I love you, I adore you, I lay my life before you, I'll help you once more and more.

And finally it seems my lonely days are through.

I've been waiting for you, I've been waiting for you.

Hello and welcome to episode 1147 of Effectively While the Shangri-La Spaceball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I am Jeff Selvin, a thangress joined as always by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer.

I was supposed to be joined by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer four hours and forty minutes ago, but as he sent me the link to the recording window.

Yes, Shouhei Otoni made his decision.

How are you this Friday?

I'm relieved, I'm exhausted, we were just doing some work that we hadn't anticipated doing, but the moment is at hand.

The moment that we have been anticipating for months, years and certainly days and weeks in a very concerted way is finally here we can stop speculating about where Shouhei Otoni is going and we can start speculating about other things related to Shouhei Otoni.

You reflect on all of the speculating that we did and we were wrong, everybody was wrong.

I don't remember reading a single, I know every single MLB.com website ran its own, this team could sign Otoni except for probably the Marlins.MilB.com website.

Aside from those, I don't think I ever saw anyone be like, it's the angels, I don't even think I saw the angels given a chance even as a finalist.

Yeah, I mean I didn't express any strong opinion about where he was going because I didn't think I had any knowledge of where he was going but certainly it seemed like the angels were in underdog, if not the underdog, just everything we had heard, made it seem like it was going to be potentially one of the teams that wasn't even a finalist and then once we got to the finalist stage it seemed like the Mariners were the leading contender and Jerry DePoto was certainly acting as if he thought he had a chance and evidently not.

So the angels did not see that coming. It's fine. And also it means Otoni made his decision two weeks before the deadline, which I mean since when to these things ever not go to the deadline or at least close to them.

I kind of headed as back in my head, maybe he would like make his announcement at the winter meetings in a press conference or I thought maybe he would travel to go see like I don't know three cities, three finalist cities, although I guess he didn't have to travel far to see what animes like.

And even though there are currently five active significant fires in the Southern California area, my understanding is none of them are significantly impacting the Anaheim area, I think.

So what a time for him to be there. But yeah, it's the angels. This was already a Mike Trout podcast recently. This has been a show, hey Otoni podcast might as well have the Mike Trout show, hey Otoni podcast. We podcast about the angels now.

I don't know if you knew that they might as well go get John Carlo Stanton that just really put a cap around things and making play second base.

Yep, we have already received our first listener email with a Mike Trout show, hey Otoni hypothetical. How much worse would Otoni be if while he was pitching, Mike Trout would have to be in center field in a handstand and would run with his hands and catch and throw with his feet.

We'll save that for next week's this the show.

But yeah, I mean, it's a it's efficient for us because these are probably the two players. We will talk about the most next season and have been talking about the most lately. And now they'll be playing on the same team.

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