For All You Kids Out There
Episode 475: "It's a war on WAR"
With Lucky Land Sluts, you can get lucky just about anywhere. This is your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's fine, but we're just going to circle up here a while and get lucky. No, no, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes that are up quick. So I suggest you sit back, keep your tray table upright, and start getting lucky. Play for free at LuckyLand Sluts.com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. BG, W grow Boyd, we're prohibited by law. 18+ Terms and Conditions apply. Citation Mets fans, welcome to this week's edition of For All Your Kids Out There, a Mets adjacent baseball prospectus podcast. I'm your host, Jeffy Peddonostro, with me once again this week as Jared Seidler. Jared, if we didn't have much save out the Mets last week, we're not going to have much save out the Mets this week. People are really obsessed with like, I can't get excited about the day-to-day wins losses of a team that this team was built to be exactly this team. They have an 83 to 85 win talent base. They're headed for that direction. They may or may not make the playoffs. The manager's an idiot. I will say it's like, you mentioned this probably. Like I just, I can't. Why is Adomatovino stolen the roster? Because if you look at his key performance indicators, he's actually outperforming his season last year. But they won, he was shot last year. They brought him back, he's verbally opted out the contract, and then they brought him back anyway. And two, he's a good clubhouse guy. He's been here for three years. He was previously with the manager's other team. And it was a good clubhouse guy, respected veteran. He's out there saying like he's out there saying it would not be in the Mets' best interest to cut me, basically. Yeah, but yeah, exactly. He's saying that because he knows that he's not going to get cut with a 4.4 ERA or whatever it is, it's not. And good with numbers and good performance indicators, they put together a bullpen and they hired a manager who are not capable of managing to what Adomatovino needs to be, which is a three or four times a week, middle of the order of Ruggie. They do not have the ability to deploy him that way. They have a manager who is managing his bullpen based on rest cycles and schedules, not based on leverage and game tactics. And he's been doing that all year and should have been obvious he was going to do that because his old boss in New York, who he learned everything from, also does that. Yankees fans never complained about that, but so instead we've got the fan base, many, many of the same people that were so happy that they brought Adomatovino back, because he's funny in post games and he had a shiny ERA and he was good on SNY in the off-season. Now those same people have turned on him and want him cut. They are going to come to a short of optioning dead Neil Nunez when he's ready. They just don't have guys with options. Like Sean Ripley is going to read Garrett's already. It's three weeks until roster expansion. Yeah, I guess they can probably run anymore. Yeah, they can Nunez is just throwing now. They can stretch this out if they want to get it. Sean Reed fully might get hurt again by then anyway. You can manipulate all these guys in their IEL stands. You can option people for short periods. If you have to, you can start cycling through starting pitchers if you really have to on optional side. You can all to protect Adomatovino's feelings. Well, no, it's not just Adomatovino's feelings. It's the Adomatovino based on the key performance in the game. That a modern major league baseball team is going to use to evaluate pitching. It's about the fifth best pitcher in our ballpad. But they're not gonna cut them. Jared, I watched the games. Jared, I don't know. Yes, separate. I have been screaming that this fucking team shouldn't, I did not think they sort of brought Adomatovino back into 2020. No, but I know three off season. This was a stupid fucking contract. They signed a stupid contract. They got a fucking miracle winning out of it. And then they fucking signed him again. It's like this is the mission of all creation. No, I know. It's just like you would think at the end of the day, he has a 4.4 ERA for a team in a panic race that play off for sure. What are you gonna do? You gonna cut him? For Daniel Nunez, probably. It will be eventually. What's it gonna do? Go on SNY and complain about it. He did that last year. They bring everybody onto SNY that is mad at the Mets for various reasons because the Mets got rid of them. That's like the entire SNY programming block right now. So, what? Regarets got an option. Daniel Nunez got an option. Voscar Bryce won his 3. Posef Bruno has won. David Peterson. You are literally making your team worse. And the last week of those games is against San Diego and Arizona, by the way. Making your team worse for a year and a half ago. I guess we do have some to talk about. What I was trying to say before Jared decided to play a wide amount of, you know, which is fine. We don't have much to talk about. You had mentioned about a month ago, maybe longer. I have no sense of time anymore, that one of the problems that Mets were gonna run into in this wild card race, even when they were playing well, and sort of gotten back into it around 500, is that you get enough teams in this mix. One or two of them are gonna go on runs. And that's what Arizona and San Diego has done for the last two weeks. Now, the Braves have done the opposite of that, so the Mets are still around while basically playing 500 baseball, so I guess that's how it sorts itself out and will continue to sort itself out. And look, the Diamondbacks are probably gonna have a dip in there somewhere. The Padres are probably gonna have a dip in there somewhere. It's, when I said we don't have anything to talk about this week, compared to last week, like this is nothing particularly interesting has happened. From a Mets point of view, other than Jackson Merrill continuing to hit game-tying home runs basically, every day. But look, people are going to be annoyed by this road trip, even if they went tonight to go five and five. And that's fine. It's fine to be annoyed by this trip. Look, if you wanna live and die, I'm just gonna say, they went to... If you wanna live and die every day by a... One of the Mets. The Mets are 61 and 50. They're a 5.21 team. They're probably true talent 5.25. If you wanna live and die every day on a true talent 5.25 team, be my fucking guest. It's just, I'm not going to. Well, all I'm gonna say is that, you know, you can look at this, that, you know, it was a tough road trip with the Makeup Day in St. Louis. It's four teams or four cities in 12 days or whatever. And hitting Seattle at the end of this with this pitching was, you know, they might be a little gassed reasonably so. But also, they're not that great a lineup when demo is not hitting. And beginners is starting to come back to Earth against Rites especially. And, you know, from this conference, it hasn't hit for a few weeks now, outside of the occasional single. And, you know, it's a lot of, you know, even when Alvarez is not buying off Alvarez, we'll start studying. Probably, well, I think Torren's played Friday. But when it's like Torren's Vader and Taylor at the bottom of that lineup, it's not. Oh, I have a question. They traded for Jesse Winker, and they'll not playing Jesse Winker against Rites. Like, I don't, I'm sure there's some lineup analytics reason why, but they have, they have said this, they've said this to beat reporters. They said that guy are calling the other guy. Yeah, here, there are two reasons that they're not playing Jesse Winker regularly. One, they are concerned about his physical ability to play the outfield regularly and maintain his health. And two, they won't play Tyra and Taylor. That's fine. Then why did you trade for Jesse Winker? Because it cost them, I know, I know, I know, I don't care about, I know, I understand that. But like, okay, I, I, the friend that was at the, um, I guess Harrisburg, Harrisburg, I think it's really fun. Yeah, they sounded Harrisburg. I think they had thickened with Harrisburg. Yeah. Because she was texting me about, um, Sam Masayo initially. And yeah, he struck out 13 guys last night for Harrisburg. Yeah. He's basically not throwing his fastball for them at all. Right. Gee, though. Yeah. Now, I don't think his second areas were actually good enough for that to work higher than AA, but we'll say it's still an improvement in pitch mix. But yes, I don't, uh, I don't know, man, it's just a little weird to me. Like you can just use, like everything you just said about Jesse Winker, you can say about DJ Stewart and Jesse Winker is better than the DJ story. But for the, like, it's a rental and again, whatever. It's right. It's the, you know, Ben Gammel saw on this roster. It's just a little weird to me. Like, go out and get a left handed out feel bad. You are more comfortable playing every day. Oh, I'm like, I'm sure he could come up with one if I thought long enough. But who without it, Matt, man, man. There's nobody out there that they want. Also, also one, they had Tyrone Taylor, who they're obviously very, very, very comfortable playing. Well, it's fine. Then just go. My taste going to be back in a couple of weeks, my taste fucking played six days a week when it comes back. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, it shouldn't be, but he is, maybe better than Tyrone Taylor. He's a hitter right now. So. Yeah. Do you think, do you think Mendy is going to, is going to sit starling more tag? No, star like his fucking superstar. Yeah. Well, he's going to play every day. Yeah. Which again, might help him against lefties at this point, but whatever. That's, like I said, you can, as Jared said, you can choose to live and die by these kind of decisions and games and that's fine. And like, I mean, I would wait till September, just like pace yourself because it's like six weeks left. But yeah, it's a, you know, this is a flaw to team that, you know, they're going to get, they don't really have that stopper, right? Like, Maniah pitched greatest last two stars and then couldn't find the play last night. It's going to have any shaman, he's shamanite. He's shamanite. He's shamanite. He's shamanite. Right. They're unbalanced. I've gotten a lot out of shamanite. Happens the, happens never got. Severino to, I mean, yeah, I mean, it happens to like three, four starters, more than number two starters, which they don't have. So that's a 42% of BP to make the playoffs. I'm looking at fan graphs. It'll probably hold eventually. Either that or I'll just drop off of here. They're 30% in fact. That feels like, yeah, I mean, that's because I, I suspect brother, they've been, they've been between 30 and 50% to make the playoffs, except for like two weeks in May, since I don't know, fucking December, basically. Yeah. I mean, I think those numbers are probably even a little soft because they probably overrate what Atlanta is actually going to get the rest of the season from that team, but more or less reasonable. That's not a good team. That's a bad lineup right now. Yeah, because the Mets lineup's fucking sensational. But I'm saying it's probably not waiting. How bad that lineup is probably regressing that lineup to the mean a little more than it should at this point, given the age and relative health players, whatever. A lot. It's a lot of Bryce elder, man. Here's where we stand. Yeah. The Mets are eight games back in division. Their division chances are not zero. Right. The Phillies are a couple point. It would have been nice. It was a better road trip than they have. Yeah. They are. They are in fourth place, a half game back, but the problem is that seventh place is closer to third place than third place is the second place. The Dodgers and Diamondbacks are actually going away. Yeah. So you're in a situation where this is, again, this all can will change. But right now, they're in a situation where it's four teams for one spot. That's why they play off odds to take down. That's why the playoff odds are so low, even though they're only a half game out of the third wild card. And if you start running, yeah, if you run a projection for the rest of the season, the Braves are going to project a lot fucking better than the Mets. Cardinals probably are too, because they were the better pieces and projections. Yeah. These these projections, for the most part, are not particularly dynamic in season. And before the season, Bryce looked like they were fucking 20 games better than the Mets. Right. And that's, I'm sure, been come down some, but also not as much as you might think. San Diego's already cut it to five to three after going down five nothing. Love them, Marlins. Never count on them. That's a four and a half games behind the Padres. We do not need to fucking be scored where we are. No, it's funny. I was just, I was just checking, because I was curious to see if I'm more amused by the Padres that concerned for the Mets in this particular regard at this point to see how they can do this every day. Right. But it's, yeah, like, we, we just like, we don't actually need to. I guess the other notable message of the week is Brenton Sprote got promoted to AAA to not pitch particularly well there in his first start, which I'm not really surprised. Like the international league between moving from the Eastern League run environment, the international league run environment and adjusting to ABS. I'm not like, if it was me and I was planning or thinking about calling Sprote up, you know, once they get past the PPI date or whatever in a week or so, I wouldn't have said him to triple legs. Let's just make him do two starts there and then go to the majors. It seems like it's probably wasn't a great idea. But if they don't really have plans on calling him up fine, whatever, then you can just keep them the rest of the season. I'm doing consolidation time really next year. That's fine. That's fine. And they have a lot of starting pitching right now. But, you know, what would you say? Like, it's difficult to say. What would you say, Brenton Sprote right now is the ex best healthy starting pitcher in the Mets organization. For fourth, probably. Sorry. I mean, it's probably not lower than that, right? Might be higher than that. It's, you know, Blackburn's had a couple nice starts for them. That's been good so far. Like, again, he still looks like a guy constantly where he's going to have a three run homer and at some point he's going to have a three run homer and he'll give up like two solo shots against Colorado or one solo shot and give one run. But that's going to, and that's the thing. It's every day you can get the number two starter version of any number of five starting pitchers or the number five starter version of any of number five starting pitchers. Because that's the, so it happens when you get a bunch of three four starters in a rotation, basically. It's not a straight line. Yeah. You know, the Mets are, we have a Facebook question about the Mets being a low variance, 85. So the high-vite variance, 85-win team. And that's mostly true, but also you don't get that your low variance, 85-win team is also generally a bunch of high variance players playing to slightly above average results generally. Yeah. I guess the only other Mets use of the week. I saw that. Whatever. We're going to talk about a Howie Rose tweet because why not? We have this little content. Howie noted that he doesn't want the White Sox to break the 62 Mets record, which isn't, I mean, isn't even really this a record per se. But I guess you want to use like modern baseball, it is. Because it's part of the team lore. Do you have a strong opinion on that? No, I have absolutely no strong opinion. So you don't like do you like, I don't know, like there's been a lot of absolutely careful. Yeah, I've had this like Patrick has talked about this, Sam Miller obviously did on the athletic pod or whatever they call it the rundown. I forgot what name it is. But like, I don't, what do you make of the White Sox season? Because we're both broader baseball fans, obviously. And you haven't seen really, you know, we both were, we both were, we both were around for the 2003 Tigers, right? But that felt different than this. I mean, sure. Yeah, it's just, I don't, it's such a bad team, Jared. Like, it's so bad. Like, it's, it's, I don't, it's, I watched a little bit of it while they went on this west coast trip, who just have something on while I'm cooking dinner or whatever. And it's not, you know, it's bad baseball, but it's not, I don't know, it's not like astros.gift level bad. Occasionally it is. But like, they tried to build like a 72 and team and failed about as badly as you can fail while doing that, which is a very, not a very high bar to be kidding. Yeah. Like, we're in the conversation. Like, it's, they turned, they didn't really turn over that front office, right? But it's pretty. And it's clearly the worst front office in baseball, like, even worse than the teams, Han was putting together. And I don't know, it's just, I guess some team was going to do this eventually, but you would think that it, you know, maybe the Mets record would be safe forever, just because the variance in front office processes has narrowed so much, not necessarily the results, because sometimes you're not trying to be good. But it's like, look, I know, I know what how he's saying, but also just like, I don't know, I feel like the other thing is me, it's like, obviously we were in around for 62 and things like that. But, you know, we've seen a lot of bad match baseball. It's not like, maybe, maybe not that bad, but like, I was around, you know, I was watching regularly for like the worst team. Money could buy, and they like, they never really bottomed out in this way under the Willpons, but not the White Sox were trying to bottom out either. But you know, it was just some dire, like, just some dire 72 win teams, right? Like, some really just unpleasant, unwatchable, not even really with an eye to the future, 72 win teams. And far more, like, it's more, like, I don't know, 62, obviously, they were an expansion team. But in some ways, like, 2009 and 2023 are more disappointing and more difficult watches, right? Because there's actual expectations. And to just see it all go wrong. And 2009 was injuries, for the most part, obviously. And that didn't even include the collapses in 2007 and 2008, which one could argue are more unpleasant than just watching. You don't have to watch, right? I didn't watch a lot of the Raphael Ortega DJ Stuart maths at the end of last season. Like, I feel like it's easier to tune out. I assume White Sox fans are pretty much not watching at this point. I don't know why I am. I wouldn't recommend it. I can't imagine being emotionally and not sit in it. But, all right, we have a favorite of questions. So, actually, before we take a break, this is not technically a cue for the P, but I did want to. It's a jumping off of a conversation we had last week. It seems like a good way to wrap this up and then transition to something else. So, Mike, I'd love to hear more from both of you guys about the differences in the three flavors of war, your personal preferences with which to use, i.e. is there an all-around superior version that they cover different types of players more or less well? You should look at them all on aggregate, etc. And how you certainly think war is when evaluating a player's body of work. My working knowledge is that war is a perfectly fine starting point to begin the conversation for things like MVP and Hall of Fame consideration, but no version of war is precise enough to use it beyond rough estimation of the pod and of how much you contribute to my Mets and baseball fandom. Yeah, but that's basically right. Yeah, I mean, so when I first discovered war, which was really warp, this would have been the old Clay Davenport, Warp 1, Warp 2, Warp 3, career font player pages that baseball prospectus probably around. I don't know, somewhere 2003, 2004-ish, if I had to guess. And it was a really cool idea, right? It tickled something for me as a nascent Sabre 1.0 baseball fan. Because it adds, the idea to encapsulate a player beyond just like, you know, what the color commentator is saying, right? Or ESPN baseball tonight and things like that. It's actually like, you know, it's the old, I think it was like, he was like, oh, I'm nervous. Kel saves 50 runs this season with this club. Like, no, we can actually measure that. It tones down some of the tall tales, right, of baseball guys, so to speak. But you get into more of it, obviously, and there are certain limitations. It's a good starting point over a career, right? If you look at, you know, like Adrian Beltray, right? I guess he has traditional staff. It doesn't have like traditional county sets. Larry Walker is a good one, right? Like, he didn't have 500 home runs. He didn't have 3000 hits. He played in, at least when he was in course, he played in like an extreme run environment. And the ability to like measure that all out in like real terms and level it off and, you know, normalize it, I guess would be like this, the statistical sense is important. But when you're looking at, you know, 2020 for war metrics, 110 games into the season, you know, it's, it's fine, right? Like, like any good stat, it's generally going to, originally or tear down correctly, right? Like, there's going to be, it's generally going to put the best players at the top and the worst players at the bottom and the middle players in the middle. But they all do things a little bit differently, pitching, I'm gonna go throw pitching out because pitching is wildly different between the three fighters of war. You know, they are clearly measuring different things, baseball references run average per nine with a defensive and defensive and difficulty adjustment. So park factor, teams faced role, et cetera. Fangrafts war is FIP based, which is literally just strikeouts, walks and home runs and normalizes all walls and play. And baseball objectives is DRA, which is a very complicated mixed model in terms of evaluating pitching. So, so Brendan Tuma, who's two, so that's interesting thoughts on baseball. He works at underdog fantasy, writes for BA a little bit, tweeted this morning with Paul Skins his fifth and nationally F4. Yeah. He's behind, he's well behind Jackson Merrill and then there's Tyler Fitzgerald, Sota Iminaga and Mason Nguyen, right ahead of home. This is for rookies. This is for rookies. This is nationally rookie F4. Right. Conversely, he's almost the full win ahead of everybody in our war, our war. People make the most definitive arguments. This guy has the most war, which is the three weights of the scores of Ellen or those. The differences here are so minute and such tiny differences in methodology, but there's a demand for granularity that just does not exist in baseball analysis. It just does in too much as complex private. So why is Paul Skins rated so much better by baseball reference war than he is by Fangrafts war? Because he gets more credit for contact suppression. That tweet, by the way, I think like fairly significantly move the odds working with the yard doesn't be clear. There's two reasons for this. One is if his ERA is a half run under his FIP. Sure. That's number one. And number two, baseball reference thinks the pirate's defense is a lot worse than Fangrafts does because they use different defensive matches. They do. Like F4 doesn't really care about defense. Right. And it does, but it's about team defense a lot. Yes. And I don't love the team. I don't love the team defense adjustment the way they do it. Conversely, Jackson Merrill, who's a lot higher in Fangrafts war, then I'm going to take a wild guess that Jackson Merrill to use the R superstar. And that's like, see enough. Yeah, if I recall, if I recall the RS doesn't actually love him in center field. Right. And if the pod is sweet, it's replaced. Yeah, the RS has a minus two, which probably, I have not watched enough onto his baseball to comment, but seems broadly fine. shock of shocks, he's 9.2 runs per 150 there you go. Now, I, I, I am not going to pretend to have seen enough of Jackson Merrill in center field this year in run in in wide enough shots to tell you whether that's true or not. I will say one thing. He is 87th percentile in OAA and that's only four outs. Yeah, outs are not worth nearly as much as a run. And they out field they're closer, but yeah, they're not there. UCR has had scaling problems for, I don't know, fucking 15 years. And only that. Yeah. And, you know, I understand Fangrafts is different defensive calculations than they did a couple of years ago. But again, the, the lack of stability in these war numbers, we have had knockdown drag out brawls. Yes. About awards based on war numbers, the two years later, a park effect, or something small got recalculated. These are going to get, these are going to get changed yet. DRP has him at minus 0.3 run, so almost bang average. Sure. I don't have any fucking idea which one of these are using our senses. Probably none of them are actually right. Always says he's good, but not great. DRP says he's average. And the other thing is, we have offense. No, I don't. I mean, I also don't. If I started asking team analysts, they wouldn't know either because this has been the option for 90 games in the slide. Yeah. You don't know how sticky any of this is, how much of this is situational. Look, they might have more granular. I would assume those teams have more granular data. Yeah. Like we don't. And the other thing is like all the offensive stuff is all going to come pretty much in line because we're all using the same Palmer and Thorne hidden game of baseball linear awaits with slight variations since 1980s. So it's like whatever. You know, we're kind of the outlier here because DRC is a little bit different, but like DRC has them at 14% better than leg average. You know, it's a little under his OPS plus, but DRC also tends to scale down off OPS plus and WRC plus anyway. So I'm guessing our bat is 125. I'm guessing his WRC plus is reasonably close to that. You know, not that 10% is insignificant. We also use a different replacement level, which is a whole another long conversation that. Oh, yeah, that's not really our not really our vertical, Jared. So we can move on from that. Like, look, war is fine, right? Like war again, we'll generally, you know, I'll just pull it will point it will point you in the right direction, but you're also still allowed to use your brain. Yeah, like it's a, but you're allowed to still acknowledge that there are things other than war that matter a lot. So Francisco Lindor has a 5.3 f4 right now. Freddie Freeman has a 3.5 f4 right now. I am pretty confident Francisco Lindor is having a better season than Freddie Freeman this year. Francisco Lindor is a 5.3 f4 right now. Bryce Harper has a 4.0 f4 right now. But we're getting into the fact place where you can reasonably make an argument. Harper is actually having a better season, right? Once you get to like one, one, like what are the actual air bars? Not air. I shouldn't say air bars. What is with the confidence interval on these numbers, given the like, keep in mind, all these offense stats are contextualists, right? There's no, you know, Francisco Lindor has a 5.3 wins above replacement. His WPA is 2.42. So that's one way to look at it. Wow. Oh, I can probably find someone that's been, let's look up Jackson Merrill. I'm guessing Jackson Merrill's f4. WPA is probably higher than his f4. 3.5 wins above replacement. His WPA is, oh, it's only 1.89, weird. I guess I just probably recency bias on my part there. And WPA is going to scale us either because it's like most baseball games. Most baseball at bats do not move game leverage, meaningfully, even if they're successes or failures, you know, generally speaking, you know, outside of like closers, right? Closures are going to tend to have higher WPA than war, just because of the situations they're used in. But yeah, so again, it's useful when, you know, war is a, was a fairly large leap forward for baseball analysis when it happened 25 years ago. Yes, yes, it was, every 23 years ago. And we haven't made particularly great strides. You don't say that. I mean, we can measure a lot more things. We can, like you look at the, you know, you talked about the key performance indicators or whatever, like before we got pitch level data, like we didn't know things like, you know, zone contact percentage, very important stat for major league hitters. I actually had some contact percentage for longer than, longer than you think it's fair. That's actually one of the ones that came up. As you want to say 90th percentile x in velocity, let's go with it, right? You know, you can argue what, and we've had this conversation before, obviously. We've had questions about it. You know, what metric would you want to know more, you know, do you know one metric for a hitter, right? You could argue 90th percentile x in velocity, right? You can, you can absolutely one look that can lead you a strike. A lot of guys with really great 90th percentile x in velocity that can actually hit. But generally speaking, like this is one of the reasons Mark Bientos is having success, right? If he hits the ball, so damn hard, you know, outside of everything else. What night, what, when you do that, what it allows you to do is when you get marginal gains elsewhere in your contact profile, it has an exponential effect because the balls you're hitting are way more likely to be hits or extra base hits when you hit the ball that hard. Again, this sounds kind of like obvious and productive, but, you know, sometimes important to say those things out loud and like, look, we're, we're going to get a stat cast war at some point. I don't know when it's going to happen. What? I feel like we're going to. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but we're going to get some, maybe not an out and out war. Maybe, maybe an out and out war, but I just feel like somebody is going to do something with this day. We're going to get like X war or something, right? Expected war based on, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there'll be more, there'll be more wars on war to come. It is a war on war, but for now we'll take a break, come back and do the third half of the show. Welcome back. Now it's time for the third half of the show. Before we do the third half of the show, we do housekeeping. It's for all you kids out there. Episode 475 for all you kids out there is a Mets adjacent to baseball prospectus podcast. You can find us on the internet at baseball prospectus.com. The podcast is on iTunes and various other non iOS apps. Just search for all you kids out there and you can listen or subscribe right there. You want to get in contact with the show or on Twitter at for all you kids here at Sun Twitter at J. So either I'm on Twitter at Jeff Paternostro Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/for all you kids out there. You can email the show and all you kids at baseball prospectus.com. I got to say, this is a good email week. It's a good core. I'm really intrigued by a lot of these questions. Some of them are like, what you would expect, but there's some there's some fun ones in here too. I got to say, so good work by the listeners this week. This is from Philip with a 2025 Mets we're already skipping ahead. Hey guys, you're right. This is a French playoff team. They weren't as bad as they played in April and they weren't as good as they played in May and June. Occasionally we know things, Philip. The offense is so weird. There's one to two strong offense pieces missing. Sort of a miracle hot two months and that's won't be hanging a banner in 2024 with this unreliable offense. Philip, they hang the play at the wild card participant banner every year. So they might have like the fucking diamond backs look like this last year. Yeah. Yeah, it's right. Yeah. Rangers at times look like this last year and they won the World Series. Yeah, maybe we're not. I mean like the modern baseball analysis is just getting better all of us. Yeah. And you know, maybe wasker-browsabon is this year's Kevin Dinkle or whatever, right? Ryan Thompson. Ryan Thompson. Yeah. Reed Garrett struck out three last night. You know, Daniel Nunez will be back soon. They're not even actually, they're not, they're not particularly well built to play however many games you have to play in a month, but like if they get three relievers, they get hot, like they get three relievers, they get hot. They have guys with stuff back there, right? Like it's not. Reed Garrett, Daniel Nunez, wasker-browsabon, Jose Budo. Yeah, they can, you know, but anyway, that's 2024. We're talking about 2025. So what exactly can the Mets realistically do to be a consistent contender in 2025? What obvious offensive pieces and starting pitches? You guys. Would you guys recommend the ad and the Aussies then? So we don't have to watch them lose the series to the Angels or get shut out yet again in Seattle. That's all. We have a question from Johnny Capps. Do you think the Mets will sign Soto? Would you give him whatever contract it takes to get it done? Yes. Yes, I would. So that is the, the thing, right? It's the, you want, if you want to reduce variants, you know, offense or race floor, going from Tyrone Taylor to Juan Soto, seems like a pretty good way to do it, Jared. This is Jeffrey. Oh, really? I don't know, man. Help me now for the very first time. My illustrious 13 year in baseball media, mostly covering the Mets, has led me to certain conclusions. Also covering Juan Soto as a prospect. Uh, yeah. It's gonna be 26 next year. If I'm, uh, if I recall, I think this is age 25 season, because I think he was still on the, uh, 25 and under for the Yankees. So, but I think this is last year, the 200. Yeah, I mean, you just, yeah, you just signed Juan Soto. Um, as you said, that's one of the two strong offensive pieces missing, but that's a pretty strong offensive piece. And look, we talked about the pitching stuff. You can trade for Gary Crochet, right? Or you can sign Corbin Burns too, if you want and sign. How, are you reasonably confident now? Like this obviously doesn't always work out because this is the nature of the end of the market you're working in, but are you more confident that they can find, you know, actually find the next Sean and I, at least every now next year? Oh God, no. So you don't think there are actually any better at this? Like identifying the correct one in $14 million a year picture to sign. No. Okay. So you think there's a certain amount of luck involved here, basically? Yes. Okay. I mean, again, it's a very difficult market to work at, right? Yeah. Generally speaking, are you more confident they can bring along Brandon Sproat and Jonah Tongue than you maybe have been in the past? Okay. Because that's be part of it too, right? You don't really like, look, it should probably just sign Corbin Burns, but also you don't want to have to be in the business of giving $150 million to pitchers, generally speaking. Right. Now look, you're going to do it for a Corbin Burns level guy, I would feel like. Yeah, you're going to do it. And we had this conversation with Blake Stell, right? The last off season, do you really want to do it for Blake Stell? Some teams probably going to do it. Yes. Yes, you did. Oops. You did. Oops. But it's, it's tough, right? Sometimes it's like Robbie Ray and like Kevin Gossman has been both good and bad with the J's too. Unbalance, you're probably fine with that deal if you're the Toronto Blue J's. Other things went wrong there. But yeah, like if you have the the backfill and they're getting there, right? Like even this year, the problem was, you know, Sengo was hurt. They didn't have the front of the rotation guy, but they've been fine filling in with, you know, Peterson and Budo and Scott and sound like Scott is pain-free and throwing again. How confident are you that Christian Scott is going to pitch for the 2025 Mets, Jared? Uh, we'll see how that goes. Um, so yeah, they are you that Christian Scott is my suspicion. So it's tough, right? Because if he's pain, like the reason you don't really worry about cutting in August versus cutting in October is it doesn't fight. He's going to miss 2025, either way, and it's not going to meaningfully impact his 2026 ramp up. However, if he's pain-free right up until February 15th next year, when he gets on the six-pack in Port St. Lucie and starts throwing in a hundred percent effort, then, you know, it's 2025 and most of 2026. Now guys want to avoid surgery. He's going to want to avoid surgery specifically in his particular spot, and I get that. And like, I'm not advocating cutting if there's no reason to cut, but yeah, I mean, what's the best predictor of future elbow injuries for a picture, Jared? Past elbow injuries. Yeah, and Scott's had a few now, hasn't he? Yeah, I mean, you just cross your fingers at that point, really. But yeah, again, you've got Spro, you've got McLean, you've got Tongue. You know, Tongue will be in the 2025 mix at some point, and things continue to go well for him, obviously, at the beginning of the season. They're going to need a backfill. You know, they're going to sign Andrew Haney or someone like that, probably. And no, maybe it goes about as well as we submarine them. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's a lot of Jose Budo and David Peter. So again, again, next year, maybe it isn't. I don't know. I do know they can probably fill the rotation with three and a half to four ERA pitchers again, and Paul Blackburn too. But you're going to need to outscore your opponents, some doing that. And Juan Soto is probably, again, it's just why it's his, I just saw he had another home run today. This is OPS back over 1000. It sure is 303, 429, 577. He has already had the best season. Okay. He's point why me after he hit his home run today, I'm confident in saying he has had the best season of his career by Fangrafts War. It's August. I mean, this is kind of the season we, like, I don't know, expected. Here we put cutting up after 2020. And again, he's only 25. He does not turn 26 until October. And look, I get he's not a great defensive outfielder. He's probably going to be a first baster DH for the time. He's 30, 303, 429, 577. He's going to have 40 home runs. He's going to hit 300, probably. He's walked more than he struck out this year. He's Juan Soto, just sign one Soto. Another question from Johnny Capps. That was a good bouncing off point from the last one. Hey guys, considering the price for mediocre starters and good relievers at the deadline, do you think this is a trend moving forward with the parody in the league? Do you see the Mets having a strategy of using their financial resources in future years of signed middle and back end starters and potentially good relievers to one year deals as athletes look at the deadline for an overpaying prospects. The Mets build good pitching depth and triple layer to replace players they trade because it's be a viable strategy for hopefully contending team. It's the employee type of strategy, sterns and cold would be uniquely good at implementing. Also, what contract would you give Burns this offseason? Do you think he's legit target for the Mets? Same as Puma? Yes. German already said that they're one of them beats dead, so it's out there. The fingers crossed healthy rotation of Burns, Senga, Sprout, Scott, and Blackburn would be nasty with plenty of depth and triple A. So it is difficult to do this for some of the reasons we outlined the atom out of, you know, discussion, right? If you go and sign Andrew Haney, a veteran starter, a World Series winner to be your number four starter and then trade him at July 25th to like arbitrage his value in a seller's market and backfill him with Nolan McLean, you might have clubhouse problems. You may, especially if he's pitching well, like if he's pitching basically let's say a sevary now or a menia level, right? And if he's pitching worse than that, you're probably not flipping him. So this is a difficult thing to do, especially with a veteran clubhouse. Like teams don't do this. Even the brewers didn't, they did it with Hader, I guess, is the main example. Yeah, Burns has said it. He missed, yeah, he misplayed his hand there. Like he did not have a firm grasp on the actual situation. Obviously we saw this in Seattle a couple of years ago with Kendall Gravman, right? And they brought in, it was a raised closer to backfill that. So it wasn't even like a prospect, right? It was another team's closer and a pretty good one. But it's still like it upsets the working environment for these guys, right? Now we can say, and we can argue from the outside how much front offices should care about that, but they probably should care a little. They do, but they do. I mean, nobody wants, again, it's like anything else. If you get in a, you know, we've both worked to share about his jobs, a bunch of, if there's a bunch of turnover, right? Like that's an uncomfortable working environment sometimes. It's because you start looking over your shoulder a little bit too. Now maybe not for the, you know, the Nemo and Lindor level guys, but you know, if you're Tyrone Taylor, right? Now you got some team control left, but you know, you might find your like, and you don't want to be. I guess in this case, you're probably going to another contending team for the most part, but you don't really want to be the guy that gets traded from the team in the playoff race to, you know, the 2020 for Cubs or whatever, right? Probably not. Like these guys still want to win. So yeah, it's, you can do it, but it is a little bit of like players and strat cards kind of stuff, and that can have knock on effects in your locker room. What contract would you give Corbin Burns this off season? A lot. Yeah, a lot of years. Yeah. Yeah. It's been very good. This is a lot of money. You know, like the comps here, like he's better. I would say he's probably better than Gosman and Ray, just as he's done it for longer. It's the road on deal sticks out to me because I was just a weird deal at the time. Though the Yankees are not regretting at all right now, I'm sure, but he's not like a Jeffrey Jeffrey is being sarcastic there. The Yankees very obviously. Yes. I think after 470 just five episode people would take my toe. I just want to be clearer than Jeffrey who's being sarcastic there. I hope you would understand my tone by now, but yeah. You being sarcastic? I don't even know anymore, man. There hasn't been like this level of pitching free agent in a while. It feels like, like Cole was younger. He was a clear cut ace. I guess Burns is an ace. Would you call Corbin Burns an ace? Probably an ace. If not, he's a very good number two, right? I know he kind of had a little bit of a down here last year, I guess, but if you want a nitpick, the strikeout rates are going in the wrong direction. He's still been very good. I would wonder how my rates have been going in the wrong direction. I mean, look, 2021 is probably just the best he's in his career, and that's fine. You don't need him to be that level of a guy to give him $180 million or whatever. Yeah, he's probably more of a good number two than an ace looking at the top line. I'm guessing if I dive into the metrics, I'm going to find something I don't like, and the whiff rate on some of this stuff, because I mean, he's going to be a 30-year-old pitcher, and he's been pretty durable. He's gone 290 the last two years, probably going to be in the somewhere in the 190-200 range. Again, this year, yeah, it's like the cutter and curve. Oh, they both of ours really changed its pitch mix. That's interesting. The cutter and curve are not missing as many bats, the slider is missing more, so again, that's relative to 2023. 2022, which was one of his better, if not 2021, so a young level, one of his better swing-and-miss seasons. He was running over 45% whiff on his cutter change and slider, sorry, curve change and slider, and running 28% on a hard cutter, he was throwing more than half of the time. He's not doing that anymore. That would concern me a little bit. He's still a very good pitcher, but that would concern me a little bit, if I'm, again, giving 150 to 200 million dollars to a starting pitcher, which is, again, why you don't always really want to be swimming in that market, because these guys get to 2930 and, you know, he throws everything very hard, literally everything here, like his main pitches, his cutter is 96, touch 99. You know, his curves in a different bellow band, but the slider is 88, touch 92. The change is 89, touch 92. When he throws actual fastball, it's a sinker now, they've had him completely ditches forcing him, not nearly through a four-seam-a-ton in Milwaukee either, as 97, touch 100. That's, you know, again, me, Corbin Burns is on the market, he's not in Corbin Burns, but, at least something to keep in the back of your mind. Do you believe from Jason, this past week radio host by the name of Brandon Tierney claimed that if the Mets missed the playoffs, David Sterns will be on the hot seat. Is this actually true? That seems really fast and short-sighted. He said you can't not make the playoffs this year and be given a pass going to 2025. So the time is now for Sterns, and if you can't get it done, I'll be sent packing soon. When's the last time you listened to WFAN? Who are your favorite elite favorite hosts, whether it be pastor or president? I also hope David Sterns doesn't get fired. Is this, like, oh god, what's the, is that a Mad Max meme? That's bait. That's bait. That is bait. Look, nobody wants, you don't actually want Jared and I to be hosting a five-hour drive time, sort of talk radio show. It'll be fun, yeah, you would be literally driven insane by the Francisco Lindor questions by Tuesday. But yeah, I just, like, you gotta come up with content, right? No, they're not going to fire David Sterns one year into a five-year contract when he's making significant money and it's just not good business. Also, after the owner was out there all of last year saying 2025 was like a reset, or 2024 was a reset year. I don't know, I pay attention to some of these things in my 13-year career in sports media most of all. I just, I don't, I have not listened WFA in a while. Obviously, we both like Mike and the Mad Dog and have listened to a lot of Mike and the Mad Dog over our, our 20s, I would say, more than perhaps our 30s and 40s teams. Yeah, I mean, I didn't get into my 20s. Yeah, I mean, Francis has been off the air for a long time. I had a new car about a year ago and I had a new car. The car had both the really high-end Apple CarPlay and SiriusXM. I have not intentionally listened to WFA in a sense. Did I, did I listen to it some before then, even in more recent years? Yeah. They're current group of hosts. We're not the audience for that. Now, I mean, I like Evan Roberts. Yeah, I do too. I, but the show that Evan Roberts is doing right. Yeah. It's not a show that's aimed at me. You know, for whatever, and Lord knows, Joe Benengo is probably not somebody I would want to know personally based on things that have come out. The Joe and Evan show was much more aimed at me than the Evan and Tiki show, right? So, that's, you know, he went from hosting a hardcore, hardcore fan show to what I would call a broader hot tech show, right? So, yeah, my favorite WFA on host of all time is Steve Summers. Hard same. Yes. And again, he had his moments of less, less than greatest, too, right? Is he still even on the air? I don't even know. He's officially retired now, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, I really like Steve Summers. I really like my princess. Yeah, he, he left in 2020, Steve officially left in 2021, but he does pop on occasion. You know, I, you know, the, the Mike and the Mad Dog Show was like foundational if you're like a New York sports media fan of a certain, like what I call good. No, absolutely. Um, I will say nothing. Again, nothing beats. This is for me, right? Driving back from Cityfield after a, you know, going to a game Saturday night or Friday night or going into whatever, putting on WFA and for the post game, getting the sacks outro and then the schmooze. After like a good win. And then the schmooze monologue. That gets good sports talk radio. That is like a, I'm not the pinnacle of the form, but like a high end version of the form because it is, it's stick, right? It's all stick. It's all stick. This is stick to an extent. Let's stick them. No, no, no, we're not. We don't, we don't do bits. What? Oh, no. I'm like this real life. But again, it's like we're closer to the WWE model of like, you know, just emphasize certain parts of your real personality or whatever they said about like stone cold and shit. But sure. We're not, we're not playing characters. But yeah, I really liked these summers. Um, yeah, I didn't mind having enjoy like, like, like to put on in the car, driving home from work for 40 minutes. Like, it's fine. I couldn't do longer than that. And like, again, I don't know what the, what their market is right now. Like, how many people actually listen to sports talk radio? Like Spotify and any other podcasts. Like this one, not really like this one, but other podcasts. Yeah. I listen to podcasts most of the time. And sometimes there was some other stuff too. Like, you know, yeah, it is about getting engagement and like getting phone calls, right? Do I got a call on to be like, Oh, you can't say they're going to fire David Stern. That's crazy. Yeah. You know, the next 20 minutes before, uh, before you kick it back to the mink man, I don't know. He's still there. But probably yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Uh, from the goog, Q for the fee. How many homers would Esau parade a set if he played all his home games in the polo grounds, especially special bonus question. How much would it cost us to pull our money by the A's and build them a polo grounds clone in Oakland to play in? Let's do that. I was, I was going to look up this question. So I had a nice solid. It's like 290 down the left field. It's shorter than the right field. I was actually going to give this like a real run to try and figure out what the answer was. And then I just did didn't forget. Yeah. Um, I mean, a lot, I guess is the, uh, right? Yeah. This is the old, uh, Bill James offline. Like there's, there's certain new historical abstracts offline. Yeah. We love Bill James. The new historical abstract entries that I remember, it was him going off for like an entire side of the page in the hardcover new historical abstract about the no cheap home runs for art. Um, claim. Yeah. I'm like, obviously Melod. You know, yeah. Yeah. And that grew up as well. Yeah. Um, he saw parade A's in a Wrigley field. Choices were made. Yeah. I mean, there's worse places for him. Not many, but not many. There are worse places for it. There's not many worse places. I would say Kaufman, but Kaufman apparently is playing like Coors lately. So I don't know what's going on there. There are worse places from him. Uh, yeah. So we'll just, we'll just stick with a lot, I think is the answer there. Is that all the, oh, we have a question from Jack. Two questions for the all you kids bond. When Sandy was hired the first time October 2010, was he considered a good or above average GM at that time where baseball was at? Or was the game already starting to move past him and he was becoming a dinosaur? I know he brought in Rachardi and Deepa Desta, who were former GM's help him out. Adam Rubin wrote a piece saying once that Deepa Desta leaving the Browns was the beginning of the end for the Sandy tenure. I bet he did. Deepa Desta was the bridge for, bridge for Sandy for the younger GMs and helped the Mets keep up with the more modern new trends at the time. The second question is why has Jack later not lived up to the hype and billing and being the second overall pick and having a dominant college. That's an interesting question. They're both interesting questions. So I got hired at an amazing avenue in April 2011, probably marks she does 11. So I think the Sandy, you know, I joined up and started running about the Mets the same time Sandy 10 years started. I thought it was a good hire. It wasn't specifically a baseball hire at the time. It was a we need an adult in the room because you can't really manage anything. And look, it took like he had to cut a ton of payroll, which he did. You know, he made the obviously the Beltran for Wheeler trade, which was good. He made the, you know, the Dickey for Sandegar Darno and when we're Becerra trade, which is good. Well, that was even really after the start to cut money, but it was after Dickey started getting expensive. You know, he was, was the GM for one of four, five, six, I can do math, six Mets teams that made the World Series. So five, 69, 73, 86, 2000, 20, 15, five, yeah, but the first time. Yeah. But at the time he was hired, like, it was because he hadn't really been a day to day GM. He was a president of baseball operations when that was more a team president. I think he wasn't really, he was less of a day to day role with the Padres. The Padres were not particularly good in that era of like the Kevin Towers GM era, I think. I don't know. And also the pace of change in baseball between 1990 and 2010, it was, but maybe not as high as the change in baseball between 2010 and 2024, if you're a front office executive. Like the bar is just higher now. Like who is the, who is the Sandy Alderson equivalent in 2024? So like Kim Aang, that's my first thought. But I guess Alderson was still fairly active. Like he was in a frontal, he was in a major league teams front office, he wasn't doing day to day stuff. Is it Theo Epstein? That's probably Theo Epstein. So if the, if the Mets hired or any team hired Theo Epstein going to 2025, it would be a lauded hire, I'm sure. Yeah. But would he be an above average GM in 2025 baseball? I have no idea. I don't either. It's a good question. Yeah, Deepa Desta was certainly an important part of that front office. I don't, you know, again, looking at it in hindsight, it's difficult to parse just because of the situation the Mets were in when he was hired. Is it Josh Burns was the other finalist, I think? Yeah, Josh Burns would have been considered like a more progressive, more modern GM at the time. I don't know that actually would have played out that way. But I think that would have been the viewpoint. So what happened to Jack Lighter, Jared? All his pitches backed up is the short answer. Now, why all his pitches backed up is more complicated. It's what happened. You look at his key performance indicators, Jared. I'm guessing they're not as good as when they were at Vanderbilt. Never thought. Now, there could be a lot of reasons for that. Yeah, they're cookie. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't, I both do have a good answer for this and don't have a good answer for this for the purposes of hosting a podcast. You can just, you can just put the Jose Mourinho meme in here again for the second straight week. A curious question from Rob Kay. I've only watched a few bits of this game, but Gary has brought up bientos stuttering before breaking on grounders and that Francisco Endora is a different war, depending on the website. And his subject line is, is Gary listening to the pod? No, not impossible, but not likely. That's what I will say. Long drive, long drive in from Fairfield County. I would be very, very surprised. Yeah, very, very, I would be too. It is a long drive in from Fairfield County, but I would be surprised. I think we have a driver anyway. He's got his earbuds on. Listen to Jarrett Ranavout at amount of, you know, unlikely, not impossible, unlikely. Facebook group. I thought there was like, only a couple of questions. Yeah, that's the only one question from Tom. Two for the P. We know what a high variance 85 wind team looks like. It's sort of low variance 85 wind team looks like. Yeah, more or less. I mean, I guess they were 10 under at one point, but yeah, it's a slog. It's been a slog. They have some good players. They don't always play great. They have a rotation of number three ish, number four ish starters. It's just yeah. The Mets. It's a weird one. It's not even the, I can't even really do that because it's not actually the Mets with a bunch of S's on the end. It's, I don't know. Again, it's, I think I've joked on this podcast and perhaps my previous one or a number of years, like, I don't know what I would do if they actually hit the exactly 85 wind version because they never did. It's like kind of roundly unpleasant in a way, but like low level unpleasant. Like not enough to be, I don't turn the games off. And now that they're in like a playoff race, it's kind of like, especially annoying. Cause you like, you know, you get a little more juice, right? So you're, you are living and dying a little more with every pitch and every dumb game and every double play with first and third and one out, right? Which have been a few of those on this road trip, God knows. Yeah. And it's like, the thing about actually hitting the 85 wind, the low variance version, right? As you know, there's a higher outcome version of this team. And they're like occasionally close to it, but never quite there. Like it's just not like, you could just tell me they get to like 88, 89 winds. Again, not, not a high bar. Not asking for much. But it's just they can't beat the angels to out of three, right? They can't just go on this road trip and do like though they have a homestand coming upward. You would hope they would make a maybe they will, maybe they won't. I don't know, man. It's, it's a kid's, it's really weird. Cause again, it's, and I think some of these starts, there is a little bit of a stern stamp on this, right? So like the processing stuff, you're going to get bits of this, even on the better versions of this team that hopefully he's building in the future. And it's just like, I don't know, it's like, it's like when you watch a movie or a TV show or, I had this today when it's watching Wednesday play. So Wednesday is on Paramount Plus now, instead of ESPN Plus for the sky games, which actually they're doing like a full studio show and the video quality is a lot better, like whatever the late and then it's just better high def than what ESPN Plus was showing. But I was listening to, I was watching the game a little bit and they just didn't quite have the sound mixing, right? So like the announcer was a little low and the crowd noise was a little high. And it was just like driving me nuts. It's like I'm like straining to listen a little bit and like watching and it's like, this is so close to being really good. And once they won four nails, so I don't care, but at the top of the table, but it's better than watching the best. But like just that little, it's like, it's like, or when you watch something and like you can tell the audio is off by like a couple frames, you're watching like the actor's mouth move or something. And in some way, it's worse than if it was a little bit worse, right? Because it's, it's like annoying. Like it just, you can't see anything else other than the flaws of this team. This is what it comes down to, I think is what I'm trying to get. You can't see anything else than like Mendoza not pinch hitting with Francis Guavares or the weird winker usage or Sean and I are not being able to locate the plate last night or again, the first and third double plays with look that happens to everyone happens to every team. You roll over one first and third and one out and you know, that's why the statistic for lesson, you know, getting brothers in from third with less than two ounces and a hundred percent, right? But it just, it just magnifies the flaws when they're this close to like being good. Like being an actual good, they sell green man meme, right? The Mets who are good. The Mets who are so close to being good, but they're not good. Yeah, it's, it's, it's annoying. It is. That's, that's the word for it. It's annoying. It is just annoying. The Mets who are annoying. I don't have any wrestling. I'm going to GCW, but I think that's going to be next Sunday, so I'll probably record before that. Are you excited? So here's a, here's a funny story about this. Like I saw the address for the venue and didn't think much of it at the time. It's, it's like not really downtown, but like it's a short drive. And then I actually like looked at the venue yesterday because I was looking at my ticket or whatever and things like that. And I have literally, I kid you not driven by this venue 100 times. It is literally on the corner of State Street where I turn to get my kid to preschool. I have stopped at that light a hundred times. I have never noticed this place before. I'm very, so it's, it's, I looked at it. I just literally went to the Google roadside map to see it and it just looks like a house. Sure. It's very, very short drive. It's like 20 minutes, but in short drive, I still have the most part, but very short drive. They've announced, it's not a bad card. Like it's a very GCW show. I knew it. There's nothing particularly noteworthy. I can, the last one they just announced yesterday is Starboy Charlie against Masha Samovich, which should be fun match. Sure. It's a gringo loco against Jack Cartwheel, which the match I feel has happened like a hundred times, but we'll also be a perfectly fine match. I know what that match is. It'll be good. I'll enjoy it. Mance Warner is facing many lemons who's like the big local guy that runs Devotion Championship Wrestling here. And then there was like break Blake Christian against somebody, it was a Blake Christian match that looked fine too. The way Maki Ito, the way Nick Gage, I think Bussy is also on this show. It's a GCW show. It's all check it out. It's a GCW show. It is again, I cannot believe it is like three blocks from my kid's preschool, but apparently it is. It is. I know exactly where to get parking because I know that area well. That's good. That's good. That makes my life easier. You like that? Yeah, I like that. It's good. I'm not going to some place out in West Valley City or something that I have to figure out. Easy drive. I know the area. I know the bars. Lovely. We won't chat about it next week because I won't have gone yet. But certainly on a future edition. For all you kids out there. Ryan Seacrest here, when you have a busy schedule, it's important to maximize your downtime. One of the best ways to do that is by going to Chumba Casino dot com. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino games, like spin slots, bingo, and solitaire that you can play for free for a chance to redeem some serious prizes. So hop on to Chumba Casino dot com now and live the Chumba life sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. Looking for excitement? Chumba Casino is here. Play anytime. Play anywhere. Play on the train. Play at the store. Play at home. Play when you're bored. 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