i actually got a lot done today

went with bree to a restaurant where if youre a pregnant lady and you eat the salad the odds magically increase that you will deliver the bambino within 3 and 36 hours.

bree wanted to go there because on monday theyre going to induce her and she would rather her angel come out the natural way.

she taught me a lot about being a pregnant lady. we did a little podcast. it turned out better than i expected.

when you’re unemployed you feel like a complete loser and when you do something well it has a way of surprising you.

apparently i can talk aloud in a conversation.

anyways this restaurant has an unpronounceable name, it’s on an adorable street in studio city that actually looks like it could be in the movies now that i say it.

the waiters told us that 15-20 women a day go in there for The Maternity Salad.

bree is picky and she said the salad was good. mine was meh.

they had this huge board with all the names of the Salad Babies.

she was very calm. her work gives her 6 months off to do this. which seems like a lot, but then how do you just not be around your 6 month old if you wanna receive money and benefits?

we’ll check in with her later.

best question i asked: what was your best baby shower gift?

tune in never to hear her answer because lets be real, if i wanted to do podcasts i would have been doing them by now.

came home and watched the end of the cubs game.

then did something on the howard stern group that ive been wanting to do somewhere, anywhere, for the last 10 years.

long long time ago usa today had a blog called pop candy by whitney matthewson and she did this thing where once a week she would feature one of her commentors.  most posts got like 20-100 comments, but those ones got 1,000+ because it was actually really nice to see who these people were and what they were into.

last month i did an Ask Me Anything to get the ball rolling. i knew some of these people disagreed with some of the rules that i had implemented or didn’t like how i did certain things, so i did it to let them grill me on it so that there would be a record of where i stood on things and so maybe they could understand my rationale better. funny thing was, most of them had zero interest in any of that and just wanted to ask good questions. which was fine because that AMA wasnt about me, really, it was to set the table for the weekly AMAs to come.

so i made sure to keep it as really real as i could, but also to mirror what we love about the Stern show, which is people are brutally honest, including the host. especially the host.

well it worked out because today i picked this guy who was one of my best Informants. the group gets more than 50 posts a day and it is really helpful that 3-4 dudes regularly tell me any time someone says something insane that needs my attention. in a perfect world i would make them all admins, but this system has worked out fine and despite the size (16k) most people respect the rules and are civil.

so i asked him yesterday if he was up to do an AMA and he said whats that? turned out he was perfect. he grew up on Long Island in the 80s; knows everything about the show, the staff, all the minor details, and even knows the comedian guests on the much-maligned Wrap Up Show. works in government in DC. the whole thing was shocking. and then he came out in the middle of the thing.

pop candy strikes again.

then i watched this video of David Ross, the backup catcher for the Cubs in 2016 who was the oldest player on the team so they called him Grampa Rossy.

if you remember, in the World Series, in the final game, on what everyone knew would be his final game of his career because he was retiring, he hit a crucial home run off one of their best pitchers.

the cubs digital team has taken it to higher level this year with their videos because not only is the production good but the interviews, like on this one, lead to some amazing insights.

for example: Grampa Rossy has no business hitting a home run off Andrew Miller on a rainy night in Cleveland,

but through this video we learn all this crazy ass inside baseball stuff that is what i live for

namely:

Rossy and Miller played together in Boston. when you are the catcher and he is the pitcher, you tend to learn things about him if you ever have to hit against him. Ross, like most people, knew that Miller’s money pitch was his slider – a pitch that will trail away from a right handed batter, just out of his reach.

sliders are super hard to hit so you usually just let those go by and wait for him to throw a fastball.

miller had a tell. one that probably only a catcher would know because it may hurt some catcher’s feelings.

when a catcher calls the signs, he’s not asking the pitcher “hey what do you think about a fastball?” he’s telling him “dude, let me call this game. i see what you have going. i study the hell out of these batters. here’s what we should do: fastball.”

if the pitcher disagrees with the call he will shake off the catcher and have him call another pitch. most pitchers only have 2-3 pitches so it’s not that complicated. but if a pitcher shakes off a catcher, generally the catchers don’t like that.

so Grampa Rossy noticed that every time Miller would shake off a pitch it was usually because he wanted to throw a fastball.

there it was, game 7 of the world series. all of his years of being around the league, learning weird quirks, studying batters… it was Grampa’s weird knowledge of his former pitcher that helped him know that when Andrew Miller shook off a sign with one ball and two strikes it was probably gonna be a flaming hot fastball.

and it was, and the Cubs were on their way to winning the world series.