Should A Home Run Automatically End An Inning?

I will not keep you waiting for an answer on this one. No, absolutely not and under no circumstances would it be a good idea for a homer to automatically end an inning in a big league baseball game. It seems important not to equivocate on this question. And yet this Funbag question, from a listener named Kacey who absolutely needs to send us more such questions, struck both Drew and me as profoundly right-on. Not because it is a good idea—I just do not know how I could be any more clear about the fact that it is not—but because it is such a perfect Funbag question. It is admirably out of the box, wildly out of pocket, and close enough to being brilliant that it can catch you leaning for a moment. We could have devoted the entire episode to this question, honestly.

We did not, though! We devoted both a sufficient and wholly inadequate amount of time to this stunning and, to reiterate, stunningly wrongheaded question, I did an avant-garde Lou Piniella imitation, and then we moved on. The podcast that resulted covered a wide range of topics—Drew’s upcoming transformation into a bionic hearing machine colloquially known as RoboDad, the hideous kitsch of 9/11, the hideous quarterbacking of Jameis Winston, the broader question of what the Mets are doing at this particular moment, and I guess also Wilson Phillips’ cheese-classic “Hold On” and what it’s doing in barbershops. There was no Trump question this week, although there was a frank and timely discussion of Our Big Guy’s bold and characteristically informed stance on America’s vaping crisis.

If I’m being honest, we were a little bit far afield in this one, because it had been a couple weeks, because we were back in the normal studio under passably normal circumstances, and because we were excited to talk to each other about big ideas. Like a home run automatically stopping an inning. Good and big are different things.

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