Hello, my name is Justin the Kluen. I'm here today with Will Slown. And you're listening

to the important cinema club. Take me out to the ball game. Ah, the crack of the bat. The ball is

flying. The sun is shining down and I'm just drinking my bruskees and eating my hot dogs.

So I went to a baseball game with Justin earlier this week. And Justin, long-time listeners will know, has for the past year been calling himself a baseball guy. Jokingly. Or so I thought. But when I got there, I realized it's no joke. He really is a baseball guy now. Every time somebody came up to bat, he was peppering me with statistics and facts.

He was telling me all about the rules of the game, which I thought I knew. But it turns out there are a whole bunch of other rules I didn't know. Well, so when I called myself a baseball guy last year, what was I reading? Was it a baseball manga or baseball movie? It was something like that. and a listener pointed out that when I said that the Blue J started doing well

and then they went to the World Series. baseball manga or baseball movie was something like that and the listener pointed out that when

i said that the blue jays started doing well and then they went to the world series so i watched

all of those games and then kind of followed along afterwards and the city had baseball fever last

year yeah complete baseball fever everyone was following and i'll get into this more as we go along

but baseball is something that i always kind of liked but it it took me a while to get there. So I've always liked baseball of the team sports. I've liked it the most because it's chill. Yeah. It's warm. I like hot dogs and popcorn. I enjoy beer, you know, and so all these things. If you had asked me like 15 years ago what your favorite sport is, I would have probably said like, oh, basketball, because I love how it's fast moving. It never like stops. And now I'm like exactly like Will. I like baseball because it moves at its own pace. You can follow. There's no real rush. And that it's not a linear path in the way that hockey. With hockey, and I think

we agree on this, it's like one end of the ice, other end of the ice, one end, the other

and then somebody scores by accident. Sorry, sorry, I know we have a lot of hockey fans listening.

Yes. And that's great. But, you know, baseball, it's everyone's playing on the field, different positions. And people are like, in hockey, they do that too. But there's something so gridlike about it. I just love watching it. I love that when a moment happens, the audience reacts as one. There's like a building tension when a ball gets hit. The tension and release of it. Or like a, and the other thing about when we went to the game, some of the biggest things

that happened if you were watching it on TV, if you weren't locked in, we were very high up, you wouldn't know because people were chatting, they're eating their popcorn, like, they don't even notice. A home run happened? Not a peep from anyone. But don't you love how like, innings will go by and nothing happens and then boom what a double play but also

the double play will be will be proceeded by like gradual it's like playing risk or something where it's like

we got somebody on one base oh now they're on the other base oh basis basis loaded and then and then oh

third guy got out or or four points home run Slam. Homer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or like, oh my God, he tried to go for the ball and he missed it.

It bounced.

He's going.

He's going. But, you know, baseball is the favorite sport of many of our greatest structuralist filmmakers, like James Benning, for example. They love that it's like slow cinema. And it's also, like, if you're a nerd, it is the ultimate buffet of statistics.

That, like, everything is a record being broken or you've never done this, you've never done that.

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