It’s hard to know what to expect from a pitcher returning from a serious injury. In addition to velocity and spin rate, pitching is also about rhythm and feel, and that can take time to come back after a long layoff. But there was little rust for Gerrit Cole to shake off when he made his season debut Friday night at Yankee Stadium. In his first major league start since undergoing Tommy John surgery on March 11, 2025, Cole silenced the first-place Rays, allowing just two hits and three walks while striking out two across six scoreless innings. His only real trouble came in the first inning, when he gave up a leadoff single to Chandler Simpson and walked Junior Caminero to put two on with nobody out. After a Jonathan Aranda fly out, Cole picked the speedy Simpson off second base and then struck out Yandy DÃaz looking at an inside fastball to end the inning. From there, he got in a groove. He averaged 96.1 mph with his four-seamer, and he threw 50 of his 72 pitches for strikes.
Cole left the game with the lead, but the Rays scored four runs in the top of the eighth inning to take the first game of the series, 4-2. They now lead the Yankees in the AL East by 5.5 games. Watching the Rays play Friday night, I couldn’t help but think about how annoying they would be to play against. They pitch well, put the ball in play, and are aggressive on the bases. One Yankee told me before the game that they remind him of last year’s Blue Jays because of their pesky bottom of the lineup and refusal to strike out. I’m still not sure how good the Rays are, but I get the feeling that they are always going to be better than I think.
In this week’s mailbag, we discuss another surprising team over the first two months of the season. We’ll also answer your questions about how many players in baseball have the ability to win MVP, how good Randy Johnson and other all-time-great starting pitchers would’ve been as closers, and why the 9-9-9 challenge beers are so small. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
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The Cardinals are winning games at a roughly 95-win pace early in the year. First question: What the hell? Second question: Is this potentially sustainable enough to justify not trading players like Riley O’Brien, Dustin May, JoJo Romero and Lars Nootbaar at the deadline? I would expect Chaim Bloom to prioritize the team’s long-term outlook at the deadline, but it currently feels like they have a real chance to make the playoffs. — Spenser
The Cardinals have been one of the more fun teams to watch this season because they are playing in, and winning, a lot of close games. St. Louis is 10-3 in one-run games, 9-5 in two-run games, and 3-3 in three-run games, for a 22-11 record in games decided by three or fewer runs. The Cardinals have an overall record of 28-21, meaning that more than three quarters of their wins have come in close games. They are 7-1 in extra innings, giving them by far the best winning percentage among teams that have played at least two extra-inning games. They also have 14 comeback wins, which as of Friday is tied for the fourth most in the majors with the Guardians and Athletics; only the Braves (17), Diamondbacks (16), and Dodgers (15) have more.
Is it sustainable? No. The Cardinals will not win 95 games this year. They probably won’t win 90 games. As I write this on Friday afternoon, we project them for 81.5 wins, and that’s with 28 wins already banked. Our Playoff Odds give them a 27.5% shot to reach the postseason, up from 8.5% entering the season, when we pegged them for 75.4 wins. They are outperforming their Pythagorean record by four wins and their BaseRuns record by five wins. They have a -10 run differential. At some point, their luck is going to turn; a team doesn’t win 95 games on vibes alone. But is this sustainable enough to justify not trading guys like Riley O’Brien, Dustin May, JoJo Romero and Lars Nootbaar at the deadline? Generally, I’d say yes, at least for some of those players.
I think the Cardinals are better than we expected, good enough to win somewhere in the range of 85-88 games, which would put them squarely in playoff contention. There is some reason to believe our projections are low on St. Louis. The prime example is Jordan Walker, who only just turned 24 on Friday. After watching the Cardinals play the Nationals in D.C. last month, I wrote that Walker “looks like a completely different player. He seems way more confident and is making much better swing decisions; he’s lifting the ball, while walking more and striking out less.” He cooled off for a stretch toward the end of last month before making an adjustment and heating up again, an indication that he’s a more mature hitter who truly has figured things out. It’s still early, but I’m confident that he can continue to be one of the game’s top hitters moving forward. But the projection systems aren’t convinced yet. Walker entered this weekend batting .295/.366/.563 with 13 home runs, a 161 wRC+, and 2.0 WAR in 48 games. Our Depth Charts project Walker to slash .248/.315/.421 with 15 homers, a 107 wRC+, and 1.1 WAR the rest of the way. That rest-of-season projection is factored into the team’s projection.
The Cardinals aren’t good enough to reverse course on their rebuild and go all in, but if they are in the thick of the playoff race come the beginning of August, I don’t think what they’d get in return for any of the four players you asked about would be enough to justify trading them. Still, I could see St. Louis moving one or two members of that quartet while holding onto the others.
Assuming the Cardinals are still in contention on the day of the deadline, I see no point in trading O’Brien, who is under club control through the 2030 season. Yes, he’s already 31 years old, but if the Cardinals think he can be a valuable reliever for even the next two seasons, they might as well hold onto him. He’s fallen back down to earth in May after a dominant first month, but relievers go through rough stretches, and it’s reasonable to expect his performance the rest of the way to fall somewhere between his lights-out March/April and his inconsistent May. In other words, I think his final line will look like his current seasonal stats do now. Across 23 games (23 innings) this season, he has a 3.13 ERA, a 2.54 FIP, a 27.2% strikeout rate, a 3.3% walk rate, and a 58.6% groundball rate. O’Brien is a sinkerballer who gets a ton of groundball outs and doesn’t give up many home runs; that’s incredibly important for a relief pitcher. My guess is he won’t continue to run a 99th-percentile walk rate, considering command was his biggest problem up until this season. But also, as Ben Clemens laid out last month, “there are good reasons to assume that O’Brien’s command is a true change in talent level.”
As Ben wrote:
O’Brien didn’t start throwing a sinker until joining the Mariners in 2022. He transitioned to the bullpen at the same time, increasing his velocity by around 4 mph in the process, and he continued to throw harder as he acclimated to life as a reliever. Even though he’s 31, most of his time in professional baseball scarcely prepared him for his current form. He was a soft-tossing starter who mixed a four-seam fastball, a curveball, and a changeup. Now he throws three completely different pitches, and his current slider moves faster than his old heater. His walk rate spiked when he started throwing a sinker, because he simply couldn’t command it. It’s reasonable to expect some kind of learning curve when it comes to location. He’s gotten better every year, and even if he backslides from his current elite form in the second half of 2026, there’s no reason to expect him to fall all the way off. After all, improving continuously for years is a good sign that continual improvement will continue.
Because of his sudden improvements and age, I don’t think the Cardinals would get too much in return for O’Brien, at least not a prospect package that would equal or exceed his value to them as a solid cheap pre-arb reliever. This is the type of player who teams hope to develop when they go the quantity-over-quality route during a rebuild, the exact approach the Cardinals have taken under Chaim Bloom. They shouldn’t give that up just to take a flier on a prospect whose ceiling is what they are getting now from O’Brien.
Unlike O’Brien, Romero is a rental reliever, but I think for that reason, the Cardinals probably wouldn’t get much in return for him. At that point, I think it would probably make sense to keep him around.
I’m not sure what to expect from Nootbaar. He’s making his way back from offseason surgery to correct Haglund’s deformities in both of his heels. That’s the same injury that cut short Yoenis Cespedes’ career. The Cardinals are eying an early-June return for Nootbaar, and if he performs well enough over the two months between then and the deadline to get a decent return, I think they should move him. He’s under contract through the end of next season, so he won’t be around for the bulk of their next competitive window. That said, if his trade market is soft coming off a serious surgery, it might make more sense for the Cardinals to hold onto him and try to deal him in the offseason (either before or after the looming lockout). If his trade value rebounds by the time the season ends, it’ll likely mean he produced enough to warrant an everyday role on a contending club, which would only benefit the Cardinals down the stretch this season.
May is the team’s most interesting trade candidate. At one point, he looked like a budding ace with the Dodgers, before injuries derailed him for much of the last five years. He had Tommy John surgery in 2021, flexor tendon surgery in 2023 and esophagus surgery in 2024. He returned to the mound last season after missing most of 2023 and all of 2024, but he struggled. The Dodgers traded him to the Red Sox at the deadline. The Cardinals signed him in November to a one-year, $12 million contract with a $20 million mutual option for 2027.
He got lit up in his first two starts of this season, allowing six runs in four innings against the Rays on March 29 and seven runs in 3 1/3 against the Tigers on April 4. Since then, though, he has a 3.28 ERA and a 3.53 FIP in eight starts and 46 2/3 innings. Before Thursday, a loss to the Pirates in which he allowed four runs in 5 1/3 innings, he hadn’t given up more than three runs in a start since that seven-run clunker against Detroit. He’s pitched into the sixth inning in each of his last eight starts. Overall, he’s 3-5 with a 5.00 ERA and a 3.92 FIP in 10 starts and 54 innings, but I think his last eight starts are a better reflection of his performance this season. Teams are certainly going to be interested in him at the deadline, but I don’t think the Cardinals should sell him for cheap.
As Jon Becker is always eager to point out, mutual options hardly ever get exercised. Even so, if the Cardinals don’t trade May, I think it’s possible that they bring him back for 2027. If he continues to pitch like he has over his last eight starts, I could see the Cardinals and May working out a new deal to keep him around for at least another year or two. He might not want to risk hitting the open market this winter because of the likely work stoppage. If the Cardinals offer him close to $20 million for next year, he might rather have the certainty of knowing where he’ll be playing next year. Or, maybe they work out a longer-term deal instead. He’s still only 28 years old, and because of his injuries, he actually hasn’t thrown that many innings despite being around for a while. If he proves he’s healthy, there’s no reason the Cardinals shouldn’t want to have him atop their rotation for the rest of this season, next year and then perhaps for a while after that.
It’s still too early to know if the 2026 Cardinals are for real, but they certainly are further along in their rebuild than many of us initially expected they would be right now. Under Bloom, they’ve quickly restocked their farm system to the point that I don’t think they need to trade away their more experienced guys just to add prospect depth. If they get an overwhelming offer for May, O’Brien, Romero, or Nootbaar, they should take it, but otherwise, they could be better off — both in 2026 and the next few years — staying the course.
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How many players in the major leagues right now have the ability to win an MVP? Like, if they hit their 99th-percentile projection, how many of them would beat the average MVP level season? For example, a guy like Gunnar Henderson absolutely has the skills to play at that level, we’ve seen it before, but I can’t imagine someone like Luis Arraez providing enough value even in his best season.
Thanks in advance,
Burrito Boi
Dan Szymborski: When talking about a level of production that a player has only a one-in-100 chance of achieving, you open up a lot of possibilities. An 8-WAR season typically results in serious MVP consideration, especially today. Going back to the start of the Wild Card era (1994), there have been 45 different players who have put up at least one 8-WAR season. While most of the names on the list are ones you’d expect to be there, guys like Barry Bonds, Aaron Judge, and Alex Rodriguez, there are also some more surprising players, such as Jacoby Ellsbury, Darin Erstad, Chuck Knoblauch, and Magglio Ordonez.
For this exercise, I’m only going to look at hitters because pitchers are far less likely to win MVP. Using the 99th-percentile projections for position players as of the start of this season, ZiPS lists 41 hitters as having at least a 1% chance of hitting that high-water mark of 8 WAR. The chances of these 41 hitters ranks from Shohei Ohtani (with pitching) at 51% and Judge at 41% all the way down to Maikel Garcia, Rafael Devers, Oneil Cruz, and Michael Harris II, all right around 1%.
ZiPS expects 2.1 8-WAR seasons from those 41 players and 0.2 8-WAR seasons from players not among those 41. That’s right in line with the 70 8-WAR seasons since 1994. This isn’t because I’m particularly bright, only that I’ve had a couple of decades to calibrate ZiPS.
Since 2004, the earliest year I have ZiPS projections, there have been 44 individual 8-WAR seasons. Only a single one of them came from a player who had a less than 1% chance of reaching that threshold when the season began: Ben Zobrist in 2009. The average preseason projected WAR for an eventual 8-WAR player since 2004 was 5.5.
If we lower the threshold to, say, 6 WAR, we get 81 players with at least a 1% chance at an MVP-caliber season. In other words, lots of players who are not necessarily superstars may have a superstar year or two in them.
Incidentally, while Luis Arraez didn’t project to have a 1% chance at putting up 8 WAR coming into the season, it wasn’t like the projected likelihood that he would reach that threshold was in lotto-ticket territory. ZiPS gave Arraez a one-in-385 shot at recording an 8-WAR season this year. The future is very uncertain and with hundreds of players with starting jobs, something crazy is going to happen, even if you’re not sure what it will be.
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Hi,
Considering the traditional traits of a successful reliever/closer, how successful would Randy Johnson have been as a reliever?
Are there any other pitchers that would have been even better?
Thank you!
Shu
Jay Jaffe: Thanks for your question, Shu. The thought of the already-intimidating, 6-foot-10 Johnson coming out of the bullpen with the adrenaline boost that comes with a typical ninth-inning, game-on-the-line situation is a tantalizing or terrifying one, depending upon your point of view.
Before digging deeper into your question, I will point out that we’ve already got at least some evidence that the Big Unit would have been great in that role, even in the highest-pressure situations, because he thrived in a pair of relief appearances in the deciding games of two postseason series, both against the Yankees. Neither was a save chance, because his teams didn’t have the lead and were at home, but still, the performances were spectacularly memorable. In Game 5 of the 1995 Division Series for the Mariners, working on one day of rest, Johnson covered innings 9-11, extricating Seattle from a two-on no-out jam in the ninth, striking out the side in the 10th (Ruben Sierra, Don Mattingly, and Gerald Williams), yielding a run in the 11th on a walk-sacrifice-single sequence, but getting the win when Edgar Martinez doubled home both Joey Cora and Ken Griffey Jr. in the bottom of the inning. In Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, a day after throwing 104 pitches over seven innings in a blowout, he pitched a scoreless 1 1/3 innings while the Diamondbacks were down a run before rallying to score two against Mariano Rivera, capped by Luis Gonzalez’s broken-bat single.
At his peak, Johnson’s fastball could reach 98-101 mph as a starter, but he did have to pace himself, so it’s not like he hit triple digits every time. In a shorter stint, pairing that heater with his hard slider… Mercy. I wouldn’t want to face him. I think he’d easily be one of the best in the game in that capacity.
Having said all that, the reality is that being a closer is generally easier than being a starter. A pitcher doesn’t need as deep an arsenal when he’s only facing each batter one time, and in a single-inning setting, he isn’t so worried about pitch count. The best starting pitchers from just about any era would probably thrive in that role. Imagine Walter Johnson, whose fastball “hissed with danger,” as Ty Cobb famously said about facing him when the pitcher was a rookie in 1907. Nobody was throwing with that kind of velocity — and especially from that sidearm slot — back in his day. Ninth inning, late afternoon game with no lights to offset the shadows as they creep in and make the mucked-up ball easier to see… good luck with that.
I could probably just reel off names of great starters who pitched between Johnson and Johnson — or more recently for that matter (Paul Skenes? Jacob Misiorowski?) — who would make great closers and produce a satisfying list, particularly if I threw in some kind of subjective “intimidation factor.” Wanna face Bob Gibson fresh out of the bullpen in the ninth? Don Drysdale? Roger Clemens?
Inevitably, the stathead in me got to wondering about a way to bring numbers into this. Since we’re making cross-era comparisons, I figured this would be a great opportunity to break out our Plus Stats, which index rate stats to their respective park-and-league context, with 100 being average. What I settled on is a measure that combines high strikeout rate, low batting average allowed, skill at stranding baserunners (because some high-K pitchers will walk guys, and some wildness can add a bit of extra intimidation to the mix) and strong run prevention. The list I came up with includes both Johnsons in the top 10, in fact:
| # | Pitcher | IP | K%+ | AVG+ | LOB%+ | ERA- | Closer Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dazzy Vance | 2966.2 | 225 | 89 | 106 | 81 | 161 |
| 2 | Pedro MartÃnez | 2827.1 | 168 | 81 | 107 | 66 | 128 |
| 3 | Sandy Koufax | 2324.1 | 173 | 81 | 107 | 75 | 125 |
| 4 | Randy Johnson | 4135.1 | 176 | 84 | 105 | 75 | 122 |
| 5 | Lefty Grove | 3940.2 | 170 | 91 | 109 | 68 | 120 |
| 6 | Nolan Ryan | 5386.0 | 183 | 79 | 102 | 90 | 116 |
| 7 | Walter Johnson | 5914.2 | 160 | 87 | 108 | 68 | 112 |
| 8 | Bob Feller | 3827.0 | 168 | 87 | 107 | 82 | 106 |
| 9 | Dizzy Dean | 1967.1 | 169 | 93 | 106 | 77 | 105 |
| 10 | Lefty Gomez | 2503.0 | 160 | 87 | 109 | 79 | 103 |
| 11 | Roger Clemens | 4916.2 | 150 | 87 | 105 | 70 | 99 |
| 12 | Jacob deGrom | 1590.1 | 138 | 84 | 110 | 66 | 98 |
| 13 | Chris Sale | 2146.0 | 146 | 87 | 107 | 70 | 96 |
| 14 | Tommy Bridges | 2826.1 | 158 | 90 | 106 | 80 | 94 |
| 15 | J.R. Richard | 1606.0 | 166 | 83 | 101 | 92 | 93 |
For this Totally Scientific Closer Score, using a cutoff of 1,500 career innings and weeding out the relievers, I added K%+ and LOB%+ (the stats where higher numbers are better) and subtracted AVG+ and ERA+ (the ones where lower numbers are better). The result looks pretty good. Vance, a Hall of Famer whom I wrote about in spotlighting our Plus Stats a few years ago, battled injuries early in his career and pitched just 11 games in the majors before his age-31 season. He resurfaced with the Dodgers in 1922, his age-31 season, and on the strength of a blazing fastball and sharp overhand curve led the NL in strikeouts annually for seven straight seasons, with a high of 262 in 308 1/3 innings in 1924. At the time, his strikeout rate was more than double the league average, and he also won two ERA titles in that span (plus another in 1930). He would seem to be the kind of pitcher we’re looking for in this role. Pedro, Koufax, Ryan, Feller, Clemens, all 6-foot-8 of J.R. Richard, deGrom, the two Leftys… I think we’re in the ballpark here, with a list of guys who had overpowering fastballs and were generally dominant. I’ll also note that if I lower the innings threshold to 1,000 and don’t automatically exclude guys who made their names as relievers, Rivera would rank fourth (124), Trevor Hoffman 10th (106), Lee Smith 16th (96), and John Hiller 17th (95), with Rich Gossage (89) and Bruce Sutter (88) 24th and 25th, respectively, as well. Those guys weren’t as reliant upon being overpowering as the aforementioned starters, but my little junk-drawer score flags them as being on similar footing statistically.
I wouldn’t trade the above starters’ actual spots in baseball history for their alternate-universe careers as closers, but it would be fun to see them fulfill that role at least once just for entertainment purposes.
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Why do all these stadiums that do 9-9-9 challenges have little baby beers? — Chase
Michael Baumann: What a great question. A couple years ago, the various accursed short-form vertical video platforms started showing me posts from intrepid baseball fans out to complete the 9-9-9 challenge. For those of you who don’t look at the various accursed short-form vertical video platforms, the challenge is this: Eat nine hot dogs and drink nine beers over the course of a nine-inning baseball game.
The concept is not new; ESPN Page 2 (God bless its eternal memory) had a post by Brian Murphy on the 9-9-9 challenge in 2004. But the concept regrew some legs around 2024 or so. Indeed, the algo served these videos up to far more influential eyeballs than mine, and as of Opening Day 2026, Aramark was selling special 9-9-9 combo boxes at six MLB ballparks. (The Giants have since pulled out of the 9-9-9 League, perhaps for reasons I’ll get into later.)
I’ll concede that any drinking challenge — especially one related to sports — is inherently douchey. (One of the earlier mentions of the 9-9-9 challenge that I was able to find came on Total Frat Move.) Indeed, this is a young man’s game. I’ve eaten my share of hot dogs and drank my share of beers over the years, and when I first heard of the 9-9-9 challenge the first word that came to mind was “bloat.” When I told my wife I was tackling this mailbag question, she said, “This is a game for 23-year-olds.”
Nevertheless, there’s something in the ambition of taking on nine beers and nine dogs in nine innings that moves me. It’s not something you’d ever do organically, but it’s right in the center of the challenging-to-attainable Venn diagram.
The 9-9-9 challenge is difficult, and expensive, and gross, but that’s why JFK said we went to the moon. Also, I’m not going to act like America has a monopoly on processed meats and binge drinking, but there’s something about the combination of hot dogs, baseball, and stadium beer that makes me want to listen to Zac Brown Band unironically. It’s our culture, by God.
So that’s the background. On to the specific question.
If you click on the link to the Aramark boxes, you’ll notice that the box comes with one can of beer for nine “flight-sized” beer glasses. These are 2.5-ounce cups the likes of which you’ll find at a beer garden or beer festival — a situation in which one might like to try a number of different beverages without committing to a full pour. The ballpark wieners are similarly tiny.
It’s undeniably cute, but it does seem antithetical to the point of an event built on conspicuous consumption. The New York Post sent a reporter to try the Mets’ 9-9-9 box on Opening Day, and she panned it. Dogs were too dry, not enough beer, and what little beer she had warmed up in the sun.
So if you’re going to do this properly, you have to do it a la carte.
The hot dog component of the 9-9-9 challenge actually might be easier than you’d think. I’m a veteran of numerous Dollar Dog Nights at Citizens Bank Park (if the cops are reading this, I have never once used a hot dog as a missile), and can attest that they’re far from intimidating.
Ballpark hot dogs tend not to be that big, and if they’re wrapped in tin foil for individual sale (and not left under the heat lamp in a box to enstaleify) the bun steams a little and gets soft. Open the wrapper, a little mustard and relish, and down the hatch it goes.
The beer component, however, is where this gets tough. I can’t claim a comprehensive knowledge of the beer situation at every ballpark in the league. (Here, FanGraphs misses the exhaustive research capacity of Eno Sarris.) Opportunities for me to order beer at the park are rare anyway, because funneling booze down your gullet in the press box is apparently frowned upon by MLB and the BBWAA.
I do know this: It’s hard to get a standard 12-ounce can in a stadium. Most beers get sold in tallboy form these days, and for good reason. Twice as much beer per can means half as many trips to the concessions stand. But the dictates of 9-9-9 require an entire discrete beer to be finished each inning, no matter the shape or size.
It gets worse. Your average big league ballpark has a really good beer selection. Here’s a photo, from Reddit, of the offerings at a beer kiosk on the concourse at Citizens Bank Park. It’s a couple years old, but you can see the offerings of the Delaware Valley’s best microbreweries: Yard’s, Tröegs, Ship Bottom, and so on. You’ll also see the menacing blue-green can of the New Belgium Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA.
I like a big, meaty IPA as much as anyone, but only a lunatic would order that beer — especially 24 ounces of it — in the hot afternoon sun of a Philadelphia summer. But lunatics walk among us. Someone could theoretically try to 9-9-9 with tallboys of Voodoo Ranger Imperial.
After some searching, I was able to find a blood-alcohol calculator that would tell me what the 9-9-9 challenge would do to a 200-pound man, depending on what he was drinking. I calculated the total alcohol present in four beer offerings: the 2.5-ounce taster in the Aramark 9-9-9 set, a 12-ounce can of Bud Light, a 24-ounce can of Bud Light, and a 24-ounce tallboy of Voodoo Ranger Imperial. Then I plugged those numbers into the machine.
My findings are probably not precise, so don’t go out trying to tickle the tail of the dragon based on this graph, but those findings are striking.
Some context: A BAC of 0.08% makes someone legally too impaired to drive (though the only safe level of alcohol is zero, as they say). A BAC of 0.40%, give or take, gets you fatal alcohol poisoning. Somewhere in between, the Fun Zone turns into the Not Fun Zone, and nobody wants to watch a ballgame with people in the Not Fun Zone.
I mentioned the difference between the 12-ounce can and the tallboy earlier; drinking twice as much Bud Light over three hours actually gets this hypothetical man two and a half times as drunk.
Drinking nine regular beers over the course of a three-hour ballgame lands our hypothetical Tyler at a BAC of 0.12. Definitely drunk, but he can take the subway home, have a glass of water and a burrito, and wake up the next morning little worse for wear. Don’t do it 162 games a year, but it won’t kill you to do it once.
Change those 12 ounce beers to tallboys, and Tyler leaves the ballpark with a BAC of 0.30. Forget driving home, he can barely walk at this point. No team wants anyone this intoxicated anywhere near the stadium.
As for the theoretical Voodoo Ranger Imperial attempt, that would put Tyler at 0.39 after five innings. A 9-9-9 with that beer would actually literally kill him — maybe before there’s movement in the bullpens.
And this is under pretty favorable circumstances for a 9-9-9 attempt: Decent-sized dude, slow-moving game. A 120-pound woman at a George Kirby start would blow a 0.26 after two hours.
I think it’s pretty clear why Aramark is selling these tiny glasses. A 200-pound man drinking 2.5 ounces of beer every 20 minutes would not only never get drunk, he’d metabolize the alcohol faster than he was drinking it.
Yes, it’s the training-wheels version of the challenge. Yes, the beer gets hot and the hot dog buns get stale. Yes, we’ve had yet another transgressive grassroots movement co-opted and defanged by corporate America. On one level, it sucks.
But on another level, it means fewer disruptive drunks in the stands, and fewer patrons flirting with alcohol poisoning. On balance, cutting the legs out of the 9-9-9 challenge is a positive social good. We’re not 23 anymore.
* This article was originally published here
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