Jared Carrabis wanted to prove that he could be successful without the backing of Barstool Sports.
That’s his reasoning for leaving Barstool, where he became a prominent baseball personality from 2014-22, to launch a new venture with DraftKings. He said as much during an appearance on Comeback Media’s newly launched Short and To The Point podcast with host Jessica Kleinschmidt in May.
According to Carrabis, the transition to DraftKings has been rewarding because Barstool instills the belief that its talent is just part of the machine, benefitting from the brand founded by Dave Portnoy.
“If you’re competitive or you want to be the best in the world at something, you have to take that leap,” Carrabis told Kleinschmidt. “Admittedly, it would bother me when people were like, ‘Oh, you’re Dave’s b*tch’ and ‘You’d be nothing without, without Dave.’ In my head I’m thinking, ‘That’s not true!’ But I can’t prove it, how do I prove that?”
Portnoy took issue with Carrabis’ characterization of his exit from Barstool, claiming it had more to do with money than anything else. He discussed the comments on Carrabis made on the Short and To The Point podcast and the article linked above with his quotes during an appearance on Barstool’s The Kirk Minihane Show in June.
“I thought that was a fairly disrespectful article that he had circulating around the interwebs,” Portnoy said. “It’s a little bit strange…The article’s premise was, Jared Carrabis doesn’t want to be associated with Barstool anymore, but the entire article is about Barstool. It was an odd article.
“The article was sort of along the lines that he left [Barstool] to prove he’s not like Barstool. It’s not so much Dave, but that’s not really why he left.”
Kleinschmidt recently appeared on the Awful Announcing podcast and was asked if she had happened to hear about Portnoy’s response to Carrabis’ comments on her podcast.
“I remember somebody tweeted me. I said that Jared offered the information saying, ‘I was held back from Barstool’ and I commented on it,” She told AA’s Brandon Contes. “Yeah, he offered that. They were like, ‘Jessica, you should’ve done this.’ You literally gave four seconds of a clip. He offered the information. I commented.”
Portnoy’s issue was with Carrabis making those comments when in his mind, he really left because of the money that DraftKings was offering him.
“He really didn’t take a risk,” Portnoy said. “That’s literally, 100 percent has nothing to do with why he left this company…So then what is this?
Here are more of Carrabis’ comments:
“Are you a product of the company or are you a product of your hard work? And I think it’s a combination of both. I know that Barstool helped me a ton. But there are definitely examples of people who go there and work there and move on and you never hear from them again.”
“I’m not gonna get into how other people feel about the Barstool brand, they obviously have a lot of die-hard fans, but there are a lot of people that hate Barstool. That always bothered me, where people wouldn’t give me a chance because of things that were said or done by other people. That’s not fair…Now I have the opportunity to be judged based on what I do and what I say, versus what other people do and say.”
While Portnoy was up in arms about the whole ordeal, Kleinschmidt was happy to get the mention of the Short and to the Point podcast out there.
[Short and to the Point, The Kirk Minihane Show]
