Darren Smith is in Florida, drinking Sicilian margaritas and generating thoughts on Super Bowl LIX, Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance, the San Diego Padres (with pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training tomorrow) and This Week In Trump.

From the back patio of Border X Brewing in Barrio Logan, Darren Smith joined John Gennaro to talk about all of the things that cause John’s anxiety to be extremely high.

My wife Rebecca isn’t just a fan of the Dallas Mavericks, and she’s not just the person who made me a fan of the Dallas Mavericks, but she also covered the team for years as a beat reporter. We’ve spent the hours since the Luka Doncic trade trying to deal with our own emotions and decided to do some of it on a podcast. Enjoy! Unless you’re Nico Harrison. Then you should never enjoy anything ever again.

Is the San Diego Padres ownership situation to blame for the team’s slow offseason? Is it the reason Jurickson Profar signed with the Braves? And what would John Seidler look like as the “control person” of the team?

For the third week in a row, two unemployed guys who are passionate about San Diego sports (and politics) got together to talk about the San Diego Padres, the Los Angeles Dodgers, whether Roki Sasaki and Tanner Scott signing with the Dodgers is bad for MLB, what the Padres need to change about their roster in the next month…. and then we talked a little bit about inauguration day.

Darren and John are still unemployed and still talking into microphones, this time at Darren’s house in Imperial Beach. This conversation jumps all over the place, but it’s well worth your time.

You remember Darren Smith! He’s that guy from the radio who has been guesting on every podcast in town since he left radio. I lied and told him I had a podcast so that he’d come up and chat with me about the state of sports media, the Padres cutting spending, San Diego sports fandom, the future MLS team, dreams of an NBA arena in Mission Valley and so much more.

I know that a lot of the people subscribed to this newsletter/podcast subscribed to hear my thoughts on the San Diego Padres. It’s been a while since I dove deep into the team and gave any sort of grand thoughts. So, I thought I’d do that today, starting with the media covering the Padres and then getting to the roster construction.

I haven’t hosted a podcast in a really long time. I haven’t posted a podcast on Substack ever. I wanted to see how it works, so I recorded myself talking about Juan Soto signing with the Mets and a personal obsession with comparing Fernando Tatis Jr. to Luka Doncic.

My friend George Wrighster is a Dodgers fan. It’s not his fault, he grew up in Los Angeles and lives there to this day. But imagine my surprise when he started texting me, after the Padres swept the Braves in the wild card series, with trash talk. I replied with my objective thoughts about the Dodgers (not realizing that George was on the air with SiriusXM at the time) and….well, you should probably just listen.