There are only so many ways to describe a podcast, as regular readers of these little blogs already know. Because they are cut in two by our ad break, it is easy enough to mentally divide them; because they all begin with Drew's signature skronking vocal overture, they all have a shape. But what does it mean, really, to say that something like half of a podcast is given over to soda-related discourse, and that the other component parts are about going to a Marlins game, the demi-crisis in WNBA officiating, and also a frank discussion about the frustration of duffing the preparation of a familiar recipe? You can put all that together and reach 100 percent of a podcast and 63 minutes, but also those things do not, on their face, fit together at all. I realize that. And yet:
Much of the credit for this unusual and patently unstable mixture goes to our guest, Sports Illustrated's Emma Baccellieri. All of these are, somehow, her areas of expertise, and as such the decision to divide the episode between MLB (her former beat), the WNBA (her current one), and her beloved carbonated beverages (her lifetime beat, true passion, and the subject of her newsletter The Soda Fountain) more or less made itself. If this is maybe a strange thing to make a podcast out of, it is also just what Emma herself is made of.
We began with Emma celebrating the experience of enjoying a baseball game as a civilian and pondering the question of if and when it is OK to leave a game. We discussed visiting the Marlins Home Run Feature as a holy pilgrimage, the liberation of no longer feeling compelled to know everything about every guy on every roster, and Emma's story of eating dinner at the ballpark on the night of a game that didn't happen. I copped to making myself mad about the Pittsburgh Pirates at the trade deadline and why, and while I think I made a decent enough case about the unspoken social contract of workplace conduct the word "diseased" was nevertheless used to describe me having an opinion about this at all. Which I thought was rude.
The WNBA portion of the episode was confined mostly to the league's officiating issues and how to fix it. Emma, who has written well about the way WNBA officiating works and doesn't work, talked about some possible solutions and the way this issue functions as a reflection of the league's growing pains and some longstanding hierarchical issues in the league's relationship with the NBA. Briefly, we touched on a patently insane Wall Street Journal story about Caitlin Clark and the one (1) thing it gets right.
Pretty much everything else is ice-cold soda pop. This sounds stranger than it probably was. There was some Fresca chat and a consideration of the Frescaissance in general, a disquisition from Emma on soda seasonality, a mostly failed two-headed attempt to describe what Moxie is and tastes like, and Emma admitting to enjoying "sipping sodas" like a fine whiskey. Drew's questions about Coke Freestyle machine best practices were addressed in an informed and respectful way, the MAHA soda agenda was addressed less respectfully, and various regional sodas and the broader concept of beverage regionalism were celebrated. I somehow wound up talking about the siren song of the Ortega taco seasoning packet in a longish digression on the distinction between authentic and inauthentic cuisines. Red was unanimously deemed "a flavor."
The Funbag gave us a chance to share our experiences of fucking up a recipe you make all the time in front of families and friends, and the agony of being someone who'd really care about that. A final question detailing some absolutely outlandish retail misconduct at Great Clips was suitably scandalizing. It was a good way to head off into our one-week podcast vacation. Like any elite sipping soda, there's a lot of unexpected stuff on the palate, and plenty to savor.
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