Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1932: The Best of Baseball Twitter

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

With the future of Twitter uncertain, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley welcome Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus and Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz of Fox Sports and Céspedes Family BBQ to draft the best tweets and traditions from more than a decade of content on Baseball Twitter (plus a Past Blast from 1932). (Warning/preview: Prepare […]

🎵 Cause Elon, you're making me so sad 🎵 🎵 Cause I calculated the math of our birthdays 🎵 🎵 And I had a head start at the best of days 🎵 🎵 Two years plus 86 days that all went to waste 🎵 🎵 Oh Elon, you're making me so sad Cause the race I wanted to have was How much of a race Hello and welcome to episode 1932 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Riley of Fangraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. From time to time we do drafts of things we like about baseball and today we are drafting things we like about baseball twitter specifically there actually are things we like about it there are a lot of things we like about it and we are joined today by three people who have sent some good tweets in their day

or at least a lot of tweets whether Whether they're good is debatable, but I guess that's what we're here to discuss. So we're here, first of all, with a friend whom I have described in print as an accomplished shit poster, which he proves the truth of every day, Craig Goldstein, Baseball Prospectus Editor-in-Chief. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I felt the comment about a lot of tweets, but we'll see if the good was specifically for me. Yeah. And we are also joined by more moderate tweeters, Jake Mintz and Jordan Schusterman of Cespedes Family Barbecue and Fox Sports and the Barbercast, the Baseball Barbercast on SiriusXM and other podcast places. Jake and Jordan, welcome back as well. It is so good to

be with you, Ben. And also, I would just like to say that Jake and I just had, we literally just had lunch half an hour ago in person, IRL. We had not seen each other in months. So I don't know if, but now we are back in our separate recording locations. So I don't know if that's going to make the remainder of this recording just totally unbearable because we might be referencing the sandwiches we had at lunch. We'll see what happens. We have a lot of real-life experience that we can now pull on. It's nice to see Jake again. I've got to be honest. Good to see you too.

Yeah, the place we were hanging out in my house still smells like you, Jordan. I miss you already. Did you guys kiss? No, I don't think so. I don't think we did. Where were the sandwiches from? Oh, whoa, whoa. No free ads, Craig.

Let's be careful now. I'd like to know offline. The sandwiches were from Patreon, Craig, whoa. No free ads, Craig. Let's be careful now. I'd like to know offline. The sandwiches were from Patreon, Craig. Wow. But yes, we've been... Thanks to our Patreon supporters for the sandwiches. But yeah, you guys, whatever else you may have done or not done, you did collude on this draft. We heard.

It was revealed before we started recording that you came up with a list jointly. So you're aware of each other's strategy. This is serious business here, obviously, drafting. And so this is collusion. This probably violates the spirit of the draft. Ben, don't tell Andy Martino, okay? I was about to say Andy's going to report on this. Well, I guess that's off the draft board now. Weed by Andy Martino, the prompt collusion investigation. That's a little, there's some little recency bias there i mean we're going to be digging back through the through the archives here while i will say yes we do technically have the same draft board some of these tweets mean a little bit more to each of us than the other so you know i don't think we have the exact same board also we have the same twitter account so it doesn't make sense that's true

that's also that's true i would i would like and Andy Martino's tweets to be off the draft board because he blocked me after I made fun of him saying a source close to the action but not in the room or something like that. A well-placed source not in the room describes. Well-placed. Not perfectly placed, but somewhat close proximity. Yeah. So we have come not to bury baseball Twitter, but to praise it. Or maybe we'll do a bit of both because Elon Musk is currently trashing Twitter. He is laying people off for giving them great reason to leave. He is seemingly just deactivating useful services left and right. He is repelling advertisers. He's reinstating suspended accounts. He's tweeting and trolling through it. And it seems like there's some chance the service will just break. Basically, Twitter has been on a vigil for the last week or so, just waiting for it not to work anymore. But perhaps a better chance that it will just gradually get worse and possibly drive people away, though we all know how rare it is for people who quit Twitter to truly stay away. But we've reached the point where Jeff Passan is trying to make news breaking on Instagram a thing. So that's how desperate things have gotten. No, I don't think it's going to happen,

Jeff. But if Twitter does die, then this can serve as a memorial, an Irish wake, if you will, for baseball Twitter and the good times that we have had on that platform. And if it doesn't die, then this will just be a Thanksgiving-themed gratitude draft of things that have brought us joy over the past however many years we have actually been on Twitter. And I can't claim to know whether Twitter is a net positive or net negative for humanity, but I do know that as much as we joke about it being the hell site and a cesspool, and as much as it is also those things, we don't actually want it to end. I've been contemplating its demise and preemptively feeling its absence. How would I find information? How

would I quote classic tweets like the ones that we're going to draft here? How would I contact people? How would people find me? And how would I find them? I guess we would manage, we would survive. Even Jake and Jordan were born before Twitter, right? So we have all known a life without it, but unless a perfect replacement popped up, we would miss it. And internet lightning doesn't always strike twice. Sometimes a Google reader dies and everyone mourns it and wants something just as good or better to come along and it isn't really replaced. Or maybe Twitter replaced Google Reader for a lot of people. Anyway, there isn't necessarily going to be a perfect proxy waiting in the wings. So let's value it while we have it and while we have had it. And that's what we're here to do

today. I'm so ready. I'm so ready for this. I'm not at all ready for this. Of course, Meg, it's a draft. We know. This is the most I've prepared for anything. We've all been preparing for a decade, whether we knew it or not, just lurking on Twitter. Some of us tweeting more often than others, but all of us at least passively consuming some tweets. And not everyone who listens to this podcast is as extremely online as we are. And that is fine. If you have also been on Baseball Twitter, then some of what we discuss will probably be familiar to you. But if not, this can be a guided tour of the funhouse.

This can just be a sociological, anthropological experiment where we document some things that have brought us joy. And we didn't really discuss ground rules so much here. So the way that I thought about this is like we could draft specific tweets. We could draft specific Twitter traditions, things that baseball Twitter people do or say, or it can't just be specific tweets, but it can't just be accounts. We have agreed that we cannot just draft our favorite Twitter accounts. It has to be a bit more specific than that or certain genres of those accounts tweets. So I guess that's enough

preface. I have no idea whether we will all have the same things on our boards. I know Jake and Jordan do, but the rest of us, but this should be fun. Yeah. So Meg has requested to go first in this draft and I have granted that request yeah i asked to go first because uh true to effectively wild draft tradition and perhaps even more true than usual my prep might have been wanting but that's not my fault i had to run fan graphs you know i had to i didn't have time for sandwiches or lunch of any sort but But I think that this one sets the stage well. I would like to draft with the first overall pick a tweet from one Ken Rosenthal.

At MrSugarPenis, read the column. Yes. All caps. This is the Bryce Harper, LeBron James of this draft. There is no doubt. It is the ur-ex the example of baseball Twitter. It brings together so many of the things that we both like and dislike about it. Right.

The unintentional comedy of a respected newsman like Ken Rosenthal giving credence to and reiterating Mr. Sugar penis. I mean, really, what what is better than that? It also describes the dynamic that I think has come to define many of our experiences on Twitter, which is, what if you, even for a moment, looked at the thing you're complaining about to understand what it said? And so I think it is the perfect baseball Twitter tweet. And I would like to take it first overall.

Great pick. Yeah, I was trying to find that tweet earlier. I'm not sure it exists anymore. I think it may have been deleted at some point. Yeah. I don't know what could possibly prompt Ken Rosenthal to delete his tweet to Mr. Sugarpenis. But at some point that seems to have happened. So all that's left is people quoting it or manual retweets of it. And it was a long time ago. Like it was what, like 10 years ago or something like that. Yes, it was the 8th of March 2013. And I think that the best archive of it is from a knock graphs by Dane Perry. Two tweets for your considered consideration in the triune interests of baseball, media, social and dong jokes. I present to you with minimal commentary, two tweets that the reader may find of arresting relevance. And then we have Ken's tweet and also at Jed Hoyer, spanking it. It should be noted that neither tweet is particularly recent, just as it should be noted that each tweet is particularly timeless.

Yeah. Hashtag save not graphs. That's great. Yeah. I have to say about read the column, Mr. Sugar Penis, that phrase has entered just my day to day life. I have said that to people who are not on Twitter or in the world of baseball and then found myself having to explain myself when I told someone to read the column, Mr. Sugar

Penis. Yeah, I totally agree. It's great. Like in just in everyday life, it's like, oh, a good example. Again, we just mentioned we're at lunch, right? Oh, you're looking at a menu at a restaurant and someone's wondering, oh yeah, I wish they had this. It's like, yeah, it's right there. They have the BLT. It's right on the menu. Just read the menu, Mr. Sugar Penis. And then I've said, it's like Jake said, I've said it to many people and I do

usually explain it. It feels like I owe it to humans who hear someone say that out loud in public to explain it to them. Yeah. Also, just the experience on Twitter of replying to people with disturbing names. Yeah. Like I've had just real conversations with people that have just like, you know, it's like piss blanket 47 or whatever. There was someone for a while that would repeatedly be in my mentions, not in a bad way. Like it's seemingly a smart person.

That was just young horse cock. And I was just going to say, it's the same genre because when people like reputable baseball writers, newsmen, as, as Meg pronounces it, they will sometimes, you know,

if they're replying to young horse cock at Young Horsecock on Twitter, who, according to their bio, is a lawyer. But when you have a display name like that, people will often just write it out, just reply to the tweet and address it to young horse cock just to expose the absurdity of this platform. There's one more of those kind of that category that I just sent to all of you, which is John Heyman saying thank you to at daddy dick bagel. But I think here's the other thing about this right i think that the mr sugar penis incident kind of opened our eyes to be like hey like take a second to look at who you're replying to yeah i mean a lot of us don't care right and we'll proceed accordingly but it's that is the other thing that it has kind of informed as we move forward as long as Twitter lives.

Yeah. But I want to make it clear. I'm not better than than young horse cock or Mr. Sugar. Yeah. Or certainly than responding to them. Right. Oh, no. Yeah. of any content creator on baseball Twitter or probably any subset of Twitter, which is that

people will treat the tweet about the thing as the whole thing. So I don't know whether it doesn't occur to them that you can click through. Despite what Elon said recently, Twitter has terrible click-through rates and it doesn't actually send much traffic to anyone's website, unfortunately. And so people will often interact with the tweet that leads to my article as if that is the entirety of the article. So whatever you see in that preview, just the headline and the subhead, that will be treated as the sum total, just the entirety of what I wrote. And people will respond to that without occurring to them, I guess, or without caring enough to follow the link to see if I said the thing that they're saying or maybe I responded to the point that they're making.

It's just entirely on Twitter, which I guess we kind of just keep it to Twitter for better or worse. And so I sympathize with Ken. I don't even know what the column was. And I don't know what Mr. Sugar Penis was saying or what he had not noticed, but it's just, it's universal. It's very relatable. So good. All right. Can I go? Sure. Do it. Okay. Well, I'll take one that is sort of in that genre, I guess. It's a tweet about a Reddit comment, but I think it's still admissible because the tweet itself is great content and has been shared many times in the past several years. And that is Grant Brisby's tweet about the provenance of the Jose Quintana trade, which was source Jose Quintana to Cubs for four players.

Katy Perry's booty hole had it first. Parentheses via wet butt 23. And he linked to and screenshotted the White Sox subreddit where indeed Katy Perry's booty hole was the first to report that Jose Quintana had been traded. And that was backed up by Katy Perry booty hole source, which was wet butt 23. And that was from July 13th, 2017. And that's sort of absurd in the same vein, I guess. And I just love that that tweet exists and that Grant followed the convention of baseball newsbreakers crediting each other, which I don't know if anyone was planning to draft that as a thing. It's on my board board so i don't know i don't want to steal

anyone's pick if anyone was going to pick that it's just it's similar it's obviously what grant is riffing on here but the fact that you have the news breakers we know who they are who have their their etiquette when it comes to crediting each other for who was first on a thing yeah and often it was like one second before the other person. And sometimes they get in little snits about someone who didn't give the proper credit. And look, they're all trying to break news at the same second. And maybe comes to crediting someone else who reported a bit of news like 30 seconds before you did. There will be hell to pay if you do that. Yeah, I had wet butt 23 on my board. I was just going off memory. I did not.

I did not remember Katy Perry's booty hole. So shame on me for that. But I did have and I don't think it's I had it under one category, i had like unconventional newsbreakers so i wanted to throw in yeah on mine that do you there's the summer of like 14 year olds breaking news yes yeah this was on our board jake wesley is the one that i remember is this your pick you wanted this no no no i had this under the same category as okay as like wet butt and and the randos that I'm saying a lot of there's a lot of editable material here no we won't edit any of it but

we're going to have to put a blanket oh no I meant for someone if you want to you got wet butt and the unhorse cock create a Craig soundboard yeah exactly and knee belt Rodriguez I think oh my, my goodness. Yes.

And people who went on to be reputable professionals, right? Yeah, like Devin Fink. Chris Cotillo, I think. And Cotillo, yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. And that blew my mind at the time that I've never aspired to be a baseball newsbreaker. But part of why, I guess, is that I thought that would be hard. And I don't

want to discount the fact that a bunch of teenagers did it. I'm sure it took some hustle, but it turns out that I guess just blanketing people's DMs or replies or whatever, and just spamming them and being like, give me some news, even though I have no credentials or track record of breaking anything. Like that was a viable strategy. Like you could get something out of agents for that. And that seems to have subsided slightly in recent years. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, for a while, we all had to know who MLB underscore AL underscore NL was. And that was a certain period of time. Yeah. Right. And Robert Murray was one of that group too, I think. Yes, yeah, good call. And, you know, like people have gone on to have like full-time professional baseball careers and be beat writers and everything, just like from having gotten into the business that way, which like would not have been a route, I don't think, for any earlier generation.

Like, I don't know that you could have just gone to the winter meetings and hung around and pestered people to give you news and then broken it in your non-existent newspaper. It would have been tough to do. Ben, are you telling me that what you do on baseball internet as a teenager might not necessarily have to define you as you get older and you can change? Well, if you delete your tweets. Oh, okay. Let the boy hold the baby is all I'm saying. If you judiciously scrub some of your ill-advised tweets from when you were a teenager. Yeah.

Okay. Okay, cool. Thank you. All right. Craig, what's your actual pick? Oh, I'm up next. Okay. I cannot.

Jeez. I feel like I have so many options here. I can't believe we're three. We're now. Well, I guess I'm up next? Okay, I cannot. Jeez, I feel like I have so many options here. I can't believe we're three. We're now, well, I guess I'm the third pick. We're three picks into this. And I have the option to take Sam Miller's race tweet. Yes. Yeah.

To me, I think this was right up there with Ken Rosenthal in the first overall discussion. But yeah, I mean, I love this race trade. Who'd they get? Who'd they give up? Yep. That's a classic. And by the way, again, if I'm bogarting someone's pick here, you can just claim this, but I was actually going to lump together with Sam's race tweet, your Craig Goldstein's Billy Bean tweet, because very much the same genre, right? Because Sam's tweet is about, you know, basically like being biased toward a sabermetric team, sort of, and just believing that whatever move they make is good. And your tweet from 2015, which is in brackets, Billy Bean does 19 things to get his team slightly cheaper, but slightly worse. Quote, yes, I see it. And then in brackets, Nat Seinscherzer, quote, makes no sense. That one very much same idea and

has had a similarly long shelf life. So those kind of go together in my mind. I will always take being in company with Sam Miller, but I won't pretend I was going to do that. in company with Sam Miller, but I won't pretend I was going to do that. Yeah. If you had drafted your own tweet, that probably would have been gauche, but I can do it. I hate to flatter you, but you've done some good tweets here and there. We'll go to my head. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So Jake and Jordan, I don't know if you have exactly the same pref list here or whether it's not ordered. But I don't know. I guess we can go in alphabetical order.

Would you like us to draft separately or together? Separate. Separately? I'm jumping on separately. Separate people? You have separate Twitter accounts? Yeah. You're not a hive mind?

We do now. We did it for a while. We can celebrate more things this way. That's also true. All right. Well, should we do alphabetical? No, Jordan, go ahead. I'll go ahead.

Listen, we've offered up. I think that the Samuel L. Ray's tweet and Craig's tweet are great because they are hilarious and a legitimate commentary on baseball, right? But I'm just going to go back to September 9th, 2011, when Peter Gammons tweeted, buy her a washing machine. And Peter Gammons tweeted, buy her a washing machine. I had Peter Gammons. Well, I had typos, but it's not. I mean, I think there's a whole genre here. I think flops also.

Flops was very high on my list. Yes. Peter just tweeting things that I don't think he knew he was tweeting. Of course. 100%. It's two distinct genres, really. It's like butt tweets, and it's tweets that presumably he thought were texts or DMs or something.

Just to be clear, everyone, Ben means tweets done by his butt, not about butts. And also not from the Twitter account PeterGammon'sButt, which might or might not exist. Not the Matt Gelb ButtsButtsButts tweet either. But we just need to get this one out of the way. I mean, like you said, there's a lot of

P-Gammo to pick from. As I know, Craig might have some. There's some other Craig-adjacent ones we could bring up on this episode. Yeah, I have Gammon'sDunks later. we could bring up on this episode. Yeah, I have Gibbons Dunks later. Okay, but this one, especially the time that it was, right? 2011. And you know how on a tweet, it'll show like what kind of Twitter app it came from.

It says Twitter SMS, which does suggest to me that he was just trying to text somebody. And instead, now, but again, but I think about this all the time because not only is this, you know, this Hall of Fame writer Peter Gammons, who's still 11 years later churning out legitimately great articles. It's that I just – even in regular conversation, when would you be telling someone to buy her a washing machine? And so I know we're not really talking about baseball anymore, but I just wonder who her, who is her, why does she need a washing machine? What was

the occasion? And it just kills me. I just, it just makes me smile. Well, cause you could argue that Peter Gammons has had more control of the pen in the field of baseball than to anyone ever, right? Right. That he is a master of the craft. And yet he is not a master of this craft. And I find that to be- That is such a nice way of putting that. I find that to be very humanizing. Yeah. This man who I think to many of us who grew up reading him,

viewed him as a giant, as a titan. And he's just like us. Yes. Really. Yeah. That's one of the great things about Twitter. It's like it's a very democratizing platform, right? I mean, you can be a big shot in real life, but you might be bad at Twitter.

And someone else who hasn't really raised their public profile in any way might be amazing at Twitter. And people excel at that. And it's a totally different skill set. Some people possess both, but it doesn't necessarily apply to both. And so you have people who get discovered for being incredible at Twitter, and then you have people who are already well-known from something else, and then they get exposed on Twitter. Or they just become, you know, kind of like grandpa's tweeting again kind of figures, right? And so I love that. Like, one thing I love about Twitter, not even baseball Twitter specifically, is that, like, people are really funny, you know? Like, in real life, like, when you're just, like, going around and talking to people to people, like not everyone has great one liners. And sometimes you think of these things later.

And on Twitter, yeah, it's a platform where you can just tweet out whatever the last thought you have. And that was what it was initially. But it's also a place where you can kind of curate these like smart things that you have to say or funny things that you have to say. And like Twitter makes me laugh all the time. Like it makes me appreciate people's sense of humor. On the other hand, if I like Twitter search any joke, then I realized that like 50 million people already made exactly the same joke. And then that makes me think that no one is actually funny or original. So kind of cuts both ways, but this is, I think you're right. This is a great thing about Gammons. So are we sharing other Gammons greatest hits here?

Are we saving them? We can. I mean, this feels like the time unless Craig wants to save his personal interaction. With my pick, I would like to take pure Gammons dunking on Craig. Okay. Do I get a wraparound actually?

Do I get two? Yeah, I think you do you do yeah i think it's a snake draft and i also think i you know i look i don't want to declare myself winning ahead of time but i'm in two of the first round drafts and i've selected a second you know another that's why you're here the author of one and the object of another yeah craig like one one way to view that is that you're winning yeah the other way to view it is that it's really just a um you know it's an accurate reflection it's not always good to be in the mix my friend yeah fair enough and like look you're gonna make mistakes given the volume it's kind of like of like pools having so many ground into double plays. It's a volume shooter. It's a reflection of longevity, but also some

of them are double plays. Nolan Ryan had the most walks too. Some of them could have stayed in the drafts potentially. Refresh our memory. Wait, what's the dunk? On November 10th, 2014 uh nick caffardo

like we're in court or something yeah uh nick caffardo the late nick caffardo who is now a hall of famer tweeted red sox have lost pro scout galen carr and director of player personnel David Finley to the LAD, the Los Angeles Dodgers. And Craig Goldstein quote tweeted this innocuous little tweet and said, bet they're fucking nerds. To which, which is just so aggressive.

There wasn't... No, no, no, no, no, no. To which Peter Gamins responded, never let stupidity hold back a tweet. Two of the best evaluators and best people in the game. And Craig backtracked so hard. Craig went by that motto for the rest of his Twitter career. And Craig said,

I was angrily mocking Steve Dillbeck's recent column. I don't know who Steve Dillbeck is for the record. He was an LA Times columnist. Okay. But my favorite part actually about this entire thing. So you say I was angrily mocking Steve Dillbeck's recent column. And then you double tweet. You desperate double tweet.

I have nothing but respect. Nothing but respect for Karn Finley. And I love that there are no likes. There was 140 characters back then. So you could get it all in one. There are no likes, retweets, or responses to the initial response to Gammons.

No one backed you up, man. No. Well, again, it was Gammons. There was no coming back from Gammons just ending you. But I don't remember the exact article, but Steve Dillbeck was like a Luddite kind of columnist at the time. And he was complaining about the nerd revolution underway in Los Angeles at the time. nerd revolution underway in Los Angeles at the time. So like I was making fun. I mean, like there's no way I'm sure Nick Cofarto did not care, but he wouldn't have known.

But like Peter, I don't know. It was a discussion. I mean, the other thing about a lot of Twitter and baseball Twitter is like, there's a topic at the time or like a subtopic that everyone kind of understands and you make like an oblique reference to it. And then it's just gone. Several within context yes yeah it seems like everyone really understood your

reference my my last question for you and then i will make my next selection where were you when this happened do you remember where you were when you got the notification absolutely i was uh i was in, you know, the apartment, I can make this very specific reference to you and Jordan. Do you know the apartment building across from the Chipotle in French Apartment? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I was in my studio apartment there, sitting at my desk, and I believe I probably started sweating profusely immediately.

I remember exactly where I was. Incredible. I have a couple of Gammon's tweets to shout out here. I have a whole archive. This came up not that long ago in Ringer Baseball Slack. And I found that when I just searched my G chats, when that was still like possible, I had like a ton of just Gammons tweets that I had sent to various people over the years, which helped me keep track of them. But a lot of them are unpronounceable, just because they're sequences of characters and letters and numbers and special characters. So there's one that's like

Lada Mad Anna in buns yi peddies free fallen dot dot dot so that was a good one great one but some of them like make even less sense than that there's one that's just like

so which is like maybe he was practicing for plops which was like apotheosis of this form. But also in the genre of the washing machine thing, which I've also puzzled over, like what could he have possibly been saying that?

I've wondered if it was like, was it a dirty joke or something that maybe he was making? Oh, come on, Ben. Not have wanted it. Ben, Peter. Maybe, like, I don't know. I know, I know. But in what other context would you say that?

But here's one that is certainly innocent and wholesome, I suppose. On October 24th, 2017, he tweeted, I'd love to see you when we get back from Houston. Just had dinner with John Keenan. Still one of the best, like you. I don't know who that was addressed to. John Keenan, I think, is a member of the best like you i don't know who that was addressed to john keenan i i think is a the massachusetts state senator yep that sounds right that yeah i would buy that from peter yep he also tweeted one that just said quotation mark baseball players are players period in the green home sits alex bregman i mean these are riddles for until the end of time yeah that was from 2016 he also tweeted one that uh well sometimes like

he gets political on there but like sometimes in kind of just a confusing way where like he tweeted uh i think it was october 22nd 2018 he tweeted a picture of the green monster like from foul territory on the third base side in fenway park and just said is this trump's wall yes why is he dragging his beloved Red Sox into this? This is a very strange decision. Yeah. Anyway, like the great thing is not that that he like accidentally tweets these things. I mean be like, oops, typo. I'll delete that one. But he treats it as if it's at POTUS or something. And it's just part of the public record forever. It's going to be archived in the Library of Congress, so why bother to delete it? So these tweets from like 2011, they're just like a sequence of numbers and letters. They will just always be with us as long as Twitter is. And that's great. I don't know if he doesn't know, like, does he not look at his replies? I was going to question whether he knew.

Right. Because he gets like tons of people like retweeting and quote tweeting and replying to like mock the tweets he didn't mean to send. But I don't know. Like, do you think he knows about notifications? Like, does he only access the home timeline? Maybe he tweets like adult children. He's like, they're out in the world now. They got to fend for themselves. You know, they got to find their way in the world.

These typos are no longer my problem. Yes. Although I guess it's ironic that he tweeted at Craig about Twitter quality control given this. But these are unintentional, unlike Craig's, which was fully intentional. I also, well, I want to add another kind of dunk that he had around the same time. It was April 2014. Matt Hollins, who used to write for Over the Monster and BP on the fantasy side a little bit, he tweeted, get the fuck out of here. Adam Eaton is what Matt tweeted.

And Peter replied, everyone who watches baseball but you knows Adam's makeup and skills. Wow. But they don't need obscenities. See, okay. Can I just say, this is what makes this category like why we keep expanding it because the thing about the craig dunk is not just that he defended him without the context of the dillbeck article whatever it's how it starts never let's do pretty hold back a tweet like same thing there like everybody but you dumbass like he's he's really just like bringing the heat it's

not just like correcting people for the sake of correcting people like he's got spice yeah and the other thing i think it speaks well of him that he follows people like yeah yeah in whatever year that was or or in over the monster but maybe not no but like the fact that he's not like, I'm Peter Gammons and I will only follow like the cream of the crop when it comes to like people who are accomplished. I will follow Craig Goldstein. Get owned, Craig. Wow.

Yeah. I thought this was Peter. We're going to have to do a draft of me getting owned on podcasts. Oh yeah. But like, no, like he's welcoming to like new members of the community and writer he's like supportive of people who come along like a lot of people have stories about

you know peter gammon's like he you know boosted my work or he encouraged me or whatever it is he's insanely nice and so even if sometimes he is like replying to end your life like at least he followed you in the first place. Like he, he, you know, he didn't have such high standards that he wasn't going to follow Craig Goldstein before Craig was like a big wig baseball prospectus editor in chief. So I think that is a credit to him. It is. And he is like, he's incredibly nice. And also I would point out, Matt replied to him, triple question mark. I like Adam Eaton a lot i'm probably gonna swear sometimes peter sorry yeah i mean yeah we listen everyone backtracks if peter comes for you you're gonna backtrack

yeah that's true you can't escalate all right jake you're drafting again i am and i am going to take an account okay or i know we said we couldn't take accounts but i'm going to do it to take an account. I know we said we couldn't take accounts, but I'm going to do it. You will let it slide once I say the account. It is Jose Bautista. That's fine. Jose Bautista, for those of you who do not know, used to play baseball. He did it very poorly and then incredibly well, and then very poorly again at the end as is the case with most of us but for the purposes of this conversation jose bautista follows do you anyone want to take a gander take a guess at how many people he currently follows on twitter two million uh no eight hundred and fifty one thousand people okay he follows eight hundred and i was gonna 851,000 people. Okay. He followed.

851,000. I was going to guess like 200,000. Yeah. That's a lot of people. And I did a little research, I will admit, because the question that comes up is why. Yeah. Why does he do this? I'm sure for most of you, you had the moment where you were like, oh, cool. I was like, Batista followed me. Yep. Then you don't feel special at where you were like, oh, cool. I'm so about to follow me.

Yep. Then you don't feel special at all. And then you don't feel special. Here's a quote I found when he was asked about it. Quote, being a celebrity in the limelight as an athlete, I feel like I need a lot of people supporting me. Social media is a big part of that. I want to make sure that the fans can get to know me.

If you talk about me or MLB or the Blue Jays, if you grow the game and give it awareness, my team is going to find you and follow you. Okay. My team. That almost sounds threatening. We're going to find you and we're going to follow you. Jose Bautista has tweeted twice since 2018.

Yeah. So I'm not exactly sure why he did this. He didn't even tweet that much at the peak of this either. He wants you to buy an Endy mattress, though. He does want you to buy a mattress. The last thing I'll say about this is

when this was happening, Jordan and I thought it would be funny to make a fake Twitter account and see how quickly we could get Jose Bautista to follow it. And the answer was about 12 hours. What did you do to demonstrate your value? I liked a couple tweets. Okay.

And pretended to be a blue jay. He was hooked. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. This is Irvin Santana is another one. I was going to bring him up too. They have the same agent.

Ah, okay. Maybe the same social media team. Hashtag smell baseball. Correct. Yeah, he follows like 217,000 people and is followed by fewer than 200,000. How many follow Jose Bautista? Does he get the follow back from everyone? Yeah, he's got a mil.

Okay. All right. Well, at least he's in positive territory with the ratio. We were once blocked by Irvin Santana, Jordan. Do you remember this? I do. That was really troubling. Did you not smell baseball?

That's funny. There was one year where Irvin Santana led the league in home runs allowed, I believe. Yes. In 2012, he allowed 39 home runs in a season. And he made a montage of all of them and put it online. And I guess he saw it. Did he do the exception to that?

Did Chris Resop block you guys? No, Chris Resop's a homie. What are you talking about? Chris and I. I'm just making sure. You know, I just was trying to see if you also made a montage of him giving up. Yeah, I wish we could draft that. That's, you also made a montage of him giving up. Yeah.

I wish we could draft that. That's a different podcast. That was not a tweet, right? I mean, that was, that was, you wrote that, I guess. That was extensive to talk about research. Oh boy. That was great. Yeah.

Yeah. These are like the, the, the Taye Diggs or the John Cena or the Yoko Ono of baseball Twitter where you get that little charge of like, whoa, hey, Taye Diggs followed me. And then, oh, Taye Diggs follows everyone. Okay. It's more like a problem if he doesn't follow you. Right. That's a good thing. You're really doing something wrong. All right. Jordan? Yes. I'm very excited for this. I'm really glad this is on the board. I know we've been dragging our feet here, but I'm excited that this is a 10, basically exactly the 10-year anniversary of this tweet, this Twitter interaction between two of the greatest players in our game today. Are you guys familiar with what Giancarlo Stanton tweeted on November 14th, 2012? Does this ring a bell? Does this ring a bell?

I think I know the interaction. I don't remember the original tweet, but if I can guess, it involves his last name backwards. Yes, yes. Well, I think the context is even funnier in some ways. Ben and Meg, do you remember this? No. This is vaguely ringing a bell. I'm going to know it when you say it. All right.

On November 13th, 2012, after another disappointing season for the, I guess, I think they were the Miami Marlins at that point. Oh, no. Yeah. Their first year as the Miami Marlins, the Marlins were really bad. And then what did they do after? They tried to undo their horrible offseason from before and trade Josh Johnson and Jose Reyes and a bunch of guys to the Blue Jays. And when they did that, John Carlos Stanton tweeted,

all right, I'm pissed off, plain and simple. Okay. Now this is 22 year old John Carlos Stanton voicing his displeasure. Little did he know he would have many more years of not winning. Of being pissed off. displeasure. Little did he know he would have many more years of not winning. Of being pissed off. All right, I'm pissed off, plain and simple. A 19-year-old Bryce Harper responds to this and says, you can always come play for the Nats. We will take you anytime. Get some red, white, and blue in your life. To which John Carlos Stanton responds, dang, bro, if only my last name backwards wasn't not Nats, which is there's so much here to really dig into. And I just love this because this is just the kind and tone and just everything about this interaction is just so unfamiliar with just like baseball players nowadays. Honestly, like the idea that I don't think Bryce Harper,

John Costant tweet at all anymore. Like this is just such a raw and weirdly, you know, like a dad joke from a 22 year old, but it's also a really clever one. Like it's just, and two of the most famous players at the time and still now, it just ages so funny in so many ways. And then I also think that this actually

got them in some tampering trouble somewhat later on with Bryce Harper. So I just love this tweet so much. Someone told Andy Martino, didn't they? Exactly. Exactly. So I just love this tweet, this interaction. And John Colston was then stuck with the Marlins for a lot longer and never ended up on the Nats. So there you go. I'm picking that interaction. It's a good one. All right, Craig. Okay. I'm going to take, God, there are so many good options. You guys, this is, this was a great idea. I am going to take, um, let's see. I'm sorry. I'm having a moment. You sound like me during. Yeah. You got to go a little bit bit more though to really sell it. That's how people know you're serious.

I'm going to take Jeff Sullivan's Jared Weaver fastball jokes as a genre. Oh, man. Very good. This is a very good pick. Go ahead. I have a few. If you see a baseball seemingly lying still on the ground, don't pick it up. It might be a Jared Weaver fastball.

Oh. Yes. still on the ground don't pick it up it might be a jared weaver fastball oh yes uh a top secret government drone program has been researching how to provide aerial refueling to jared weaver's fastball i don't this is like if you every fresh jared weaver fastball ends up with a five o'clock shadow okay you still haven't even gotten to my favorite one from what i from my record i don't i just pulled down like a bunch of the most recent ones i did not highly research it jared weaver always gets extra defensive support behind him because he gets to be his own catcher oh my this guy hasn't pitched in five years he's catching strays here he's uh i i believe he's on the uh

hall of fame ballot so he's uh okay i think these tweets are from from when he was pitching so yes this is from when he was dancing on his but it was like i don't know i love that it was such a reliable option i don't know what was your favorite jordan that you were thinking of yeah jordan what do you oh no mine was the her this is uh i think this was one of the first ones he did the one where it says jared weaver throws glove in frustration slash sits down slash stares straight ahead slash rests on hands slash picks at teeth and then it says in the end slash glove hits the wall yeah but by the way that's probably the best one here's here's the thing about this jared weaver is is now i don't think he was when he was playing is now very active on twitter so it's maybe only a matter of time before he digs some of these up yep okay it is my turn. I can't believe this is still on the board, but maybe it's just because

it's so obvious that no one wanted to pick it, but if no one picked it, then this draft would be a travesty, I think. So I've got to take the Joe Buck, oh God, yes tweet. I mean, if you had to narrow down baseball Twitter to one tweet, you could do a lot worse

than that. It may be the most engaged with tweet on baseball Twitter. I don't know that anything can beat that. And it's from Justin Clue. I hope I'm saying that correctly from baseball prospectus and the dirty inning podcast. And this was sent on October 28th, 2015. I don't remember what game prompted this. What was going on? What World Series game was going on on October 28th, 2015? I don't know. Someone looked that up. I guess it was 1.13 a.m. on October 28th, 2015. So it would have started on the 27th. Was it Madison Bumgarner's relief game? Oh, maybe. I was at that game.

Royals Giants. Okay. Well, it of course goes Joe Buck, welcome to the top of the 47th in brackets, sun rises, sun keeps getting bigger. Buck, yes. Brackets, world engulfed by flames. Buck, oh God, yes. And it's impossible to perform it. I think it's better to read it unless if Joe Buck were to perform it, maybe he has. It seems like the sort of thing that he would probably get a kick out of, but that might do it justice. But really it works better with print, I think, with the brackets and everything. But the great thing about this

is that it really does seem like something that might happen to Joe Buck because he does seem like there's an element of nihilism to him or something, or he's just kind of like presiding over like the end of all things and just making wry observations about it. And I like Joe Buck, to be clear. I quite enjoy him and I think he's funny. But this tweet just sort of sums up his demeanor on broadcast, I think. And it is timeless.

It's endlessly reshareable because without fail, there's going to be a long postseason game or there's going to be a long something or other. And this has become a meme that has, to some degree, I guess, transcended baseball Twitter. And I see people doing, oh, God, yes, tweets about all manner of things that take a long time, whatever it is. So this has just developed a life of its own and will never die as long as Twitter doesn't. I do want to make a correction. I was off by a year.

This was Mets Royals. It was game one and it went 14 innings. Damn it, Craig. Useless. Sorry. All right. Well, that had to be drafted by someone at some point. Oh, yeah.

No, that's an all-timer. And like you said, it's engaged with a ton. But but also i feel like we've all done our own riffs on it like it you know there's a lot of things that are like homages to it that are not even interactions with it but keep perpetuating its popularity right it's like david ross crab ring goon tweet or something like it will live on forever. Yeah. All right, Meg, we're back to you. Okay.

Well, it's sort of in a similar vein. I would like to draft the following at a baseball game. God caress America. When you make love, crowd begins booing, uh, stand behind her when you're inside her trash.

This is from, uh, I think Hegelbon is the originator. I forgot about this one. Trevor Strunk. Yeah, of that one. And it remains perfect. It is a perfect tweet. I feel more comfortable saying that on balance, Twitter has been bad for humanity

than I think anyone else on this assemblages. But this tweet was good. And it makes me laugh every time I read it. And I think of it every time someone sings a bad version of the national anthem at a sporting event, baseball or no. And I just have to say, like, as an aside, I know it's a really hard song. You know, it's a hard song to sing. It's a really hard song to sing without any sort of backing music, which we often requested of people. I think that's called acapella. That's the word I wanted. But I just think that we don't pick good people to sing the anthem a lot of the time. We pick people who are

bad at singing. And it's weird, especially when that happens in major metropolitan areas where presumably you have an opera company. Or when it happens in New York, I'm particularly confused because I'm like, aren't you just like bursting at the seams without a work Broadway actors who would love to come to like Shea? Oh, it's not Shea anymore. Whatever it is now. City Field. City Field and sing the anthem or like get a guy with a guitar or gal with a guitar. Get a person with a guitar. Like, what are we doing? Why are there bad anthems? There's no excuse for this. I also find it funny when at arizona fall league they tend to just play like an instrumental track and then people clap at the end it's like a pre-recorded anthem and they clap and i'm like no one involved in the production of that can hear you they're not here

every single college baseball game i played in for four years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like the Yankees playing Kate Smith's God bless America. She's been dead since 1986, but she's still bringing down the house with the God bless America Yankee Stadium. Yeah. Every time I read this tweet, I laugh. And I also want to point out back to back picks for the Dirty Union podcast. So good for them.

It's true. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess back to back picks for meg as well if we're doing sneak here i get to go again yeah you do okay all right then i would like to draft i did some research while you guys were talking that's why i was so quiet i would like to draft this gem from andy money 69 i can't wait to take my kid to a baseball game daddy what's going on shut the fuck up i'm calculating win probability jesus christ oh this is such a good one that's really good i i considered that for my first pick that's a tremendous tremendous value it's just the gem that remains unfortunately relevant a lot of the time i don't think there's much to add i think that's

just a perfect tweet yeah yeah all right i i don't i don't want to add any i just do we get to i have another andy money tweet that i could just throw in with this which is clay rapata he did the hello mother hello fada song but with clay rapata it's it's very good i i will share all of it but i'm i'm not gonna sing it for the benefit of everyone but i i can give it to ben to put in the rundown or whatever perfect this is sorry i'm gonna now pump one of my own tweets here craig if you don't mind uh if our love is tragedy why are you ryan flaherty if our love's insanity why are you ryan flaherty. If our love's insanity, why are you Ryan Flaherty? I listened to that song the other day and I was just belting Ryan Flaherty. I think he just got promoted. I'm pretty excited for that guy. Go Ryan Flaherty, go. All right. I'm going to take a tweet by another soft tossing pitcher,

not Jared Weaver, but Dan Heron. and this is from October 25th 2016 and Heron tweeted two years ago I beat Corey Kluber one to nothing today I walked my two pugs while wearing a pug life t-shirt life comes at you fast just perfect

post career self-deprecation which he has mastered on Twitter and I find myself thinking or saying life comes at you fast fairly often. And whenever I do, I'm thinking of the pug life tweet from Dan Heron. Isn't his Twitter handle literally I throw 88? Yes, it is. Yes. That just reminded me, Dan Heron is great. That also just reminded me of all of the Brandon McCarthy ones, which I did not think to include. But shout out to McCarthy. There's a lot.

Yeah. If we were just drafting best accounts, Brandon McCarthy would be close to the top. So, yeah. All right. Back to Craig. Yeah. Oh, that I I honestly I had also forgotten about the I'm not going to pick it. But the one where he said, like, I guess it was the wrong time to ask for a threesome.

Yeah, when he got hit in the head, and he had his middle plate. And he's like once again torn, but I think I'm going to go with, I'm just, as a genre, I'm going to go with Bob Nightingale found poetry. Okay, this is an enormous genre. This is like calling music a genre. Be careful. What do you mean by this? Well, I'm only using one example. So if you'd like to add on or differentiate.

I would like to argue. No, I'm not taking all of Bob Nightingale. Okay, but aren't you effectively taking all of Bob Nightingale? No, because I don't. I had at least two separate sections. I have Bob Nightingale being dead wrong as a separate. That's another one.

As one example, a recent one from March of this year, he tweeted, it is now midnight and no one is moving as the two sides moving ever closer, ever so closer. That counts. Yeah. Yeah, that was great. That is, that's art. I will never, I have never and will never write anything as poetic as that. And he's just, you know, he's just out there firing them off. Yeah, I mean, we could

probably use the rest of our picks on Nightingale tweets. I think Jake might, but I'll skip Bob for a second for my pick. But I mean, yeah, the one from March, I mean, I feel like lockout tweets are also just its own weird

subcategory. Yes. And how the lockout tweets are also just its own weird subcategory. Yes. And how the lockout was covered gave us a lot. Lockout photos of people crossing pavement. Yeah. Exactly. But I'm going to go with kind of a layup. And I feel like we've really done some deep cuts here that some people who are on Twitter now or not on Twitter that much are like, what are these people talking about? Which is fine because this is what we should be celebrating.

But I'm just taking the Mike Trout tweeting where he's flying because it's – I mean that's in some ways the simplest joy we have on Twitter, the most reliable thing too. Although there was a point when he wouldn't tweet it, I was very concerned. When he was really consistent about it earlier in his career, when it was every road trip. If he missed it, I was then scrambling to see like, oh my goodness, is he got a hamstring? Did he stay back in Anaheim? Like what's going on? Why isn't he traveling? But he's still doing it now. And actually, it's actually worked in reverse in the recent years of his career when he has been injured so much. I feel like there have been times when he's tweeted he's flying to a city while still on the IL. And I'm like, oh, Trout back soon? Trout back soon? Maybe we have something here? So in some ways, he's breaking news. And he's Mike Trout. I mean, we talk all about his

weather obsession. But this, to me, this is really Mike Trout in his purest form. And I love it. Yeah. That and the number of exclamation points and the spaces before the exclamation point. We had a thorough stat blast breakdown of this from a listener who really crunched the numbers on Mike Trout's tweets. This was on episode 1912 last month, if anyone wants to search this out. But yeah, this was a great tradition. Had to be drafted. Now I'm just reading old Jeff tweets and they're all, you know, a lot of them are pretty funny, you guys. Even the new ones are funny. There aren't that many of them, but they're good.

He makes them count. Jake, is it Bob time? No, not quite yet. Okay. I don't know if you guys know this because many people don't, but your likes are public. Yeah. Well, Jake, also, formerly your favorites. This was another thing.

Your favorites are public. As we were digging back through Twitter, remembering that they used to be favorites. Rest in peace, fave star. What a great time that was. That was really, really simple times on Twitter. Anyway, go ahead, Jake. That is an important reminder on a larger scale that your favorites are public, but it is more of a reminder to one, Mr. Carlos Martinez, who is no longer in Major League Baseball, but maybe peaked in February

of 2014. He liked just a ton of porn, just like a waterfall of pornography and didn't know that it was public. And it ended up being a thing that Mike Matheny had to address at spring training. The old Deadspin headline, the Cardinals are very embarrassed by Carlos Martinez's wall of porn is just incredible. Mike Matheny, we don't want distractions. We're going to do everything we can to help, but you have to help yourselves incredible just incredible it makes sense that Matheny later went to the royals if only if only learned of the content with the royals then yeah oh it's so good maybe that's why you got pushed to the royals it's like Cardinals have way too much porn I gotta go all the way to

the other end of the spectrum yeah or Dayton Moore recruited him based on his response to the wall of porn. Listen, that's the sales pitch. Listen, you're not going to deal with this. Yeah. You promise. I miss when they were called faves because I was always amused every time I favorited something, just like the implication that this is my favorite tweet. This one right here.

This is my favorite. And the next one. Yep. I miss that terminology. We have likes everywhere, but faves. That was Twitter. So I want to take Bob typos, but

that might be too big of a category, but I'm going to do it. That's okay. Yeah. I mean, take a blanket, Bob. Here's some absolute bangers. I think I have about five of them. This is from October 30th, 2015 during the Mets Royals World Series.

If any of the Royals have any trouble with Syndergaard, he said, he'll be waiting for them. 660 feet, six inches away. Really far away. He'll be waiting. Really far away. Remember, there was a, during the World Series, like, Cinderguard was chirping with someone, and there was going to be a brawl, and I'll be ready.

660 feet, 6 inches away. I'll be in the center field concourse with that Shake Shack. You need me. 600, 600. I'll be in the center field concourse with that Shake Shack. Next one is from October 15th, 2021, during last year's free agency, where Bob says, left-handed pitcher Eduardo Perez signs the first big free agent contract of the winter, five years, $77 million with the Tigers. Congrats to ESPN's Eduardo Perez. He does not mean Eduardo Perez. He means Eduardo Rodriguez. E-per, as everyone calls him.

A couple more. This is the best ever. November 13th, 2020, Bob Nightingale tweets, Miami hashtag Marlins GM Kim Ang also believed to be the first GM of any North American men's sports league in history. Congrats to her. First GM. Yeah.

History. Milestone. Trailblazer. She, Kim Ang first. And then let me see. I think i have one more uh oh yes of course jordan max munch i think this is from this year i can't find it here we go bob nightingale october 12th 2022 during i believe this is game one of the nLDS between the Dodgers and the Padres. Max Munch now goes deep. And Dodger Stadium is rocking 2-1. It's incredible.

I think my favorite is Kim Ang, the first GM ever. It might have been the reading, but 660 feet really got me. He will be waiting. Okay. Right there. Over half a football field away. Yeah. I guess Bob is its own topic.

I mean, we talk about Bob typos is its one thing. Bob, just complete misinformation is another. Because Heyman is dropping typos like crazy with correct news, right? I mean, that's the difference there. But yeah, Bob, what a roller coaster. Jake, you forgot the one where he said that the Dodgers would trade outfielder Joe Peterson and Ross Stripling to the Angels for Luis Ranjifo. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that's why Artie Moreno nixed it because he didn't want Joe Peterson.

Oh, another Nightingale one. Do you remember when he tweeted about Freddie Freeman? He may be gone, but he'll be forgotten. They're yogisms, basically. Oh, I forgot that one. He may be gone, but he'll be forgotten. That's why Freddie was crying so much. So what is your theory?

Do you have a unified theory of Nightingale? Because people believe that this is a work, right? Like that he is wanting us to interact with his tweets. He's planting the typos. us to interact with his tweets he's planting the typos not necessarily the incorrect reports that has led to a reputation for any news he breaks being diametrically opposite what actually happened but like the typos like it seems like some of them like max munch that could be auto correct so like maybe he's he's not like proofreading but like at this point he mustn't know. Cause, cause he will delete,

right? Unlike Ammons. Sometimes. He will sometimes delete. All of the tweets I just said, I think are still up. Yeah. But he has some awareness.

Here is my theory, Ben. So I sat two seats down from Mr. Nightingale for the entirety of the NLCS and World Series in Philadelphia. Okay. And I think I saw him tweet a typo live. Exhilarating. I mean, incredible stuff. You were there.

I was there. I don't think he thinks about it. I think you are giving him too much credit with the thought that there's a deeper conspiracy afoot. I don't think there's a Nightingale deep state. I think he just doesn't care because him spelling things right has no impact on his life or bottom line. Really? So why would, whereas for, you know, like Craig, like Craig has to spell stuff right or he's not going to make a living. You know what I mean? Yeah, but it has worked to his advantage to some extent, right? Like on the one hand, he's kind of like a laughingstock, but also people are very fond of him.

And he probably like gets more people paying attention to him because he's not just the generic news breaker. He will break news that is sometimes correct and often incorrect, but in the most entertaining way possible. So like he definitely gets more quote unquote engagement when he screws up than when he does not. So like the incentives are aligned here. Call me close minded or, you know, old fashioned. I would say that being one of the top journalists in baseball, you should worry more about being a source for reliable information than you should. But he's not worried about that either. I understand, but I'm saying that maybe this has worked to his benefit. I just don't think it's a good thing for us. It's a good thing for the world of baseball that this is happening, I think generally, think it's a good thing for us. It's a good thing for the world of baseball that this is happening, I think, generally, because it's just fucking hilarious, right? But I think that for the safety of journalism, it's eyesight is notoriously bad. And so Bob takes a lot of really blurry pictures and posts them, even though you can't tell what's happening, which could be its own category here.

But I believe the theory is that his eyesight isn't that good. And so even if he's misspelling or adding an extra hundreds of feet to the mound, the distance between the mound and home plate. And if he's relocating a pitcher to Poughkeepsie? I just think he's not seeing it necessarily. I think he's typing it and not fully seeing it and also doesn't care. I think it is

a tack-on to what Jake is saying. Yeah, well, I'm glad he doesn't care because I would not want this to be spoiled for me by feeling ableist when I make fun of Bob Nightingale's typo tweets. But like, yeah, clearly, I don't think this bothers him. Just read it again. news because you know someone else might be on the verge of doing it but often his things are not the most time sensitive you know like his his typos are not all like i'm pounding the keys as quickly as i can because i got get this out one second before hayman or passen or rosenthal or someone breaks these news like you could take a second to read it over again and he does not i

gotta think so all right yeah i did consider taking blurry beat writer photos, which David Roth has written about. And Bob's not the lone purveyor of those. It's rarer now just because phone cameras have gotten far better. So it used to be that specifically spring training photos, right? And there is a defunct or inactive Twitter account that was just making visible beat writers, spring training photos through the chain link fence of just catchers and pitchers milling about. So that's great. But these days, you still get the odd press box angle where you can't really make anything out. But for the most part, cameras have improved enough that usually you can actually tell what's happening. It's not great photography, but you can at least tell what is being pictured. I'm not going to take that. I feel like I'm in the position of

taking the gimmies here, like the ones that we have to have. I was going to say, how many more rounds are we going here? I mean, I could start right off. I know. I planned for five here, and this is my fourth pick, I believe. I guess I gotta take Tungsten Arm O'Doyle, right? Someone's gotta take Tungsten Arm. So, Tungsten Arm. I think everyone knows what Tungsten Arm is, but

the fact that the Tungsten Arm O'Doyle tweet, again, another one of these that proved to have a life of its own, to be just endlessly reshared because it's the kind of thing. I mean, again, this is at Matomic on Twitter. Every time I see an Angels highlight,

it's like Mike Trout hit three Holmes runs. There is a typo, Holmes runs. And raised his average to 528 while Shohei Otani did something that hasn't been done since Tonkson Armo Doyle of the 1921 Akron Groomsmen as the Tigers defeated the angels eight to three and that was tweeted in may 2021 and the fact that that proved to have such staying power

that you could continue to tweet that and retweet that and quote tweet that through the end of of last season and presumably the coming season i was to say, this could be the last hurrah for this tweet here. Whoa, whoa. Someone doesn't believe in Gio Urshela. I guess I don't. Yeah, no, it's true. This is the last year that Shohei Otani is under contract with the Angels. So, I mean, he could go be tungsten arm O'Doyle with someone else,

but I think he hopes and we all kind of hope that maybe he will get to play for a good team at some point. Yeah, we think the Mariners are on the rise, Ben. So I think it'll be fine. Yeah. You might have more than one productive teammate, but there were just so many games long after this tweet was first tweeted when it applied perfectly. And I'm kind of a strict constructionalist when it comes to the tungsten arm tweet. Like sometimes people will try to over-apply the tungsten arm tweet to games where I don't feel like it fully applies, but there were so many games when it did perfectly apply and it was just so apt and so prescient and so perfect. Yeah, it's just a perfect distillation of his entire time on the Angels

and just the Angels themselves. I would also say just as seeing people like you mentioned the Billy Bean tweet I have, Max Scherzer's now been on several other teams or two other teams at this point, and people still engage with it. So I don't think it'll ever really die as long as the Angels are themselves. So Meg, your final two picks, I guess? Oh, God. I think that's right. Well, we'll see. But that would get you to five.

Yeah. Okay. I was like, oh, yeah, I have to pick again. What am I going to pick? I would like to draft. I'm going to draft a thing and then maybe it's too mean. And you should tell me. I'm not going to single any particular person out.

But you tell me if it's too mean. And you should tell me. I'm not going to single any particular person out. But you tell me if it's too mean. I'm not going to unpick it because I don't have very many pixels left to think of. I don't have any more things on my mind. But I would like to draft the subgenre of tweet where you can tell that the breaking news scoop is just a copy and paste from an agent or a team person. Oh, man. I'd like to draft that entire genre. I'm not going to name names because we can all think of them

without the aid of those names. And I don't need to get in a fight with anyone. But I really enjoyed that sub-genre because what you will see is the Scoopsters who scoop in that way all having the exact same tweet yeah one after another and uh you can tell you know you can tell that it is um it's coming direct from someone and i like that you can often differentiate like that one's from an agent that one's from someone on the team

side just because of the verbiage that's being employed and then i like to guess like who's the the jake and jordan weren't you gonna do like a scoop tracker at one point weren't you working on scoop tracker yeah that was uh definitely in the works maybe maybe we'll come back around this off season we'll see we'll see i mean i i this is it's just funny because it's like it's the same thing as you know copying and pasting from a press release right and putting it on twitter as news yeah but yeah i mean it's it is like oh right this is how this works right and unfortunately and sometimes it's more obvious than others yeah yeah it's related to something i i consider drafting which is as you said meg like sometimes a bunch of different accounts will tweet virtually the same thing yeah back to back to back to back to back

and then something will or or what are we doing back to back and belly to belly? Whatever it is, whatever we decided it was. But people will tweet a screenshot of the human centipede of news. Exactly. Yeah. Or if it's like beat writers tweeting play by play, sometimes it'll be like exactly the same play reaction from like five different beat writers at the same time. So that is one of my favorite baseball Twitter things. I mean, it's it's annoying, but it's it's cute. Sometimes it's just a press box announcement and people just don't acknowledge the press box.

And then like the last person will be like the press box just announced. And it's exactly what everyone else had just said. Right. Or an MLB press release that everyone just got there in their inbox. And they like their inbox and they act as if it's breaking news that they just got and no one else did. Yeah. So that went to a distribution of like thousands of people. Yeah. I do have a disdain for when people – it's usually like a political person, but they'll just be like inbox, all caps, colon. And I'm like, that's not anything.

That's an email. Right. You got an email yeah congratulations we also have email yeah and i i like the like subgenre of the play-by-play reaction sometimes it's not play-by-play like you know we get this a lot during the postseason maybe this is just my next pick because i can't think of anything else i'll think of something to say i like when it's clear that everyone is watching the same game and that only really ever happens during the postseason even during sunday night baseball it's like people are busy with other stuff sometimes but i i love when you have like

the the block of reaction to like a home run and it's like wow amazing why i murdered that baseball then there's one person who's doing something else oh my god it's oh meg meg it's you know what it is it's the fall league and this is what happens during the postseason where it's like yes harper harper has done it you know a double a pitcher with the rockies was 93 95 for the uh surprise saguaros this afternoon. It's like, it's okay. Like, wait until the morning for that. Yeah. Yeah.

So I guess those are sort of related, but those are the picks I'm picking because you're right, Jake. There's a lot of that during the fall league where you're like, wow, you know, I'm glad that you're invested in an award, Julian, but I think it could have waited. All right.

What am I going to take here? I've got too many, but I'll take the Grand Junction Chubs. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. I forgot about that. One of the best days in baseball Twitter history. And they've changed their name to the Jackalopes now, I think. They're an independent team in the Pioneer League now.

But when they were still a Rockies affiliate. One day, one great day in late June of 2019, they tweeted out of nowhere. The GJ Rockies are not considering changing their name and never have. We are owned by a group led by the Colorado Rockies and having a team on the West slope helps build their brand. Suggesting we would be called the GJ Chubs is offensive and a slang sexual term for erection. Oh, that's what it is.

I forgot that they explained what a chub was. The GJ Rockies pride ourselves on providing fun family entertainment and suggesting inappropriate name changes will not be tolerated. Anyone who continues to suggest the GJ Chubs in any way will be blocked from our account. Yeah, they continued. They will also not be renamed the Stiffies or the Six to Midnights. This is the best. It's so good. And it had like a Streisand effect where like no one was aware that anyone was tweeting like GJ Chubbs at the GJ Rockies, but then everyone was aware of it suddenly. And this led to a great podcast bit of banter on episode 1396 where we just like laughed for several minutes straight at this and i still don't know did we ever find out like how this happened exactly like was it yeah do you remember the story was it like social media or something or

what so every minor league team was becoming you know, like the untied shoelaces or the- The rumble ponies. Right. Like they were all becoming these absurd names. And so this is from an SB Nation article written by Eric Steffen on June 27th, 2019. It says that a local Grand Junction resident named Ian Loomis started a petition to change the name to a local fish native to the area, the humpback chub, an endangered species that can reach up to lengths of 20 inches AO.

He was saying it was like to honor the name, like to honor the humpback chub. By far, our local endangered fish, the team being the humpback chubs, would be the funniest name for a baseball team, which is true. Anyway, I have a DJ Chubbs t-shirt, which I still wear from time to time. One of my fondest baseball Twitter memories. Wow, that's devotion right there. Yeah. All right. Craig, last pick?

Yeah. Is this my – for some reason, I've only – We can do a lightning round like anything we didn't draft at the end. I would love a lightning round, Raider. Okay. I don't know. Oh, God. So many options still.

I'm going to have to go with John Heyman's Black Fan tweet. Yes. On the board. Yes. He tweeted on October 11th, 2009. This is 2009. This is early. This is a very early tweet.

Past street called Black Fan on way to Fenway. And haven't seen one since. End tweet. Boom. That's it. Yeah. Talk about poetry. That's an old timer.

I don't, you know. This is reminding me of John. Sorry, I don't know why this is. Now I'm thinking of all kinds of Heyman-related things, but this one is tough to top. He had one about hitting a traffic cone in the parking lot of the Arizona Diamondbacks spring training facility that is also an all-timer. He said, this was March 10th, 2014, want to apologize to the Diamondbacks. On the way into stadium, I accidentally knocked over an orange parking cone

I've never seen that that's great oh yeah just like going into Salt River I've knocked over traffic cones at Salt River did you apologize to the Diamondbacks but also not tag the Diamondbacks just tweet it out there they probably saw it no I didn't I did put the traffic cone

back because I'm not a monster you also you know but i i don't they bounce back they're they're durable yeah that's what they do they're fine they're designed uh just really you know pure tweeting what i'm thinking energy yeah these are the insights that we get into people's personalities for better or worse that we would not know if not for Twitter. So, yeah. This is my last one. I mean, we could do a lightning round, but I did. I was thinking about, again, when you bring up Heyman, like, I just feel like all just the dichotomies, the differences between Heyman, Rosenthal, Passon, when news is breaking, I think is just one of my favorite things.

Never gets old. Just the different kinds of diction and how many characters we're using. Like, I think that's its own category, which I love. But I'm just going to do one that makes me laugh every time I go back and look at it. And this is courtesy of Anthony DeComo, Mets beat writer, longtime beat writer, MetsbeatwriterforLNB.com. On September 25th, 2014, he tweeted, this is at the end of the regular season, and the Mets were on the brink of history. All right. And the Mets were on the brink of history.

All right. And he tweeted at 2.40 p.m., I believe during a game, one of baseball's oddities, Mets can become the first NL team in 15 years to go an entire season without balking. Two minutes later, Dylan G. balked. And Anthony DiComo tweeted in all caps, oh, my God, they just balked. And Anthony DiComo tweeted in all caps, oh my God, they just balked. Especially when the Mets had another balking incident this year with Richard Blyer, I believe. I was reminded of this incident and it just makes me laugh so much, especially if you know Anthony DiComo, who is delightful. So I wanted to share this with you.

Did anyone tweet before Blyer's thing? Like Richard Blyer never bought. I think there was something close to that. Yeah. So yeah, that's great. That's also relatable because often when you notice something that seems really cool and fun and it's a fun fact and you're all excited about, Oh,

I'm going to write about this and then it's spoiled instantly. So maybe not that instantly, but yeah. Anyway, Jake, last, last pick what we got. Bad people can make good tweets

oh no and one of those people is jose canseco there was a stretch of time where jose canseco was just putting out gold he's still he's still going man i know but there's a difference between what he's doing now. He's like dad boner. Yeah. Some of his tweets are just too much, but then there are some unbelievable

things. Like, yes, time travel is possible. We'll explain later. That's all I need to know. Did he go back and explain later? No. No, we're still waiting. Time travel's complicated. That's true. February 2013.

Overwhelmed by side boobs. What? October 20th, 2013. I farted. Oops. No, I pooped it. And then there's the time where he got pulled over with goats in the car. Do you remember this?

Yes. No. There's a picture of him with a goat in the car getting pulled over. And then the one time his finger fell off during the poker tournament. Of course. Wasn't the goat wearing a diaper? Wasn't that part of it? Yes, it is wearing a diaper. Oh, my part of it thank you that's just in my brain all the time anyway jose cansego was there was a time where

he was just before we really knew how bad he was and how bad he is i guess maybe we knew i didn't know at the time i was just a child but But I just will never forget. Yes, time travel is possible. We'll explain later. I also would like to nominate Bob Nightingale's Ed Howard tweet. Oh, boy. That's an all time one. You got to explain. you gotta explain so this was during uh the draft the mlb draft in 2020 in the beginning of june as the black lives matter protests were happening all across america and during the draft that year they pretended to care and had gms hold up flimsy pieces of paper on their Zoom calls. Do you all remember this? It was very

uncomfortable. And they only asked the black players how they felt about it. It was all bad. But the Cubs then drafted Ed Howard, a high school shortstop from Chicago who is black. And Bob tweeted, the Cubs draft Ed Howard. Yes, showing action instead of hallow words. Not hallow words. Hallow words. And so there are a million things about that tweet, including the idea that Cubs were like, oh, you know what?

There's immense racial inequity in this country. We should draft this kid. As if he wasn't like a deserved top one pick. It was just ridiculous. But to me, it goes to another level because it's hallow words. Yep. Yeah, he was. Like, he thought he was being poetic here.

Yeah. No. Well, or he typoed. Yeah. I think he was trying to be grandiose and missed it. Yeah. Yes. So that comes to mind too.

So I guess that's the last of our official picks, but I'll just empty out my drafts here, empty out my draft picks, my potential draft picks. So none of us took the Nick Castellanos meme, which is, you know, on the one hand, I guess it's too obvious, but it's obviously like it's inner circle it's on the mount rushmore i think oh i forgot one sorry ralph oh oh my god wow ralph's gotta be on here too that's a great one yeah can we explain ralph for people i don't know people have craig all the context i'm explaining'm explaining, Ralph. I don't remember. I mean, the theory at the time was like Jim Bowden was a newsbreaker, I guess, on par at the time or close to like Nightingale types.

Is that fair? Yeah, he was working for ESPN at the time, I believe. Yeah, and he would break news. And there was a lot of suspicion in that time that he was just seeing other people's news and then like confirming it, that he heard it from other people. And then he he broke the sign. It was a Yankees signing, right? I think I don't. This is not committed.

I was getting lunch with my grandma in Central Park when this happened. So I don't remember. OK, so I believe it was like a Yankees signing and he said it was happening. But that was tweeted out by like a it was essentially like Ken Rosenthal And it was a Yankees acquisition. It was about them acquiring Marlon Bird from the Phillies. But it was Joel Sherman. But the L in Joel was actually an I, a capital I. Anyway, it was a fake account that made up the news.

And he just said, it's happening. And he did not credit the account. This is why these accounts credit each other, by the way. But he did not credit the account. This is why these accounts credit each other, by the way. Yes. But he did not credit the account. And then actual Joel Sherman shot everything down. And I'm just going to read from the Deadspin article. Jim Bowden panicked. He first deleted his Twitter photo so that Jim Bowden ESPN XM had an egg avatar and looked fake. He then transferred his account to at Jim Bodiv, B-O-W-D-I-V. Like Bodiv different. Yeah. Perhaps thinking no one would find him

because he transferred the account or he changed the handle. So all the tweets were still there. Or I don't know exactly. His original at Jim Bowden ESPN XM account was nuked, but it is now back with 25 followers at press time. Someone is cyber squatting the account and using his old avatar and is following fake Joel Sherman and no one else. Credit to that person. And just now, since Barry Pacheski,

the author of this post, has been typing, Jim Bowdov has disappeared. We don't know where he went and he's probably not going to receive the DMs we sent him. Update, he is back, and he changed his display name to Ralph, right? Or did he just meet Ralph? No, his display name was Ralph, right. It is remarkable.

Jim Bodin still gets real credence today, And it's pretty remarkable given his overall history, not just social media, but otherwise. Yeah, Ralph is an all-time thing. I'm ashamed not to have thought of it. Yep, Ralph is great. Can I pick one? And those on this pod employed by Fox Sports can just sit quietly if they want to.

Oh, I thought I was going to have to do this. Okay, go ahead. What can you be referring to, Meg? Woke up thinking about how Babe Ruth set his poor white Ellen on fire, yet the moral gatekeepers are keeping Barry Bonds, the greatest hitter of all time, out of the Hall of Fame. Follow up, allegedly. Asterisk.

That's the best part. It's like a while later, if I recall, too. It is a full day and change later. 24 hours and change pass between these two tweets from Ben Verlander. All I was going to say was that it's a shame this is episode 1932, because in January of 1929, poor Helen Ruth. We're only three episodes off. That's an all time.

I just don't. Why did he wake up thinking about that? Wait, what is this? First, you're hearing about this this uh this did remind me of the kate upton tweet about justin verlander which is also probably one that deserves mention from when he finished second in cy young in 2016 and she tweeted hey at mlb which is always already a great start right yeah you know the mlb social people are the ones voting for cy hey adam will be i thought i was the only person allowed to fuck justin verlander what two writers didn't have him on their ballot? I mean, she's

out for blood. Yeah. But you know, I mean, will that cost him a first ballot Hall of Fame? Probably not. Being second in the 2016 Cy Young Award, but it's alright. He was going to win two more five years later when he was really old, so she'll be fine. Mm-hmm. Alright. Others I had, other than the Castellanos

Brenneman meme, I had people tweeting announce transactions at like Passon and other newsbreakers. I just like announce judge, announce Correa, whatever. I don't know what the thought process is there, but I just I enjoy that people take the time and trouble to do that. I also had Bailey Foolish Baseball tweeting the Felix picture when a perfect game gets broken up. That's a good meme. I had people using Roto World injury updates or like any injury update. I specifically had Meg and Sam quote tweeting.

Yeah, Meg, Sam. Sometimes others will take the Roto World wording that is suggestive in some way or misleading in some way and will quote tweet it and make fun of it. Those are wonderful. Always enjoy that practice. What else? I had like just like a wholehearted, like genuine thank you to like the fun fact tweeters, the good fun fact tweeters. And also, I guess guess the truly terrible ones yeah well i was gonna say jordan and jake's thread of like esoteric fun facts i guess yeah i don't know exactly the right word for it but where there's like four qualifiers involved is one of my

personal yeah we've gotten a lot of content out of that but but shout out to to the real ones to to the sarah langs and the jeremy frankss and the Christopher Kamkas and the people who are like actually good at that and make us smarter and teach us things. And did I have anything else? I guess like congrats Twitter as a thing is like, it's kind of nice, I guess. Definitely nice. like it's kind of nice i guess definitely nice yeah like when people do this unpersonal news and then they announce that they're changing their job or whatever and they're just like it ain't personal it ain't personal news it's professional news it's professional yes oh sure have work-life balance brag about it sorry no distinction between the two but but yeah like the fact that it's obligatory and everyone knows it's coming and there's just this wave of validation and support and congrats and good for you. It's kind of nice that you know that that chorus is waiting out there to make you feel good about

yourself. So I would miss that if congrats Twitter went away, what would we even have anymore? Congrats Gchat or something. It's just, it wouldn't be the same. Meg would invite you to google plus yeah have you all gotten this new gmail layout where chat is on a different oh it's the worst i delayed it as long as i have them i have them in the same spot yeah i have it where i rejected it over and over but i just woke up and it's it's implemented now it's permanent there's no way i adopted it early so i could learn to hate it and adapt. But you don't have to use the separate thing. You can minimize it and put it in front of your email still.

You're going to have to help me because I don't see the friends list anymore when I'm in my inbox. I only see a different tab for chat and mail. So. So it's, it's bad at the same time. Elon is ruining Twitter. Google is ruining my Gmail. This is perhaps a me problem. Did I have anything else? I think that about covers it. Does anyone else have,

have any, I have a lot. So if anyone else has a field, Oh, weird baseball, I guess weird baseball. I was going to mention that. Hashtag weird baseball,

the Kevin Goldstein thing where the game's going on at midnight and you eat ice cream for some reason. Yeah. Yeah, I liked that. That was good. Yeah, that was good. Hassan getting hacked. Oh, my God. An NFT thing.

Yeah, that was good. Yeah. Oh, that was great. Okay, I can start running through mine. Oh, wait, there is one more Gammons tweet that I had here which I can actually pronounce which is from June 2019. Xander Bogarts goes into Wednesday night leading all SS in war

OPS Wobama WRC Plus Fucking Wobama Speaking of Ralph, OPSVI Oh yeah I asked around for some Speaking of Ralph, OPSBI. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's an all-time thing. Yeah. I asked around for some recommendations on this.

Oh, me too. And Andy McCullough sent me, pointed me to a very good tweet from Dylan Hernandez of the LA Times. This is from March of 2017. Wife of D-backs reliever trained hashtag Harambe. JJ Hoover said late gorilla was quote awesome quote super smart. Okay.

Very good. If I can flatter you two by the way this is a subset of baseball Twitter this is like sabermetric baseball Twitter but Craig's name changes. I mean, we got to give it up for Craig's display name. No, we don't, Ben. Now that he can't do it anymore, I think we can look back nostalgically.

Except for me. And also, Craig's The Phillies Cannot Be Remotely Normal. Oh, yeah, that was nice. Oh, thank you. And Jake and Jordan's congrats on the Homer dude thread to Reese Hoskins, which I don't know. The Phillies are really Yeah. I don't even remember how

that started, but the fact that it's gone on for years and years and that he welcomes it is brings warmth to my heart. He likes every tweet. He likes every single one is all I will say. Okay.

All right. I have, I have a bunch that are, some of them are particular to me and not probably not super popular, but whatever. I'll start with the quote, the intentional question mark, misuse of quarter pole,

which was a big thing for a while. And I intentionally do it around the 25% mark of every baseball season now. People got real. And then there's a backlash to it. People get really. That's not what the quarter poll is, but I think it's fun to do. Chris Crawford's Bryce Harper ski movie villain tweet. I don't know if it's image based, so I don't know if people recall.

But Ryan Zimmerman has sunglasses on and is holding Harper back. And Crawford said, when the bully from the 1980s ski movie wants to fight now, but his best friend tells him to save it for the slopes. And Bryce Harper's hair is just perfect for this. So I really like that one. Oh, Sam Miller's The Ball Just Sounds Different tweets as a genre. The ball just sounds different coming off Joe Panic's bat. It sounds like car doors shutting in the dark as dad carries you asleep inside. I'll do one other one for that. The ball just sounds different coming off Casey McGee's bat.

It sounds like an unclassed belt buckle catching the side of a urinal. There's just an entire catalog of those that i absolutely adore this one i think jake at least jake will appreciate the era of matt weeder's fun facts twitter was very different at the time that was like i mean this is we're talking chuck norris i mean this is really yeah it was chuck norris facts adapted to matt weeder's and before he was a major leaguer. But that was, you know, that was a very different era. But that's true. Yeah.

Batting around arguments. I don't know if that's good or bad, but they're there. I know which it is. Don't miss it. I also this is not a baseball Twitter tweet, but it's a it's a weird Twitter tweet about baseball and it's no longer on Twitter. But the Wade Boggs Cranberries tweet, I didn't name you hit the ball. I named you Wade Boggs. Now get back to those cranberries or whatever it was. Just old house Radbourne as an entity. Damn it Astros as an era. I don't know if that's Twitter

or specifically belongs to SB Nation. Oh yeah. like the Brisbane. I mean, I can picture the gif of the bunt defense. Yes, yes, yes. Which Jose Altuve being in that gif is like, that's when I, whenever I see Jose Altuve, I'm like, man, this dude saw some shit and now he wins every year. Yeah, the Jonathan VR butt slide is the one I think of for that.

Remember fake Fernando Tatis Sr.? Oh, no. This was way before Tatis Jr. was a thing, right? I mean, this was like... Yes. Oh, yeah. What about fake Carlos Beltran's niece or whatever it was? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's a little different. The fake news leak stuff. Yes. Yeah. So I had grouped under playoff Twitter traditions is just people freaking out about whatever song they choose to make like the song of the playoffs. Yeah, Mupps. Right. There's Light Em Up.

Yeah, the Mupps song, This Train Written in the Stars were various ones. Dane Cook's Interstitials where he was like popping a vein yelling about, I don't know, something that wasn't worth it. My wife recently said, what happened to dane cook and i said i don't know that is a that's a long story well i'll fill you in as i teach you how to use g chat okay the tweet where the guy got mad big bang theory wasn't on to enjoy his garlic garlic knots yeah uh because the baseball playoffs were on tbs oh man yeah uh spoonerisms just in general the baseball spoonerisms most specifically oh man yeah uh spoonerisms just in general the baseball spoonerisms most specifically i think catfish hunter and buck farmer productive outs making

up names yeah this is i don't know i think this is a deep cut maybe it's not but the hunter pence a positives do you guys remember oh i kind of remember that people brought like signs like it started on social media but people then brought signs about like, it was like Hunter Pence doesn't know how to park his, like parallel park or something like that. It would be like something that's mean, but not really that mean. There's, you know, just the whole thing with names, all the minor league names. There are so many, but like Storm Throne was one I recall. I think people did brackets.

Did you guys do brackets? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Not minor league names, yeah. Oh, yeah. Not minor league names, but that has been done, yes. Minor leaguers tweeting about Chipotle? No, it's any baseball player tweeting about Tiger Woods. You know, the boys love seeing Woods wearing red on a Sunday. That is like the most baseball player thing.

Oh, which reminds you're saying the boys reminds me of Spencer Torkelson. Just tweeting. The boys were hungry after trying to open a can of beans. He got hurt doing that. Just the hashtag sensual baseball for a while was a, was a big thing. Hug watch.

Yeah. Yeah. Hug watch. Yeahyan howard's caught for choice i think all time just uh oh wow that's we're really okay you're damn you you really prepared craig yeah i worked on history here i worked with this and and again this is this is very specific to me this is but it involves four members of this podcast. Well, three. I'm sorry. I'm not involved, but it's specific to me. Jake and Jordan tweeted, I don't know which one, at Ben and Sam on June 24th of 2014, why is the Dodger bullpen in San

Francisco? And there's a background ad for Blue Shield of California. And Ben just kept replying, providing answers to this. And either Jake or Jordan kept favoriting his tweets. And eventually Ben said, stop favoriting me and retweet me like a man. That's crazy. Wow. Wow. And Ben. I do want to point out that I guess it does involve me because I'm guessing Jake's reply to this was a picture of me. Yes. Well, yeah, like a bitch. So, yeah, that is, again, that's very specific, but it's a tweet that has lived in my head for a very long time. And it just seems very out of character for Ben. Yeah, that's true yeah i'm a

i'm a lover not a fighter i'm a retweeter not a tweeter these days but there were days when i was well i think we have named every tweet wait that has ever been i have one more there's another okay last one last one i promise i promise i think i think craig will remember this one this one i think this is one that does not require any inside knowledge. It's just a great Twitter take, particularly for prospect Twitter, which Craig is very familiar with. I believe this was two or three years ago. Oh, this is amazing. From Chuck Johnson.

Quote. Okay. Said it before, but if Vlad Jr.'s father was a plumber from Poughkeepsie. He wouldn't be a top 10 prospect. Going to see him tomorrow for the first time. We'll see what the eye test shows. 148 replies, two retweets. So plumber from Poughkeepsie. I love that one.

I think the easiest, best part of that is going to see him for the first time tomorrow. Yeah. We'll see. Just coming out with a hyper-ag hyper aggressive take and then immediately undermining that the product of nepotism as we know petition moving forward i will be calling vladimir guerrero jr the plumber from poughkeepsie or the poughkeepsie plumber anyway but i just wanted to sneak that one in there i was going to throw out also, I forgot to add it. Hard to imagine, I know. But just the picture of Vlad Jr. in the Expos jersey next to his dad as a kid with the incredible hair.

That's just, to me, never gets old. That's baseball Twitter. That's not Twitter. It's a picture. That's on Twitter. That's on Twitter. Everything's on Twitter. You can't draft a picture.

I wasn't drafting it. I'm just mentioning it at the end. I thought I love it. But you're not mentioning it has nothing to do with Twitter. Okay. I'm not trying to get through Yum, but you're wrong. That's fine.

I enjoy the picture. I think it's good. That's great. I vlad cheering on his son extremely earnestly the whole time do you think that do you think that vlad listen hey and it was with an endearing message and i think that was on twitter yeah i bet when vlad looks at that picture boy i love twitter well no it's It's different to different people. Okay. All right. Wow. An acrimonious way to end. How fitting for Twitter.

I think it's fine. Craig, meet me in Temecula. I'm just going to tweet through it. I'm going to draft through it. This was fun. We had fun on Twitter sometimes. Maybe we will continue to. We'll see. But we'll always have this draft, this memorial, this eulogy, at least. So for the time being, you can find us all on Twitter, I guess. If you want, you can find Jake and Jordan there. They're at Cespedes BBQ. You can also find them individually at jay__schusterman underscore and also at jake underscore mince craig is at cd goldstein meg is at meg rowler i'm at ben lindberg the podcast is at

ew pod we're going down with the ship so thanks to everyone who has followed along here i hope this wasn't too navel gazey thanks to all of you as well. Thank you. Yay. All right. By the way, just for posterity, either Jake or Jordan wanted to make it clear that the column that Mr. Sugar Penis had not read by Ken Rosenthal in March 2013, it was one that was titled Phillies Have Work to Do on Defense at Fox Sports at the time. It started with quotes from Michael Young talking about how his range was going to be better. Spoiler, it was not, at least according to the stats. Anyway, it was basically about how bad the Phillies' defense was, so the more things change. Do not know if Mr should have a trophy or some sort of award for the team that has the best regular season record. We supported that. Just wanted to note that the NHL also has something like that, the President's Trophy, which has been awarded to the regular season champion since 1986.

Also, I supported the idea of having a trophy or an award that would be handed out to the player who had the best postseason. So not just the MVP of any individual round, but the best postseason as a whole. The NHL has that too, the Conn Smythe trophy. So basically I'm saying that MLB should copy the NHL, at least in some respects. From what I can gather, though, the President's Trophy is not that huge a deal to hockey fans. Gotta end, as always, with the Past Bl, which comes from 1932, because this is episode 1932. And of course, it comes from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair

of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. Jacob's headline, 1932, clipped wings. Beginning in 1919, he writes, the St. Louis Cardinals under general manager Branch Rickey built baseball's first farm system by purchasing control of minor league teams and stocking them with young prospects. He writes, League teams controlling every level of baseball and destroying the independence of the minor leagues, he frequently clashed with the Cardinals in contract disputes and did what he could to help players escape what he called the St. Louis Chain Gang. The commissioner's heavy-handedness backfired in 1932. The few minor league teams that managed to stay afloat during the Great Depression actually preferred being in the Cardinal system to trying to make it on their own. Here's a description from 1932 winter meetings. Quote,

To Judge Landis, chain store baseball has long been the horrid word and a practice he abhorred above all others, but a rebellion that has been smoldering for years flared suddenly into open insurrection at the December meeting of the moguls. When the smoke of battle cleared away, it was discovered he was powerless to interfere with the farming of players to clubs that are members of anybody's chain store system. Judge Landis has been stripped of the trappings from his one-man show, his wings are clipped, and while the illusion of power remains, the substance is gone. It was taken away from him at the joint meeting of the major leagues, where they voted him out of his interpretive power in applying the rules governing the sale and purchases of players

and made him a mere administrator, an employee, a glorified managing clerk. The handwriting on the wall clearly indicates that the end of the Landis dynasty in baseball is not far away. Jacob concludes Judge Landis, of course, would get the last laugh. When his term ended in 1933, owners in both major leagues renewed his contract for another seven years. He remained as commissioner until his death in 1944. And Landis also got a little revenge against the Cardinals and Branch Rickey, too. In 1938, he punished the Cardinals for owning multiple teams in four different minor leagues by declaring more than 100 players in their system to be free agents. It didn't hurt the Cardinals much because just four of those free agents eventually made the majors, and only one, outfielder Pete Reeser,

became a star. Branch Rickey was not above bending the rules when it suited him and when he could get away with it, and keeping more players under team control than he was supposed to, that was one way he did that. But he was a brilliant innovator and a winner, and so the cheating is often forgotten or sort of excused. That tends to be the way it works. Not so much for the Astros. But signing Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier, that makes up for a lot of other chicanery, even if it wasn't for entirely selfless reasons. Commissioner Landis would not have liked that either, but by then he was dead, which was crucial to Robinson's signing.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks, and help us stay ad-free. Shane Wilson, Alex Hoffman, Steve French, Jesse Seiler, and Farhan Arif. Thanks to all of you.

Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, now more than 900 members strong, as well as monthly bonus episodes, one of which will be coming fairly soon for November, plus discounts on merch, access to playoff live streams, ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and more. You can check out the perks at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. You can also message us through the Patreon site if you are a supporter, and if you're not, you can email us at podcast at fanagraphs.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively

wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. As noted, you can follow the podcast on Twitter at EWpod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. put me away. I'll think back on active days. Most were worth the minus cost. Some were worth the damage cost. And the judge will say to me, Bob, you've got a bad means to a word. Why an end?

An end? But here comes Bob. I have a bullet list between 25 and 30 items. Holy shit, Craig. Are we drafting? Yeah. I mean, there's no material difference between

drafting and discussing, really. That's true. We can't keep score here. Ben, you tell that to a baseball team. Listen, if we made it... Sub-drafts, it matters. Not ours. Jordan, you're a little quieter. I mean, Jordan, you're a little quieter.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I know you're quieter than Jake in general probably, but specifically right now. Yes. I'm in my parents' basement like all good bloggers.