There is still a mostly dead mall I have to visit and another day of meetings and such, but I'm prepared to call the Defector offsite in Atlantic City a qualified success. This is mostly because my criteria for assessing this kind of thing are kind of a mess. Seeing some dolphins horsing around more or less cancels out a hotel-wide internet outage that postponed the recording of this episode; some of the most critically dire bar vibes I have ever encountered at 10 p.m. anywhere in the world are counteracted by seeing a security guard happily dancing to Kool & The Gang's "She's Fresh" on the casino floor the next morning. None of this is reasonable, really, but that is not the kind of thing a person (or flourishing media company) comes to a place like this for.
If the deep jankiness has sometimes made it harder to do the things we actually did come here to do, it has also added some depth and color to the experience. For instance, I doubt this week's episode would have begun with 10 minutes of discussion about youthful fallacies re: how close and how fun gambling trips actually are. I know that I wouldn't have gotten to talk about what I can only describe as The Private Rutgers Football Viewer Room, sitting, so tantalizingly close and so obviously closed, just off the floor of one of the sports books we visited. It will be up to the listener to determine how good that is or isn't, but it is addressed.
That first chunk notwithstanding, and especially for an episode that's just Drew and me, the rest of the pod is decently disciplined. I guess it's a World Series preview, although that bit comes after a discussion of what was one of the happiest fan experiences of my life as a Mets fan. There's not too much Mets gristle—it would be rude for me to lay out, for instance, my preferred bullpen strategy for next year where someone might hear it—and more about the happy feeling of surprise that ran through the season and the fun of cheering for a team that is outperforming even the most outlandish fan expectations. My analysis of the NLCS is pretty light beyond an attempt to parse the extent to which the Dodgers beating the Mets asses made the end of the season easier to take.
And then we got to the World Series. The Dodgers and Yankees are, and pardon the jargon here, both really good, and both decently likable given that they are, respectively, the Dodgers and the Yankees. There's some analysis there, in terms of each team's unusual magnitude of guys who seem less obviously and obnoxiously on-brand than usual and the fine points that will likely be as crucial in deciding the outcome of the series as the performances of the team's centerpiece stars. We talk about those stars, too, but also about the teams' relative unwillingness to give away outs with lousy at-bats—I will, again, boost Kathryn's blog about the Dodgers just not chasing bad pitches here—and their ability to steal them with their strange and strangely effective bullpens. The Blake Treinen facial hair issue is addressed, with as little bias as I could muster.
After the break, we pivoted briefly to NFL chat, as Drew and I compared and contrasted our reactions to the tragicomic collapses that both Deshaun Watson and Aaron Rodgers have endured this season. Watson was so bad it was difficult to fully to enjoy him failing, much as he deserved it; and anyway he is gone now. Rodgers we have discussed before, and since which nothing much has changed—he has remained just bad enough to lose, and still Rodgers-y enough to be obnoxious and weird about it. We discussed the fine points of aging gracefully (and less gracefully) as a quarterback, made the inevitable Joe Flacco comparison, and wrestled once again with what Drew described as the "heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made the most beautiful throw you've ever seen" issue. I look forward to revisiting the Rodgers bit every couple of weeks deep into the winter, or until he decides that he wants to go host Based Jeopardy on Rumble and walks away from football entirely.
There was time for a few Funbag questions—time moves differently down here on New Jersey's more despondent barrier islands—and so we closed by considering which processed food product has remained the most consistent. This led, as it must, to a Polly-O String Cheese appreciation station, and to an anxious consideration of the possibility that our beloved Extra Toasty Cheez-Its could be permitted to decline by irresponsible corporate parentage. We also considered the question of why sports league websites are invariably so weirdly, unusably bad. Conspiracies were considered and dismissed, although it was hard to land on a completely convincing answer. All we had to do was look out the window to know that sometimes things just kind of decline.
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