Hello and welcome to the In The Pen podcast, a podcast about relief pitchers, part of the

Pitcherless podcast network.

My name is Jake Crumpler, and as always, I'll be your host, and I'm joined by

pitcherless bullpen expert, Rick Graham.

Well, had that locked in all year long down to the last episode and somehow screw up the intro.

But hey, Rick, we made it.

We made it to the end of the 2025 season.

Yeah, we're finally here.

It's been a crazy quick year, I feel.

I don't know.

It's basically after like the All-Star break, it just everything kind of speeds up, I feel.

But yeah, we're here.

We're getting ready for postseason baseball, which, you know, for fantasy purposes, there's really nothing to look forward to.

But, I mean, we like, we love to cover.

We'll talk about the playoffs every other week when we're doing the podcast. So still fun times ahead. And yeah, still, I mean, this weekend still, I mean, the Guardians just lost to Detroit. Finally, Detroit won a game. So, I mean, there's still, you know, a lot at stake here over the last weekend of baseball. Yeah, which is something that we've talked about the last couple of weeks and something we were worried about like three weeks ago, whether or not anything to play for. And now we have not not only the Tigers and Guardians, but the Blue Jays and Yankees are tied for first place in the AL East. I mean. Reds, Reds, Mets. That's right. And you can't really count out the Red Sox at this point either. There's only three games left, but it's still possible. Yeah. They're not going to win that. They're not going to win the ALEs, but they should be. They're not going to. They're not going to. Detroit needs those games so much more coming up than Boston. Right. Because the wild card is still yet to be determined. So yeah, we'll definitely be interesting, fun baseball still to come over the weekend, which I'm really happy to see because I was worried we might have a final week or a final weekend where there's just nothing to play for it's just sort of tying up

loose ends on the season playing games that don't really need to be played and then even on top of that

i mean on the hitting side you have the lmvp race with uh rally and uh judge going head to head

i mean yesterday both hitting a pair of home runs it's been really cool to see and and the sort

of discourse on social media just

continues to heat up around that where a lot of people are on one side and a lot of people

are on the other. That's usually not discourse works. I mean, who would you choose if you had to vote

right now if this isn't ended today? You're putting me on the spot. Yes, I am.

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