Dan “Barstool Big Cat” Katz put himself on the hot seat on the latest Pardon My Take, and Ken Rosenthal gets to keep his job. Sort of.
After calling Rosenthal a “loser” and a “jerk” earlier this week and demanding Fox remove him from their baseball coverage — dredging up the ugly incident between Rosenthal and a cameraman during the Brewers’ celebration last September, an incident Rosenthal quickly apologized for — Katz acknowledged on Wednesday’s episode of PMT that he probably went too far.
“I went a little hard at Ken Rosenthal,” he said. “I thought it was kind of innocuous. I guess looking back, it was a little harsh. In context, it was midnight — long day, long weekend. He popped up on TV. I just went stream of consciousness. I don’t really know him.” A couple of people who do know Rosenthal got in touch after sports media came to his defense. “They were like, ‘Dude, you got it wrong. He’s a good guy.’ You know what, hand up. If I got it wrong, I got it wrong. That’s my bad. So, Ken Rosenthal, you can stay. I do think it was weird with the Brewers thing, but you can stay.”
The jerk part, however, stands.
“He’s just a jerk is what I said,” Katz clarified, before noting he barely remembered saying any of it in the first place. “I don’t even remember, because we do so many podcasts — it just popped up on the TV. And on Monday afternoon, I was like, ‘Whoa, why is this trending?'”
He also mentioned that nobody from Fox said a word to him about it, which is worth mentioning given that Katz sort of shares an employer with Rosenthal through his FS1 role on Wake Up Barstool and Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff and was publicly calling for the man’s ouster on one of the most downloaded podcasts in the country.
The thing is, Katz acknowledged that he and PFT Commenter, plus Hank, Memes, Max, and Zac, still do Pardon My Take like nobody’s listening. That’s also why the show took home the 2026 iHeartPodcast Award for best sports podcast. But millions of people are listening, Ken Rosenthal might be one of them, and so are we, which is how we ended up here, dutifully quoting Katz on the recently retired Thad Matta being the oldest 58-year-old going, just as he requested.
And since we’re handing those out, Katz had one more for Rosenthal: “I don’t want to also take credit, but Ken Rosenthal, a lot of people came to your defense and said some really nice things about you, so — you’re welcome,” he said.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.