Katie Nolan has laid relatively low since leaving ESPN in 2021 but was shredded by baseball fans over her performance in the Apple TV+ MLB booth last year.
In an interview with Dan Le Batard this week, Nolan responded to the harsh criticism she received over the gig, calling it misogynistic and regressive. Nolan clearly appeared to regret taking the job and how she performed in it but also addressed how Apple producers and MLB fans alike created a negative environment for the broadcast.
“Maybe I sucked at baseball depending on what you were expecting me to do,” Nolan said during a recent appearance on South Beach Sessions. “But part of me is like, isn’t that true of quality? If women can just go suck at something and still get to do it.”
Nolan added the lessons she took from the criticism are similar to why some of her other projects have not worked. In part, doing comedy around sports is a hard needle to thread.
“Sports is so silly that we almost do the opposite (of politics),” Nolan explained. “We take it so seriously when we talk about it, because we’re afraid if we get silly about it, then the whole thing is just going to be silly, and what’s the point?”
Clearly still insulted by the detractors and what she called “cavewomen” inside baseball, Nolan swiped at the stuffy nature of baseball coverage and culture.
“You’ve made it homework, you’ve succeeded,” Nolan said. “I enjoyed watching this thing and now I look at it like a math equation. Thank you very much.”
Nolan still believes there are baseball fans who could be tuning in that might respond to her style. She explained that she has always felt like an outsider in sports and wants to find other sports outsiders and connect to them with her content.
“There’s got to be somebody who loves baseball who is bored to death by the booth, just like me,” Nolan said. “And so I’ll just make it for her.
“It just gets hard when you have a lot of people screaming at you, and you start to overthink every word you say.”
Despite realizing that she was not a great fit for a baseball broadcast, Nolan believes baseball fans went out of their way to attack her. And while she understands those who believe she was just flat-out bad and deserves the scorn that came her way, she believes the nature of the attacks in part came from her being a woman.
“I can tell you from reading the words that were written, there was at least a little bit of misogyny in it,” Nolan said. “Because why are they bringing up that I’m a woman? Why is that coming up so often if it has nothing to do with the criticism?”
Nolan previously described Apple producers instructing her to treat the broadcast like a podcast before backing off that plan. She was also vocal from the start about how much the vitriol got to her.
Let’s just say the arrangement didn’t work well for anyone involved.
