Last week I made an appearance on Mike Ferrin's Sirius XM radio show, and had a nice time. I wasn't asked to do anything I don't usually do in my normal life, beyond not cursing for 20 minutes, and enjoyed talking baseball. Ferrin, professional that he is, asked me at the end of my appearance to deliver a sort of elevator pitch for our podcast. Me, semi-professional that I am, struggled mightily to do this. I am proud of the podcast, I have fun doing it and pretty much always enjoy listening to it, and yet having to describe it to people in a way that makes it sound like something they might enjoy was more difficult than I thought. Looking back, the issue was just that my appearance was a week early. If I'd done it after this week's episode, I would've been able to say "we had Lindsey Adler of The Athletic on, and had a decently wide-ranging conversation about baseball after talking about dogs for 10 solid minutes." That is what this episode is, and it is also what this podcast is.
Lindsey covers the Yankees, and so there is a notable amount of Yankees Chat in the monitors here, although to be fair that will only be an issue if you can make it past me doing Corgi Voice during the first ten minutes. But, speaking as someone who does not really like them at all, the Yankees are interesting in the way that good baseball teams are interesting, and interesting as an example of how good teams can get better, and what trying looks like in a sport where a plurality of teams are mostly not. Given how much airspace/headspace has been devoted to the slow-motion Juan Soto trade debacle, on this website and elsewhere, it was refreshing to talk about teams that are trying to win, and how a locker room full of alpha red-ass individuals figure out a way to do it together. The Yankees are not the only team working on cracking this problem, or even the one with the most advanced or effective approach in that area, but lord knows it is more fun to talk about teams working on that than teams sweatily trying to dump the best young hitter in the sport so that they will be more appealing to some ultra-rich cynic.
While we tweaked the usual order of things by sneaking in some stupid stuff up front, there was plenty left over in the back third of the show. While our exercise in remembering a guy wound up leading to more (Yankees-related) baseball talk, there was also a glimpse into what The Ballwriter Lifestyle is like for Lindsey, a brief nod at Drew's new habit of watching movies at like 7:00 a.m. on Saturdays, a brief and affectionate objectification of Jimmy Garoppolo and a consideration of some reliably perverse Funbag questions. Also, if you want to give points for pre-cognition, Lindsey called the deal that sent Andrew Benintendi from the Royals to the Yankees minutes after their game ended on Wednesday night. We also talked about the right way to wash your socks, or more specifically talked about whether such a right way exists, but I'd probably leave that out of the elevator pitch if I had to do it over again.
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