165 - Let's Play Catch

Alright, so we're going outside to play baseball. Is that what we're doing? Oh, sorry. Hit me into the bar.

Yeah, we're gonna decide to play baseball. When's the last time you played catch with somebody? Uh, my son and I played... let's say back in the late spring or early summer.

When's the last time you played adult catch with another man? Uh, I'd say church softball. How long ago was that? Probably last year.

But that was part of a formal activity. Yeah. You didn't have a man say, hey, let's go play catch. I did not.

No, you just did. Me throwing the ball in my glove here. Okay. Throw it to you.

That's a good start. Let's move you away from that vehicle so I don't crunch it. Did you see that squirrel just drop that thing on me? Yeah.

I was ready to go. Here you go, ball. Uh huh. I got it.

My goodness, dude. That's your third throw. And you're just in full velocity mode. That was...

Sorry. No, why are you apologizing? That was a good pop. Real good pop.

Dude, I'm old. We're gonna do this for 30 minutes. Only 30 minutes? Come on, man.

What do you do right now, sports-wise? You go out and throw the ball around with people, play basketball? No. Nothing.

I don't, man. Your circle of friends doesn't do that? I don't know. I'm just in a weird place.

I, uh... I used to love playing ball, baseball. Like, love it. But, it's busy.

And, uh, I'm the backup guy for the church softball team. And so, I do two things. When I go. No.

So I, uh, I'm the guy that just generally tries to get people excited. I try to pump them up. Okay. I can see that.

But, uh, I usually play shortstop, third, or rover. Rover's the thing in church softball. What do you like playing best? Uh, rover.

Just because you're involved in everything? You're involved in everything, but plus you can, uh, you can mess with people a little bit. Like, you can play one position and win the softball's pitched. You can run to another.

And so in softball you can try to hit it where you want to hit it. Because it's slow pitch softball, right? Yeah, it's slow pitch softball. It's not getting crazy.

Yeah. And, uh, you can kind of mess with people because you can place it if you're a good enough hitter. And so, when I know a guy's up to bat and he's going to place it, let's say, dink it right over the second baseman. That's typically around where the rover is.

I'll get in that position and then when the pitches throw in, I'll run to center field. Does it work? Yeah. It totally works.

Just so he can see movement in his eyes and it gets a little confusing. But I only do that with the really good hitters because they overthink it. Uh-huh. I don't know.

Does that stupid? That makes sense. Yeah. I like to do that.

Okay. Physics question. I have a few of those while we're out here. Okay.

In softball, sometimes you'll see those players who will almost swing down through the plane of contact. Like chopping it. Like chopping wood. Yeah.

Like chopping wood. Like a 45-degree angle. Yeah. And when that happens, if the ball goes in the air, it follows this odd kind of upward and then almost spin back toward the plate kind of behavior.

It has this weird glide to it. What is it about that spin being applied to the ball, that kind of goofy underspin? Backspin, yeah. That makes it levitate.

It seems like it floats longer and hits us. The what? The Magnus effect. I knew you'd know the name.

So the Magnus effect, if you think about this throw me a curveball. It would be my great honor to throw you a curveball. Yeah, throw a curve. Okay.

We're a little too close but I think I can get a little bit of spin. I'll give you some more distance. A little bit of spin on this. What's the distance between the pitcher and the catcher?

It is 60 feet, 60 feet. Oh, pitcher in the plate is 60 feet, 60 inches. Oh wow, I missed that bad. Okay.

But if you stretch out, it's less. And so from the rubber that your foot goes on to the plate. Is that how you hold a curveball? Me?

Yeah. Now you have two fingers on one of the horseshoe seams. I don't know if I can get this to spin or not. Okay.

Here's just like a, this is like a two o'clock to eight o'clock curveball. This would be a very hitable curveball but it should break a little bit. Okay. A little bit of movement.

Yeah. So I did the same thing. I just put a lot of spin on it. Yeah.

I kind of, I'm spinning it over the top but the way your hand releases it, it spins like at a 45 degree angle. Yeah. I tried to exaggerate the spin and it didn't work there. It's really hard for me to catch over here because I'm backlit or you're backlit because of the sun.

I'm going to move 90 degrees to the sun. Let's go in this little spot over here. Then we're near the sun. Okay.

So Magnus effect. Yeah. I'll give you more of a breaking ball later on. Okay.

So what I find is that if I try to throw a curveball before I'm loose, it looks like what you just did where you get a little curve but you have to do that. You're almost like you're flexing your muscle. You're flicking it. Yeah.

And that is not sustainable for joints and ligaments. That'll wreck you. Yeah. You played college baseball, didn't you?

I did. I did not. Throw knuckleball. Dude, that was pretty good.

Good enough that I didn't see it coming. I dropped it. Nice toss. Oh, that was ugly and weird.

Isn't it weird? The knuckleball went. They like rotated it a weird way. I mean, so a knuckleball for the third chair because I can't see us playing catch is when you try to take all the spin off of the baseball.

Yeah. Which is not feel natural because the way that the pads of your fingers grab the seams of the ball, the motion of throwing just naturally creates that friction on release and it gives it a bunch of spin. So you are throwing a knuckleball with your actual knuckles, right? I am.

Yeah. So I kind of hold it with all my fingernails and I push away from my finger as I'm throwing. Interesting. Yeah.

And for me, it's just my fingernails. I'm dug into the white part of the ball. Okay. That is weird looking.

Your knuckleball is better than mine because there is just a little bit of rotation and it's forward. It's weird. Yeah. Sometimes I will take my pinky finger and I will hang it off the edge to try to stabilize that but it doesn't work as well.

It's a good knuckleball. I mean, you are getting the spin off of it. Colly. You have a derpy kind of throw with that.

That's great. That was pretty. That was weird. I don't understand how knuckles break but sometimes they do.

God, I am so uncomfortable with yours. That makes me really, really happy. It's meant to make you uncomfortable. You were talking about the Magnus effect before we moved and why that spin makes the ball float or move different.

Yeah. The way it's been explained to me is where flow is high, pressure is low. If you think about spinning a baseball, one side of the baseball is if you imagine it rotating, let's say you're just looking at the baseball from the side and it's flying left to right. Let's say it's rotating clockwise.

The air moving across the skin of the baseball is going to go higher. The relative velocity is going to be higher on the advancing side and it's going to be lower on the retreating side. You have a dissimetry of pressure there because of the drag or aerodynamics. Any difference in pressure there at all will pull the ball in one direction.

So yeah, that didn't break very well. No, I moved. I don't know what makes it that moved. I don't know what makes it break more than other things but I do know that one night in Lacy's Spring, Alabama was the best curveball night of my life.

And for some reason, I don't know if we were closer to the river and we got better pressure or differential. I don't know what happened but I knew I could make people jump out of the box when I was pitching and then it would come in for a strike. Really? It only happened one time.

Maybe Mercury was in retrograde or something. But it's pretty good. What about you? What do you mean best time ever throwing a breaking pitch?

I relied on it so much in high school and college and the knuckleball as well. Yeah, I was rarely through a fastball or a straight pitch at all. Everything had movement on it. So I don't know if I can do it again.

I'm not loose yet but I had this breaking ball. Did that go the opposite way? That went the other way, didn't it? How did you do that?

Isn't that weird? Is that a slider? That is a screwball. How did you do that?

Or a cup fastball. But I don't really throw a cup fastball. I throw a fastball. How did you do that?

I am closing like I'm throwing a football. That's not how you throw a football though. Well, I can't be. So rather than rotating across my body and turning my hand forward toward my opposite throwing hip, I'm coming over my body and I am rotating my hand outward and coming back to my throwing hip.

But you're having to do it violently. It doesn't hurt. It's a very broken wrong way, right? The first time you see that.

You see a feminine motion with your hand there. That's hurtful. Do it again. Now I miss that one.

I don't like it. Yeah, I want to slip a little bit. I can't do it. I tried.

Good snag. Thank you. Oh, I hate everything about that. Like from what it looks like when I do it?

As a matter, I just don't like it. Which is why you should throw it all the time. Right? It's weird.

My dad and I used to play burnout. The other person cries. Golly, I could barely catch that. Because my algorithm wants to like it knows the parabola, it knows it's going from your right to my right.

But then my cowman filters all messed up. It makes me look at my past data in my database and I can come across this side. It's weird. I hate it.

You ever had a shoulder injury? So there, you see that? That looks kind of flat slider. Yeah.

That moves the same amount the other way away from the hitter. Yeah. So I could throw that. Oh, it's a disaster.

You're never getting that back. It's gone. I think it's in a lake. No, it's in the gum tree.

Mistakes made. I got it. I was going to throw this before I threw that ball to eternity. Yeah.

Is that how I compensated for not throwing a super hot fastball? Yeah. Just move it this way. Move it this way.

Mix it up with the knuckle ball. I wonder what this sounds dumb to not take us out of the moment. But I wonder what this sounds like because as I'm throwing, you can probably hear me throwing when I... The exertion you mean?

So again? The exertion you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Especially if we make an asymmetry of the audio file here. Right. There's that. But then I think there's the other thing where I got a little grunt going on.

That's interesting. So obviously throwing a baseball just means something. Okay. Right.

It is a unique social activity. I think it's different than throwing a football or playing shuffleboard or hitting the tennis ball because the tennis eventually, the idea is I want you to miss. Here I don't want you to miss. I want to deliver something I had to you faster than I could walk it over to you.

It's cooperative. Yeah. And it's kind of about getting in sync on a thing, but it's also kind of a metaphor I think for conversation. I think there's a reason.

The dads and sons, dads and daughters, moms and daughters even and friends. Well just without thinking about it, go out and pick up a ball and start throwing it back and forth like this while you shoot the breeze. Yep. Kind of how conversation is.

Oh, you're saying throw the ball back and forth. Okay. That thing. Huh.

Yeah. Feels right. I miss doing this with my dad. We don't do it much anymore.

It's been a while. Yeah. I haven't thrown him with my dad in a while either. You see that when you were kid?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Dad was always assistant coach. Yeah.

Which is the way, I mean, that's the way the coach. Well, yeah, you're assistant coach. So what was I like throwing with your dad? I mean, talk about the world or just when you're trying to get better at baseball when you play catch.

Mostly baseball. Yeah. He'd teach me all kinds of stuff. Like, teach me how not to be scared of it.

They're you a grounder like this. We're in a forest. Yeah. Have to do the alligator.

The thing that we always would focus on is perfection. Maybe not perfection, but. Nice scoop. Like the goal is for you not to move at all.

And for it to hit you right in the chest. You throw it well. You got a good release. You look good.

So that was the way he taught me how to throw was. Yeah. But the goal is to never make that person move. And so we have a game where we would keep our feet like this.

Okay. I'm doing it. You could. You didn't have to take a walk.

You didn't move to that one. Whatever. All right. You got to hit that.

You got to hit that. That's pretty good. Not good. Yeah.

Not quite. Yeah. I miss that stuff. I used to stay up real late with my dad.

We'd talk about things at night and go out in the yard and play catch during the day. That was a busy guy. I mean, he had a lot of responsibilities, but he was a sucker for me walking into his office and he was like, yeah, right there on the spot. Your kid wants to play catch with you.

You say yes, right? Yeah. I hope my son remembers that the same way. Interesting.

Yeah. I need to keep saying yes. So he keeps asking. My son, whoa, that was a disaster.

Sorry. I kept it out of my crotch. That was a whole. My son, they called him up to the mound this year, which is really cool because, oh, that was weird.

That moved up and down. Knuckle ball. So my son started the season in right field and then he was just consistent. And they eventually let him pitch.

Like not as a position pitcher. They actually put him in his pitcher a couple of times. Yeah. They needed an extra few throws and they put him in there.

But he worked his way all the way up. It's pretty cool. So we went and set up. When I got some lights and started throwing on, you know, they'll sit on the bucket, hit me in the glove kind of thing.

Pretty cool. Yeah. I don't know what it is. I don't know why I don't feel it over basketball or tennis or football.

I mean, I like all the sports. I play all the sports, but only baseball feels like father's son, magic, like, like it breaks down whatever little invisible masculine conversational hurdle might exist. And all of a sudden, maybe just how you throw it back and forth as part of the conversation. I don't know.

I might be stretching. What do you want me? I mean, it sounds like you kind of want that conversation right now. Are you getting some hair in places?

You weren't really expecting hair, son? Yes, sir. I mean, I don't know what you want me to do, buddy. I'm glad I can make you uncomfortable by talking about masculine friendship.

Here's a bizarre knuckle ball to mess with your sense of reality. You can throw heat. Let me see what you got. That was a knuckle ball too.

It was. Okay. One second. I will not throw hard without telling you what's coming.

Okay. This is just a straight four seam standard issue ball. Yes, pretty quick. No.

So my problem is, is this he? Oh, there he is. I tried to make it cut a little bit and all I cut was dirt. Did I ever tell you about my dad's uncle, uncle, uncle, pod, uncle, pod couldn't talk really well?

Okay. If you would, this is a great story. I got to get my dad to tell this story, but uncle, pod, that was a disaster. Oh, bad.

So basically, he would say, come on, come on. The way he taught, he was like, I had a speech impediment. And he, he would tell you, my bad. He would tell you to hit a bitter weed cutter.

Come at it. Bitter weed cutter. What does that mean? A bitter weed cutter.

So if it's really low like this, oh, that hit a log. It did. But, or a worm burner. There's the same thing.

Yeah, worm burner. Yeah, worm burner. We got to go ask my dad because they were playing out in the country after church one day or something like that, and like the community would be out there and they, uncle, uncle, pod paid, played third base. I imagine this would be like back in the sixties or whatever.

And they said that a crazy, fast one got hit the third base. You know, that's where you get the, the heaters. Oh yeah, I corn. Hitting real hard.

Here comes boom. And right before it got to him, it hit a little clotted dirt or a, probably a, you know, a little cow patty or something. And it popped up and I hit uncle pod in the throat. And he dropped his glove.

He just threw his glove down and then he just ran off the field and he went to the concession stand and he got a Coke and he started gulping it. And they're like, what are you doing, uncle pod? He goes, I got hit in a dozel. I got to get me a dank before my dozel swallow.

I'm not going to lie, I was hoping the punch line of the story would be a knock to the speech impediment right out of him or back into him. Yeah. It's kind of like rookie of the year or something. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that was not the case. I'm getting dead until it's story. It's pretty good.

But we always talk about getting hit in the dozel. You want to try to get to 100? What are we getting to 100? One, two, three.

You want to go quick hands? No. Oh, six. Good thing that's a 14 inch glove.

What's the glove you got there? Eight. And it's a 14. What is that?

Riveting radio. No, it's not. That's what it is. 15.

16. What happened there? 18. You seem to drop it and recover it in the process of throwing.

20. I mean, the throw is there. 21. It's just an end on the right side of the body now.

I'm starting to sweat. That means it's working. Everyone's going to do this with the kids. I do this.

I just take one that's a little harder. Fortunately, fortunately I came prepared. Oh, what the heck is that? You're going to jump with that?

You're trying to make it harder for a second. What do we have? I'm going to do that. I think that's like 75.

It is not. Oh, gosh. You ever see that little meme or whatever? It's been floating around for a while.

It shows a bunch of kids with their ball gloves and everything. It says one day in your childhood, you went out to play with all your friends. It was the last time and nobody knew. Yeah.

It sucks. You think? Why are you doing that? Why are you making this sad?

Why is that sad? I don't know. You're only kids for so long. I guess it's what I'm doing.

First of all, I think that meme is true. Obviously, there was a last time. You're just not thinking that way when you're a kid about the whole crew, the whole gang, and everything. That's it.

I guess what I never understood about that is why we stopped. Should we go play kickball? No, I don't want to play kickball with you. That gets back to the first question.

You asked me the last time I did it was. That's it. I see what we're doing here. I see what's going on.

It's because of responsibility. How do you mean? You got to go feed people that need you to feed them. Well, first you have to go make them.

I don't know. It just feels like it kind of gets time to not play anymore. If you got a quick plan and you got to go accomplish something, and that's good. I like accomplishing things, but I guess I kind of feel like we were accomplishing things when we went out and played catch, played ball in the neighbor's yard or whatever.

I think that was fruitful. I don't think that was just frivolous rehearsing for something that would matter later on. I think that all of that play mattered then. I think how we treated each other then mattered then.

Yeah, did you have that kid in your neighborhood that was like, they weren't super fun to play with? But you invited them anyway? Yeah, we did. Yeah.

Or literally everybody else is busy, but well, that kid's available. Yeah. That kid? Yeah, that kid.

I think I might have been that kid. I might have been that kid too. Don't look at it. I guess it's what I'm driving at.

It makes me sad that sometimes I think of play as a thing that is the opposite of work or recovery from work and not accomplishing anything, because I think we're accomplishing something right now. And I don't care if I can't tell you exactly what it is. I don't know. For whatever reason for me, it's meaningful to hang out with my friends and not have anything electronic around us.

And it's something as simple as what my dad and his friends did, his dad and his friends did, because it's just being a part of something incredibly simple and that you can't do by yourself by playing catch. It's just kind of the anti-digital in a way. Yes. And play for the sake of play because, you know, because you got a friend.

It's a good thing to have a friend. It's a good thing to have a dad. It's a good thing to have a friend. So that friend has to get on an airplane and come to Alabama.

You came to me last time. It evens out. This episode of Notam Questions is sponsored by Raycon. Really good earbuds.

Absolutely. They're fantastic. Yeah. I like the blue ones.

Yeah. The blue ones sound a little different than those white ones. In my head. Okay.

To me they sound exactly the same as my white ones. Sounds sportier to me. I don't know. A little bit quicker.

A little faster. I had the blue ones on when I flew down here to hang out with you. And I had an awareness mode on when I got on the plane. I could hear all the announcements and everything going on.

And then I thought, you know, I didn't get much sleep last night. It's time for me to shut it down. So I put on a real boring talk show. Yeah.

And I took off awareness mode and everything just went away. That's great. And those people talking about stocks and bonds and other things I don't understand. They just put me straight to sleep when I woke up.

I was in Alabama. So true story. Yeah. I was on an airplane recently.

Two guys behind me. Real loud. Okay. I looked at the guy right to me.

To my right. I was near the window. We were on the left side of the airplane. I looked at him and looked at him and looked at him and looked at him and looked at him.

Can you believe they're talking like this? This guy starts talking about all kinds of stuff. About time he had in the army. All this stuff.

Starts talking about learning English and learning German. In Germany. He's talking about all this stuff. He's like, yeah, man, there's some Germans.

You don't want them learning English. I was like, what? What does it mean? He's like, yeah.

Yeah, those people. And I was like, what? What is happening? Where am I?

Where am I flying into? He was just singling out a people group and saying, yeah, you don't want them to have this language. And I was like, what does this even mean? So we get ready to get off the plane and me and the guy next to me.

We both put in our earbuds and we were like just trying to drown out what they were doing. Awareness mode off right on the earbuds. Got off the plane and I'm like, hey, dude, I don't know what that was. I heard him talk and he had kind of a South African twang to his voice.

I was like, are you South African? He goes, no, no, I'm German. So the guys behind me were talking about Germans and he was German. He was just playing along really nice.

It was interesting. What about his earbuds? Were they high quality Raycon earbuds or were they a lesser brand? I think they were a lesser brand.

It's okay. It's okay. It's traveling far from home. They had to buy something that's cut rate but still very expensive from some airport store where they overcharged when he could have just gone to.

I'm Raycon.com slash NDQ. That's the one. Yeah. What's NDQ stand for again?

What's the name of this program? Oh, no, no, no questions. I think we both like about Raycons. One is you get the gel tips so they super fit in your ears and they're not going anywhere.

That is a total dead thing to say. Oh, yeah. It's not going anywhere. Yeah.

Okay. I did that. But that's the thing. Ratchet straps and Raycon gel tips that's not going anywhere.

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I wonder if we're getting close to 100. We haven't dropped anything, have we? We dropped a couple. Not since we started like counting.

Right. Do you remember that time we went to the beach and we started playing paddleboard or what was that called? Yeah, I actually had a surgery after that and lost a testicle. So I remember it vividly.

You didn't. No, I didn't. I could. You hit me really hard.

But that was the first time we had done something like that. And do you remember? Well, let me put this way. I remember your face because I remember your face because it said, oh, you're not supposed to have these skills, but you do.

Oh, yeah, because you were competent? No, yeah, I just remember. I remember your face. You're like, oh, you're used to throwing with people that can't throw back.

You're used to hitting a paddle with people that can't hit back. And I'm just, I remember that. I remember thinking, I've seen my son and his buddy. He's like, he's got a buddy.

I went to camp with him recently. And I remember him discovering that the other kid was good at stuff. And then they just kind of gravitated each other and like, oh, I can play ball with this kid literally. I remember seeing that and being like, oh, that's fun.

The moment that I realized that you were athletically competent, is that it worked? Yeah, whatever. Just like a catch. Well, yeah.

Yeah, and really, I mean, we sat out there on the beach and just tried to see how many times we could keep that paddle ball in the air. There's a lot. You bailed us out there. I got dangerously close to the dirt.

Yeah, I didn't catch it. I called it right in the palm though. I'm not proud of that. Man, I wonder what number we're at.

Third chair knows. Yeah, I don't. We haven't dropped any will. We'll make sure to spell it out when one hits the dirt so they can let us know when we fail.

Yeah, man. I don't know what it is. Like the dad thing or state of the world or what, but I've been enjoying simple things like this a lot more last. I don't.

I don't keep up with politics much anymore. I'm working on a fence at home. Same. I'm going to keep a goat in there.

That's kind of the opposite of politics. Yeah. I just want to go. I can be like, hey, goat, you want to eat this?

Goatee cans according to cartoons, right? And gloves. Gloves are their favorite food. Yeah.

That's what I learned from cartoons. I mean, my thought is, I don't know, I just, the less I get on the internet and the less I read social media, the happier I become. Are you doing that less? Yeah.

I am. I think I'm doing that less because I realize there's not like a single tweet I'm going to read or post or whatever they call it these days. It's like I'm waiting for the one thing to read. They're like, oh, cool.

Well, that was it. That's the one I was looking for. I guess I don't have to read social media anymore because I finally satisfied that internal thirst for whatever it is I'm looking for. That's not going to happen.

Uh-uh. No, it's not there. Ever. How'd that occur to you?

I don't know. I mean, I've had this thought many times and I was posting a lot too. I just don't post as much anymore in terms of tweets or I don't know it. When I do, I try to make it constructive.

I go, Tim throws real tight. One. Two. I got blinded there for a sec.

What's that? I just got the wrong backdrop for the ball for one sec. It took me a minute to pick it back up. I did that.

I made it up too. You get a bright leaf behind it. The contrast isn't there. Here's the last one and there's a lobber for Tim.

That's nice. What do I call for the vigorous interlude? So I don't know. I just don't think I want to spend as much time on social media.

But I do want to spend more time doing things with my hands. I like tractors. I like turning rinches. I like making things.

Yeah. When you used to make things a lot, now you make things even more. Learn more tools and stuff to do that. That's a direct threat to your social media time.

It is. Yeah. I think getting the social media time down to toilet time only is about perfect. Toilet time.

That's plenty. Wow. I must admit, I re-step in the shower too. Interesting.

Yeah. My phone's water. Oh. I didn't think it was as short as you thought it was.

Yeah. I don't know. I got to mess that one up. That's safe.

That's the safest throw of my life. That was safe like a sitcom dad throwing toward the camera knowing no one is going to be on the other side to catch it and having to look super gentle with his eyebrows up in the middle. There you go, Junior. Great job.