I can’t see Spike Eskin’s tweets because he blocked me and blocked the Crossing Broad account, but someone sent over these screengrabs. It’s a minor kerfuffle with Nick Piccone, who has 17,000 followers and posts a lot of video clips that highlight television and radio calls:

So that’s Nick starting out by ragging Joe Giglio for being a take artist. In 2020, Joe wanted to trade J.T. Realmuto to the Mets, but now he thinks Realmuto is a Hall of Famer. Someone tags Spike and tells him to slap Giglio in his bald head, then Spike responds by criticizing Piccone for taking WIP audio and posting it without permission.

Then Nick says the following, I think in response to Spike, but again, I’m blocked and can’t see his shit:

“Y’all love me. If I stopped doing it your social media numbers would take a hit”

“The guy was talking about Giglio’s takes. It’s funny. You turned it into something else because… well, I’m not sure why. I’m not making any money off it, if it makes you feel any better. The content I wanted to provide years ago you denied and gave to someone else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”


A couple of thoughts on this:

  1. Spike is correct that the audio belongs to WIP and you’re supposed to get permission to reproduce it.
  2. This is rarely enforced because it basically amounts to free advertising, free promotion, whatever you want to call it. When Nick posts Scott Franzke radio calls, it provides publicity for the WIP product. Similarly, when an account like Absolutely Hammered clips NBC Sports Philadelphia video, and shares it with 27,000 followers, it’s generally regarded as a positive. Nobody cracks down on this practice because it’s not harming them. And as an aside, it also makes the idea of social media accounts stealing content from other social media accounts comical, since it usually begins with someone stealing content from the rights holder. If we’re going to be sticklers for the rules, then the only Phillies clips you’d see would be on the NBC Sports Philadelphia account, the Phillies account, or the Major League Baseball account. And Scott Franzke would only be heard on WIP’s official feeds.
  3. Nick says he doesn’t make money off the clips. That’s easily confirmed because he doesn’t have a blue checkmark, and you need that to enroll in Elon Musk’s revenue sharing program. We’re in the program and we have six times as many followers and the revenue is negligible. It’s chump change. You can scrape together enough coin to buy yourself a Wendy’s Biggie Bag.
  4. When you peddle in hot takes, you can’t act surprised or offended when people call you out on it.

To the last point first, Spike seems to become awfully offended when people go after his guys. If you need to defend your people, defend your people, but when you flip flop like John Kerry in 2004, you’re going to be criticized.

And then on the second point, I don’t think you’ll find anyone in Philadelphia sports who thinks Nick Piccone is doing anything harmful. Sure, you could craft some type of argument that he built a decent-sized account on the back of other people’s content, but he’s not making money from it and WIP isn’t losing money because of it. This is like an automated quid pro quo. An unspoken symbiotic relationship. This is the remora and the shark of local sports media. I hear more of the WIP product as a result of Nick sharing it.

EDIT –

adding this: