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Fourth Annual 22 Panels Baseball & Comics Roundtable · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:08
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back. It's 22 panels, baseball and…
• 0:14
  Tad Eggleston: Comics Roundtable. This is our fourth annual, which is just weird to me.
• 0:20
  Tad Eggleston: That I've gotten a group of people together to talk baseball and comics.
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: 4 years in a row. As I emailed out to everybody earlier this week, the Cantwells didn't manage to provide trivia, and I failed miserably last year. So we're not gonna have a trivia round, but what I want instead is I want to lead off everybody tell me their favorite, just, tidbit
• 0:46
  Tad Eggleston: Of baseball and or comics trivia, and massive bonus points if you can make the two come together.
• 0:55
  Tad Eggleston: Do we have volunteers to go first, or… or should I introduce people as we go? I don't know, I'm making this up as.
• 1:02
  denislkitchen: let go.
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: Heidi's sitting there going, he's so unprofessional.
• 1:06
  denislkitchen: How about you?
• 1:07
  denislkitchen: How about Will Eisner in baseball comics?
• 1:12
  Tad Eggleston: I have that one. Both of them.
• 1:15
  Heidi MacDonald: Nice! Sitting at hand.
• 1:19
  Heidi MacDonald: Dennis, always prepared.
• 1:21
  denislkitchen: Try.
• 1:23
  Eric Reynolds: Weirdly, I don't even think that's my favorite baseball comic you published, Dennis.
• 1:28
  denislkitchen: What are you thinking of, a spirit story, or…
• 1:31
  Eric Reynolds: No, the Ray Gatto book.
• 1:34
  denislkitchen: Oh, yes, the Ray Gatto book, sure.
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: How do I not know the Regatto book?
• 1:40
  denislkitchen: Yeah.
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: What's the Regatto book? I'm feeling really good.
• 1:44
  denislkitchen: He's the guy who did a lot of, sporting news covers and…
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: A lot of baseball strips, and then he did a daily strip.
• 1:55
  Eric Reynolds: cottonwoods.
• 1:55
  denislkitchen: Cottonwoods.
• 1:57
  denislkitchen: Which, yeah, I collected long ago, and he was still alive, and signed some copies, and was amazed people cared.
• 2:05
  denislkitchen: That was a nice moment.
• 2:08
  Eric Reynolds: I have one of those signed copies.
• 2:11
  Ruben Bolling: Oh, of course you do, Eric.
• 2:19
  Eric Reynolds: I think you had it for a while, and I eventually bought one directly from Kitchen Sync.
• 2:26
  Rob Neyer: I have one.
• 2:28
  Rob Neyer: Okay.
• 2:29
  denislkitchen: Oh.
• 2:30
  Rob Neyer: I, I could not locate my visual aid.
• 2:35
  Rob Neyer: So, you're just gonna have to trust me on this. I just discovered about…
• 2:41
  Rob Neyer: 9 months ago, and some of you will already know this, or might even remember,
• 2:47
  Rob Neyer: in the mid-1970s, I believe it was 74 and 75,
• 2:54
  Rob Neyer: Tug McGraw had a comic strip that was widely syndicated.
• 2:58
  manru: Oh, wow.
• 2:59
  Rob Neyer: It was called Scroogee.
• 3:00
  Rob Neyer: And there were… there's two collected editions out there. And
• 3:07
  Rob Neyer: It's, about what you would expect. It's a comic book strip about… or, I mean, a newspaper strip about a…
• 3:17
  Rob Neyer: a screwball throwing pitcher modeled after Tug McGraw himself. He theoretically wrote it, although, of course, he didn't really write it at all. There were 3 or 4.
• 3:29
  Heidi MacDonald: 3 writers and 1 artist. I actually interviewed all 4 of them.
• 3:33
  Rob Neyer: last spring. I haven't gotten around to writing anything yet, mostly because I don't know what the audience is for that story, but, pretty interesting.
• 3:43
  Heidi MacDonald: The audience for that story is Heidi McDonald, okay. Yeah, the audience is sitting right here.
• 3:47
  Tad Eggleston: Cross post.
• 3:49
  Ryan Browne: I'll read it.
• 3:49
  Heidi MacDonald: on…
• 3:50
  Derrick Goold: I'd read it, as soon as you let it run.
• 3:53
  Heidi MacDonald: Privately. I own both those books.
• 3:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right. As a huge… as a mentor.
• 3:57
  Heidi MacDonald: I had those books. I, of course, I love Tug McGraw. I read them over and over and over again. They were destroyed in a fire, so that's sad. And, I should try to find them again. That would be a real, you know, close of the circle moment. But yeah, you know, if you want to run it.
• 4:14
  Heidi MacDonald: Like, I'll cross-post it on the beat, you know? We can have, like, the… the great Scroogey.
• 4:21
  Rob Neyer: Well, that… that… I appreciate that. I will… this is one of my off-season projects, because this… my off-season runs from September through May, actually, so it's a pretty long off-season, fortunately. One of my off-season projects is…
• 4:34
  Rob Neyer: Going back, and I talk to all four of those guys at length, and have a lot of great notes.
• 4:39
  Eric Reynolds: Who was the cartoonist?
• 4:41
  Rob Neyer: Who is the cartoonist?
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: If Heidi doesn't want to publish that, that feels way up Tiffany Babb's.
• 4:47
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh, yes, yes.
• 4:49
  Tad Eggleston: Alley, too.
• 4:50
  Tad Eggleston: And now I can't hear Heidi, either. Did I mute myself?
• 4:54
  Rob Neyer: The cartoonist is Mike Witte, W-I-T-T-E.
• 4:57
  Ruben Bolling: Never.
• 4:59
  Rob Neyer: And the writers, I'm gonna have to go look up.
• 5:02
  Tad Eggleston: It's always bad when the host can't hear anybody.
• 5:04
  Rob Neyer: There were 3 guys who sort of took turns with the writing.
• 5:08
  Ruben Bolling: Let me ask you, did, did the writer say that Tug McGraw was involved at all?
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: my sound go?
• 5:15
  Ruben Bolling: Oh, you can't hear.
• 5:17
  Rob Neyer: Can you guys hear me?
• 5:18
  Ruben Bolling: I can hear you.
• 5:19
  Tad Eggleston: I can hear you. Great.
• 5:20
  Rob Neyer: So, yes, McGraw was… they would talk to McGraw
• 5:26
  Rob Neyer: Very occasionally, and he would pitch a few ideas, but for the most part…
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: Nye here.
• 5:30
  Rob Neyer: He was not involved in the writing at all.
• 5:34
  Ruben Bolling: Wow. I might actually have…
• 5:35
  Tad Eggleston: to do real edits this time, because this is… this is bad.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Can't hear.
• 5:44
  Heidi MacDonald: Let's take a timeout while Tad gets his… Got to sound.
• 5:49
  Tad Eggleston: Now I can hear… my… my headphones just…
• 5:54
  Tad Eggleston: Decided to stop momentarily. Now they're back.
• 5:58
  Heidi MacDonald: Anyway, it was a fun little story, and I'm glad I had something to contribute to this conversation. And also, you know, Tom McGraw's had so many unusual contributions to pop culture, you know? Scrooge and Tim McGraw, so…
• 6:11
  Tad Eggleston: Big one, yeah.
• 6:15
  Ruben Bolling: And I think that was a surprise, too.
• 6:18
  Rob Neyer: It was.
• 6:19
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, it was a rediscovery, you know?
• 6:23
  Rob Neyer: Although, it, it, it… Tim's mother… Reached out to…
• 6:34
  Rob Neyer: to Tug early on, and he basically said, go away from me, and so she left him alone for…
• 6:42
  Rob Neyer: I don't remember what it was, 15, 20 years, and then it reached a point where he was willing to accept that he did have a son, and then they became pretty close eventually.
• 6:51
  Ruben Bolling: You gotta believe.
• 6:52
  Heidi MacDonald: Right. Alright, got to tell you guys 3 contributions to… Pop culture.
• 7:01
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah.
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, he's got one of my favorite quotes, too. When he signed his free agent contract, he said, 90% I'll probably spend on whiskey and women, and the other 10% I'll waste. Right.
• 7:11
  Heidi MacDonald: Yes.
• 7:14
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, whatever happened to the,
• 7:20
  Heidi MacDonald: weirdo screwball reliever. I, you know, I feel like Tug was at the forefront of that generation, where they really were wild and crazy men. And, you know, now they're… they're emotional, but they don't seem to have quite as much of a, you know, weirdo…
• 7:35
  Heidi MacDonald: kind of reputation.
• 7:37
  Ruben Bolling: I think their interviews are so managed and, you know, coached that there's just no way anything interesting is going to come through in an interview like that.
• 7:47
  Heidi MacDonald: There's, oh, I was just gonna say, you know, I gave 110%, and you know… Oh, you know, we're really in the zone.
• 7:56
  Heidi MacDonald: zone. If I could find this zone someday, right? You know, like, we really… we're really in the zone, and…
• 8:02
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, it's all about the team.
• 8:06
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like Rod Beck was the end of…
• 8:11
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the, the weird, cool…
• 8:14
  Tad Eggleston: reliever era. I remember when he was trying to extend his career, and he was at AAA in Iowa. He lived in his camper in the parking lot, and…
• 8:31
  Heidi MacDonald: Cooked brats for fans before the game.
• 8:34
  Heidi MacDonald: Amazing.
• 8:39
  Derrick Goold: I mean, I wouldn't dismiss Sean Doolittle. Sean Doolittle, a pretty.
• 8:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Sean, I'll do it later.
• 8:44
  Derrick Goold: He would have lightsaber battles on the field after games.
• 8:48
  Ruben Bolling: That's true.
• 8:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:50
  Derrick Goold: So…
• 8:50
  Ruben Bolling: He read books.
• 8:52
  Ruben Bolling: Smart guy, yeah.
• 8:53
  Derrick Goold: And he had, like.
• 8:53
  Tad Eggleston: But hey.
• 8:53
  Derrick Goold: Boba Fett helmet in his locker.
• 8:55
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah. He was a good interviewer.
• 8:57
  Tad Eggleston: bid… I did hear that he is literally the only member of the…
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: Nationals coaching staff that got kept under new management.
• 9:10
  Tad Eggleston: what his role will be hasn't been cited yet, but he's the only manager from the coach… er, only person from the coaching mat staff that the new GM kept.
• 9:18
  Derrick Goold: comic do that.
• 9:19
  Tad Eggleston: Little would be around for a while.
• 9:21
  Derrick Goold: It'll be comic relief. The other guys had options, but they bolted. A couple guys were invited back, if I remember correctly.
• 9:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, were they?
• 9:28
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, because Cairo could have stayed, and he left.
• 9:33
  Tad Eggleston: Very, yeah, but that'll be an interesting staff to watch. Very…
• 9:37
  Derrick Goold: A very progressive coaching staff coming to Washington, D.C.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: Any other favorite random baseball trivia?
• 9:47
  manru: Well, I'm gonna throw out, and you guys probably already all know this, but Stan Musial had exactly the same number of hits at home as he had on the road. 1,815, I think.
• 9:58
  manru: But exact, exactly the same rotor home.
• 10:04
  Derrick Goold: I can piggyback on the Stan Musial if you want an amazing one. His hit…
• 10:10
  Derrick Goold: that… I mean, the half… the split in half is… but one of my favorite things about the hit with Stan Musial.
• 10:17
  Derrick Goold: is the hit that he had that set the National League record, that he held for decades, went past a diving second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds by the name of Pete Rose.
• 10:28
  Heidi MacDonald: Who wouldn't.
• 10:30
  Derrick Goold: Broke the record years… decades later.
• 10:35
  Heidi MacDonald: Amazing.
• 10:36
  Ryan Browne: Great.
• 10:38
  Derrick Goold: I can do a… I can do one that blends comics and baseball. But first…
• 10:43
  Tad Eggleston: Today's the…
• 10:44
  Derrick Goold: Today's the 40th anniversary of Calvin and Hobbes, and of course…
• 10:49
  Derrick Goold: had… the first strip of Calvin and Hobbs appeared 40 years ago today, which of course had strong baseball ties right from the start.
• 10:58
  manru: Now, baseball or Kelvin Ball?
• 11:00
  Derrick Goold: Well, both, right? Like, didn't they both kind of create, like… there's the… well, there's the baseball one where, what, Hobbs hits… holds the bat out to knock the ball, and then runs. Right.
• 11:12
  Derrick Goold: Then there's one where he's trying to play it by himself. But alright, so my baseball comic merger one is I, I, this year, inspired by the Superman movie, went on a deep dive into the lore of the Metropolis meteors, and I was trying to find out if
• 11:30
  Derrick Goold: you know, what was their story, and you probably may all know this answer, but their first appearance, they got a win. Does anyone know who their win was against in their very first appearance in comics? It was a 9-0 win, which may give it away.
• 11:46
  manru: Was it the Gotham Knights?
• 11:47
  Derrick Goold: It was not. It was not the Gotham Knights.
• 11:50
  Ruben Bolling: Good guess, though.
• 11:51
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh.
• 11:52
  Derrick Goold: That is a good guess.
• 11:53
  Tad Eggleston: 9-0 is a forfeit win.
• 11:56
  Derrick Goold: Correct.
• 11:57
  Tad Eggleston: It can be a forfeit win.
• 11:58
  Derrick Goold: It is a forfeit win.
• 12:00
  Eric Reynolds: I remember a… I remember a DC comic from the 70s where…
• 12:06
  Eric Reynolds: the Justice League played a game against somebody.
• 12:10
  Derrick Goold: They did, they did, they played against… that's also… I think that was part of the same series, it was part of the Strange Sports series, which I… Yes, that's right. Yeah, which I went and hunted down a whole bunch of those this summer, much to my…
• 12:22
  Derrick Goold: you know, I mean, my budget's chagrin, but I did track them down.
• 12:27
  Eric Reynolds: Who would…
• 12:28
  Derrick Goold: It's, Strange Sports, number one, Metropolis Meteors, very lead-off story. They won 9-0 in a forfeit against the Devil.
• 12:36
  Tad Eggleston: Chord. Is he playing a.
• 12:39
  Ruben Bolling: alone, like Bugs Bunny, all the positions?
• 12:42
  Derrick Goold: Exactly, and do you have any clue as to how the manager of the Metropolis Meteors, who definitely looks like Earl Weaver, how he outsmarted the devil?
• 12:55
  Derrick Goold: it's with an intentional walk. He, he realized that they were not likely to ever get the devil out unless he wanted it to.
• 13:05
  Derrick Goold: So, they intentionally walked him, and then pinned his tail to the base. Oh, pinned the tail to the base trick. Yes.
• 13:14
  Derrick Goold: Well, I mean, they were holding him on, is the joke, and he, he couldn't then get to the bat, and the umpires who were told to play by the rulebook said, you don't have a batter, we've given you time to come up with one, it's a forfeit.
• 13:31
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 13:32
  Ruben Bolling: Great. Great. Did you guys ever see the, well, you might… you probably have all seen this, but, like, the Fantastic Four issue, where the Fantastic Four and the Black Panther
• 13:45
  Ruben Bolling: play baseball in Wakanda. This is,
• 13:48
  Ruben Bolling: early, Jack Kirby. And as great as Jack Kirby is, his… the… I just remember the baseball positioning, the way they held… they held the bat, was just way off. It was super heroic, but it was not at all a baseball… these were not baseball actions or stances.
• 14:07
  James Sturm: I think Wyatt Wingfoot had a really good… couple good hits or something in that.
• 14:12
  Ruben Bolling: That sounds right. Yeah. He was on that adventure, that's right.
• 14:16
  James Sturm: Hey, speaking of Bugs Bunny,
• 14:19
  James Sturm: There's, of course, that famous gag where Bugs, like, chases down a fly ball and goes to the Empire State Building.
• 14:25
  James Sturm: And I've seen that gag, like, 2 or 3 times, in newspapers, like, beginning… there was a… a New Yorker cartoonist that actually Ed Korean gave me, donated to the… to the cartoon school, that had that gag for some, like.
• 14:41
  James Sturm: magazine. I'll look it up during the conversation, but it was, like, Life on the Road for Boys. It was, like, a magazine out of Boston, maybe somebody remembers that, but they gave a lot of young cartoonists a lot of, opportunities.
• 14:54
  James Sturm: In the 1920s, I believe, and there was a baseball… I saw that gag there, and then I saw it again somewhere, and then Peanuts, used that gag, too, in, like, the 50s, there's a, Charlie Brown chasing and chasing, and then popping out of the mitt.
• 15:08
  James Sturm: So I… I didn't realize that was, like, such a kind of a repeating trope.
• 15:12
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah, running through the neighborhood, right?
• 15:15
  Ruben Bolling: That's great.
• 15:17
  Tad Eggleston: Rob just dropped in the chat about Willard Mullen doing the cover for the year the Yankees lost the pennant. Eric, didn't Phantographics do a collection of…
• 15:27
  Tad Eggleston: Willard Mullen baseball comics?
• 15:29
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: Mmm.
• 15:32
  Eric Reynolds: I think it's possible Rob might have given us a blurb for that.
• 15:36
  Rob Neyer: I did indeed.
• 15:37
  Heidi MacDonald: That's true.
• 15:42
  Heidi MacDonald: By the way, speaking of spending too much money, I just looked up Scrooge on eBay, and it ranges… the one book alone ranges from, like, $70 to $100, so this'll be an expensive quest for me.
• 15:54
  Ruben Bolling: A little pricey.
• 15:56
  denislkitchen: Wow.
• 15:57
  Heidi MacDonald: I shouldn't have had that fire.
• 15:58
  Tad Eggleston: I did also wanna… I did wanna bring up, and I know some of you might know this, but, like, since…
• 16:06
  Tad Eggleston: Was it Ruben that mentioned that today is the anniversary of Calvin and Hobbes?
• 16:11
  Ruben Bolling: This is, Derek.
• 16:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right now? Oh, that was Derek, Derek.
• 16:15
  denislkitchen: Perfect.
• 16:15
  Tad Eggleston: right now, in Cooperstown, is the…
• 16:21
  Tad Eggleston: Billy Ireland's Calvin and Hobbes exhibit at the Fenimore Museum. So, like, if I were, like, a rich man, rather than doing this all on Zoom, I would have invited you all to Cooperstown, and we would have gone to the Hall of Fame and the Calvin and Hobbes exhibit, and then just sat down over dinner.
• 16:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because that's, like, the perfect connection of baseball and comics.
• 16:48
  Derrick Goold: I don't know if I've mentioned this before, Tad, I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but have I told you that I have a cartoon at Cooperstown?
• 16:57
  Tad Eggleston: No, you didn't.
• 16:58
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, probably.
• 16:59
  Tad Eggleston: Cool.
• 16:59
  Derrick Goold: Probably haven't brought that up. Yeah, in the permanent collection.
• 17:03
  Derrick Goold: at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, I have a cartoon I drew. All the words that I've written about baseball, I got nothing but a cartoon, of all things.
• 17:12
  Ruben Bolling: the cart.
• 17:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, in some ways…
• 17:14
  Derrick Goold: Where was.
• 17:16
  Ruben Bolling: What's the story behind it?
• 17:18
  Derrick Goold: I, so during the pandemic, I drew two cartoons. I used to be a cartoonist in college to make money, and to make money!
• 17:28
  Tad Eggleston: To make money? Yeah.
• 17:32
  Ruben Bolling: I'm in… I'm in college money. Yeah. College money. It was… Wow, you're the first person who got into cartooning for the money.
• 17:39
  Derrick Goold: No, well, yeah, I mean, it was like, it was nice to have, like, you know, it wasn't great, but I drew strips for the student newspaper, and they paid regularly. Yeah. But
• 17:49
  Derrick Goold: the story behind it is, I just, you know, we obviously had a lot of time on our hands, and we were trying for coverage, and so I drew two cartoons, just to see if I could still do it, and one of them was published in the post-dispatch. It was,
• 18:03
  Derrick Goold: a riff on Casey at the bat, but it was Casey safe at home. And the other one was just a drawing of the Musial statue.
• 18:12
  Derrick Goold: Which a big phrase here in St. Louis is, meet me at Musial. And, I did the Musial statue with a face mask on, so it's all gray scale. Oh, yeah.
• 18:23
  Derrick Goold: face mask, and it says, meet at Musial later, or something like that.
• 18:28
  Ryan Browne: Nice, yeah.
• 18:29
  Derrick Goold: One of them is at the Yogi Berra Hall of Fame, that's the Musial one, and then the other one, the original, for the KC Safe at Home, is actually in Cooperstown.
• 18:38
  Ruben Bolling: So you've done two comics, and they're both in Hall of Fames?
• 18:41
  denislkitchen: Confused.
• 18:42
  Derrick Goold: Correct. Well, I mean, I did for… I'm pretty hype.
• 18:45
  Ryan Browne: There's a great hit rate.
• 18:46
  Derrick Goold: I'm 2 for 2 as a pro cartoonist, yeah.
• 18:51
  Heidi MacDonald: Hey, I'd like to know everybody's fandom, you know, in case…
• 18:55
  Tad Eggleston: Anybody's come in.
• 18:56
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, let's find out everybody's fandom, because I…
• 18:58
  Tad Eggleston: Since we haven't actually introduced everybody, how about we go around, introduce yourself, give your brief job description, and, what your current fandom is.
• 19:15
  Ruben Bolling: Do we have to go alphabetical? Do you want to call people alphabet? Should I call people off?
• 19:19
  Tad Eggleston: I'll call people off. I'm just gonna go in the order you're on my screen, so Dennis, you get to go first.
• 19:25
  denislkitchen: A description of myself, and then fandom.
• 19:28
  Heidi MacDonald: Like, what team?
• 19:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, I mean, I think if you say your name, everybody will… that counts as a description for you.
• 19:35
  denislkitchen: Alright, a man who wears many hats who's trying to retire is, grew up with the Milwaukee Braves until they were hijacked to Atlanta, so I don't like them anymore, so now I love the Milwaukee Brewers, even though I live in Boston Red Sox country.
• 19:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so he had a rough, a rough playoffs this year. Yeah. Wasn't able to…
• 19:59
  denislkitchen: Appreciate it all.
• 20:00
  Tad Eggleston: Tani the way he should have.
• 20:03
  Heidi MacDonald: I think you're gonna hear a lot of that around this, this Zoom.
• 20:06
  Tad Eggleston: This… Mr. Dennis Kitchen. Heidi McDonald!
• 20:10
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, well, if you've listened…
• 20:12
  Tad Eggleston: winner, Heidi McDonald.
• 20:14
  Heidi MacDonald: joined everyone else here who has their eyes in there, but
• 20:18
  Heidi MacDonald: I, yeah, if anybody's listened to previous iterations, you know I am a Mets fan, New York Mets, and so there's, you know, sorrow and sadness, but there's sometimes a ray of joy.
• 20:30
  Heidi MacDonald: And then, for comics, I do the beat, comicsbeat.com, and, which is a news… a website about comics news, but, you know, I have had many hats in my life as well, and, because my face looks good in hats!
• 20:47
  Tad Eggleston: And which… which, which manga did you put behind you? There's so much.
• 20:51
  Heidi MacDonald: I don't… you know what, I don't even know. I went on Google and just found some baseball manga, because I'm like, you know what? They… they… nobody does baseball comics like, manga, so…
• 21:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there's actually a new one on Viz that's only, like, 20 chapters in, called Harakami Mound, that's about a lefty submarine high school pitcher that's been fun.
• 21:14
  Tad Eggleston: And at the… at the… I think, I think they closed the Billie Ireland for construction, but the Motion Lines exhibit had a whole wall with a picture from,
• 21:26
  Tad Eggleston: I forget which comic, I'd have to ask Ben, but it was just a great, like… Pitcher-hitting… ball.
• 21:35
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, I would like to pitch a yaoi-based sports manga starring Juan Soto and Starling Marte, because Soto's face just lights up every time he's around Starling. I mean, everybody's face lights up.
• 21:49
  Heidi MacDonald: or, you know, among myths, we call… we call ourselves martisexuals. But, you know, if you saw the whole season of the relationship between the two.
• 21:59
  Heidi MacDonald: And then he even… Soto even said, I hope they bring Starling Marte back, we really need him. So, you know, there's a lot… you don't… you hardly… you only need to go over a very tiny line.
• 22:12
  Heidi MacDonald: And the manga writes itself.
• 22:14
  Tad Eggleston: There you go.
• 22:15
  Heidi MacDonald: There you go.
• 22:15
  Tad Eggleston: There you go.
• 22:16
  Tad Eggleston: Mark Russell.
• 22:19
  manru: Yeah, so I'm a comic book writer. I pretty much have written a lot of things, whatever they'll let me get away with these days. And my fandom, because I'm stuck here in the Pacific Northwest.
• 22:31
  manru: I root for the Seattle Mariners, my pro team, and my minor league team, my local team, is the Portland Pickles, 2024 champions of the West Coast League.
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and Mark is somewhat responsible for the fact that this exists, because I had Mark on my podcast, and we wound up talking baseball for, like, 15 minutes, because he was wearing a Phillies t-shirt, and then he.
• 22:58
  manru: I got it on sale, I'm not a Phillies fan.
• 23:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but then he put out a comic about, stadium…
• 23:08
  Tad Eggleston: funding, and Rob Nyer was all over it, and wrote on Twitter, my favorite comic writer wrote a book about stadium funding this week.
• 23:19
  Tad Eggleston: And I immediately jumped in on that to go, wait a minute, my favorite baseball writer is a fan of one of my favorite comic writers? My head's gonna explode. Do you wanna be on a…
• 23:29
  Tad Eggleston: comics podcast, I think Mark would… would vouch for me, and Mark, in, like, real time, seconds, is like, I would absolutely vouch for him. We spent, like, 15 minutes talking about baseball, and suddenly I have a DM from Rob Nyer going, I don't know what I'd have to say about comics. I'm like, I don't care. I don't care. You'll have plenty to say.
• 23:50
  Tad Eggleston: And now we get to do this every year.
• 23:53
  denislkitchen: By the way.
• 23:54
  manru: At some point, I'm going to hit Rob up for throwing out an opening pitch for a Pickles game.
• 23:59
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… That would be cool, Rob. I think we can make that happen. I second that.
• 24:05
  denislkitchen: I'd just like to say, I don't know Mark, but Mark, I've bought one of your books 6 or 8 times to give away to other people. The God is Embarrassed by you.
• 24:16
  manru: I was disappointed in you.
• 24:18
  denislkitchen: I disappointed you. Well, thank you.
• 24:20
  manru: Thank you so much.
• 24:21
  Tad Eggleston: So good.
• 24:22
  manru: You know, technically that makes you a, like, a Bible salesman.
• 24:29
  denislkitchen: Gosh, you're right.
• 24:33
  Tad Eggleston: Eric Reynolds.
• 24:37
  Eric Reynolds: Hey, yeah, so I'm, one of the publishers at Phantographics Books, Comics, graphic novels Publisher.
• 24:44
  manru: As far as fandom goes, I grew up in Southern California.
• 24:49
  Eric Reynolds: where I grew up an Angels and a Dodgers fan, which is probably, like.
• 24:54
  Eric Reynolds: hard to fathom for, like, Heidi, where you… seems like everybody has to choose one or the other in New York. But, back then, you know, pre-interleague, there was, like… they didn't compete with each other at all, so it was easy.
• 25:07
  Eric Reynolds: And then I moved up to Seattle when I was 21 in 1993.
• 25:15
  Eric Reynolds: And, you know, they have… Oh, that's a good.
• 25:17
  Tad Eggleston: time to be in Seattle for baseball.
• 25:19
  Eric Reynolds: It was a great time, and without trying at all, I, like.
• 25:24
  Eric Reynolds: just switched over to the Mariners, and it really coalesced in 95.
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I imagine 95 had to be rough when there was a one-game playoff against the Angels.
• 25:35
  Eric Reynolds: Oh, I think, like, you know, I went into that season, like, you know, I would have said, like, I wanted the Angels to win the division, but by the end of that game, like, I was 100% in on the M's, and I never looked back, and now I hate the game.
• 25:50
  Eric Reynolds: Like, I not only, you know, don't… I not only want the M's to finish ahead of the angels, I want the angels to finish as low as possible, you know?
• 25:58
  denislkitchen: at home.
• 26:01
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
• 26:02
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, well, your wish is always coming true, so…
• 26:06
  Eric Reynolds: Yes, exactly.
• 26:08
  Eric Reynolds: I was so pissed off when the Angels finally won the World Series in, what was it, 2001?
• 26:13
  Eric Reynolds: Because they had done nothing really but lose throughout my whole childhood, too, so…
• 26:21
  Eric Reynolds: That was tough, but the tides have turned.
• 26:26
  Tad Eggleston: Alrighty, Ruben Bowling.
• 26:28
  Ruben Bolling: All right, hey everyone, Ruben Bolling.
• 26:31
  Ruben Bolling: I am the author of the weekly comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug.
• 26:37
  Ruben Bolling: And I am,
• 26:42
  Ruben Bolling: unfortunately a rabid Mets fan. I say, I'm trying to temper it, but I can't. It's a… it's a problem.
• 26:52
  Ruben Bolling: Heidi and I are both in New York City, so we see each other a lot at various comics events, and we always, manage to find some time to either commiserate or celebrate,
• 27:05
  Ruben Bolling: And, yeah, I'm a, I… it's, this was a… this was a tough year.
• 27:11
  Ruben Bolling: It was the polar opposite of the previous year, which was exhilarating, and one of the best, years I've ever had as a Mets fan. So…
• 27:21
  Ruben Bolling: That's it.
• 27:22
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, I think… I think…
• 27:24
  Heidi MacDonald: We have to return to that after the intros, because really, like, you know, I mean, my heart goes out to your Mariners fans, you know, my heart goes out to the Canadians we're about to speak to. You know, us Mets fans never even got to the starting gate, but you know.
• 27:41
  Heidi MacDonald: 24 for a Mets fan, we should.
• 27:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I feel like this roundtable last year was all Mets all the time, because Fred was here, and Darren was here, and you guys were all just riding high.
• 27:57
  Tad Eggleston: And you didn't even have Soto yet.
• 27:59
  Heidi MacDonald: That was your wish at the end.
• 28:01
  Tad Eggleston: into the.
• 28:01
  Heidi MacDonald: Well…
• 28:02
  Tad Eggleston: That was your wish at the end of the podcast.
• 28:04
  Ruben Bolling: You'd sign soda.
• 28:06
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh, yeah!
• 28:08
  Ruben Bolling: We did better with that. We wish we still had Jose Iglesias.
• 28:11
  Heidi MacDonald: Yes, yes, you know, yeah, anyway, let's… we'll return to this topic.
• 28:17
  Ruben Bolling: Yes.
• 28:19
  Heidi MacDonald: Let me get some lauden up in the meantime.
• 28:22
  Tad Eggleston: Derek Gold.
• 28:26
  Derrick Goold: I, I… well, Derek Gould, I'm in St. Louis.
• 28:30
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry.
• 28:31
  Derrick Goold: That's okay, it's alright, my name's weird. It's all messed up with the spelling.
• 28:35
  Derrick Goold: I, I'm in St. Louis. I, I, cover the St. Louis Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
• 28:41
  Derrick Goold: I'm a baseball writer. I have been on the beat since 2004, and, continue to try to,
• 28:51
  Derrick Goold: guess, go with the turbulence of the newspaper industry and do what I can to stay on the beat. So that's,
• 28:58
  Derrick Goold: I grew up in the… what I like to describe as the time zone baseball forgot. I grew up in Boulder, or near Boulder, Colorado, and Boulder, and for the mo… for the majority of my… well, actually the entirety of my childhood, to date myself, they did not have a major league team, so I had the…
• 29:13
  Derrick Goold: the great Denver Zephyrs and the heroic Joey Meyer, who became a great Milwaukee Brewer briefly, hit a home run that I think traveled 755 feet, and I will not
• 29:25
  Derrick Goold: settle on anything else other than that. But I was a Yankee fan because they were available, and my dad was a Yankee fan because of the same reason that you were not a Braves fan. He grew up in Milwaukee, and when the Braves left town.
• 29:40
  Derrick Goold: he swore off the National League, and refused to take me to a National League game. Wow.
• 29:47
  Derrick Goold: So, so I had the Yankees, and then, that… I got to enjoy their early ni… or their… I'm sorry, their late 90s run, and then you give it up when you become a baseball rider. You kind of see the wizard behind the curtain, and make a… make a call on just being a fan of the game and not any particular team.
• 30:04
  Tad Eggleston: Now, I have to ask, because you're a Cardinals beat writer, were you… were you with them early enough to actually see the wizard behind the curtain?
• 30:12
  Derrick Goold: So, I was not a beat writer then, I did see them play. I did get to see Ozzy Smith play. I have a.
• 30:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I saw Ozzy play, but I wasn't… I mean, part of your job is to be in, like, the clubhouse now, behind the curtain, so…
• 30:26
  Derrick Goold: Yes, I've gotten to know him pretty well, but not… not when he was a… I didn't cover the team when he was playing.
• 30:30
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 30:31
  Derrick Goold: Yeah. Okay. Gotten to know him pretty well through the years, and have had the chance to…
• 30:36
  Tad Eggleston: Ozzy is a guy that you, like, he recognizes you on the street, which is just…
• 30:42
  Derrick Goold: Yes.
• 30:42
  Tad Eggleston: It's making my head explode right now. That would be the case, yeah.
• 30:47
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, he might even say hello.
• 30:49
  Tad Eggleston: I dislike the Cardinals, but you can't dislike Ozzie Smith. It's just not possible.
• 30:56
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, there's a lot of Mets fans on here, so I… maybe I should be hesitant to say I cover… I cover Major League Baseball.
• 31:04
  Derrick Goold: Excellent.
• 31:04
  James Sturm: You exported Vince Coleman to the Mets, too, right? I did. Yeah, blazing amazin'.
• 31:10
  Derrick Goold: I did, I did. I was looking back… I should say this carefully. I was looking back on Game 7, NLCS, 2006 today, just trying to write something about Carlos Beltran and what he was as a Cardinal, but also what he was against the Cardinals, and so I went back to look at that.
• 31:28
  Derrick Goold: game. It's still one of the most remarkable games I've seen in person, and I know it did not go well for the Mets, but that was…
• 31:35
  Derrick Goold: That was just a brilliant baseball game in a lot of ways.
• 31:38
  Ruben Bolling: It sure was an incredible ending. It's a mythic.
• 31:42
  Derrick Goold: I have that hat.
• 31:43
  Ruben Bolling: See this? I just put it on.
• 31:44
  Derrick Goold: I love that hat. That is the hat of my youth. I have that, and then my first job out of college was going to New Orleans, and they had the New Orleans Zephyrs, which was this…
• 31:54
  Ruben Bolling: Some New Orleans, yeah.
• 31:55
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, which was the same team, I was like, I'm following that around, so I was very excited. Love the Zephyrs, I miss that.
• 32:02
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
• 32:05
  Rob Neyer: Wasn't the Zephyr the name of the team in Twilight, the Twilight Zone episode about the robot?
• 32:10
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 32:10
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, that's right, yep.
• 32:14
  denislkitchen: When they have a bed.
• 32:15
  Derrick Goold: and you can add more Zs to the hat, right?
• 32:20
  Ruben Bolling: That's a… that's a comic strip convention.
• 32:24
  Tad Eggleston: James Sturm.
• 32:27
  James Sturm: Hi, yeah, I'm a cartoonist, and I've done a couple graphic novels around baseball, and I just thought of a piece of trivia. I did a book called The Golem's Mighty Swing years ago.
• 32:38
  James Sturm: And, it did really well, won some awards, and it was nominated for an Eisner, but it lost the Eisner Award, and I lost it to Will Eisner.
• 32:48
  Derrick Goold: Wow.
• 32:49
  James Sturm: That's kind of better than winning, to be able to say that.
• 32:53
  Ruben Bolling: Fair enough.
• 32:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's…
• 32:56
  Eric Reynolds: We used to, when we go to the Eisner's, we would often all try to, you know, get a pool going and
• 33:04
  Eric Reynolds: Pick, you know, the winners, and… One of the, like.
• 33:08
  Ruben Bolling: rules of thumb was never bet against Will Eisner.
• 33:14
  James Sturm: Kind of a home field advantage, that'll work.
• 33:17
  James Sturm: In terms of my rooting interests, I guess Heidi and Ken, we can kind of join a support group.
• 33:25
  James Sturm: For Met fans.
• 33:27
  James Sturm: I grew up in the New York area, and yeah, like, like someone was saying, like, you just kind of… you're born like a… Giants or Jets, Rangers or Islanders, Mets or Yankees, Knicks or Nets, I guess, back then.
• 33:39
  James Sturm: And you're just one or the other, and sadly, or maybe not so sad, I only became a Meth fan. But I used to love, like, looking at the, really fond memories of, like, the tabloids, like…
• 33:50
  James Sturm: like, you know, I mentioned the Blazin' Amazing when Vince Coleman came. I still remember a headline, Ricky Henderson was having,
• 33:58
  James Sturm: a hamstring, and was he gonna play, or wasn't he, when he was with the Yankees and Jack Clark, the other St. Louis Cardinal? And I remember one headline said.
• 34:06
  Heidi MacDonald: Swoon over my hammy.
• 34:12
  denislkitchen: Wow.
• 34:13
  James Sturm: That was…
• 34:13
  Heidi MacDonald: Amazing. Amazing.
• 34:16
  James Sturm: But one thing I'd like to pick up on later with all this, like, baseball brain trust here, when I was working on that Golem book, a friend of mine, the cartoonist Matt Madden that many of you know, he was living in Mexico City at the time, and he knew I was working on this graphic novel about baseball. And, you know, as much as I like Cotton Woods and Will Eisner's work.
• 34:36
  James Sturm: And I, I mean, the greatest comic strip with baseball peanuts, probably. Not probably, in my opinion, my humble opinion. You know, the strip format really didn't lend itself to, like, the breadth and the scope of the game, and…
• 34:50
  James Sturm: Matt found these, like, shounen champion comics that were, I don't know, published maybe the 80s, excuse me, the 90s.
• 35:00
  James Sturm: And he emailed me, like, a whole bunch of them, and they were just, they kind of blew my mind, and I couldn't read, I didn't understand the Japanese, but the storytelling was so great that you could, you know, like, one at-bat would be, you know, 20 pages.
• 35:14
  James Sturm: And you could just follow all the action and really get to know the characters, because the visual storytelling
• 35:22
  James Sturm: was so amazing. So if anybody… and I don't really know much about them, so if anybody does, know about the Shonen Champion comics, I'd love to, to know more. The artist was Shinji Mizuishima. So, anyway, just putting that out there in case,
• 35:41
  James Sturm: Somebody has any intel.
• 35:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, too bad,
• 35:47
  Tad Eggleston: Brian Baines from Bubbles had to bow out, because he's even published some early baseball manga.
• 35:55
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm certain that there will be some of us that look into this, because…
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: I love me some baseball manga. I want more baseball comics, period.
• 36:08
  Tad Eggleston: Which is a good time to talk to Ryan Brown, because, you know, our next two people… well, no, James, you're an artist too, but you've already made baseball comics, so… so, Ryan, you make wonderful comics, but I haven't seen baseball in any of them yet.
• 36:24
  Ryan Browne: Are you gonna fix that? There's baseball, it's just, like… around the edges.
• 36:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I did this…
• 36:30
  Ryan Browne: I did this book called Curse Words, and For Image Comics, and…
• 36:37
  Ryan Browne: It ran, for 29 issues, and…
• 36:41
  Ryan Browne: at the very… in the very first issue, people are watching a Yankees vs. Tigers game. I'm a Tigers fan.
• 36:50
  Ryan Browne: And…
• 36:51
  Ryan Browne: The good wizard comes in and does something really bad in front of the audience, and so his solution is to cast a spell and capture everyone that's watching that baseball game.
• 37:01
  Ryan Browne: Including the players, and put them in a bottle.
• 37:04
  Ryan Browne: And just kind of put it on a shelf. So it's like a bottle of City of Kandor, but it's, Yankees and Tigers fans.
• 37:12
  Heidi MacDonald: It's the bottle city of K-Line.
• 37:14
  Ryan Browne: events.
• 37:16
  Ryan Browne: So, like, as the series goes on, you realize that the… inside this bottle, time passes differently, and so it's, you know, it's hundreds of years.
• 37:28
  Ryan Browne: and the two tribes of the Northerners and the Tigers,
• 37:33
  Ryan Browne: you know, become, like, the warring tribes of this fantasy world. And so, they're, like, long…
• 37:41
  Ryan Browne: you know, removed from baseball, but they still have, like, weird little baseball tie-ins. Like, they don't know the sport, like.
• 37:49
  Ryan Browne: The armor still kind of looks like batting helmets and catcher's equipment and stuff, and
• 37:55
  Ryan Browne: like, the leader of the Tigers is named the Overlander.
• 37:58
  denislkitchen: And, you know, they don't really know why, but it's like a descendant of Justin Verlander? I don't know, I…
• 38:04
  Ryan Browne: It's not about baseball, but it has, like, baseball on the edges.
• 38:10
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 38:10
  Ryan Browne: You know, and so I put baseball around the edges of all my stuff. I kind of think that drawing a baseball comic
• 38:16
  Ryan Browne: would be way too hard. Like, really, really hard.
• 38:22
  Ryan Browne: But I, like, I do have a dream of one day doing it, but… I think that it would…
• 38:28
  Ryan Browne: It would be too much mixing,
• 38:32
  Ryan Browne: something I love and isn't my job with something that's my job, which is doing comics. So, I'm kind of alright with having them be separate.
• 38:41
  Ruben Bolling: Does anyone else have, hate drawing, like, a stadium, and the perspective, and the…
• 38:48
  Ryan Browne: I have to do it all the time, it sucks.
• 38:49
  Ruben Bolling: It's hard.
• 38:50
  Ryan Browne: sucks, like, that…
• 38:52
  Ryan Browne: Within that book, Curse Words, like, the stadium gets sucked into this bottle world as well, and so that's, like, their…
• 38:59
  Ryan Browne: Headquarters, and so…
• 39:01
  James Sturm: I just had to draw it all the time. Who do you steal from when you have to do that?
• 39:07
  Ryan Browne: Who do I steal from?
• 39:08
  James Sturm: Yeah, I mean, whenever I'm faced with a difficult task in the drawing board, I was like, hmm…
• 39:13
  James Sturm: I'll look at… I don't know, Richard Thompson has some amazing, like, panels, giant crowds, and he does it, like, so casually and offhandedly, and, you know, maybe steal's the wrong word, but… No, no, steal's good. I'll give you a little inspiration. I steal all the time, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I don't… I don't…
• 39:32
  Ryan Browne: specifically steal anyone for that, in terms of I will steal from photos.
• 39:40
  Ryan Browne: you know, like, I'm not… I'm not a big reference guy, I like the cartoon a lot more, I don't… I'm not, like, a photorealism person, but figuring out the perspective of the… of the stairs, you know, because
• 39:51
  Ryan Browne: it's always going down, it's always like a triangle wedge, but then it's, like, slowly rotating around, you know, a center point, and so I will, I'll just find… I'll go on, like, StubHub or something, and you can… you can get the seat view.
• 40:07
  Ryan Browne: When you're looking at tickets, and so then I'll, like, find a seat view that's kind of close to what I want, and then I will,
• 40:15
  Ryan Browne: I'll, like, sketch over it in the computer, and sometimes I'll print it out, like, blue line, and, like, or lightbox it, like,
• 40:24
  Ryan Browne: And just, like, do it really loose. Sometimes I just… I won't even pencil it at all, I'll just go straight to ink so that it can feel more organic.
• 40:34
  Ryan Browne: But it's… it still sucks, but it's great… it's great for hiding gags. It's great, great, great for hiding gags. Drawing a crowd of people is just so…
• 40:45
  Ryan Browne: like, you know, I realize that, like, I'm a pretty detail-oriented guy when it comes to drawing, in terms of, you know, putting lots and lots of lines.
• 40:56
  Ryan Browne: But I feel like people, you know, just flip past it really, really quickly, and so I… I personally love poring over details and work, and so I try to,
• 41:08
  Ryan Browne: you know, blow all my deadlines by putting as much little Easter eggs and gags into the…
• 41:14
  Ryan Browne: the little minutiae and the, you know, the crowd scenes and stuff.
• 41:19
  Ryan Browne: So, I guess I'm not really doing my introduction now.
• 41:23
  Heidi MacDonald: Wait…
• 41:25
  Ruben Bolling: The way I handle drawing stadiums is if I write something that I have to draw a stadium, I just write something else.
• 41:32
  denislkitchen: Yeah.
• 41:33
  Ryan Browne: Well, you could, you could do, like, some, like, some sort of foreground element, and make it real big, so that, like.
• 41:40
  Ryan Browne: You know, you're kind of, like, like a guy, like, guy, like a profile, or, you know, and then… then you see the stadium around his head, and that… that will take up, that circle or oval will take up a lot of, people and seats you don't have to draw.
• 41:52
  Ruben Bolling: That's good advice, yes.
• 41:54
  Ryan Browne: Yes.
• 41:55
  Ryan Browne: So, yeah, so I make, I make comics. I mostly do stuff for Image Comics,
• 42:02
  Ryan Browne: I'm mostly known for a book called 8 Billion Genies, that I did with a writer named Charles Soule.
• 42:08
  Ryan Browne: I draw, I do the colors, I write as well. I, had this kind of cult following book called God Hates Astronauts that I did for a long time, and then I'm currently working on a book called The Lucky Devils, for Image Comics, which…
• 42:26
  Ryan Browne: I was coloring all day, and now my brain is kind of fried, so…
• 42:30
  Ryan Browne: I apologize for, not being as sharp.
• 42:34
  Ryan Browne: It's fun to listen to you guys, though.
• 42:36
  Derrick Goold: I'm always unsure what to say on this… on this podcast, but Ryan, I'm a big fan, so count me among the gods. Oh, man! Dude, that's all…
• 42:44
  Ryan Browne: You know, you know how many…
• 42:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna get… Go ahead, Ryan.
• 42:50
  Ryan Browne: Derek, I have definitely listened to you on many, many podcasts while drawing those comics.
• 42:55
  Derrick Goold: Oh, that's… that's crazy, but…
• 42:57
  Ryan Browne: Oh, yeah.
• 42:58
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, no, I…
• 42:59
  Ryan Browne: Totally, man, totally.
• 43:00
  Derrick Goold: I mean, I bought it off the rack, I bought God's Hate Astronaut off the rack.
• 43:04
  Ryan Browne: Oh, man, that is awesome!
• 43:05
  Derrick Goold: I got… yeah, no, I'm a big fan of all of those, and curse words, I don't know if I'm supposed to say it, but that's my favorite one of them all, of the three, so I…
• 43:17
  Ryan Browne: Oh, dude.
• 43:17
  Derrick Goold: That's awesome! Well, that totally makes my day.
• 43:22
  Tad Eggleston: Ryan, are you still in Chicago?
• 43:24
  Derrick Goold: the Gollum graphic novel, I've given that a lot as a gift, because it's so great.
• 43:28
  Tad Eggleston: Damn.
• 43:30
  Tad Eggleston: Fantastic.
• 43:30
  Derrick Goold: That's my fandom for a moment.
• 43:33
  Tad Eggleston: Derek and I have been talking about getting together for, like, comics and lunch sometime, when he's in covering the Cardinals, so now we have to rope you in, too.
• 43:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, sure. And, Derek, does this mean I'm gonna get random emails for the next 2 months about you getting to meet Ryan Brown, like, like when you, met Scott Snyder 4 years ago?
• 43:55
  Derrick Goold: So when I had to appeal.
• 43:58
  Derrick Goold: Well, yeah, that was… I was… yeah, I was kind of… yeah, I was struck. I had no idea, like, yeah, yeah, it was cool. I mean, the Court of Olives guy walks into a podcast, you say.
• 44:08
  Derrick Goold: Pretty good, I like your stuff.
• 44:12
  Tad Eggleston: One of my favorite artists, I'm so glad that she popped in since the beginning, Emil Farris.
• 44:20
  Heidi MacDonald: Hey, Mule.
• 44:21
  Tad Eggleston: All right.
• 44:23
  Heidi MacDonald: And then…
• 44:24
  Tad Eggleston: It means I'm not the only Cubs fan here for a change.
• 44:27
  denislkitchen: Well, I don't know, she lives in Milwaukee now, you know?
• 44:31
  Tad Eggleston: I know, but I don't think she's switched her allegiances.
• 44:34
  denislkitchen: Well, I can respect that.
• 44:36
  Emil Ferris: Yeah, I can't. I mean, I went rogue with the Green Bay Packers, and my father is like a gyro in his grid, just spinning and spinning. I should have been worshipping the Bears, the Bears, as I…
• 44:50
  Emil Ferris: did all my life. But then the Green Bay Packers won me over, and it… I had to.
• 44:57
  Emil Ferris: But I will tell you that I will be a Cubs fan until the day I die, because… I just will be. And it's a really fraught thing in Chicago, as, if you don't know this, I was born on the South Side, so by genetic…
• 45:11
  Emil Ferris: whatever, I should be a Sox fan.
• 45:15
  Emil Ferris: But, I kind of grew up on the north side, and the Cubs won me over with all their, curses and eternal losing.
• 45:24
  Emil Ferris: Which was, like, they were the hopeless guys you love so much. You know, they're like that cousin that you know is gonna die in a storage locker, because they're just, like…
• 45:36
  Emil Ferris: They're just, like, doomed, but you love them so much. They're the funniest cousin, they're the sweetest cousin, they're the most hopeless cousin, they're the most talented cousin, and they have the best…
• 45:48
  Emil Ferris: the best field of any… of any group, in my opinion, so… Right now, I… I have to draw Wrigley.
• 45:54
  Emil Ferris: Because Karen escapes to Wrigley, instead of going to school, which we all did. I don't know, Tad, did you do that?
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: I may have, once or twice. I actually may have done it a lot during college. This might be one of the reasons that I don't have a degree, is that…
• 46:15
  Tad Eggleston: that my school, my college, that I'll be kind enough not to plug, because I didn't graduate from them, and…
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: may owe them money.
• 46:27
  Emil Ferris: Or my… I don't know.
• 46:28
  Tad Eggleston: Was, was 9 stops away on the red line?
• 46:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 46:33
  Ryan Browne: No, that's, I went to Lane Tech, which, when you get off… Oh, nice!
• 46:38
  Emil Ferris: Yeah, when you get off the L, and you get off at Addison, you can go past Wrigley, or you can forge your mother's signature on a note you write about how you were sick, and you can literally just go to Wrigley, which I pretty much…
• 46:55
  Emil Ferris: did a lot.
• 46:56
  Emil Ferris: And that…
• 46:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:58
  Emil Ferris: You know, I mean, I was a bad kid. So, as you already know, because you're just seeing the beginnings of it in the books. But, anyway, happy birthday, Heidi! You turned, I don't know what, 22, but you turned 21.
• 47:10
  Tad Eggleston: 22?
• 47:11
  Emil Ferris: November 15th!
• 47:13
  Heidi MacDonald: Didn't you? Yes, I just… but, Emil, you were missing. We were just, no, I'm cut off. Cut off, no more birthdays. So, that's it.
• 47:23
  Ryan Browne: quitting?
• 47:24
  Heidi MacDonald: Quitting, quitting birthdays, yeah, we're not just gonna count them anymore, yeah, just stop.
• 47:28
  Heidi MacDonald: No, you know…
• 47:30
  Emil Ferris: When the approval…
• 47:31
  Tad Eggleston: That's why she said you were 22.
• 47:33
  Heidi MacDonald: Yes.
• 47:34
  Emil Ferris: this really gets going, you might want to rethink that, because it's going to be like, wow, I made it through another year, and it's like, we're all radioactive, but I'm alive.
• 47:45
  Ruben Bolling: Like…
• 47:46
  Emil Ferris: I might feel differently.
• 47:48
  Heidi MacDonald: I want to say for you Cubby fans that I have this cup as my, my pen holder by my desk, that I… yes, because I went to the,
• 48:00
  Heidi MacDonald: Of course, the Mets were in the World Series in 25, and then 2016, the Cubbies, you know, law broke the curse, and I was very touched. I think all of us were so touched by the reaction of the, you know, the longtime fans. I mean, people going and visiting their families' graves and showing that
• 48:17
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, the Cubs win, and that kind of thing, and like, you know, it was so moving. So the next year, in 2017, there was a Diamond Summit in Chicago, and it just so happened the Cubs were playing, and I'm so happy that I got to get, you know, the cup from the…
• 48:31
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 48:31
  Heidi MacDonald: beer cup from the… from the World Series, so, you know, that is… I… I do… I have lots of other Mets cups here, but I… I do treasure that one, so… because, you know, it'll…
• 48:43
  Heidi MacDonald: It might never happen again. Certainly not when I'm alive, but yeah, I know, we'll see, we'll see. There's a lot of folks here who may not live to see another World Series.
• 48:53
  Ryan Browne: And it's not…
• 48:54
  Heidi MacDonald: And because we're old, it's just because our teams are never gonna win again.
• 48:58
  Ryan Browne: Heidi, I will say that I grew up in Detroit as a Tigers fan, and then I went to school in Providence and lived in Boston, and while I was there, the Red Sox broke their curse, and then after that, I moved to Chicago, and then the Cubs broke their curse. So I… if you…
• 49:16
  denislkitchen: I guess I could move to Queens.
• 49:18
  Heidi MacDonald: Wow!
• 49:19
  Ryan Browne: This is what you do in Cleveland!
• 49:21
  Heidi MacDonald: If you need my help… But who's the one team?
• 49:23
  Derrick Goold: That's number one.
• 49:24
  Heidi MacDonald: One, is it, it says.
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: the actor.
• 49:26
  Ryan Browne: Cleveland.
• 49:26
  Rob Neyer: Seattle.
• 49:27
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna go to Seattle first.
• 49:29
  Ryan Browne: I'd rather go to TL than Cleveland. Yeah, let's do that.
• 49:32
  Heidi MacDonald: I'll move to Seattle, okay, yeah.
• 49:37
  Tad Eggleston: And last but not least, Rob Nyer is with us for the…
• 49:43
  Rob Neyer: Well, gosh, I'm very old, and so I could…
• 49:48
  Rob Neyer: go on for way too long. Something that I don't think I've ever mentioned in this this,
• 49:54
  Rob Neyer: venue is that…
• 49:57
  Rob Neyer: In the summer of 1976 is when I fell in love with both baseball and comic books. We moved to a Kansas City suburb, and I fell in love with the Royals almost immediately.
• 50:11
  Rob Neyer: And… also.
• 50:14
  Rob Neyer: There was, two teenage… two teenage boys who lived next door to us, and one of them was so much… so into comics that he had a big…
• 50:25
  Rob Neyer: like…
• 50:27
  Rob Neyer: magazine-style rack in his garage where he would store his comic books. And his special passion, as I recall, this goes back a long time, obviously, was
• 50:38
  Rob Neyer: DC, War comics.
• 50:41
  Rob Neyer: Here's a question I've never heard anybody answer, and I don't…
• 50:45
  Rob Neyer: wouldn't expect anybody here to know why, but Marvel never had war comics in the 70s, at least not that I would know about, whereas DC had this amazing… you know, maybe it was just due to Bob Caniger and Joe Kubert, but… but I fell in love, I was a huge history buff.
• 51:00
  Rob Neyer: And I was crazy for the Haunted Tank, and Sergeant Rock, and Enemy Ace, and The Unknown Soldier, and the Losers, all of them. I loved all of them. I just ate them up.
• 51:13
  Rob Neyer: So I've been a baseball fan, a religious baseball fan, and an off-and-on religious comic book fan ever, ever since then.
• 51:22
  Rob Neyer: I did move to Seattle in 1996, and lost my Royals fanhood not that long afterward, probably just from… due to distance and also the Royals being so terrible for so many years in a row. I never became a Mariners fan, unlike…
• 51:38
  Rob Neyer: others, like Eric, it just never happened. But… because I've…
• 51:45
  Rob Neyer: in a former life, I was a baseball writer for a number of years. I had the chance to sit in the press box and hang out with the broadcasters and all those fun things, among the many perks of the job. I do follow the Mariners, and I can't help but…
• 52:02
  Rob Neyer: root for them a little bit, and in fact, I think this is sort of…
• 52:06
  Rob Neyer: I don't know if we're gonna get to this tonight, Tad, but I think one of your questions was favorite baseball moment. I actually was in the stands for game 5 of the Mariners-Blue Jays series this fall, and there's so many postseason games.
• 52:22
  Rob Neyer: Some of you probably don't even know what happened in that game, but the Mariners were down 2-1, heading into, I believe it was the bottom of the eighth. Cal Rogue led off the bottom of the eighth with a home run, which was thrilling enough, and then four batters later.
• 52:36
  Rob Neyer: A Eugenio Suarez hit a grand slam, and I actually got excited, which I didn't even know I could do anymore. Because I'm not a Mariners fan, and I'm very jaded, but that was so exciting to be there with that crowd, and to see that happen that I actually
• 52:52
  Rob Neyer: almost peed my pants, so…
• 52:54
  Tad Eggleston: But what's really crazy…
• 52:56
  Rob Neyer: That was my favorite moment this season.
• 52:59
  Tad Eggleston: what's really That was all going on simultaneously with Ohtani's 10-strikeout, 3-home run game.
• 53:06
  Rob Neyer: Which meant nothing to me, because I wasn't watching it.
• 53:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, because you weren't there.
• 53:10
  Rob Neyer: Exactly. But yes, that was a pretty amazing thing, too. It was… that was one hell of a day.
• 53:15
  Tad Eggleston: One of the cool videos the MLB has put up
• 53:19
  Tad Eggleston: Is, is, like, with timestamps, going back and forth between those two games.
• 53:27
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm. All one night of baseball.
• 53:31
  Tad Eggleston: Which Dennis had bowed out on, because it became pretty clear pretty quickly, that his Brewers were gonna lose.
• 53:37
  denislkitchen: It was a beautiful performance, but heartbreaking, yes.
• 53:41
  Rob Neyer: I should mention that I used to be a colleague of Derek's, and treasured the chance to speak to him over the years about
• 53:50
  Rob Neyer: our profession. Now I do something quite different. I'm the commissioner of a baseball league, the West Coast League, which is,
• 54:00
  Rob Neyer: Right now, we have 16 teams here in the Pacific Northwest, plus, Edmonton, which is not in the Pacific Northwest. And, as, as,
• 54:12
  Rob Neyer: as Mark mentioned earlier, one of the teams in our league is the Portland Pickles, who have become sort of famous all over America, somehow, thanks in large part to their incredible marketing skills. But I am fortunate enough to live in Portland, so I get to more Pickles games than any other team in our league, and it's just a real…
• 54:31
  Rob Neyer: It's a… it's a, it's a really interesting,
• 54:34
  Rob Neyer: a line of work I found myself in.
• 54:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, you not writing at all anymore? I thought we were just waiting for the next book.
• 54:41
  Rob Neyer: No, I don't have any book projects. I had my shot. I wrote at 8, and I think that might be it. I'll post something on Substack.
• 54:51
  Rob Neyer: this off-season, a few things, depending on what, and I'll also write that… I'm gonna write that Scroogey article, but I don't have any… I don't have any books in the works right now.
• 55:00
  Heidi MacDonald: copywriter.
• 55:01
  Ruben Bolling: Rob, there actually is an answer to your question about the war comics in Marvel.
• 55:06
  Ruben Bolling: I don't know if I'm the most qualified. I'd probably butcher the answer. Does anyone… any comic expert want to talk about…
• 55:13
  Ruben Bolling: Stan Lee and the creation of, Sergeant Fury.
• 55:19
  Ruben Bolling: that… well, he… I guess something… it was something like he… he'd hated road.
• 55:24
  Tad Eggleston: how…
• 55:24
  Ruben Bolling: like Commandos?
• 55:26
  Ruben Bolling: Do what's that?
• 55:28
  Ruben Bolling: He hated war comics, Stan Lee.
• 55:30
  Ruben Bolling: And so he challenged himself, or… or maybe there was a dispute with the publisher, and then he said, I'm gonna write
• 55:37
  Ruben Bolling: a war comic, which I hate, and I'm gonna make it good, the way I make superhero comics good. And so he created Sergeant Fury in the 60s, and that lasted for a long time. Right. But it was sort of an unusual,
• 55:50
  Ruben Bolling: War comic, because it was, you know, about the personalities, and they're always fighting, and each other, as well as the enemy.
• 55:59
  Ruben Bolling: So anyway, that's… that was his… he did war… his war comic.
• 56:03
  James Sturm: I always think of Marvel as, like, just one giant war comic from Jack Kirby's imagination of, you know.
• 56:09
  Tad Eggleston: It's not as expensive.
• 56:10
  James Sturm: listed as the DC ones.
• 56:11
  Ruben Bolling: Yes.
• 56:12
  James Sturm: But it's all his, you know, this soldier's experiences that's just playing out, and…
• 56:19
  Rob Neyer: each of those characters.
• 56:20
  Ruben Bolling: Great point.
• 56:21
  Rob Neyer: That's a good point, yeah.
• 56:26
  Rob Neyer: Ready.
• 56:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 56:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, I wanted to share one thing that did make me very happy in terms of baseball and comics this year. I don't know if any of you read Pastime?
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: From Mad Cave?
• 56:39
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah.
• 56:39
  Tad Eggleston: Huh? Yeah, yeah.
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: So, the very first issue… Involved one of my favorite images ever.
• 56:51
  Tad Eggleston: Greg Maddox on the tarp at Wrigley Field.
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: Which then, later in the season, was also a bobblehead at Wrigley Field. I don't know why this year, because it was 1988, so it's what?
• 57:10
  Tad Eggleston: 37 years ago, but…
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: But this, this scene both made a comic book and a bobblehead this year. I have them both.
• 57:22
  Ruben Bolling: Nice.
• 57:24
  Heidi MacDonald: Very nice.
• 57:25
  Tad Eggleston: So, so that, that, that was just pleasing to me. Also, I don't know if people have noticed, there's a, just started on, on…
• 57:34
  Tad Eggleston: Comixology Unlimited, Medieval?
• 57:37
  Tad Eggleston: takes a Yankees fan, And sends him back to King Arthur's court?
• 57:43
  Tad Eggleston: because apparently Neil Clyde was reading King Arthur's Code, and kept… kept putting New York Yankees rather than Connecticut Yankee as he was reading it, so… That's pretty neat.
• 57:54
  Derrick Goold: That's pretty good.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: that… that… that the first issue is available on Comixology now. I've got Neil coming up on the podcast with Alex Cormac, who's one of my favorite artists. And I'm… I'm looking forward to seeing
• 58:08
  Tad Eggleston: More… more baseball in our 30 in times.
• 58:12
  Eric Reynolds: When I was a kid, you used to be able to, you used to get these things in the mail that were like, you know, subscribe to 10 magazines for one low price, or something like that.
• 58:21
  Heidi MacDonald: And it had the little stamps, the little.
• 58:23
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 58:25
  Heidi MacDonald: And… and when I was…
• 58:27
  Eric Reynolds: really pretty young. I didn't…
• 58:30
  Eric Reynolds: I really… I think it was something like, you know, you'll get your first X number of months free! And anyway…
• 58:37
  Eric Reynolds: without consulting my parents, I filled one of these out.
• 58:41
  Eric Reynolds: And I had a… I think it was, like, you know, 10 magazines, so of course I'm, you know, getting, like, Sports Illustrated, and I forget what else, but by the time I got to the end, like, there just weren't… I was too young, there weren't, like, any magazines that I really was interested in. I'm sure Mad Magazine was one of them, probably, but…
• 59:00
  Eric Reynolds: So, I put down a…
• 59:02
  Eric Reynolds: Yankee Magazine, which I had no idea about, but I thought, hey, it's a magazine about the Yankees, that sounds good. Well, of course, it was not a magazine about the Yankees, it was, like, about colonial, you know, times.
• 59:19
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh, man. You know, I was… I saw… this is a little tangential, but just talking about the,
• 59:26
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, mysteries of baseball, there was an article in The Athletic about how they have all these… there's some Chase variant cards, you know, one of one that's like, you know.
• 59:35
  Heidi MacDonald: like, Aaron Judge's signature, and a lock of his hair, or whatever, and, like, some of these cards have not been found, right? Like, like, they're still out there, and they've never been opened, they've never found the pack that has these super rare variants in, and…
• 59:51
  denislkitchen: You know, I love that idea. I love the idea that.
• 59:54
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, little Citizen Kane rosebud action there, you know, somebody someday might open one of these packs.
• 1:00:02
  Tad Eggleston: This is the idea that I love, because so many of those rare, rare variants are so incredibly stupid.
• 1:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: is that they were opened by an actual kid that went, what's this, and tossed it aside, and it's kicking around in a toy box somewhere.
• 1:00:22
  Tad Eggleston: Why is there no picture of a baseball player on that stack?
• 1:00:26
  Heidi MacDonald: I'm looking at the story, it seems the missing ones are, LeBron, Curry, and Brady, but…
• 1:00:33
  Heidi MacDonald: So, they're not actually baseball cards, they're other sports, so I'm not surprised by that. They found the very rare Otani card, so I'm not, you know, I don't, I don't think children are quite as, obsessive about, or children or adults.
• 1:00:48
  Heidi MacDonald: quite as obsessive about, football cards as they are baseball cards. It doesn't even sound right. Football… try saying that, football card, ugh.
• 1:00:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I did get a complete set of football cards in 1986, but that was because I was 6, and the Bears won the Super Bowl in 1985, and they were on sale at the grocery store. And or my mom put together… I don't remember, my mom got them for me.
• 1:01:15
  Heidi MacDonald: And wow, we just got a relief pitcher coming in from the bullpen!
• 1:01:19
  Mark Chiarello: Mark Chiarello!
• 1:01:23
  James Sturm: Hey, picking up on the magazine thing, I was thinking one of my favorite baseball moments was,
• 1:01:30
  James Sturm: I… reading the story… The Curious Case of Sid Finch in Sports Illustrated. Oh, yes. I wonder how many people… I just believed it, every word of it.
• 1:01:40
  James Sturm: And I was, I think, a freshman in college, sophomore in college, and I was so excited until I, like, you know, 1 plus 1 equals 7, what's going on here? But I wonder if anybody else, got excited, or remembered it, or knew it was, like, a hoax right away.
• 1:01:56
  Ruben Bolling: Modern Sinker, for me. I totally believed it, and was so excited. And, it was, it was, the highlight of the year. It was like, look at this guy we're gonna get! I can't believe it! And, yeah, I shouldn't have believed it.
• 1:02:11
  Derrick Goold: There's a great story about when Plimpton comes out with that, right? Story in Sports Illustrated, and one of the longtime Mets PR guys will talk about how members of the New York media went, how could you give that scoop to Sports Illustrated? What do you guys do?
• 1:02:28
  Derrick Goold: And just laid into them and said, why would you give this story away? We're here all the time, how would you keep this from him? And there was a real… whether it lasted an hour or a day, but there was a real moment of, like, confusion within the beat-writing class there about, like.
• 1:02:44
  Derrick Goold: How could they… how could they, A, have hid this story, and why would they not give it to the folks who are here?
• 1:02:49
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah. I guess it fooled more than just fans.
• 1:02:54
  Derrick Goold: It did.
• 1:02:54
  James Sturm: That's like winning a game on, like, on a game-winning shot or a home run, only to, like, nope, inches foul, sorry, you've lost.
• 1:03:01
  Ruben Bolling: Right, no, just kidding.
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: But that was the… I mean, it wasn't the end of the game, but that was one of the craziest plays of the playoffs this year.
• 1:03:10
  Ruben Bolling: the Max Muncie Grand Slam double play. Oh, yeah.
• 1:03:16
  denislkitchen: Love that one.
• 1:03:17
  Tad Eggleston: That was a good moment for the Brewers.
• 1:03:19
  Eric Reynolds: Heh.
• 1:03:20
  denislkitchen: Yup.
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: So, Mark, introduce yourself. We were just finishing introducing ourselves anyway, so you came in at the perfect time, Mark.
• 1:03:28
  Mark Chiarello: Yeah, I apologize.
• 1:03:29
  Tad Eggleston: other mark.
• 1:03:30
  Mark Chiarello: Apologize for being late, I,
• 1:03:32
  Mark Chiarello: I got my West Coast times screwed up, of course, being the New York kid as I am. I'm Mark Ciarello,
• 1:03:41
  Mark Chiarello: Fandom. Former art director at DC, and now back to being a working artist again.
• 1:03:47
  Tad Eggleston: In your fandom?
• 1:03:49
  Mark Chiarello: Sorry?
• 1:03:51
  Tad Eggleston: Your fandom. What's your team?
• 1:03:53
  Mark Chiarello: Oh, the… well…
• 1:03:55
  Mark Chiarello: I kind of gave up on baseball a few years ago, but you know, I guess it's still the Yankees.
• 1:04:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. You gave up on current baseball, you didn't give up on the game. We need to make this… make this clear, because… because I have talked to you enough to know how much we can talk baseball, and I have a three-finger brown on my wall over here that you drew, and a Josh Gibson over there, so, you know…
• 1:04:20
  Tad Eggleston: Honestly.
• 1:04:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:04:24
  Mark Chiarello: Yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm sure you guys have talked about the great World Series from this year.
• 1:04:30
  Tad Eggleston: No, we were just getting to that.
• 1:04:32
  Mark Chiarello: I don't know.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: We did baseball trivia first, like, or random baseball facts, and I do want to toss one thing in that I was actually looking around through some of the comics that I thought might have had it in there.
• 1:04:47
  Tad Eggleston: And didn't find it, so James, if I missed it in Golem's Mighty Swing, I'll… I'll apologize. I worked dementia care, and I…
• 1:04:57
  Tad Eggleston: took care of a woman who had 9 brothers. Her 9 brothers happened to be… the… the Stanzak…
• 1:05:07
  Tad Eggleston: traveling…
• 1:05:09
  Tad Eggleston: baseball team. The Stanzak brothers traveled… so back in the barnstorming days of the 20s and 30s, her… her brothers would go around and play against town teams, and Negro League teams, and probably the House of David team, and… and that sort of thing, because there were 9 of them, so they learned to play baseball.
• 1:05:29
  denislkitchen: Wow.
• 1:05:29
  Tad Eggleston: And we're their own team. So that's one of my favorite random trivia things, is that there was once a team where all of the members were brothers.
• 1:05:42
  Tad Eggleston: Which just seems fun to me. And I did discover that her son, pretty certain… no, she didn't have kids. Her nephew, I met him, did write a book about it that I just ordered a digital copy of, because I want to know more about it.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: the Stanzak brothers.
• 1:05:59
  Tad Eggleston: traveling baseball team. But now, we are to the…
• 1:06:02
  Tad Eggleston: 2025 was such a fun year. Favorite moments from the season?
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, not as much for Mets fans as last year. You're not gonna do any dances for me, Heidi, but that doesn't mean that you didn't have some fun.
• 1:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: Fun happens before September.
• 1:06:22
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, just it was a cursed year. Every… so, literally, the first time I went to a game this season was on June 13th, Friday the 13th, and that was when the Mets began their slide. Like, literally, they had been the best team in baseball up to that point, and that night they lost to the,
• 1:06:41
  Heidi MacDonald: I think it… no, it was, the Tampa Bay.
• 1:06:44
  Heidi MacDonald: And, you know, it was one of those… the first of many late-inning implosions, and
• 1:06:52
  Heidi MacDonald: I was like, oh, well, we'll get them next time, and you know what? We never did. We never got them next time.
• 1:06:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like…
• 1:06:58
  Heidi MacDonald: Like, like, there was a, a…
• 1:07:00
  Heidi MacDonald: Twitter, a tweet with, like, you know, a list of the most horrible Mets losses of the season, and I had been at 4 of them, including San Diego Comic-Con, where they were playing the Padres the next night, and I was, you know, that was pretty exciting, because for the first time in 20 years, I happened to be staying at the Omni, did not pick the Omni, it just so happened, and of course, the Mets were also staying at the Omni, so I was like, oh, I'm…
• 1:07:24
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, only about 12 floors away from the Mets, and, you know, I saw Steve Gelbs running around in the morning, and, you know, I went to the game that night, and at first the Mets were winning, and it was awesome! And then,
• 1:07:37
  Heidi MacDonald: what's-his-face there, hit the home run, and the Mets weren't winning, and I just, you know…
• 1:07:42
  James Sturm: That what's-his-face, goddamn him.
• 1:07:44
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, I know, petis.
• 1:07:46
  Heidi MacDonald: Tatis is excited. We've all suffered from what's-his-Face. Yeah, what Tatis, and… but, you know, then, the worst one of all was this Braves game that I went to with Fred and Crystal, Fred Van Lenti, and…
• 1:08:00
  Heidi MacDonald: like, Peterson was pitching, who was the best pitcher the Mets had for, you know, this sad season, and
• 1:08:09
  Heidi MacDonald: I go to, like, well, it's about the 5th, and it was delayed for 90 minutes of rain, and then we stuck it out, and then, like, it's the fifth inning, so it's, like, 10.30 at night by this point, or 10 o'clock. I'm like, I'm gonna get some ice cream. I'm like, oh, well…
• 1:08:22
  Heidi MacDonald: the Braves are scoring a few runs, and then it's like, I come back, and the Braves are scoring 9 runs in one inning. Nine runs! How does that happen?
• 1:08:31
  Heidi MacDonald: How does it happen? So anyway, it was a… it was a… just… oof, just bad. Every time I went, it was a disaster. I never saw them win. And, but it does bring up, you know, and of course, you know, Ruben and James, you can,
• 1:08:47
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, like, like, I… I saw, you know, Ellen and… and Fred and, you know, my other Mets fans in baseball over the… you know, and, and…
• 1:08:58
  Heidi MacDonald: 24 for the Mets was the best year, because we were hap… we lost, and yet we were happy.
• 1:09:06
  Heidi MacDonald: You know? And it was even… it was like, oh, we'll get him next year, maybe, and okay, we wished they'd hire… get Soto, and they did. But it was like, that year was so… it's so rare in life.
• 1:09:16
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, that you have this, this, this… struggle… that… ends…
• 1:09:24
  Heidi MacDonald: With losing to a better team.
• 1:09:26
  Heidi MacDonald: And you're still like, you know what, that was amazing. Everything that happened was… was so good and interesting, and fun, and… and wholesome, and…
• 1:09:34
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, so it's just an amazing feeling. And, you know, this year, like, you know, the Mets are just so bad, and like I said, you know, the Mariners fans, I mean, the Mariners and Blue Jays had this epic battle, and I could have… either team. You know, I didn't want the Dodgers to win, but, like, I was…
• 1:09:51
  Heidi MacDonald: I was rooting for the Mariners at first, because obviously I want them to win the… you know, I want Seattle to win the World Series.
• 1:09:57
  Heidi MacDonald: And then…
• 1:09:59
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, I was rooting for the Blue Jays. I went pretty big on the Blue Jays, and yeah, also, you know, I love Scherzer. He's one of my all-time favorite players, so seeing him come back and have a good game, and…
• 1:10:10
  Heidi MacDonald: I mean, the last game was Scherzer versus Otani, it was just, you know… I mean, then Ohtani, the best ever baseball. I mean, yeah, it was great. It was… it was… I had to objectively admit it was great, but…
• 1:10:22
  Heidi MacDonald: But, I don't know, how does everyone deal with the heartbreak? How is the…
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: I was gonna say…
• 1:10:27
  Heidi MacDonald: Happiness with heart… and without heartbreak?
• 1:10:29
  Tad Eggleston: In a lot of ways, the Cubs season this year, and particularly my experience with it, is a lot like your Mets experience last year, because, like, I made it to 3 Cubs games this year. They won all 3 of them, two of them in walk-off fashion.
• 1:10:44
  Tad Eggleston: Pete Kerr Armstrong hit home runs and stole bases in all 3 of them, and had crazy catches in 2 of them.
• 1:10:53
  Tad Eggleston: the Cubs made the playoffs, they got beat by a really good Brewer team, so it was, like, hard to be upset. And, like, the rest of the playoffs, from that point, there were no teams that I was gonna be upset if they lost. Because even with the Jodgers as kind of the juggernaut now, they're kind of the juggernaut.
• 1:11:12
  Tad Eggleston: with Shohei Ohtani, who's not only, like…
• 1:11:15
  Tad Eggleston: This… this unicorn of a ballplayer just has so much fun.
• 1:11:22
  Tad Eggleston: He's so fun to watch. So it was cool, but, like, my moments of the year were…
• 1:11:32
  Tad Eggleston: Getting to see PCA hit a game-tying homer against the Dodgers in April, literally as the crowd was chanting PCA, PCA, PCA, he took the first pitch and hit the scoreboard with it.
• 1:11:50
  Tad Eggleston: And then, like, I feel like a lot of us brought up Otani's 10 RBI game last year as one of the great…
• 1:12:01
  Tad Eggleston: Games of the season, and possibly ever, and here he is, like, outdoing himself.
• 1:12:09
  Eric Reynolds: 10 strikeouts and 3 home runs in one game, and… How about the… how about the…
• 1:12:13
  Tad Eggleston: Left Dodger Stadium.
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: How about that?
• 1:12:16
  Eric Reynolds: You know, the on-base percentage in the 9 at-bats in the other game.
• 1:12:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:12:22
  Eric Reynolds: That would seem…
• 1:12:24
  Tad Eggleston: next day.
• 1:12:26
  Eric Reynolds: Just as insane.
• 1:12:27
  James Sturm: Yeah. Unreal.
• 1:12:28
  Tad Eggleston: It is. I honestly think that the four intentional walks were one part, we don't want to pitch to Ohtani in extra innings, and one part, we want tomorrow's starting pitcher running the.
• 1:12:43
  Heidi MacDonald: Extra innings. Well, that, you know, that game, the extra inning game, like, was… I mean, I was out, and then I'm like, you know, looking, I was like, oh, I can get home and watch the last inning of the game. You know, I get home, and I get to watch a whole nother baseball game.
• 1:12:59
  Ryan Browne: You didn't want.
• 1:13:00
  Heidi MacDonald: It was so amazing, I got to watch 9 more… and, you know, it was…
• 1:13:05
  Heidi MacDonald: That was, like, a great…
• 1:13:07
  Heidi MacDonald: Great, just a great… it was great on Blue Sky, like, everybody all of a sudden, like, you know, coming together and watching this game. It was so… felt so good.
• 1:13:15
  Tad Eggleston: And how are there two 18-inning World Series games in history, and they both ended with Freddie Freeman walk-offs?
• 1:13:25
  Eric Reynolds: That was the greatest World Series, I think, I can remember.
• 1:13:28
  James Sturm: Yeah.
• 1:13:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:13:29
  Ryan Browne: It was great.
• 1:13:30
  Tad Eggleston: It was, it was great.
• 1:13:31
  Eric Reynolds: And, you know, it was so heartbreaking for the Mariners not to get there.
• 1:13:35
  Eric Reynolds: that…
• 1:13:36
  Eric Reynolds: I felt really conflicted going in, you know, did I want the Blue Jays to win, to make the Mariners look that much better, or did I want the Blue Jays to suffer for what they just.
• 1:13:43
  James Sturm: And…
• 1:13:46
  Eric Reynolds: By the end of it, I really didn't care, it just was… but it was so good that it actually did kind of…
• 1:13:52
  Eric Reynolds: you know.
• 1:13:52
  Tad Eggleston: How about that Cal Raleigh homer?
• 1:13:54
  Eric Reynolds: Wound a little bit.
• 1:13:56
  Tad Eggleston: How about that Cal Raleigh homer in Toronto that went to the guy in the dump it here? In his shirt?
• 1:14:03
  Eric Reynolds: Who had the other shirt underneath it?
• 1:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: I had the other shirt underneath.
• 1:14:07
  Eric Reynolds: That was so great.
• 1:14:09
  manru: Are there any time?
• 1:14:10
  Mark Chiarello: Can I ask a question?
• 1:14:11
  Tad Eggleston: Stars align, and then they… Yeah. They rarely stay that way.
• 1:14:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, Mark.
• 1:14:18
  Mark Chiarello: Back to Otani, if we can go back to Otani for a second.
• 1:14:23
  Mark Chiarello: Do we really think he's the greatest baseball player ever?
• 1:14:26
  Mark Chiarello: I'm just curious everybody's opinion on that.
• 1:14:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:29
  Ryan Browne: Definitely the greatest peak.
• 1:14:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think… I think he needs 5 more seasons before I can absolutely say greatest ever, just for…
• 1:14:39
  Tad Eggleston: for counting stats, but I can't think of anybody who's got a greater peak. But Rob's got his hand up, and he's… he's the guy that I want to hear from here.
• 1:14:51
  Tad Eggleston: You're muted, Rob.
• 1:14:55
  Rob Neyer: The way I like to think about it is not as he the greatest, because we can argue about peak and career all day long.
• 1:15:01
  Rob Neyer: And… relative statistics.
• 1:15:06
  Rob Neyer: Because if you're talking at relative statistics, nobody's ever going to beat.
• 1:15:10
  Rob Neyer: Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.
• 1:15:13
  Rob Neyer: But, in my mind, Otani's… Clearly, without a doubt, the most talented Baseball player who's ever lived.
• 1:15:24
  Rob Neyer: Because not… he's not only an incredible hitter and pitcher, he's an incredible hitter and pitcher, in this era.
• 1:15:33
  Derrick Goold: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:34
  Rob Neyer: In which the players are more talented than they've ever been before, so mathematically, it seems obvious to me that he's the most talented player who's ever lived, and that it's not even close. That's my spiel.
• 1:15:47
  Derrick Goold: He's dominating a global game. I mean, the sport can take talent from anywhere in the world, which is not the case. Certainly wasn't the case when Babe Ruth played, and…
• 1:15:57
  Tad Eggleston: And they train all year round.
• 1:15:59
  Derrick Goold: And they train all year round, and they throw sliders at the speed that they used to throw… that the…
• 1:16:05
  Derrick Goold: that Nolan Ryan used to throw fastballs, and now they're throwing sliders and splinkers, and splitters, and they're inventing new pitches. The athletes in the game today have never been better, and now you have this guy who is not just
• 1:16:20
  Derrick Goold: good as a pitcher, and great as a hitter, or good enough as a hitter, which we… there are other few pitchers who are good enough as hitters to survive. This guy is elite at all of it, and he is… he's doing things that we haven't seen. Do you all know his comic book?
• 1:16:37
  Derrick Goold: Connection? Does everybody…
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, major.
• 1:16:40
  Derrick Goold: It's, it's huge. Yeah, major. And it goes to what James was, James was asking about earlier. Those, the, the manga comics that you had, those, he drew inspiration from those. A major comic who was a two-way talent who went to Anaheim to play baseball.
• 1:16:58
  Derrick Goold: And, he was a young kid reading those comics, and said, why can't I do it? And then he obviously got the support of, as Rob knows, the history really well. But he told the Japanese teams not to draft him.
• 1:17:11
  Derrick Goold: one did, and said, we're gonna draft you, but allow you to be both. And it was that… those two things that really funneled into them. But, yeah, those are…
• 1:17:20
  Derrick Goold: My friend also sent me those same comics, James, and said, you gotta read these and see what's possible with art and comics and baseball, just along the lines of that genre that helped inspire Shohei Itani to do what he's doing.
• 1:17:34
  James Sturm: Maybe he'll write the introduction, and some publisher will, will, will.
• 1:17:39
  Heidi MacDonald: We'll do a translation, English edition.
• 1:17:43
  Heidi MacDonald: tried… they've tried so many times to get him to, to endorse some manga or endorse some publisher, but he's… he's very, very cagey. He doesn't… he just doesn't do it, you know? I always say this about Otani.
• 1:17:55
  Heidi MacDonald: just kind of what Rob was saying. I always say he's the greatest ever baseball. I don't say he's the greatest baseball player of all time, but… but just… just what Rob was saying, you know? I mean, he's… he's Super Saiyan. I mean, he really is. He really is like if a Dragon Ball Z character came and played baseball.
• 1:18:12
  Heidi MacDonald: It would be Shohei Attani.
• 1:18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Though, I gotta tell you, he…
• 1:18:18
  Ruben Bolling: I was gonna say, have you guys ever seen the, the chart he made when he was a kid, I think in high school?
• 1:18:24
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:25
  Ruben Bolling: I mean, it's just remarkable, the discipline and ambition. He made a chart of, like, maybe, like, 10 by 10 of all these different things, including
• 1:18:34
  Ruben Bolling: personality, strength, stamina that he was gonna improve himself on, and then subcategories of, like, what he's gonna eat, and, and how he's gonna hit, mental toughness, all this, all this stuff, and it just, it's incredible. At that young age, he had this focus.
• 1:18:54
  Ruben Bolling: And desire to, to excel.
• 1:18:57
  Eric Reynolds: You know who else that sounds like?
• 1:18:59
  Eric Reynolds: In terms of baseball.
• 1:19:01
  Ruben Bolling: Who's that?
• 1:19:01
  Eric Reynolds: players, each hero.
• 1:19:04
  Ruben Bolling: Must be a Jets, thanks to the Japanese cultural thing.
• 1:19:07
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, that's… that's interesting.
• 1:19:09
  Ruben Bolling: Seline. Self-discipline is a big part of the culture, I think.
• 1:19:13
  Ruben Bolling: So…
• 1:19:14
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta tell you, Derek, though, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, you're the one of us still in Major League locker rooms from time to time.
• 1:19:23
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like Shohei needs to be on next year's roundtable.
• 1:19:27
  Ruben Bolling: No, no, totally, yeah.
• 1:19:28
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, let's get him in here. Yeah, let me get right in touch with his agent, who is part of a huge organization, but his only… he only has one client now.
• 1:19:39
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that makes it even easier.
• 1:19:40
  Derrick Goold: I think the key is to get a crypto-style comic for decoy, because clearly.
• 1:19:46
  Derrick Goold: Shohei is all about decoy at this point.
• 1:19:49
  Tad Eggleston: Ryan?
• 1:19:50
  Derrick Goold: pull up.
• 1:19:50
  Tad Eggleston: Ryan, can you, help us out with that?
• 1:19:52
  Ryan Browne: I got it. I'll start. I'm gonna do…
• 1:19:55
  Tad Eggleston: Just start putting them in whatever you're drawing.
• 1:19:58
  Ryan Browne: I'm gonna… I'm gonna do 120 pages without asking, and then…
• 1:20:03
  Heidi MacDonald: No, I'd like… I'd like to see…
• 1:20:05
  Ryan Browne: I'll have Derek give it to him in a locker room somewhere.
• 1:20:08
  Heidi MacDonald: I like to see emails, decoy comic, too, though.
• 1:20:10
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:20:12
  Heidi MacDonald: We can collaborate.
• 1:20:13
  James Sturm: It's just too bad he plays for the Dodgers. I mean, it's like rooting for IBM or something, you know? I mean, the appreciation's real, everything everybody's saying is right, like, you just can't help but appreciate him, but do you love him? Like, can you love… I mean, can you love the Dodgers? Can you root for the Dodgers? It's like rooting for the Yankees back in the…
• 1:20:31
  James Sturm: Same thing as a Met fan, you used to forget about all the reasons I don't want to root for the Yankees.
• 1:20:35
  Tad Eggleston: I can totally root for them when he's on the field.
• 1:20:38
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:20:39
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:20:40
  Tad Eggleston: Now, now, I mean, I had to learn how to occasionally compartmentalize, because…
• 1:20:45
  Tad Eggleston: My favorite player of all time is Greg Maddox.
• 1:20:49
  Tad Eggleston: So when he went to Atlanta.
• 1:20:53
  Tad Eggleston: I couldn't root against Maddox when he was at Wrigley. In fact, I would be there in my Maddox Braves jersey and cap, and if he came out of the game before the ninth inning, I had a jacket to put on, a Cubs cap to put on, and we were coming back against the bullpen.
• 1:21:08
  Ruben Bolling: Wow.
• 1:21:08
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why I still haven't… which is why I still haven't forgiven Joe Torre for bringing him in in relief in the Dodgers-Cubs game in 2008 in the playoffs.
• 1:21:21
  Emil Ferris: So… I got a delivery.
• 1:21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Leo's running away?
• 1:21:24
  Emil Ferris: Goodbye, Chad. Goodbye, Dennis.
• 1:21:26
  Tad Eggleston: Any great baseball?
• 1:21:28
  Tad Eggleston: Memories from this year, before you run a meal?
• 1:21:30
  Emil Ferris: I… it's a big story.
• 1:21:32
  Tad Eggleston: It was fun.
• 1:21:33
  Emil Ferris: 1880. I'm doing research. You will all find out about it. Love you all. Bye-bye.
• 1:21:40
  Heidi MacDonald: I am in. I am in .
• 1:21:45
  Tad Eggleston: I think. But, yeah, no.
• 1:21:47
  Ryan Browne: From my… from my standpoint,
• 1:21:50
  Ryan Browne: I root for players more than I root for teams now. Like, I… I can… I will put on the Dodgers game on, you know, MLB.tv or whatever,
• 1:22:01
  Ryan Browne: I used to watch Shohei and Mookie, like, I love Mookie Betts.
• 1:22:05
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:22:06
  Eric Reynolds: I think that was one of the great things about this World Series, was that you had two teams that were… their franchises aside, they were extremely likable.
• 1:22:14
  Ryan Browne: Yeah, they were great characters, great, great players, very entertaining players, and so I, you know, I can watch every Dodgers game and hope that Shohei hits 4 Grand Slams, and the Dodgers somehow lose, and, like, that'd be great, like, you know, in terms of, like, the…
• 1:22:33
  Ryan Browne: the more that I…
• 1:22:36
  Ryan Browne: watch baseball, the, you know, the sillier it seems to me to be rooting specifically for, you know, laundry, as they say, or, like, a team, or, like, a team's history.
• 1:22:46
  James Sturm: Hmm.
• 1:22:46
  Ryan Browne: I just… I really just… I… I really enjoy watching performances of the… of the individual players, and
• 1:22:54
  Ryan Browne: you know, I think we had, you know, last year's World Series and this year's World Series, like, we had…
• 1:23:01
  Ryan Browne: I didn't really care who won, but there were just so many great players that were doing amazing things, you know? Like, it just…
• 1:23:10
  Ryan Browne: That's… that's what I loved. And, you know, I,
• 1:23:14
  Ryan Browne: you… we were mentioning earlier that, Twilight Zone episode with the… with the cyborg that, is playing for the Zephyrs. I feel like if Ohtani, if they found out he was a cyborg, like, I wouldn't be that surprised.
• 1:23:31
  Heidi MacDonald: Nope.
• 1:23:31
  Ryan Browne: You're gonna be like, yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:23:33
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:23:35
  Ryan Browne: Wow, that's amazing technology, but
• 1:23:38
  Ryan Browne: Yeah, I've never seen anyone do that before.
• 1:23:41
  Tad Eggleston: That would fit in with the anime thing.
• 1:23:44
  Ryan Browne: Lots of things.
• 1:23:45
  Tad Eggleston: It'd be like Pluto.
• 1:23:47
  Ryan Browne: I mean, robotics are getting really, really sophisticated, so…
• 1:23:51
  Heidi MacDonald: I mean, yeah, you know, I mean, it's so true about likable, and you know, as a Mets fan, you know, I spent years and years hating Freddie Freeman.
• 1:24:00
  Heidi MacDonald: And, you know, fucking Freddie Freeman, like… and in the 18-inning game, I was like, well, Freddie Freeman's gonna hit a home run. I mean, that's, you know, he's gonna be the… he's gonna do it. Of course it's gonna be Freddie Freeman. And then…
• 1:24:12
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, you see, he is such a likable person.
• 1:24:17
  Eric Reynolds: It is, like, you want to hate him, but you can't.
• 1:24:19
  Heidi MacDonald: Did you see him doing the worm? Yeah, and so he's doing the worm, and he said… you know, this guy's, like, 6'6", you know, he's doing the worm, and he said the Braves would never let him do it. So, a little bit of… thank you, Dodgers.
• 1:24:33
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, you let Freddie Freeman do the work.
• 1:24:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is… this is like… I mean, for your team, Mark, I wanted to hate that Yankee dynasty, because they're the Yankees, and I was a Red Sox fan, and we hadn't even… but it was really hard.
• 1:24:49
  Tad Eggleston: to hate Bernie Williams. It was really hard to hate Jorge Posada. It was really hard to hate Paul O'Neill. It was a little bit easier to hate Cheater, but not, like, easy.
• 1:25:02
  Mark Chiarello: Yeah, and real easy to hit E-Rod, who came a little later.
• 1:25:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but that was after… I mean…
• 1:25:07
  Mark Chiarello: Rivera was a lovable guy.
• 1:25:10
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it that they went out and bought a team that didn't win.
• 1:25:14
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah.
• 1:25:15
  Tad Eggleston: Because they brought in all sorts of guys that were easy to hate, and they lost.
• 1:25:20
  Mark Chiarello: I wanna know, I wanna, I wanna know who Dennis Kitchen's favorite player of all time is.
• 1:25:26
  denislkitchen: Warren Spun.
• 1:25:28
  Mark Chiarello: Really? The most underrated?
• 1:25:30
  Tad Eggleston: Screwball.
• 1:25:31
  Mark Chiarello: mystery?
• 1:25:32
  denislkitchen: Well…
• 1:25:34
  denislkitchen: Again, I grew up with, I was lucky. The Milwaukee Braves, as some of you may know, we had Hank Aaron.
• 1:25:42
  denislkitchen: Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews… Lou Burdette that won 3 games in the 1957 World Series.
• 1:25:51
  denislkitchen: Lot of amazing players. The Tory brothers, Frank and Joe.
• 1:25:56
  denislkitchen: So, I was very lucky to enjoy them while they were…
• 1:26:00
  denislkitchen: You know, in Milwaukee. But yeah, Warren Spahn always impressed me. I loved his,
• 1:26:06
  denislkitchen: unique way of lifting that leg way up in the air when he threw. If you haven't seen it, look it up. It's a… it's like ballet.
• 1:26:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:26:17
  denislkitchen: And, you know, winningest left-hand pitcher of all time.
• 1:26:21
  denislkitchen: So…
• 1:26:24
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 1:26:25
  Mark Chiarello: That's sort of what I mean about, you know, my comment about the most underrated pitcher of all time.
• 1:26:30
  Mark Chiarello: You know, if you say to somebody, name the… name the 20 greatest pitchers of all time.
• 1:26:36
  Mark Chiarello: You know, you're gonna get Seaver, and Sasha Page, and Lefty Grove, and, you know, Maddox. I just see Spawn as such a forgotten genius, a phenomenal genius.
• 1:26:51
  Tad Eggleston: I remember in Bill James' original version of,
• 1:26:56
  Tad Eggleston: what was it, the case for the Hall of Fame?
• 1:27:00
  Tad Eggleston: he compared… Sandy Koufax and Warren Spahn. Is it better to have 20 really good years, or…
• 1:27:10
  Tad Eggleston: 10 great years, 5… Okay years, and only 15 years total.
• 1:27:18
  Tad Eggleston: And essentially, it came down with the fact that they were equal players.
• 1:27:26
  Tad Eggleston: over the course of their career, but that everybody thought of Koufax as the better player, you know, so it was essentially he used Spawn and Koufax to…
• 1:27:37
  Tad Eggleston: To illustrate the peak versus overall value. I do have a great Warren Spawn story, though. Apparently, between…
• 1:27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Games of a doubleheader.
• 1:27:51
  Tad Eggleston: between the Giants and the Braves, they had a thing where both of them in their 50s at the time.
• 1:28:00
  Tad Eggleston: Warren Spahn came out to pitch against Willie Mays, and it was, can Spahn still strike him out, or will Willie Mays hit a homer?
• 1:28:08
  Tad Eggleston: And spawned through one pitch, and Willie set the bat down on the plate and walked away. And they asked him about it, and he's like… he pulled the Scroogee out. I'm not messing around with that shit.
• 1:28:23
  Tad Eggleston: This old man's still throwing me a screwball?
• 1:28:27
  Tad Eggleston: No way!
• 1:28:30
  denislkitchen: He threw a no-hitter at the age of 41.
• 1:28:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 1:28:34
  denislkitchen: I don't know, has anybody else done that?
• 1:28:38
  Eric Reynolds: Nolan Orion.
• 1:28:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Ryan.
• 1:28:41
  denislkitchen: Oh.
• 1:28:42
  Tad Eggleston: I think Ryan had 2 after he was 41.
• 1:28:45
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:28:48
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta ask with the Ohtani, and I know we've got some guys who have some Negro League knowledge. The more I watch Otani, the more I wish we knew about Martin Digo.
• 1:29:01
  Tad Eggleston: Anybody want to jump on that one?
• 1:29:05
  James Sturm: I thought you were going to say Josh Gibson, but I'm not as familiar with him.
• 1:29:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… I'd love to know more about Josh Gibson, but Martin Digo was…
• 1:29:14
  Tad Eggleston: an elite pitcher and an elite everything else for many years. He's in, what, 4 Hall of Fames? Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, U.S,
• 1:29:29
  Tad Eggleston: and the, the, the Negro League Museum.
• 1:29:32
  Tad Eggleston: He played every position except catcher.
• 1:29:36
  Tad Eggleston: like, his Sabre biography talk, you know, starts out with the story of a game down the stretch in the Mexican League, where… where…
• 1:29:46
  Heidi MacDonald: he was dueling Satchel Page.
• 1:29:49
  Tad Eggleston: Paige… Paige ran out of energy, still tied at 1.
• 1:29:54
  Tad Eggleston: after 10, and Digo came up and hit the game-winning homer in the bottom of the 11th.
• 1:30:00
  Tad Eggleston: But at the time, he was the lead's leading pitcher and hitter.
• 1:30:08
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, they literally called him El Immortal, and, like, just the faces I'm seeing from everybody else, I'm knowing that he's clearly more underrated than even I thought he was. I thought at least James, Derek, and Rob were gonna know.
• 1:30:26
  Mark Chiarello: Well, you know, I met Buck Leonard one time, and I asked him, you know, I said, I know everybody asks you who's the greatest, and you knew he was gonna say Josh Gibson.
• 1:30:36
  Mark Chiarello: And he didn't, he said, Martin DeHigo.
• 1:30:39
  Ruben Bolling: There you go.
• 1:30:40
  Mark Chiarello: It was, you know, he was Roberto Clemente, and Tom Seaver wrapped in one guy.
• 1:30:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 1:30:49
  Derrick Goold: He's It's one of my…
• 1:30:50
  Tad Eggleston: I re…
• 1:30:52
  Derrick Goold: He's one of.
• 1:30:52
  Tad Eggleston: the guys who just…
• 1:30:53
  Derrick Goold: I don't have, like, a whole lot of…
• 1:30:55
  Derrick Goold: statistical track record, right? Like, so there's… there's legend that creates…
• 1:31:01
  Derrick Goold: And there's, like, rec… or there's stories of certain games, but, like, you know, Josh Gibson does have… we do know what some of his stats are, or, like… like, Oscar Charleston is another one, like, I wish I knew more… I wish I could see more of him, just…
• 1:31:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean…
• 1:31:18
  Derrick Goold: Amazing.
• 1:31:19
  Tad Eggleston: Reportedly, he started out as a great pitcher, too.
• 1:31:22
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:31:23
  Tad Eggleston: There was a biography on Charleston that came out recently that starts out with him and Bullet Rogan in…
• 1:31:30
  Tad Eggleston: the Pacific playing for the… the Buffalo Soldiers.
• 1:31:36
  Tad Eggleston: Baseball team.
• 1:31:42
  Tad Eggleston: And he was the star pitcher, and Rogan was the star catcher, and they were both the star hitters. And there were, like, 15, because they lied to get into the Navy.
• 1:31:54
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh, man.
• 1:31:56
  Tad Eggleston: And these, these are stories that I would love to… I mean, I, I…
• 1:32:02
  Tad Eggleston: I, like, we see so many history comics, we see so many,
• 1:32:08
  Tad Eggleston: historical fiction comics. I feel like the Negro Leagues are just packed.
• 1:32:14
  Tad Eggleston: Packed with stories that would be told so wonderfully in comic books.
• 1:32:20
  Eric Reynolds: There was a great, card collection that an illustrator put out.
• 1:32:24
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah.
• 1:32:24
  Eric Reynolds: years ago.
• 1:32:26
  Heidi MacDonald: Basing on the artist's name, but he did them in the style of, like, old tobacco cart or something. I know, I like those… that was a great set, yeah.
• 1:32:33
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not… I'm not spacing on the artist's name, he's here.
• 1:32:37
  Tad Eggleston: Are you kidding? Wait!
• 1:32:39
  Heidi MacDonald: No, I'm not joking! No, I thought you were joking!
• 1:32:41
  Heidi MacDonald: I thought you were joking!
• 1:32:42
  Tad Eggleston: That was… that was Mark Chiarello.
• 1:32:45
  Eric Reynolds: Nope.
• 1:32:46
  Mark Chiarello: No, there's no way, really? No, mine was.
• 1:32:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, there's another one?
• 1:32:49
  Mark Chiarello: 1989, the… that's.
• 1:32:51
  Eric Reynolds: I would remember if it was Mark.
• 1:32:56
  Eric Reynolds: Sorry, I was like, wait, what? Yeah.
• 1:33:00
  Mark Chiarello: I'm spacing on them. They're really nice, though, and they're not really narrative per se, but they do have good, you know, nice…
• 1:33:06
  Tad Eggleston: Aecdot.
• 1:33:07
  Eric Reynolds: It's about the players on the back.
• 1:33:08
  Tad Eggleston: Is this… is this the never-ending card set?
• 1:33:14
  Mark Chiarello: No.
• 1:33:14
  Eric Reynolds: My recollection is that it was just called, like, the, you know, the Negro Leagues or something today.
• 1:33:18
  Mark Chiarello: Oh, okay.
• 1:33:21
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Oh, another one!
• 1:33:22
  Heidi MacDonald: I know what you mean. I think I might have the…
• 1:33:25
  Heidi MacDonald: I think I might have a set of those kicking around here.
• 1:33:28
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't think he was a comic book artist.
• 1:33:30
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah. But he did…
• 1:33:30
  Eric Reynolds: Draw in kind of a bit of a comic book style, you know?
• 1:33:34
  Mark Chiarello: Yeah, I think it is that never-ending card set. He does…
• 1:33:38
  Eric Reynolds: I'd know his name if I heard it, but I can't remember.
• 1:33:40
  Mark Chiarello: It's, like, Chiardowski or something?
• 1:33:43
  Eric Reynolds: Yes, that, yes.
• 1:33:44
  Rob Neyer: Certowski.
• 1:33:45
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, he's great, he's phenomenal. He's been doing that set for, like, at least…
• 1:33:50
  Mark Chiarello: 10, 12 years?
• 1:33:52
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, very cool.
• 1:33:54
  Rob Neyer: He was on my podcast.
• 1:33:56
  Mark Chiarello: Oh, wow.
• 1:33:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:33:58
  Tad Eggleston: I missed your podcast, Rob. Why'd it go away?
• 1:34:01
  Rob Neyer: Low ratings.
• 1:34:05
  Tad Eggleston: You had higher ratings than I do, I'm not going away.
• 1:34:09
  Rob Neyer: Well, you're smarter than I am.
• 1:34:15
  Tad Eggleston: Most people don't know who I am, but Heidi McDonald, and you, and Mark Cirillo, and Dennis Kitchen, and James Sturm, and Eric Reynolds, and Derek Gold, and Ruben Bolling, and Mark Russell.
• 1:34:27
  Tad Eggleston: And this guy named Ryan Brown, who I haven't met in person yet, but… well, no, I did. I met you at C2E2 a couple years ago, and I told you, I've got a baseball!
• 1:34:35
  Heidi MacDonald: Thing.
• 1:34:36
  Ryan Browne: Was, was I, was I charming and funny, or was I, like, tired and distracted?
• 1:34:41
  Tad Eggleston: Mostly tired and distracted, because, like, it was… I managed to grab you as you were about to get hit with the massive 8 Billion Genies line.
• 1:34:55
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:34:55
  Tad Eggleston: I totally knew that it wasn't, like.
• 1:34:59
  Tad Eggleston: Wasn't a great time, but I wasn't standing in line to give you a business card.
• 1:35:04
  Ryan Browne: Oh man, well, I would have would have preferred to just talk baseball, that would have been… yeah, that would have been nice.
• 1:35:10
  Tad Eggleston: We, we did, we did for a minute or two, and then Charles was like, we gotta go. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like him, yeah.
• 1:35:18
  Derrick Goold: Are you on…
• 1:35:19
  Derrick Goold: Are you all familiar with the comics that Revolutionary Comics did of baseball.
• 1:35:27
  Eric Reynolds: Vegas.
• 1:35:29
  Heidi MacDonald: No, because they didn't get sued.
• 1:35:31
  Heidi MacDonald: The one where they didn't get sued.
• 1:35:33
  Derrick Goold: It's amazing that they didn't get sued.
• 1:35:36
  Eric Reynolds: They do get sued by a lot of people.
• 1:35:38
  Heidi MacDonald: Not me.
• 1:35:39
  Eric Reynolds: I do like baseball. These are, like, kids on the block.
• 1:35:43
  Derrick Goold: Oh, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't put it together. These are incredible. I found a whole stack of them in San Diego.
• 1:35:49
  Derrick Goold: And…
• 1:35:50
  Tad Eggleston: The last… the last time I was there, there were a bunch of them at,
• 1:35:56
  Tad Eggleston: Ides in… in…
• 1:35:58
  Derrick Goold: Pittsburgh?
• 1:35:58
  Tad Eggleston: Me too, yeah.
• 1:36:00
  Derrick Goold: Yeah. Yep.
• 1:36:01
  Tad Eggleston: In their dollar bin, all together.
• 1:36:05
  Derrick Goold: Hides is a favorite.
• 1:36:06
  Ruben Bolling: Are they comic book biographies?
• 1:36:08
  Derrick Goold: They are. Yeah, they're…
• 1:36:10
  Tad Eggleston: Bad, relax.
• 1:36:11
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, they're not great, but for lack of a better description, that's exactly what they are.
• 1:36:18
  denislkitchen: Isn't that the publisher who got murdered?
• 1:36:21
  Eric Reynolds: Yes.
• 1:36:22
  Mark Chiarello: Yeah.
• 1:36:23
  Eric Reynolds: It's still…
• 1:36:24
  Ryan Browne: What?
• 1:36:24
  Eric Reynolds: Open cold case in San Diego.
• 1:36:27
  Tad Eggleston: See, this I didn't know.
• 1:36:29
  Derrick Goold: Great. It's a publisher got…
• 1:36:30
  Tad Eggleston: Better and better.
• 1:36:31
  Eric Reynolds: The publisher was murdered. He… and he had a lot… he made some enemies, too.
• 1:36:36
  Derrick Goold: There's also a dark horse.
• 1:36:37
  Ruben Bolling: getting sued.
• 1:36:38
  Derrick Goold: The Dark Horse did baseball greats.
• 1:36:42
  Derrick Goold: the Jimmy Pearsall story.
• 1:36:45
  Tad Eggleston: That…
• 1:36:46
  Derrick Goold: Yeah.
• 1:36:47
  Derrick Goold: Maybe I have evidence, and I didn't know it.
• 1:36:53
  Mark Chiarello: Does anybody know that Publisher
• 1:36:56
  Mark Chiarello: from, I guess, the early 70s, they were a religious, I want to say, Christian publisher that… Expired.
• 1:37:02
  manru: Dick?
• 1:37:03
  Mark Chiarello: Expire. Yeah, I have a Johnny Cash one.
• 1:37:08
  Eric Reynolds: Yeah, they did that one.
• 1:37:09
  Mark Chiarello: Did they do any baseball, players?
• 1:37:12
  Eric Reynolds: No, I think the Tom Landry one's the only one that I remember.
• 1:37:16
  Eric Reynolds: They did do other greats, though, like, Bonsie, the girl who loves the swastika.
• 1:37:21
  Mark Chiarello: Right, right.
• 1:37:22
  denislkitchen: Alright.
• 1:37:23
  Eric Reynolds: They're classic.
• 1:37:25
  Eric Reynolds: across on the switchblade.
• 1:37:27
  Heidi MacDonald: Thompson.
• 1:37:28
  Tad Eggleston: Tyre sent Rob and I some… some baseball comics that he was…
• 1:37:32
  Tad Eggleston: came across. Do you remember what those were, Rob? I didn't… mine are down in boxes.
• 1:37:37
  Rob Neyer: Mine are out in another building in my backyard. I do not… they were biographies of 3 or 4 different superstars, Brooks Robinson being one I remember.
• 1:37:47
  Rob Neyer: But I don't recall the others. They're really well done.
• 1:37:49
  Tad Eggleston: I remember… yeah, I remember there was a backup story on… on Josh Gibson in one of them that made me happy.
• 1:37:57
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, those were pretty well done.
• 1:38:00
  Eric Reynolds: the cartoonist, Peter Bagg, I know some of you know who he is.
• 1:38:05
  Eric Reynolds: Did a comic book called Hate for Phantographics that was hugely popular in the 90s, and he and I are really good friends, and
• 1:38:13
  Eric Reynolds: we had an idea in the mid-90s that we were gonna try to pitch the Mariners on doing a promotional giveaway comic.
• 1:38:21
  Heidi MacDonald: by us.
• 1:38:23
  Eric Reynolds: And it was something, you know, we were talking about.
• 1:38:25
  Ryan Browne: over beer, and…
• 1:38:27
  Eric Reynolds: never got around to it, and then probably around the time Safeco T-Mobile opened up, they actually did do a comic book giveaway, and I went and I got it, and it was very bad.
• 1:38:40
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, it's… it's incredible.
• 1:38:41
  Ryan Browne: source.
• 1:38:42
  Heidi MacDonald: It's incredible, the, you know, nerd crossover with baseball now, because… and I mean, I guess it's other sports, but, you know, because there's so many baseball games, they have so many promotions, and you know, one of the hottest nights
• 1:38:55
  Heidi MacDonald: at, Citi Field with the Mets was, Hello Kitty Night.
• 1:38:59
  Eric Reynolds: Here, same as the other.
• 1:39:00
  Heidi MacDonald: They had to have two. I think they do it when the Dodgers come to town, which, okay, but sure. And, you know, the aftermarket on the giveaways was huge, and, I mean, obviously they have the Star Wars night, and, you know, the Marvel Comics, you know, MCU, and yeah. Yeah, there you go.
• 1:39:16
  Ryan Browne: There you go.
• 1:39:17
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice!
• 1:39:18
  Ryan Browne: Heidi, did you get… did you get a George Costanza under his desk?
• 1:39:24
  Heidi MacDonald: I did not get that one.
• 1:39:26
  Ryan Browne: Oh, man.
• 1:39:26
  Heidi MacDonald: I, you know, I didn't get, I got one, it was actually Lady, Mrs. Met. I got a Mrs. Met giveaway. That was the… I think that was the, the 9-run inning game.
• 1:39:37
  Heidi MacDonald: So, you know, just… that was the one bright spot in the whole night, but
• 1:39:42
  Heidi MacDonald: But yeah, I mean, it's amazing that…
• 1:39:45
  Heidi MacDonald: that, you know, because I always say there's kind of nerd world, you know, the most popular thing is nerd stuff, I mean, it is insanely popular, then there's sports stuff that's insanely popular, but I say the third thing is, like, BravoCon, you know, like the Kardashians, that's very popular, but that does, like, no crossover with nerds.
• 1:40:03
  Heidi MacDonald: Right? But I used to say, you know, jocks versus nerds were obviously
• 1:40:08
  Heidi MacDonald: you know, polar opposites, but now the fact that they've… they've united for money is great! You know, money brings everyone together.
• 1:40:16
  Tad Eggleston: I… I think particularly baseball has always had kind of an attraction to the same.
• 1:40:23
  Eric Reynolds: For those of us of a certain age.
• 1:40:25
  Tad Eggleston: very cold.
• 1:40:26
  Eric Reynolds: Cards and comic books are…
• 1:40:28
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah.
• 1:40:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:40:29
  Ryan Browne: Yeah.
• 1:40:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but also, like, the ways that baseball is different, you know, it's not judged by time, it doesn't have set dimensions to its field. You know, baseball lends itself much more to epic narrative than any of the other sports do.
• 1:40:47
  Ryan Browne: And I will say from, like, the artist's perspective.
• 1:40:53
  Ryan Browne: Being an artist who likes sports, made me, you know.
• 1:40:58
  Ryan Browne: like, there are not many artists that really liked sports growing up. Like, me at art school, I was on our… I was on our ice hockey team, that our… that my art school had.
• 1:41:09
  Ryan Browne: But, the art school had an ice hockey team? Yeah, we were called the Naz.
• 1:41:14
  Ryan Browne: So that the fans would say, go Nads, and we were just, like, a joke.
• 1:41:20
  Ryan Browne: And, but… But I know a lot of comic book artists that are baseball…
• 1:41:27
  Ryan Browne: And I think a lot of it comes from being able to listen to baseball.
• 1:41:35
  Ryan Browne: Because I spent, you know, I spent a lot of… like, I always liked baseball growing up, but it wasn't, like, until I was…
• 1:41:43
  Ryan Browne: You know, professionally drawing all day, or coloring,
• 1:41:48
  Ryan Browne: that I was, like, every single day there was a game, and I could listen to it, and be working, and, you know, like, my visuals could still be focused, and I could follow what was going on, and so that,
• 1:42:02
  Ryan Browne: there's a bunch of other comic book artists, and we all talk… we all talk baseball, and we all… Yeah. You know, like, I… I used to…
• 1:42:11
  Ryan Browne: I used to intentionally not find out what would happen in every night game, so that I could listen to it.
• 1:42:20
  Ryan Browne: During the day when I was working the next day. And I did that for years. And so, like, there is no other sport that even comes close, in terms of being able to listen.
• 1:42:32
  Ryan Browne: And, like, follow the game, and, you know, it's so moment-to-moment, but it's, you know, it's always focused on, you know, one or two individuals at a time, and, like.
• 1:42:44
  Ryan Browne: I think that, for me, is what really made me fall in love with baseball, was…
• 1:42:51
  Ryan Browne: the fact that I could be listening to it while I was drawing, and it wouldn't, you know, take anything away from… from either experience, really.
• 1:43:00
  Eric Reynolds: I love when you're working and listening to baseball on the radio, and if you're, you know, if you get really focused in on what you're working on, you might kind of tune the game out a little bit.
• 1:43:09
  Eric Reynolds: But then, just from the inflection of the broadcaster's voice, you know when to instantly just kind of tune back in, and it's, like, completely intu- you know, instinctive, and I'm with you 100%.
• 1:43:23
  manru: I had a conversation with a friend about how there's no good football movies.
• 1:43:28
  manru: And when you think about, like, sports movies, it's like 90% of the good ones are either baseball or boxing movies. And I think that's entirely because it's about these individual
• 1:43:38
  manru: sort of narratives, these one-on-one sort of adversarial relationships, and you get a lot of different ones within a baseball game. You know, you get the third baseman against the batter running the first, you get the pitcher versus the batter, you get, like, the catcher versus the guy trying to steal second.
• 1:43:56
  manru: And it lends itself, I think, to storytelling in a way that… that… Really, no other sport does.
• 1:44:03
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, the… you know, not to keep talking about the Mets, but anyway, you know, their director, the director of the Mets games, John DeMarco, he got so much attention this year because he was using all these cinematic effects, and
• 1:44:15
  Heidi MacDonald: I don't know if anybody else is aware of this, but, like, on his Twitter feed, he would show, like, oh yeah, I did this shot based on, you know, something Brian De Palma did, or, you know, this was a reference to
• 1:44:28
  Heidi MacDonald: to Goodfellas, or… and, you know, he would show, like, you know, he was doing these incredible, like, wipes, and… and juxtapositions, and cuts, and, you know, there was one that was, like, based on the death of Boromir from Lord of the Rings.
• 1:44:43
  Heidi MacDonald: Starring Ryan Stanek, and it was, you know, I mean, that's the thing, and it's like, you know, nobody was like, oh, that's too highfalutin for us. Everyone is like, you know, oh my god, we're so into it, because he was just dramatizing the game.
• 1:44:55
  Heidi MacDonald: And… and showcases the beauty of the game as well, you know?
• 1:44:59
  Derrick Goold: Yeah. And then in baseball.
• 1:45:00
  Ruben Bolling: there's time to do that. There's time between, you can… it really takes its time. You know, the other thing that I think of when I think of the cross-section, the intersection between nerds and baseball, not just pop culture nerds, but also anybody… I bet there's some people here who play… played or play Stratomatic.
• 1:45:19
  Ruben Bolling: And that's why I was obsessed with that when I was, a kid, and well, and into adulthood, too.
• 1:45:26
  Ruben Bolling: And it's, you know, that's basically, you know, Dungeons & Dragons for, for baseball. And so, you know, you're simulating…
• 1:45:34
  Tad Eggleston: Before I played Stratomatic, before I knew Stratomatic existed, before I knew Dungeons & Dragons existed, I was creating dice games with my baseball cards.
• 1:45:45
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
• 1:45:46
  Tad Eggleston: It was, like, 9 working out the stats to figure out how many dice I needed to be able to have it work out right, how to set up…
• 1:45:56
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah, it lends itself very well to that, and you know, I just… kids just get… you can get obsessed with it, because you… you have a draft, and then you're competing against your friends, and it's it's… it's great, and my friends who I did it with, and I was, like, the nerdy kid who…
• 1:46:15
  Ruben Bolling: was into comics, and none of my friends were, and into, sort of, art, none of my friends were. They were all into sports, but we were all into Stratomatic. So it was a nice way to, to, that we sort of had this thing in common.
• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, technical difficulties over. Recording in progress again. We'll have to figure this out in edits. I now actually have to do editing. I normally don't do that.
• 0:12
  markchiarello: Did we all freeze, or was it just me?
• 0:15
  Ruben Bolling: I think everyone… I was… I was talking, and then I finished talking, and then there was, like, stunned silence. Let me check, let me check.
• 0:23
  Heidi MacDonald: Twitter!
• 0:23
  Ruben Bolling: I go, that really.
• 0:24
  Heidi MacDonald: Perhaps there's been a solar flare.
• 0:29
  markchiarello: I thought it was me, because I was… I had just asked the question about.
• 0:32
  denislkitchen: That's true.
• 0:33
  markchiarello: hard.
• 0:33
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh! No, Mark, it was the cursed card!
• 0:37
  denislkitchen: No.
• 0:38
  Heidi MacDonald: Who is the card?
• 0:40
  denislkitchen: Burba?
• 0:42
  markchiarello: Eli Grabraugh, yeah.
• 0:43
  Heidi MacDonald: No! Woo! Every time you say it, there's a solar flare.
• 0:49
  markchiarello: Do we know what's unique about this card?
• 0:53
  Ruben Bolling: What is it? No.
• 0:54
  Derrick Goold: glasses?
• 0:55
  markchiarello: a pitcher for the LA Angels, it's indeed not Eli Grubras, it is… Ryan Duren.
• 1:07
  markchiarello: In the photo.
• 1:08
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:09
  markchiarello: who went on to pitch for the Yankees.
• 1:11
  denislkitchen: Hmm.
• 1:12
  markchiarello: My, my hobby is collecting cards.
• 1:15
  markchiarello: That are, sort of, Screw-ups or unique ones, we all know that one.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:21
  Ruben Bolling: I don't know. What's that?
• 1:23
  markchiarello: I won't… I won't curse, but the famous FF bat…
• 1:26
  Ruben Bolling: Oh, yeah.
• 1:28
  markchiarello: Hmm…
• 1:29
  Derrick Goold: Mark, do you have this one?
• 1:34
  markchiarello: Yes, indeed I do.
• 1:35
  Ruben Bolling: I do too.
• 1:37
  markchiarello: Two!
• 1:38
  Derrick Goold: I do.
• 1:39
  Tad Eggleston: Two, I got that one because of you, Derek.
• 1:42
  Derrick Goold: I love this card.
• 1:43
  markchiarello: Eric.
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:43
  markchiarello: I got this because of you, because you showed it 2 years ago on.
• 1:47
  Tad Eggleston: So we both went out and got it because of Daniel.
• 1:49
  Ruben Bolling: You guys, can you explain it?
• 1:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:52
  Derrick Goold: So it's a night… yeah, it's the 1970 card of Kurt Flood.
• 2:00
  Derrick Goold: Right? Okay. And you see it says that he plays for the Phillies, right?
• 2:05
  Ruben Bolling: Okay.
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:06
  Derrick Goold: Well, he famously never played for the Phillies, because he refused to go. He refused to trade. And that is what led to the Supreme Court case.
• 2:16
  Ruben Bolling: That started the case, wow.
• 2:17
  Derrick Goold: Started the…
• 2:18
  Ruben Bolling: creation.
• 2:19
  Derrick Goold: free agency.
• 2:19
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
• 2:20
  Derrick Goold: Yeah, so I went and got that card. I have it here on my desk to kind of look down on me and remind me about…
• 2:26
  Ruben Bolling: Nice.
• 2:27
  Derrick Goold: That the… what the.
• 2:28
  markchiarello: Here's one of my favorites.
• 2:31
  Heidi MacDonald: Is that…
• 2:33
  Derrick Goold: Not… I'm glad I'm inspired… oh, that's cool
• 2:35
  Derrick Goold: I'm so glad you guys went and got that.
• 2:37
  markchiarello: It's the… it's the bad boy, Aurelio Rodrigo, who could probably hit… hit a curveball better than Aurelio Rodriguez.
• 2:46
  markchiarello: Mmm… I hope you don't mind me doing this, I just love you.
• 2:49
  Tad Eggleston: Not at all.
• 2:50
  markchiarello: That's not Al Leiter on that Yankees card. I don't know who it is.
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, that is… that is… the problem with… that one's the… I think that's the one that is Al Leiter, but it's working… missing the Yankee logo.
• 3:02
  markchiarello: No, no, that's not Allied, I know.
• 3:04
  Tad Eggleston: Because there were two… there were two mix-ups with that card. One of them was, it was the wrong player, and one of them, it was missing the Yankee logo.
• 3:12
  markchiarello: Right.
• 3:13
  Tad Eggleston: Because that was the first set I ever collected all of. That was the 1988 Topps Future Stars Al Leiter card that he was showing.
• 3:21
  markchiarello: This is not a baseball one, but… Whoops.
• 3:24
  markchiarello: One of my faves.
• 3:28
  markchiarello: Who's it, Mark Jackson? Yeah, Mark Jackson from Kicks.
• 3:31
  Heidi MacDonald: What's wrong with that one?
• 3:33
  markchiarello: If you look in the background, After killing their parents.
• 3:38
  Derrick Goold: Menendez Brothers.
• 3:39
  markchiarello: Brothers went on a spending spree, and they went to Madison Square Garden, saw a Knicks game, and there they are, right?
• 3:46
  Derrick Goold: there.
• 3:46
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh my god.
• 3:47
  Ruben Bolling: hard.
• 3:48
  Ruben Bolling: Wow.
• 3:49
  Heidi MacDonald: Wow.
• 3:50
  markchiarello: I don't think, I don't think Charles Manson's on a, on a baseball card.
• 3:56
  Tad Eggleston: No, no. But maybe a Beach Boys album.
• 3:59
  Ruben Bolling: You know, be sure that.
• 4:01
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, so last year, the question that was so popular that it kept us going in the email for, like, a month afterwards was, share your favorite or a favorite piece of baseball media.
• 4:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think Mark Speedy was the winner in terms of everybody went out and watched it to see Babe Ruth in a silent movie.
• 4:26
  Tad Eggleston: So, something, something baseball that we should go out and read, or watch, or listen to.
• 4:36
  Tad Eggleston: Or whatever.
• 4:39
  markchiarello: Well, can I… can I jump in and just ask a question to preempt that for a second, sort of related?
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: Sure.
• 4:44
  markchiarello: What's everybody's favorite baseball movie? I mean, absolute favorite movie.
• 4:50
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm…
• 4:51
  Derrick Goold: Major League.
• 4:52
  denislkitchen: I'd say, the natural.
• 4:55
  Heidi MacDonald: I haven't seen it in a long time. It's either the natural or Bull Durham, but I think Bull Durham.
• 5:01
  Eric Reynolds: I was gonna say Bull Durham. Yeah, I'm with you, Heidi. But I haven't seen it in years.
• 5:06
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah, Bull Durham is saying, but I… I wonder if I just feel the same way. I don't think I feel the same way about, Field of Dreams as I did when I first saw it. I think that is… Oh, A League of Their Own! There you go. A league of their own, which is a great one.
• 5:21
  Heidi MacDonald: If we rewatch Boldurum and find out it doesn't hold up, we can switch over to League of Dura.
• 5:27
  Tad Eggleston: I rewatch Bull Durham regularly, and at least I feel like it holds up. It shouldn't hold up, but for me, the original Bad News Bears.
• 5:38
  Tad Eggleston: Still, even though there are so many reasons why it shouldn't hold up.
• 5:43
  markchiarello: I'm still very nostalgic about Pride of the Yankees, the Lou Gehrig story.
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: I like Pride of the Yankees, they did really well with that.
• 5:50
  Ruben Bolling: Do you guys ever see Bang the Drums Slowly?
• 5:53
  manru: Yeah, let's give me my tip.
• 5:55
  Ruben Bolling: It's really a beautiful movie, yeah.
• 5:57
  manru: It's a great movie. Mostly because the natural was already taken, but yeah, the things are unfolding.
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: I… I…
• 6:04
  Heidi MacDonald: You are.
• 6:05
  Tad Eggleston: I think for love of the Game is criminally underrated.
• 6:09
  Tad Eggleston: I actually like that more than I like…
• 6:13
  Tad Eggleston: Field of Dreams. Bull Durham is still the best Kevin Costner movie. Baseball movie. But I like For Love of the Game as my second best. But I'll also toss out a… has anybody seen the, Bingo Long Traveling.
• 6:26
  Ruben Bolling: Moto Kings? So when it came out, so that long ago.
• 6:29
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really good.
• 6:31
  Derrick Goold: a book, too.
• 6:32
  Tad Eggleston: I'd love to rewatch that. That should go on my list. That'd be a great one to see.
• 6:37
  markchiarello: It holds up pretty well.
• 6:38
  Ruben Bolling: Oh, that's great.
• 6:42
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, I actually have a little piece of baseball media that, came to my mind, and I don't think I mentioned it last time.
• 6:49
  Heidi MacDonald: But I was driving around with my parents, and they love Paul Simon, so they listen to Paul Simon all the time. In fact, I can't get them to listen to anything but Paul Simon when they drive around, and in Maine, you spend a lot of time driving around. Luckily, Paul Simon's genius.
• 7:05
  Heidi MacDonald: So, but I did get them to listen to the entirety of,
• 7:10
  Heidi MacDonald: Still crazy after all these years. And there's that great song on there called Night Game. Does anyone know that song? Yes.
• 7:17
  Ruben Bolling: I know that whole album so well, I've listened to it a billion times.
• 7:20
  Heidi MacDonald: And night game. I'm not gonna try to sing it, but
• 7:24
  Heidi MacDonald: I'll just read the fourth, if you don't know it, that… there were two men down, and the score was tied in the bottom of the eighth when the pitcher died.
• 7:33
  Heidi MacDonald: And they laid his… I gotta read the rest. And they laid his spikes on the pitcher's mound, and his uniform was torn, and his number was left on the ground.
• 7:42
  Heidi MacDonald: Then the night turned cold, colder than the moon. The stars were white as bones, the stadium was old, older than the screams, older than these teams. There were 3 men down, and the season lost, and our tarpaulin was rolled until the winter frost.
• 8:00
  Heidi MacDonald: And it's a beautiful… it's a beautiful song. Really beautiful. I mean, the lyrics go… you can just read it as a poem, but of course, the singing and the lyrics and the music is great. It's a great song.
• 8:09
  Ruben Bolling: That's a nice choice, yeah, that's great.
• 8:11
  markchiarello: I don't… I really hate doing this, I don't mean to be, like, braggy, but I'm gonna for a second. I saw it about 4 years ago, 6 years ago, I got a call from some guy.
• 8:19
  markchiarello: And he says, I'm so-and-so. Paul Simon's a big fan of your artwork. And I'm like, Paul Simon who?
• 8:27
  markchiarello: He literally said, dude, Simon and Garfunkel pull Simon?
• 8:31
  markchiarello: And I'm like, why are you calling me? That's… I love Paul Simon. He said, but while Paul's coming out with a new album.
• 8:37
  markchiarello: And he's got a song on there, on the new album called Cool Papa Bell.
• 8:43
  Ruben Bolling: Oh, wow.
• 8:43
  markchiarello: And he wants to use your painting of Cool Papa Belle in the booklet.
• 8:46
  Heidi MacDonald: Oh, wow.
• 8:48
  markchiarello: So he used my painting, and I said.
• 8:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 8:50
  markchiarello: Well, what is he gonna pay me? Well, he's not gonna really pay anything, it's an honor, and I said, bullshit, I'm 60 years old, you gotta pay me, I gotta pay the rent, so he paid me something for it. Yeah. But I'm very proud of that, so I apologize for bragging.
• 9:04
  Heidi MacDonald: No, that's perfect! That's a great story.
• 9:07
  denislkitchen: Don't worry, because…
• 9:08
  Heidi MacDonald: He's a huge baseball fan, obviously, so…
• 9:10
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
• 9:11
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, so, Heidi, you're in New York, Paul's in New York, Paul clearly likes comics. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring Paul Simon next year.
• 9:21
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, there we go, yeah, yeah. You know, the funny thing is, if you could randomly get these people to sit on a podcast and talk about baseball, they would do it, you know?
• 9:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, like, if they… I mean, that's one of the reasons that I take some huge shots, particularly with this one, is that, like.
• 9:38
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes they're, like.
• 9:40
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody listens to his podcast. I can't possibly hurt myself, and I get to talk baseball for an hour?
• 9:47
  Ruben Bolling: That's fun.
• 9:50
  Tad Eggleston: Anybody else? We got two Paul Simon songs, which I'm gonna throw a song in, just because it's been going through my head. We've… it's finally been long enough since the Cubs won a World Series that it's become my favorite Cubs song again, because it doesn't feel…
• 10:02
  Tad Eggleston: out of date. Steve Goodman's Dying Cub Fan's Last Request is just, like, every team should have a song
• 10:11
  Tad Eggleston: that… Beautiful, and that… Specifically about them.
• 10:19
  markchiarello: My favorite baseball song is sort of baseball-related. Shel Silverstein, the, the Great Smoke Off.
• 10:28
  markchiarello: They hold in Yankee Stadium, and…
• 10:30
  markchiarello: pearly make and roll joints faster than this… I forget the guy can smoke them. They have this big to-do in Yankee Stadium.
• 10:39
  Tad Eggleston: Great smoke off, I love it.
• 10:42
  Ruben Bolling: That's great.
• 10:42
  Eric Reynolds: If we're gonna talk music, are any of you familiar with the band, The Baseball Project?
• 10:48
  Derrick Goold: Oh, I love the baseball project.
• 10:51
  markchiarello: What's that? I don't know what that is.
• 10:52
  Eric Reynolds: It's… it's basically half of REM, and a Seattle musician named Scott McCoy, who's in a popular
• 11:00
  Eric Reynolds: semi-popular, 80s, 90s indie band called the Young Fresh Fellows, and they just, write and play songs about baseball.
• 11:10
  markchiarello: No.
• 11:12
  Tad Eggleston: They've got one called Satchel Page Seds, they've got one called Harvey Haddock's.
• 11:16
  Eric Reynolds: And they're all very talented musicians.
• 11:19
  Tad Eggleston: Each hero goes to the moon.
• 11:21
  Eric Reynolds: Ichiro goes to the moon. Alright, can I… we have time for a quick little question, anecdote? Yeah. So, this kind of dovetails into some of what people have brought up about history and, greatest players ever lived.
• 11:36
  Eric Reynolds: Peter Bagg, who I mentioned before, cartoonist, did a…
• 11:40
  Eric Reynolds: did a story in, his comic Hate, that just happened to be titled, A-Rod Goes to the Moon.
• 11:48
  Eric Reynolds: And it was based on something I think his nephew had said to him in touting A-Rod's greatness, and
• 11:57
  Eric Reynolds: And it…
• 11:58
  Eric Reynolds: it got me… this World Series, going back to the World Series, too, I saw more of Alex Rodriguez, you know, this fall than I've seen in 30 years. And it was really interesting, sort of, seeing him leaning into his Mariners history, because…
• 12:17
  Eric Reynolds: I also just re… I also just watched the first episode of this Alex vs. A-Rod series on HBO, I don't know if any of you have seen it, but, the first episode is all about his years in Seattle, and…
• 12:30
  Eric Reynolds: It is… it was shocking to me how much I realized that Seattle Mariners fans, myself included, have, like, just completely gaslit Alex out of Mariners history. He's just, you know, he's… he's so far…
• 12:45
  Tad Eggleston: him when he was at the Mariners.
• 12:47
  Eric Reynolds: Well, I did two, but then he left.
• 12:49
  Eric Reynolds: No, I know. And then he alienated… I mean, he basically alienated all three franchises he played for, but… but it's really a remarkable… it was really remarkable to go to see, like, and be reminded of…
• 13:03
  Eric Reynolds: He was as singular as Griffey or Ichiro, you know, for 7 years in Seattle.
• 13:11
  Eric Reynolds: And yet, like, he… nobody ever talks about him, when rehashing, you know, Mariners history.
• 13:22
  Tad Eggleston: I… I remember… like, his rookie season was, like, was 97, right? So it was, like…
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: One of those last years before it was really easy to get up-to-the-minute baseball stats on the internet. So, I would buy Baseball Weekly the moment it came out.
• 13:44
  Tad Eggleston: Just so I could see if Alex Rodriguez was still hot, because I was in Chicago, I wasn't getting to watch him play. I was just seeing these… this line for this 19-year-old that was just ridiculous, and continued to be ridiculous week after week after week.
• 14:02
  Tad Eggleston: It was, like, updating the stats in the baseball computer game that I played to make certain that the A-Rod on my team was as good, and dreaming of him being at Wrigley Field.
• 14:12
  Eric Reynolds: It was an interesting lesson in just, like, how your collective memory, you know, can really be… pretty,
• 14:21
  Eric Reynolds: subjective, I guess.
• 14:22
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
• 14:24
  Ruben Bolling: Hey, let me, since I looked it up, let me give you one more baseball song.
• 14:29
  Ruben Bolling: There's a band called Wolfpeck.
• 14:32
  Ruben Bolling: And they have a song called, One for One DiMaggio. It's relatively new, it's only a couple of years old.
• 14:39
  Ruben Bolling: And, it's just a fun song about,
• 14:43
  Ruben Bolling: baseball fandom, being a baseball player, and there's even, I think, a reference to Stratomatic in it. I actually DM'd the writer to see if it really was, and he did not respond.
• 14:55
  Ruben Bolling: But the line goes, I've got the golden glove, I've got the minus 3, I'm in the local news, all-state high school team. Minus 3 is a, is a defensive rating in Stratomatic for
• 15:08
  Ruben Bolling: Anfielder's arm, would be a good arm. So, I'm pretty sure this is Stratomatic. It's just a really fun… so, Wolfpeck's a really fun band.
• 15:17
  Ruben Bolling: And this is a fun song about… really about baseball fandom and being excited about your team. It's a very, genuine and open-hearted song.
• 15:27
  manru: Well, we're talking baseball songs. I think one of the best I've ever heard is, Joe DiMaggio's Done It Again by Billy Bragg and Wilco off the Mermaid Avenue album, which was written by Woody Guthrie, actually, while Joe DiMaggio was on his 56th hit, streak.
• 15:47
  Tad Eggleston: I love that song.
• 15:54
  Tad Eggleston: And I've heard it live.
• 15:57
  Heidi MacDonald: Dennis, do you have a baseball song or a baseball media?
• 16:04
  denislkitchen: Not offhand. Can't think of a song that, no.
• 16:12
  Tad Eggleston: Any other baseball media, then? It doesn't have to be a song. It just seems that we've all, all done songs this year. Last year was a lot of movies. This year's a lot of songs.
• 16:23
  Tad Eggleston: But really, any media whatsoever, something for us to go off and…
• 16:27
  Ruben Bolling: Even… even comics.
• 16:28
  Tad Eggleston: baseball, yeah, please, comics. Enjoy baseball over the off-season. That's, that's…
• 16:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there are winter leagues. I find myself occasionally watching, like.
• 16:44
  Tad Eggleston: There are a couple of, like.
• 16:46
  Tad Eggleston: south of the Equator leagues that have their… their games on…
• 16:55
  Heidi MacDonald: Well, we have about 9…
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: websites.
• 16:56
  Heidi MacDonald: 90 days, 90 days until spring training, really nothing. That's true. You know, it's gonna last on by, like…
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: Like, watching the Dominican Winter League is fun. Actually, the baseball season starts on my birthday in San Francisco this year. Second time ever that there's been an actual baseball game on my birthday.
• 17:17
  Tad Eggleston: And this time it's in the United States. The last time it was in Japan, it was one of those, like, early series. Yeah.
• 17:25
  Derrick Goold: Netflix will have all the game… will have all that day, right?
• 17:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's only one game on the first day. I think Netflix has the opening day for the rest of the seasons. Oh, okay. So I think they get the 26th. I'm not certain.
• 17:38
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 17:39
  markchiarello: I don't…
• 17:39
  Derrick Goold: Yes, Lord.
• 17:40
  Derrick Goold: Pizza.
• 17:41
  markchiarello: How do you guys and gal watch your games? The MLB package, or…
• 17:47
  Heidi MacDonald: I pay for Hulu, so I get SNY, you know?
• 17:51
  Ruben Bolling: Yeah, me too. Yeah.
• 17:53
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 17:53
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, because I can't possibly miss one minute of Gary Keith run.
• 17:58
  Ruben Bolling: But now, MLB will allow you to get your home market games
• 18:04
  Ruben Bolling: For an extra co- for an extra charge, so…
• 18:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 18:07
  Ruben Bolling: You actually can cut the cord now and not get a hole.
• 18:11
  Heidi MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm… Yeah, I go back.
• 18:13
  Tad Eggleston: and forth.
• 18:14
  Ruben Bolling: Dude.
• 18:15
  Heidi MacDonald: You know, I'll say one… I'm gonna throw one last topic, even though I just said I have to go, because my cat is starving, and I gotta go feed the cat, but I'm gonna… one more thing, real fast, though, and we gotta do a lightning round, though.
• 18:27
  Heidi MacDonald: this was the… one of the highest-rated World Series of all time. Baseball viewership is way up. I mean, it's… it's kind of exciting.
• 18:36
  Heidi MacDonald: that baseball has really caught on with a younger generation. It's all due to the pitch clock 100%, but I'm just really excited about the fact that that's kind of become reinvigorated.
• 18:48
  denislkitchen: Yeah, great, good point.
• 18:50
  Derrick Goold: The last, did anybody see Aphis? Were anybody able to see Aphis, the movie, this past year?
• 18:56
  Ruben Bolling: No.
• 18:56
  Eric Reynolds: Oh, no, I haven't. I wanted to.
• 18:58
  Derrick Goold: That's worth going to. Especially, like, as an off-season, kind of, like… you know.
• 19:04
  Derrick Goold: The chicken soup for the baseball fan soul kind of thing.
• 19:08
  Ruben Bolling: Never heard of it. What is it about? What is it?
• 19:10
  Derrick Goold: It's about the last game played in a community league.
• 19:15
  Derrick Goold: At a ballpark that is about to be bulldozed for a school.
• 19:20
  Heidi MacDonald: So it's.
• 19:22
  Derrick Goold: And there's a lot of different, like, conflicting emotions about it. You know, community growth, good thing. Community history being paved over, bad thing.
• 19:32
  Derrick Goold: Spaceman Lee shows up for a little bit and pitches.
• 19:36
  Ruben Bolling: Really?
• 19:36
  Derrick Goold: Amazing, yeah.
• 19:38
  Ruben Bolling: Cool.
• 19:38
  Derrick Goold: It's qual… it's good, it's good. It's kind of, it's not your usual baseball
• 19:44
  Derrick Goold: It's not your usual baseball movie, because it doesn't have that grand third act.
• 19:49
  Derrick Goold: Climax or somebody wins, but it is your classic baseball game in the sense that you might go to it and nothing happened.
• 19:57
  Ruben Bolling: Right.
• 19:58
  Eric Reynolds: I'm glad you mentioned that. I've wanted to see that, and I forgot about it. Just made a note.
• 20:04
  Tad Eggleston: Well… Thank you all again for the fourth annual.
• 20:07
  Derrick Goold: Yeah.
• 20:07
  Tad Eggleston: 22 Panels, Baseball and Comics Roundtable. We'll see, hopefully, many of you next year, and many of you in the time in between. And for all of these wonderful baseball people, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.
• 20:21
  Eric Reynolds: Go Ams!
• 20:22
  Heidi MacDonald: Yay!