Casual Diehard

This could have been all yours, Milwaukee. Or Tampa Bay. Perhaps it still could be yours, Nashville. Or perhaps the White Sox belong in Chicago and will be there forever, no matter how bad their owners are, what kind of weirdos want to buy them and move them, or what damage they do to their own stadium in the name of hating disco music. You think 2024 is bad for the Pale Hose? Let's take a trip back to the 1970s with Chrystal and Colleen.

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Ana, Janice, and Jesse share their reactions to the WNBA draft, from Caitlin Clark officially becoming the face of the Indiana Fever to the Las Vegas Aces putting together a sparkling draft class without a first-round pick. Did the Liberty outsmart everyone, including their own fans? What are reasonable expectations for Clark, not just adapting to the WNBA level, but playing the most basketball of her life -- especially if she's on Team USA for the Olympics? Finally, something good happened for long-suffering Chicago Sky fans. And is the balance of power in the league shifting westward?

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The "win or bin" concept is not our own, but Addy, Jesse, and Katie do find some similarity between their faves here, whether it's at Ferrari, in NASCAR, or on the baseball diamond. On a between-races episode in the F1 season, there's plenty of room to speculate about silly season ahead, and lots of fun scenarios to imagine as we get ready for the first Chinese Grand Prix since 2019 -- a rare race on the calendar that's never been won by Max Verstappen.

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Jesse and Youppi go for a walk in Prospect Park with Jennie Egerdie, the author of Frog And Toad Are Doing Their Best and the upcoming Oh, Bother: Winnie the Pooh is Befuddled, Too, to enjoy a beautiful spring day and talk about the Sesame Street atmosphere of Park Slope, trees growing in Brooklyn, monster trucks, and, of course, the biology of Mr. and Mrs. Met as relates to their old SportsCenter commercial. There was also discussion about the metric system and tricking Michiganders about Canada, but there were sound problems with that part. If you want to hear that part through the sound of microphone rubbing on hoodie, it's available on the dedicated Youppi Show podcast feed, because Youppi sure didn't mind.

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Ace, James, and Jesse are back together to transition from the NBA regular season to the playoffs, tackling all the big questions. Could the bracket have worked out any better in the East for the Celtics? Is Dame Time already up in Milwaukee? Can the Knicks really make a run without Julius Randle? Is Oklahoma City for real as a top seed? Is Denver inevitable as a repeat winner of the West, if not the whole thing? Can the Clippers avoid going full Clippers? We've got a lot of thoughts and a lot more basketball to watch.

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Ace, Jesse, and debuting guest Martin Rickman ready for the playoffs by examining potential intriguing matchups and what might come to pass as the regular season winds down toward its conclusion. We now know all 20 teams that will be involved in the play-in and playoffs, but not their seeding order. Is it as simple as being a two-month march to an inevitable Denver-Boston collision in the Finals? Maybe, but that’s why they play the games, and Nuggets-Celtics would be a heck of a matchup if that’s how it does wind up.

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After a snooze of a racing weekend between F1 at Suzuka and NASCAR at Martinsville, Addy, Britt, and Jesse are tackling big questions, like whether Max Verstappen or Mike Trout is a more interesting person, what's going on with Lance Stroll's hair, and whether Charles Leclerc would get designer glasses made for viewing a solar eclipse. Oh, and does Williams have enough cars to actually make it through the season?

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It’s never a good thing when Pete Rose is back in the news, and he has been lately because of the alleged theft of $4.5 million from Shohei Ohtani to cover gambling debts. That story has yet to fully unfold. Rose’s has, to the point where the Washington Post ran not one, but two big stories looking back at it… 10 years ago. This year is the 35th anniversary of the death of then-commissioner Bart Giamatti, who banned Rose, even though so much of what happened feels so recent. Nope, it was 1989. It’s just that Rose, who agreed to his own lifetime ban, has never once shut up about it, and he probably never will.

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Walking in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Sophie Vershbow and her dog, Simon. It's a great park for dogs, a great place for walking, and little did we know, a great place to look across the river to New Jersey right before an earthquake, which struck less than an hour after we finished recording. That would have been some kind of conversation topic. As it is, a great time was had by all!

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Ana and Jesse are joined by one of women's basketball's best writers, Jackie Powell, to celebrate a momentous NCAA Tournament won by South Carolina, and to look ahead to the 2024 WNBA draft, which of course will be headlined by Caitlin Clark after she led Iowa to the national title game against the Gamecocks. If "reality is coming," as Diana Taurasi said, what does that mean? The challenges that WNBA rookies face are enormous, starting with making it to a roster in a league where, every year, incredibly talented players don't make it out of training camp. While one player was driving the headlines and one team was driving to a championship, who drove their draft stock in the right direction? One thing is for certain: we all love Dawn Staley.

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