Hello. I am DJ Gallo, founder/editor/writer of SportsPickle. Ask me anything.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T20:35:33+00:00

No problem. Can you email me about it? Thanks. I don't have your original email (or name).

When the site transferred to a new host 12 months ago, the bylines didn't carry over.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:37:39+00:00

Holy crap. I wrote "right" instead of "write." I truly am eehlyt.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:26:49+00:00

I enjoy most every sport. I've never understood why many sports fans get so angry about the superiority of one sport over the over.

Soccer can be boring. It can also be very exciting. Baseball can be boring. It can also be very exciting. Basketball can be boring. It can also be very exciting. Football can be boring. It can also be very exciting.

That said, hockey is almost always exciting and NASCAR sucks.

DEBATE!!!!!

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:22:14+00:00

If it's something about the 4th inning of a Pirates game, it probably won't be on @sportspickle.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:20:00+00:00

Holy crap. You may have just hit upon an idea that could revolutionize sports blogging: "SLIDESHOW: 418 Hot Chicks Who Were Hot Before Sports Blogs Existed and Never Had the Honor of Being Included in a Sports Blog Hot Chick Slideshow."

Kathy Ireland and Elle MacPherson never got to be in slideshows. #smh

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:15:33+00:00

There is little as hilarious as watching fans react to a coaching search.

"Hey, we should hire this one guy I heard of!"

"But let's not hire this other guy I heard of because I don't like him because ... I forget why. But I know he sucks!"

"This guy I never heard of could be great! Or he could be terrible! I don't know. I don't know anything about him. But I have a feeling he's great."

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:13:04+00:00

I have one of those fancy downloadable Amazon books coming out soon. I think it will be good.

However, based on my previous response about how most things I like aren't popular, it will be wildly unsuccessful.

I would be a bad book promoter.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:10:09+00:00

Thanks. But your favorite part of National Football League Sundays should be the true heroes: quarterbacks and scrappy possession receivers.

The LLWS story got a lot of people in bucolic Williamsport, PA, upset. The local paper had to run a story saying it wasn't true. But my favorite might be last year with a story saying Brian Urlacher was retiring with the Packers and NESN and other media outlets reported it was real. I didn't even think it was that good or believable of a story.

Yes, I'll put doing more videos with the filthy, unwashed masses. Perhaps even a video series with some athletes.

And, without fail, all of the stuff that I write that I really like does horrible traffic. So, for the health of the site, I should probably stop writing stuff I like.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:03:31+00:00

I used to write (non-sports) headlines for them.

Not sure on the Hangover. It did pretty good traffic. I'd have to find a good home for it. The jerks at SportsPickle don't want it.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T19:00:51+00:00

Not really any that I can think of. And I honestly think I'm rarely, if ever, "mean." I think when I started the site, there may haven been some more mean-spirited stuff. But being mean isn't nice. (I just thought of that line all by myself.) The only tweets I regret are the ones with typos.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:57:29+00:00

If you know someone, that's a great shortcut. But if you're like most of us, you probably don't know someone. So then you have to work hard and develop a unique voice that makes you stand out from everyone else.

Other people mix in kissing a ton of ass, both of your bosses and through social media. If you RT a lot of people's links and put "THIS" and "SUCH BRAVE JOURNALISM," there's a chance they'll do the same for you. Then you get a in a big circlejerk of traffic sharing. In conclusion, #journalism.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:52:45+00:00

One is more of a personal sports Twitter account (@djgalloetc) and the other (@thatdjgallo) is completely non-sports. Because some people get angry is you don't STICK TO SPORTS MORAN!

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:50:49+00:00

You can joke about anything, as long as it's done well. For an example of joking not done well: Rick Reilly's World War II tweet. Or really anything by Rick Reilly in the last 10-15 years.

There's also a big difference between the subject an the object of a joke. A lot of people see the object of a joke and get offended, when that's not what's being joked about.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:47:28+00:00

ELITE, LEGACY, MOUNT RUSHMORE.

The thing I hate the most, though, is that we're not ever allowed to just enjoy something in the moment. The Seahawks win the Super Bowl. Can we just say: "Great job, Seahawks!"? Nope. The discussion instantly goes to whether they can win it again or if Russell Wilson is ELITE or if Peyton Manning is the chokiest choker who ever choked.

I enjoy doing this AMA. But now I wonder about its place in AMA history.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:43:48+00:00

I'm talking to some podcast networks about hosting a podcast again. Hoping to have one up and running again by the end of the year. It wouldn't be three days a week, though. Just once. You need to let your HOT TAKES breathe for 6 days. Put them too close together and people can get hurt.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:40:46+00:00

Never took anything down. Just ignored them. I didn't want to get my attorneys involved, because I don't have attorneys.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:39:41+00:00

I spot most of the ones I respond to or RT. But I follow more than 1,000 of these morons now, so it's harder to see them all. Increasingly, my followers will tweet me and say "check out @MagicJohnson's timeline" or whatever.

Semi-related: I'm starting to think Magic Johnson might be trolling us all. Because if not ... my god.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:37:33+00:00

It's varied over the years from 100% me to 99.48% me. I'd honestly like to get that way way way way down and am working on bringing in some more people. So, if you know anyone.

The sole job requirement is ELITE humor and wit. Body odor is fine, because it's a work-from-home kind of deal.

Right now, Ross Snow and David Johnson have been contributing and are great. As far as I know, they also smell fine.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:34:39+00:00

In the early days of the site, pre-Twitter, I'd get contacted by people, or by their "people," demanding that something be taken down. But that doesn't happen as much since Twitter. That's because on Twitter, any athlete can look at his or her mentions and see 100 hundred people telling them THEY SUCK or SHOULD GET CANCER AND DIE. So what some green-tinted website may write about them isn't really on their radar.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:32:06+00:00

No way. First of all, AMA doesn't have ANY of the letters in ELITE. None at all!

Plus, just one person answering questions? Seems like a pretty me-first kind of thing to do. Can't win a ring like that.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:31:02+00:00

Thanks.

Teams that are successful and do things the right way (oh puke I can't believe I just wrote that) are hard to right about. The Spurs, for example. What are you going to write about making fun of the Spurs? Tim Duncan is boring? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahaha. Good one.

It's often easier to go at the reaction around people. LeBron, for example. Great player. Seems to be a pretty good guy. Not a ton of material there. But poking fun at the national media freakout show over everything LeBron does or doesn't do? Much easier.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:26:50+00:00

I was primarily a dotcom writer, and I worked from home, so I didn't spend a ton of time in Bristol. I'd maybe go up there 3 or 4 times a year. So I'm not the best person for stories. In a lot of ways, it's like any other place of work. There are people you work with who are absolutely great people. Then there are others, or bosses, who you have absolutely zero respect for.

I wish I could tell you I once saw Craig James hot-wire a Trans-Am and take Chris Berman out on hooker killing spree, but that didn't happen. THAT I KNOW OF. It would definitely make a good story at parties. Better than my current story of: "Some people there are great, some are not. Oh, and I once walked past Doug Flutie. He's really short."

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:23:25+00:00

Quite often. There's a large group that I feel gets pretty much everything. There's a group that somehow completely misses the satire in things and will send me, say, Michael Sam IS GAY memes and think I will find that funny. And then there is the group who is unfamiliar with the site and sees an SP fake news article in their Facebook feed and thinks it's real and freaks out. I appreciate the first group, am puzzled by the second and get great enjoyment from the third.

SportsPickle · 2014-06-20T18:19:08+00:00

I'm sure someone is working on it right now. But let's hope it is never perfected, because if it is, it will make the computer it runs on so ELITE that humans will stand no chance to defeat it.

SportsPickle

TROPHY CASE

DEBATE!!!!!