Hello and welcome to episode 1470 of The Sleeper in the Bus.

It is Monday, February 2nd.

I'm your host, Paul Sporer.

Join this afternoon by my two buddies, Justin and Joe.

What's up, guys?

How you doing?

Doing great.

Doing great.

Like I told Justin before, I'm feeling ready for 700 plate appearances, best shape of my life.

It's that time of year.

Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go.

Moving Joe at my board. Justin, how you doing? I'm doing good. I just got out of the gym. I'm moving you up my board. Now, can I ask you something, though? It's pretty, Joe shouldn't be here for this. But with his off-season surgery, how much are you moving Joe down the board? Like he is best shape of his life like after

the surgery, but the surgery was was in the off season. I got to see spring plate appearances.

That's kind of where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, you know, there's, I think that makes

sense. You can see the videos of me in the gym, right? Like I'm, I'm working out. I'm there,

you know, every day, uh, like I'm trying to get into that best shape of my life. But, like, all we're hearing is noise. It's talk right now with Joe. I agree. I agree. But I'm going to see, you know, he's got a little green arrow on the board. And then if he has a big spring, I'm taking him. I'm taking him early. If I can get him cheap enough, right?

Oh, yeah.

I think right now in a lot of drafts, Joe is being slept on because of the off-season surgery. Everyone's like, man, that kidney surgery, what the hell are they going to do about the kidney stones? Anyway, I'm glad Joe is healthy and good to go here. We're going to talk to second base, which is Joe's position. Joe, this was not a punishment.

I want you to know that.

Like when you drew the second base rankings, it wasn't like, oh, we hate Joe, let's give him this terrible position. It was amazing. It's just really amazing. Joe's the new guy. But how bad is, is it as bad as we think? Because Justin and I've been railing on this position all winter. Yeah, and not only do I do it here, but I also write up second base and shortstop in the Blackbook for Pisa. You have to do it twice. At least you get the short stops to smooth it out because there's a lot of fun to talk about in shortstop. Shortstop, yeah, it makes it. I usually do shortstop first and then I end up, you know, okay, I got to do second base now. It's, it's not as bad as maybe the perception is, I think, if you're in a shallow league, if you're like a, you know, standard 10, 12 team player, I think it's fine. For us who are more in the deep league realms, the 15 team deep mixed leagues, it does fall off a cliff pretty quickly. There's maybe seven or eight guys

that you feel really good about. And even within that top 10, top 12 group, there's Albies who was

...