drafting for 2025. That's right. Drafting for 2025. The meatball draft. The two early

meatball draft has already happened. Rob DiPietro is going to join me next on the Roto Wire Fantasy

Baseball podcast, brought to you by our good friends from the Draft King's Pick Six app. I'm Jeff Erickson here. I am here with the great Rob D. Pietro, aka Deadpole Hitter.

If you've paid attention to our podcast before, between me and James, we've had Rob on numerous

times on this stream on this channel, and we're happy to have him again. Rob, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing well, Jeff. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to come on the Auto Wire pod. The standard for podcasting for fantasy baseball, so I appreciate the invite. Oh, appreciate you. And appreciate the kind compliment. That's very nice of you to say that. We have a good time. We have a really good time doing that there. And the thing know, the thing is, both for baseball and football,

you know, we've lengthened our, uh, our lineup. And I love that we've got now, like Eric

Alterman's doing weekend podcast for us. James has been, it will carry the torch all throughout

the off season. James Anderson is amazing doing that. He's not just a prospect guy, people. He is

everything on, including participating in your draft the

way too early meatball draft not a mock i made that mistake once once um i won't let you down

for it yeah yeah it's uh yeah what was uh the uh trying to remember the 80s movie johnny Dangerously. I did that once. Yeah, good reference. I got that one too. See, I'm better than Scott with this. Oh, yes, yes. You are, you are definitely better than my radio co-host, Nick Whalen, who's a slight bit younger than us. But that's okay. It just shows, that just means I'm old., um, tell everybody about the origins of this. Why you started doing this? Okay. So the two early meatball drafts, it's funny because Todd Zola last year asked me, why is it called the meatball draft? Well, just, well, just a bunch of meatballs, you know, drafting in August. I remember in the early 80s my brothers would uh you know call call everyone meatballs my dog's name

meatballs so that's why that's why it's called the and August. I remember in the early 80s, my brothers would, you know, call everyone meatballs.

My dog's name Meatball. So that's why that's why it's called the Meatball Draft. And of course,

as you know, Jeff, the Patreon is all Meatball Tears. So why not keep it in fashion? So a couple

years ago, just listening to all the fantasy podcast that are out there.

Everyone's always bringing up.

It was J. Rod.

J. Rod was the big guy. He was having a fantastic stretch of the rookie. I wonder where he's going to go next year's draft. Once he was going to go next year's drafts. And you heard it. It was repetitive. And I was like, let's just find out. Yeah. You know, so X a bunch of close friends, you know, NFBC veterans, a good mix of podcasters as well,

an analyst.

And we start to a bunch of people and they're like, yeah, sure, let's do this, you know.

And so we started it up three years ago. This is the third year of it.

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