It was not so long ago that the return of baseball had me in my feelings in a positive way. Kelsey McKinney and I talked about it on the podcast just two weeks ago, but while the bump in my emotional wellbeing that accompanied the mere presence of baseball games on my television was real, it was not enduring. Which, beyond the fact that he is a delightful guest and has a new book coming out, is part of why we asked Michael Schur back onto the pod this week. We needed someone who knows how to get upset at a seasonally appropriate level.
A great deal of this is on the Mets, who are in midseason form re: soft groundouts to second base but otherwise playing as if there were a gas leak in the dugout. As Drew noted, some portion of it is absolutely on me as well, but that's just how baseball is. Stuff phases in and out of significance over the course of a long season, players slump and surge, and generally the outcomes even out over time. Knowing all this is nice but does very little to make the bad stuff more bearable in the moment. From a podcasting perspective, it is better to get upset—as both Mike and I did about our respective sleepwalking teams of choice—than it is to maunder through some cope about regression to the mean. Although we did that, too.
Before we got to the baseball stuff, there was a generous serving of the free association that is a trademark of every Schur episode. Much of it was about the strange experience of encountering zombie brands in the wild, our personal strategic reserves of blank CD-R's, and the unparalleled satisfaction of downloading a .exe file from Limewire. Chalk this up to the hazards of having three middle-aged dudes on the same podcast, but I enjoyed it.
From there, we celebrated MLB's new ABS technology for removing the least satisfying stuff from the game (this was Schur) and adding new stupid stuff by revealing which players are goofy enough to challenge like idiots (this was me); talked about the fun of players processing how to deal with this new agency, and teams figuring out how to use a new tool; and charted umpires on the Paul Blart to Observe and Report continuum. An invitation from Drew to consider the World Baseball Classic hangover allowed us to air some grievances about the miserable vibes of Team USA, best practices in concealing a team's chud ethos, and the hazards of booking a different sociopathic ex-Navy SEAL to come in to talk to your team before every game. Drew made an impassioned case for real swords in MLB dugouts, and while Schur and I made equally impassioned arguments against I don't think we convinced him.
There was other stuff, too. I told a story about Elon Musk losing at poker, Mike considered the reverse of the famous One Red Paperclip parable going on in the Red Sox infield, and I celebrated the bartender who wrote the very complicated name of Pirates prospect Jhostynxon Garcia on an index card to demonstrate how serious he was about the team. The transition from this topic to Mike explaining his preference for elevated gruels and pastes was smoother than you'd expect. The pivot to a Funbag question about people watching videos or whole movies on their phone, while on the toilet, was, I would say, exactly as smooth as you'd expect. The podcast ends there, as it absolutely should have.
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