We're back. I'm not Drew McGarry. I'm David Roth and this is the distraction. Drew is on vacation with his family.

He's in the little mozzarella balls wearing his rash card and avoiding sunburn.

Which means it's me and the legend Ray Rado joining for a two-hander

Ray. Good morning to you. How are you?

Hi dad. How are you?

This is one of the rare

pairings that people actually request in the comments under the post that I put up on defector with these podcasts embedded in them.

Most of the time they're like asking you either Drew to keep it down or for me to take like a long vacation.

But there was an episode that you and I did which I remember being almost entirely about like your personal memories of Atley Hammaker

that apparently really made an impression on people. We're going to get to that. But I wanted to start with the news that everybody is talking about which is our website becoming a Mets blog.

I wrote about Jacob DeGrom earlier this week which is something that I've been afraid to do for a long time because of jenksing it.

And you wrote the post that I probably should have written which went up immediately afterwards which was about Dan Volgobach scoring from first base on a double that was slightly misplaced in the outfield.

Sorry to make you write about the Mets like how are you holding up under the strains of having to you know like sort of investigate and begin to get into like writing a long Carlos Carasco bit.

Well I have a I have a rash that.

But other than that it was relatively painless and as the second best thing to happen this week in baseball the Volgobach thing was actually fine.

Yeah he's it's weird I mean in some ways I'm going to put myself on the clock with method this is not going to be in a full Mets podcast if I can help it.

But I can't help it which is fine you know I just know that there's there's like dozens of people listening to this that will get upset if it's like if I'm just doing a roster run down of the bullpen 15 minutes from now like they're gone they're never coming back.

The thing that I wanted to sort of touch on because like Volgobach is a you know a joy in his own right a special contributor and a most unique baseball individual.

He's also one of the few sort of like low profile dumpy-ish trades at the Mets made around the deadline all of which have worked out smashingly so far bizarrely so there's something to adding these like situational players to a roster and then watching the Mets.

It's the thing that happens with good teams and I don't know to what extent I'm reasoning backwards from those teams success or if there's something about like I guess this is more of a vibe based question.

You spent time covering the giants in the previous decade.

They were good in ways that I as someone who watched them win the World Series every 24 months never really fully understood.

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