His whole banned list is just a running joke, it's not like he was looking to pick a fight with him. He has explained multiple times today and thought Cusack was going to play along with it but he kind of took it seriously and it threw Dave off
The whole company was talking about it and promoting it online, even Portnoy has had multiple tweets. You may not like it but Dave has given more eye balls to this Sox in the past couple years than most people