Picking Nits
Statistics; trade veto; manager; uniforms; baserunning; ending; daughter; scar; Gus; crowd; food; romance; father
In the discussion (15)
Approx. transcript time · 01:09:11Read transcript
- Chapel's season line—30 starts,211 innings,8–11 record,3.55 ERA,98 walks and 111 strikeouts—is challenged for incompatible-seeming workload and run-prevention implications.
- The manager’s urgency despite a 64–97 record is a nitpick.
- Unusually high Yankees uniform numbers are a nitpick.
- Reilly's awkward baserunning is criticized, with a wide shot using a double proposed.
- Chapel's service is corrected to eighteen completed years entering his nineteenth season; ten-and-five trade-veto rights undermine the threatened Giants trade plot.
- The preferred alternative ending leaves Chapel crying alone in his hotel, possibly without the perfect game; Jane finding someone else abroad is proposed jokingly.
- Jane joking about Heather's name during an urgent runaway call is considered inconsistent with her fear; calling an estranged partner rather than a contact in Boston, where the father lives, is also challenged.
- The tiny hand scar is considered incompatible with the severe saw injury and emergency transfer; a more visibly damaged hand is proposed, with doubt about whether he could then pitch again.
- Gus wearing the Tigers cap in a New York hotel and his exaggerated drunken portrayal are criticized.
- Leaving a glass of water in Gus’s hand rather than a bottle nearby is questioned, as is his greater drunkenness than Chapel.
- The aerial view's empty seats are challenged for a potential pennant-clinching game, whose stakes also receive too little broadcast emphasis.
- Chapel eating bread and milk in a glass is questioned as an unfamiliar habit.
- Jane foregoing goodbye sex is questioned; the claim that she is presented as nonsexual is countered with their first-night encounter and other sexual references.
- Chapel describing his supposedly important father merely as very tall is criticized as weak dialogue.
- The saw accident prompts a joking distraction theory and a serious objection that a professional pitcher should avoid risking his hands.