Mild Card Season, With Maitreyi Anantharaman
It is the nature of a podcast to unravel, or anyway it’s mostly the way that ours works. We start out trying to be normal, with a rundown of topics to address and a sense of roughly how long we have to discuss them, and then it all kind of unspools and derails and malfunctions and by the end I am singing the “they got a pepper bar” song from those weird Quiznos ads while Drew names different Vikings interior linemen as our guest feigns technical difficulties. Listeners know this; presumably some of them even like it. I mention this only because this week’s episode, in which we are joined by Defector’s own Maitreyi Anantharaman, unfolds more or less in reverse.
I mean, it still starts with Drew honking “we’re back” and ends with a Funbag answer abruptly transitioning into the credits. But also the episode begins with a digression inspired by Drew being impressed by Maitreyi’s extremely clean kitchen, meanders through a discussion of suburban clutter and accursed yard sale anti-finds, and then finally begins to be about sports after six and a half minutes of high-intensity unraveling. At which point it is honestly pretty normal.
By Distraction standards, I mean. There are some side quests and bloopers; at one point I call Bryce Young “Bryant Young” which is surely the biggest possible difference in physical bulk between two people who could ever be confused for each other. But within mere seconds of me saying the name “Pazuzu” we were on to talking about the damn NFC North. Most of that NFL discussion, invariably, was about weightier topics than the Lions stumbling out of the gate. We talked about Tua Tagovailoa’s latest concussion, which flowed more into a conversation about the conversation surrounding it, the strange spectacle of ex-players pushing the It’s His Decision line, and the frankly unsolvable broader problem that runs under all of it, which is the fundamental risk inherent in the sport and the absurdity of “playing football in moderation.” We also spoke about the Panthers benching Bryce Young, and how grim and decisive his slide into bust-hood has been. The eternal question of how to evaluate anyone or anything stuck within the suck vortex of David Tepper’s Carolina Panthers proved, in this case, pretty easy to answer.
After the break, the unexpected streak of narrative discipline continued. We talked about the American League Central, and how Maitreyi is and isn’t dealing with the sudden surge of her Detroit Tigers into the Wild Card picture, and a little bit about how I’m processing my dumb, wonderful Mets making a run at it in the National League. We agreed that baseball’s unique timescale, and the inherent inconsequentiality of basically anything that happens in July or August, made it somewhat easier to be normal about all of it, but also I would not say that either of us was entirely normal about it. There was also some White Sox chat, including a semi-appreciation of polarizing White Sox play-by-play goofball John Schriffen; I spoke my truth about watching a White Sox win and being denied his “South Side Stand Up” catchphrase, and Maitreyi singled out his strange tendency towards making a Thundercat sound whenever Luis Robert Jr. hits a homer. I snuck a Pantera joke by Drew, which I was proud of in the moment but now seems kind of unfair. He’s more of a Ratt guy.
We also ran down the WNBA playoff picture in anticipation of that league’s postseason, with Maitreyi speaking on the real appeal of A’ja Wilson’s low-key greatness, the coolness of the Minnesota Lynx, and the advantages of a comparatively cozy-sized league. And then, after a brief appreciation of the unique menace that only the most hard-core coaches provide, inspired by Becky Hammon’s uncommonly forbidding vibes, we were on to the Funbag. A listener’s question about whether or not total bases is kind of badly named led me into a brief meltdown over the word “integer,” but also to an unusually decisive answer. A question about what the best and most blessed type of sports fan to be, inspired by a Portland Sea Dogs superfan, let us address Maitreyi’s soft spot for fans that have never been to a game before and disdain for ballpark know-it-all’s who are barely at the know-some level. I also got to introduce my family’s concept of Mr. Restaurant; after Maitreyi saluted a kid who benefited from being able to identify Cionel Perez by sight, I expanded upon my extremely unsurprising past as just that kind of kid. By the time it ended, with a salute to the backup catcher who once threw me a baseball at Shea Stadium, we were just about back to where we usually begin. We’ll do our best not to hold it together quite so well going forward.
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