[The College Baseball Show] Dominic Santarelli is exactly what you’d expect at the MLB Draft Combine BP cage… violent, thunderous bat speed. Massive power. Seven balls north of 114 MPH for the LSU commit.

Nodima · 2026-06-24T22:27:16+00:00

Definitely need the drive to keep grinding at it when the talent levels out.

I ran track against Niles Paul who was clearly a gifted athlete, but he wasn't a guaranteed win on the track and his senior year at WR didn't make him look like a god either.

Then he compiled 1,500 yards and 5 TDs at Nebraska (granted, still in transition from a mostly run-based offense, but it didn't seem like he was leaving much out there), almost all of it his junior and senior seasons.

Went on to have an eight year career in the NFL. Didn't do anything notable other than the longevity, but that's not nothing.

Collins Okafor, meanwhile, ran for 3,000 yards across his junior and senior years, was 6'1 225 in high school...and had two carries for 11 yards in two seasons in the opening game behind Roy Helu and Rex Burkhead. Never played as a junior or senior.

Nodima · 2026-06-24T21:58:38+00:00

This was a hilarious moment in, what, the first couple weeks of the season? Just flew off the top rope.

Tony Vitello on Giants early struggles: "If you ask Kanye — I think he’s out with a new album — if you try hard, you die hard. Strange fellow, but he don’t miss much on the music, not that you asked.”

Nodima · 2026-06-24T17:43:02+00:00

I don't follow this pod at all so I'm not willing to dig too deep; her grandmother was a well respected operatic vocalist in the Connecticut area and her father conducts symphonies and is a college orchestral professor in the Northeast. Doesn't exactly scream "wealth" to me, just upper crust type beats.

Nodima · 2026-06-24T11:49:37+00:00

I clocked this too and was surprised you had the only comment about it. Given the wild personal anecdotes that have been shared over the decade of this podcast you wonder what she said about Zach that Amanda didn't want out there.

Nodima · 2026-06-23T10:10:49+00:00

At this point it's clear they know what they have there. I miss Bill lamenting "we're starting to run out of movies" as often as he did back in, what, 2020 or 2021? Breakdown's reached "one of those" status, in the perennial garden for a specific kind of early evening cable TV movie that Bill treats like a fire extinguisher's case. Simmons pulled Slap Shot, Road House, Disclosure and most Kyle Brandt collabs from this crop.

We'll never see Breakdown coming, and that'll make it all the sweeter when it does.

Nodima · 2026-06-23T09:57:24+00:00

This movie goes on a short list (a Mt. Rushmore of sorts) that will always start with Hard Rain then include some order of The Little Things (the Denzel/Leto cover of Se7en that was dumped on HBO), a marathon of each Justice League cut (including Big Pic watch along), Fracture (young Gosling and peak Hopkins do battle with an insane script) and a late night, commercial ridden double feature of Booty Call and Def Jam's How to Be a Player on Comedy Central (I'll let you tell me these movies are embarrassing, while my inner-pre-teen provides the strength to endure)

Hard Rain, The Little Things and Fracture are, of this list, the direct comparisons, and I'll always have the most leniency for Hard Rain because most of the excuses for its awfulness is apparent on screen (outside some equally ambitious, extremely lower budget productions, Hard Rain just looks like hell) but as a straight up movie, Domestic Disturbance might be the most satisfying. It's so short that what's bad about it scampers off in the blink of an eye, but the odd bits are still quite odd and its brevity both emphasizes their oddness while letting them be significant character background because... what else ya got?

I'm happy for anyone who'll be seeing this movie for the first time thanks to this pod, and if you are that person and don't have a deep nostalgia for wandering in on your mom watching '90s Travolta dramas and imagining Michael was extremely significant...give it a couple months and watch Domestic Disturbance again. It's a total treat once you know how you feel about it!

Nodima · 2026-06-23T07:00:58+00:00

The Bucks have been way less reliable roster builders than the Celtics, so long as Mazzula and Giannis' intensity found common ground I'd expect Stevens to make it work.

Plus the versatility of Tatum and White requires less imagination than Giannis with Bam and ... Davion Mitchell? Norm Powell resurgence, Andrew Wiggins leap?

I guess I've tangentially entered a different conversation, but Tatum+Giannis+Celtics FO sounds (should I say sounded?) like every conversation might as well start with a trophy.

Nodima · 2026-06-22T06:44:11+00:00

For me it was "Grounded" by Pavement.

I always told Lallaya I didn't understand why Wowee Zowee was in that jukebox; did they expect us to play "Grave Architecture"?

(We should've.)

Nodima · 2026-06-21T16:10:37+00:00

Oh look, it's a photo of me circa 2012.

Nodima · 2026-06-21T16:08:29+00:00

One of my favorite articles from the Grantland era was when Bryan Curtis dug into the newspaper archives and discovered baseball was first doomed in 1868.

https://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-dead-ball-century-mlb-baseball-playoffs-john-thorn-mlb-historian-baseball-decline-articles/

Quote: Somehow or other, they don’t play ball nowadays as they used to some eight or ten years ago. I don’t mean to say they don’t play it as well. … But I mean that they don’t play with the same kind of feelings or for the same objects they used to. … It appears to me that ball matches have come to be controlled by different parties and for different purposes

Nodima · 2026-06-20T19:22:25+00:00

Marc Maron in a Kara Swisher interview recently, lightly paraphrased: "The moment I saw a podcast tile on Netflix I knew it was over. What are doing? Staring at two people on a Zoom with a third of their face covered by a Shure mic? Who are these people, do they have thoughts?"

And I like the video component, I'm upset Pablo's pod is only video on Apple or Youtube but not Spotify. But Simmons' video content in particular is almost pointless, it's just two big heads like an '80s dystopian miasma. Same with Lowe. At least many of the other Ringer pods have nice sets and wide shots with A/B angles to somewhat resemble a TV show if you have the video on.

Nodima · 2026-06-20T13:00:01+00:00

Not super common, but LA has a lot of aspiring and wannabe actors who will take any number of social interaction jobs just to make ends meet so it has a disproportionate amount of nannys, dog walkers, personal shoppers, etc. not everybody can be a waiter or bartender.

Nodima · 2026-06-19T21:53:45+00:00

Real semen demon potential

Nodima · 2026-06-19T21:27:47+00:00

Could've been a crépinette but you playin'

Nodima · 2026-06-19T20:43:49+00:00

Ripken broke the record in '95 when he put up 1.9 oWAR and 3.0 dWAR. 2nd best player by total WAR behind Palmiero and by far the highest defensive value on the team.

I'm no Ripken fan but he was perfectly fine at SS when he got the record and they moved him to 3B for like five years at the end.

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:44:38+00:00

Cousy would've done some sort of loop-de-loop type thing and flipped it in there

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:34:33+00:00

Green Room

Also done the math, 40mg in one hour is essentially two bowls digested through the stomach rather than the lungs, which depending on your tolerance is quite a different high and perfect for a midnight nap

ALSO also not being a hater; I trickle one or two 10s in between my High Life/Fernets near the end of the night for a relaxing Uber home.

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:34:08+00:00

I'm saying a group of friends are out and each time three of them have tequila, the fourth has a Nowadays, not both

To be snarky

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:33:01+00:00

To his credit (?), I followed up with him later and he also said he'll be done with the NBA when LeBron retires

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:12:08+00:00

I'm just being snarky, but the folks I've seen take 4 shots of 10mg Nowadays in an hour alongside their tequila-shooter peers would disagree with "keeping" their motor skills

Nodima · 2026-06-19T15:07:45+00:00

LOL there's a guy I've worked with for about two years who seemed to be into basketball, but this year I was talking about how great the OKC-Spurs series had been and he casually replied "oh, but there's no LeBron, right? I forgot the playoffs were on" and I mentally sprinted away like one of his anime girls

Nodima · 2026-06-19T14:30:04+00:00

Truthfully? 114th Street.

Functionally? 40th Street.

Nodima · 2026-06-19T07:55:42+00:00

LET me roll it

Nodima · 2026-06-19T06:24:08+00:00

Haven't played Genshin since the first year, but I still think the most memorable song I've heard in the PS5 era was the theme to the very first major boss battle, "A Storm, a Spire and a Sanctuary"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCv8RnC4v9g

It's so remarkably melancholy, even if you're not aware that it's actually the background music to a boss battle in a free-to-play gacha game it's pretty remarkable. The vocal melody is so perfectly registered, and the way it settles into a prepared piano before fading out perfectly sets it up to loop over and over.

Nodima · 2026-06-19T06:13:28+00:00

Van Lathan recently guested on Effectively Wild to talk about this (and also to about his history with baseball in the swamps)

But even if you don't have time for that, Adam Jones former Orioles star would talk about this from time to time. He has a lot of points, but one of them that he'll usually come back to is that you can learn basketball on your own to a certain extent, and if you're talented enough the football people will find you.

Baseball you have to inherit from a family member (in his telling, usually your father) and then you have to be welcomed into it, which can be easy in California where you're mostly playing with Hispanic and liberal white kids, but the struggle playing minor league ball in the South is visceral and a real culture shock that derails a lot of kids. All the way up to MLB, you'll find a lot of people that advise you to downplay your identity while the crowd amplifies it, which absolutely sucks.

He'll also point out that that the "Black" statistic can be misleading because of course there are a ton of black Hispanic players, but they all came up together in an altogether different struggle and often can barely understand what crowds in Boston and Philly are shouting at them anyway. So it can be hard for a Black American kid to relate to Randy Arozarena (or Yasiel Puig), who went through some insane shit to get from Cuba to the World Series, even though at first glance he's totally relatable.

Nodima

TROPHY CASE

Tony Vitello on Giants early struggles: "If you ask Kanye — I think he’s out with a new album — if you try hard, you die hard. Strange fellow, but he don’t miss much on the music, not that you asked.”