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Opening Day Baseball & Comics Roundtable · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. I guess morning still for our LA area.
• 0:08
  Tad Eggleston: Friends, we're doing our first ever opening day!
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: Baseball and Comics Roundtable. We normally do this after the World Series, because that's when people are most free, but
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: For the second time in baseball history, the season is starting on my birthday, and I thought, what do I want to give myself for my birthday? And I said, I want to talk baseball and comics. So thank you all for joining me for the thing that I've been looking forward to.
• 0:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, since I emailed you initially, it's gotten me through.
• 0:41
  Tad Eggleston: Knowing that it's coming, I'm, I'm very, very excited, and, and, like, I'm gonna lead off with, with, any of you…
• 0:50
  Tad Eggleston: I wound up following more than watching, just because I've cut all my cords, and not enough of it was on things that I could watch, but did any of you follow the World Baseball Classic?
• 0:59
  Tad Eggleston: There were some good games there.
• 1:01
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 1:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:03
  Fred Van Lente: Venezuela vs. Japan game, I thought was kind of classic.
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I saw a bunch of highlights of that. I actually watched
• 1:13
  Tad Eggleston: rewatched the Bad News Bears last night, and as I was watching it, I went, oh, so… the U.S. team is… is the… the…
• 1:27
  Tad Eggleston: The Roy Turner Yankees.
• 1:30
  Tad Eggleston: And the Bears are, like, everybody else.
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because, like… I mean, what I love about the World Baseball Classic every year, or not every year, every time it comes around, is twofold. First,
• 1:47
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes even with the U.S. teams.
• 1:50
  Tad Eggleston: There's a lot more, just, joy shown on the field. I love the way that they have fun.
• 1:58
  Tad Eggleston: And the other thing is, like, because it's in a form that we so rarely see baseball, it's the round-robin tournament where the one game can really matter, you see some really unexpected things. I mean, I remember being, like, an hour late for work.
• 2:18
  Tad Eggleston: when, when, the Netherlands, led by Rendell Simon.
• 2:24
  Tad Eggleston: beat the Dominican Republic that had 5 MVPs
• 2:28
  Tad Eggleston: 3 Cy Young Award winners and, like, 6 future Hall of Famers on it in 2009, I think.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: 3 to 1.
• 2:38
  Tad Eggleston: When, like, er, 2 to 1?
• 2:41
  Tad Eggleston: with, like, the sum total of all of the Netherlands hits went… 212 feet?
• 2:51
  Tad Eggleston: But they played good defense, and they just held on, and it was like, how? How? But that's… that's…
• 2:58
  Tad Eggleston: what I love about baseball is that, like.
• 3:01
  Tad Eggleston: If you take Mark's mighty New York Yankees and put them up against the actual bad news bears, you know, the ones with the 6-year-old in right field, the bad news bears are probably gonna win at least one game in a thousand.
• 3:17
  Tad Eggleston: And that's.
• 3:18
  Eric Reynolds: I didn't realize…
• 3:19
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna love.
• 3:19
  Eric Reynolds: I only… I don't think I realized until this current WBC that Major League Baseball owns the WBC.
• 3:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 3:29
  Eric Reynolds: In a weird way, that kind of, like.
• 3:32
  Eric Reynolds: diminished it a little bit for me. It does.
• 3:37
  Rob Neyer: Right, I mean, the whole thing was built, essentially, to spread baseball around the world, and ultimately, generate more income for Major League Baseball, and support this… what's become a massive business with hundreds and hundreds of employees. So, it's one of those things where you… you… you…
• 3:57
  Rob Neyer: You kind of have to enjoy it despite it.
• 4:00
  Rob Neyer: A lot of things, as Tad says, a lot of things happen within the event that make that easier.
• 4:07
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 4:07
  Rob Neyer: All the great stories.
• 4:09
  Tad Eggleston: And I.
• 4:10
  Fred Van Lente: With the hope, right, that some team like Italy did this year goes on a bit of a Cinderella run and spikes interest in that home country.
• 4:19
  Rob Neyer: Exactly.
• 4:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 4:24
  Tad Eggleston: So, anybody have… Anything that they're really looking forward to this season.
• 4:32
  Eric Reynolds: Mariners World Series.
• 4:34
  Tad Eggleston: Mariners World Series? Of course.
• 4:37
  Rob Neyer: They are… weirdly, the projections I looked at last night of the Mariners.
• 4:43
  Rob Neyer: with easily… no, the second widest gap between first and second place in baseball. I think the Dodgers have the biggest between them and second. And then the Mariners are… are…
• 4:55
  Rob Neyer: have a, I don't know, 8 or 9 game gap between them and the next team, which is a bunch of teams that are hoping to win 82 games, basically.
• 5:04
  Rob Neyer: So yeah, if this was… if there was a year for the Mariners, this would be it.
• 5:08
  Rob Neyer: Beforehand, obviously, things change.
• 5:11
  Tad Eggleston: I have actually seen that pic by a couple of people already.
• 5:15
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, they seem to be the sexy pick.
• 5:18
  Tad Eggleston: What a fun team.
• 5:18
  markchiarello: Let me… if I can ask, hyperbole aside, what do we expect from the Dodgers, realistically?
• 5:25
  Rob Neyer: 95 is their number.
• 5:29
  Eric Reynolds: The Dodgers are unquestionably the best team on paper, but they're also a little older.
• 5:35
  Eric Reynolds: And then they seem like they're a little more potential for things to go sideways.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and one of the things I saw pointed out, in a baseball column this morning is, like, in spite of everything, like, we…
• 5:51
  Tad Eggleston: They only won 92 games last year.
• 5:53
  Rob Neyer: How many?
• 5:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, 92? I mean, to say… Is that a rough middle.
• 5:58
  Tiffany Babb: season.
• 6:00
  Tad Eggleston: to say only 92, like, if you're… if you're a Royals fan, you're kind of upset with me that I said only 92. But, like, given the way we treat the Dodgers.
• 6:12
  Tiffany Babb: Right.
• 6:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know, 92… 92 wins is… is…
• 6:17
  Tad Eggleston: And what he… it was Craig Calcatera, I think, that I was reading, and what he pointed out was that, like, the Dodgers are built to have a lot of depth, but essentially what they use their money for is to be able to take the gambles on
• 6:37
  Tad Eggleston: The guys that they don't actually expect to be able to play a whole season.
• 6:40
  Rob Neyer: Right.
• 6:41
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 6:42
  Tad Eggleston: So really, what the Dodgers are playing for is if they get into the playoffs, and if most of their guys are healthy.
• 6:51
  Tad Eggleston: they're gonna be a force to reckon with.
• 6:53
  Tiffany Babb: They had so many injuries last year. Yeah.
• 6:56
  Rob Neyer: Here's the thing about what the Dodgers figured out.
• 6:59
  Rob Neyer: It used to be… I used to always write things like.
• 7:03
  Rob Neyer: All the money in the world, that's fine, but you only have so many roster spots.
• 7:09
  Rob Neyer: Which is… then was 25, and you can't… you can't…
• 7:14
  Rob Neyer: find enough guys to spend the money on to fill those roster spots, because it's not even 25, some number of those are players that you're locked into for whatever reasons. You're already paying them, or they're a prospect and they need a chance, whatever it is.
• 7:29
  Rob Neyer: Well, the Dodgers basically have 35 roster spots, or 30.
• 7:34
  Rob Neyer: And… because they know that there's gonna be so much churn, especially in the pitching staff, and they don't mind paying $10 million for a guy who's gonna give you 60 innings, because they have an unlimited… they don't care about… I shouldn't say they don't care about making money, because they're… I'm sure they're making a profit every year anyway, but they just don't think about their…
• 7:52
  Rob Neyer: Roster and their payroll the same way that teams have historically.
• 7:58
  Tiffany Babb: Because they're even starting with Roki, and he's been bad spring training, right? So, like, that shows you what the Dodgers are doing that other people aren't, which is they have this leeway where they can run with him for a bit to see if he heats up at a certain point. And other teams don't have that runway.
• 8:17
  Tad Eggleston: Or choose not to.
• 8:18
  Tiffany Babb: Or choose not to. That's fair. A lot of these teams have money, but they just don't spend it.
• 8:21
  Tad Eggleston: do a lot more than they do. I mean…
• 8:25
  Tiffany Babb: That's one of the…
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I laughed at when everybody got upset about this Shohei contract is I'm sitting there going, do you understand how marketable this man is? If you think for a second that they're not making money on that contract, you're insane.
• 8:39
  Tad Eggleston: If you think for a second that if he manages to play two seasons, they won't have made all $700 million back, you're insane.
• 8:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, if you think of it strict… like, if you think of contracts strictly in terms of baseball value, sure, but, like.
• 8:58
  Tad Eggleston: teams are businesses, so there's more than just baseball value. For that matter, it's always one of the things that's bothered me in terms of some of the spring… er, some of the free agent decisions that ballplayers make. Like, when Pedro Martinez left…
• 9:12
  Tad Eggleston: the Red Sox for the Mets. I'm sitting there going.
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, the Mets are giving you a million and a half more a year. Tell me you couldn't have made that up 10 times over in Boston area endorsements.
• 9:26
  Eric Reynolds: Probably make that up just by never having to buy a beer again.
• 9:29
  Eric Reynolds: Right.
• 9:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:32
  Tiffany Babb: And for the teams, there's also, like, the fan retention, right? Like, this is what the Rays struggle with, and their fans, like, they can't keep fans because they can't keep their stars. Whereas, like, when they signed Vladdy, when the Blue Jays signed Vladdy, like.
• 9:45
  Tiffany Babb: the fans felt a certain… a lot of this was just, like, it… the fans were happy about it, right? And they felt like this is a team that I can invest my time in, because they're investing in players that we like, and can stick around.
• 9:58
  Fred Van Lente: And that's where the Mets got a lot of ire this, off-season. Our… our absent pal Heidi still has not gotten over to Pete Alonso.
• 10:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, though, I mean, they also made a lot of good moves. I think you're gonna like Freddie Peralta, I think you're gonna like…
• 10:14
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, just…
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: Jet?
• 10:15
  Fred Van Lente: to shake my fist at the Dodgers again, I mean, I think the one that really hurts is Diaz, losing our closer, you know? Yeah.
• 10:22
  Fred Van Lente: you know, why wouldn't you want to go play with the Dodgers if you were a…
• 10:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right? Isn't it surprisingly.
• 10:26
  Fred Van Lente: to the Dodgers also?
• 10:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think Devin Williams is a good bounce-back candidate.
• 10:31
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, we'll see.
• 10:35
  Tad Eggleston: great, great mo… I mean, I watched him in Milwaukee, and certainly when he was playing the Cubs, I never liked it when he came into the game.
• 10:44
  Tiffany Babb: You know…
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. It's so…
• 10:49
  markchiarello: Kershaw done, or is he coming back?
• 10:51
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think Kershaw's done.
• 10:53
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, that reminds me of, you know, answering your Dodgers question, like, even in the playoffs last year, they had, what, one reliable bullpen arm?
• 11:04
  Tiffany Babb: That was a crazy bullpen, when you think about it in hindsight.
• 11:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 11:08
  Tiffany Babb: Like, it's nuts that they were going into those games with Apple Pen.
• 11:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, their best bullpen performance of the entire postseason came from a guy who got called off of his couch
• 11:23
  Tad Eggleston: Because they'd had another guy have to leave for a family issue.
• 11:29
  Tad Eggleston: You know, a guy with how many Major League innings? Like, 5?
• 11:35
  Tiffany Babb: He… he brought it, though. Like, he was great.
• 11:39
  Eric Reynolds: What was pitching?
• 11:40
  Tad Eggleston: Which…
• 11:40
  Tiffany Babb: What was his name?
• 11:41
  Tad Eggleston: try to.
• 11:41
  Tiffany Babb: I can see his face in my…
• 11:43
  Tad Eggleston: Me too!
• 11:46
  Tad Eggleston: I can too. We will figure it out before the end of this podcast.
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but yeah, no, I mean, so… I mean, that's the beauty of baseball, is that there's, like, no amount of money that guarantees everything. You're a Yankee fan, Mark, you know that.
• 12:05
  Tad Eggleston: You got 3… payroll went up for the next 3, and how good were those?
• 12:12
  Eric Reynolds: It's no different in comics publishing, really.
• 12:14
  Tiffany Babb: Hmm.
• 12:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 12:17
  markchiarello: That's interesting, Eric. Why do you say that?
• 12:21
  Eric Reynolds: Look at the… look at the… the trail of tears of well-capitalized fly-by-night comics publishers.
• 12:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 12:32
  markchiarello: Do you think it's, peripheral question.
• 12:37
  markchiarello: something he said, do you think it's possible to start a comic book company these days?
• 12:41
  Eric Reynolds: That's a good question, because I think in terms of fanographics, which is really my only perspective.
• 12:48
  Eric Reynolds: No, I don't think we could. I think we are… I think we benefit from…
• 12:53
  Eric Reynolds: You know, being grandfathered into the direct market, and…
• 12:57
  Eric Reynolds: You know, having made the inroads into the book trade that we did 20, 25 years ago.
• 13:04
  Eric Reynolds: I think it would be really, really, really hard, and I don't think it's,
• 13:09
  Eric Reynolds: You know, strictly a question of how much startup capital you have.
• 13:14
  Eric Reynolds: I don't think that… that's a guarantee of… of anything, any more than a bloated payroll.
• 13:19
  markchiarello: Do you even think it's a question of content? Like…
• 13:22
  Eric Reynolds: No.
• 13:22
  markchiarello: Yeah.
• 13:23
  markchiarello: You know, I see Mad Cave making a decent run at it.
• 13:29
  markchiarello: But these are…
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: They're also 10 years old, so they're not really new.
• 13:33
  Tad Eggleston: This is their 11th year. That's right. You know, I was thinking that, too. Both Mad Cave and Uncivilized feel like they're new, and seem to be doing pretty good runs right now.
• 13:45
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, in reality, they're… they're not new.
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: They've been able to hang on.
• 13:54
  Tad Eggleston: for long enough to… to… you know, Iron Circus is similar. So, I mean, I…
• 14:00
  Tiffany Babb: Kickstarter might be, like, the Kickstarter publishers, or the digital publishers.
• 14:04
  Tad Eggleston: That's where I was gonna go, is that I don't know that it's impossible to start a comic book company, but I don't know how much it would… I don't know how much it would look like…
• 14:16
  Tad Eggleston: what phanographics looked like when they started, what image looked like when they started, certainly not what Marvel or DC looked like when they started, you know? You'd have to be thinking more about crowdfunding, you'd have to be thinking more about digital markets, library markets.
• 14:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if you can crack the library market…
• 14:35
  Tad Eggleston: That's a big deal. And the fact that there are more and more
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Libraries that are stocking more and more comics, not just for kids, but for adults.
• 14:45
  Tad Eggleston: Matters, but, but, like… .
• 14:49
  Eric Reynolds: It only matters in the aggregate, though. It's like, it doesn't, you know, the library market's not gonna sustain you. It's just… only if it's another piece of the overall pie.
• 14:59
  Eric Reynolds: But each of those segments, channels.
• 15:03
  Eric Reynolds: You know, are getting more and more difficult.
• 15:05
  Tad Eggleston: They're getting more and more difficult.
• 15:07
  Eric Reynolds: What's that?
• 15:09
  Tad Eggleston: Get on syllabuses and reprint a new volume every couple of years.
• 15:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know, with that extra thing that the students need, you know, get professors to force the book, and you're in good shape.
• 15:25
  Tad Eggleston: I was talking to a comics teacher recently.
• 15:29
  Tiffany Babb: I know startup capital was mentioned, and in my opinion, the startup capital makes it way worse, because there's that pressure to spend big at the beginning, and you can't kind of mete out the money where you want, and then company's gone in 2 years.
• 15:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and also.
• 15:46
  Fred Van Lente: The problem is, so many of the recent startups and comics are still predicated in the same IP farm model.
• 15:52
  Fred Van Lente: And the studios just aren't buying as, like, they used to, and there's less studios to buy. So, it's a rock and hard place, if that's what you're trying to do.
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I also…
• 16:03
  Fred Van Lente: Movies.com.
• 16:04
  Tiffany Babb: the…
• 16:04
  Tad Eggleston: In general, startups.
• 16:07
  Tad Eggleston: expect a much higher return on investment than, like… it's different when you need to…
• 16:16
  Tad Eggleston: Break even and pay everybody, versus you need to pay back the people who gave you money 10 times over.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Ye, y, and, you know…
• 16:29
  markchiarello: But is the ultimate goal with starting, you know, some of the smaller companies that have started over the last 4, 5, 6 years, is the ultimate goal to put out comic books, or is it to get properties for Hollywood?
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: It depends on the company. Will Klein, really quick, was the relief pitcher. Managed to find him.
• 16:50
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I've talked to people at Mad Cave, and I think one of the reasons that they're actually…
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Holding on, is their goal is comics.
• 17:00
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas one of the reasons that you saw Aftershock and Action Lab really struggle is they were spending as much money trying to sell their IP as they were spending making their IP.
• 17:13
  Fred Van Lente: And Mad Cave's contract, I've got two Mad Cave books. It's very competitive, and it's one of the better ones with other media than I've seen recently.
• 17:23
  Fred Van Lente: You see even bigger companies book publishers you think would know better are offering, kind of, these
• 17:32
  Fred Van Lente: weak sauce contracts where, you know, your name is on the copyright of the book, but all relevant rights are tied up 50-50.
• 17:41
  markchiarello: 50, but…
• 17:41
  Fred Van Lente: With the big corporate publisher, and it's just unfortunate, but…
• 17:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 17:46
  Fred Van Lente: I don't think people, to answer your question, Mark, I don't think people are expecting to make money on comics.
• 17:52
  Fred Van Lente: You know, so it's hard to have a publisher whose business model is for-profit comics.
• 17:57
  Fred Van Lente: You know?
• 17:58
  Fred Van Lente: Phantographics, notwithstanding.
• 18:01
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 18:02
  markchiarello: What's the, what's…
• 18:04
  markchiarello: I don't pay that much attention to it. What's the arc of that company? What's it called? Distillery that Tula Lote was drawing for, and Becky Clooney?
• 18:12
  Fred Van Lente: That's the ex-comixology guys, right?
• 18:14
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and they've already… they've already kind of… Press pause. Well, they…
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they press pause, but they're coming back in the news solicits.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: So, so April, you can, you can, like, so… it seems like their pause was literally, look, we had supply chain issues, we had stuff that, that got in the way…
• 18:36
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than trying to rush out and give you an inferior product, rather than folding.
• 18:43
  Tad Eggleston: we're pushing stuff back, we're regrouping, because I think they've got 5 books…
• 18:49
  Tad Eggleston: Finally picking up again in the April catalog.
• 18:53
  Tad Eggleston: That was definitely… I was gonna be talking to a couple of people at C2E2 that I know have been doing distillery work, and…
• 19:01
  Tad Eggleston: asking if they had… because, I mean, overall, everybody that I've talked to that's done work for them is still happy.
• 19:08
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, whether or not the… the comp… I mean, it's kind of like Bad Idea. I don't… I don't know for certain that Bad Idea is making money, but I know that if they're losing money, it's Dinesh and… and…
• 19:23
  Tad Eggleston: The people at the top that are losing money, they're making certain that their… their creators are paid up front and still have…
• 19:31
  Tad Eggleston: some backend whatever. You know, I haven't talked to anybody that's like, oh yeah, I did work for Bad Idea and it was terrible. You know, I've talked to people that's like, I did a 10-page
• 19:41
  Tad Eggleston: for a bad idea, and got paid 3 times as much as I normally get paid for a full comic.
• 19:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know? And they just gave it away at a con.
• 19:55
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking forward to the fact that the Bad Idea panel is right after one of my panels in the same room, so I might be able to talk to a handful of people off the record in between.
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: That actually is a good way to spin, though. Like, spring season is when we start getting solicits for some of the bigger comics of the year. Is there anything that people have seen?
• 20:22
  Tad Eggleston: coming soon, that they're like, I can't wait to see that.
• 20:29
  Fred Van Lente: My big summer announcement hasn't come yet, so…
• 20:32
  Fred Van Lente: The answer is no, you have.
• 20:37
  Fred Van Lente: My thing's gonna be in July.
• 20:38
  Tad Eggleston: You wanna give me an exclusive fret?
• 20:41
  Fred Van Lente: I can't, I'll be murdered.
• 20:43
  Fred Van Lente: There's the spot.
• 20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so it's a…
• 20:45
  Fred Van Lente: Somewhere.
• 20:45
  Tad Eggleston: So it's a sequel to Murder Kingdom, check.
• 20:50
  Fred Van Lente: No, my… yeah, that's that… that's my fir… that was my first Mad Cave book.
• 20:54
  Fred Van Lente: That second one's come out later this year, but that's not one yet.
• 20:57
  Tiffany Babb: I'm looking forward to the new Archie stuff.
• 20:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:01
  Tad Eggleston: I am.
• 21:02
  Fred Van Lente: through ONI?
• 21:03
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah. Yeah?
• 21:06
  markchiarello: I don't know anything about that. What are they… are they retooling?
• 21:10
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, they're kind of rebranding, putting it out as a monthly.
• 21:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they've got some interesting creative teams involved, it's gonna be really…
• 21:20
  Tad Eggleston: really interesting to see what they do. I hope…
• 21:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is the second time in my lifetime that they've done it, and I think it actually went pretty well the last time.
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm assuming that it just kind of petered off, and it was… it was time to…
• 21:36
  Tad Eggleston: to… to do something cool again. I feel like that's a good partnership. Oni seems to be…
• 21:42
  markchiarello: Is there a new… is there a new takeaway?
• 21:43
  Tad Eggleston: Out of the wreckage.
• 21:46
  markchiarello: Is there a new take on that?
• 21:47
  Tad Eggleston: It'll be more modern.
• 21:51
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't know anything.
• 21:52
  Tiffany Babb: They haven't put out that much stuff about it. It's mostly just been teaser art and stuff. Right.
• 22:00
  Eric Reynolds: There's a new Chris Ware comic coming out for.
• 22:02
  Tiffany Babb: That's right. That's exciting.
• 22:05
  Tad Eggleston: A new, a new, it's actually another…
• 22:08
  Eric Reynolds: acne.
• 22:09
  Tad Eggleston: Acme, yeah, that's right.
• 22:11
  Tiffany Babb: When's that coming out?
• 22:13
  Eric Reynolds: I think in the fall, it's a drawn a quarterly book.
• 22:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, look at him, plugging the competitor.
• 22:21
  Eric Reynolds: Well, I was trying to think of something that wasn't phantographics.
• 22:25
  Tiffany Babb: You can talk about Phantographics books.
• 22:29
  Tad Eggleston: There's a lot of good stuff coming from Fanographics. A couple of Karl Bark's artist editions, you've got the complete Palomar stories.
• 22:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's just the reprint stuff.
• 22:41
  Eric Reynolds: Probably the thing I'm most excited about… I'm not even working on it, so I can… I can kind of tout this without it being too self-serving, is,
• 22:49
  Eric Reynolds: a big box set of the complete Harvey Kurtzman mad.
• 22:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. That's cool.
• 22:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's totally on my radar.
• 22:56
  Tiffany Babb: How big is that gonna be?
• 22:58
  Eric Reynolds: Well, it's, what, 20… 27, 30 issues, I forget exactly. That's cool.
• 23:07
  Tiffany Babb: And they're all going to be presented in.
• 23:08
  Eric Reynolds: Baximile form, like a bound.
• 23:10
  Tiffany Babb: Nice.
• 23:11
  Eric Reynolds: Found copies of the original magazines.
• 23:14
  Eric Reynolds: Comics?
• 23:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it, it, it, if, if, if you, if you remember the, the recent,
• 23:27
  Tad Eggleston: first 50 Lovin' Rockets, it's got a similar design.
• 23:33
  Eric Reynolds: Similar, not quite as… Big.
• 23:36
  Tad Eggleston: No. Well, it's not 50.
• 23:38
  Eric Reynolds: Right, right. But yeah, same… Same… similar place.
• 23:42
  Tad Eggleston: Aren't you also doing the complete Zap coming up in the same…
• 23:45
  Eric Reynolds: We are. We did a big box set of the Complete Zap and hardcover, about a decade ago.
• 23:52
  Eric Reynolds: And that was a big, deluxe… $500 box set.
• 23:58
  Tad Eggleston: There is the… This, this one's only 300.
• 24:02
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and then the new Zap set is kind of a reconfiguration of that, but in paperback and more of a… it's still expensive because it's a lot of material, but it's still a lot more.
• 24:15
  Tad Eggleston: It's 200?
• 24:16
  Eric Reynolds: I don't even think it's that much, although I could be wrong off the top of my head.
• 24:21
  Eric Reynolds: I was gonna say more like 100, but…
• 24:28
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, there we go. Oh, it is 200. You, you, you…
• 24:31
  Tad Eggleston: I may have looked through your catalog recently, I need to send your PR guy, my listings…
• 24:38
  Eric Reynolds: Well, I'm impressed by your, you know, you mentioned earlier that, like, Distillery has 5 books in the April catalog, like… I think it's 5. Well, the April catalog.
• 24:47
  Tad Eggleston: just dropped. The April catalog just dropped, so, like, I've done my first perusal. But also, for our weekly episode.
• 24:59
  Tad Eggleston: We'll… we'll highlight items from… the…
• 25:09
  Tad Eggleston: The catalogs, and we'll make certain that we highlight the
• 25:13
  Tad Eggleston: the stuff that we're really interested in that's coming out, or that has FEO, so, like…
• 25:17
  Tad Eggleston: I try to stay on top of it so that I can tell my 4 or 5 listeners, hey, go buy this book.
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, at least one of my listeners is a comic shop owner, and at least one of my listeners has library connections, so sometimes it gets farther than 4 copies sold.
• 25:34
  Eric Reynolds: Take it.
• 25:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, to be fair, I think I'm up to consistently 30 downloads, and since the downloads don't necessarily represent streaming, I probably have more listeners, but I like to stay humble. And they're certainly not paying me yet.
• 25:50
  Fred Van Lente: Each recording is handed out to 5 people, so…
• 25:52
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 25:53
  Tad Eggleston: All of my Patreons are family members, so this is me remembering that I should occasionally plug the 22 Panels Patreon. You can give us money.
• 26:04
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes I don't know why you'd want to, but, like, I have fun anyway.
• 26:10
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I,
• 26:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's weird to me. I mean, Mark and I have been talking on and off. It's been such a weird year that it doesn't feel like it should be baseball season yet. Because the world is just… the world!
• 26:28
  Tiffany Babb: that too, but also the… I feel like the postseason was, like, it was quite late, right? And then… and then we also had WBC.
• 26:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 26:38
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, like, the earliest U.S. start to a baseball season ever.
• 26:44
  Tiffany Babb: Short off-season.
• 26:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 26:46
  Rob Neyer: I'm never going to get used to opening day being in March. I'm not going to look long enough.
• 26:51
  Tiffany Babb: I can't with this opening day thing, too. I was complaining about this earlier, which is just, like…
• 26:56
  Tiffany Babb: So, we gotta watch the Yankees and the Giants, and that's it. Like, what happened to opening day?
• 27:03
  Tad Eggleston: I liked it when, you know, I think the Reds always got the first game, but that was because they started at, like, 1 o'clock, but there was a full slate on opening day, I think, when I was a kid.
• 27:16
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, everybody gets to watch their game.
• 27:18
  Tad Eggleston: B.
• 27:19
  Tad Eggleston: is full slate opening day. I mean, it's great if you're a Giants or a Yankees fan, particularly if you're a Giants-Yankees fan, and live in the Bay Area and can afford tickets, but…
• 27:32
  Tad Eggleston: For the rest of us, it's like, okay.
• 27:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's not…
• 27:36
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, the forecast for Mets opening day, which is tomorrow, up until about a couple days ago, was like 42 degrees, and I'm like, no.
• 27:45
  Fred Van Lente: I'm not going… my wife's birthday is April 2nd, so she gets excited, and she's like, I want to go to the Met, so let's get tickets, I want to go for my birthday. I'm like, I don't want… it's gonna be 40 degrees on your birthday, I do not want to go. I'm not sitting in a.
• 27:57
  Tiffany Babb: That is very cold.
• 27:59
  Tad Eggleston: It's.
• 28:00
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, man, and it's not gonna warm here, get warm here for, like, 2 weeks.
• 28:02
  markchiarello: Jeez, you know… It's not Mets opening day if it's March and Tom Seaver isn't starting.
• 28:11
  Fred Van Lente: Street on that one.
• 28:13
  Tad Eggleston: That leads… that leads to a…
• 28:14
  Tiffany Babb: and…
• 28:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we've got a lot of people who've been to a lot of games. What is the worst weather that you've actually gone to a game in, and how many innings did you stay?
• 28:26
  Eric Reynolds: I don't know how to… I don't know about that, but I do know that some of my favorite games to go to in Seattle are the dreary April days when they draw 10,000 people, and you feel like you've kind of got the stadium to yourself.
• 28:41
  Eric Reynolds: There's something to be said for that. I mean.
• 28:43
  Fred Van Lente: Do they have a dome in… do you have a roof in Seattle?
• 28:45
  Eric Reynolds: Well, yeah, we have a… what do you call it, a retractable.
• 28:49
  Fred Van Lente: graduate.
• 28:49
  Tad Eggleston: roof.
• 28:50
  Eric Reynolds: But it's still open air, you know?
• 28:53
  Rob Neyer: Yeah, I have frozen my ass off at Mariners games, roof or no roof. I wasn't smart enough to bring a real jacket, or any jacket at all, and there can be sort of a tunnel effect, where the wind just goes under the roof, right into the stands on the right field side.
• 29:11
  Tiffany Babb: That's rough. In California, it's mostly heat. Like, last two years ago, David Harper came out and he wanted to see a Dodgers game.
• 29:19
  Tiffany Babb: Which sucks already, because you have to drive all the way there, and it's such a mess to get in. And it was, like, 95 degrees, and he wanted good seats, so we had no shade, and we were gonna die. But we stayed… we stayed 9 innings. There were extra innings, and we didn't stay for that, because I think we actually would have gotten heatstroke.
• 29:37
  Tiffany Babb: But that was pretty bad.
• 29:40
  Fred Van Lente: they were handing out, like, a David Wright Captain America t-shirt as a giveaway, like, some Friday night promotion at Mets, and it was in April, and it was low 40s, pouring.
• 29:52
  Fred Van Lente: And, like, you know, you're just mopping up
• 29:56
  Fred Van Lente: using David Wright's face to mop up all the seats as they're just getting ringed on.
• 30:01
  Tiffany Babb: Jeez.
• 30:02
  Fred Van Lente: Guys walking around in five thick David Wright Captain America shirts.
• 30:07
  Fred Van Lente: And I was with a bigger die-hard than I am, and we left. We, I don't think, made it out of the sixth. It's like…
• 30:14
  Fred Van Lente: Through this! To the bar!
• 30:19
  Tad Eggleston: Here's exactly one time that I have left Wrigley Field before the 7th inning stretch.
• 30:25
  Tad Eggleston: And that was a April game.
• 30:29
  Tad Eggleston: Against the Dodgers.
• 30:31
  Tad Eggleston: Where there was freezing rain, It was 28 degrees with freezing rain.
• 30:36
  Tad Eggleston: And… The Cubs were down 8-0, despite having out-hit the Dodgers.
• 30:46
  Tad Eggleston: 6 to 3.
• 30:48
  Tad Eggleston: In… in that time, because in the first 6 innings, they'd walked 12 batters and made 4 errors.
• 30:58
  Tad Eggleston: And when they gave up a 3-run double to the opposing pitcher, I said, okay, that's enough.
• 31:07
  Tad Eggleston: That's enough. I went across the street to Salt and Pepper, which isn't there anymore, but it was a nice diner that I used to love going to after games, and we watched the rest of the game there. I could not, could not bring myself to leave Wrigleyville, because if, if, by some crazy occurrence.
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: we had come back to be able to say that I was on a train when I found out that was too much. I had to… I had to be nearby.
• 31:29
  Tad Eggleston: But, man, that was brutal. However, there was one… one day
• 31:36
  Tad Eggleston: that was as cold and as miserable physically that I've been at Wrigley Field. And what's really annoying is it's one of the few times that I went down at 7am for a night game, because it was opening day, and WXRT Radio does an opening day broadcast.
• 31:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and they started at 7 AM, because Lynn Bramer is the one that did it. Rest in peace.
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: But this year, they had a night game opening. So I was down there at 7am, I was there all day, it was, like, 60 to 70 and sunny most of the day, and, like, 10 minutes…
• 32:14
  Tad Eggleston: Before game time, it started raining, And dropped 40 degrees.
• 32:23
  Tad Eggleston: Which…
• 32:24
  Tad Eggleston: is when scalping… because I also went down without a ticket, that's when the price on tickets fell enough that I could afford one, so that got me in.
• 32:34
  Tad Eggleston: But it was a truly miserably cold experience, except for one thing.
• 32:40
  Tad Eggleston: we raised a championship banner, so I stayed for all 9 innings.
• 32:48
  Tad Eggleston: I got to see rings from, like, because the Cubs gave rings to, like, all of their staff, so… so, like, the… the…
• 32:56
  Tad Eggleston: The hot dog vendors, and the… the… the…
• 33:04
  Tad Eggleston: Ushers and whatever, the security people were all wearing their championship rings and more than happy to show them to you.
• 33:11
  Tad Eggleston: I spent the last 3 innings sitting on a rail with one of the security guards, talking about the fact that she was an accountant, but the Cubs have a system where, like.
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: It's really kind of first, you know, once you get the job, it's like, first come…
• 33:26
  Tad Eggleston: Until… until they've got enough people, so she managed to get the gig, because she had a gut feeling that the Cubs were gonna win the World Series that year, and that was the only way that she was gonna be able to go to the games. So she got in the gig, she's like, you know, I'd come down here on… on the days that I was free, whatnot, but I was at every playoff game.
• 33:49
  Tiffany Babb: That's a great story.
• 33:50
  Tad Eggleston: show up 2 hours early for work to make certain that I was one of the ones.
• 33:56
  Tiffany Babb: Hacking the system.
• 33:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 34:00
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I had a… I had a friend who was a peanut vendor, even though he had
• 34:06
  Tad Eggleston: season tickets that were incredible, like, because he, A, it got him in, B, you know, make a few bucks, and C, he'd just go down every day and go, do I feel like sitting in my seats, or do I feel like scalping my seats? And…
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: And walking around as a peanut finder.
• 34:26
  markchiarello: Wow.
• 34:29
  Tad Eggleston: You know… But yeah, no, I've known lots of people
• 34:34
  Tad Eggleston: Who… who have gotten various jobs at… at…
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: Wrigley, just to be able to go to games.
• 34:43
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's a common thing for a lot of…
• 34:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't know how other teams run their… their concessions and their security and whatnot, but I know the Cubs have always run it in such a way that, like.
• 34:55
  Tad Eggleston: Your commitment isn't really any more than you want to make it.
• 35:00
  Tad Eggleston: The pay is decent.
• 35:02
  Tad Eggleston: The work can be hard, but not grueling, and you get to be at the game in a way that you can actually kinda watch parts of it.
• 35:11
  Tiffany Babb: Chris Seidman, from Mad Cave, her mom worked at Wrigley.
• 35:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 35:16
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, I don't know in what capacity yet. I'm trying to, I'm trying to get her on the website, but I have to go through the Cubs media situation, and that's a whole headache. But yeah, I think, yeah, she worked at Berkeley for years.
• 35:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 35:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I worked in senior care, so I took care of a couple of people who did long…
• 35:34
  Tad Eggleston: term Wrigley work, and one woman who…
• 35:39
  Tad Eggleston: Got to go to Wrigley as payment for babysitting.
• 35:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because she babysat Charlie Root's kids.
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: Idea of how old she was.
• 35:49
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. She would babysit Charlie Root's kids in exchange for…
• 35:54
  Tiffany Babb: Wow.
• 35:55
  Tad Eggleston: and continued, you know, because of that, she had, like, connections, so… and she lived close enough to the ballpark, so I think the first kids that she babysat in exchange for tickets were Charlie Roots, and the last were Stan Hacks, so…
• 36:10
  Tad Eggleston: 1920s to the, like, 1940s.
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: And then she passed away, I think, 3 months before they won the World Series.
• 36:20
  markchiarello: There was a guy, I remember when I worked at Marvel in the 80s, there was a guy in the bullpen
• 36:27
  markchiarello: doing production work, but he was also an anchor, and I cannot remember his name, I can picture him, real nice guy. He…
• 36:34
  markchiarello: was in the band that would walk around Yankee Stadium.
• 36:38
  markchiarello: In the 7… in the 80s, 90s.
• 36:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 36:40
  markchiarello: You know, in, like, 5-piece band with the trumpet and stuff.
• 36:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 36:44
  markchiarello: They used to have one of those at Wrigley, too.
• 36:46
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it.
• 36:47
  markchiarello: There's a comics… baseball crossover.
• 36:49
  Eric Reynolds: Wow.
• 36:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 36:50
  Eric Reynolds: Well, it was. Was it… I mean, it wasn't, like, Al Milgram, or…
• 36:54
  markchiarello: No, no, no. I'm trying to look it up. I can picture them.
• 37:01
  markchiarello: Short guy.
• 37:03
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know my Marvel 80s inkers well enough, I was too young.
• 37:07
  Eric Reynolds: I'm trying to think of inkers who worked in the bullpen.
• 37:11
  Tad Eggleston: I just started noticing names on comics at all by the end of 1980, or the end of the 80s.
• 37:21
  Tad Eggleston: So… I don't know if I've asked this question with this group of people. Talk to me about, like.
• 37:29
  Tad Eggleston: What you remember about falling in love with baseball?
• 37:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's a good beginning of the season question. What's your earliest… oh, I… I'm…
• 37:40
  Tad Eggleston: I'm hooked. Like, like, when you look back, you go, there was no turning back from this point.
• 37:46
  markchiarello: I can remember falling out of love with baseball about 5 years ago.
• 37:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and about 25 years ago.
• 37:54
  markchiarello: Yeah.
• 37:54
  Tad Eggleston: Because since you fall… you fell out of love with the strike, and you fell out of love again…
• 37:59
  Tad Eggleston: with the steroids, and… we suck you back from time to time, and I'm…
• 38:04
  markchiarello: You know.
• 38:04
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna get you going to minor league games now.
• 38:07
  markchiarello: Yeah, I'm in love with that.
• 38:08
  Tad Eggleston: Major League Baseball, not with baseball.
• 38:11
  markchiarello: Well, yeah, that's a good question for the group. I'm thinking of…
• 38:16
  markchiarello: Because the World Series was enjoyable, and it's the first couple games I've watched in 5 years.
• 38:21
  markchiarello: Other than a couple live games that I've gone to.
• 38:25
  markchiarello: Is it worth my time getting back into baseball?
• 38:28
  Eric Reynolds: Well, but the great thing about baseball is you don't have to devote your full attention to it, you know?
• 38:35
  Eric Reynolds: I mean, I have almost exclusively listen to baseball on the radio, and it's just… it's a… you know, it's the kind of thing where I'll have it on every night, but I'm not really listening to it. What I hear is the inflection in the voices that kind of
• 38:51
  Eric Reynolds: perk my interest and, you know, break me out of whatever I'm doing to kind of listen to, and I love it. It's a great rhythm,
• 39:01
  Eric Reynolds: But to go back to your…
• 39:02
  Eric Reynolds: to Tad's question, I… I kind of… when I think back to when I was a kid, it's hard for me to know if… like, baseball cards and baseball is kind of a chicken and an egg relationship. Yeah. And they definitely…
• 39:16
  Eric Reynolds: you know, the cards definitely fueled the interest in the sport. And then the other big thing I remember as a kid that really
• 39:24
  Eric Reynolds: like, captured my imagination was, Fernando Valenzuela's.
• 39:29
  Eric Reynolds: Fernando Mania. I grew up in Southern California. Yeah.
• 39:34
  Eric Reynolds: And, that was…
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: I watched one of his no-hitters on YouTube recently.
• 39:38
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, it's, like, kind of hard…
• 39:40
  Tad Eggleston: From… from that era.
• 39:42
  Eric Reynolds: It's… it's almost hard to… Believe, like, just what a phenomenon that was at the time.
• 39:50
  Eric Reynolds: I also grew up partly in… in…
• 39:54
  Eric Reynolds: Palm Springs, California, and so we would go to spring training every year. It was, like, a mile away from where we lived.
• 40:02
  Eric Reynolds: And go get autographs, and…
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: That's something that I haven't done yet, and want to. I want to go to spring training.
• 40:08
  Tiffany Babb: I was just there a couple weeks ago.
• 40:10
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I did that.
• 40:11
  Eric Reynolds: It was great. We used to go to the… we lived very close to the Gene Autry Hotel, and of course, at the time…
• 40:17
  Tiffany Babb: Where are the angels?
• 40:19
  Eric Reynolds: was the owner of the Angels, and the Angels were still in Palm Springs. I don't think there is any spring training in Palm Springs anymore.
• 40:26
  Tad Eggleston: It's all Arizona.
• 40:27
  Tiffany Babb: They're in Tempe now.
• 40:29
  Eric Reynolds: But my dad would take me to, the Gene Autry Hotel for breakfast, because we would go, and just, like, all the players would be eating breakfast. I got… I remember getting Reggie Jackson's autograph, and Ricky Henderson.
• 40:42
  Tiffany Babb: Wow.
• 40:44
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 40:45
  Tiffany Babb: That's very cool. My story is much more recent, so I have a much clearer memory. I only got into baseball a few years ago. I mean, I also grew up in Southern California, I still live there. And growing up, I remember when the Angels won the World Series, and I had some passing interest, but I didn't… like, for me, it was…
• 41:04
  Tiffany Babb: a handful of years ago, Haas Otzmanel, how the letterer, was just like, you gotta go, because one fun thing that we do, because we live in very different places, he lives in England, is we'll look up where we live on a map, and he'll be like, well, how often do you go to Disneyland? That's really close to where you live. How often do you go to the beach?
• 41:21
  Tiffany Babb: And he was just like, you gotta go see Shohei Ohtani pitch, at Angel Stadium. And I'm like…
• 41:26
  Tiffany Babb: I chase novelty, so I was just like, yeah, I'll go watch a game, and I started going to games, and then it just kind of took over my life, and now it's a big part of my life. But… it is very different, I think, getting into it as an adult, as opposed to as a child, because…
• 41:43
  Tiffany Babb: Like, I don't have that long history with it, necessarily. I never played the game. I didn't collect baseball cards as a kid. So it is very different.
• 41:54
  Tad Eggleston: I also love that it's Haas that got you into it.
• 41:57
  Tiffany Babb: Because, because.
• 41:58
  Tad Eggleston: He's… and I've never managed to get him on one of these, mostly because he's in the UK. Like, Haas… there's no good reason for Haas to be a major baseball fan, except that somebody turned him onto it, and then he… he… kind of like you, Eric.
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he tends to have the TV on, but he more listens to the calls while he's working, so he loves the rhythm of… he's somehow a Texas Rangers fan.
• 42:27
  Tiffany Babb: Yes. He's all Texas teams for everything.
• 42:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 42:31
  Tiffany Babb: No explanation.
• 42:33
  Tiffany Babb: He's never been to Texas.
• 42:35
  Eric Reynolds: That's random.
• 42:36
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I discovered that because he started, you know, he did a thing on Twitter for a while where he was just… he would take calls from games and just letter them with nothing else. So just be the word balloon.
• 42:49
  Tiffany Babb: I didn't know about that. That's crazy, I'm gonna have to look that up.
• 42:52
  Tad Eggleston: this was one of the things that I, like, before I'd reached out to… it was one of the things that went, well, I kinda wanted to talk to a letterer anyway, and Haas is amazing, but, like, he's got baseball tweets?
• 43:06
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta reach out! So, I mean, that's how he wound up
• 43:12
  Tad Eggleston: on 22 panels to begin with is, like, I wanted to talk to him about these. I saw these, so I then looked into it, and I'm like, wait a minute. He's of Indian descent in Great Britain, and he's a baseball fan? How? How? What!
• 43:30
  Tiffany Babb: And the funny thing is, he doesn't even follow, like, English sports.
• 43:34
  Tiffany Babb: Like, he's just… he has no…
• 43:36
  Tiffany Babb: he has no interest in cricket or whatever. He's like, he watches basketball, he watches football, he watches baseball.
• 43:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I think baseball's the one that he came to last, but the one that he likes the most, at least when I was talking to him.
• 43:51
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, I'm an adult.
• 43:53
  Fred Van Lente: baseball fan as well, I mean.
• 43:55
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah?
• 43:55
  Fred Van Lente: I have a nerdy…
• 43:57
  Fred Van Lente: you know, picked on kids, so, you know, I… total disdain for sports, you know, it's the…
• 44:02
  Fred Van Lente: what's the Dark Knight Returns line? You know, the sports is the weapon of the enemy, we do not use the sports.
• 44:07
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 44:08
  Fred Van Lente: But then, my wife, she's my girlfriend at the time, was a huge 80s Mets fan, so took me to a Braves-Mets game during the Piazza era, and I just fell in love immediately, you know? It's weird, like, baseball's, like, very structured.
• 44:23
  Fred Van Lente: There's a lot of numbers involved, and it's great if you have, like, an OCD, like, addictive personality.
• 44:31
  Fred Van Lente: shocked at how… but within… by the end of the 99…
• 44:35
  Fred Van Lente: season, I was completely hooked. And I… I think, literally, we went on July 4th. It was the July 4th game.
• 44:42
  markchiarello: Fred, I am confirming myself, I thought you were from Ohio, and you are.
• 44:47
  Fred Van Lente: I am, yep.
• 44:48
  markchiarello: You weren't a Reds fan as a kid?
• 44:51
  Fred Van Lente: Well, I'm from Cleveland, so we would have been, what was then the Indians. No, no, I was, I had a total hostility to sports. I often find that in my, geek compatriots.
• 45:05
  Fred Van Lente: It's weird, it's either I hate sports, they're the tool of the enemy, or I'm as crazy addicted as everyone else, you know, that's definitely me.
• 45:13
  Tad Eggleston: Though, the…
• 45:15
  Tad Eggleston: There is definitely a very… there is a very select group that's like me, where the crazy addiction is only to baseball.
• 45:24
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, me too. Yeah, I don't…
• 45:26
  Tad Eggleston: They know, I mean.
• 45:26
  Fred Van Lente: People… I…
• 45:27
  Tad Eggleston: People are like.
• 45:28
  Fred Van Lente: basketball. I wrote the comic history of basketball. Right.
• 45:32
  Tad Eggleston: People will say to me that, like, oh, I'm not into sports when I'm talking about baseball. I'm like, I'm not into sports anyway, either. I'm into baseball. I differentiate between the two. And I think a lot of it is what you were just talking about, like, there is…
• 45:48
  Tad Eggleston: there is that set of rules, and the stats, and all the ways to be OCD with it, but…
• 45:55
  Tad Eggleston: it's also so creative, and open-ended, because the outfield wall doesn't have to be, you know, the foul lines can reach for forever, and… and it's not amount of time that you play, it's a number of outs that you need to get, and, like, all of that stuff… I mean, I recently discovered.
• 46:12
  Tiffany Babb: that…
• 46:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, two things. First, have any of you read the, I think it's Robert Coover's book, the Universal Baseball Association, by Henry H. Waugh, proprietor?
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's a fantastic novel that's all about this guy who created his own stratomatic-type game, and then fell into it.
• 46:34
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, so he's… he's rolling dice to, like, decide if they went out partying the night before, or if they got divorced, or whatnot. But what I discovered recently…
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: is Jack Kerouac had a similar game that he made up.
• 46:52
  Tad Eggleston: That he would play, and he'd draw scorecards, he'd draw programs, he'd do the postseason, you know, wrap-up that wasn't just about the games, but, like.
• 47:06
  Tad Eggleston: all of the players that he created would have personalities and whatnot. It was, like, how he entertained himself on the road, and I'm sitting there going.
• 47:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, A, now I need to track down Coover to ask if that was the…
• 47:18
  Tiffany Babb: the inspiration, but B, like…
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: How cool is it that, like, this sport inspires…
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: not just, rah, rah, I want my team to win, but… but, like, all of this cool…
• 47:33
  Tad Eggleston: storytelling, and I mean, you read W.P. Cancella works, and everybody knows Shoeless Joe, which became Field of Dreams, but, like, the… the… the…
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy is just a crazy good book, you know, and he's got a ton of short stories. You know, Ring Lardner baseball short stories are amazing.
• 47:57
  Eric Reynolds: We don't have enough U.S.
• 47:58
  Tad Eggleston: Comics yet, but there are how many… how many baseball mangas?
• 48:02
  Tad Eggleston: That are all just… At least all the ones that I've come across are just… fun.
• 48:08
  Eric Reynolds: Does anybody have a, like, a favorite piece of… Writing about baseball.
• 48:12
  Eric Reynolds: Nonfiction, fiction, whatever.
• 48:15
  Tiffany Babb: Favorite all time is hard.
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, so many.
• 48:20
  Tiffany Babb: I was gonna say, out of books last year, I really enjoyed, this book that I read called In the Japanese… Inside Japanese Baseball, I think is what it was called. And it's all… I know very little about MPB, and it's all just interviews, and they format it into essays, from people who work throughout MPB, so key interviews, like the cheerleaders, the beer girls, a commissioner, like, the mascot.
• 48:45
  Tiffany Babb: And that was really interesting.
• 48:48
  Eric Reynolds: That sounds good.
• 48:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 48:50
  Eric Reynolds: What did you say, Fred?
• 48:51
  Fred Van Lente: Boys of Summer. Angles. The Boys of Summer is probably my favorite.
• 48:55
  Eric Reynolds: Is that Halberstan?
• 48:57
  Fred Van Lente: What's that?
• 48:58
  Eric Reynolds: Is that David Halberstam?
• 48:59
  Fred Van Lente: No, it's… it's Roger Engel.
• 49:02
  Eric Reynolds: Oh, Roger Angel, okay, yeah.
• 49:03
  Rob Neyer: Roger Khan.
• 49:05
  Eric Reynolds: New Yorker. What?
• 49:06
  Rob Neyer: Roger Kahn wrote, Boys of Summer, is that the…
• 49:10
  Fred Van Lente: Farewell.
• 49:11
  Rob Neyer: Dodgers book?
• 49:12
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, the broken dot.
• 49:13
  Rob Neyer: That's Roger Karn. Yeah, Roger Angel's also awesome.
• 49:16
  Tiffany Babb: I just found out that Roger Angel didn't get into baseball until, like, they had started the Mets, and he was, like, sent to cover, like, the beginning of the Mets, and then he fell in love through that.
• 49:27
  Rob Neyer: group.
• 49:29
  Eric Reynolds: Have any of you read, Don DeLillo's Underworld?
• 49:33
  Eric Reynolds: The first thing… Not the whole thing.
• 49:35
  Rob Neyer: I read the baseball part in the beginning.
• 49:38
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, the first hundred pages.
• 49:40
  Rob Neyer: It turned into a standalone book.
• 49:42
  Eric Reynolds: It's… I think that's my favorite. It's just… it's… it's the shot heard around the world game.
• 49:48
  Eric Reynolds: And it's the most immersive.
• 49:51
  Eric Reynolds: baseball experience, in prose that I've ever read. It's great. It's actually one of my favorite pieces of prose of any kind I've ever read.
• 50:02
  markchiarello: There was a great… my memory's gone. There was a great book
• 50:06
  markchiarello: Came out about 15 years ago. I think the… I think the author was from Ohio. It was about what if that deal that VEC… what's his name? Bill Veck?
• 50:19
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 50:19
  Tad Eggleston: This is, and you know what? This is somebody who was invited to this, because that's Peter Schilling.
• 50:25
  markchiarello: Peter Schilling.
• 50:26
  markchiarello: The summer of, let's say, baseball or something, the premise is, what if that deal for the, for the, was it the Browns? To get…
• 50:36
  Tiffany Babb: the top.
• 50:37
  Tad Eggleston: No, it was VEC offered by the Philadelphia A's from Connie Mac.
• 50:44
  markchiarello: Right.
• 50:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I know this book.
• 50:47
  markchiarello: I was just about to bring it up myself. He essentially works out a deal to buy Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Satchel Page, and I think Judy Johnson, and the deal…
• 50:57
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was a hole.
• 50:59
  markchiarello: It's a great, great book, Schelling, Peter Schelling. I had lunch with a real nice guy.
• 51:04
  Tiffany Babb: Sounds great.
• 51:06
  markchiarello: Man, I highly recommend it.
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: One second, and I'll… and I'll… End of Baseball is the name of… The End of Baseball is the name of the book. It's a great book.
• 51:14
  Tiffany Babb: And this is where I was about to go. He also…
• 51:19
  Tad Eggleston: Has a book.
• 51:21
  Tiffany Babb: about.
• 51:21
  Tad Eggleston: Carl Barks at Uncivilized.
• 51:23
  Tiffany Babb: Oh, well, there you go. Crossover.
• 51:25
  Tad Eggleston: baseball and comics guy. Right. Interesting.
• 51:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we almost had him last November, and I reached out for this one, too, and we just didn't manage to connect, so… one day, he will be in one of these conversations. Mark my words.
• 51:40
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I was a little frustrated at the way…
• 51:47
  Tad Eggleston: Josh Gibson was portrayed in that book, because it had him in the depths of addiction, though there's some evidence to indicate that he might have been, so I'm not…
• 52:00
  markchiarello: Yeah, all according to what year, all according to what year it was.
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right, I can't… can't be completely unhappy about it, because…
• 52:08
  Tad Eggleston: Because the other thing is, like, it portrayed it in a way, like, like, one of the things that, that…
• 52:15
  Tad Eggleston: that shocked me for a second and a half, and then made me go, oh, no, that makes perfect sense, is when I discovered that Louis Armstrong was a total pothead. But… but, like…
• 52:27
  Tad Eggleston: he gave an interview once where he got asked about it, and he's like, dude, I played all of these places.
• 52:33
  Tad Eggleston: you know, listed off, like, the biggest of biggest musical halls of the era. And he's like, and I had to walk through the back door of every one of them.
• 52:43
  markchiarello: Yeah.
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: And he's like, so, I could be pissed off?
• 52:48
  Tad Eggleston: Or I can get high.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: I make better music when I'm high than when I'm pissed off.
• 52:54
  markchiarello: And he lived 5 minutes away from Shea Stadium in Corona.
• 52:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 52:58
  markchiarello: Yeah. There's a… there's another book, that I really love, Game 6.
• 53:04
  markchiarello: about the Carlton Fisk home run, that series. Mark Frost didn't… you know, here's another connection to comics. Didn't Mark Frost write the… one of the Fantastic Four Silver Surfer movies?
• 53:19
  markchiarello: Or am I crazy?
• 53:20
  Fred Van Lente: That's awesome.
• 53:22
  markchiarello: That's a great book. Man, that's one of my top 3 favorite books.
• 53:25
  Eric Reynolds: Peak Sky.
• 53:26
  markchiarello: baseball books
• 53:31
  markchiarello: Everybody's looking it up.
• 53:32
  Fred Van Lente: Mark Frost, the co-creator of Twin Peaks.
• 53:36
  Tad Eggleston: Easy.
• 53:37
  markchiarello: That's probably a different Mark Rose.
• 53:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, now I have to do research.
• 53:44
  Fred Van Lente: Well, the Twin Peaks guy…
• 53:45
  Tad Eggleston: Awesome.
• 53:46
  Fred Van Lente: was, in fact… the writer of the Michael Chickless Fantastic Four movie, so you…
• 53:53
  markchiarello: What's got a beginner.
• 53:55
  Tiffany Babb: Intriguing.
• 53:57
  Tad Eggleston: But did he also write the baseball book? That's… that's what we.
• 54:00
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, that is the question.
• 54:03
  markchiarello: New York Times best-selling…
• 54:04
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, it is, it is the same guy.
• 54:06
  markchiarello: Is it really?
• 54:07
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, so he created… no, co-created Twin Peaks. It's the same guy.
• 54:13
  Tad Eggleston: And it actually looks like he's got another… book called…
• 54:19
  Tiffany Babb: The Grand Slam.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: The Grand Slam… Is… about Bobby Jill… no, that's golf.
• 54:27
  Tiffany Babb: Oh, well, I see that's what happens when you make assumptions.
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: Not nearly as interesting.
• 54:34
  Tad Eggleston: There was another one that I was trying to find, cause it looked like it was,
• 54:39
  Tad Eggleston: Grand Slam… No, the match is… er, no, greatest game ever played, a true story… is that…
• 54:49
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's another.
• 54:50
  Tiffany Babb: I was gonna say, we're also just assuming that's baseball, but I think that's one of the interesting things about baseball.
• 54:56
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't he know that, like, golf is what you do?
• 54:59
  Tiffany Babb: Well, he can't, yes. Well, Mike Trout has opened a golf course with…
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: Corsi.
• 55:06
  Tiffany Babb: With Tiger Woods. Like, they… that's… well, that's the big thing that they do.
• 55:09
  Tad Eggleston: Kinda cool.
• 55:10
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah, they all… they all golf, but like… Yeah, great.
• 55:14
  Tad Eggleston: Greg Maddox was apparently an insane golfer.
• 55:16
  Tiffany Babb: Was he really?
• 55:17
  Tad Eggleston: SI…
• 55:20
  Tiffany Babb: an SI column.
• 55:22
  Tiffany Babb: I think it was, .
• 55:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, who was… who… Rob, do you remember who got to cover Maddox the most at SI?
• 55:30
  Rob Neyer: Oh gosh, no, I have no idea.
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's somebody… I think it was Tom Verducci.
• 55:36
  Rob Neyer: I agree.
• 55:38
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the beginning of the column was, like, Tom Verducci went up to some other person in the pneumatics well and started the conversation with, so I was golfing with Greg Maddox the other day, and
• 55:51
  Tad Eggleston: And the guy said, let me guess.
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: Off the tree, through the sand trap, onto the green.
• 55:58
  Tad Eggleston: And he's like, no, and gave some other crazy thing that had happened.
• 56:04
  Tiffany Babb: That's crazy.
• 56:06
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, apparently Maddox, Glavin, and Smoltz, like, spent almost every off day, and often the days before games that they weren't pitching.
• 56:15
  Tad Eggleston: out golfing.
• 56:16
  Tiffany Babb: Who was the fish… Ted Williams? Did he fish? He can pet a.
• 56:20
  Tad Eggleston: Ted Williams was a fisherman, fly fishing.
• 56:25
  Tiffany Babb: You gotta have hobbies.
• 56:25
  Tad Eggleston: Combat pilot.
• 56:28
  Tad Eggleston: Ted Williams did a lot of things, and apparently, when he was taking batting practice.
• 56:33
  Tad Eggleston: With every swing, he'd say, I'm Ted fucking Williams.
• 56:38
  markchiarello: Hence the song.
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: It'sball project.
• 56:42
  markchiarello: Who was the… Who was the guy who was fishing, the Hall of Famer who was fishing, who died?
• 56:48
  markchiarello: The guy he was fishing with fell over, and he tried to save him in the water.
• 56:54
  Tiffany Babb: I know who you're talking about, because he was quite young, wasn't he? Or he had come over from Cuba, was that it?
• 57:01
  markchiarello: No, no, he was a… I wanna say it was, like, Archie Vaughn or somebody like that.
• 57:06
  Tiffany Babb: Older than me.
• 57:06
  markchiarello: Charlie Garinger, somebody like that, like a great… No.
• 57:10
  Tiffany Babb: still, visible.
• 57:12
  Tiffany Babb: But a Hall of Famer. I think it might have been Arkey Vaughn.
• 57:16
  markchiarello: Sorry for that.
• 57:18
  Tad Eggleston: So many…
• 57:19
  markchiarello: Sorry for the ridiculous trivia question.
• 57:22
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's what… I have the…
• 57:26
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because, among other things,
• 57:32
  Tad Eggleston: particularly people who are into both comics and baseball are that much more likely to be the ones that are into the esoteric, weird, cool stuff about baseball. So just, I love that we get to share these little…
• 57:46
  Tad Eggleston: nuggets of… of… whatever.
• 57:51
  Tiffany Babb: That answer to Mark's question, which was, is it worth it to get back into baseball? Which is, there's so many different ways to be into baseball, right?
• 57:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 57:59
  Tiffany Babb: to be watching the games, necessarily, to, like… I mean… Yeah.
• 58:03
  Tad Eggleston: I probably only watch… maybe 3 games a year on TV.
• 58:10
  Tiffany Babb: Wow, I watch a lot of characters.
• 58:11
  Eric Reynolds: That's cute.
• 58:11
  Tiffany Babb: I watch a lot of…
• 58:13
  Tad Eggleston: Almost… There's almost never a day where I don't read something about baseball.
• 58:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. There's…
• 58:20
  Tad Eggleston: And I go out of my way to go to at least 3 or 4 Major League games, and at least 3 or 4 minor league games every year. There are certain people that when I get together with them, you know, Dennis Kitchen couldn't make it today, but, like, the last time he was in Milwaukee, it's like, oh, the Brewers are out of town, are there any bays? We went to a Milwaukee Milkmen game.
• 58:41
  Tiffany Babb: Because it was a baseball game.
• 58:44
  Tad Eggleston: You know?
• 58:45
  Eric Reynolds: I'm the same way.
• 58:46
  Tiffany Babb: I watched…
• 58:47
  Eric Reynolds: I watch about maybe 3 games a year, too, if they happen to be on national TV. And last fall, when the Mariners made the playoffs and went as deep as they did.
• 58:57
  Eric Reynolds: I watched all of those games. And, you know, by the end of it, I was fucking exhausted.
• 59:04
  Tiffany Babb: It's a lot of time.
• 59:06
  Eric Reynolds: I mean, I was almost a little bit relieved, you know, even though I wanted them to go all the way, but…
• 59:12
  Tiffany Babb: I mean…
• 59:13
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I can't imagine somebody watching, you know, 162 games on television.
• 59:19
  Tiffany Babb: a lot of games, not 162, but I definitely watch a few a week on TV, especially at the beginning of the season. As the Angels start to really fall off, it gets harder to emotionally steal myself for, like, 9 hours of bad baseball.
• 59:32
  Fred Van Lente: What drives me crazy is that the playoffs are always during near a Comic-Con.
• 59:35
  Tiffany Babb: Right.
• 59:36
  Fred Van Lente: So, when…
• 59:38
  Fred Van Lente: a team I like isn't in the playoffs, they're a fun distraction, but when my team is in the playoffs, it's extremely stressful.
• 59:47
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 59:47
  Fred Van Lente: On top of what is already a stressful week.
• 59:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. No, I, I… I… I love going to games.
• 59:57
  Tad Eggleston: And part of it is I was spoiled. I still don't think that there's been a better production crew.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: than the Arnie Harris-Joe Corneo Cubs crew that was literally their producer and director for, like, 50 years on WGN. And they figured out camera placings before any other team did, et cetera, et cetera, and I think…
• 1:00:21
  Tad Eggleston: Rob, have a great, great day. Thank you so much for joining us, and one of these days, I'm gonna get out. Rob is the commissioner of the West Coast League, a wood bat summer…
• 1:00:33
  Tiffany Babb: Cool.
• 1:00:34
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the snow.
• 1:00:35
  Rob Neyer: improvement.
• 1:00:35
  Tad Eggleston: Pickles.
• 1:00:36
  Rob Neyer: If anyone's ever up here.
• 1:00:38
  Tad Eggleston: Need to go to a game.
• 1:00:39
  Rob Neyer: teams, and all over the place, so, keep… let me know.
• 1:00:43
  Eric Reynolds: I gotta get down there. I have a friend who has season tickets.
• 1:00:47
  Rob Neyer: to, what, Pickles game?
• 1:00:48
  Eric Reynolds: They're the pickles, yeah.
• 1:00:50
  Tiffany Babb: It's a great team name.
• 1:00:51
  Eric Reynolds: I gotta, I gotta get down there.
• 1:00:52
  Rob Neyer: Big party every night there. A lot of fun.
• 1:00:55
  markchiarello: Rob, before you…
• 1:00:56
  Rob Neyer: Everybody thinks.
• 1:00:56
  markchiarello: Wait, before you go, Rob, I did have a quick question. I'm assuming you've been to, like, every Major League stadium?
• 1:01:04
  Rob Neyer: I have not, I think I'm at, like, 38 or 39, but some of those are defunct, and I haven't been to all of the new ones.
• 1:01:10
  markchiarello: My question is about Candlestick. Have you ever been to Candlestick?
• 1:01:14
  Rob Neyer: I was there in, the summer of… 19… 99?
• 1:01:24
  Tad Eggleston: Wow, I went to Candlestick the year before you did.
• 1:01:27
  Rob Neyer: Speaking of weather, I knew all the stories.
• 1:01:29
  Tiffany Babb: Right.
• 1:01:30
  Rob Neyer: It was July, and I took a heavy coat, and I was still cold. Wow. It was the most dramatic ballpark experience I've ever had. I'm very glad I got to do it once.
• 1:01:39
  markchiarello: Wow. I wish I had gone.
• 1:01:41
  Rob Neyer: Yeah, it was something else?
• 1:01:43
  Tad Eggleston: I enjoyed my night at Candlestick.
• 1:01:45
  Tiffany Babb: That's my… that's my, like, if I could go back in time, I'd watch Willie Mays at Candlestick. But also, like, I was, I was… I wrote about this.
• 1:01:53
  Tad Eggleston: Polo grounds.
• 1:01:54
  Tiffany Babb: Well, there you go. That candlestick, it's the crazy bit, right?
• 1:01:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:58
  Tiffany Babb: you have the chaos, and I was looking it up, and it's because of the placement of the park. It was in, like, the worst spot, and so when the gusts of wind came in, like, it rolled around the basin and just made this crazy, weird… and, like, apparently if they had moved it just, like, a few hundred feet or something, like, a mile or two, like, it would have been totally fine, but it was just that one placement.
• 1:02:21
  Eric Reynolds: You can see it from the freeway, and it was just exposed.
• 1:02:25
  Eric Reynolds: Out there.
• 1:02:27
  Tiffany Babb: Crazy.
• 1:02:28
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
• 1:02:29
  markchiarello: Sorry, Rob, I didn't mean to hold you up.
• 1:02:31
  Rob Neyer: That's alright, no, I had a couple minutes. I just gotta take a shower before my hair cut, so good to see everybody. Take care.
• 1:02:36
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, Rob.
• 1:02:38
  Eric Reynolds: I think I have to jet as well.
• 1:02:40
  Tad Eggleston: Eric needs to run, too.
• 1:02:41
  Tiffany Babb: I do too, actually.
• 1:02:44
  Tad Eggleston: then we should wrap up everybody giving one thing that they hope to see this year.
• 1:02:51
  Tiffany Babb: One thing.
• 1:02:52
  Fred Van Lente: That isn't our team winning the World Series? Right.
• 1:02:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's kind of the cheapy.
• 1:02:56
  Fred Van Lente: bang.
• 1:02:57
  Eric Reynolds: I'll go with a healthy Mariners rotation, which I think.
• 1:03:01
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:03:01
  Eric Reynolds: The key to their success.
• 1:03:03
  Fred Van Lente: I'll do the spiteful thing, and I'll say the Dodgers not even making the.
• 1:03:07
  Tiffany Babb: It's very possible.
• 1:03:11
  Tiffany Babb: I mean, we were talking about the weaknesses earlier, so it's very possible, and it.
• 1:03:13
  Eric Reynolds: Larry David's spite boat, yeah.
• 1:03:15
  Tiffany Babb: I would like to see Mike Trout have, like, a stellar, like, Mike Trout year.
• 1:03:22
  Tad Eggleston: That would be great.
• 1:03:25
  Tad Eggleston: I.
• 1:03:25
  Eric Reynolds: I would like to see that, too, as long as the angels.
• 1:03:28
  Tiffany Babb: Finishing last notes. There you go.
• 1:03:31
  Fred Van Lente: We're all wrong spite mode.
• 1:03:32
  Eric Reynolds: Continuing the spite thing.
• 1:03:33
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna go with something hyper-specific. I have never seen a triple play in person.
• 1:03:39
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm hoping that at some game that I'm at, I get to see a triple play. And what I'm… like, if there's, like, a sub-hope, I hope that it's not a 5-4-3.
• 1:03:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'd love to.
• 1:03:51
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah. Stop.
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: That's really cool, but I'd love to… I'd really love to see one of those just wacky, like.
• 1:03:59
  Tiffany Babb: 8… 2… 4… Right.
• 1:04:03
  Tad Eggleston: 3, 6 triple play.
• 1:04:06
  Tiffany Babb: It was a great one last year, that was 6-6-3. Right. That was nuts against… it was Zach Neto against Shohei Ohtani, which was hilarious, because they had been teammates, but it was crazy. Unassisted triple play? Yes, I guess technically it would… yeah, that would be… that would be ideal. It was almost there.
• 1:04:26
  Fred Van Lente: I had… I had Peter Parker had to do an unassisted trouble.
• 1:04:29
  Tiffany Babb: There you go.
• 1:04:30
  Fred Van Lente: Spider-Man Kids.
• 1:04:31
  Tiffany Babb: He can do it. I crammed baseball into college.
• 1:04:34
  Fred Van Lente: I remember that.
• 1:04:36
  Tad Eggleston: I remember that.
• 1:04:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't even care what…
• 1:04:39
  Eric Reynolds: I go.
• 1:04:40
  Tad Eggleston: Some of the coolest things I've ever seen have been at minor league games. I got to see Wilson Contreras get on 5 different ways in a game without actually getting a hit.
• 1:04:49
  Tiffany Babb: There you go.
• 1:04:52
  Tiffany Babb: There you go, I mean, I've… you were talking about that crazy game earlier? I literally saw, this week, the spring training Angels… Dodgers at Angels. Like, it was… I think they had 3 hits, and they, like, walked in, like, 8 runs. It was unbelievable. But to be fair, it was, like, our minor leaguers against, like.
• 1:05:11
  Tiffany Babb: The starting lineups.
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, their starting lineup.
• 1:05:14
  Tiffany Babb: like, a guy you've never heard of against, like, Shohei Ohtani, and, like, it was…
• 1:05:18
  Tad Eggleston: But you see, he got struck out by an electrician in the…
• 1:05:21
  Tiffany Babb: I did see. Well, he's not an electrician, he's an… he's actually an electrical engineer. They've come out with a clarifying…
• 1:05:29
  Tad Eggleston: In some ways, that's even more embarrassing.
• 1:05:32
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah. Cause, like, this is a high level.
• 1:05:34
  Tad Eggleston: Electrical.
• 1:05:35
  Tiffany Babb: Stage offer, yes.
• 1:05:36
  Tad Eggleston: Or an electrical… an electrician, you expect to at least be, like.
• 1:05:40
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 1:05:41
  Tad Eggleston: Probably whatever. Electrical engineer is some dude who sits at a desk.
• 1:05:45
  Tiffany Babb: Shows you baseball's all a mind game, right?
• 1:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: Idiot.
• 1:05:48
  Tiffany Babb: This was a lot of fun. Thank you, it was great to chat, everyone.
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: Always a blast, everyone.
• 1:05:54
  Fred Van Lente: And, I'm at Y7, Dad, so hopefully you'll see me over the weekend.
• 1:05:58
  Tad Eggleston: I will make certain that I see you over the weekend, and hopefully you come to my panel.
• 1:06:03
  Fred Van Lente: Hopefully I get on a plane, that's my…
• 1:06:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:06:05
  Fred Van Lente: LaGuardia, we'll find out whether or not I got it.
• 1:06:08
  Tiffany Babb: Yeah.
• 1:06:08
  Tad Eggleston: For Rob Nyer and Eric Reynolds, Tiffany Babb, Fred Van Lenti, Mark Chiarello, this has been the Opening Day Baseball and Comics Roundtable on 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.