Alex and Bobby take a trip to the Oakland Coliseum for a Bay Bridge Series protest game and report back on what they saw and heard, like “Sell the team” chants, sick Teamsters shirts, and a whole lot of passionate fans. Plus: Steve Cohen semi-open letter alert, and a programming note about the next couple weeks.
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Songs featured in this episode:
Kool & the Gang — “Celebration” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
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? That’s amazing! That’s remarkable.
SPEAKER 1: Sell the team! Sell the team! Sell the team! Sell the team!
BOBBY: On beer number two, now’s where we start asking the hard questions. How are you feeling at the Coliseum?
ALEX: A little dehydrated, honestly.
BOBBY: How’s the crowd so far?
ALEX: It really filled up, actually.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Honestly.
SPEAKER 4: So you got a podcast?
BOBBY: Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER 4: Then, well, help me out.
BOBBY: It’s called Tipping Pitches.
SPEAKER 4: Tipping Pitches?
BOBBY: Tipping Pitches. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER 4: Tipping Pitches?
BOBBY: Yeah.
SPEAKER 4: All right, man. We’ll be in [1:00]
BOBBY: All right, brother. Thank you. Appreciate that.
SPEAKER 4: Tipping Pitches?
BOBBY: That’s right. Just look it up.
SPEAKER 4: Where can we find you like—
BOBBY: Anywhere you get pods, yeah. Spotify, Apple.
SPEAKER 4: Okay. Listen [1:09]
SPEAKER 5: [1:09] on the podcast?
[laughter]
SPEAKER 4: This guy said anywhere you can find [1:13]
BOBBY: Yeah, anywhere.
SPEAKER 4: Tipping Podcast?
BOBBY: Tipping Pitches.
SPEAKER 4: What’s your name?
BOBBY: Bobby.
SPEAKER 4: Bobby?
BOBBY: Yeah.
SPEAKER 4: All right, man.
BOBBY: And that’s Alex over there.
SPEAKER 4: Is that—is that your partner?
BOBBY: Yeah. He’s my co-host.
SPEAKER 4: I’m gonna listen to you, seriously.
BOBBY: Alex, I don’t know how this is possible, but yesterday was our first trip to the Oakland Coliseum together. And our first time seeing the Oakland Athletics in person, with each other.
ALEX: Is that second part true?
BOBBY: Well, when else would we have gone? I guess—
ALEX: You mean—you mean, uh, at the Coliseum?
BOBBY: Have we seen them play elsewhere? Have we seen an A’s-Mets series? Have we seen an A’s-Yankees series?
ALEX: I guess—
BOBBY: I don’t think we have.
ALEX: I guess not together, no.
BOBBY: You—you go to Yankee Stadium every year when the A’s come through—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —usually. You went to the Wild Card game.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But I was not there with you. I don’t know why. There’s a real separation on—separation of church and state going on between the Mets and the A’s with us. You can’t combine, there’s nuclear reaction.
ALEX: You really can’t.
BOBBY: Except for yesterday when we went. And, uh, I’d say we had a great time. And the A’s won the game.
ALEX: They did.
BOBBY: So maybe all along what was missing was everybody that we know, attending every single A’s game.
ALEX: Look, small sample size aside.
BOBBY: Small sample size of one game aside.
ALEX: Right. We’re about in the 1,000 right now.
BOBBY: Exactly. And there’s—
ALEX: And we have a dozen people in the stand.
BOBBY: There’s no proof that we couldn’t get the A’s to win every single game.
ALEX: I mean, what are we doing this afternoon?
BOBBY: We’re going and helping them take the Bay Bridge Series is what we’re doing.
ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: Um, if you’re listening at home, you no doubt notice that the beginning of this podcast was a little bit different. We’re playing some audio from the stadium, of our trip to the stadium. Uh, we brought a little field recorder, brought for our little Zoom to the Oakland Coliseum to document our trip, to document what is my first trip to the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Let’s get that name correct. No official sponsor of the field these days. Most recently, RingCentral—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —Coliseum. What does RingCentral do? Pop quiz.
ALEX: Are they like a—like a cloud, you know? Like S—like software, it’s a service.
BOBBY: Oh, cloud. They’re a cloud—
ALEX: Like a—they’re like a cloud—like—
BOBBY: Oh, SAS.
ALEX: —B—I think they’re probably B2B.
BOBBY: B2B. Yeah.
ALEX: Um—
BOBBY: B2B, SAS.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: D—are they DTC as well, direct-to-consumer?
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: OTT?
ALEX: I mean, I’ve—if the consumer is the—the business.
BOBBY: I was told yesterday that, um, RingCentral is like Zoom. You know, they’re like a cloud—
ALEX: Told you.
BOBBY: —phone call software.
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: I—this whole time that—RingCentral—RingCentral was a sponsor of the Coliseum, and this is just wild promo for RingCentral here at the top—
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah.
BOBBY: —of this podcast for our millions of listeners. I thought RingCentral was the same company that does, like, the Ring doorbells.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And I was like, “That’s bleak for the A’s.” But it turns out, it’s even bleaker. It’s a company that I had no idea what they did.
ALEX: It’s a second-rate Zoom platform.
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: So what you’re saying is they have an open spot right now.
BOBBY: Yes. And you’d have to imagine that the rate is a lot lower than the rest of the stadiums, because it’s not going to be around much longer.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: We talked about this in the car the other day, but I think the A’s are only scheduled to play at the Oakland Coliseum for one more here.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So we can get that kind of discount end of—like, the end of the career contract rate, you know? Bring it back for one more—one more go at the Apple, you know?
ALEX: I thought—I think yesterday or the day before we were talking about sponsoring, uh, little league stadiums.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Like a little league team, and here we are talking about the same thing and that’s—
BOBBY: No, this—good joke. I didn’t think that’s where you’re going with it, but good joke.
ALEX: I didn’t either.
BOBBY: Um, no, this is part of our two-front plan, you know? This is like how the Mets were like, “We want to compete now and in the future.”
ALEX: Right?
BOBBY: We want to compete—we want to sponsor Little Leagues, Little League organizations, and the Oakland Athletics high and low. We’re not above either of them.
ALEX: This is the first step in our mission to, uh, push out a perfect game and create our own, uh, baseball pipeline.
BOBBY: That would be amazing mid-career pivot for us.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: We just become, like, showcase guys.
ALEX: Just talking about 15-year-olds with live arms.
BOBBY: Such a weird—such a weird cottage industry that goes on there, but are we ever going to do the perfect game, like, series that we said we were gonna do, the Little League Series, the perfect game series?
ALEX: History is any indication there’s an inverse correlation between how much we banter about, uh, a potential podcast idea on an episode.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And the likelihood of it actually happening.
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: So if we want it to happen, we gotta nip that in the bud right now.
BOBBY: Like, stop—stop—stop talking about it now. Um, on today’s episode, we are not going to do a deep dive into a perfect game. We are not going to do a deep dive into climate and baseball in the future. What we are going to do is we’re going to talk about our trip to the Oakland Coliseum, about the atmosphere and about the fan coordination, and everything that a lot of people have read about and we’ve discussed on the podcast a little bit in the last couple of months. But experiencing it firsthand, I’d say it was an eye-opening for the both of us. Um, there’s a couple other stuff that I want to get to, like by this time last week, uh, Justin Verlander had not been traded and many Billy Eppler quotes were not circulating around in the world. Um, and Steve Cohen’s open/closed letter—
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: —did not exist yet, but we’re going to talk about that later in the episode. Before we do, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I’m Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches.
[theme]
BOBBY: Thank you to this week’s new patrons, Matt and Ginger Spurs Boy. Alex, I’m gonna let you cook here for a little bit. We took a trip to the Coliseum, a place that no doubt harbors many, many memories—
ALEX: Many.
BOBBY: —in the deep end, shallow recesses of your mind.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I’m sure. Uh, how did it feel setting foot in there, center of the news cycle that it is?
ALEX: Right. Yeah. I mean, not to get—not to be—not to be, like, sincere on Main. [7:19]
BOBBY: Nah, I think we should make a hard pivot towards sincerity.
ALEX: I mean—
BOBBY: Just come on here and talk about all the stuff that we love and appreciate about the world every week.
ALEX: You know, we could probably use a little more of that, every once in a while. Um, I thought it was a really beautiful scene. I mean, it was their largest home crowd of the year, 38,000 people.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Um, as I think you mentioned, this was the—the Bay Bridge Series, the—half of it being hosted in Oakland, so they’re playing the San Francisco Giants. And these games are always sort of marquee matchup appointment viewing for lots of Bay Area baseball fans. They’re just fun. It’s fun for Giant fans to come out to the A’s stadium and vice versa, I guess. Um, but all that to say, like it felt like the—sort of my heyday of going to Oakland A’s games, right? Where the crowd was, like, in it.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: You know, early, like, 2010s when they were ripping off wild card runs and stuff. And—
BOBBY: And the Giants were ripping off World Series.
ALEX: Right, exactly.
BOBBY: More things change the more they stay the same.
ALEX: Wild cards fly forever.
BOBBY: Jeff Samardzija trades fly forever. So much Jeff Samardzija talk between you and I in the last few days.
ALEX: I know, seriously.
BOBBY: What listeners don’t know is that we do remember some guy, so we just don’t do it on mic.
ALEX: I—I mean, it was a perfect day for baseball, I’ll just say. It was like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —high 70’s, not a cloud in the sky, slight breeze. We were—we were seated up, uh, in the third deck, so there was a nice, little breeze keeping us cool up there. It was just—it was amazing. And as many of our listeners might remember, about a month and a half ago A’s fans stage this sort of reverse boycott, um, where they were gonna pack the house, right, chance all the team. It’s the—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —sort of movement that’s been—they’ve taken the show on the road to other stadiums and had—had opposing fans chip in. And this was kind of part two of that reverse boycott at the Oakland Coliseum, right, so they hadn’t—
BOBBY: And we didn’t even plan it this way, which is kind of the craziest part.
ALEX: We didn’t. We bought the tickets and learned about this weeks later.
BOBBY: Yes. You texted this to me maybe four days ago—
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: —that this was going to be happening at the game that we were attending.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: So, it felt—
ALEX: My—my birthday [9:35]
BOBBY: Not to be dramatic—on your birthday, yes, exactly.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: It felt a little bit cosmic—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —if I have to be honest.
ALEX: Yeah. The—the level of organization and care that has been put into this sort of, you know, “fan protests”—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —over the last few weeks and few months has been unrivaled. Like they—like yesterday was a, you know, Bay Bridge Series rally towel that said sell the team and they had some cheer cards. And it was, like, the coolest giveaway I’ve gotten at—at an A’s game in years. Meanwhile—I mean—
BOBBY: Apart because you can’t trade to sell the team—
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: —you know?
ALEX: Well, when we went into the ballpark, they were giving these impromptu trading card packs away, right, for international trading card.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Which did have a player who’s no longer, uh, on the team in it.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: So—
BOBBY: Shout-out to Shintaro Fujinami.
ALEX: —it will be, um—yeah, that’s right.
BOBBY: Um—
ALEX: Orioles legend.
BOBBY: I’m—
ALEX: Orioles legend.
BOBBY: The Orioles are good, by the way. I just like to say that—
ALEX: Yeah. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —after watching them play against the Mets in a three-game series, weekend series. That was—
ALEX: Real deal, we can confirm.
BOBBY: That was very fun. Can confirm, saw it with my own two eyes. James McCann, best catcher in Major League Baseball. Um, would—would the Orioles trade Francisco Alvarez for James McCann straight-up? What do you think? I don’t think so. Think on that. Um, I’m glad that you said the—I’m glad that you pointed out that the organization of this event, um, was so exceptional, because I think that when the reverse boycott was first announced a couple of months ago, um, I think what a lot of people said was that, “I worry that this becomes the type of thing where we pack the house and nothing comes from it.” And, you know—and John Fisher basically just gets to pocket a couple extra $100,000 because of these reverse boycotts and because of selling more tickets, and the gate receipts, and, um, you know, all of the—all of the concessions that we sell, all of the beer, all of the hotdogs, everything. And ultimately, it just amounts to nothing, but I think that it’s been the exact opposite. I think that the reverse boycotts, because they have been so centered in the fan community and so seemingly, like, cordoned off from ownership behavior, it seems like—it seems like a reclamation of the coliseum space, the fandom—the A’s fandom space—
ALEX: Hmm.
BOBBY: —whatever that looks like, whether that’s digital or physical. And being there in person only confirmed that sort of feeling that you got when you watched it from afar. And everybody seems to be having a good time despite the fact that, like, the A’s are trying their best to take that away. Not really the A’s, like specifically John Fisher and—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —the ownership group, and Dave Cobb are trying their best to take that away from people. And, you know, I will say, like, for all the guff that we give to Giants fans and the Giants organization, they were—they were playing ball, you know?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know, they were chanting sell the team, they were wearing—they were waving the towels, they were wearing shirts that said, “Sell”—I saw a lot of, like, A’s colored sell shirts with Giants, you know, paraphernalia as well.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like a hat or like a jersey overtop of the A’s shirt, A’s sell shirt. And I was like, “It is kind of an eye-opening experience to how—how powerful fans are in the context of the Major League Baseball, like, ecosystem, cultural ecosystem, financial ecosystem. Um, and that doesn’t—um, that’s not like me trying to say that this movement specifically is going to be the thing that gets the A’s to stay in Oakland.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But if the A’s do stay in Oakland, I think this movement will be the—like the thing in the lead, you know? Like the—the first—the thing in this first sentence about the article about the A’s eventually selling to—you know, insert billionaire who wants to buy the A’s here, Joe Lacob, whoever that might be, whatever.
ALEX: Yeah, it was genuinely emotional—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —at times. And—and again, is this going to be the thing that forces John Fisher’s hand? Like, I mean, these guys are also insulated from fans as it is that—
BOBBY: Except for when they go to the game and take pictures of you.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: They’re insulated from every fan except you.
ALEX: Except me. Right. I have the direct line, um, so you can field your—uh, I will field your comments, questions, concerns on his behalf.
BOBBY: If you can just submit them in a Google form for me, I’ll just collate those.
ALEX: But, like, it really did feel powerful and a testament to the fact that the—the team and—and the culture around it does not belong to John Fisher, right? I didn’t see John Fisher at yesterday’s game. Where was—where was he?
BOBBY: Um—
ALEX: It was—it was a pretty exciting baseball game.
BOBBY: It would have been a baller move for him to show up, though.
ALEX: It would have been—it would have been an amazing move to show up in a sell shirt.
BOBBY: And that’s the way that he announces the team is up for sale. He shows up in a sell shirt and he’s like, “Call me.” You know, like, it has a phone number underneath it. Like a used car that’s sitting on the side of the road.
[laugher]
BOBBY: Um, I think that, you know, this is at the center of everything that’s come out about the, you know, sell the team, reverse boycott movement that’s been going on with the A’s. But it was only reinforced for—for me in this past weekend that ultimately even if this does not lead to them selling the team and staying in Oakland, I think what this does do is provide irrefutable evidence that any of this was ever the fan or Oakland community’s fault.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: Like nobody could make the argument now after everything that has gone on for the last two months. Nobody could make a—an argument in good faith that this has anything to do with attendance, or fandom, or love for the A’s, or appreciation for the A’s history and shared history with the Giants in the Bay Area. Like you can’t say that anymore. And even if you were the type of fan that was prone to maybe blame Oakland or blame the fans for not showing up because the attendance has been so low over the last couple of years, this has provided the counterweight to that bad faith argument. And all in all, I—if that’s as far as it goes, I think that’s a pretty great legacy to leave for—for A’s fans. Um, you know, you—you take it as far as you possibly can and you just hope that the right outcome supersedes. It’s like kind of out of—uh, at this point, it’s like kind of out of A’s fan base.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know? Like, you’ve done everything they can.
ALEX: Definitely, I think a lot of this is catharsis, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: A lot of pent-up frustration over the years that fans kind of have, uh, an ability to channel that, or reason to channel that beyond simply—”Well, you trade our—our players and stuff.” Right? “Now, you’re trading our—our team—our whole team away.” I will say on the heels of that, you know, um, comment from you about how no one can—can make the argument that—that this is the fans’ fault anymore. Um, the opinion pages of the Nevada Independent can, I just want to say. In fact, they may make these arguments on the very day that these reverse boycotts are, uh, made. Sometimes they might even make the argument that, uh, Oakland is a little too diverse for—
BOBBY: Hmm.
ALEX: —such a white sport like baseball.
BOBBY: Oh.
ALEX: And that’s why Nevada would be better, because Nevada is more homogeneous and white.
BOBBY: So, if you’re—if you haven’t seen this at home, if you’re following along at home, what Alex is alluding to is that there’s—not that piece in the Nevada Independent, which it—it’s not even worth doing a bad take dramatic reading over this.
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: Like it’s not—this is just part of a larger bad faith movement to take the O’s—the A’s from—from Oakland, but, like, this piece makes the case that Nevada will be a better home for the A’s because it more closely aligns the demographic of people who are interested in the sport of baseball. And that may be Oakland, diverse, radical city that it is, is not a good home for Major League—for a Major League Baseball team. That is obviously a dog shit argument. But I think is at—at least a little bit instructive to how few arguments that are left to make for—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —moving the A’s to Las Vegas. Like if you have to stoop this low in the pages of the Nevada Independent to make a case that that team should be there, like you’ve lost the financial argument because you’re—you are limiting your fan base, because you’re severing the ties between all the fans who are already fans in Oakland, and you are admittedly probably not going to be able to build a—a fan base quickly in Las Vegas, given that you don’t have a team that’s very good, and you don’t have an owner that’s proven that he wants to invest to make the team good. And there’s not a lot coming up through the farm system right now. The A’s top prospect, Tyler Soderstrom, who we joked about a few weeks ago on the MLB Matchmaker episode, who’s their only top 100 prospects that they got back in all of those trades for all of their many, many all-star players who are having sensational seasons far and wide across Major League Baseball, including multiple of them on the Atlanta Braves, which—thank you for that, I really appreciate that.
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Ty—is Tyler Soderstrom already on the team, you know? Like, it’s not like there’s—the cavalry is not coming. And, you know, all signs point to the fact that they’re going to build a relatively small stadium in Las Vegas, and so I don’t really know if their goal is to try to create as many fans or if—to try to create a one-stop shop where you can give the A’s money. So, they basically lost the argument on all of those other fronts, and so they’re like, “Well, baseball is a white sport and we’re bringing it to a white town.” Like, “We’re really just doing like—”
ALEX: That’s simple math right there.
BOBBY: “—full race-baiting—”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “—as the reason that the A’s should come to Oak—or should come to Las Vegas. I—uh, as I notice that the op-ed—the op-ed pages across the United States are just completely decimated.
ALEX: Dire—dire strait right now.
BOBBY: Like, it’s just a place where you just write whatever you want. You can do, like, a terrible tweet thread and basically just publish it word for word—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —in an op-ed section across any major city in the United States. Not to be, like, let’s save journalism guy on the pod but, like—it used to be that you—you kind of had to make, like, a logical argument and support it, but that is just—that is just very gone.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, the—the desire to both sides everything has really pushed us into a bad spot right now.
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: I’m kind of curious to hear your perspective as well as someone who had never been to the Oakland Coliseum—
BOBBY: Hmm.
ALEX: —before.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Obviously, it was may—yesterday’s game was maybe not the best representation of what—watching a game at the Coliseum is like in 2023.
BOBBY: No, every game is like—it’s my only perspective on it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Every single game is like that. Highest attendance in baseball.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, if you haven’t watched another baseball game, a—another A’s game, yeah, that is [20:21]
BOBBY: A guy who’s only watched one baseball game. This is looking like the great atmosphere here.
ALEX: But what was your perspective, especially knowing kind of the baggage that comes along with the Coliseum—
BOBBY: Yes. Yes.
ALEX: —and the A’s? I—I—I want your boots on the ground reporting.
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: I want your—
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: op-ed.
BOBBY: Yes. I’m—I’m—I’m dumping the notebook.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That’s what we call it in the journalism world. I’m so glad that you asked. Thank you for asking. I think everybody complains about the Coliseum is a big whiny baby.
ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: What’s wrong with it? “Oh, I’m sorry. There’s not somewhere in the outfield that you can, like, place a bet. There’s not a casino in the outfield. Oh, wait, sorry, you can’t go and, like, have your kids play in a jungle gym in left field while the game is going on. Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t buy a $28 pork belly sandwich. That’s such a bummer.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “I’m so bummed for you. That’s a real downer.” Can you go and watch a baseball game? Yes. Can you buy a hot dog? Yes. Can you buy a beer? Yes. Can you see the field from every seat in the house? Yes. I just—look, does it need to be renovated? Yeah.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Every building needs to be renovated after a certain amount of time. Do—are the Major League facilities up to standard? Like this thing that Rob Manfred has been saying for years, this thing that John Fisher has refused to actually invest in for years, probably. Like there are enough players who are on the record that it’d be stupid for me to try to refute that point.
ALEX: Of course.
BOBBY: That the locker rooms suck, the—the batting cages suck, the—the trainer’s rooms are not very good. Like, the—the bowels of the stadium are just not, like, a 21st—
ALEX: Like, literally.
BOBBY: Yeah. Are just not up to 21st century’s standards. But that is all stuff that happens to every stadium, that happened to Kauffman a few years back, and they made the renovations and they still want to blow that up.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Happened to Shea and they decided to build a new stadium in the parking lot across the street or whatever. But, like, there—there were things that Mets fans hated about Shea Stadium, but also at the same time, it held, like, a beloved place in—in the fan base’s history, because it was both were the Mets, like, won their World Series. But also, it was, like, something that stretched from the past into the present, and you could feel, like, the baseball history amongst it. And that, like, I won’t get, like, heart on my sleeve, like emotional about being at the Coliseum, because I’m not really an A’s fan and, you know—but it’s like this was the place that the A’s won multiple World Series. This was the place that Rickey Henderson broke the steals record. This was the place that Vida Blue pitch for this team, and now finally, they have inducted him into the Hall of Fame years after they should have.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know, this was the place that Dave Stewart was pitching. This is the place where— that has been standing there through all of the, you know, history that Oakland has gone through with baseball and just, like, you know, as, um—um, a major center for, like, political movements in this country. Like, I don’t really understand, like, the out for blood feeling for stadiums. Like, the stadium didn’t do anything to you. And to some extent, like if you’re a baseball fan, how much is it really going to change your experience to have a brand-new stadium? You’re still going to be watching a game—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —in-person, you know?
ALEX: It’s gonna cost twice as much.
BOBBY: Exactly.
ALEX: That is first and last thing I’m gonna notice.
BOBBY: Exactly. Exactly. Um, even, like—I love Dodger Stadium. I love going to Dodger Stadium.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: The—is it—is it a hot take for me to say that Dodger Stadium is built worse than the Coliseum? Sure, Dodger Stadium has a beautiful view in the outfield and you can see Chavez Ravine, and the weather is always perfect, and the Dodgers are good. And so, it’s like good vibes all the time.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And Southern California is a very beautiful place to look at. Not as much of a beautiful place to live in, but that’s a different—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —podcast. But, like, I thought the Coliseum was much more accessible, easier to get around, easier to get up to the top decks and back—
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: —down to the middle deck and the field level. Like, if you go to Dodger Stadium, there’s like a couple staircases. That’s it. It’s really hard. I got lost the first time I went there, you know? So, I don’t know. I don’t hear a bunch of people being like, “Let’s tear down Dodger Stadium because it’s ancient.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And it would be sacrilege to say something like that. So, it’s really just like—it’s a matter of perspective. And I wouldn’t be, like, against renovating the Coliseum. I wouldn’t be against even, like, tearing down and rebuilding on the same site or something like that. But I don’t know. the way that it’s cracked up to be, you would think that like—like a beam was going to collapse and fall on your head the way that people talk about it. And that—that has happened to, like, multiple people—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —in our time there. It’s like not everybody seems to be relatively able to enjoy their experience.
ALEX: Yes. Yeah. It’s a big old concrete donut with no frills and—I don’t know. Sometimes that’s actually what you need when you want to go see a baseball game.
BOBBY: You should go on, like, an epic, like, sports radio rant and just be like, “If you don’t like the Coliseum, you don’t like baseball.”
ALEX: Yeah. You’re just soft.
BOBBY: We just had too much frills at the game these days.
ALEX: We really do. It’s like all these millennials need their little distraction, you know? I mean—
BOBBY: I’m sorry, we don’t have Steve Collins videoboard in centerfield.
ALEX: I—there’s a part of me that kind of believes that, though.
BOBBY: I know, yeah.
ALEX: That’s like—
BOBBY: That’s the beauty of taking all the way, a segment that we have since—
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: —propped behind the—the woodshed years ago, but—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —maybe we should bring back in this specific instance.
ALEX: It’s—and—and I recognize that—I mean, we were talking about this just last week, right, this sort of multiplicity of baseball fandom, right? And all the different—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —different ways that you can get into the game and engage with the game. And so, I—even though I don’t think it’s—it—it—good-natured in—in service of that. I—I get the inclination for teams to say, “Well, let’s put as many attractions here as possible, so we can just attract as many people as possible.” But I don’t think not having those makes the stadium, like, lesser than—or, like, a less enjoyable experience. Like, I was there with people I love, and I had a couple beers, and it was a beautiful—
BOBBY: Couple.
ALEX: All right.
BOBBY: I’m just giving you a hard time.
ALEX: I was there with people I love and—and someone I’ve—you know, have mixed feelings about. Um, but, no, honestly, it was like—not to harp on the weather, but what was the temperature in Las Vegas yesterday? It was, like, 110.
BOBBY: Yeah. Uh, that was an interesting question that you posed to me a couple days ago, is that after the Coliseum—after they leave the Coliseum and presumably before they’re able to construct a stadium in Las Vegas, where are the A’s gonna play?
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Genuinely, like, where are they gonna play?
ALEX: Right. And—and—
BOBBY: Are they gonna play in the Triple-A Stadium?
ALEX: Right. And I said, like, they can’t do the Triple-A Stadium, right, because it doesn’t have a roof on it. And you said, “But what are they doing right now? Like, that—”
BOBBY: Yeah, but—yeah, they—they play outside, right? It’s like, “Oh, you haven’t made the bigs. You could die of heatstroke.”
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Oakland A’s baseball, baby. Get pumped.
ALEX: Yeah, being dehydrated is just a market inefficiency.
BOBBY: Do you think—I guess they could probably put a roof on that stadium.
ALEX: Sure.
BOBBY: Throw a couple mil at it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Reach into those deep, deep pockets of JJF.
ALEX: What’s another drop in the—
BOBBY: What’s another drop in the—they’ve already spend a 100 million—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —on building the stadium here, you know?
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: All right. Where—where are you at? I asked you this—so when we originally did our emergency reaction podcast to the fact that the A’s were going to be leaving Oakland or they—they claimed that they intended to leave Oakland. So many caveats—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —these days. So many caveats. Um, we basically, like, pie charted it and it feels like 80/20, I think is what we said.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: The fact that they are going to leave, based on the external communications that we see from them, which is all we can really go off of, because there’s so many people who claimed that they know about whatever back handling is going on and then there’s definitely nobody who actually knows, including Dave Kaval.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And then, like, a month later—or, like, a few weeks later, we reconvened and it seems like Nevada was—was maybe like, “You guys jumped the gun a little bit here.” And we rolled it back a little bit, and we said, “It’s still probably feels like you know, 65/35 that they leave.” So now months later, everything we know about Nevada, passing the bill to give them the money, um, that they—they want. Still swirling rumors, you know, that John J. Fisher does not actually want to own this team and this maybe is, like, the biggest leverage move of all time to try to sell it.
ALEX: Such an alpha. He’s such an alpha.
BOBBY: He just—he just gets the vibe, you know? He’s just—
ALEX: Hmm.
BOBBY: He’s in the rooms. He’s shaking the hands.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: He gets, uh, the art of the deal, you could say.
ALEX: He’s making decisions, right?
BOBBY: Exactly.
ALEX: He’s seizing life by the horns.
BOBBY: Veni, vidi, vici, you know? Um, where would you put them now, percentage-wise, that they leave?
ALEX: I think it still feels pretty high to me, and it’s maybe even bumped back up a little bit since we kind of did that check in, right? We’re probably at maybe 75 that they go and 25 that they stay. I don’t know. It just feels like everything that Rob Manfred and John Fisher and Dave Kaval have alluded to in the past few months have suggested that they’re not interested in continuing the conversation with Oakland. And, of course, that could be just an attempt to put pressure on them. But, like, I think I saw on Twitter the other day that Dave Kaval is, like, no longer even a registered lobbyist in Oakland, which is what—
BOBBY: He did—
ALEX: —a sentence to say. But, like, there are little things like that, that make it clear. They’re just kind of like—
BOBBY: When are they going to fire that guy?
ALEX: God.
BOBBY: And I—I don’t mean to throw you off course, but they’re definitely going to can that dude, even if John J. Fisher still owns the team, right?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like, when they go to—when they go to Vegas and the move is complete, like that dude is going to be logging into LinkedIn.
ALEX: Yes. 100%. I mean, it’s—I recognize that, like, they probably—like he came in, right, and he’s like, “I’m the stadium guy.” Right?
BOBBY: Right, right.
ALEX: “I got the San Jose Earthquakes their stadium built and I can do it here.” Right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: So, it definitely feel like an admission of defeat if they just canned him like halfway through the process. But everything he’s—everything he’s done is—is going in, like, a performance improvement plan.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Like, he needs to do some work.
BOBBY: They’re treating that dude like a Tampa Bay Rays reliever with only one year of team control left. So, like, 90 innings [30:53]
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Just keep talking to the press, Dave. Keep going. You know, keep replying to people on Twitter.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: It’s—you’re gonna—you’re gonna work through it, you know?
ALEX: Yeah, one day [31:04]
BOBBY: You can [31:04] you got it. You got it. Yeah, I think I agree with you. I think I agree. That felt—that feels more like—the behavior feels more like a—the—the behavior of the ownership group and of the league, it feels like they’ve let go of the narrative and allowed other people to come in and take—take back control of the narrative. The fan community to come back in and take control of the narrative, because they just don’t even care anymore. Like, they don’t have anything to lose. They’ve—their decision is made.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And nothing can stop them—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —because they’ve been propagated by the league, basically. They’ve been co-signed. Everything they’ve done has been co-signed by Rob Manfred, and that’s a bummer. And, honestly, I think when we talked about Rob’s legacy a couple of weeks ago, or last week, or whenever that was about his extension and what his vision for the game is and what his vision has been, and the different ways that he’s redirected the game in his time as Commissioner. I think this is, like, one of the bigger black marks on his career, is that at the many different opportunities that he could have stepped in and tried—tried to ameliorate the situation, he was just like, “Yeah, if it’s not what John wants to do, then that’s fine with me.”
ALEX: Right. Like. they were like, “This—this stadium is deteriorating all around us. Somebody should—somebody should do something about it.”
BOBBY: Really, somebody I mean, it’s like—
ALEX: “We got to get someone in here to check this, not me, but—
BOBBY: They should have formed a committee—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —you know? They should’ve just gotten a committee together.
ALEX: Those always work out.
BOBBY: And they could have made a committee recommendation.
ALEX: The detail in—in all of this that just felt so telling about how they’re—they’re approaching this situation, the—the care and—and time they’re putting into it, is that when there were, like, a stadium renderings released to the public. Um, I mean, there have been multiple renderings released to the public over the past few years, but there were some that came out earlier this year.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Right? And it turns out that those renderings, uh, they effectively just copy pasted the, like, previous versions rendering onto the new site, and the new site is far too small to—to hold that stadium. And so, a member of the A’s design team, uh, went to—some of the architects, they were looking and said, “You can trash this. The—the designs we came up with, the renderings that we released to the public to sell them—”
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: “—on this project, it’s not—they’re not real. They’re like—they’re clipart.”
BOBBY: I just feel like you can just say anything now—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —in any context of life. You can just do or say anything, and it’s like if you dream it, you can do it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: If you dream it, you can fit this stadium on this site. It’s good enough for investors.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: You know? It’s like Wework part two.
ALEX: I mean, you don’t have to be the one to figure it out. You’re not picking up the shovel.
BOBBY: Uh, do you think John Fisher is gonna sell the team after they move to Vegas?
ALEX: I—I keep saying that I feel like he will, but I don’t know if that’s just like—
BOBBY: My question, though, is like, is the team worth more money in Vegas than Oakland?
ALEX: I know. Well—
BOBBY: Because sale price of a team has a lot to do with, like, market and—yes, stadium, I guess, but, like, really, it’s more like how much is the asset worth in the long term and is the asset going to continue to, you know, rise in value? And moving the team to Vegas—I mean, maybe we’re wrong about this and maybe we don’t know what we’re talking about. Maybe, like, we need to bring some risk analysts in here. Get some risk analysts on the pod. But moving the team to Vegas feels like a—a step in the wrong direction, not the right direction in terms of, like, the long-term value of a franchise.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, I think you can look at it, like, one of two ways. If you’re trying to improve the value of your franchise, you either improve the product on the field, right, which takes work and years of—
BOBBY: Yeah, but they were good at that.
ALEX: —investing. I—well, I know, right?
BOBBY: I just—yeah. If—
ALEX: Or—or you take the easy route out and just slap a Band-Aid on it, right? And say, “Hey, look, we got a shiny, new stadium.”
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: “Here’s a fun new toy to attract whoever.”
BOBBY: Right. You do what Warner Brothers did and you don’t release Batgirl and you write it off as a tax write-off.
ALEX: Basically, yeah.
BOBBY: I get it. I just—I get it and I don’t know. You know?
ALEX: No. And I don’t, and it’s, um—
BOBBY: I just—I don’t—I don’t relate to it.
ALEX: Like, why are you owning a baseball team in the first place?
BOBBY: If all you want to do is make it worth more money in two years?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like, just sell it. I don’t know. Uh, just sell—sell the team, you know?
ALEX: Sell the team.
BOBBY: Sell the team. Sell the team.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Maybe they’re onto something. At the—at the—at the game yesterday, I would say about half the folks in the stands were probably wearing some version of a sell shirt.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And, uh, I think we could have gotten that—that number up, but I will say that the other half were wearing, um, A’s-Giants Teamster shirts.
BOBBY: That’s true.
ALEX: So, if there’s gonna be one other shirt that’s out there on that day, that’s the—that’s the shirt.
BOBBY: It was Teamsters day at the ballpark for—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —the Bay Bridge rivalry and it was just one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever seen in life.
ALEX: It was glorious.
BOBBY: Whole families wearing Teamsters with their locals—teamsters shirts with their locals on them. Um, your dad walked up to one of the—one of the groups and like—I was like, “I want to buy one of those.”
ALEX: You—you were like—you were like, “Where—where do we get one of those?”
BOBBY: I want to get one—
ALEX: [36:11] be right back.
BOBBY: Your dad walked out to a group of people wearing them and he was like, “How do I get one of those?” And they were like, “You got to join a local.”
ALEX: Actually, be in the union.
BOBBY: And I was like, “Worth it.”
ALEX: That’s a good sell. That’s a really good sell.
BOBBY: Honestly, great—great sell. T-shirts, cool T-shirts.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: That’s clout to me. Getting to wear a cool T-shirt to the ballpark and say that I’m a Teamster. Um, that’s one thing that, uh, I will say we failed at the Ringer Union, you know? Not enough cool T-shirts.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Not enough merch.
BOBBY: Yeah, exactly.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: We gotta pivot to the 21st century. It’s all about merch, uh, that really sells your message. Um, one owner that’s not worried about increasing short-term value for his team, that man’s name is Steve Cohen. He’s willing to send a lot of money out the door for the long-term health of the New York Mets. Can we—can we spend, like, four minutes talking about the Mets here at the end of this podcast?
ALEX: Four max. Um, not a minute over.
BOBBY: [37:05] set the clock—set the clock, producer. Strike it all from the record if we don’t make it within four minutes. Um, really quickly, so many former Mets on the A’s and Giants. So many former Mets, J.D. Davis, Wilmer—
ALEX: Wilmer—
BOBBY: —Flores, Michael Conforto, Trevor May, all featuring prominently in yesterday’s action. ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: Um, I’m sure I’m forgetting some people as well. Darin Ruf was briefly on the San Francisco Giants and also a former Mets legend.
ALEX: That’s also true.
BOBBY: Um, so since we last recorded, uh, the Mets trade away Justin Verlander. They completed what was one of the biggest sell-offs that I’ve ever seen of a team that intended to contend at the Major League Baseball trade deadline. And definitely, like, the Mets biggest sell-off of my life in terms of, like, the star caliber of the players, the amount of players that they sold in previous years when they have been bad. They have, like, maybe one or two guys that are worthwhile. Um, I would say most famously the two examples that come to mind for me were when they traded Carlos Beltran to the Giants, um, in the, you know, 2012 era, 2011 era and they got back Zack Wheeler, who was a Giants top pitching prospect. Amazing trade for the Mets. And then when the one the Mets traded R.A. Dickey the year after he won the Cy Young, and they got back Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard from the Blue Jays. And those both worked out really well. It’s probably the reason that I remember the trades so fondly, but I’m sure there were many trades that did not work out quite as well. And the Mets got back, like, a ton of prospects. A lot of them have seemingly a lot of upside, but none of them are really close to the Majors. And so, this was a tacit admission that this year’s team and next year’s team basically are not built to win a World Series any longer, and they’re going to try to make the team better in 2025 and beyond. That’s like a really bleak thing to tell a fan base. I’m not sure how much of that I believe. And then Steve Cohen penned this letter to season ticket holders, who—you know, presumably he wants to continue to have season tickets next year in 2024, where they’ve basically said they don’t intend to make the team very good. He penned this letter, saying, “We’re going to do our best to make the team as good as it possibly can be next year, and then in 2025, you know, like it’s, you know, full throttle ahead.” I just think this is a really fascinating thing to observe for a podcast like ours.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Because—
ALEX: It’s an open letter.
BOBBY: It’s an open letter, and we love open letters—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —of course. All about open letters. Now that Steve has penned one, I’m back in. I’m back in on open letters, baby. No more closed letters.
ALEX: No more closed letters.
BOBBY: Transparency. Thank you, Steve Cohen. Um, it’s a fascinating thing, because they’re doing the thing that we absolutely despise on this podcast. They’re like, “We can’t be good right now because we need to be good in the future.” But the thing that we despise most about that is that typically it leads to the owners pocketing as much as possible money in the short-term, and selling hope to the fan base above all else, even though they don’t really care about whether the team is good. It’s happened in Cleveland. It’s happening in Kansas City. It’s happened in most famously in Baltimore. It’s something that we talked about a lot. And you can’t really make that argument here because the Mets are paying, like, more than half of the salaries of these guys. So, they did invest a lot of the—of the money, but they just basically admitted that they don’t want to continue to invest that money if the team is not going to make it worthwhile. I think that the main thing to critique here is that Billy Eppler doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. And you’re entrusting your rebuild and the hope that you’re selling to fans to the guy that built, like, the 2018 Angels or whatever kind of league, like the 2018 to 2021 Angels. So—I don’t know. I think it’s sort of like in—the grade is, like, incomplete, more or less on what this means for the New York Mets organization. I just think it’s, like, incredibly huge bummer town energy, but it was largely unavoidable because the team sucks this year, even with all of these guys.
ALEX: This is so me coded, like as soon as one thing goes wrong, you immediately just start apologizing to everyone about it, being like, “I promise I’m going to try to do better next year.”
BOBBY: He seems so personally hurt—
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: —by the fact that the team wasn’t good. Like, he’s really tying up his own self-worth to the success of the New York Mets and Steve Cohen. That’s how I know he’s a real Mets fan.
ALEX: That’s [41:26] yeah.
BOBBY: That’s how I know he grew up a Mets fan because whom amongst us in Mets fandom has not tied our self-worth into the performance of the New York Mets—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —baseball club?
ALEX: He’s one of us.
BOBBY: One of us. It’s been interesting to observe the Mets fans heart pivot on this strategy. ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Where it was like—all offseason, it was like no moneybag Mets are gonna buy your favorite team, favorite player. No moneybag Mets are going to sign away Justin Verlander. And the Astros can’t compete, the Yankees can’t compete with all the money that we’re spending. And then as soon as it goes wrong, they’re like, “Prospects.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “Love it, love it.”
ALEX: Trust the process, everyone.
BOBBY: “Love it.” I know—now it’s—now it’s like, “Oh, we got all these great prospects.” I just—I would like to say one thing, if we’re going to be the prospects team, I would just—I would advise fans of the New York Mets to learn how to Google the players name plus FanGraphs.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Just read about the player. Just don’t take MLB.com’s prospect ranking at face value—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —is my only advice to New York Mets fans, because I’m seeing a lot of, uh, can’t wait ’till they call Ronny Mauricio chatter going around, call him up. He’s not good. He’s not playing well, nor has he ever put together a good season in the Minors. That’s just—that’s my, um,
that’s my take.
ALEX: From the—from the veteran over here who has put his faith—
BOBBY: In Amed Rosario.
ALEX: —in Amed Rosario. I hope—I hope—
BOBBY: Who the Dodgers are going to [42:51] an MVP?
ALEX: Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: Um, do you have anything else to add about the New York Mets? That was six minutes. I broke the code.
ALEX: Yikes.
BOBBY: I broke—
ALEX: Strike it all from the record. No. Uh, I saw James McCann came out and said he thought he wasn’t really given enough of a chance with the Mets.
BOBBY: Oh, fuck off. I’m sorry, but fuck off.
ALEX: I’m sorry. I didn’t want to ruin your day.
BOBBY: How bad [43:14] at the Major League level are you allowed to be for months and months and months before you are “given a chance”?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Come on. Come on. You must be—you must be lapping this up, Phillies fan that you are. I just have to say some Phillies fan you are, you haven’t given me any guff about the Phillies being good.
ALEX: That’s true.
BOBBY: You haven’t gotten all broad street bully on me yet in this episode, so what does that say? That you haven’t fully matriculated as a Phillies fan?
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
BOBBY: You’re still learning?
ALEX: I—I’m doing an immersion course later this offseason. Um—
BOBBY: Oh, God. Oh, God.
ALEX: Just go live with your family.
BOBBY: Well, my family are not Phillies fans, but you’re—you’ll—
ALEX: Well, yes.
BOBBY: —be in the—in the area.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: You walk to the sports bar across the street from—from my parents’ and it’s like connected to a gas station.
ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: You just sit there and you watch a Phillies day game.
ALEX: That’s culture.
BOBBY: That’s called the—that’s—that’s the only immersion you need. Check out Miller’s Ale House on a Tuesday 2:00 PM. See how many Chase Utley jerseys you can find wish. That’s your guy now.
ALEX: That’s—that is, uh, for better or for worse, my guy now.
BOBBY: You can’t slander Chase Utley if you’re going to be a Phillies fan. You will be excommunicated and then you will be a Phillies fan who’s not accepted by other Phillies fans. ALEX: Yeah, I know.
BOBBY: In which case, you will have lost it all.
ALEX: Right. Which is really tough given who my co-host of this podcast is and his particular feelings towards players like Chase Utley.
BOBBY: Yeah. One thing that you’re going to need to learn to do as the—the burgeoning Phillies fan that you are as we close this podcast here, you’re gonna need to learn how to bring up 2007 and 2008 more.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: You’re gonna need to be able to do that without feeling guilt.
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: See, so when you—when we’re done with the show, you go—go to the bathroom and you look yourself in the mirror and you start talking about how the Mets blew a seven-game lead with 17 games to go. You need to learn how to do it.
ALEX: This is great. The—the—what better way to learn how to razz Mets fans than from a perpetually razzed Mets fan?
BOBBY: This is exactly right. This is like—this is like Color of Money, the Martin Scorsese movie where he teaches young Tom Cruise how to be a hustler.
ALEX: Right. It’s exactly like that.
BOBBY: I’m teaching you how to hustle me. And them when you finally do, I will be stung but proud.
ALEX: Yeah, the student will have become the master.
BOBBY: Okay. I think that’s—I think that’s everything for this week’s episode of Tipping Pitches. Um, programming note, we are going to be taking the next two weeks off from the podcast. So the 14th and the 21st, we will have no episode. We will triumphantly return on August 28—Monday, August 28th. Uh, we just have a lot of travel, we have a lot of stuff going on. Um, very exciting stuff going on. And in the meantime, if you are a new listener or if you have been busy this summer and you haven’t checked out some of our episodes, there’s been some really good ones that we’re really proud to have made. Uh—
ALEX: And there are some others that were, you know—we just tossed in the dustbin of history.
BOBBY: Every once in a while, you get one for four, you know? It’s all right.
ALEX: We jump back on that horse.
BOBBY: Well, we never go o-fer, you know?
ALEX: That’s true.
BOBBY: We’re on an amazing hitting streak. We’re Joe DiMaggio. Um, uh, we did an episode earlier this summer with—with Neil deMause about whether or not there’s an ideal way to build a ballpark. So, if some of this stuff, this conversation about the Oakland A’s has interested and you—and you—has—has interested you and you haven’t had the chance to go back and listen to that episode, that is one of the more, like, Tipping Pitches episodes that I can possibly think of like, um, uh, the—the merging of topic and guests, and our personal interest in—in something. Um, that was a great episode. Of course, MLB Matchmaker, two-parter, where you stabbed in the heart at the end. You just stabbed me in the heart. Um, but nonetheless, a wonderful listen. Uh, and then, you know, really anything else that—that has gone on. We—we, uh, recently went on Batting Around, so go check that out, uh, to talk about the trade deadline, but also just kind of talk about Alex’s feelings about the A’s and switching over to the Phillies. So, that was a lot of fun. I also went on a podcast called Disaster Girls to talk about the movie Signs, which is truly Pennsylvanian culture, uh, the M. Night Shyamalan movie, NYU legend M. Night Shyamalan, uh, with, uh, Amanda Smith who is a wonderful member of Dodgers Twitter and the host of that podcast. So, there’s plenty of content for you to consume over the next two weeks. And if you want to just take a break from hearing us talk, it’s totally fine, too.
ALEX: That’s cool. We get it.
BOBBY: That’s cool, too. Um, we really appreciate everyone listening and we will be back later this month.
SPEAKER 6: Yahoo! Celebrate good times, come on! It’s a celebration. Celebrate good times, come on!
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello, everybody, uh, 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!
SPEAKER 6: To last throughout the years. So bring your good times—
SPEAKER 7: Yahoo!
SPEAKER 8: What do you have to say about the A’s performance today?
SPEAKER 9: Celebrate good times, come on!
SPEAKER 10: Come on!
SPEAKER 9: Celebration to last throughout the years. So bring your good times and your laughter, too.
SPEAKER 6: Celebration.
SPEAKER 11: So—so when your drink, you’re just [48:37]
Tipping Pitches 
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