Jeff Passan Photo by Derek White / ESPN Images
By Sam Neumann on

Sometime on the evening of Dec. 24, Jeff Passan sat down and typed a long email to a man whose face he had never seen.

The email went to Richard Staff, the presiding eccentric of Staffcast, a baseball podcast so constitutionally, almost militantly weird that its episode descriptions read like dispatches from a parallel universe where the sport is merely the container and the actual content is everything else. It is, to put it as plainly as possible, not the natural spawning ground for an ESPN flagship baseball show.

And yet. Passan’s email to Staff on Christmas Eve was the first act of what has since become Sources Tell Jeff Passan, a new weekly baseball show from ESPN and Omaha Productions that launches April 14 with Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes — the two best pitchers on the planet — as its debut guests. It’s a lot of things at once, an interview show, an explainer series, a visual experiment, and, if Passan has his way, something the baseball podcast space has not quite seen before.

“I think the beauty of this show is that there are gonna be all kinds of different approaches to episodes that we take,” Passan told Awful Announcing. “I feel like the stories that we’re trying to tell with this show are really gonna resonate with people.”

Jeff Passan had been covering baseball for 23 years when he sent that email. He had broken news that moved markets, written long-form features that lingered, and developed the kind of institutional access that lets you fly to Toronto on a Tuesday to sit with two World Series-winning managers for two hours. He had, by any conventional measure, one of the best jobs in sports journalism. He also had, if you read between the lines of how he talks about the new show, a creative restlessness that the news cycle had never quite metabolized.

“I feel like I’ve been able to flex some creative muscles that have been atrophied,” he said. “The news game is wonderful, and it has taken my career to places I never could have possibly imagined. But in some ways, it’s limiting. We don’t have limitations here. We can do essentially whatever dumb thing we want to do and see if it works, and if it doesn’t, we just laugh at ourselves.”

The show that emerged from those late-night emails has an animating philosophy that Passan articulates most cleanly when he reaches for the metaphor of a professor. Not the droning, overhead-projector variety, but the kind you actually remember. The one who understood that the best teaching happens when you find the people most passionate about a subject and simply create the conditions for them to talk.

“The entire idea is every episode has a subject, and I’m going to talk with the people who are the best in the world at explaining it,” he said. “I want you to walk away from the show feeling like you understand the game a little better and that you understand the people who are in it.”

The debut episode is built around what it actually feels like to be one of the best pitchers alive. Skubal and Skenes are not just guests; they are the text, the primary source, the lived experience that the episode seeks to translate. The second episode reunites Dave Roberts and John Schneider — the two managers who stared at each other across the diamond in last fall’s World Series — for the first time since Game 7.

“As a baseball nerd, I had to pinch myself,” Passan said, still sounding faintly incredulous about it. “Getting to listen to these guys not just answer questions but go back and forth with each other — that’s where you get the best material.”

This is the part of the show that makes sense in the conventional ESPN-Omaha framework: the elite access, the elite guests, and a host who has spent two decades building the relationships that make those conversations possible. The part that doesn’t fit the framework quite as neatly is Staff, who does everything on a desktop because he is, in his own words, “spiritually 58 years old,” and has never once appeared on camera.

When Passan and Staff convene for show meetings on Zoom, Staff is represented by a large letter R in a brown box. Passan has seen this brown box more nights than he can count. He has seen Staff’s face zero times, and he has decided, as a matter of creative principle, to keep it that way.

“I don’t want to know what you look like,” he told Staff early on. “The longer we can keep up this mystery, the better.”

They met the way most things happen in the baseball media ecosystem now — through Twitter replies, graduated to DMs, graduated to Staff inviting Passan onto Staffcast, where he appeared twice and, each time, slipped naturally into Staffcast‘s particular frequency — which is to say, highly informed and deeply unserious simultaneously.

Staff had been the perpetual devil on Passan’s shoulder in the years since. Whether he was texting during Juan Soto’s free agency to ask if Passan could just tell him the Mets were getting him, regardless of whether it was true, or appearing in Passan’s replies at irregular intervals with something that would make Passan laugh in the middle of whatever he was actually supposed to be doing. When Passan’s new contract extension with ESPN included a podcast, Staff was the first call.

“There’s not really a situation where I’d say no to that,” Staff said.

His official title on the show is Chief Baseball Officer, which came about because Passan said it was his least favorite title in all of sports, and Staff immediately demanded it be included in the credits. It suits him. His actual role is harder to categorize — co-writer, creative director, pop-up architect — but the clearest way to describe it is that he is there to make the show strange in productive ways, to be good at the things Passan is not.

The pop-ups are, structurally, the show’s most distinctive gambit and the clearest expression of Staff’s sensibility. The visual version of Sources Tell Jeff Passan will function as something close to a real-time annotation layer, which includes definitions appearing when Skubal mentions a pitch grip, contextual humor surfacing at the right moment, the kind of thing that rewards watching over listening in a way that most video podcasts — which are typically just audio podcasts filmed from slightly further away — do not.

“So many people have podcasts, and they’ll upload a visual part on YouTube,” Staff said, “and what is it? It’s just two people in a Zoom room staring directly into the camera, and there’s not really any use in that.”

He compared the concept to VH1’s Pop-Up Video, the show that proved a quarter-century ago that you could layer wit and information on top of existing content without diminishing either — and that instinct, it turns out, is the throughline connecting Staff’s visual architecture to everything Passan is trying to build.

The show’s larger ambition — the thing Jeff Passan keeps circling back to when he talks about what he actually wants it to accomplish — is baseball literacy, but delivered without the condescension that phrase usually implies.

The sport has spent most of the past decade bleeding younger audiences and, with ABS, the pitch clock, the shift restrictions, and the international broadcasts, has spent the last few years clawing them back. The games are shorter. The stars are more visible. Corbin Carroll is on your timeline. For the first time in a long time, baseball is genuinely competing for the attention of people who did not grow up with it, and those people deserve a show that meets them where they are without making them feel like they showed up to a party they weren’t invited to.

“The three most important words in the first episode’s monologue were we welcome you,” Passan said. “That’s the idea.”

The existential challenge lurking underneath all of it — the one Passan is most clearly and carefully thinking about — is labor. The current CBA expires, and when it does, the sport that has spent three years carefully reconstructing its relationship with casual fans will suddenly ask those fans to care about escrow pools, pre-arbitration bonuses, and the precise definition of a qualifying offer. Passan wants Sources Tell Jeff Passan to be the place where that conversation becomes legible to people who do not already have a subscription to Baseball Prospectus.

“We’re gonna feed you vegetables sometimes,” he said. “We’ll just put butter on them.”

That’s the bet Jeff Passan and Richard Staff are making with Omaha producers Kirsten Sobecki and Mark Grillo, that baseball’s smartest conversations don’t have to feel like homework.

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.

View all posts by Sam Neumann