For their 200th episode, Alex and Bobby open up the mailbag and spend an episode taking listener questions about baseball and far beyond, including a baseball podcaster brawl, deadly caffeine consumption, Star Wars characters in bed, all things Taylor Swift, secondary podcast ideas, episode music choices, and much more. Thanks to those who submitted questions, and to everyone for listening!
Songs featured in this episode:
Taylor Swift — “End Game” • Taylor Swift — “22” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC]
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and and and being able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitching and kind of help out so he wasn’t Tipping his Pitches. So Tipping Pitches, we hear about it all the time. People are home on the stand, what Tipping Pitches it’s all about. It’s amazing. That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, our 200th episode has arrived. I am so excited to do this episode here with you today, that I’m not even gonna start the podcast by reading a tweet by asking you a question that’s impossible to answer. By making a bad joke by revealing to you the discography of the bad old umpire. I’m just gonna get right into it with you, to say hello. We’ve made it 200 episodes. How do you feel?
ALEX: You know, I don’t know how I feel quite yet. I feel like we’re still kind of we’re we’re basking in the afterglow of the the World Series, where we haven’t had much time really–
BOBBY: That’s how you feel about the World Series?
ALEX: We ahh, we haven’t I don’t know at least I haven’t spent much time reflecting on on all 199 episodes [1:17]–
BOBBY: I listened to all 199 in the last.
ALEX: Lord knows I–
BOBBY: Crushed them 3x [1:21]–
ALEX: –forgot, I forgot the content of I would say probably 75% of them at this point. Most [1:27]–
BOBBY: It’s really the same.
ALEX: Yes. But anyway, feeling good. Glad to be here. You know, we got some wonderful listener questions that I’m I’m so excited to dive into in this episode. I I know technically speaking, we probably have to discuss the the Major Baseball event that concluded in the last week. But I think we should just like kind of get that out of the way up top, you know,
BOBBY: Yeah, let’s get out of the way up top Atlanta ahh whooped Houston’s ass in game six. They thoroughly dominated them. Ahh it was never in doubt, Max Fried was amazing. And I hate to say it, because this is gonna be at the top of our 200th Episode forever, but they earned it, Atlanta, they earned it.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: There might have been points along the way at which other teams could have put an end to their season. I won’t name any specific names, but maybe a team in Queens, could have put an end to their season if they put a little bit more distance between them. At the midway point of the regular season. However, from that point on from the trade deadline on all those players on the field, the coaches on the field, the Manager Brian Snitker, they earned it. So if you’re in Atlanta fan, all complications aside, Congratulations to you.
ALEX: Yeah, I have to say there was a bit of catharsis in the Astros losing in Yuli Gurriel being the final out, at least it’s interesting, you know. Re-regardless, I think of of who we were rooting for, which I think was neither team really. I ultimately just like I think having a different team come out on top at the end of the year, I think it’s generally boring to see the same teams dominate in the postseason. Even if you don’t think that Atlanta was a particularly dominant team, they were an enjoyable team, and they knew their strengths and they knew their weaknesses. And they made it work for them. And you have to tip your cap to that.
BOBBY: Agreed. Uhm and now you have to you have to tip your cap to the Astros for packing it in and letting start free agent Carlos Correa walk away because they’re too cheap. Uhh, that’s enough World Series chat, I think. Do–don’t you agree? Don’t you agree?
ALEX: That’s yeah, that’s I think that’s about all I have capacity for.
BOBBY: I guess really quickly shout out to Jorge Soler. That guy is just a joy to watch play Baseball because when he connects with a ball, that ball is not coming back. Sometimes not coming back to the stadium, sometimes maybe not even coming back to the state. The home run that he hit in the first to date of the clincher, was just one of the hardest hit most destroyed baseballs I’ve ever seen in my life. And I have to say, that’s a handsome man. Jorge Soler, not bad to look at.
ALEX: Nope. Yeah, that that is one of those home runs that, at least in my mind, will will live on is one of the more memorable postseason dingers. [4:19]–
BOBBY: It’s kind of one of the only–
ALEX: –last [4:20]–
BOBBY: –it’s one of the only memorable moments throughout this whole postseason like singular–
ALEX: Yeah–
BOBBY: –moment.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. And it was fucking Jorge Soler for the Atlanta Braves.
BOBBY: Kansas City Royals legend, Jorge Soler. Ahh all right, well, we have so many questions. Thank you to everybody who submitted a question. Thank you to everyone who submitted a voicemail specifically. Ahh we want to get into all of those and hopefully answer as many as possible. There are a few that we’ve saved for future episodes. We will let you know about those if we do not get to them for that reason. Ahh but before we do all of that, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I am Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches.
[4:59]
[Transition Music]
BOBBY: All right, time to jump right in, Alex, if you’re new here if this is your first episode, listen to Tipping Pitches. This is not how it usually is, we are doing–
ALEX: So weird one for you to be starting off with.
BOBBY: We are doing a full mailbag episode just listener questions. Uhh we take listener questions throughout the year on our voicemail line through email ahh 785425881 tippingpitchespod@gmail.com. Specifically ahh we started the voicemail segment because we wanted fans to be able to call in and complain about their owners. But, you know, we didn’t want to limit it to just that we didn’t want to limit it to people’s negative experiences. So we wanted people to ask us anything under the sun. It didn’t have to be Baseball related. Didn’t have to be labor related, though it could be. So we have a nice mix of questions here. From our lovely listeners, they really did not let us down Alex.
ALEX: No, we had to think pretty hard about each one of these. There’s a good amount of these that I still don’t have an answer for yet. And it’s just gonna be you know, we’re thinking on our feet here, I like it. The the listeners are keeping us on our toes.
BOBBY: That’s what we do. Okay, uhh you start us off, pick a question.
ALEX: Ahh all right. Let’s start off with it with a big one. It comes from our good friend, Mets Twitter legend Richard Staff, “If every baseball podcaster got together for a massive barehanded brawl to the death, who would win?
BOBBY: I didn’t have to think for more than two seconds about this one, CC Sabathia would win, bro.
ALEX: Shh, yeah.
BOBBY: He’s a Baseball podcaster.
ALEX: I guess technically, yeah.
BOBBY: And he’s also a Hall of Fame six, seven Baseball pitcher who’s absolutely shredded right now.
ALEX: That feels, that almost feels not fair to include like, like athletes with podcasters. Like I don’t think of CC Sabathia as a podcaster. I think of him–
BOBBY: I do.
ALEX: –like it CC Sabathia. Yes, I know. I would like what if you exclude you know, guys like Sabathia or all the current Baseball players who have their their own podcasts?
BOBBY: I don’t know man.
ALEX: [6:56]–
BOBBY: I think we can take, we can take Collin, we can take Collin McHugh come on.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Bring it on, Collin.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: No, Collin will kick our asses, uhm he’s a professional athlete. I don’t know what was your answer for this one?
ALEX: Who would win is the the listeners because there’d be fewer Baseball podcasts you’d have to sift through.
BOBBY: Ohh.
ALEX: You know, one or two, one or two less than–
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: –you need to keep in your rotation.
BOBBY: This guy’s got jokes. You don’t have a name a specific day of someone who would win?
ALEX: I don’t know. I’m gonna be honest. I don’t have–there are not a lot of great options out there. No shade to all our fellow Baseball podcasters, ourselves included. I I I don’t think there would be so much of a win as as we’d all just kind of tucker each other out.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And go home, you know.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Like is Ben Lindbergh gonna come in here and start like, throwing chairs you know, dropping elbows? Probably not not?
BOBBY: No, although Ben Lindbergh, sneaky jacked.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Sneaky jacked–
ALEX: It’s true, it’s true. So maybe there’s your dark horse.
BOBBY: Yeah, he’s a dark Horse. But the thing about a brawl, bear handed brawl to the death as Richard said, you just have to be built different. Not to not to speak in memes, but you kind of have to like shut apart part of your brain off and turn a different part of your brain on to when it barehanded Brawl to the death.
ALEX: Yeah, well–
BOBBY: And I’ll tell you one thing. Neither of us have that part of our brain to fill.
ALEX: Oh ab–no, absolutely not, there were–
BOBBY: Who would–
ALEX: –word stamina–
BOBBY: –win barehanded, who would win in a barehanded brawl to the death between us? That’s what the listeners really want to know.
ALEX: Not sure they do, probably not me. Uhm yeah, I guess I gotta I mean, whoever is out there records like a two or three hour Baseball podcast. Because I know there are a few of those. Those are honestly probably the guys who who make it through to the end because they’ve–
BOBBY: Yeah, Steven Golden.
ALEX: –gotten. Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: Infinite inning, infinite inning, infinite brawl, Steven Golden, that’s our choice. Okay, next question. Uhm one of our most very loyal listeners, Becca, submitted several questions and a voicemail. So let’s run through Becca’s questions really quickly. And also a quick shout out uhm to her for running a half marathon and she said she plans to listen to this while she runs the half marathon so we should make this as long as possible. So let’s just answer Becca’s questions really quickly up top. Ahh this question was alarming to receive, Alex, “What is the most amount of caffeine you guys have consumed in one day?”
ALEX: My doctor stopped listening to this.
BOBBY: And also your mom, I don’t think your mom’s gonna stop listening here. But–
ALEX: I don’t think so. I mean, my answer is probably not going to be as outrageous as yours. It was It definitely happened at some point during college when–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –we were running our student newspaper. Uhm I was just thinking last night about how there were there were nights where we’d make our Dunkin Donuts run before they closed you know, they’d be like, oh shit, they close at 10. We should probably get over there to get our iced coffees. Those are some bleak days. Uhm–
BOBBY: Many of those nights turned into also us brewing–
ALEX: Right, exactly.
BOBBY: -Folgers, house blend ground coffee from the red Folgers jar at like two in the morning.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So that’s what that’s the level that we’re talking about here. The level of deep, deep darkness.
ALEX: Yeah. I [10:16]–
BOBBY: [10:16] we plumbed.
ALEX: I don’t, I don’t know that I have a number like a, like grams of caffeine consumed–
BOBBY: That’s the thing, the more alarming part of this is that I can’t point to one day, I can–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –just point to periods in my life with which by caffeine consumption was like more than eight cups per day,
ALEX: Right, days when I’m like, you know, you walk into think coffee, God forbid, and–
BOBBY: I will never set foot in there again.
ALEX: –and ask the barista for like a regular coffee with like three shots in it. And the guy’s like, “Are you sure?” No, I need you to understand what you’re asking for.
BOBBY: There’s not even a name for that. Like a red eye is one thing, a black eye is another thing. And then three shots? That’s even having a name.
ALEX: This is a, this is a gut punch.
BOBBY: Well, actually, now that we’ve talked through it, I think that I can point to a specific day. And it is the day that I wrote all 30 pages of my thesis, my undergraduate thesis, and I had three iced red eye and multiple cups of regular coffee in between it. I wrote it all all in one day. 16 hours, sat in the same spot.
ALEX: I say this was so much love that it’s kind of a miracle that you’re sitting here today.
BOBBY: It kind of is and you know where I got those. This is full circle for this podcast by the way, you know where I got those iced red eye?
ALEX: I think where you got them.
BOBBY: Madman Espresso, which is where Alex and I used to stop and get iced red eye before every time that we recorded this podcast at WNYC, which is NYC radio station.
ALEX: The only free ads we will ever give on this podcast [11:48]–
BOBBY: For the rest of my life–
ALEX: Frankly it’s it’s the reason it exists.
BOBBY: Yes. I I think we might have started recording this podcast just so that we could go get the iced red eyes.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Great question, thank you, Becca. Uhh Becca also asked for us to power rank our Halloween candies. [12:03] how many Halloween candy she wants us about, this is like every Halloween candy, I just did three. Uhm I’ll read them really quickly because none of them are very controversial. Uhm Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is number three. Hi-Chews, I put as number two. I don’t know if that counts as Halloween candy, but it’s candy. You could give it to someone for Halloween. Uhm and then my number one candy is, this might actually be slightly controversial a 100 grand–
ALEX: Candy Corn.
BOBBY: No, It’s not Candy Corn. Please do not pull me into the Candy Corn discourse for the love of God.
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: No a 100 Grand Bar.
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: People–
ALEX: I res–
BOBBY: –still use 100 Grand Bars, bro.
ALEX: They do, I respect that.
BOBBY: Thank you.
ALEX: 100 Grand Bars are good. There’s a lot in there. There’s a lot to unpack. And [12:48]–
BOBBY: There are layers.
ALEX: –it’s dense.
BOBBY: It’s dense, exactly. It’s dense, it has multiple different textures. It has caramel, which I really appreciate. 100 Grand Bar, it’s my number one candy. What about you?
ALEX: It’s tough, I have I have like three or or four at the top of my mind that I think on any given day could probably swap places. I think number three is probably, Twix, which I think are are are highly underrated. Even though I think they’re relatively popular.
BOBBY: Outstanding candy.
ALEX: It’s an outstanding candy. I mean, it’s it’s easy to take on the go it’s a very satisfying candy to eat, the crunch, you know.
BOBBY: Can you tell me a candy that’s not easy to take on the go?
ALEX: Well, I think there are some that like you know, there’s less structural integrity there.
BOBBY: Ohh, okay.
ALEX: The fact that it it has the like wafer in it lends it I think a little uhh to ease of ease of transport per se–I they’re they’re you know, I think Reese’s for example, which are which would be second on the list–
BOBBY: So they get smushed, yeah.
ALEX: Get smushed and they get very melty, right? Like that’s, if those things sit in the hot car, it’s it’s over. Ahh number one–
BOBBY: [13:57] freezer.
ALEX: Number one is without a doubt, Milky Way’s
BOBBY: Mmm, I respect, I respect–
ALEX: I have, I have said before to people and they’ve said just eat a Snickers. It’s–
BOBBY: No, Milky Way is better than Snickers.
ALEX: I agree. I think they’re, you know, they call for–
BOBBY: Twix is better than both of them though, in my opinion.
ALEX: Mmm. Yeah, I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that one.
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: So it’s the DH and Milky Way’s versus Twix, but you know.
BOBBY: Is this the point where you admit that you like Candy Corn to people?
ALEX: You know, I’d kind of I’d kind of softened on Candy Corn in in in the–
BOBBY: Oh, the woke mom–
ALEX: –in the last few years–
BOBBY: –has push you off Candy Corn.
ALEX: Exactly, yeah. You know, the witch hunt? Uhh they they got me, what can I say?
BOBBY: You used to be able to like Candy Corn in this country, Alex, and now you can’t.
ALEX: I need to bring my boys over. We just have to like turn the lights off and just eat Candy Corns and no one sees us, it’s it’s a travesty. Candy Corn is fine, it’s not terrible. It’s not a great candy either. I whoever’s out here Like caping for Candy Corn as like a tier one candy, that’s someone you should not trust.
BOBBY: Okay, good question. Thank you, Becca. Ahh Alex, I believe that is now your turn to pick a question.
ALEX: All right, well, we’ll just let’s keep it rolling with food, because we’re here. You know, we’re already in that headspace. We got a we got a couple questions about ballpark food that we will just ahh, we’ll we’ll kind of lump together and answer together. Christina asked about “Our favorite food, we’ve gotten to the ballpark”. MLB respecter asked the same thing, “What’s the favorite thing we’ve eaten at a sporting event?” And then ahh, and then Robert Guardians threw in our little bonus question, which is, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?”
BOBBY: Okay, let’s save that one for last. For the love of God, you should have waited till the very end of the episode for this slide, so that nobody [15:47]–
ALEX: This is the Patreon question.
BOBBY: Favorite food that you’ve ever gotten out of ballpark? Do you have an answer for this?
ALEX: There is one that comes to mind. And that’s I was at an A’s game in 2012 or 2013. With some high school buddies, and we went, uhm we had ahh partaken in activities prior to the event that would lead to uhm and an excessive amount of hunger.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: And so we needed something, you know, that was going to wet our our appetites. And we found what might be the best Pulled Pork Sandwich I’ve ever had at–
BOBBY: Really?
ALEX: –a Ba–at a Baseball game. I’d it’s certainly I think we, you know, you step beyond the walls out into the real world. And you’ll find multitudes of foods that are better than that. But I so I like for whatever reason, just distinctly remember that. And I also remember that we like got on the big screen. We were doing the Bernie Lean there was no one in the ballpark. We were ligatures–
BOBBY: Oh my God. It was like having the time of your life.
ALEX: It was it was an experience, but the Pulled Pork Sandwich was that the apex of that, so that’s probably going to be my answer.
BOBBY: So I guess my answer would be the time that I got barbecue when I went to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, because it was like, Oh, I just gotten into Kansas City for the first time. First thing we did was boom, go straight to the ballpark. And I was very hungry. I wanted barbecue. But then like I got better barbecue the next day incense in Kansas City. So is it like just that I was excited to be there and hungry and had been driving all day? Or was it actually really that good? I think maybe a combination of both. I remember some very good. This was this past season, some very good Pulled Pork Fries that I got at Petco–
ALEX: Mmm.
BOBBY: –which is a move. A a messy one didn’t need those in the seat, ate those at the table outside the restaurant there. I was kind of doing a tour. We had whole weekend games. And you know, it was fun. And they were good. The the Fuku Sandwich at Citi Field is very good. But that feels like cheating, because it’s like an outside restaurant that just happens to have a sandwich there.
ALEX: Yeah. And it’s also like 20% worse than if you got it outside the stadium. You know, like you’re sitting–
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: –there all day and it’s soggy and I’m like, this is a really good meal. That is not as good right now.
BOBBY: Right, exactly. I’m just a regular old, I have to give a shout out to my to my original, regular old chicken tenders and fries from Citi Field. They execute the chicken tenders and fries better than any other stadium that I’ve ever been to. So shout out Citi Field, shout out Mets concessions, I hope that when I finally make it back to Citi Field, they’re still as good because I know that these–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –concessions companies cycle through through like two or three year contracts. So I hope that it’s exactly like I remembered otherwise gonna be very disappointed when I get there. It’s been more than two years since I’ve been to a Mets game at Citi Field.
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: Isn’t that interesting?
ALEX: Wow. Well, the food’s so good. I can confirm that for you so you can sleep at night. I also have to give a shout out to the the Oracle Park garlic fries, which just which hit different, they do. Garlic fries at a baseball game, you you I think legally you can’t eat garlic fries, like outside of a baseball game. Like just socially, I’m not sure if it’s acceptable to consume that much garlic just like–
BOBBY: It’s a lot of garlic.
ALEX: It’s kind of it’s kind of incredible how much they’re able to get on there.
BOBBY: I love garlic. Uhm garlic is basically in my blood. I’ve been eating garlic, at least in one meal per day since I was like three.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But they don’t they don’t always cook it down enough like the Dodger Stadium garlic fries overrated. Sorry, to our daughter’s fans who love them and who have been eating them since they were children. But I think they’re overrated. They don’t cook it down enough. The flavor just ends up being too strong.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Maybe I’m soft, but that’s just not how I like to consume my garlic. I like it a little bit more roasted, you know.
ALEX: Next you’re going to start saying that pitchers should be able to wear jackets on the base paths. Okay, Bobby.
BOBBY: Okay. Uhm It’s a hotdog a sandwich, Alex, from Robert Guardians.
ALEX: No, it’s not. It is.
BOBBY: It is a sandwich. This is funny. It’s funny that somebody wrote in and asked this because we have gotten into so many arguments about this exact question that our group chat with me, Alex and our significant others. It’s named, what is the sandwich? Question mark?
ALEX: Mmm.
BOBBY: That is the title of the group chat.
ALEX: Yeah–
BOBBY: That is–
ALEX: We are on the bar, and spent like two hours–
BOBBY: Arguing–
ALEX: –[20:21], we didn’t come to a consensus either.
BOBBY: It got really existential and philosophical to be honest.
ALEX: Uh-hmm, right.
BOBBY: Like if this isn’t a sandwich, then what is the meaning of life basically?
ALEX: Right, yeah. Are we just a sandwich in God’s universe, the the the the the filling to to are spread.
BOBBY: My main thing with is a hotdog a sandwich is that it’s meat between two pieces of bread and people will tell me? No, the bread is connected. And I’m like, frequently on a hoagie, or a cheese steak. If you’re from Philly, or South Jersey. The bread is connected on those, but those are unquestionably sandwiches.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And then if the bread rips apart, so then you’re telling me that it’s become a sandwich because it’s two separate pieces. This is just the thing that I can’t clear. And I’ve had multiple people be like, well, hotdog is just its own category. And I’m like, that’s silly, then just just make everything its own category. Why have categories at all, if you just have all these exceptions?
ALEX: I think the 90 degree rotation actually, is a lot. There’s a lot in there.
BOBBY: Yeah, that’s why because I eat it on its side. And people eat it. Most people eat it with the hotdog facing to the sky.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I eat it with the bread to the sky.
ALEX: You–
BOBBY: Hotdog to the sky–
ALEX: –you’re making it a sandwich. Like even if it wasn’t a sandwich yet right
BOBBY: now. This is a damn sandwich. Well, I love I love me a sandwich. You know, that’s fair.
ALEX: I again, whatever helps you sleep at night, if, if turning it on inside makes it a sandwich for you, then it’s it’s a sandwich.
BOBBY: It doesn’t make me angry anymore, like it used to.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Uhm I’ve accepted your views on the world. And I’ve accepted that I can’t change them.
ALEX: Right. So it makes us special. Okay, uhh I think you’re up.
BOBBY: Okay. Uhm I’m going to take a question from Jane, one of the co-hosts of Batting Around. Uhh who has been on this show before, Jane asks, “You to use to live together, right? Which one was the worse roommate?” Now, Alex, we were asked this question by Jerry Blevins on this podcast when we brought him on to grill him. And we mentioned to him that we had lived together. And he answers–
ALEX: He turned the tables on us.
BOBBY: –he did turn the tables on us. He hijacked our interview with him. And we didn’t have a great answer for it, then do you have a better answer for it now? Who do you think was the worst–
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: –roommate between us?
ALEX: I don’t know. I think I ahh, it’s hard to distinguish between like how I live now and how I lived like five years ago, you know. I’m like, like I know right now, I’m bad at doing dishes. That’s just a flaw that I’ve accepted about myself. I I I–
BOBBY: [23:00]–
ALEX: –let them pile up.
BOBBY: –spent on that one.
ALEX: Right, yeah. I mean, it’s been a lot.
BOBBY: You’ve had to learn to love yourself and your failure to wash dishes.
ALEX: Exactly, I will say I’m very good at the the act. I just I just don’t typically ahh do it in a timely fashion, which is, you know, it’s it’s led to some tension. Uhm and so was I like was I like that in college? I don’t, maybe.
BOBBY: No, that wasn’t the prop–no, no that was never a problem–
ALEX: Oh, there was a problem. Oh oh, what was the problem?
BOBBY: No, that–
ALEX: You tell me.
BOBBY: –was, well, that wasn’t our problem, because neither of us were cooking, right? We very often–
ALEX: Not that much.
BOBBY: –we were just like buying the cheapest food that we could find to either have delivered or like pick up from the bodega or whatever. Because I don’t know, we weren’t treating ourselves well? You started cooking a lot more towards the end of when we lived together. Like when we had an apartment we never cooked like in our dorm really.
ALEX: Oh God, no. Yeah, I wasn’t even thinking about that, if I’m being honest.
BOBBY: Partially because like having other roommates around in our sophomore year, specifically, when we had two people who we didn’t know at all, and they just made the place a disaster.
ALEX: That was–
BOBBY: Nas–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –unsent–truly unsanitary space to live in.
ALEX: Yeah, you kind of have to like wait that a little bit because we were angel roommates in comparison.
BOBBY: If you had walked in to there, it would have been like, you don’t need to worry about what’s in the vaccine. If you’ve ever been in Alex and Bobby storm sophomore year–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –one of those moments. Uhm, I think that I’m better from like a traditional roommate rubric. Like I because I like cleaning things like I like–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –doing dishes. I like you know, picking up trash and throwing it away. I never leave any of the stuff around because when I get anxious that’s just the first thing that I do.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So I think if you were like labeling, who was checking off all the boxes that you would be looking for in a random roommate or like a stranger that you didn’t know on Craigslist. I think that I would check more of those boxes.
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: But then I do have some things which are which are maybe a little bit more annoying, like the fact that I just would stay up until like four in the morning–
ALEX: That’s get to be the one thing I said.
BOBBY: Playing video games like in with the lights on like in the common area or whatever. So if that is the type–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –of thing that bothers you that a roommate does, then maybe I’m not your ideal roommate. But neither of us really I think both of us are great roommates.
ALEX: Oh, absolutely. I have no coms–
BOBBY: [25:22] to share a room with either of us.
ALEX: I was going. Anyway, yes, we were both very good, good roommates to each other. Clearly our relationship made it through some some friendships, don’t. Some–
BOBBY: That’s true.
ALEX: –some roommates, uhh, you know, it, they come to blows over, you know, an electric bill and that, thankfully, that never happened to us.
BOBBY: Do you think any of our previous roommates didn’t like us as roommates? Like, do you think any of them were just like, “Man, I cannot listen to from under the court tree another time. I got to get out of here”.
ALEX: Ahh I mean, my freshman year roommate was I’m not sure he registered my existence that much. He was he was having a bit of a tough time, I think because he didn’t like NYU or New York, which is why he subsequently transferred. Uhm so I think I was probably the least–
BOBBY: Sort of it’s sort of a tough hurdle to get over.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. I think–
BOBBY: The the proto New York?
ALEX: –the most annoying thing. Yeah, is that he wouldn’t really the most annoying thing I think, probably on his part was he never really left the room and I would bring people over. And you know, because it’s college and you have like, just like, just like friends, you know?
BOBBY: Oh, yeah. bringing people over–
ALEX: People would chill.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You’re the center of attention.
ALEX: Ahh I really wasn’t I didn’t have many friends freshman year. Uhm–
BOBBY: You know brought me over. I never went to your dorm freshman year.
ALEX: That’s true, we didn’t know each other freshman year.
BOBBY: We met each other–
ALEX: [26:46], yeah.
BOBBY: –at the end of the spring semester was when we started to become friends. Uhm what about the what about the the guy, the guys who moved in with their hair gel after I abandoned you and went abroad halfway through our junior year?
ALEX: That was tough, they were not great. They were like, using my knives and like getting them like somehow getting the handles like discolored. I was like, “What are you, what are you using here? What are you like, putting shit on your hands and cutting like, how was this, how was this get working?”
BOBBY: They’re using spider tacks so that they didn’t drop the knife.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: Amazing, amazing. Uhh okay, it’s up to you to pick a question.
ALEX: Uhh okay, this one comes from Annie. I love this question. “What are your guys’s favorite and least favorite public transit systems you’ve used?”
BOBBY: Wow, so this is so up our alley, particularly, particularly your alley, Alex, since you were an Urban Studies Major? Is that what it was called in NYU? I don’t even remember. Metropolitan Studies? Yeah.
ALEX: Metropolitan Studies, yeah.
BOBBY: Uhm, what so do you want to take this one first? I have I have, I don’t really have a least favorite public transit system that I’ve used. Because most of my experience with being frustrated with the public transit system, is it not existing? So therefore I haven’t used it really like LA would be my answer for that. It is one of the most infuriatingly planned cities I have ever set foot in, let alone spend three and a half years living it.
ALEX: Yeah, well, and it’s it’s tough. Because I know, at least for me, I have a very narrow slice of transit systems I’ve actually used there are plenty around the world that are considered to be very good, that I just, you know, I haven’t had the privilege of being able to, to ride right in, in Shanghai, in London, I would love to check out the tube.
BOBBY: I’ve been on the tube, it’s very expensive. But that’s just kind of like a through line throughout all of London.
ALEX: That’s fair, yeah.
BOBBY: It’s very nice. But you understand why it’s so nice, because you’re paying–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –for it to be that nice every time you ride it.
ALEX: Right, exactly. I mean, that, all right, this isn’t gonna be a very interesting answer.
BOBBY: Yeah–
ALEX: But the best–
BOBBY: –New York.
ALEX: –It’s New York, yeah. And and that is largely from the perspective of can it get you anywhere you need to go? And is it by and large pretty affordable? And somewhat consistent, which is, it’s true on on all accounts. Now it has been kneecapped by decades of neglect, right? It’s a system that is falling apart. But it has the capacity to to carry the whole city. I think that it’s it’s blind spots. I mean, as I said are it’s underfunded and that it doesn’t reach out into deeper parts of Brooklyn and especially Queens, right? You can’t get around Queens without a car. But so the the subway system is great. The bus system is incredible, I will say as well. I use the bus a lot. Buses high key underrated.
BOBBY: People sleep on the bus and people sleeps the bus.
ALEX: I sleep on the bus, yeah.
BOBBY: Yeah. Uhm no, that that’s my answer as well, that is my favorite. Do you have like a second place, I mean, I have used so few public transit systems that I could probably just like rank them, you know.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like Philadelphia, it can get you around, and it can get you in from like a suburb pretty well. But like once you’re there, it’s not quite as easy to traverse around the area using the subway, you might have to take a bus or you might have to walk or you might have to have a car. And that’s kind of like, it’s a pretty universal experience among a lot of cities that are not like quite as big as New York.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Uhm and then the only other public transit system I’ve ever really used with regularity was the bus in Florence, which was pretty good. It was pretty good. But also, Florence–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –is like a small, basically town. It’s like a medieval–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –city. So it’s not that hard to put like five buses in there, and figure–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –out where you’re going.
ALEX: I will say BART in the Bay Area is good. If you are in San Francisco, it’s great. You can get anywhere you need to go. If you live in one of the surrounding cities. You can’t really just rely on BART. I mean, you kind of can–
BOBBY: I wonder how–
ALEX: –you can–
BOBBY: –it came that way–
ALEX: –[31:17] together with the bus. Shh–
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: Yeah, I wonder.
BOBBY: Is there anything to read into there? I’m not sure.
ALEX: You want to talk about a system that has been kneecapped by neglect, and that’s just falling apart. And there’s over capacity that’s, that’s that’s the one. So it’s it’s great the possibilities there. But guys, you got to get to spend money to make money. We know this, this is econ 101.
BOBBY: Quick shout out to the high speed trains, in Italy and in Europe. That I guess that qualifies as a public transit system. Uhm it’s just a country wide public transit system. And you can get from any point to any point in the entire country from any major city, to any other major city in the entire country. And it remains a crime against humanity and civilization that the United States does not have something comparable to the high speed train systems in Europe. It’s an embarrassment, a technological embarrassment.
ALEX: Yes, well, and this is a good point to bring up. Obviously, when Elon Musk’s Hyperloop gets built, that will be number one, yes. That [32:17]–
BOBBY: Now none of us will be around to see it.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Elon Musk’s consciousness will have been pasted into a Tesla motor vehicle by then, a Tesla truck but yeah, we won’t be around for it.
ALEX: No, our grandchildren will, will be able to enjoy it if the planet hasn’t burned yet. Ahh okay, I think it’s [32:38]–
BOBBY: All right, let’s dig into the voicemails a little bit. We got a bunch of [32:43] alternate back and forth between ahh email and Twitter questions and voicemail questions for the next few.
VOICEMAIL 1: Hello, Alex. Hello, Bobby. Ahh it’s Henry again. Your friendly neighborhood, George Steinbrenner stan. Uhm I wanted to call in to issue a hearty MazelTov on 200 episodes. Uhm as I think Bobby mentioned, one of few episodes ago, it’s kind of an arbitrary mark, as all are, of course, but I don’t know, it feels like a huge achievement. And also I was just I was thinking about uhm as you’re kind of milestone approaches, how much of this show has meant to me in terms of like, contextualizing the sport that I really, really love, but I feel like I’ve almost learned too much about from the like ownership and capitalism perspective to derive the same pure enjoyment out of that I used to. Uhm and I don’t know far far be it for me to not be a sort of like multiple things can be true person. But historically, I think me and a lot of people watch Baseball as a sort of form of escape from the drudgery of being stuck working a job for example. Or uhh, you know, doing otherwise unpleasant things and ihm it has sucked, I think growing up and realizing that a lot of the things that talk about the world also suck it up Baseball. So without wishing to get too overly gushy I just want you both to know that I really truly appreciate the the heart and love that you put into helping me and a whole ton of other people uhm navigate the sucky things about the world through the sucky things about Baseball. In a way that allows us to still enjoy it and still find community and and happiness around this thing that is so beautiful and happy and wonderful and joyful and international. Uhm so I will as I did last time again, MazelTov, and I’ll leave you with a version of what I said last which is all power to the players all power to the people. And Gary Sanchez, unfortunately might not be good, actually, but I do still love him. Thank you both. Ahh congratulations. Cheers to many more.
BOBBY: Henry, thank you so much. This was such a overly nice voicemail not not really a question in here. Uhm but still amazing to hear, nonetheless. And I I really, truly appreciate the call. It’s very kind.
ALEX: Yeah, and I’m sure we will say this at the end. But you know, there were a there were a few different listener messages that that came through talking about kind of what they’ve what they’ve gotten out of the show. And we’ll acknowledge it throughout this episode, most likely, but all just to say, it’s you all are very incredibly sweet. And it’s a joy to come on here every week and, and spill spill our hearts onto this podcast about this sport that we hate to love and love to hate.
BOBBY: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that stands out about all of the incredibly kind things that people have said is that they just enjoy like that they’re able to enjoy hearing someone else talk about Baseball, and the way that they are thinking about Baseball. Which is part of why we started this show, right? In that we just didn’t hear that many people talking about the game. And talking about some of its problems or its uhm quirks or the reasons that they love it despite all of that. And so we wanted to have that conversation with each other because we were doing it in our own space, like five times a week and wasting a lot of our time and cutting into a lot of time that we should have been sleeping, just arguing about things or discussing things or getting frustrated about things in the Baseball world and for for the amount of people who wrote in to say, thank you for helping to feel like a part of a community views Baseball this way. It just it it you know, no, I get gassy, but it makes me kind of emotional. It’s very nice.
ALEX: Yeah, couldn’t have said it better.
BOBBY: Okay, it’s your turn to pick a question.
ALEX: Okay, since we we just did one that was a little self congratulatory, let’s, let’s do one that roasts us a little bit.
BOBBY: Ohh.
ALEX: Comes from, from a quite indeed. Who asks, “Has anyone tallied results of your preseason fantasy gift draft?” The answer is, no. I almost forgot about that.
BOBBY: Well, so let’s talk about what results are for the gift draft.
ALEX: Right
BOBBY: Because–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –even while doing it, even when we came up with the idea, and it was just you and me doing it, you know, we joked about who was gonna win. And for the first month of the season, we usually pull out some gifts. And we link back to the gift draft and the web page for the gift draft and we say, “Oh, it looks like Bobby’s team is out in front” or, “Oh, it looks–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –like you know, our our guests team is really coming in hot to start the season”. This past season, by the way, we absolutely waxed everyone.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: We had Tatis, we had Lindor, we had Ohtani, we had Devin Williams, which, you know, hit or miss. Uhh–
ALEX: Same same with Amir Garrett.
BOBBY: Like ah, we had Soto I mean, the team, our team was very, very stacked. We lost we lost Acuña halfway through the year, but that’s okay. So it’s really we also picked Cody Bellinger, he hit 190. Uhm it’s really more about like, for the fun of it, and for being able to like joke around with our friends online. I don’t know if there’s really an empirical way to decide who creates better gifts and who gets circulated more.
ALEX: Yeah, well, I will say this is a task that actually has been made a little harder. Major League Baseball, they’re the media side of things used to have a, a robust gift repository that I relied on quite heavily. And that was posted on their website. And I think a lot of these guests were probably automatically generated. Uhm but they went back years and they were from every game. And they featured normal plays and reaction gifts, and just weird shit that happens on the field. Gifts from videos that players have done. And unfortunately, that doesn’t exist anymore. They’ve just started posting gifts to their giffy account, and it’s far less comprehensive. And I would say that’s just a shame. That’s a loss for the culture.
BOBBY: I know they’ve, they’ve opted to do like their advanced video search function. And they’ve put way more time into building that out versus just the mlb.com/gifts, which is like, kind of 80% of the reason we even did the gift draft to begin with
ALEX: Right, exactly, because we–
BOBBY: With that–
ALEX: –had a really easy way of looking through them all.
BOBBY: Yeah, exactly. Uhm, okay, next question. Are you ready?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Is the time to do the Taylor Swift questions?
ALEX: I guess. So we’re kind of we’re coming up on the halfway point here. I think, maybe. Well, before we’re doing our best we got we got to get to them. At some point, though. It feels like a good time.
BOBBY: Before we do all the Taylor Swift questions, actually. Let’s just run through it just it’s all the music questions in general. So we have a voicemail here from Abby, that I will play very quickly. That also kind of roasts us.
VOICEMAIL 2: Hey, fellows, this is Abby from St. Louis. My question until your 200th episode is who picks the music’s within the episodes? My assumption based on no facts dress vibes is that anything kind of indie hypo pop on campus coffee shop kind of is Alex and the emo alternative oldies are from Bobby. So yeah, dropped the Tipping Pitches playlist. Congrats on 200 episodes and I’ll hang up and listen.
ALEX: A roast but I feel like she kind of got it backwards.
BOBBY: You think?
ALEX: Lowkey. I mean, we dabble all over the place.
BOBBY: Right, that’s why–
ALEX: And both [40:35] are incredibly similar. So–
BOBBY: I played this voicemail out loud for Phoebe yesterday, because I thought it was funny how specific it was the in the hyper pop on campus coffee shop, just the amount of superlatives that are in there.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It was very funny. Uhm-
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –but I don’t think that it’s quite as much genre driven as it is like, the way that you can tell who chooses the music is, if it’s anything like newer, or like that hasn’t quite circulated around yet that might just be that might come from someone listening to an entire album all the way through, it’s Alex. Because I don’t really listen to music like that anymore. Uhm I just, I wish that I did. I just don’t carve out enough time in my life for it.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So I choose like, I choose songs that I know that I like already and have not really recently discovered most often.
ALEX: Right, so yeah, your stuff is kind of like, late 90s to like 2015. Like–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –that’s the that’s the range.
BOBBY: Crowd pleasing, but not like not that often played on the radio, if that makes sense.
ALEX: Right, yeah, like he’s not basic guys don’t worry.
BOBBY: Right, exactly. I’m like too layers [41:38]–
ALEX: As we as we proceed to answer like a bunch of Taylor Swift questions.
BOBBY: Listen, critical reexamination is important.
ALEX: Oh, absolutely.
BOBBY: In the music industry.
ALEX: Uhm the Jesse asked a similar question, “Which is how do you all decide on songs for segment transitions? Or is it whatever you are just feeling in the moment?” The answer is, it’s largely what we’re feeling at the moment. Occasionally, when we have a specific themed episode, I might try to include songs that speak to the topic. We, we had a discussion that went deep on on labor a couple weeks ago. And so I felt somewhat obligated to choose a song or two that spoke to the rich history of labor oriented music. Sometimes there’s just a word that overlaps, you know. It’s like, oh, we’re doing a podcast where we talked about a lot of money. Let’s, let’s play, Cash rules everything around me, you know, like–
BOBBY: Yeah, I will say, after all these episodes, 200 episodes, this is our 200th episode, we never repeat songs. And for me, when I’m choosing the music, I usually choose a musical theme. Like I don’t choose multiple songs that don’t go together throughout an episode. Does that make sense?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: So I I’ll choose–
ALEX: How do you, how do you how do you decide that? How do you decide what songs to–
BOBBY: [42:53] yeah, what I’ve been listening–
ALEX: Okay. I’m still just vibes.
BOBBY: But no, like, I’ll choose like Motown for a week. Or I’ll choose like, 80s Pop for a week, or I’ll choose like, 90s indie, or I’ll choose like three different Robin songs like, you know what I mean? Like, it’ll be a little bit more. Like, I won’t just choose the three most recent songs that I listen to. The way that I listen to music now is I go through other people’s playlists that they’ve created. And I’m like, if you like the song enough to put it on a playlist, it’s probably a good song. And other people being like, my friends are like people who I see post playlists on Twitter or whatever, who I think have good music taste. And I’ll find new songs that way. So that that’s kind of how I ended up picking the songs.
ALEX: Yeah, there’s a bit of pressure at times, you know, especially because some people have said, oh, really likes the music this week. And it’s like, I forgot that people are actually listening to the songs thinking consciously about about what those songs are. So you know, we got we have to keep up appearances.
BOBBY: You’ve put me on to some music just on songs that you’ve chosen.
ALEX: Yes. I know it right away.
BOBBY: I’ll listen to the song and I’ll be like, oh, like, I want to listen all the way to the end of this song while I’m editing the episode–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –and I’m like, killing too much time listening to like, an entire hospital bracelet record, like, just like. Uhm yes, but you know, Abby brings up a good point at the end here, Alex. Drop the Tipping Pitches playlist. It does exist–
ALEX: It does exist.
BOBBY: –but you’re gatekeeping it because you own the playlist and you haven’t updated it since like, 2019.
ALEX: It’s true, so I have a little work to do, but it seems like there’s a little demand for it. At least one person likes it. So you know–
BOBBY: I like it, I like it, I want to listen to the Tipping Pitches playlist.
ALEX: Yeah, of course.
BOBBY: You could give me edit ability and I can just I can add them if you want.
ALEX That’s that’s true.
BOBBY: We can offline about that.
ALEX: We can offline about this. But uh, yes, we will drop the Tipping Pitches playlist because I gotta say, it’s got bangers regardless of I think how we how we pick songs. I think at least I try and do ones that are like somewhat upbeat and you can just kind of vibe to you know.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: There’s not a lot ton of sad boy, yeah.
BOBBY: Even though you know, that’s kind of like the formational aspect of our music tastes.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Okay, Jesse’s other question. This will open the door to can of worms you could say into the Taylor Swift conversation Jesse’s other question was, additionally, any pre release thoughts or comments about “Red (Taylor’s Version)”? Now I know that you’ve been prepping a lot for this question. Did you read, did you not listen to read straight through just to answer this question?
ALEX: Uhh, I listened to the first eight songs which–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –are arguably the only songs worth listening to off Red, that is a great–
BOBBY: Takes are coming–
ALEX: –half of an album.
BOBBY: –out, let’s go.
ALEX: There are some there’s some there’s some duds in there. That’s it’s a great album that also happens to feature some of Taylor’s hardest songs to listen to, hardest songs to get through. I don’t really know why we needed a song with Taylor Swift and the guy from Snow Patrol, but we haven’t, nobody knows why [45:55]–
BOBBY: Snow Patrol doesn’t know why he was in that song. He was just like cashing the check cash.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Gary light body.
ALEX: That’s his name.
BOBBY: That’s his name.
ALEX: I don’t know it’s ugh, I have–
BOBBY: You don’t like everything is changed? Come on, that’s a good one.
ALEX: I mean, there’s some I’m not saying there’s there’s nothing back there, right? I kind of [46:15]–
BOBBY: [46:15] like my one top 40 blind spot every it’s like, he’s just like hitting a part of my brain that I don’t want to admit likes this thing. But it does like this thing. Every insurance. I’m like, I recognize that this is garbage. But also I’m enjoying listening to it.
ALEX: Ed Sheeran is is like a is a talented musician. Like he’s very good at what he does. And I just don’t particularly uhm listen, I don’t listen to much of his music just because it’s not really for me. I also think that his appearance on Red is probably his worst Taylor Swift appearance. He has, I think two? Three?
BOBBY: He has the one with future as well. You like that one better?
ALEX: Absolutely. I mean–
BOBBY: That song so chaotic. I can’t–
ALEX: It’s okay, it’s it’s a it’s a great song–
BOBBY: I can’t decide–
ALEX: Ed Sheeran was the worst part of that song.
BOBBY: –more future or more Ed Sheeran, both or neither.
ALEX: Yeah, I don’t know. I have, I have weird thoughts about the re-recording, mostly because, like, it’s not like, everything is changing. You know, like, it’s by and large, the same album. Uhm it’s both a business decision and it’s also fan service. And I respect that they’re leaning into it, and Taylor’s gonna make a lot of money off it and get that back. But I don’t know I I think I feel like I’ve may have said this before maybe even on this podcast, but at what point does kind of the novelty wear off. You know, when she says okay, I’m re-releasing Taylor Swift and re-releasing Speak Now, right? And it’s like her fifth re-release. Is the energy so gonna be there? I mean, maybe, probably among Swifties Yes.
BOBBY: Specifically for Red I’m curious because it’s one of the albums where she started doing more like, it wasn’t just like, chorus verse, chorus, verse chorus first, like, they’re like, I know, you were trouble and 22 There’s like speaking on it. So I’m curious if she’s just gonna, like stick to that, specifically, or an or, like, try to interpolate it or like recreate it in a different way. Or if it’s really going to be like the first few Taylor’s versions where it’s just like, this is just the song straight up.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Nothing is, nothing is different.
ALEX: I mean, I imagine that is going to be the case, right?
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Because you want she wants that kind of continuity, but that’s also why is–
BOBBY: It’s so rooted in time though. Like–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –if somebody put out a song even for her like her newer albums, like off lover and like me and stuff, when they’re like doing cheers and chants and shit, I’m like, this sucks. I don’t like this like, but in that moment, I was like, this is still this is kind of fun. I’m still I’m doing it’s 2012, you know–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –I’m going to high school.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I’m enjoying when she’s talking over the song in between the the verses like I’m okay with it. But now is it gonna hit the same on the re-release? I’m not sure.
ALEX: Yeah, I am, like kind of I’m like, genuinely curious to hear the older albums almost more because I think they will sound more different just because their voice has matured so much. Like what is our song going to sound like? I’m so I’m so fascinated–
BOBBY: That song–
ALEX: –for something like that.
BOBBY: Let me just say, that song is Taylor Swift’s best song. That and all too well are Taylor Swift’s best songs. They’re tied one A and one B.
ALEX: I while I don’t know that I agree. I’ve I’ve absolutely respect that.
BOBBY: Thank you.
ALEX: You’re both very good.
BOBBY: Yes, thanks. Uhm the speaking of all too well. Uhm Brian also writes in to ask, “As we’re on the cusp of labor legend Taylor Swift’s re-release of Red this question came to mind what song are you most excited to hear Taylor’s version of from Red or any of the future albums she has planned?” So uhm I did not look at any of the other future albums she has planned. I only looked at red because it’s it’s a big ask to look at every single song and decide which ones I’m most excited for. But what do you have for this? Is it just all too well? Is that the obvious answer?
ALEX: I’m excited for State of Grace.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: I think that’s one of her best songs.
BOBBY: I love that song.
ALEX: And–
BOBBY: So underrated.
ALEX: It’s incredibly underrated it she like, decided to do arena rock for one song and then said, I don’t ever need to do that again, and I love it. And it’s amazing. And I want to hear that again.
BOBBY: I think a lot of people don’t like that song.
ALEX: Yes, I agree.
BOBBY: Because they think it’s like, it’s like reaching at anthemic but not actually anthemic. But I do–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –think that if you’re the type of person who listens to an album straight through, and that’s the first song on it, it sets a definite tone for the rest of the album.
ALEX: For sure. I mean, she has other songs in which she tried to do anthemic on that album even that just don’t don’t hit for me.
BOBBY: Yeah, Holy Ground?
ALEX: Ahh see, I kind of like Holy Ground, Holy Ground is cool.
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: Begi–Begin Again is a little weird, but I–
BOBBY: I like Begin Again–
ALEX: [50:56] yeah, I don’t know. Okay, so sure. And All Too Well, yeah, okay. My biggest take–
BOBBY: Wow, are you going to no-sell All Too Well right now?
ALEX: I not All Too Well, specifically, which is once again, one of her best songs. I don’t know that we need to hear the 10 minute version of All Too Well. I just I have conflicting feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s a piece of Taylor history that fans have wanted to hear for years, right. And it’s talked about in hushed tones. No one’s ever been able to find it. It’s something that’s kind of lives out there in the ether.
BOBBY: It definitely exists–
ALEX: Obviously–
BOBBY: –on vinyl somewhere, right?
ALEX: Oh, yes, yeah
BOBBY: Like it’s not just an approachable session at wherever, who who’s her record label who was her record label?
ALEX: But a part of me also really likes that there’s like a piece of this history that will only ever live on in our imaginations-
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –like once the song is released, then that’s it. Then there’s no more lore around the 10-minute version of All Too Well, then we just hear it and we say, oh, it’s Yep, it’s–
BOBBY: It’s all 10 minutes, yeah.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’s almost impossible for it to live up to the hype. The hype is absurd. If it lives up to the hype, it’d be like LeBron James, where the hype was like, he’s gonna be the greatest Basketball player of all time. And then he actually was and then he was better. He was static. Uhm that would be insanely impressive. Ahh really quickly, I want to I do want a shout out. The song Red off the album Red–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –is an amazing song. Yeah, I’m excited to hear the RE recorded version of that. And then if I’m going off read clean from 1989.
ALEX: Ooh, yes.
BOBBY: Top five Taylor Swift song. Definitely in more of her like senior more mature register also switches. I feel like on a re record will actually bring more of it out.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: So that would be my choice for a non-Red future Taylor’s version.
ALEX: I feel like, like I don’t expect her to make any changes to any of the songs so I feel like it would just be like us naming like, our favorite Taylor Swift song.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Like wow, yeah, I really want to hear our song. But I want to hear her do like Haunted, which is a weird space for her and also a good song.
BOBBY: Was was Wildest Dreams like that much different or better? Or like, has her voice maturing changed your relationship to that song? I don’t know.
ALEX: No no, no, no. Which is fine, that’s fine.
BOBBY: Okay, thi–this question comes from Christina, who we’ve already read a question with, who we’ve already read a question from, but we wanted to pair this with the other Taylor Swift questions. Christina asks a very good question. “Which Taylor Swift song would you choose as your walk up music, if you were a baseball player?” now I’m very excited to see what you chose for this.
ALEX: Am I going first on this one?
BOBBY: Yeah you’re going first.
ALEX: End Game off reputation featuring the aforementioned future and Ed Sheeran, please do not play the Ed Sheeran part while I’m walking up to the plate. But that song features like her highest highs just as far as like pop crescendos. I mean, that was like, you know, her maximum was pop album. And it’s good. I thought about doing ready for it. But I just think ready for–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –you know. End, End Game has so much like swagger to it. It’s like really, she’s kind of playing ahh with her voice a little bit more. And it I mean, it works, it works and it hypes me up. I don’t know about you, but hypes me up. What about you? What is your uhh what’s gonna be your song?
BOBBY: Man, I I so when I was initially asked this question my first thought was kinda off Reputation. Because it’s like the most it’s like the loudest explosions get yourself hype get pumped up. But I I while I respect the artistic effort and evolution that was Reputation I don’t actually like the album that much.
ALEX: Reputation is such a good album.
BOBBY: It’s it’s it’s–
ALEX: So good.
BOBBY Uhh, there’s but we don’t but–
ALEX: You know, whatever.
BOBBY: There’s too much like, like musical misdirection on the album for me where it just doesn’t feel like they totally knew what direction any of the songs were going anyway, that like there’s just random explosions in places that there should not be explosions in my opinion. Uhm–
ALEX: I love that it’s like a it’s like a Look Behind the Curtain of Taylor.
BOBBY: So I wrote down three songs that came to mind. Would you like to hear them?
ALEX: Sure.
BOBBY: And as we know, you’re allowed to change your walk up song as much as you want. So as long as I’m sticking to Taylor Swift songs, I could walk to all three of these songs and again, the first song is I Don’t Wanna Live Forever by Taylor Swift is insane.
ALEX: Arguably the worst Taylor Swift song, okay.
BOBBY: Just a terrible opinion by you. That song absolutely bangs. Ahh No Body, No Crime. Just because–
ALEX: Okay, int-intresting–
BOBBY: –they feel like flying come in and you feel like–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –everybody can kind of get behind it a little bit. It’s not too flashy.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But it is like groovy.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And then Cruel Summer, that’s just like–
ALEX: Nice, yeah.
BOBBY: –it’s also–
ALEX: [55:41]–
BOBBY: –thematically appropriate. The baseball season is a cruel summer for both–
ALEX: It is, it is.
BOBBY: –days hitters and fans. So that’s why I chose that.
ALEX: Okay, good choices. I respect 67% of those.
BOBBY: You hating, I Don’t Want to Live Forever, It’s so bad. It’s such a bad opinion.
ALEX: I su–we’re like, we’re not gonna do this. We’re not gonna do this right now. We’re gonna have to have a Taylor Swift only episode.
BOBBY: We could just do a Taylor Swift podcast, just her whole discography.
ALEX: That is true.
BOBBY: Uhh, okay, I think it’s, I believe it’s technically your turn to pick the question.
ALEX: Okay. Well, in that same vein of other podcasts we could do, I’m going to I’m going to throw to a very difficult question we received–
BOBBY: Hardest question.
ALEX: My good friend, Lauren Walker, at Batting Around who asked us. “If you had to do a second podcast, what is the thing with the least amount of mass appeal, you could still easily talk about for an hour each week?”
BOBBY: Can I ask a procedural question about this?
ALEX: Sure.
BOBBY: Is Lauren implying, no Lauren iss not here to answer this question, but in your mind, is Lauren implying that we still have to do the podcast together? Or is it just like individually? What is something that you Alex Bazeley. And then you Bobby Wagner, could talk about for an hour each week.
ALEX: I mean, I I thought about this question from a personal lens, although I’m–
BOBBY: Yeah, me too.
ALEX: –sure that you and I could both tap in and that–
BOBBY Not have a problem–
ALEX: -make share to work, yeah.
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: But I’m I’m gonna let you answer this one first, because I still still turn in some things over.
BOBBY: Okay, so the first couple of things that came to mind. Here’s the trouble with this is that there are a lot of things that I could talk about for an hour each week. But that would not satisfy the least mass appeal aspect of this–
ALEX: Right, that’s an interesting wrinkle.
BOBBY: Right, because I could talk about Basketball for an hour every week, I could talk about movies for an hour every week [57:24]–
ALEX: Nearly Taylor Swift.
BOBBY: –can talk about Taylor Swift for an hour every week. I could talk about, I could do a podcast about the My Chemical Romance discography that just took an hour every week. I could do a podcast about unions for an hour every week easily. But that not only is that not only is that kind of mass appeal in a certain way, but it’s also kind of just what this podcast is.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: So I didn’t write any of those things. The thing that I could do a very niche, very little mass appeal show about for an hour every week is microphones, Alex. I could talk about microphone–
ALEX: I actually knew you were gonna say that.
BOBBY: –and audio and EQ, and compression, and how to make yourself sound good, and how not to make yourself sound good. And tips and tricks and advice about microphones and recording every week. Nobody would listen to that.
ALEX: Nope.
BOBBY: So I’m not gonna do it–
ALEX: I would I would I would–
BOBBY: No you wouldn’t, you don’t even listen to this.
ALEX: Well, occasionally, I’m forced to listen to your tirades about audio anyway, so it probably wouldn’t be that much that much different.
BOBBY: Tirades is such a negative, [58:31]–
ALEX: It’s a it’s a poor way of framing it–
BOBBY: I’m just trying–
ALEX: It’s usually, it’s usually–
BOBBY: –to make us both sound good for the people at home–
ALEX: –thumbs up in the context of being frustrated–
BOBBY: –to wanna listen, to the [58:42]–
ALEX: –as someone who produces audio professionally, this really grinds my gears. My answer is going to be equally boring, which I guess is kind of the kind of the point here.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Uhm it would probably be something around technologies like browser security.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: VPN choice–
BOBBY: Right–
ALEX: –you know–
BOBBY: –yeah.
ALEX: –how to how to Torrent uhm safely.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: There’s probably a little bit of appeal in that, although you can probably just go to a Reddit thread and find all the answers you need on a weekly podcast to answer any of these questions for you. But I could do it.
BOBBY: Yeah. How long would that last though? Pens? Like like–
ALEX: Yeah yeah, pens.
BOBBY: [59:28]–
ALEX: It’s like quality, like will you write with like quality pens–
BOBBY: It’s funny that you say that because I thought about writing that down too. So maybe that would be the one that we do together, every week.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Our long audio only pen review.
ALEX: Mm–hmm.
BOBBY: We could get like the ASMR pen the panel page.
ALEX: Right, exactly.
BOBBY: Really funky with it.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
BOBBY: Another one that we could do together is how to run a student newspaper.
ALEX: That’s true.
BOBBY: We could talk for an hour–
ALEX: Or [59:52] not to–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –we can talk about successes and failures.
BOBBY: Yeah. Mostly successes that we crushed it, uhm–
ALEX: I appreciate your rose tinted glasses.
BOBBY: All right, are we are we good on that thing?
ALEX: I think I think we’re gonna that.
BOBBY: That was easily the most thought provoking question that we got. Thank you, Lauren.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: I will go to a voicemail for our next question.
VOICEMAIL 3: All right, you guys is Dave from Delco and I just wondering if you think the [1:00:23] you may lose trade to get Nick Foles back, this kid around, and it’s Tom Paine. And I wonder in your ideal Baseball world who would own the league and the team? Would it be the players? Would it be the city with which they are located would be a combination thereof? Please, I’m interested in this. I need to know. Thanks. Alright, so they’re all ready, bye.
BOBBY: You Dave from Delco, thanks for calling. I was just aside from the Nick Foles thing. I think maybe the Sixers should just trade Embiid instead of Ben Simmons. I think they should build around Ben Simmons. Ahh maybe we can go down to the Wawa and talk about it uhh. No, thank you for calling, this is an amazing question. Uhm and and leaving it with the Delco accent is just phenomenal stuff. Uhm Alex, this is like a real meatball right down the middle for you. In your ideal world who would own the Baseball teams?
ALEX: Well, so it speaks to obviously, conversations we’ve had in the past. We had a whole episode about could fans on a Baseball team. The answer is, I mean, in practice, no. But in theory, yes. Who shouldn’t? Like who should only as for example, I think I should? I don’t have the money to do it. But I think I would I would do pretty well. It might conflict I realized with my current standing as the Mets General Manager, but I that’s the conversation.
BOBBY: I forgot [1:01:50]–
ALEX: If A. Rod. can, if A Rod. can be in the front office of the Mets and uuh–
BOBBY: Calling Sunday Night Baseball game [1:01:55]–
ALEX: [1:01:56] well, I think that’s fine, yeah. I mean, I think our our answer is probably that cities should own the team. And the revenue should be funneled back into cities for non sports related purposes or for, you know, youth sports, expansion. Uhm maybe infrastructure, you know, can you imagine Baseball funding our infrastructure bill?
BOBBY: Not only can I imagine it, I think about it often. Probably more often than is healthy.
ALEX: Yeah, I think I mean, I think that’s my that’s my kind of somewhat boring answer is that you could probably give it to cities, although I’d love. I’d love a Baseball workers Co Op.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: A team owned by the players.
BOBBY: It feels like in our world where we expropriate Baseball from the private billionaires who own it. There’s room in there for like one of the teams to still be workers Co Op, like some of–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –the teams could be owned by a city. Some of the teams could be owned by fans. Some of the teams could be workers Co Ops, like, Why limit ourselves? It doesn’t have to be a monopoly anymore. It doesn’t have to be a cartel, like it currently is.
ALEX: That’s true, although it makes it more interesting, you know. What would we what would this podcast be, if the if that was the case with Baseball?
BOBBY: Well, it sounds like it would be microphone and VPN reviews and pens.
ALEX: Okay, well, speaking of could fans own a team? This next question comes from @ohsorry, on Twitter, good handle, “What are your personal top five favorite episodes you’ve made?”
BOBBY: This is a very hard question, because it’s it’s hard to have any level of perspective on the episodes that we’ve made, I guess, I would lean more towards the episodes that I’ve had the most fun making, which often have guests that we’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time and felt really lucky to talk to for a long time. But I will say one of those five episodes that Alex and I have collectively come up with together is the episode about good fans on a team. Because it was kind of like the culmination of a lot of conversations we’ve had on the show about how a lot of the problems that we talked about weekend and week out, just are rooted in the fact that these billionaires have revenue, have revenue at the top of their interests above all other things. And so that was a really fun and rewarding episode to just have a conversation with you about and talk about how we’d like to envision it. And I think that it is also one that it’s evergreen enough that we can refer people back to it if they’re new listeners to which from a inside baseball perspective, it’s it’s helpful and useful for having in our catalog. So what what other ones have you right now?
ALEX: This is cheating a little bit. Uhh but anything we’ve done with the with the Doolittle-Dolan crew is great. We had we had Eireann Dolan on Sean Doolittle partner, before we had on Sean, and I think it was the right call because Aaron was a great guest.
BOBBY: Yeah, that was–
ALEX: It remains that was very early on. That was in our first uhh–
BOBBY: Six months.
ALEX: –year or so–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –as a as a podcast. And she graciously came on to talk to us college kids about I don’t even know what at this point.
BOBBY: We talked a lot about uhm, like activism from within the Baseball sphere–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –I remember and like the ways that you can minimize your negative impact while also maximizing your platform, but also not burning yourself out. I remember it being such a great conversation, Aaron, we had no business asking some of the people on that we asked on–
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: –most of them said yes, which is really cool. Uhm–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –and I feel lucky for. Even all the way up to when we asked Shawn to come on and rank his favorite Star Wars movies, which was a lot of fun. If you haven’t listened to that, go back and do it. Yes, that is a great one. Uhm I wrote down the dumbest Baseball things of 2021. With Batting Around, uhh our friends over at Batting Around. That was one of the most in what that was one of the episodes that I went right. While we were recording it, I was like, This is gonna be a great episode. Everybody is in it, they’re on the same page. We’re all having a lot of fun. That was not that long ago. So most of you have probably heard that already. If you haven’t, go back and check it out. And then also check out Batting Around. Uhm thanks to all the Batting Around people who each individually wrote in questions we’re gonna get to Stephen in just a minute. Uhm I also have another crossover podcast episode that we did, which was with the, at the time co hosts of the Horse podcast, ahh Mike Schubert and Eric Silver. And we talked about we did a cultural exchange between Baseball and Basketball, where we swapped different elements of Baseball, we basically traded them among the two different sports and we said what we wanted to take from Basketball and they said what they wanted to take from Baseball, they were very silly with it, we were obviously predictably very serious with it, uhm as we tend to be. And then wha–what’s the last one that we wrote down here?
ALEX: This year’s all gift draft, I think that’s kind of a perpetual winner in in our books, which may sound a little ahh self indulgent. But I think it has been enjoyable for us, not because of what we’ve done on this podcast, but because we’ve gotten to bring on some of our friends and engage them in the process. And that has made it I think, a lot more fun than when it was just you and I going back and forth. Just kind of naming players we like, it’s always fun to kind of open the floor a bit to some of the people in our rotation and, and bring them in for a spot here there.
BOBBY: Yes, so that’s a great place to start. If you’re new here and you haven’t listened to those episodes, go check them out. Okay, Alex, I promised we would get to. I mentioned we would get to Stephen’s question, Stephen from Batting Around, asks, “What was your favorite non-Baseball thing that you watched, read or listened to this year?” So it’s kind of a stumper as well.
ALEX: Yeah, this is this actually is a really tough question, because it requires me to take stock of all the culture I’ve tried my best to consume over the last year, which is a harder task than one might think.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: As far as listened to, I mean, there’s plenty of good music that I’ve enjoyed in the last year that it’s not really worth running through just all the all the albums that I that I liked. I don’t think that would be very interesting. It’s also this is not a music podcast, and–
BOBBY: You’re supposed to say your favorite, come on.
ALEX: My, my single one favorite. That was that favorite thing I’ve listened to everything I’ve read and favorite thing I’ve watched, or across all three categories. What’s the the favorite thing that I have?
BOBBY: I think across all three categories, I did write three things down. But I just, you know, favorite, you’ll need to list every album you listen to.
ALEX: Okay, well, then I’ll cheat and say ah two things. And one is the the new turnstyle album, which I’ve just, you know, if you know, you know. And, and the other is the the book that I’m reading right now called, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” about direct action in response to climate change, and why it’s time to actually start taking matters into our own hands. So those are process probably my answer right now.
BOBBY: So [1:09:10]–
ALEX: I very well, that very well could change. I’m also enjoying a current podcast series about the role that oil companies have done in ahh spreading propaganda to school children?
BOBBY: Nice.
ALEX: It’s called the ABCs of Big Oil. I encourage you guys to check it out. Again, no, no free ads here, but it’s a good podcast. So uhm yeah, I think that’s I think that’s where I am right now. What about you?
BOBBY: The two things that I wrote down with “The Sopranos”, which I watched for the first time this year, it’s the greatest TV show ever made. It’s iconic, it holds up. It’s maybe even aged better than it even felt [1:09:45]–
ALEX: It change pretty well.
BOBBY: –yeah. Uhm in terms of its pessimism about American Empire and the forces with which you need to fight back against it. And then uhh the other thing is I wrote down Mike Duncan’s podcast revolutions which chronicles the history of all revolutions since the formation of the English monarchy. Ahh I started with the current season, which is still going on. It’s insanely comprehensive as a podcast. Uhm it’s still going on, even though it started over a year and a half ago about the Russian Revolution, which is just a lot of a lot of things that I feel like formed my current politics, but I don’t really know the events that spurred them. So ahh I’ve enjoyed that quite a bit. I also wrote down Sex Education, which is a phenomenal television show that I enjoyed every single episode of all three seasons I watched this year. And then Succession, I mean Succession is amazing.
ALEX: Oh, yeah.
BOBBY: That’s but that’s still going on so–
ALEX: This is a we’re not going to talk about succession right now. Because why would we, but I feel like I can’t breathe this season.
BOBBY: It’s amazing.
ALEX: It’s so claustrophobic, and I feel suffocated. And I love every second of it. And I need to like talk about it with my therapist each week after I watch an episode.
[1:10:59]
[Transition Music]
ALEX: Okay, moving right along. This next question comes from Sonia. I hope I’m saying that correctly, please. DMs if I didn’t. Uhh [1:11:23] about your opinions on proposals at sporting events, Is it cute? Cheesy? Have you ever witnessed one?
BOBBY: Uhh I have never witnessed one. I don’t have as strong opinion on this, as some people seem to out in the world. Uhh some people are like, if you proposed at a sporting event, you should be publicly ridiculed and have tomatoes thrown at you for eight days straight. Uhm I think that if you’re going to do it, it better be because you have a serious relationship to the team and the stadium with the person that you’re proposing to, like you met them at a Mets game, or you go to Mets games all of the time. And that is a core part of your relationship and the thing that you’d like to do, don’t just do it for the attention. That is my take. I think you probably feel similarly.
ALEX: I feel very similarly. I just I can’t imagine wanting to really share that moment with 40,000 people. Or if you’re in A’s game like 7,000 people, I just I don’t think that [1:12:23]–
BOBBY: The Rays game, like 20,00 people.
ALEX: I just, I don’t know, that’s a very I mean, people feel differently about these sorts of things for they, I get the sense that that’s a very intimate moment. And I don’t know, do you want that filmed and be put on a big screen? Also, I hope you’ve talked with your partner about this ahead of time–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: I hope they know that’s coming.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: That’s that’s a lot to just kind of put on someone who has no clue what’s about to go down, right? You know, they’re shoving a hot dog in their face. And all of a sudden, you’re down on one knee. It’s like–
BOBBY: If you haven’t–
ALEX: –you finish my garlic fries.
BOBBY: –and you don’t know for 100% certain that this is something that they would want it straight up manipulative, because how does that person say no, to that?
ALEX: Yes. Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
BOBBY: In front of 40,000 people. That’s that’s not cool.
ALEX: Yeah, that’s not really fair.
BOBBY: Uhh, okay, next question. I’ll go to a voicemail for this one.
VOICEMAIL 4: Hi Alex and Bobby, [1:13:20] here. I’m just calling with a question about Shohei Ohtani. So I think we can all agree that it’s time to dispense with the cons to Babe Ruth, considering once Babe Ruth became a power hitter. He was more or less done pitching. So I wanted to know if either of you guys have any appropriate comps of athletes, maybe from other sports that you might be familiar with, that are appropriate for Shohei Ohtani because I honestly cannot think of one. I really think that he’s like, in a league of his own, and there’s just no other athlete like him. So let me know what you guys think. I also have an idea for a name for the Tipping Pitches hive. It’s a little bit esoteric, but I know you guys are into that. I was thinking about Bazeley’s brigade. So yeah, let me know what you guys think. Thanks. Bye.
BOBBY: Can Bazeley’s only one of us–
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: Come on.
ALEX: Wow.
BOBBY: What the hell? I’m really hurt by that–
ALEX: True colors shown here.
BOBBY: Come on, what the hell? Uhm anyway, do I have a comfort what Shohei Ohtani is doing? Kinda, the the thing, the person that I thought of was Michael Phelps. Because he dominated several different Olympics doing different strokes. Like I think it’s hard to compare an athlete in another sport unless they’re doing something that is similarly that that requires a similarly uhm vast set of skills. And I think that like the butterfly stroke is nothing like freestyle is nothing like backstroke and what Michael Phelps said at the 08′ and 2012 Olympics where he just won in all different kinds of strokes. Seems to me like ahh comparable to what Ohtani is doing.
ALEX: That’s a good answer. I don’t know that I have a I have a better one than that. But the the closest comps I was going to think of are the obvious like multi-sport athletes, right? But that’s not even a really, you know, that’s not a one to one comparison because these are still different skill sets. Deion Sanders being able to play Football and Baseball is not the same as him being able to you know, shut down the shut down the field as a wide receiver and also be a quarterback, right? Like those are still within the same sport. It’s still very there are transferable skills to other sports, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the ability to be versatile within your same sport. So it’s hard and that’s one of the reasons why Shohei Ohtani is so singularly amazing. I do think there are some interesting comps, in places like the Negro Leagues. That’s where you there actually are some two way players that we saw guys like Martin Dihigo, uhh but still I would that remains in Baseball. And Shohei Ohtani is still I I don’t know, he’s been in the league for a few years now. And I still don’t really know how to comprehend what he’s doing. And I think that says something.
BOBBY: Yeah, and I mean, the only other person that I can think of is, again, another Olympic athlete, Simone Biles, who–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –just dominated almost every gymnastics category. It’s just like people who get you when you get to that high of level of a sport, you have to concentrate on one thing, and these people just did not. Uhm I guess another person that I might think of is like Serena Williams, and maybe this is just because I just saw King Richard last night. But uhh first, Serena and Venus Williams to be able to dominate in singles and doubles together, I guess is kind of close to what Ohtani does, but it’s like the two versions of your sport. But even then, it’s like you’re still playing tennis. Like it’s still similar rules, it’s not completely different sides of the ball in the way that it is in Baseball, I don’t know, but those would be the ones that come to mind.
ALEX: You know I’m going to say the last one, uhh who I think of is Jim Thorpe, who is not a incredibly well known athlete in history.
BOBBY: Jim Thorpe hours, yeah. Pennsylvania legend.
ALEX: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean this is a guy who was one of the most versatile athletes of all time, of all time, right? I mean, who could participate in 10 different track and field events, and be the best at all of them, right? He played Football, he played Baseball. I, his legend is, I think not properly recognized. He doesn’t get his do in sports history, in part because, you know, I mean, he existed at the turn of the at the, at the start of the 20th century. And we don’t tend to have a great grasp on players end. And also, he’s Native American, and I think that as a result, his story kind of gets pushed under the rug a little bit, which is unfair to him because he remains one of the one of the best athletes of the 20th century.
BOBBY: Agreed. Okay, uhh let’s move on. You’re trying to pick a question.
ALEX: Okay. Uhh, here’s a here’s a question. That’s that that we got. Uhm this is from Daniel. He says, “I think you guys could do a good partner segment to your friends at Batting Around. What Star Wars characters, do you think fuck it?
BOBBY: Got it. I think the real question here is which ones don’t? Because there are probably so many that do, right? Like–
ALEX: Yeah. I did put a little bit of thought into this though.
BOBBY: All right, hit me, hit me.
ALEX: Well, it’s kind of mulling it over–
BOBBY: Hit me.
ALEX: There’s some there’s some easy ones and then there’s some dark horse candidates. Uhh–
BOBBY: You know who does not fuck it?
ALEX: Who.
BOBBY: Sebulba.
ALEX: True, there I actually as I was kind of thinking about this, I did come across a lot of Star Wars characters who I’m certain do not fuck it. Uhm–
BOBBY: Or at all even, right?
ALEX: Right or at or at all, yeah. Uhh–
BOBBY: General Grievous is not fuck.
ALEX: Poe Dameron fucks.
BOBBY: Yeah obviously.
ALEX: No doubt–
BOBBY: Obviously.
ALEX: Uhh Lando, Lando Calrissian fucks. [1:19:20]–
BOBBY: And even more now that he’s we played by Donald Glover like–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: It was like the original Lando was like, all right, he’s hot, kind of like cold–cold icon. And now they just like lean all the way into that with the newest version of him where it’s just like–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –the whole thing is that this guy fucks, all he does is fuck he doesn’t–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –run anything else efficiently, he just fucks.
ALEX: Yeah. Uhm Biggs Darklighter, who is uhm a a lesser known in the Star Wars canon but is one of one of Luke Skywalker’s best friends growing up. This man has the stash to end all stashes. He I’m I’m not gonna use words that you would have to bleep me out for but I’ll just say this guy is is–
BOBBY: Keep it together, Alex.
ALEX: –is getting it on the weekends. And then and then lay off bucks if we’re being quite honest. Yeah, of course.
BOBBY: Of course, of course. Uhm–
ALEX: What about you, who did I missed?
BOBBY: Mandalorian? He fought.
ALEX: Yeah? But like, do you think so? Is that does that go against Mandalorian code?
BOBBY: This is not like, “Does this person actually have sex?” It’s like, this is more like, do they fuck, I don’t know how to explain the difference.
ALEX: Really? Well, I I took it as like, who is like, actually, who’s good and bad, you know? Like do this guy like really as you’d like, you know.
BOBBY: If you ever get to that point Chief–
ALEX: [1:20:41]–
BOBBY: –Mandalorian it’s a definite yes.
ALEX: That’s That’s true. If you ever [1:20:45]–
BOBBY: You might actually made him abandon his religion, but if you did be worth it.
ALEX: Okay, I agree with that. Is it all that we’ve got? Ahsoka Tano.
BOBBY: Yeah, Ahsoka Tano, obviously. And the one person we have not said, who I think would be the number one draft pick if you pulled like, like normal people, or every Star Wars fan in the world. The answer you would get as Han Solo.
ALEX: Yeah. Which I kind of disagree with. I–
BOBBY: Ohh.
ALEX: –it feels like there’s a little bit of overcompensating going on there. That’s–
BOBBY: Well.
ALEX: –just my, that’s my opinion.
BOBBY: I think that the problem is just like, we know that Harrison Ford has just been hot and so many roles.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That were just like, even though he is kind of corny as Han Solo, and even though the character probably doesn’t function very hard to imagine him as anything, but just Harrison Ford.
ALEX: Right, yeah.
BOBBY: We can both–
ALEX: Luke, Luke does fuck–
BOBBY: –agree that Luke is the Virginist character like all Star Wars.
ALEX: Oh, what is Luke Skywalker’s pickup line? Hey, want to–
BOBBY: Pull up the Death Star? That’s pretty good, actually.
ALEX: Yeah. You ever done pod racing?
BOBBY: Uhh okay, great question, Daniel. Thank you, I’m going to put an end to this one. Because for the love of God, we just can’t. We can’t keep going down this rabbit hole. Uhm all right, next question comes from Jesse, “I’m a recent-ish listener. And I was curious about your history with thinking and talking about labor. Also, y’all kind of joked about talking about your theses. But I would really enjoy hearing you talk about that”. Alex, what’s your history with labor? You’ve been it?
ALEX: Work I’ve ever worked a wage job. Firsthand experience, I don’t know. I would say a lot of it kind of materialized uhm in the last four or five years or so probably in concert with this podcast. I think doing this and and having these conversations with you. Week in and week out has done a lot to to develop my awareness of that. Uhm going to NYU and seeing the work of for example, grad students union–
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: –I think also really, really bolstered my understanding of like, union power, and–
BOBBY: Financial twist.
ALEX: Right, exactly. And–
BOBBY: Or political story.
ALEX: –a ways, in which businesses corporations try and and suppress them. So I would say that actually is pretty fundamental, even though I think at the time and maybe you didn’t realize it.
BOBBY: Well, it was so powerful, because it’s like, you’re also changing your opinion on like the rest of the world at large. And then–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –when you put it in the micro sense, you know that you’re paying $70,000 a year or like whatever you’re paying after your scholarships and loans or whatever. You know that you’re paying all that money and then the people who are actually teaching you on a day in and day out basis are getting how much of that
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: How much of that is going towards the endowment? How much of that is going towards the President’s $5 million salary? How much of that is going towards a million dollar celebrity professor? Yeah, that was definitely a fundamental text. For me. It’s similar. Uhm I’m glad they singled out this, this podcast on our political and labor journey makes me feel so proud to be a part of it. Uhh I will also say that I formed a union. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know this, that I was part of the organizing efforts at The Ringer. So I am a Writers Guild member. That was needless to say, a very important part of my history and evolution and thinking and talking about labor and ever since I’ve become, you know, part of more union social circles. Uhm I’ve just started to care a lot more about like the wider labor industry, the wider uhm state of unions in America and online. content writing journalism around the labor industry has also helped for me a lot in that way. Alex, what is your thesis about?
ALEX: Climate change to talk in this podcast? I wrote it about how oil drilling in the Gulf Coast, is leading to the destruction of the marshlands, that along Louisiana and is quite literally drowning New Orleans, and the ways in which it is literally sinking sinking into the ocean. And and how complicit we are in that. So it was an it was an upper I had a really great time researching it.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Made me feel very good about the state of things,
BOBBY: Right. Uhm as I mentioned already, in this podcast, the day that I consumed. The most caffeine in my life was the day that I wrote my thesis. That thesis was about the ways in which we use public space as it pertains to sports within New York City, and specifically, the places that they put recreational Basketball courts, which seems very specific, but I I wrote a lot about how I think I wrote a lot about this because I never re-read it because I had to write it all in 16 hours. Uhm but I got an A so it must have been worthwhile. Uhm I just wrote about how the ways in which we invest in certain public spaces and the reasoning behind putting sports facilities in certain places and which areas are more served versus which areas are underserved. And the resulting cultural ripple effects of both famous and accessible basketball courts in New York City.
ALEX: Fuck yeah. would read 10 out of 10.
BOBBY: I don’t know if you would read it. I don’t know if I would read it. I don’t know if I can find it. I’m not sure that it exists anymore. I would read I would read yours too. That sounds right up our alley. I wonder how we became such good friends?
ALEX: Yeah. All right, I think I think it’s back to me to pick another another question. Let’s uh, let’s throw it to our good buddy, Austin. Has been on this podcast before and uhh and wrote in to ask us, “Shadow producer plant question. What is the coolest thing you ever did as a baseball player?
BOBBY: I have two answers for this.
ALEX: Okay, go.
BOBBY: Both of them came in literally uhh because by the time I got to high school, I stopped playing Baseball because my high school was very, very focused on Basketball and in order to make the Basketball team you really had to do it all year round. Just another example of youth sports taking over young children’s lives. Uhh two answers, number one, I hit a home run off my best friend in Little League, amazing feeling recommend it for everybody. I can hold that over him for the rest of my life. I can text him right now and he would be mad. Uhh and then the second thing is I had a dueling no-hitter in travel ball that lasted into the fifth inning and I broke up the other guy’s no-hitter as a batter which is another reason why pitcher should hit, Alex. Uhm–
ALEX: Right, because you you are you are [1:27:57].
BOBBY: Right, I did not complete the no-hitter but I got close, five complete innings. Those are my two best go–
ALEX: I mean that’s that’s pretty good. That’s only a couple innings away from a you know a doubleheader hitter, right You were right there with mad bone.
BOBBY: But in literally the only place six innings, so I was only one inning.
ALEX: That’s true, you’re right.
BOBBY: Heartbreaking. I was pissed.
ALEX: Yes, tough, tough.
BOBBY: They tried to pull some shenanigans actually, by the way. They tried to say that my pitch count was higher than it actually was. So they tried to get me pulled out. It was like a 10-minute delay. While they argued about the pitch counts. They had to check with the umpire that checked with the field as a whole thing. I was really mad.
ALEX: Oh, yeah, I forgot that like pitch counts were like a thing that mattered.
BOBBY: Yeah. 75 is the max I think?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I was just throwing fastball down the middle every time. It’s a real power pitcher.
ALEX: Challenging them, yeah. Uhh, I have a couples as well, uhm I you know, it’s really only a couple because I was I was not very good baseball player. That’s why I’m not a baseball player today. I did, uh, when I was like 12, I struck out the the league’s power hitter, was just a was just a goofy Bugs Bunny curveball. That that brought him to his knees. And I uhh feel pretty fucking good about that, I’m not gonna lie. That was kind of one of those things–
BOBBY: [1:29:13] strike out?
ALEX: –where I’m like–
BOBBY: Yes, no, bro, yeah.
ALEX: This is the dude who who annihilates every every pitcher he faces–
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Right? And I get up there as the relief pitcher. I come in I’ve you know, big big moment. A–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –high high leverage moment and I come in.
BOBBY: Shake and bake [1:29:32] hearing.
ALEX: Exactly, yeah. It took quite literally, yes.
BOBBY: Amazing.
ALEX: And uhh, and II played in a perfect game, I played second base in a perfect game.
BOBBY: Oh, cool.
ALEX: Uhm, it was really cool. You know I didn’t do? Touch the ball once.
BOBBY: You didn’t make a single out?
ALEX: Just the ball never came to me.
BOBBY: At second base?
ALEX: At second base.
BOBBY: How many innings? Was it seven or nine?
ALEX: This is this is high school. So I guess it would have been seven.
BOBBY: Interesting. Wow, a lot of strikeouts in that three trials.
ALEX: That’s right. Yeah, that was there. You know, we have to celebrate.
BOBBY: Yeah, that’s cool.
ALEX: It’s fun.
BOBBY: That’s cool.
ALEX: It’s memorable.
BOBBY: Sticking on the theme of stuff that happened while we played Baseball. Dawson asks, “What’s the best dugout or clubhouse prank you’ve ever pulled off and or witnessed?” Uhm Dawson has another question, I’ll get to in a second. But I don’t really have a good answer for this. I wasn’t much of a prankster. I’ll just tell a story of when I was in middle school. Uhm I was just a, I was a pitcher and so I and I was a starter, so I only played like once every three games basically. And so in the other two games, I wasn’t that great of a hitter by that point. Uhh I probably needed to be wearing glasses didn’t start wearing glasses until high school. Might have had an effect on my ability to pick up pitches and hit them. Uhm I used to just sit there with my friends who also were not playing and we used to take sunflower seeds and try to shoot them into other people’s batting helmets, like from on one side of the bench to the other side of the bench. And so when they would put their helmet on sunflower seeds would fall all over their face.ALEX: Why so, was the shooting them into the helmet that was just like a game for you guys, because it would have been very easy to just like pour the bag and–
BOBBY: No, it was–
ALEX: [1:31:17] helmet, you know.
BOBBY: We also, this is a little bit a little bit grosser, but we sometimes we try to spit them into other people’s helmets.
ALEX: Young boys are disgusting.
BOBBY: Yep, absolutely.
ALEX: Say that.
BOBBY: All right. What’s what’s your answer here? You have one?
ALEX: I apologize, Dawson, I don’t have a good answer. I was not a uhm I was I was not really a a jokester. I feel like when you’re uhh when you’re second string, you don’t really there’s not a ton of ahh cachet that you can throw around to you know, pull clubhouse pranks.
BOBBY: That means you have to answer Dawson’s second question, which is, “How did you come up with the idea for this podcast?” It’s exactly what I would have done with my best friend if we had thought of it first.
ALEX: Uhm the answer to this, that we tell everyone, and that is true, which is why we tell it to everyone. Uhh is that we would spend long hours of the night coming back from the newspaper, or even not coming back from the student newspaper, just you know, it’s just 1am. And neither of us really wants to finish our schoolwork. And so we would just kind of usually it was you coming into my room, and just kind of standing in the doorway.
BOBBY: Pacing back and forth.
ALEX: Pacing back and forth. I’m kind of like, you know, I have class really early in the morning.
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: But I’m just gonna let them go.
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: No, uhh we would talk for hours. And it was it was really inhibiting our ability to get other things done. Like, you know, sleep, or once, as I mentioned schoolwork. And we said, why don’t we codify this a little bit more, and just like set a designated time each week where we just get it out of our system, and then we don’t have to put up with any shit anymore.
BOBBY: And then the rest of the time, we can argue about whether hotdogs are sandwiches or not.
ALEX: Right, exactly. That’s the bonus content.
BOBBY: What’s the best Taylor Swift song is? Uhm, yes, that’s a good answer. Okay, we are running very low on time. Let’s move on to a question from Greta. Greta asks, “What can MLB do to help get more women into Baseball, as GM, scouts, OMPS, coaches, etc.”
ALEX: This is obviously a really big question. And there’s also a certain irony in to men having this conversation about how to uhh how to open the gates a little more. So I’m, you know, up top gonna say that I certainly don’t have all the answers for this. And it’s, it’s something we have, we’ve had discussions with other folks about on this show before.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And I I hope we will continue to have these conversations we had on RB Butcher. I think, earlier this year, late last year.
BOBBY: Yeah, part of the series that we did with people asking what what they would do if they were commissioners. We had Ginny Searle, we had Randy Wilkins, a couple other people.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah. And and they gave some really good really thoughtful responses on how to reduce the the gatekeeping that happens in Baseball to you know, non sis men. I think it’s as much cultural as it is structural, you know, there are obvious like, like, literal barriers in in, you know, not seeing women playing baseball, and we’ve talked about that before, but I think it’s, it leans far more on the culture that is, is frankly not very welcoming to women in baseball, and that has to change and that, you know, that speaks to some players conduct uhh that speaks to that speaks to the general conservative nature of the sport and its fandom it speaks to the the criticism, for example, that say, female broadcasters receive or are female coaches and obviously there are strides that have been made in the spaces. But there’s a reason that they are are few and far between, and that there hasn’t been a, you know, a breaking of the levees. And it’s not because there aren’t talented women out there who are more than capable of thriving in these roles, right? We saw Kim Ng get hired as the Marlins GM. And it took her 20 years to to do that. That’s a job that she was capable of doing for 20 years and was was talked about 20 years ago. And and still, there was a, you know, a black mark on her name solely because of her gender. So I think it has as much to do with the mindset of people who work in and around Baseball than anything else. And that’s, that’s not a very satisfying answer. And there’s not even a lot actionable, there. But it starts from from the ground up. It starts from places like Little League, right? It starts in conversations you have about Baseball with other people. There’s a long road ahead. That’s for sure.
BOBBY: I agree with everything you said. And I want to add if there’s something that is actionable, it’s that I think that MLB needs to shift its view on what its responsibility is on effecting change at the Little League and youth level. They just kind of they, they lean in as much with youth Baseball, as they feel like is not as beneficial to them. They don’t really lean in to try to help steer the direction of the game enough. Like they’re fine with perfect game taking over and making it more exclusionary towards people from ahh a more disadvantaged background. They’re fine with the stark dichotomy of Baseball and Softball from a young age that steers that steers girls away from Baseball.
ALEX: Frankly.
BOBBY: Uhm the existence of Softball and the way that it’s thought of in the cultural in the culture of the Baseball world means that it’s very hard for people who are not sis men to get into the sport of Baseball at a young age. And what do we talk about all the time, the reason that we love the game so much is because of the nostalgia of it, remembering playing, it remembering watching it growing up, and if you gatekeeping that from such a young age, you’re already pre determining who your ideal fan is. And I think MLB doesn’t care about that really, like I think that they are fine viewing the ideal fan as like an over 50 white guy. Because it’s comfortable for them. And I think they need to be okay with getting a little bit more comfortable. And that starts at a younger age.
ALEX: Yes, great. This is this is not the end of this conversation. Uhm there’s there’s plenty more to dissect here that is probably not appropriate to get into in a, you know, a goofy mailbag episode. But I appreciate Greta, you asking this? Uhm because it’s a question that doesn’t come up often enough.
BOBBY: All right, we only have time for a couple more. There are a lot more here that we wanted to get to that. And then there are even more that we wrote down on the list. But I decided to hold for future episodes to answer either in a longer segment, or potentially as a whole episode discussion because they were good ideas or about larger topics that warranted ahh a deeper discussion. So let’s just do one or two more, Alex.
VOICEMAIL 5: Hi Alex and Bobby This is Alexander from DC. I lived in Winnipeg in Seattle as a kid for mostly growing up in the Dallas area. But because the Rangers were both really bad, and impossible to see in person without dying of heatstroke, I’ve never really had a team. call myself a Camden Yards fan, and pretty content to just cheer for specific players, especially Shohei Ohtani. But I’m curious which five ish teams which you consider to be the most rewarding to be a fan of? and which five ish would you consider be like the hardest to cheer for? Usual stuff, love the pod, keep up the good work and congrats on 200.
BOBBY: Usual stuff, love the pod, usual stuff, love the pod. I’m gonna start signing off with that usual stuff, Alex, thanks for listening to the pod ahh five, five at the top and five at the bottom is slightly too many. That’s like a third of the leak. But we could do like two or three at the top who are the two or three most rewarding teams to be a fan of. What do you write down?
ALEX: Most rewarding teams you can you can obviously interpret this in in various ways. I think unequivocally uhh the Dodgers.
BOBBY: Yup.
ALEX: A rewarding team to watch., i’s kind of no question. As of the past year, the Padres I think that’s another very rewarding team to watch.
BOBBY: Despite.
ALEX: Right, regardless of successes on field, I think that plays a role but it is not the primary factor, right? A team that tries is more interesting than I think one that just kind of just you know, I mean, just because the Rays won 100 games doesn’t mean they’re the most rewarding team to watch in Baseball. And then honestly, I wrote down the Astros.
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: I think regardless of personal feelings towards them, Astros’ fans seriously to love that team. And over the last few years, they have managed to really build up a pretty darn good core of players. Now that remains to be seen what that looks like. After this offseason, does Carlos Correa stick around these? Who knows they’re just got word about the contract they offered him. This is not the news breaking podcast. But I think by and large, they are an extremely good Baseball team that it has seems like they are not afraid to kind of go all in. That’s my answer. What about you?
BOBBY: I bristled a little bit the Astros because of how they’ve basically been a little bit self defeating about guys who are coming up for free agency. Like it already happened with Gary Cole, they’ve already proven that that is their organizational philosophy. So I wrote the Yankees, because the number one thing that I think is rewarding about being a Yankees’ fan, aside from all of the times they have actually won is how organizationally frustrated they feel for having not won since 2009. I think most other organizations would say, Get off our back a little bit, we won in 2009. I think the Yankees would say you guys are right, we haven’t won since 2009. That’s the reason–
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: –that I would add them into the mix there. The bottom, uhm I only wrote two, the bottom two I wrote are Cleveland and Miami. Cleveland because their player development is actually been phenomenal in the last decade, but they are too cheap to keep any of them around. Uhh so they end up trading them away and the whole the shenanigans about changing the name was absurd and indefensible. Uhm Charles Dolan is an idiot, all of that stuff that we’ve talked about a million times. Uhh and then because they got so close, and then they systematically dismantled the T by not wanting to pay for it, I think that it is a special type of not rewarding. And then from Miami, the payroll and the crying poor and the different changes of hand of ownership in the last 15 years. Now they won two World Series very early on in 97′, and 2003. But I think since then, it’s frustrating and not that rewarding in terms of what they’ve given back on a day in and day out level. Like the stadium is is weird, and indoors, and even some of the quirky things that they like about the stadium like the homeruns sculpture, they take it down, it’s just like it doesn’t really seem like the fans are that big a part of the experience if part of the experience at all.
ALEX: Yeah, I agree. I wrote the Marlins sound as well not because, again, it really has very little to do with success of the team, or who their players are. Because again, they have a they have a fun Baseball team, but it’s really a lot of the baggage that they carry. I also wrote down as of late the Cubs, I don’t think the Cubs have a rewarding team to watch these days. they very well could be and in previous years, they have been and the the the rackets are doing their best to turn that on its head. Uhm, I I wrote down that the Mariners which I I don’t know how I feel about, but I think that’s just a really tortured fan base that probably deserves better. And while I think they’re a very fun team to watch, there’s it’s a, it can be brutal at times. And uhh and I think also the Mets are our hidden risks. You could you could you could place them on this list, and I won’t speak for you, as the resident Mets fan here. They are very rewarding to watch at some times. And I wonder if that outweighs that the bumbling nature of their franchise, I don’t know.
BOBBY: You know, I’m wondering that as well. The part that is rewarding about Mets fandom is like the community with the other Mets fans.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Mets fans are good. They’re good fans, and they show up to the ballpark and they make a lot of noise and uhh no matter what the organization does to them, and I find that rewarding. But I have also chosen to compartmentalize the different parts of my Mets fandom so that it doesn’t actually crush my soul every day.
ALEX: Yeah, some people might call this Stockholm, Stockholm Syndrome. Other people might call it being a Mets fan.
BOBBY: Yeah. Uhm I guess in the sense that every night when I go to bed, and every morning when I wake up, one of the thoughts that I have is will I die without seeing my team win a World Series? I guess in that sense, it’s not that rewarding. But when they do if they do, maybe they won’t, maybe they will. It’s gonna feel pretty damn rewarding.
ALEX: Yeah, when that euphoria hits.
BOBBY: Yep, absolutely. I think that’s all we have time for because we’re gonna be over two hours if we keep going and we might even be over two hours as it stands. Uhm I want to Have a quick shout out to Owen, Alex, Destin, Gavin, Zack, Dave, William, Rob, Liz, Max and a different Alex. So many Alex’s, did you bring the Alex hive into the podcast? Do you have like–
ALEX: I did, yeah–
BOBBY: –you guys have a group chat?
ALEX: I did drop it in the group chat was like, “Yo, I need y’all to show out for this”.
BOBBY: No Bobby’s asking questions, what the hell? Now you don’t see that many Bobby’s out there these days. Uhh I want to give a quick shout out to all of them because we didn’t get to their questions several of those we will save for like I said the longer conversations longer answers a couple of them we will include in our voicemails uhm regular listener questions segments next week. But thank you all so much and thank you to everybody whose questions we did answer. Thank you so much for the incredibly kind words about the show that many if not all of you included in your messages and like I said at the beginning and after we got that one voicemail it means the world that uhm the way that we view Baseball and the way that we talk about Baseball and think about it in relation to the larger world that we’re forced to be a part of every day uhm is enough to build community around. So 200 episodes we did it we commit right here to 200 more.
ALEX: I mean need to talk to my agent, right? There may have to be some opt outs built in you know like after 100 after 150.
BOBBY: I have a specific opt out built in ahh, a mutual option built in for after the Mets win the World Series. If they win the World Series I want to reserve the right to just be like I’m done. I’m done with Baseball, period no more Baseball podcast–
ALEX: So now you opt out from the podcast, the opt out from the sport your layout–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –this is this is I’m done with Baseball–
BOBBY: –I’m getting–
ALEX: –I got everything I came here for.
BOBBY: –time this shift my focus to Tennis.
ALEX: Tennis is good, I agree. It’s way better than Baseball. The last thing that I will ahh I will say before we get out of here and let the rest of you ahh enjoy your your afternoon your evening or if you’re Becca your your run. I want to read off Zack who who we put out a call for or what Tipping Pitches listeners should be called.
BOBBY: Right, right true.
ALEX: We did not actually get as many as I would have hoped for and frankly that’s that’s on you guys. There’s nothing we can do about that. We put the call out there. Zach came in–
BOBBY: [1:47:29] louder in October, that’s the reason that we got eliminated from the proceeds.
ALEX: Zach came in–
BOBBY: This one’s good
ALEX: –and kind of threw the gauntlet down I’m not gonna lie this might be my front runner so far. Podcasts a podcast listener names. I feel like we need to we need to play off unions here, right? Like “The Tipsters” feels obvious, right? Or something excessively long, like “The United Tipping Pitches Listeners of the Internet”, which is hilarious–
BOBBY; I–
ALEX: –so true.
BOBBY: –Tipsters sounds a little bit too much like people who write into the New York Times.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I like United Tipping Pitches Listeners of the Internet, UTPLI. It has to be an acronym though. Because I’m not reading UTPLI every time. So maybe or maybe it’s just UTPL? But that’s not an acronym either. So we we could workshop it but that’s a good starting point.
ALEX: Yeah, well being you know, like the like the Auto Workers Union. It’s like it’s it’s UAW, right? No one’s out there like aw aw, uwaw.
BOBBY: Wow.
ALEX: Wow, wua.
BOBBY: We’re literally making noises, we have to end the podcast.
ALEX: This is this is tough, yeah, tough territory. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote or called or tweeted any of this. We had a lot of fun fielding all your questions. And and once again, Bobby, like you said. Thank you to everyone just for, for sticking around. And being here with us on this ride. It really means the world to us that people actually tuned in and listen to this. And y’all are as much a part of this as, as us we really couldn’t do the show without without the input and the support of everyone. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
BOBBY: We’ll be back next week with a slightly more normal episode. Thanks everyone.
[1:49:12]
[Music]
[1:49:35]
[Outro]
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m Alex Rodriguez, Tipping Pitches, Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most Tipping Pitches. So we’ll see you next week. See ya.
Transcriptionist: Vernon Bryann Casil
Editor: Krizia Marrie Casil
Tipping Pitches 
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