The podcast is something I listen to fairly regularly, so I just listened to the latest episode, which I hadn’t listened to yet. It’s a relatively popular podcast, especially since it’s about how design interacts with the world and that’s something I’m interested in.

The episode itself was adapted from THE EDGE by Ben Reiter. It includes clips from the audio show, interviews with different players, and Roman Mars tying the story together with different statements. Ben Reiter is a writer for Sports Illustrated, having written numerous cover stories for the magazine. As for the length of the podcast, the actual podcast content is only around 28 minutes, so it’s probably meant to be listened to on a commute, or what that equivalent is these days.

The story is mostly linear, starting off with the story of a particular inning, and how it turned out the Astros were cheating. They interviewed Mike Bolsinger, who had 4 runs on 4 hits and 3 walks with 2 outs to go. From that night that effectively ended his career, Reiter goes further and talks about how the Astros won the World Series that season, which most people thought was because of good talent and a top tier analytics team. Then, they mention a whistleblower who told the public that the Astros were stealing signs, and notifying the batters of the kind of pitch by banging a trash can. There is some build-up, as we don’t find out about the sign stealing until the middle of the episode. Roman Mars also mentions how sign stealing is a tradition, but only if no technology is used to sign steal. In the end, the listener is left a bit bitter, as the Astros got to keep their pennant, and Bolsinger had his career ruined by a cheating team. Of the 29 pitches he had, there were bangs on 12 of them. We are left with some hope, though, since we hear of the Astros being sued because of their cheating.

The podcast has some pretty robust social media and marketing, since they just had a book on the NYTimes bestseller list, have 65k followers on Twitter, and are consistently ranked among the top podcasts.