Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 869: Buckle Up, Replay is the Law

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a behind-the-scenes Barry Bonds story, then talk to legal consultant Jason Wojciechowski about why it’s both good and bad that replay review is like the law.

Standing in a slide zone, falling through a time zone, stepping in a slide zone, he had me falling through a time zone. Good morning and welcome to episode 869 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by our supporters on Patreon, as well as the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? Okay.

Is this the same Sam Miller who had an opinion piece published in the New York Times this weekend? Only because you were too big shot to do it. Yeah. I don't stir myself for little rags like the gray lady. We're also joined by Jason Wojcicki. Hey, Jason. Hi, guys. The official legal analyst of Baseball Prospectus' daily podcast, Effectively Wild.

And I don't know if you knew this, but when people ask me my favorite episode, I always say it was the one when you came on and had the discussion with us about the express written consent. Well, that's good. I don't remember that, so I hope I gave good advice. But I'm glad that somebody enjoyed it, particularly somebody in a position to matter. It was a good couple weeks of the show. The show has had some periods where it just feels like for like two weeks, fun things happen. And it was around that time that we had Gabe Kapler on, and it was around that time that

a raccoon was walking on the roof, the ceiling right above me, because I was in my backyard. It was just a wild time. Anyway. I'm excited to rank above both Gabe Kapler and a raccoon. That's quite good.

That raccoon now runs the Dodgers R&D department. You guys, I have a couple of quick banters, if you don't mind. Three, in fact, of progressive importance. The first one is the shortest one. I swear I heard it. I might be wrong, but I swear that I heard a commercial today on a baseball radio broadcast that began. It was a woman speaking and it began. Sometimes diabetes can feel a bit like don't a beaties. I, I, I have to hear it again before I believe it. Okay.

I have to hear it again before I believe it. Okay. Second thing, after we talked about Trout versus Harper, Trout hit.556,.667, 1,333 on the weekend or for the next three games. He raised his season OPS 200 points in those three games. He entered Sunday's – we're doing this on, so we're recording on Sunday. He entered Sunday's games with a OPS plus of 168. His career OPS plus is 169. And his war on baseball reference entering play on Sunday was the same as Bryce Harper. Third thing is that I happened to be in conversation this weekend with a uh

a player a marlins player who was at the barry bonds the reported barry bonds home run derby ish win over john carlos stanton you guys remember that from spring training eyewitness testimony and there was uh it was corrected after, it was contradicted after the fact By Stanton and Yellich Who told John Heyman that it was not a home run derby In fact, it was just a sort of a BP Kind of like It was sort of a contest, but it wasn't home runs

It was like trying to, you know Hit to different parts of the field or something like that Anyway, eyewitness tells me That what happened is That they goaded Bonds into picking up a bat. It was off a curveball pitching machine. And the first pitch, first curveball Bonds sees, he just tracks it. He's not even considering swinging.

He just tracks the first pitch, okay? So he's seen one. The second pitch he sees hits the batter's eye. The second pitch he sees hits the batter's eye. He just completely bombs one to dead center. He takes 12 swings and then drops the bat, raises his arm, and says, 51 years old, best there ever was. So that's even better than the reported story. And I asked

this person who I'm not naming because this person is not expecting me to tell this story, doesn't know that I have a podcast what bonds would hit if he were active today and he says he would hit 320 with 20 bombs. Wow.

He looks like he's in excellent shape. It's plausible hit 320 with 20 bombs. Wow. He looks like he's in excellent shape. It's plausible. 320 with 20 bombs is more plausible than whatever Rafael Palmeiro says he would hit. Well, he is with the team that is most likely to, in the second half of the season, just decide to give him that shot. All right. So that's all my banter. Ben, unless you have banter, I'm going to jump right into the topic, which begins with banter. Go right ahead. So, you know, a tie goes to the runner. You guys all, you've heard tie goes to the runner your

whole life. And then when you, you know, at some point when you get older, then you start hearing people go, tie goes, there's no rule that says tie goes to the runner. There's no such thing as a tie. There are no ties in nature. And that is very true. However, it is also true, and I don't think that this was necessarily proven, provable until replay, that in fact, there are no technical literal ties, but there are plays that even in super slow motion from multiple angles, you cannot tell which got there first. Amazingly, even slowed down to X-Mos speed, you cannot always tell whether the ball or the runner got there first. So in fact, there is something very, very, very much like a tie. And throughout baseball history in that situation, the tie would go to the runner. And it occurred to me today that, in fact, replay has killed tie goes to the runner.

Because now tie goes to whatever the call on the field was. It no longer goes to the runner. It just goes to whatever the call on the field was. You just have to, if it's inconclusive, we just say whatever the umpire thought. So this is a new victim of replay review. It is not the most important victim of replay review. of replay review. It is not the most important victim of replay review, but the very saying, the very rule of thumb that tie goes to the runner is dead because of replay review.

So I was thinking about this as I walked home from Trader Joe's today, and in the next two or three hours, in quick succession, I heard Dave Fleming on the Giants broadcast say that something along the lines of, you know, from what he hears around the game, instant replay is not at a particularly high moment of popularity right now. That he's hearing a lot of, you know, sort of grumbling that it's just not really working that well or that it's not implemented cleanly enough or something. You know, there's just a general sense of dissatisfaction. And then I saw Jason Focacoski doing a little Twitter rant about how he finds it lacking. And then I heard the Houston Astros, local radio broadcasters complaining about instant replay. And three different people complaining about three different situations, three different things within like a three-hour period had caused them all to go public with their general dissatisfaction of replay as it is.

And I also have felt this sort of sense of dissatisfaction, not because I am for or against it, so much as I'm just sort of generally underwhelmed with it relative to how sure we all were that we were going to love it. Like, we were completely confident that this had to happen and that this was an important thing for the game and that it would be better. And I'm not sure it's better.

It might be better, and it might would be better. And I'm not sure it's better. It might be better and it might not be better. And so we are having Jason on. Long intro, long prelude. We're having Jason on because Jason is our legal scholar and knows the law. And I wanted to find out from him sort of what we can learn from the law that might help Major League Baseball fix replay because the law obviously has to do a lot of the things that replay does and somehow manages. So first of all, Ben and Jason, give me your takes on replay as it stands right now. Well, if I'm starting, I will stick up for replay, I think. I think we always complain about something and we pick out whatever the problem is at the time. So pre-replay, we complained about the fact that there was no replay and that there

were routinely just egregious calls that stood because there was no recourse, even though people watching at home or even in the stands could clearly see that these plays should have been called a different way. And that just was an untenable position. It seemed you couldn't have people in the ballpark, people at home, seeing the mistakes just laid bare very obviously in ways that changed the game. And we needed replay. Replay was inevitable. It probably took too long to get here. So now it's far from perfect and it has had unintended consequences and maybe hasn't been implemented as well as it could have been in certain respects. And so now we complain about the problems with it now and they are real problems and there could be improvements. But I think the problems that we are complaining about now, at least from my

perspective, are less serious, less game-altering than the problems that we were complaining about before. And that's fine, because that's how things improve. That's how the system gets better. And so we pinpoint the problems, and eventually some of those problems will be fixed. But for me, at least, replay is still a net positive. Sharp take, smart take. Jason, what's your take? So I think Ben's 100% right. And at the same time, I just don't think replay is fun.

As I have aged, I really kind of just care about fun more and more. And I don't find... Some of this is implementation, right? Some of this is issues like, you know, the manager kind of raises his hand and the umpire says, okay, we'll all stop play. And just everybody kind of sits around looking and the cameras have to find something to do and the fans, you know, get yelled at by X-Ball players for checking their phones. And nothing happens during that moment.

That's not fun. And then the specific issue that I was whining about on Twitter today, and that I think Sam has written about, maybe, if I remember right. No, just talked about. Oh, OK. Is the popping off the base issue. No, just talked about. Oh, okay.

Is the popping off the base issue. You know, you slide in, and it is occasioned by an A's game. Not a partisan issue, though, because there's no reason to think that it's, I guess, base-stealing teams are probably hurt by replay more than anything else. But you slide into the base. You're going about, you know, whatever an elite athlete runs. And you slide because you can't run through the base, and you hit this whatever it is, 14 inch by 14 inch or something like that bag, and your body inevitably cannot stay in contact with that item. For a century, this was fine, as long as you did not blatantly overslide.

You were safe. The human eye could not detect that three millimeters that your body left the bag. And now that's not true. Now those guys are out routinely and correctly in some very strict sense of the rule, but not in the spirit of it, I don't think. When you beat the ball by three feet and the throw was kind of up the line a little and caused the second baseman to have to reach, you stole the base.

I mean, you stole the base, and it is only the sort of laws of physics that kept you from not stealing the base. And I think we're just, you know, it's so new, it's so new to us. We all grew up with that, with that person being safe. And we even grew up with slow-mo replay that could show that technically they were out, but we did not care that they were out, unless it was our team that got hurt. But we didn't care globally. And now all of a sudden that global rule has changed. And I just, I find it, I find it lame. You know, I don't find it like problematic with a capital P

or whatever. I just find it lame. Yeah. So I see some similarities to the way that there are like about a billion laws and regulations that are selectively enforced, that a lot of times nobody is paying attention to them. You can pretty easily drive 66 your whole life without ever being in jail. But you are technically breaking the laws. And the day that somebody decides to go after you, or the day that somebody decides to enforce that law, or the day that somebody decides to enforce that law, or the day that somebody just is, you know, having a bad day, you're all of a sudden now

exposed to these crimes that you never really worried about, or that maybe the penalty is life-altering, even though, you know, the world was going along just fine with you breaking whatever small law there is. Is there – well, I don't know. I don't know what to ask you. Am I smart? How smart am I? It's hard for me to – I mean, so one of the things that I did say kind of toward the end of what I was talking about on Twitter today was that the law, maybe more on the civil side than the criminal side, has developed essentially ways in which when something is just going to be completely unfair, we seem to find a way around it. When it just seems like a ridiculous outcome is going to happen, that outcome doesn't happen. For instance, can you give me an example?

Not really. It's more, so I think, you know, anybody who's gone to law school will hopefully, depending on, you know, what style their professors were in, have had the questions about what was really behind what was happening in this case. Because there's the facts as recited in an opinion, and then there's kind of the larger circumstances, the larger surroundings, and there's just kind of the realities. judges, um, are asked to do things like decide in a contract, whether there is consideration for the contract. And it basically means, did you give something up for the thing that you got?

Um, judges are asked to decide, um, whether something was approximately caused by another thing, you know, was the car accident caused by the boulder or by the person who pushed the boulder? And those things are, you know, they dress them up in legal language and they make all sorts of noises and they say Latin and they do all this stuff. But at the end of the day, I think realistically, the answer comes down to what seems like the right answer and um and where you don't have that kind of safety valve built in now on the other hand okay so there's a problem here with with unelected um elitist judges making these determinations but you know as applied to baseball where you don't have that kind of safety valve built in you get things like the popping off the bag.

You get things like, I mean, basically like 100 and whatever years of quote-unquote precedent of every time this player ran this way and the ball went this way, that person's been safe. And now all of a sudden they're not because it turns out they, within the rule book, weren't safe all along. because it turns out they, within the rule book, weren't safe all along. And so you have to ask whether the precedent means anything in, I guess, a similar way that you would do with law if you found some way to...

I mean, I guess we could put monitors in all the cars and just automatically hand out tickets whenever people went over a certain speed limit. But, you know, for a variety of reasons, we don't do that. And so we sort of balance other things against strict application and strict enforcement of the law is another maybe way to think about it. So if judges have some leeway to impose common sense on the process, recognizing that, you know, every situation is maybe different and maybe the use of language is flexible. And there are all sorts of reasons why a judge might be able to, you know, to be smarter about the individual situation than a, you know,

strict reading of some statute or whatever. Why does that work? Why doesn't the lawyer who loses because of that judge's decision immediately pull out the rule book, read an extremely literal reading of it, appeal, and win every time like the manager who appeals to the guy with the TV screens? Well, because appellate judges are judges too. Well, because appellate judges are judges too. And they have – appellate judges have theories on what the law means, what the prior precedent means, what the statute means. And it's – I mean this is why five, four cases at the Supreme Court exist. It's some of it's political, some of it's personal, some of it's genuine dispute, honest, good faith, whatever you want to put it, dispute. But it's never really been the case that strict, there's no objective, there's no such thing as objective interpretation, right? That's kind of, that's something that we've started to admit to ourselves, I hope, as a people. And so, you know, yeah, you'll, you'll appeal on those grounds if that's where your client needs you to go for that particular case. And of course you'll make the opposite argument the next time around. If a more liberal reading of the statute is, is what helps your client the

next time around, just like, you know, a manager would get red in the face about the size of the strike zone, depending on, depending on whether his team is pitching or batting. It's not really different in that way. So do you think that the fault lies in these cases where you think that replay has been overapplied or been taken too far? Is it that people failed to anticipate the consequences? Or is it that they framed the rules poorly? Is it a failing of language or a failing of intention? I think it's a failure to... I don't think they looked at the video and realized how many times things like coming off the bag were happening, and how much of the game wasn't being strictly,

wasn't being sort of strictly rulebooked. Not so dissimilar, I guess, from what PitchFX has taught us about the strike zone and about pitch framing and those kinds of things. We learned that, that, I mean, we all knew that the rulebook strike zone was not there, but we learned about the different strike zones for the different sides of the plate. And, you know, it's been a process to kind of work through, and I think it's still being worked through, what we're going to do about that kind of thing long term. And I think with replay, it's the same. I don't think anybody realized just how umpires were essentially, were making a lot of fairness type decisions. It's like that the runner beat the ball,

he's safe. And, you know, you don't, again, you don't, you don't apply that when they overslide, you don't apply that when, whatever, it makes a stupid slide and somehow winds up, you know, whatever, it makes a stupid slide and somehow winds up, you know, tagged out in an obvious way. But use those heuristics because you don't have any ability as a human to see at the level that the cameras do. And I don't know that anybody realized necessarily just how, just what was happening on a not quite microscopic level. Yeah, they MLB before implementing this, I think, basically tested to see how many calls would be overturned, how many calls would be challenged. And I presume, I don't know this, but I presume that they looked at all the close plays and saw, well, how often do umpires get it right on these close plays? But what we're talking about are not close plays. These are plays that would never have been challenged, that were not seen as controversial.

And what we've done is essentially replay is being used like kind of completely different than it was. It is finding controversy in the non-controversial plays far more than winning the plays that we were all mad about. far more than winning the plays that we were all mad about. Yeah, I mean, I think, I hesitate to make a sort of empirical claim, because the plays we were mad about, you know, those are going away. Those are, you know, those are being overturned. You know, and I don't know the degree to which the plays we weren't mad about are, are making us mad or making some of us mad anyway. Um, uh, a number of people would say, I actually, I sort of polled the audience, you know, whatever

audience my people on Twitter are. Um, and, and a handful of people are completely okay with the problem, the quote unquote problem that I identified, uh, by the way, you know, they, they, the rule says you have to be on the bag if the ball is touching you, and they're completely fine that technology has allowed us to actually enforce that rule. I do, yeah. That's an entirely reasonable position. I wonder how unhappy we would be right now if they weren't calling that. If there was no explicit carve-out in the rule for that, and we saw it it every time and we're like why don't they call that like it would be like how we're upset that they never call the batter not getting out of the

way of a hit by pitch perhaps yeah or the 3-0 gimme strike or some of these other things that still exist um despite us knowing knowing that they exist but But it seems to me, though, that the point of replay is, maybe the point of replay is to be as literally correct as possible. Like, maybe this is something we'll get used to, and this is fine, that we will see baseball as being a much more demanding game in some sense because you have this very precise margin of error for what is safe and what is out. Maybe we will grow to love that. It will make the game harder, for sure.

So maybe that'll be fine. Yeah, I think I would like a system that reflects players knowing what the correct call is. Like, umpires exist because there's too much money and there's too much pride and there's too much whatever for the players to call their own calls, right? This is not ultimate Frisbee. There's no spirit of the game. They don't care. They will lie and cheat and steal in order to win. So you have to have umpires. But, you know, on a close play, I think players have a sense of whether they are out or safe. And you see players signaling toward the dugout, challenge it, challenge it, challenge it. Or I think maybe opening weekend, maybe, Brett Laurie was involved in a close play on a steal or something like that. And kind of comes back to the dugout making like

jazz hands like he wasn't sure he's like 50 50 i'm not really sure and it's those 50 50 calls where the player even the player involved in the play who feels the tag come on to them or who feels their glove on the guy's leg doesn't actually know um whether they were out or safe. Those ones being overturned feels weird to me in a way that it's like the player knows they slapped that tag on the leg before, or they know that they put a tag on, period. You know, where the umpire says, no, you missed them completely.

It's like, I felt the end of my glove, you know? Those kinds of plays where the player knows, but you've just got to convince someone. You've got to argue correctly. And those, you know, I see as the sort of ideal replay overturns, not even necessarily egregious versus unegregious or just, you know, just the ones where we get to pretend that the umpires don't exist. Pretend that the umpires don't exist. Well, it seems to me that both of your complaints, the managers sort of stalling while they check the tape before they do it, and the pop-off type, the type of plays where you're finding this little almost like glitch in the matrix that you can exploit rather, sort of true controversial play. It seems like they can both be solved just by removing the video room. Because if the point is that we like the umpires, we like umpires calling the game, but they're fallible, they get things wrong. It's really hard to tell these plays sometimes. And so they get it wrong. Well, we're trying to

strengthen those calls. We're trying to basically make their eyes better. And so it seems fair to say that a manager should have the same view, that if everybody involved in the game has basically their own eye view of the game, it brings it more to the kind of common sense use of replay that we were expecting. And it saves us this sort of burdensome, like, oh, well, they, you know, it feels like replays feel like, like fait accompli a lot of times because they already know. And I don't know, it's boring to watch them get approval. Maybe that's not an issue.

I'm sure a lot of people are like, what's wrong with that? But you'd get rid of both of them if you just took the video room out of the equation and made them, you know, use their best judgment. Basically, make the manager beat the umpire at umpiring. Instead of giving the manager this like, you know, 12 TV screens in order to use technology to beat the umpire, make him beat the umpire at umpiring. And that feels like a fair way to, to a fair thing to ask of them. Or take the system out of the manager's hands entirely. Or that. That ship has probably sailed, but that's another option. Just take, remove the challenge system and concentrate on umpires umpiring themselves. Yeah. Although then I, that, that would also do this,

but then we would still be mad when the eye in the sky missed a call or when the eye in the sky missed the, you know, the runner who doesn't touch first base on a triple. And we might still see that in a replay on Coors Light cam and then be mad and think that the league is, you know, biased against our team or whatever. and be mad and think that the league is biased against our team or whatever. In this case, though, if the manager misses it, then it's the manager's fault, and we're fine being mad at our managers. There's somebody to place that blame on. And that does seem like half the point of this sort of feels like, in my mind, is to get it right, and half of it is to just have somebody who I can be mad at when they get it wrong. If it's if it's ticky tack, I mean, I don't want bad calls. But I don't I also

don't want free floating anxiety over these kind of much more ambiguous calls. I think that the conspiracy theories are also something that I find more obnoxious than amusing. something that I find more obnoxious than amusing. You know, the hashtag bias is not all that fun. And, you know, to the extent we can get rid of any ground, we can't ever get rid of it. That's the beauty of being conspiracy theorists. But, you know, oh, they called so many calls against our guy at second base just doesn't exist anymore. And, yeah, because there's a manager there who gets to overturn, you do eliminate that. Maybe other people find those things a lot more amusing than I do. Does either of you expect this to be a regular subject of conversation five years from now,

ten years from now? I mean, is this an inherent problem of replay technology that we're going to be grappling with for the rest of the game's existence? Or is this just a simple tweak to one or two rules that would resolve most of the lingering reluctance to embrace this stuff? I'm very surprised that the pop-up slide or the pop, you know, the pop-off whatever slide wasn't addressed this offseason. It felt like this was something that everybody was pretty unhappy about by early last season.

So if it was simple, I would have thought they'd have knocked it out. So maybe it's not simple. Yeah, I don't think it is simple to address that one sort of point. You know, there are larger changes you can make that would also address that one sort of point, you know, there are larger changes you can make that would also address that point, like the, you know, the fifth umpire in the booth thing where the fifth umpire would just never challenge that kind of call or, you know, other types of fixes. But I'm not sure how you can eliminate that call. how you can eliminate that call. You know, maybe at some point we will get the, I think somebody told me, Sam,

that you've suggested a sort of airspace around the bag kind of solution. And, you know, I just, I don't know if the technology is there for that one yet. That would be a perfectly nice one-off solution, but feasible plus narrowly tailored to take another legal term. I don't know if it is easy to find that combination. Yeah, for me, these are all valid concerns and things that I hope will get worked out

as we get a bigger sample of post-replay baseball. But I think all of this is worth it for me just to do away with the times when we don't know what happened or when we do know what happened and what happened was not consistent with what the umpires called. There's a moment in our book, which I will not spoil, but it's a pivotal moment in a game and a play occurs and essentially no one knew for sure what happened. play occurs and essentially no one knew for sure what happened and everyone had a strong opinion but in the pacific association there is no replay and so there was no way to establish there was no objective record that we could all point to even for our own satisfaction after the game and establish conclusively what happened and that impotence, that, you know, helplessness that there was nothing to appeal to is something that baseball fans no longer have to deal with. And a lot of those moments have been big parts of baseball history. And in retrospect, maybe they enrich baseball's

history, you know, like things like Merkel's Boner or something, you know, plays that people continue to talk about a century after they happened. It enriches baseball's history in a way. But if you were rooting for the team that was wrong that day or think you were, you would gladly, I think, welcome some edge cases where things weren't always ideal in exchange for having an answer and having it usually be the correct answer. I think I agree with pretty much everything you just said. I, though, do think that if there's a lesson to this, it's that we, I mean, a lot of the arguments against replay beforehand, we just completely mocked them as being so pointless, so nothing.

And I don't know that they necessarily anticipated these problems, but in a way they did, in a way those arguments did anticipate it. I mean, this does, there is something sort of non-human about the, some of these calls. And if that's the human element, I, fine. I'm, I'm not recommending we go back, but what I am saying is that we're never going back now. Once replay comes out, it's out. You do not put that back in the bottle. And the next time there is something that seems like the most obvious progress in the world, we might just be a little bit more conscious of the fact that it's not going to go as smoothly as we think.

Right. Like balls and strikes, maybe. Right. Robot umpires. Right. It's not going to go as smoothly as we think. The objections that some other people feel deep in their heart might be more valid and universal than we're giving credit to. probably, in fact, is probably better to be conservative on the side of not changing the game than to change it if the direction, if movement only goes in one direction.

Basically, you can always add it next year if you don't do it this year, but you can't take it back next year if you do. So it weighs the scale a little bit more, I think. If I could raise a different sport, and I know people disagree with me on this too, but I'm not sure that knowing is always, this is kind of from what Ben said, always the best thing either. The NBA in the last couple of years has taken to after a game, after a close call, after a foul or a non-foul, issuing sort of proclamations, that was a foul. That was not a foul. And, you know, so for instance, the Rockets beat the Warriors in game three of their playoff series, and they said, you know, this should have

been a foul, this shot should not have counted, that would have changed the outcome of the game, and therefore the series, and therefore blah, blah, blah. I'm not sure who that benefits. I don't know who actually wanted to know this. All it does is make Rockets fans upset and feel like the one game that they won in the series was illegitimate and it makes Warriors fans feel aggrieved. And who wins from that? Who wins from these fans feeling aggrieved and who wins from that? Who wins from, from, from your, these fans feeling aggrieved. They don't change the outcome. They don't, you know, uh, replay the game. They don't George Brett it, you know, pine tar. So, um, they just, they just say should have done that. And that's the end of it. And so that kind of knowing, um, even I, I think is not always an inherent good. But maybe other people like knowing,

maybe I'm in a strong minority about those proclamations. I will also just note that I lived through the same play that Ben described, and I don't feel the same way. I actually think that while there is a part of me that desperately wishes that I had finality on that play or that I had closure on that play and knew without a doubt and didn't have to think about which way it went and what it means that it went that way and didn't go another way and all that, I also think that somebody observing me with keen understanding of the human psyche would probably know that, in fact, I'm no less happy because of it. My enjoyment of the game, the season, the play itself is no less because of it. And in fact, to some degree, I might have enjoyed it a lot more

because of the lack of knowing. So I'm not sure I agree, Ben, that your example is a good example. I think as someone who had to write a book about that game, I think it worked out for us. So I don't mind that much either. The uncertainty is a good story. Okay, so you can find Jason on Twitter, where he sometimes conducts polls and rants about instant replay and has a background picture of iZombie at JL Woj He also blogs about the A's at Beanball.org

and he co-edits the BP Annual He's also a lawyer. Jason, thank you Thank you Alright, Good Wife and Winterfell await So that is it for today. You can support the show on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Today's five Patreon supporters, Reed DeWolf, AJ Lee, Wayne Brandes, Neil Mullen, and Jesse Severay. Thanks. You can buy our book and you can hold it in your hands a week from tomorrow.

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