Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Tuesday, February 25th. Derek Van Riper, Ino Seris here with you.

It is our 2025 NL East team previews. We got one more episode after this one to wrap up the series. We'll have the AL East team previews coming up on Wednesday of this week. So if you want to catch up on the past ones, each of the last two weeks has two episodes just like this one. And you can join our Discord with the link in the show description. Talk about your favorite teams. Talk about our predictions and projections. Talk about your fantasy teams. All that

in one place. Just hit the link in the show description. If you're watching us on YouTube,

smash the like button on this video. We would appreciate that. You know, I know we're in

full-on chaos mode as far as draft season goes because I have one draft already done

for the day as we start a recording. I have another draft tonight sometime after the episode comes out

and somehow in between meetings and the rest of life will happen. I'm on three slow drafts

right now and like they're vastly different. Like one's a draft and hold, one's a 20 team keeper. It's like every time you have to be like, and where are we now? And who am I talking to? And like, yes, now the radios have started calling. So I get these, I have to actually answer the random phone numbers on my phone because I don't actually keep track of the radios. And this is St. Louis now. The producer is always like, are you ready? And I'm like, just tell me what city it is and what we're talking about. Just so I have five seconds of prep time. You should save the number in your phone just so it at least tells you what city it is that's calling. That would give you one small bit of prep before you answer. It doesn't always tell you,

like even from the zip code because, you know, sometimes they call from like a 1-800 number because

they're like part of a, you know, conglomerate or whatever. The difficulties of being a podcaster, a writer,

a content creator of any kind this time of year, right? All sorts of little problems. Just like no sense for the

calendar. Just absolute no sense. I'm just not good with calendars. My wife is always annoyed at me that I don't

put stuff on the calendar or look at the calendar. You probably have noticed this. You put things on the

calendar. I don't react to them. I don't know what's going on. I'm like this kind of person that I get to my desk in the morning and I'm like, what's going on today? You get there, you send me to Slack. What time we pot? What are we talking about? I'm like, two spreadsheets. One's the calendar. What's the topics? They're there. It's all there. So we're a good combo, dude. Yeah, man. We got to balance each other out, man. And I've said this about Nando before too, but it's important to have people in your life that color outside the lines. because for my entire life, if you handed me a coloring book and some crayons, I'm not going outside the lines.

I'm coloring that thing. people in your life that color outside the lines because for my entire life, if you handed me a

coloring book and some crayons, I'm not going outside the lines. I'm coloring that thing as

neatly as possible. And that's not a fun way to live life. I'm telling you as someone that

has done that for 40 years. It is not the most fun way to live life. So you need people that can

encourage you. There's some not fun things on the other side. you're just like, you know, where everyone's like you'll have a day

where just everybody is mad at you because you forgot something important. Oh yeah, but I have

days where I'm just mad at myself all day because I forgot something important despite writing

everything down. So if it's not everybody else that it's mad at you, it's just yourself.

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