A Close Read Re: My Good Friend Bob Iger

Let's dive deep.

If you have paid any modicum of attention to this newsletter (and you have, I am sure, you know that I like baseball. It’s America’s pastime! The greatest sport in the history of the world, even when it breaks your heart! (I am looking at you, the 2023 New York “We’re just waiting to get good even though it’s past the All-Star Game” Mets.) Baseball is the best, even when it hurts. Of course, one way to make it hurt less is to mock some of its players and commentators.

“Josh, what does baseball have to do with Disney, or me, your good friend Bob Iger?” Oh, we’ll get to you in a second, Bob, don’t you worry. I like to set things up here, give it time.

I bring up baseball and mocking because one thing I probably have not mentioned here is one of my favorite long-gone websites, Fire Joe Morgan. You can still visit and read all of the posts from FJM, but as you’ll note upon clicking through, it wrapped up as a living site nearly 15 years ago. For those who are not baseball-savvy, the late Joe Morgan (I will note here that he passed on many years after this site was a living thing) was a legendary player for the Cincinnati Reds, among other teams. He was also a longtime color commentator for ESPN, primarily (but not entirely) on their Sunday Night Baseball broadcast with play-by-play man Jon Miller. As FJM noted, though, Joe Morgan’s skills at analyzing the current game of baseball as it stood in the 2000 was Not Great, Bob!

Though the site was named after Morgan, the three men who created FJM (including Michael Schur, who created Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, and Alan Yang, who worked on those shows and co-created Master of None) did a lot of close-reads on dumb comments and/or articles regarding baseball from all sorts of sportswriters, announcers, and the like.

And that, my good friend Bob Iger, is where you come in.