It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of a waste. This week, with Drew out of town, and the long and contentious libel charges I brought against her and Megan due to their fish-related calumnies in that episode resolved in my favor by a court of law, we remedied that. The result was an episode that touches upon picking up hobbies as an adult, the hazards of the MLB partial season-ticket package, and how to be good at going to restaurants while pointedly not accusing me of any food-safety improprieties.
We'll have some more formal MLB preview stuff on the podcast in the weeks to come, but feel free to consider this week's highly informal discussion an overture to all that. We discussed the usefulness of baseball as a place to put your stress and mental illness, offered an adult perspective on eating nine hot dogs in one day, and celebrated the eephus of Phillies utility man Dylan Moore. Whom I confused with Tyler Moore. I'm not apologizing for that, and will never, I'm just getting it on the record. Kelsey talked about "The Bad Grannies" and the other members of her Phillies ticket-package family, we compared our early-season live baseball experiences, and shared our early impressions of baseball's grand ABS experiment. Kelsey also spoke on Baseball Sainthood, a Kelsey Original Concept developed in collaboration with the Elias Sports Bureau; we celebrated a newly canonized Baseball Saint, bemoaned the decline of annoying-style baseball offense, and talked a bit about the Elias Sports Bureau, which was a towering mythic part of my young fandom and is now a place that Kelsey sends weird emails.
After the break, we pretty much abandoned the sports talk in favor of Life Stuff. Kelsey discussed her accurséd sewing class creations and we talked about the challenges of adopting a hobby as an adult, trying to figure out how to be bad at stuff, and the importance of being willing to get hurt/humbled/owned in any new life pursuit. We also discussed a shared quasi-hobby of ours, which is going to restaurants, and more specifically trying to be good at going to restaurants. We addressed my experiences at my first friends-and-family service, which Kelsey helped prepare me for, and the benefits of being a high-quality patron, like getting to try the weird Chartreuse and root beer cocktail that the bartender has been tinkering with. This is a little bit goofy, and I do keep my streak alive of confessing to weird food stuff on Kelsey pods, but we also talked about the thrill and necessity of communal experiences and other people's noise in a way that was earnest and sincerely felt. We brought the same combination of daffy earnestness to this week's Funbag question, which concerned the origin and importance of in-relationship bits and shared home memes, and gave us an opportunity to talk about our respective internet information-gap relationships, the experience of watching Love Island competitors realize that other people are real for the first time, and Kelsey's number one relationship gag-meme. I will not tell you the origins of "We're slaying, Annabelle!" but I can already attest that it's catchy.
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