New Owner Interview - pimpbotlove

1. Who is pimpbotlove in real life?

I’m an author and reporter/editor, living in the Boston area with my extra-forgiving sportswriter wife and an awesome two-year-old. Spent about a decade on the road as a baseball beat writer, mostly with the Wall Street Journal covering the Yankees, before quitting that in 2015 to go deep inside the then-emerging world of Daily Fantasy Sports as a professional gambler, and write the tell-all book about the industry, Dueling with Kings. Working on my second book now, about Treasure Hunting, and am an editor at The Athletic, running the Boston edition of the site. I also commish the BBWAA world, which is a world made up exclusively of professional baseball writers.

When I released my last book, one of the articles written about it actually included a bunch of stuff about HBD and whatifsports, so that was kinda fun to get this quasi-secret obsession out into the open:

https://www.vocativ.com/falsestart/409122/sportswriter-daily-fantasy-sports-obsession/index.html

2. Best or worst HBD moment?

Brought up, developed, won several world series with a rock-star HOF player named Adam Langerhans with my main team, the Toronto Argonauts in the BBWAA world. At the end of his career, around age 40, ratings all in the 30-40-range, I brought him up from the minors for the final game of the season, to give him one last at-bat in a game against our longtime Canadian rival, the Montreal Sacre Bleu. With the game tied in extra innings, Langerhans walked to the plate and delivered a pinch-hit, walk-off home run in his only at-bat of the season, and the final plate appearance of his career. He retired immediately after, and waltzed into the Hall on the first ballot. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.

3. Best or worst sports fan moment?

Hrmm… probably when Derek Jeter got mad at me for getting him in trouble with his girlfriend, for a (super innocuous!) tweet I put out in Spring Training in like 2013 or so. “Best” in the sense that ha, I unwittingly got this crazily famous guy I used to watch in high school in the 90’s in trouble with his supermodel girlfriend (it’s fine, they got married and have a kid now, no harm no foul), which is funny and weird in a very meta way, worst in the sense that it damaged my relationship with him and made my job more difficult… but really both because it reinforces that once you’re in that world, you can’t really be a sports fan anymore, none of it resonates in the same way, the fan experience is kinda polluted forever. I only watch English soccer now because it’s a far-enough-removed experience from the American sports world that I can still get into it.

I ended up turning the Jeter thing into a funny-ish story when he retired, if you care.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-glimpse-into-derek-jeters-world-1411687857

(And we eventually made up.)


4. It's you and 3 guests, alive or dead, real or fictional, human or otherwise, around the dinner table. Who are your 3 guests?

Arnold Schwarzenegger, because I’ve always been fascinated by people who can succeed across multiple disciplines, jumping from one world to the next; Julius Caesar, because his drive to power and incredible military genius was also married with a tremendous talent for historical writing; and my dad, because, well, I miss him and he'd like to have met those dudes.

5. What's the most underrated player rating in HBD?

Speed/baserunning. You can do a lot with those baserunning & basestealing sliders if you have a team built to exploit them.


6. If you were an HBD player, what would your ratings be?

Oooooh it would not be pretty. I have (had, mostly, at age 39 it’s starting to fail) one tool, which is speed. I consider myself legitimately fast, and used that to at least decent effect in high school ball and other sports, but everything else is worthless. I’d be an incredibly weak-hitting 2nd baseman, good range, ok glove, terribad arm, and probably like a 45-10-55-35-40 for the hitting ratings, with decent baserunning and good speed. Oh, and good bunting! I was a good bunter. Woohoo.


7. What's the significance if any of your HBD username?

Back in the ‘90s, there was a Conan O’Brien sketch called “Pimpbot,” which high school me thought was the funniest thing in the damn world, about a robot pimp. So when I needed a username for Yahoo or AOL or something in like 1997, I tried “Pimpbot” and it was taken… so I figured, what matters most to a pimpbot? Lovvvvvve, baby. So I tacked that on, liked it, and ended up using it every time I needed a random username for a random website that was 100% guaranteed not to be taken.

(In that vein, Pimpbotlove also ended up being my Daily Fantasy username, and became what I was known by at these DFS events, which was very strange to be at, like, the Playboy Mansion or someplace and dudes will walk by and be all “what up Pimpbot!” Strange times.)