk side by side or just behind Garrett Crochet.
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