Now it is time for our exclusive bonus segment for Slate Plus members, and we have a special

guest joining us in the New York studio, Seth Stevenson. Hi, Seth. Hey, Josh. So I was told by

Gabe Roth, who is the editor of Slate Plus, he has a crazy idea for something to do next year and something that will require the largest of Slate Plus members.

The idea, and this is how Gabe described it, I might dispute some of the parts of this.

Some of the specific numbers involved.

I'm not 100% confident.

So he said, no, he said every fall for eight years, Seth has been pitching a story where he goes to umpire camp and reports back.

And every fall, the editor-in-chief of Slate has rejected the proposal as too expensive.

Now, Slate Plus will foot the bill as long as we can

attract a thousand new members by January 1st. So we are speaking to Slate Plus members now.

We're going to make this segment available to everyone, though. So we're trying to encourage

people to sign up for Slate Plus to support Seth, to support his journalism, to send him to umpire school.

So go to slate.com slash hang up plus, sign up, and you can be confident in knowing that your

contribution will go to sending Seth to Empire School.

Now it's time to debate.

Should we really send Seth to Empire School? Because I don't want to just tell you, I want you to believe it in your heart. So, Seth, you start. Why should people pay their hard-earned money to send you to Empire School? Well, they should pay their hard-earned money to support Slate Plus and all the great, important journalism that Slate does. This would just be a sort of ancillary benefit of that would be me getting to go to Oh, you're pushing it hard, maybe. But let me, let me, let me, let me, uh, let me offer some context. So 15 years ago for a different publication, I went to umpire school for just a couple of days. I just got a taste of umpire school. This is, of course, the Harry Wendell Stead School for umpires. It's like five weeks, right?

The official course is five weeks long, the Harry Wendellstead School for umpires. It's like five weeks, right?

The official course is five weeks long. And at the end of it, the top of the top, the cream of the crop actually go into professional baseball. They enter, you know, rookie ball or a league or whatever it is and become minor league umpires. Actually, the last day of the class is the first game of the World Series, and all the top graduates just umpire the game. That's exactly right. Well, so I only did a couple of days. I just, but even just that tainty taste of it was so thrilling to me that I've yearned to go back ever since for the last 15 years, and I have continued to pitch Julia Turner, editor of Slate. Please, send me back to the umpire school with some more time to be there and some more space to write about. The other thing is this other publication squeezed the published story down to like, it was more like an infographic than anything else. Unlike an Eric Greg strike zone. Exactly. He squeezed it.

And I only just got, it was like bullet points and some pictures.

And it didn't get, it didn't get to the soul of the man in blue, which is what I want, which I propose to do.

Can you tell us about the props that you brought in?

I brought in some props.

...