Numlock Sunday: Jody Avirgan on 30 for 30 podcast “The Sterling Affairs”

It’s a FiveThirtyEight reunion!

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to my former FiveThirtyEight colleague Jody Avirgan, who today is the producer of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast. Much like the Oscar-winning film series of the same name, the podcast does splashy features on the social and cultural and people side of sports.

I’m a huge fan of the podcast. Just last week Jody and his team launched season five, which I promptly listened to marathon style in one day.

This season — “The Sterling Affairs” — is hosted by journalist Ramona Shelburn and takes listeners through the tumultuous events that roiled the NBA after an owner was caught on tape making racially disparaging remarks. What followed was a blueprint for incidents to come and provoked a reckoning that served as an inflection point for the entire league. It also led…