Bradford William Davis, Acuna, Eric K discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
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I mean, I guess if you can't get to the real truest park, I could see wandering around once to get the lay of the land. It's like as a friend of the show Bradford William Davis quipped the braves would rather build their stadium in the metaverse than a black neighborhood. There's that. But really, I just don't see the appeal. I'm all for, as you said, catering to a different audience and there can maybe be some fun Fortnite style things where maybe you have a concert there that's accessible to people without spending some exorbitant amount or being able to access the place, but I just don't know how many people are really in the market for let's wander around a semi photorealistic recreation of a ballpark. With other avatars, just not really high on my list. Now I'm a picturing you're walking around digital, truest perk, right? You've customized your avatar and you're walking around and then zooming by you is the Acuna from field vision that doesn't look like him at all. And you're just like bye. Yeah, this is doom. We shouldn't do this stuff. I mean, it's not that we shouldn't do it. It's just that like why do it, you know? There's so many things we could do. They're so few actual hours in the day. This talk work, right? Some developers plural had to sit around and figure this out and spend time on it and, you know, when they're like, moms ask them what they did with their week at the end of the week when they call their mouse they're going to say this and their mom's going to pretend to know what they're talking about, but not. And you're going to say developer, that's because, you know, my mom, she's in her 50s or 60s. She doesn't know what that means. That's not why she doesn't care. You should sit with that. Sit with it and think about what you've done. Yeah. Make a metaverse. I would want to visit. I don't know that the technology is quite there yet, but someday, in my lifetime, I imagine there will be a metaverse that appeals to me, just not yet, but who knows? Maybe give it a few more months of lockout and maybe I will be lining up to visit digital truest part just to get some sort of fix. And look, I know that not everyone can be their physically, but if what you're interested in is a tour, all of the ballparks give you tours, they'll give you a tour of Truist. They won't. I don't think they take you through the Clubhouse when they do those, but the reason you want to see the Clubhouse is 'cause you want to see the players there. You don't care about an empty Clubhouse. You think you do, but then you're gonna go in there and you're gonna be like, oh yeah, lockers, huh? Just to everyone who is sending me these press releases. I am once again asking you to just demonstrate one appealing application of this. Aside from NFTs specifically the environmental ramifications and just the general scamming of it. I have yet to really hear one suggestion of why this will make my video games better and what it will enable me to do that I can't currently do. And if you can't answer that question, then I just don't know why I should care or why I should spend any money on these things. My favorite thing about all of the press releases I get about NFTs and MLB is that they all say you get this exclusive enter to win this exclusive NFT and then you read like what you get and there's the NFT and then there are all of these literal physical and real world experiences that go with the NFT and I'm like, so you don't actually think the NFT is cool, which is why you're giving people two free tickets to sit behind. That's not, you know what? It's not a non fungible tokens. Sirs. You're just doing a ticket giveaway that comes with a QR code. What are we doing? I need it here. Yeah. Well, speaking of hating it here, another little bit of news that we wanted to touch on. There was a verdict shortly before we started recording in the Eric K trial. So this has been going on all week. It has been pretty big baseball news in the absence of the regular course of baseball news. And a jury in Fort Worth has found the former angels communications director Eric K guilty of distributing fentanyl that resulted in the death of Tyler skaggs, the former angels pitcher. He was also convicted on a charge of conspiracy with intent to distribute controlled substances and TJ Quinn of ESPN and Sam Blum of the athletic and others have been reporting on the trial from the scene and I don't know that I have a whole lot to add from a legal perspective here. But it's just a sad story all around and it's made some headlines partly because other major leaguers have been testifying including that Harvey and they have acknowledged either using or distributing various drugs of abuse, including opioids and so I think there has been some concern about how prevalent is this in major league clubhouses, not that it's particularly surprising to me that it would be an issue in major league clubhouses because it's an issue everywhere or at least in this Clubhouse. And when you have athletes who have disposable income and also have a lot of aches and pains that they may be incentivized to repress and maybe also have more ready access to ways to get these things if they are so inclined. It just doesn't shock me in any way and you just have to hope that teams are that the league are providing the help that they need and hopefully in more of a therapeutic form than a punitive form. So that future skags cases can be avoided. So I don't know how common it would be for team employees to be providing these substances, hopefully that is the exception. I don't know if it's unique, but just as players in the past in the 80s were using cocaine or in the 90s we're using steroids or whatever. Players are people in the world. And so they are going to do the things that people do. And this is just that there's no happy outcome to this. I guess maybe skaggs family get some sort of closure that there is a verdict in the case, but obviously it doesn't bring him back. So it's just kind of a depressing story all around that you hope can maybe help avert future occurrences of this kind of thing. Yeah, and you know the testimony of Matt Harvey inspired Terry Collins to share a bunch of very personal information that I think that you hit it just right, what we are hoping for in instances like this is therapeutic intervention to make people well and to give them the help and support that they need to deal with not only whatever sort of underlying medical issues, whether they're physical or mental, or sort of driving their use of substances and also the use of those substances themselves and obviously using opioids and cocaine is different. Like I don't mean to equate all of these things together, but I think that you are far more likely to be.