Music

Hello and welcome to episode 1857 of Effectively Wild a baseball podcast from

Vangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Winford of the

Ringer joined as always by Meg Rally of Vangrass. Hello, Nick. Hello. So first things first, we have merch.

Merch! How about that? Historically speaking, we have been pretty remiss when it comes to merch on this podcast.

Just haven't done a lot in the merch space. Probably should have been doing much more, but I guess the limiting factor was our lack of design skills.

And maybe also business skills, at least in my case. And so, these are pretty big impediments to actually making anything happen merch-wise.

So we had one t-shirt years ago and then some listeners at what point stepped up and just made their own merch shop with our permission. This was back in the baseball

perspective days and they did some mugs and shirts and such. But we haven't had anything recently. And now I think those two impediments have really been removed because Vangrass has a designer,

Luke Cooper, who is a long time effectively wild listener and also pretty talented when it comes to graphic design. That is his passion and he is actually good at it. And Vangrass has a partnership with Breaking T, the t-shirt company.

Yeah. And the upshot of all that is that we've got a few t-shirts that are for sale now. There's a fan graphs collection and half of the fan graphs collection is effectively wild specific. So it's for sale. We will put the link on the show page.

There is a 10% discount for Patreon supporters. Do you want to lay out the options here for fans of effectively wild if they want to rep the pod on their persons?

We have such exciting options. We want to take you through them here. So the base shirt, the stand by, the classic is going to be a new effectively wild strike zone t-shirt. It says effectively wild. And it's got some pictures that one might describe as effectively wild.

And it says effectively wild. So it was 2012. A fan graphs baseball box. Not on the corner there. Not strikes. But yeah, that's just your basic podcast name and logo and a little graphic for you.

Yeah. And then we have a delightful stat blast t-shirt. And it says stat blast on the front. And it's got like a rock is going on. Can I should I share with our listeners the thing we were saved from. Oh yeah. It comes when it comes to the stat blast t-shirt. So you know, like I have new sympathy for bad corporate logos and designs now because Luke did a very nice show. He did it as you did a stat blast t-shirt. And it says stat blast. And it had a cloud. And it was meant to evoke like the like a, you know, a phrase.

And it was sort of the vibe I think he was going for or an explosion of some sort. Yeah, an explosion. I guess we also learn some things about what we understand the blast in stat blast to be like what is the kind of blast is what kind of

and it had that on the front and then it had the lyrics to the stat blast jingle on the back. And you know, we're in we're close to to to go on into production with breaking T and they send over. You know, we have our final proofs and they send over the shirts with the designs on them they send logos and the pictures and you shared them with your wife Jesse and she said.

That looks like a fart. She sure did. Yeah, she wrote the lyrics to the stat blast song. So I figured I would show her the stat blast t-shirt and she said is that a fart. Yeah, it was not intended to be one not the blast we were trying to evoke. No, and none of us had made that connection. So it's possible that this is a Jesse problem. Yeah, this is just a small sample one person reaction. But once it was out there when she put that in my head, I couldn't unsee it.

So we went back to Luke and said, Hey, my wife says it looks a little like a fart. And he was obliging enough to un fart it a little bit and he changed some things and my wife agrees that it looks less like a fart now. So we were able to go to press go to print with these things.

And it, you know, emerging from the cloud or a number of stats, both literal stats and the names of stats that will be familiar to listeners of the pod and also of the song. So it's in it. It's in a very cool like purple and teal color scheme that is a vocative of some really classic sort of like 90s baseball thread.

So it is, it is very nice. And as I said, it has the lyrics to the song on the back. So if you are one of those people who listens to the pod at like 3x speed and doesn't know what it says, then you're going to have it on your back forever. And then I'm saving not necessarily the best, but certainly the t-shirt design has been demanded, I would say by our listeners for last we have.

How can you not be a pedantic about baseball t-shirt? And, you know, I, it's great. It's, it's, it's got a, it says, how can you not be romantic about baseball and the romantic is crusty and pedantic is written there instead.

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