Aaron Gleeman is trading in his podcast microphone for one behind the stand at the Minneapolis Courthouse. On Wednesday, the Senior Writer for The Athletic, who also hosts the Gleeman and the Geek podcast, decided to take Twins Daily to court for intellectual property theft. He argues the site has gotten away with stealing his talking points for their own benefit for years now, and enough is enough.
“Don’t tell me it’s some coincidence that we’ll put out an episode and 24 hours later three guys named Cody will put out three different articles, all surrounding my main talking points from the day before,” Gleeman said to a gaggle of media members waiting outside the courthouse on Tuesday morning. “If these guys are going to be making money off of my thoughts, then they should pay me. Well, they should pay me more than they already do (join now at patreon.com/gleeman – that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N slash Gleeman. Okay, back to the proceedings).”
Gleeman’s representative from the law office of Robinson, Dangerfield and Dice Clay says that Twins Daily has operated under shady business dealings for nearly 15 years, and the public deserves to have their team covered by polished, dignified professionals who have class. When asked to name which members of the current beat contingent fit this description, the attorney pretended to get a phone call and rushed off.
It’s a particularly interesting development, given the fact that Gleeman’s podcast partner, John Bonnes, happens to be one of the owners of Twins Daily.
“I’m going to be honest, when Aaron starts complaining about something, I almost always tune out for a few minutes,” said Bonnes. “He very well could have brought this to my attention years ago. There’s really no way of knowing.”
Twins Daily is known as one of the premier independent sources of Twins coverage, and often finds themselves central in online conversations surrounding the club. Gleeman argues their coverage has become somewhat predictable, among other complaints.
“Want to know what Twins Daily is going to write about tomorrow? Listen to Gleeman and the Geek today,” said the disgruntled media personality before turning into the courthouse. “And don’t get me started on their half-baked parody articles. In order to write effective satire, you need to be able to throw s*** at the wall, and you need to be able to make people laugh. Aside from Randballs Stu, everyone at Twins Daily has shown they’re capable of doing exactly one of those things.”
There’s been a notable increase in the parody articles that Gleeman is referring to, which is bound to happen at this point of the year when there’s little else to cover surrounding the team. Asked what a Twins blog ought to do about the unavoidable overlap of topics between a podcast and a website dedicated to the same baseball team, Gleeman’s attorney declined to comment.
Stu, for his part, has been the premier satire writer for the site for years, and is starting to feel the weight of the hardly chuckle-worthy content that he has inspired.
“Part of me feels like Oppenheimer after he witnessed his actions leading to the first atomic bomb,” Stu said while combing through the latest drivel in Twins Daily’s Just For Fun tab. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of comedy.”
You can find more of Gleeman’s thoughts on the Gleeman and the Geek podcast multiple times per week, and make sure to visit Twins Daily for all the post-podcast rehashing you can handle.