Welcome to Rates and barrels. It's Friday, August 23rd. Derek Van Riper here.

Eno Seris flying to Chicago for Sabre Seminar,

but I brought in a guest, a good friend of mine from Baseball H.Q,

great writer, great fantasy player.

Ryan Bloomfield.

Ryan, how you doing today?

I'm doing fantastic, Derek.

Thanks for having me on.

Appreciate the invite.

I think very much conveniently timed, given had our 20, 25, too early

drafted whole draft on Wednesday night. So I look forward to talking through that with you today

among some other things. So yeah, hope you're doing well. We'll be catching up soon in person at

first pitch Arizona in like two months. So I'm looking forward to that too. Yeah. If you have not registered for First Pitch, there's actually a discount still available through today, through Friday. So good to get the early registration, get a better price that way. Baseballhq.com has all the details. I think that's the first place. We actually have to hang out was first pitch probably eight years ago, 10 years ago. I don't know, running an auction, doing something.

Running the auctions. Yep. We cut our teeth running, running those auctions for. I mean, that's one of the

things at first pitch is we do these live drafts. And you were the auctioneer. I was tracking the

picks. We had a sticker guy running stickers, and it was, by the time, we did it for a couple years, it was pretty, I must say, a pretty well-oiled machine.

Yeah, I think we had that down to about four hours after a while. First year might have been five and a half, six hours, a little longer. And by the way, if you recognize Ryan's voice, you probably do.

The Bubba in the Bloom podcast, highly recommended as well.

Be sure to check that out if you haven't done that already.

So tons to cover today.

You mentioned it.

You were part of the, I call it the meatball invitational draft.

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