Parenting & Family Quote by Leigh Steinberg

There is a carefully placed modesty in “Well,” a throat-clear that signals conversation rather than proclamation, and it matters because Leigh Steinberg’s public identity is anything but casual. As a super-agent figure in America’s sports-industrial complex, he’s typically associated with leverage, contracts, and the cultivated mythos of elite athletes. By reaching back to “as a kid” and landing on something as middle-American as baseball, Steinberg performs a strategic softening: before the boardrooms and bargaining tables, he was simply a fan.

The wording does quiet work. “Favorite sport” frames taste, not destiny; he’s not claiming an origin story of inevitable greatness. “Clearly” adds a wink of certainty that reads less like arrogance than like memory polishing itself into narrative. It’s the kind of line that fits an interview where the subtext is credibility. In an era when sports business can feel extractive, the agent’s easiest defense is sincerity: I loved the game first.

Contextually, baseball isn’t a random choice. For a man born in 1949, it’s the pre-NFL-domination national pastime, the sport of radio voices, box scores, and civic ritual. Dropping baseball as the childhood touchstone aligns him with tradition and nostalgia, a cultural shorthand for authenticity. The intent isn’t to inform you of his preferences; it’s to establish that his relationship to sports began in awe, not opportunism. That’s reputational armor, delivered as small talk.