Latest / Your Dark Companion Podcast / Rangers Bullpen Magic: Eric Nadel's Birthday Bash & Mental Health Mission | YDC Ep 222
Transcript
- Nobody would have thought that I would be the one. Ryder, sports talk. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Oh, with the big mic. Oh, okay. Alright. Yeah. Okay. Now I get it. We got a lightning strike, boys. What happened over there, Grego? We had a little lightning strike right outside the window. Alright. Alright. Here's a tip for all these Americano League teams. Don't what? You said tip. Yeah. Tip. Okay. With a p. Keep jamming. The the ticket colon. Nothing but a big X jerk off set. This is a cool night or what? I wish somebody would hear that and go, bullshit. I'm back, bitches. And just like that, do we have distressing news? I think we do. I'm seeing that, Nathan Ivaldi has been scratched for tonight's game, so it's gonna be a bullpen game. I believe Jacob Junis will be our opener. How do we feel about that? We don't feel good about it. I'll bet our guest doesn't feel particularly good about it either. Because if we don't like what's going on, we can turn off the TV or the radio, go about our business. He cannot do this. He is there for the duration because he is the great Eric Nadel. Alright. So you hearing anything about any situation with Nate? He has a side issue. His side is sore, and he reported to the ballpark today with side soreness. So they're playing it safe. They haven't done any testing or anything yet. They're just playing it safe. The old abundance of caution that we hear so much about. That's good. That's true. And it's the best way to form a champion. League leading bullpen for all nine today. Well, that's gonna be interesting because I can't think of a thing an area of this team that's been as surprising to me as this bullpen. It's been the strength of the team. It's unbelievable. You come out of spring training. It's the biggest question when you come out of spring training. In a quarter of the way through the season, it's the biggest strength. Yeah. I mean, there were no big names. Nobody that that, you know, you would really get all worked up to go see or anything like that. And all kinds of of doubt, I guess, and an area an air of dubiousness if there is such a thing as that around it. And yet here we are into the second month of the season, and it's been really, really good. It's crazy how this game works, Eric. Yeah. Especially with bullpens. You know, they a lot of teams do what the rangers have done this year and kinda put their bullpen together every year without a whole lot of returnees. You know, the rangers bringing in Jacob Junis and Jalen Beaks and Tyler Alexander to add to the guys they had coming back, and they've hit on a couple of rookies with Peyton Gray and Gavin Collier out there. So it's remarkable how everything they've done in the bullpen this year has worked except what they expected to happen, which was for Robert Garcia to be the closer and Chris Martin to be the eighth inning guy. Well, I don't know about you, but for me, I'm good with the way things are right now. You know? I mean, I like those guys, but if they can get back, that's great. If they can't, well, I like the way things are. What do you think about the closer situate the the closer situation? They've got a guy in lats now who can, you know, pitch multiple innings. You know, I feel like I'm watching, Willie Hernandez out there or Raleigh Fingers, you know, guys who throw multiple innings. You know, I'm wondering if, you know, he could even be one of these rare relievers these days who throws over a 100 innings in a season because he's able to go multiple innings. You know, that's what those guys used to do when Dosage Relaver and and Fingers and Bruce Suter, Willie Hernandez, I mentioned earlier, Jim Curran, when he was having that great year with the rangers, those guys all threw over a 100 innings in relief, and now it's almost unheard of for a guy to throw a 100 innings. Well, you know, Lats has come up with the ability to do that because the idea of the in the in spring training was possibly for him to be in the starting rotation, but the starting rotation fixed itself so quickly that that they had to figure out something else to do with him. He he just kinda wound up here by default, it seems like. That's pretty much the case. You know, he wound up in the bullpen with the role undetermined. All the roles were pretty much undetermined, you know, other than Martin and Garcia going into the season. And then as those guys got hurt, it looked like Jacob Judas was gonna be the closer, but Skip Schumacher never anointed him as a closer. You know, he kept saying we're gonna match mix and match based on who's coming up, based on the pockets that the reliever would be facing. But with Lats, he has not allowed a hit to a right handed batter all year. Over 30 at bats, and it's more than crazy. No hitter. It's like throwing a no hitter against a lineup full of all right handed batters. It's it's unbelievable a quarter of the way through the season. That is crazy. I don't think I've ever heard of anything like that where, you know, a guy Yeah. Go ahead. Not from the same side. You know, you might you might have heard of a lefty on lefty having Yeah. Some kind of numbers like that, but not a lefty getting righties out at that rate. Are you getting ready for your birthday bash as we sveltely segue over into that? Yeah. I'm really excited. It's this Thursday, and, you know, it's my 70, which is a little daunting, as you know. And I do. We decided to blow it out and, you bring in a couple of big bands, higher budget bands, Chuck Proffitt and his Kumbi issues from San Francisco. Chuck's a longtime Bay Area legend. I've been a huge fan for years. He's also a very big baseball fan. I've met him a couple of times. And he's doing this Latin rock called cumbia, which comes from Colombia. And then from New York, Sammy Ray and the Friends, which is a a big band with a dynamic charismatic singer, horns, backup singers. So it's gonna be more of a high energy event than it's been in the past. There'll be a lot of dancing, and it it's gonna be fantastic. I'm really excited about it. The Longhorn Ballroom is the perfect place for it. You hear that, Shupee? Dancing. Yes. Dancing. I do hear that. I do hear that, Shupee. I think I'm gonna are we gonna see you two stepping or line dancing? Or No. You won't you won't see any of that. We're gonna see you salsa. No. No. You won't see any of that. You won't see me dancing. You'll see yourself dancing before you will me. Well, that's not happening either. So how'd you get familiar with these bands? Did you just run into them on the road? Or mean, I I tell people all the time that you're a very eclectic music guy, you know, and you don't just dip your toes into the mainstream of it. You you search for deeper stuff. Yeah. Chuck Proffitt was actually recommended to me by some friends in the Bay Area many years ago, and I started listening to him and really got hooked on him. And then for the first time about five years ago, I got to see him perform live at the thirty a songwriters festival that I go to every year in Destin, Florida in January. And I was really really impressed by the kind of show that he put on both in terms of the music and he's a he's a personality too. He's a character. He's he is out there. And I really enjoyed the show. As for Sammy Ray and the friends, I didn't know they even existed until they started opening shows last year for my favorite band, Lake Street Dive. And I even tell people sometimes that Sammy Ray and the friends are like Lake Street Dive light. No. They have a a similar lead singer. They have a similar style as a lot of their songs are are a little jazzier than your usual Iraq type stuff. Right. And it's a really fun live show. All the people I know in New York who have seen them live just rave about them. And, you know, they I've never seen them live. They've opened shows for Lake Street Dive, and I've never seen an opener at a Lake Street Dive show that I didn't love. I've never had the opportunity to see one of the shows that Sammy Ray and the friends opened. So I'm very excited about seeing them live for the first time after watching lots of their videos. How many times have you seen Lake Street dive? I've probably seen them 12 to 15 times, but I've seen them in eight different states. I have traveled to Red Rocks to see them. I've traveled to Missoula, Montana to see them. I've seen them in New York. I've seen them in Chicago. I went to see them one year on New Year's Eve in Chicago, and I've seen them at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I've seen them in Arizona, and I've seen them in Dallas, at the Kessler and at the Granada. Pretty good. That's devotion. That is. That is true. I'm planning tentatively this offseason to go to Europe to see one of their shows. They're doing a tour in October and November. And depending on when the ranger season ends, I'll catch them somewhere there. It wouldn't be wouldn't be bad to see them in Italy. If the rangers don't make it past the first round of the playoffs, I'd be able to go to that. Let's talk a little bit about the event itself, how it all came to be and and how it's developed over the years because, you know, I've been around for all this. I've been watching it. I've been keeping an eye on the evolution of it all, and it it must it must be very rewarding for you to see. Yeah. You know, it's grown from, you know, just kind of a harebrained idea after I had a sixtieth birthday party at the Kessler, is just had just opened as a live music venue, and I decided I wanted my birthday party to be there. So I invited, you know, pretty much everybody I knew, and I bought out the whole balcony and brought in one of the singers, Daphne Willis, to play with the Austin singer songwriter Kelly Willis, you know, not related, but kinda cute. And it was such a good time that afterwards, you know, I was talking to some people and decided it would be a nice idea to do it on an annual basis if we could raise some money for a mental health charity. And that's really how it started. So the following year, for the first time, we actually sold tickets to it, did it at the Kessler again, sold sponsorships, and we were doing it for a charity called Contact Crisis Line, which later got absorbed into suicide in Crisis Line. So I needed a new beneficiary a few years into the whole project, and I switched over to an organization called Focus on Teens, and they didn't make it through COVID. And I needed another partner, and that's when I found the Grant Halliburton Foundation, which provides mental health and suicide prevention programs in schools. And they have been, you know, greatly helped by the money and the name recognition that, you know, this event brings to them. They've been able to put their programs into far more schools, and they have grown tremendously. They're celebrating their twentieth anniversary this year, and all the money raised goes to them. And, of course, we get money from sponsors. We get money from ticket sales. We haven't sold the TV rights yet. I don't I don't know what what's going wrong there. I don't I don't know why that hadn't happened. But we didn't have come out there and podcast it next year. There you go. You know? Perfect. But we do a silent and live auction, and that's where we actually raise most of the money. We we've been very successful with what we call celebrity meals. We have 25 of them this year where you can get to go to lunch with one Mike Reiner at Eddie's Tex Mex on Lower Greenville. You could go you can go to dinner with Rangers managing partner Neil Liebman at Al Bernays. You can go to lunch with Elvis Andrews at Chuloso. You can go to lunch with Skip Schumacher at Texas Live with Ross Fenstermaker, arranger's general manager, and all of the hosts at the various radio stations at the fan and a ticket with Evan Grant, Mike Doocy, and Sam Gannon at Masume. And then in our live auction, we have a dinner with Chris Young at Nick and Sam's. But we also have these great experiences where you can sit in the radio and TV booth for an inning, and you can sit in with me when I record the Skip Schumacher show. A new one this year is you can run the dot race. You can bid be one of the dots, which is something that's never been offered before. And I think I think the next thing we just need to figure out some way to have somebody sit with grooves and pick out the music for one night. I'm not doing that anymore, but I know Chris Staatser would happily have someone sit in with them and tell them what to do. Because I already do that. Groups. But, anyway, the the silent auction is already live and people can bid, and this is how you get involved. You text the letters e n b b, all lowercase, to four four eight three four. That's e NBB to 44834 and the bidding's already on for these items. It'll go till 09:30 the night of the show on Thursday And it's a it's a really unique auction. We have a lot of autograph memorabilia as most of these auctions do, but we have so many other experiences in these celebrity dinners that it's it's become, you know, a really big thing, and and it is how we raise most of the money. So people should jump on and see if there's something they like. We have a lot of signed baseball cards this year from various Ranger players. I even got a rookie card signed by Nick Kurtz of the athletics when we were out in Sacramento. When AZ Fudd threw out the first pitch the other night and the whole Dallas Wings team was here, we got AZ to sign a ball, we got Paige Beckers to sign a ball. You can you can get a baseball signed by either one of those. And when I was at Seattle, Brandi Carlisle threw out the first pitch. I got her to sign a baseball. We have a we have a baseball signed by Brandi Carlisle that you can bid on. Alright. There you go. What more could you possibly want? That's a very stout lineup of auction items this year you put together. Let's talk a little bit about the mental health aspect of this because I know that's something that is very close to you and something that, you know, you've you've dealt with a little bit over the course of your life. Yeah. It's, you know, it's something that you I think you really don't understand unless you've been through depression and anxiety. If you haven't had the experience, it's really hard to comprehend that some people just have their brain chemistry go haywire. And when you're in a clinical depression, you know, as I was, you wake up every morning sad. For some reason, you're just sad. You feel like crying. It doesn't matter what's going on in your life. It doesn't matter if everything is perfect in your life. Your brain is just telling you you're not happy. Your body feels weird. When you have anxiety, you feel it in your gut. You feel it in your solar plexus. It's really unpleasant. And, you know, some people respond to talk therapy. Some people respond to antidepressants and antianxiety medications. A lot of people respond to both. But the most important thing is to talk about it, to acknowledge it and to talk about it and to make other people aware of it. And it's important, and this is what Grant Halliburton Foundation does so well. It's important for your friends and your peers to know the signs of somebody who's going through depression, somebody who's having mental health issues. And that's one of the things that they teach in their programs in schools, not only to students, but to teachers and parents as well. But the whole stigma around mental health issues is something that we're working hard to eliminate. You know, it's it's an illness. It's a it's a disease. People don't like to admit they have, quote, mental illness or mental health issues, however you wanna phrase it. But, you know, it's a physiological thing, you know, just like any other physiological sickness. Yeah. It's probably more people have have had it than might realize it. It's one of those things that kind of can hang around you for a long time, And you know something's wrong, but you don't know what it is yet. You keep fighting through it, and there comes a point where it just sort of overtakes you. It sort of gets on top of you, and you can't get out get it out from under it. Right. And you don't see the end in sight. You know? You don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, and that's one of the hardest things about it. You know, how do you how do you carry on feeling so crummy all the time? And a friend of mine who had been through it really helped me. She told me that what you need to do is be grateful and appreciative of all the little things in your life that give you pleasure. Whether it's stepping into a hot shower and realizing how lucky we are that we have access to hot clean water all the time when a significant percentage of the world does not. You know, you get into clean sheets at night and a comfortable bed. You know, relish that. You know, enjoy that. It's that whole idea of being in the moment and appreciating what you have. Every time a meal is placed in front of you, you'll be thankful that you're, you know, you're eating a wholesome food. You're eating what you wanna eat. You're not like the people in Cuba, for example, who are fortunate now to just have rice and beans to eat. It's, you know, it's it's something that keeps you going when you realize how many things there are in your in your life that you still appreciate. You may not enjoy them as much as you normally do, but you still generally like eating. You like sleeping. You like taking a shower, and all of those things help you get through those tough times when you're basically going through depression and or anxiety. I tell myself that all the time too. Just be glad for what you've got. Enjoy what you've got. You've got it good. And I I I I tell myself that all the time, but sometimes I don't know if I'm doing enough there. It's hard. You know, we take so much for granted, and, you know, we're blessed. We've you know, we are certainly in the realm of first world problems, you know, as fortunate as anybody. And but depression is not a first world problem. It's a it's an all world problem. And we're fortunate in the first world that we can get help, that we can try antidepressants and see if they work, that we do have, you know, talented talk therapists, both psychologists and psychiatrists, you know, who are available to talk to us and help us through these things and maybe actually help us get out of it. And, you know, that's always the question. How do you get out of it? And it usually happens kinda gradually and it can be the antidepressants working, it could be something kicking in and talk therapy. But all of a sudden, like I realized that one day I realized, hey, I'm enjoying music again. That was the hardest thing for me when I was going through it to not even be able to enjoy music that much. And then one day, you start listening to the radio or you put on Spotify or Apple Music and and you hear a song and you really enjoy it and you think, wow, you know, the the worm has turned. You know, I'm on my way out of this black hole and you start appreciating and enjoying things again. And, you know, in my case, when I was going through it, I was taking a lot of medication for anxiety, which slows down your mind. You know, it makes you calm Mhmm. But it slows down your mind so much. I didn't feel I was capable of working. You know, in in this job, have to focus, you have to concentrate, you got a million balls in the air at one time, and your mind has to come up with stuff really quickly. And I didn't feel I could do that. And I didn't wanna work, you know, at 50% or 60% of, you know, what my capabilities normally are. So it wasn't until I was able to wean off the anxiety medications that I felt normal enough, you know, mentally that I had the mental acuity to be able to do that. This is the great Eric Nadel with us, and we're talking about the Eric Nadel birthday bash, which is coming up here. And we'll have more with Eric here in just a little bit. But right now, we must stop down for the dreaded and feared mid show read. Dun dun dun. Alright. Let us talk to you a little bit about the house of healing. You know, we're talking about mental stuff here, but there's the physical end of things as well. And you may be roaming through this world in a whole lot of physical pain. These days, I'm having to deal with some of that myself, and, I found out about this. This helps. I got this from the CBD House of Healing. This is the full spectrum salve stick. And I don't know if I've exactly what it is I've got, but it hurts like a pulled muscle, and putting this stuff on it helps quite a bit. Now the CBD House of Healing, they got all kinds of things for all kinds of issues. Their owner is a registered nurse. And if you've got something wrong with you, you need to go down there and at least talk to her. Tell her what's going on, and chances are she will have something that can and will help you out. The CBD House of Healing is located at Plano Road and Northwest Highway in the northeast quadrant of that burgeoning intersection. Do drop by, check it out for yourself, and see what they can do for you at the CBD House of Healing. Tell them you heard about it from us here on YDC. YDC is coming to the Stockyards over there in crazy Fort Worth. We're going to be hosting a remote show along with Jake White and John Henry of our signal 51 chronicles podcast. Join us at Bronx Tack Room, the newest casual restaurant in the Stockyards with a basement bar with darts, pool tables, and live music. We'll be talking some true crime with Jake and John and the live music scene with the great Steve Helms. Tyler Kern of the Sunset Soccer Club and special guest Arlington mayor Jim Ross will join us with all things World Cup. This will be coming down on the May 20 from five until seven at 115 West Exchange Avenue over in crazy Fort Worth. You've been asking for it, and Bronx Tack Room is giving it to you. YDC in Fort Worth, May 20 starting at 05:00, 01:15 West Exchange Avenue. Is that it? I think that is. Alright. So that's what's happening with little YDC. What was the first music you remember hearing? The first music I remember hearing is show tunes. My parents would have Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, music like that always playing in the house. And that's the first music that I remember. And my my parents used to sing along with those with those songs, and we had a deep appreciation for it. My dad had a great singing voice. My mom didn't. I can't sing at all. My sister can't sing at all. But we would whistle those show tunes, and sometimes he would badly sing along with them. And then of course, when my sister who was three years older started appreciating music on her own when she was maybe eight or nine years old, she started buying Elvis Presley records. You know, they were the singles then. They were the seventy eights, which were, you know, like dinner plates. And she I remember she brought home first one she brought home was Hound Dog with Don't Be Cruel on the Other Side. And then she brought home Love Me Tender. I don't remember what the b side was, then Jailhouse Rock, and then Heartbreak Hotel. I might have the order mixed up, But we just love those songs. It was one after another, and we were crazy about it. And then I remember the first album that I actually got was the Buddy Holly and the Crickets first album, which was like the the fabulous crickets or the Yeah. Amazing crickets or some kind of crickets. It wasn't just the crickets, but that'll be the day was our favorite song for a really long time. We would we would sing that at the top of our lungs. Yeah. I love that'll be the day too, and I love Buddy Holly. I remember when Elvis first came out. My parents always had the radio going, and I heard music on there constantly. And and it just it got into me, and it it never has left, and it never will. And I I I don't want it to. You know? I mean, it's too big of a part of the fabric of who I am and who I've always been. There have been times when I've blown a little hot and cold on it. There have been times when there there have been some genres that have come along that really didn't do much for me. And I found out later that, yes, there is something there, and you should have gotten into this the first time around, but you didn't. So it's I'm like you. It's been a I mean, we're rough contemporaries or maybe not rough contemporaries. Like, six months apart pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. We're smooth and deeper. It's it's just always been a part of the fabric of my life, and it always will be. And for what it's worth, the b side of love me tender, any way you want me, that's how I will be. Yeah. So now you know. What are we gonna do about this? That's a Buddy Holly song I don't think I remember. Elvis for Elvis. Oh, Elvis? Yeah. Oh, okay. I don't think I remember that for him either. I don't either. Well, that's why it's a beat side, I guess. I think the first Any Way You Wanted, remember is by the Dave Clark five. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's gonna be a great time out there. Yeah. We're gonna be there. But I'm telling you, the band is sensational. They they are fantastic. We we debated who goes first. They're both really hard to follow. But, you know, in between the two bands, we have our our live auction. And that's where people can bid on a dinner at Nick and Sam's with Chris Young or a home plate suite at a ranger game or Chad Hauser, the award winning chef from Cafe Momentum, will come to your house and prepare a dinner for ten. That's one of our live auction items. And we have a trip to Napa with several wine tastings at different wineries and a trip to Houston for a weekend with the rangers when they play the astros later on this season in July, I believe. Those are the live auction items where you have to be present to bid. The rest of the auction that's online right now, you don't have to be present to win. You don't have to have anything to do with the event other than the auction but I should point out the tickets for the event are they start at just $25 You know, most benefits, most charity, galas, you know, the tickets are a $102,100 dollars. You know, we start at $25. I think they're 25, 45, and 70 if I'm not mistaken. And Mhmm. Last year, we had about 600 people at the event. We'll probably have about the same thing this year, the way things are looking, which isn't totally full at the Longhorn, but gives people room to move around. And, again, get up and do some dancing if you feel like. And, of course, you'll be at the Longhorn Ballroom, and there's it's not like there's any shortage of stuff to walk around there and look at either. They've got an unbelievable country music memorabilia thing going on. Just anybody who has ever played at the Longhorn Ballroom has pretty much given them something to put up on the walls, and they just got all kinds of great stuff. You call music museum. Yeah. It really is. It really is. Yeah. You also get to see us right outside the Longhorn Ballroom. Oh, yes. We'll be there too. Me and you. You and that purple carpet. Alex and Rob from the clubhouse. Yes. Our own little pre show purple carpet. Oh, yeah. We'll be there too. Fantastic. This thing without us. We'll be we'll be there to screw everything up for you. Can we talk a little ball before you go here? Yeah. Let's talk some ball. We're excited after these two shutouts. Boy, this was a really, really good series, but I'm wondering if people are aware of what's going on in the National League Central right now. I don't remember a single time since they turned the American League and National League into divisions where I have seen a team this late in the sea into the season. We're a month in now. So things have started to, you know, shake out the way they're going to. But in the National League Central, every team is over 500. And the Cubs, who the Rangers just won the series against here, are sitting at the at the top of the division. I gotta think the team has, gotta be a little bit jazzed by the way they played against them. Especially in light of the fact, Ryan, that the cubs came in. They were the highest scoring team in the national league. They're averaging over five and a half runs a game, and over the last three weeks, they were averaging over six runs a game, and they score a total of seven runs in the three games against the rangers, all of them coming in one game. Two shutouts. Two shutouts. The Rangers ranked third in the league ERA. Remember last year, they ranked first, but their bullpen ranks first by a huge margin. The bullpen ERA for the rangers is about a half a run lower than anybody else's. And again, they're doing it with so called journeymen like Jacob Junis and Jaylen Beaks and Tyler Alexander, but also with the emergence of, you know, Jake Latts and Cole Wynn and Gavin Collier. It's been it's been phenomenal, and it'll be interesting to see what happens tonight with the bullpen night and also, you know, with the Rangers having to use a bunch of labors over the weekend Mhmm. What that does to the Rangers staff for the remainder of this series. Fortunately, the Rangers do have an off day on Thursday, but they've gotta have enough pitching to get through this series. So we're all wondering whether they'll call somebody up at some point, and it might depend a lot on Ivaldi's situation and whether he's available to pitch, you know, probably not tomorrow, but maybe on Wednesday. I don't know. Or or whether they're gonna need to piece it together without Ivaldi starting a game. And, you know, they do have the starters lined up for the next two days, but, you know, they might need some help in the bullpen. Can you pinpoint any particular thing that's led to the success of the bullpen? That's a great question. You know, every team now has what they call a pitching lab, and they figure out what each pitcher does best, what each pitcher doesn't do best, what pitches a guy should be using more. They work with the pitchers on changing the shape of their pitches. You know, sometimes they think the slider is too horizontal and needs vertical breaks. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes they change the release point of a pitcher. Sometimes it's just a matter of changing the grip a little bit. You know, you hear them talking about tunneling, about which pitch will deceive the batter the most because it's coming through the same tunnel out of the pitcher's hand, you know, that the fastball does, and some teams are better at it than others. And, you know, the rangers pulled it off last year, and, you know, a lot of the credit, I'm sure goes to Mike Maddox who was the pitching coach, but they're doing it again with Jordan Teagues as the pitching coach who was kinda Maddox's understudy for the last few years. And I've just gotta think that the Rangers, you know, they've got something going there. They they've got some really good analysts. You know, there was all kinds of people on the staff. Now I don't even know who all the people are who travel with the team now and do all this kind of stuff. But there's there's a whole team full of them. And apparently, on the rangers staff, they're really good at it. Is Joc Peterson finally starting to get going? Oh, it looks like it. It looks like it. And, you know, you never you never feel that confident in Joc, I think, because he had such a bad year last year. And on top of that, because his swing is so unorthodox. You know, he's he's not Will Clark or Rafael Palmyra up there with the sweet left handed swing. You know, he's not Don Manningly. You know, he's got this really unorthodox swing. Obviously, he has a somewhat unorthodox body type for a baseball player. And so until we see him do it over a sustained period of time, I'm sure Ranger fans are going to be skeptical, but he just had a fantastic series over the weekend against the Cubs. And I think he was on base six times out of nine plate appearances. He hit the ball over a 110 miles an hour three or four times. It really looked like a completely different guy than, you know, who we saw all of last year and the beginning of this year. Now we gotta worry about Jake Berger, though. Jake Berger is the style of hitter that always makes me a little bit nervous because he's a pretty big all or nothing guy. And he started off well, and it looked he was on his way to a really good year, but it's very, very early in those first few weeks of April. And this game has a way of catching up with you. Sure. And Skip Schumacher has made the point that, you know, he he managed Berger in in Florida, or I guess Miami, we're calling them now, and he's a streaky hitter. And Skip has been through the good and the bad with Jake, and he felt that giving him the two days off over the weekend would allow him to reset, you know, work in the cage, blah blah blah, come in maybe. Sometimes it's just a matter of a different mindset, but he's back in the lineup today after Justin Foskue played first base the last two days, and, you know, we'll see when it helps. So far, he's had pretty good success sitting people down and having them come back and play well. It certainly worked with Josh Young. What are your thoughts on Skip so far? He's I think he's a really good manager. He's a great communicator with the players. You know, several players have commented on that when I've talked to them about Skip. I think he's a great strategist. He seems to stay in the inning ahead, you know, of what's happening, which is, you know, what all the great ones did so well. And he has a very different personality type from Bruce Bochy. Bochy was, you know, laid back. He was like your favorite uncle when you talked to him, whether it was just a casual conversation or doing the Bruce Bochy show every day. You can tell in that interview what an intense guy Skip Schumacher is. And, you know, from what we've seen so far, at least when he's at the ballpark, he doesn't really have a relaxed gear. He is he is into it. He is intense. He's thinking all the time. He's moving all the time. You know, even when I go down there to do the show, you know, we shook the breeze for a minute or two, and then we do the show, and it's almost like before I say and that's the Skip Schumacher. He's gone already off to a hitters meeting or off to meet with his coaches or with that night starter and pitcher. He's he's a man in perpetual motion once he gets to the ballpark, but I think he's doing a a fabulous job. Alright. May 14 is the date the Longhorn Ballroom is the place. It is the Eric Nadel birthday benefit. That's the Thursday. Yes. It is. Certainly is. There you go. It's all right there for you. And tickets are at Longhorn Ballroom Dot Com if you'd like to come to the show. Longhornballroom.com. This is what you text to get involved in the auction. Text ENBB to 44834. Yes. ENBB 44834 or go to longhornballroom.com, and we will You know how I remember the the number text to, Ryan's? I use uniform numbers just like I do to remember my hotel room. You know what? This is a 4 4834. 44 for me is Henry Aaron. 8 is Yogi Berra. Mhmm. And 34 is Nolan Ryan. Who who would you go with if you had to remember a 44834? You can do a whole lot worse than any of those. In fact, I probably I I would probably go with those. They're pretty free all the family. Know? The only thing I might change is the eight. To me, eight is Ray Jablonski of the Dallas Fort Worth Rangers in 1960. As he is for all of us. Yes. As he is for all of us. There you there you go. Yeah. My 44 my 44 for a while was was Danny Darwin, the the bottom bullet. But over time, I've kinda thought, yeah, I should probably probably go with the all time home run leader. Yeah. Probably should go with time home run leader. Let's put it that way. Well, Eric, as always, great talking to you, brother. And Thanks for having see you out there. The YDC crew is all gonna be there. Mhmm. Alright. Purple Park. It's gonna be a great night. We will see you at the bash. Thanks, Eric. Looking forward to talking to you there. Thanks so much, Ryan. See you, Bruce. Eric. Yes, sir. Alright. That is your dark companion for today with the great Eric Nadel. Again, everybody come out and see us at the Longhorn Ballroom. See the show. It's gonna be great. Eric loves music. And not only does he love music, he's an excellent judge of what's good and what's not. So you will enjoy this. You will enjoy everything about it. You'll enjoy the music, the vibe, all of it. Thanks to Eric for being with us today. Thanks to Ashley. Thanks to Shubi. Thanks to all of you. If you like what we're doing here on YDC, then get us out there on your social media. Help us out. We will continue to do this for you. Till next time. Bye. Bye. Alright. I'm gonna go take your pants off. You're Dark Companion is a stolen water media presentation.