Chartreuse And Root Beer, With Kelsey McKinney

It is something like malpractice that Kelsey McKinney, a beloved S-tier podcaster with whom I goof around in Defector's work Slack all day, hasn't been on The Distraction since she and Megan Greenwell ganged up on me back in June of 2025. At the very least, it's something of a waste. This week, with Drew out of town, and the long and contentious libel charges I brought against her and Megan due to their fish-related calumnies in that episode resolved in my favor by a court of law, we remedied that. The result was an episode that touches upon picking up hobbies as an adult, the hazards of the MLB partial season-ticket package, and how to be good at going to restaurants while pointedly not accusing me of any food-safety improprieties.

We'll have some more formal MLB preview stuff on the podcast in the weeks to come, but feel free to consider this week's highly informal discussion an overture to all that. We discussed the usefulness of baseball as a place to put your stress and mental illness, offered an adult perspective on eating nine hot dogs in one day, and celebrated the eephus of Phillies utility man Dylan Moore. Whom I confused with Tyler Moore. I'm not apologizing for that, and will never, I'm just getting it on the record. Kelsey talked about "The Bad Grannies" and the other members of her Phillies ticket-package family, we compared our early-season live baseball experiences, and shared our early impressions of baseball's grand ABS experiment. Kelsey also spoke on Baseball Sainthood, a Kelsey Original Concept developed in collaboration with the Elias Sports Bureau; we celebrated a newly canonized Baseball Saint, bemoaned the decline of annoying-style baseball offense, and talked a bit about the Elias Sports Bureau, which was a towering mythic part of my young fandom and is now a place that Kelsey sends weird emails.