Longtime sports radio host and play-by-play commentator Brooks Melchior started Sports by Brooks in 2001 to share, analyze and sometimes break news from all corners of the sports media world. Sports by Brooks had a voice and a following, drawing millions of readers to a site that helped form the tone of the sports blogosphere.
By 2013, however, both the site and his Twitter feed went silent until … five years later, he tweeted a clip from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on Sept. 26, 2018. Then, finally, SportsbyBrooks.com returned this past February with the first of what has become a regular posting schedule.
Melchior, 51, will now have an even larger daily presence, hosting a new daily sports talk show on the mobile streaming platform, Fancred, which is best known for the work of national baseball writer Jon Heyman. Every weekday at noon Eastern, Melchior will host a two-hour live show through Fancred’s On Air platform that gets distributed via its app, YouTube channel and on-demand podcast sites.
In announcing the new show, Fancred’s founder, Andrew Miller, credited Melchior for having “invented sports blogging” and “covering sports in the most entertaining but informative way.” SportTechie then caught up with Melchior to talk about his new job and his insights into digital media.
* * *
SPORTTECHIE: How did your relationship with Fancred start, and what are you hoping for out of this new show?
MELCHIOR: The Fancred relationship came out of a phone call from Andrew Miller, who’s the founder and CEO of Fancred and a longtime entrepreneur. He called me early in August to gauge my interest in doing what I really wanted to do, which is a daily show as a Sports by Brooks broadcast.
I had always done talk shows on radio—ESPN radio, Fox Sports radio. I was a program director for Entercom and was a longtime play-by-play guy. My play-by-play career culminated doing the Kansas City Royals in 1999. So I always had that broadcast background and, of course, I had the online presence that really transitioned me into a national figure. When Andrew called, I had long contemplated mixing those two and, for some reason, I hadn’t at that point.
Now what I’m ready to do—thanks to Andrew’s support and Fancred—is do for online live video streaming broadcasts what I did for sports blogs. Back in 2001, when I started Sports by Brooks, there was no sports blogosphere. It didn’t exist. We were part of the vanguard that created the sports blogging industry.
SPORTTECHIE: As a sports media pioneer, what did you learn about the space? What prompted you to start the site and how did you capture that audience?
MELCHIOR: I saw how the early online sports media was developing. I saw how sports content was being disseminated early on the web, and I saw that there was no aggregation going on. This was in 2001. You would have all these great things being reported by all these newspapers, and back then, there were no paywalls. It occurred to me, you have all of this great content, why not have one place where you could go through some of that stuff? And then, of course, I would personally curate that. When I started Sports by Brooks, there was a lot of sports content that was falling through the cracks and just wasn’t happening at all online.
And by that I mean, forget about the game stories. Forget about commentary and the opinion pieces that you get from columnists. I don’t know if you remember, but—and I know it’s still around to an extent—the notes columns [like] the Peter Gammons Sunday notes columns that you would get in The Boston Globe? I mean, that stuff was gold.
NFL SAFETY: Select Teams Wearing Sensor-Laden Mouth Guards to Study Concussions
I said to myself, wait a minute, almost all of that stuff is not being put on the web by those newspapers. With it not being there, I could be the conduit to bring that online and communicate that stuff—not that I was going to cut and paste it. I would either seek it out and link it if it was there, or I would bring it up. It was sports celebrity gossip in a way. You could argue that. I was someone who was a curator of all of this stuff, and it caught on.
And the other thing I did, I was someone who broke legitimate sports stories that moved markets. For instance, I reported on [comments] that got a longtime ESPN college football play-by-play announcer fired. It was my reporting, period. A couple of months ago in June, I broke the news that Michelle Beadle, Chauncey Billups and Paul Pierce were not going to be back for next season. I was the only person as the voice in the wilderness. And now, of course, it’s slowly but surely been confirmed.
What’s funny is, the whole time I was doing all of that, I was working at Fox Sports radio. I was doing talk shows, national talk shows. I was doing stuff for ESPN radio—ESPN 710 in Los Angeles, the affiliate ESPN owned and operated—and I had previously just launched a radio station for Entercom in Kansas City. I had done play-by-play for many years: baseball, American Hockey League. I’ve got this long, weird résumé that people don’t know about. When you put all this stuff together, it’s what we’re now talking about with Fancred.
POUND FOR POUND: Science Draws a Fine Line Between Winners and Losers in UFC
We’re going to be doing the unique sports content that we do on Sports by Brooks that really does cut through the noise. We’re not just going to be a reactionary, just backwashing what everybody does. If that’s what I did on Sports by Brooks, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’re obviously going to acknowledge what’s going on around us. We’re just going to bring you a different side to it that’s still relevant.
SPORTTECHIE: Once you built an audience, how did you keep them engaged? Were certain lessons learned?
MELCHIOR: Relentless. And I want you to know, this is precisely what I’m going to be doing with Fancred. I mean precisely. The way I did it on Sports by Brooks, I was relentless. Even though sports media has now moved to the center of our culture and we have the president weighing in on it all the time, somehow people still don’t attach seriousness to it. It’s not that I’m going to be Mr. Serious. Not necessarily. But it has become so important in our culture as to be literally, physically inescapable. And this is a relatively new development. The NFL wasn’t always as popular in the 1980s and ’90s and when I was growing up. It wasn’t anything like this.
Now, you look at how Fox has pivoted. They’ve gone to unscripted [programming], focusing on live sports, particularly the NFL. Now that is the entire network’s business model. Here’s the thing though: the sports media has never changed. I’ve been the one person out there [for whom] you don’t have to have pom-poms on to listen to me.
NOSTALGIA RULES: Panini Gives Fans What They Crave With Digital Collectibles
If you watch college sports, you’re treated like you’re 18 years old. You’re treated with the fight song and the mascots and the pom-poms and there’s all the phony-baloney stuff and traditions. I [went to] the University of Georgia. I’ve been immersed in it. What college football represents to me—along with the fun and games, I enjoy that part of it like everybody—but it also is the biggest, overt institutional injustice that exists in the United States. I mean that across the board with not paying the players—not compensating the players.
SPORTTECHIE: What do you already know about the Fancred audience?
MELCHIOR: It is literally the sweet spot of the people that consume what I do. A lot of times what I’ll do is cover a team, whether it’s an NFL team or baseball, and have a series of stories. It’ll be a recurring thing. I just had a fan on Twitter tweet me because I tweeted something about Oregon a second ago, and the person on Twitter who follows me says, ‘Well, now that Brooks is going after Oregon, we know he’s officially back.’ That’s an Oregon fan, but that sentiment is echoed by fans of dozens of teams.
One of the things about sports is people are so conditioned to never being criticized in a serious way. Everything is superficial criticism, right? So when I hit somebody and it hurts, people go berserk. They don’t know how to handle that sort of adversity. Sports fans don’t. So that’s why I really resonate. Now, the key here is, don’t be contrived, don’t troll. And I don’t. What I’m doing is legitimate.
LONG JOURNEY: Entrepreneurial Swimming Lessons Straight From the Heart
The business model of sports media is completely tied to live broadcast rights. ESPN, Fox, CBS, you name it, NBC, keep going—those are all business models where it’s all about maintaining appearances and relationships with the NFL.
Fancred has these avid fans. And so now when I’m doing this show, it’s going to be a compelling thing for them. Now they’re going to have this direct connection. Now when you’re on your phone, if you’re on the couch at home, if you’re at Starbucks, wherever you are—hell, you can get on the video screen with me. We can chop it up like cable news or ESPN [when] they’ll do split screens.
To be quite honest with you, one of the main appeals of the Fancred presentation is the mobile streaming platform. What really blindsided me at the beginning and caused me to say, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’ is the opportunity I’m going to have with these avid followers.
SPORTTECHIE: How did you spend your time offline?
MELCHIOR: Well, over the past four years, I essentially devoted myself to studying sports history, mainly. What really got me going down that rabbit hole was Jackie Robinson. I discovered Jackie Robinson was a football player. The first half of his life—literally until he was 25, he died very young—he played football. He didn’t play baseball. He was a nationally known college football player. He took this commuter school with five buildings [UCLA] and no dormitories to its first undefeated season in 1939 and a chance to play for the Rose Bowl against big, bad USC.
BATS TO THE FUTURE: ‘You Can Fight Technology. You Won’t Win’
There’s nothing more boring than watching leather helmet football unless—have you seen the film of him? It’ll knock your socks off. It will explicate a little bit of what got me going down this road. I have hours of footage of Jackie playing football, including Jackie scoring a 46-yard touchdown on August 28th, 1941 at Soldier Field against the George Halas[-coached] Chicago Bears. The photo of him scoring a touchdown was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. This is six years before the Dodgers, right? I could show you film of this incredible athlete, Jackie Robinson, playing football, 1939, 1940, and he looks the way Reggie Bush looked for USC in college.
Watched thousands of hours of old football film past 5 yrs. Here’s video I slapped together of the Reggie Bush of the leather helmet era. His name? Jackie Robinson. Yep, same guy. Last TD is vs. Chicago Bears. Unreal. pic.twitter.com/PdBopJO8zf
— Sports by Brooks (@SportsbyBrooks) October 5, 2018
SPORTTECHIE: You have been back with the 2.0 version of your site for about a year. How is the sports media climate different?
MELCHIOR: I would say that I think there’s actually a much bigger opening for me to get attention and to resonate with people, because we are now at a point where ESPN is doing everything it can to control what its talent says on the air. ESPN has doubled down on going all-in on its broadcast rights agreement-based business model. And so you can’t criticize the leagues. You know, they really tamped down on that in the last year or so. And, of course, everybody else is in the same boat.
They still want it to be the toy department. Sports media still wants it to be fun and games, but it’s not. And as I said earlier, sports is now moving to the center of our culture. You could make the argument that football in America is the most prominent, unique American tradition that we have today. You think about Thanksgiving and what’s unique to America. Well, I think the most prominent, unique tradition that brings us all together in a communal way—with stadiums as our cathedrals—is football in America.
KING OF QUEENS: Behind the Scenes With ESPN at the U.S. Open
There’s never been a better time for me to do what I’m doing. I’m now kind of unleashed on Fancred. I’m going to be able to speak my mind but not just talking about superficial cartoon stuff the way they do on FS1 and the way they do on ESPN. I’m one of the few people who’s going to talk to you like an adult and give you substance. I’m going to be appointment-listening and I’m going to do everything in my power to be every bit as relentless as I was.
What’s going to be unique about doing Fancred is, you have this immediacy of the fans being able to come on and join me on the video. That’s going to be more of a conversational thing. So you really do have a communal feel, whereas when you’re in a radio studio at Sherman Oaks, doing Fox Sports Radio as I did many years, in this kind of antiseptic environment, it’s a one-way transactional conversation. It’s not a conversation, right? You’re projecting to people, and yeah, you have calls, but it’s not the same. The stars have aligned as far as I’m concerned. And I just wanted to reiterate that, what Andrew is doing, he is a visionary to be able to see that and to be able to see my background and put all these things together and believe in what I’m doing.
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com