The Pardon My Book rollout has officially left the studio. Big Cat and PFT Commenter spent the 10-year PMT anniversary book's launch week doing everything short of hand-delivering copies, and on August 19 that meant a detour through a Target in Willowbrook, Illinois.
Big Cat filmed himself signing two copies sitting on the shelf, marked down 30% off, without exactly asking permission first.
If you’re near the Target in Willowbrook. Just signed 2 copies on the shelf. Dont think I was supposed to do that but whatever. https://t.co/wDxVL3VEFc
It's the latest stop on a book tour that's been happening in real time, not on a press junket schedule. A day earlier, PFT was posted up outside Wrigley Field buying beers for anyone who bought the book off his QR-code t-shirt, and Big Cat caught teammate Rico signing his own chapter for a kid who brought a copy to the ballpark.
The book push is also colliding with the actual show. The August 19 episode of Pardon My Take brought Pete Crow-Armstrong into the studio alongside Joe Buck, who's credited by the guys as having written the foreword. It's not a small credit — Crow-Armstrong is in the middle of an MVP-caliber season for the Cubs, and Buck is one of the biggest play-by-play voices in the sport lending his name to a book about a podcast he used to just guest on.
If you wondering how the Pardon My Take guys got so many celebrities to help out with the book, here is the answer: https://t.co/kC9k5omJ50
Ten years in, PMT has built enough goodwill that a Target employee probably isn't going to stop Big Cat from scribbling on the merchandise, and a Wrigley Field crowd will just as happily hand a book to a Cubs player mid-rain-delay as they will to Big Cat himself. That's the whole pitch of Pardon My Book — it's less a release than a scavenger hunt the guys keep restaging in public, one signed copy at a time.