February 5, 2021 - Anthony Irwin on LeBron, the All-Star Game and Trevor Bauer

The Late Night Happy Hour with Andy and Brian Kamenetzky

He's the host of the Locked on Lakers podcast, one of the best ones out there. Anthony Irwin joins the Late Night Happy Hour, talking Lakers, LeBron James, the NBA and more... More in this case being his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers signing Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer. He's excellent at baseball. He's also a well-documented jerk who has harassed women online.

We start, though, with a conversation about what it's like to cover a team that you grew up rooting for as a fan. Where are the boundaries? When can you, ostensibly a journalist trying to provide honest commentary to a group of listeners or readers, use "we" in reference to the team, as "regular" fans might?

LeBron James has made it very, VERY clear he doesn't like the idea of the NBA staging an All Star Game. It's rare for James to be that vocally out of step with the league, so what happens now? For starters, he's given cover for a lot of other players to echo his sentiment. Any shot the league caves, given the amount of revenue the game could generate? Do the league's rank-and-file even want that?

How about the Lakers on Thursday? What did they prove to the rest of the league by stomping the Denver Nuggets as badly as they did over the second half? Was the gear they hit something other teams can match?

From there, we turn to Trevor Bauer. How does a Dodgers fan who wants to take seriously questions of bad behavior, particularly bad behavior towards women, look at the signing? How does this fit into the general trend of compartmentalizing that sports fans have -- or choose -- to do?