Hello and welcome to episode 1776, another effectively wild A-Baseball podcast from

Gamecrafts presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am VanLinberg of the Ringer, not joined today as I usually am by Meg Rally of Fancrafts,

Meg is traveling for Thanksgiving.

I haven't almost 8-week old baby at home, so I am not traveling for Thanksgiving, and

therefore I am with you today.

Meg will be back tomorrow, and we will be discussing the Wander Franco extension and the Kendall

Gravement deal in the next 4 episodes of Stove League, and who knows what else.

But in Meg's absence, I will be doing 2 interviews, with 2 authors of 2 pieces of recent writing

about baseball that I quite enjoyed.

Later in the episode, I will be bringing on Gerald Schiffman of baseball perspectives to

discuss his research published on Tuesday about whether shadows on the field actually matter.

You hear broadcasters talk about this every October, as the shadows creep from behind the

mound to home plate.

Back in the subject, he came up with an interesting answer, so he'll be here a little later on.

Even if you have any curiosity about romance novels in general and how they intersect with

sports, this will be a great introduction to that topic.

So let's get going.

Back in May, I got a message from my guest today, Katie Casey, who was asking me for permission

to use a quote of mine from a Grantland article back in 2013 about pitchframing as an epigraph

for her baseball romance novel called Unwritten Rules.

And I was flattered, I'm a big epigraph guy, I love using an epigraph, have never been

...