This story was excerpted from Christina De Nicola’s Marlins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
JUPITER, Fla. -- When reliever Pete Fairbanks isn’t busy finishing games for the Marlins this season, he’ll be the go-to person in the clubhouse to chat about pop culture.
With the return of Spring Training, what better way for fans to get to know the newcomers both on and off the field than through a fun Q&A? In this installment, we catch up with Fairbanks.
This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity because we both went on tangents.
MLB.com: What was your gateway to pop culture?
Fairbanks: It’s had its resurgence, but watching Pokémon early on. That's taken a way different role. Stuff like that, and ‘Harry Potter,’ and even 'The Avengers,’ as that coalesced and moved forward, it evolved into something way more mainstream.
MLB.com: What’s your favorite franchise?
Fairbanks: As a millennial, it's probably got to be ‘Harry Potter.’ As a real sleeper, I was giving serious consideration to ‘Percy Jackson.’ I'll put this at 1B, and it's a strong 1B: ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender.’
MLB.com: What’s your favorite Potter book and movie?
Fairbanks: Book is just a daily coin flip between ‘Goblet [of Fire]’ and ‘Half-Blood Prince.’ Four, you have the Quidditch World Cup, and then the whole book is centered around a giant sporting event mixed with a latent conspiracy with Voldemort coming back.
MLB.com: You said his name. That’s bold, but he’s dead, so we’re fine.
Fairbanks: Can’t break a taboo if the guy’s dead.
I really enjoyed the Triwizard Tournament and all the Quidditch World Cup stuff. I thought that the two schools were really fun to bring in. ... And then ‘Half-Blood Prince,' the Voldemort backstory is great. It's the last book where you have any sort of Quidditch again, which I love Quidditch. Quidditch is awesome, despite the giant mishandling of the snitch point scoring. I just love the Voldemort path through him descending into evil, though, I don't know if he descended, because he kind of was just an absolutely horrible person. And then Snape unintentionally being Harry's best teacher was also really fun.
‘Prisoner [of Azkaban]’ is far and away the best movie. It's not even close. It's the only one that's cohesive and close enough to everything that it does justice in a way to the book. You get the time turner stuff, the dementors. Everything. They did a very good job with three.
Prisoner also has one of my favorite lines in the whole series, when they time turn and Harry casts his patronus and Dumbledore tells him that ‘Prongs rode again last night.’ I just love it.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ has the best redemption arc ever, in my opinion, as Zuko goes from banished prince to firebending teacher for Aang. It's kind of like ‘Harry Potter.’ You have the saddling of kids with adult problems. It's set as this long journey, and to see how they brought all the pieces together and made it happen was great. There's so many good, funny references and stuff that spawned from it. ‘Avatar’ is awesome. And then they made a sequel, ‘The Legend of Korra.’
They have books. Now they're doing an adult Aang movie, doing a ton of actual stuff to make it a franchise. What I find really cool about how they've done it, is, with Aang and Korra, they're opposites. Aang is this pacifist, airbender monk grappling with having to be a warrior, and Korra is this hot-headed bending prodigy. … All these avatars are having to deal with different faces of their predecessors, and how they are almost mismatched and learn to grow as a whole to become different things that they need.
MLB.com: You said his name. That’s bold, but he’s dead, so we’re fine.
Fairbanks: Can’t break a taboo if the guy’s dead.
I really enjoyed the Triwizard Tournament and all the Quidditch World Cup stuff. I thought that the two schools were really fun to bring in. ... And then ‘Half-Blood Prince,' the Voldemort backstory is great. It's the last book where you have any sort of Quidditch again, which I love Quidditch. Quidditch is awesome, despite the giant mishandling of the snitch point scoring. I just love the Voldemort path through him descending into evil, though, I don't know if he descended, because he kind of was just an absolutely horrible person. And then Snape unintentionally being Harry's best teacher was also really fun.
‘Prisoner [of Azkaban]’ is far and away the best movie. It's not even close. It's the only one that's cohesive and close enough to everything that it does justice in a way to the book. You get the time turner stuff, the dementors. Everything. They did a very good job with three.
Prisoner also has one of my favorite lines in the whole series, when they time turn and Harry casts his patronus and Dumbledore tells him that ‘Prongs rode again last night.’ I just love it.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ has the best redemption arc ever, in my opinion, as Zuko goes from banished prince to firebending teacher for Aang. It's kind of like ‘Harry Potter.’ You have the saddling of kids with adult problems. It's set as this long journey, and to see how they brought all the pieces together and made it happen was great. There's so many good, funny references and stuff that spawned from it. ‘Avatar’ is awesome. And then they made a sequel, ‘The Legend of Korra.’
They have books. Now they're doing an adult Aang movie, doing a ton of actual stuff to make it a franchise. What I find really cool about how they've done it, is, with Aang and Korra, they're opposites. Aang is this pacifist, airbender monk grappling with having to be a warrior, and Korra is this hot-headed bending prodigy. … All these avatars are having to deal with different faces of their predecessors, and how they are almost mismatched and learn to grow as a whole to become different things that they need.
MLB.com: What’s your favorite piece of memorabilia?
Fairbanks: This is tough because other than like Pokémon cards, I don't do a ton. I'm going to go with two answers that fit in the pop culture mold. [My wife Lydia] got me for Christmas a couple years ago a stamped blaziken card from one of the sets that came out in 2005 called Power Keepers. She got me a PSA 10 slab of that. My second was also a Christmas gift from her. It’s a vinyl of “I-Empire,” the Angels & Airwaves album. It's either out of like 100 or 500 or something.
MLB.com: What’s your favorite pop culture moment?
Fairbanks: One thing that I can relate to and that I'll always remember are the lines at release night for ‘Harry Potter’ books, because it's a thing that doesn’t necessarily happen now, and seeing everybody that was willing to go to the now defunct Borders at 11 o'clock to stake it out for a midnight drop of a book. That feels like something that's from a bygone era.
Going to the midnight screening of movies. It was the summer before my freshman year of college when the ‘Dark Knight Rises’ came out [in 2012], and I went to the showing, and then went again that same night and double dipped with the same theater movie within 24 hours.