The Saugus Rocket Jared Carrabis Is Leaving Barstool Sports For Draft Kings
Baseballs Tribal Chief is leaving Barstool Sports for Draft Kings.
As a diehard Stoolie and Kirk Minihane Show faithful, this stinks to see. Jared Carrabis, the host of Starting 9, Section 10, Morning Wood, and recurring guest on the Kirk Minihane Show is leaving Barstool Sports for DraftKings following unsuccessful contract negotiations.
Ryan Glasspiegel of the New York Post was the first to report on the story. The Post was able to get a comment from Barstool founder Dave Portnoy where he stated that he was “happy for him” and that “I told him that he should take that offer. I’ll miss him though. But that is our model. Build stars from the ground up and then replace them if they get mega deals.”
No details of The Rockets contract have been reported yet.
When the news broke, Carrabis tweeted out a picture with no message on it. It’s of Barstool personalities Gaz, Feitelberg, himself, Dave Portnoy, and Hank at a Red Sox game from years ago.
While I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, I enjoy Jared as a personality. He was great on CCK with KFC and Kayce Smith along with like I mentioned prior, the Kirk Minihane Show. But a lot of baseball diehards that are also Stoolies were both sad and disgruntled by the news.
Here’s some of the sad.
Then, there was some anger towards Barstool and those who handled Carrabis’s contract.
And that tweet raises a great point. Carrabis is probably the most entertaining, young baseball journalist out there and has worked wonders in growing a dying sport. He started podcasting in his parents basement, and then a decade and half later is covering the All Star Game on the field and riding on duck boats following the Red Sox winning a World Series.
I’m not really sure what effort was made behind the scenes to get a deal done between Carrabis and Barstool, but with his impact on baseball and being the only baseball primary guy at the company, I think there should have been a bigger push to keep him around vs letting him walk to a competitor in DraftKings.
While the behind the scenes work was not publicized, in April of 2021, Kirk Minihane appeared as a guest on Barstool CEO, Erika Nardinis podcast, Token CEO to discuss his true crime podcast, The Case while also trying to get more of a feel for what Carrabis’s contract situation looked like. Ultimately nothing came from the episode as his contract issues were never resolved.
Barstool has lost two employees this week and it’s only Tuesday. Producer Mikey Fowler left Barstool to run Audiorama, the podcast company founded by Greg Olsen, Ryan Kalil, and Vince Vaugh and now they’ve lost the Saugus Rocket Jared Carrabis.