The Brewster

Lester: Welcome aboard, Aaron.
Stone: Thanks. Where are the beer nuts?

Lester: (laughs) I’m sure we’ve got some around here somewhere.
Stone: They said there would be beer nuts.

Lester sends a flunky to go find some beer nuts.

Lester: All right, with that started, maybe we can talk about the season just past, all right?
Stone: (shrugs)

Lester: It was a good one for you personally, 27 homers and a slash that includes a .392 on-base percentage.
Stone: Yep.

Lester: Totaling up to 4.7 WAR
Stone: That’s what they tell me. I guess that’s pretty good.

Lester: What are you most proud of?
Stone: Well, you know, that’s hard to say. I mean, we didn’t win, so it kinda puts a bummer blanket on the whole thing. But I guess mostly I was happy with the fact that I threw out more than 30% of the guys stealing.

Lester: Really?
Stone: Everyone says my defense sucks, but it was pretty okay last year.

Lester: (digging through reports) I’ll be damned.
Stone: No reason to go that far.

Attendant returns with beer nuts. Stone digs in.

Lester: I wanted to talk a little about your contract.
Stone: Shoot away.

Lester: You were due for $14M again next year, but you decided to forego that to put yourself on the market. Can you talk about the process that ran up to your decision?
Stone: Mostly it was Uncle Morty sayin’ I could get more than $14M.

Lester: Uncle Morty?
Stone: He’s a smart dude. Brought me this thing called arithmetic that I guess the teach in schools these days.

Lester: Arithmetic? Seriously?
Stone: Yeah, you should look it up. I mean, he laid it out so good you could hardly believe it. He said, Aaron, son, you know that the Nine get to spend $110M on their whole team, right? And I said I thought I heard that somewhere, so he showed me how, if you use this Arithmetic, you can take me outta the equation and see the Nine would be paying $88M.

Lester: I see.
Stone: But here’s the tricky part! (leans in) If you use this arithmetic thing another time, you find out that $110M take away 88M is—

Lester: $22M.
Stone: Shitfire, you’re quick.

Lester: Thanks,I think.
Stone: Can you say shitfire on the air?

Lester: I think you’re fine.
Stone: Anyway, that’s when Uncle Morty said we’d ask the Nine for $21M a year for about as far as we could see. No reason to be greedy, Morty said. We leave ‘em a mill to pay for McNeill’s kid to be the bat boy or something.

Lester: That’s generous.
Stone: Morty’s just built like that, I guess. Used to always let us kids have a sip of his beer after we’d fetched him one.

Lester: You’ll be 31 years old, next year, though. Do you think teams will be willing to go the whole six seasons on a deal like that?
Stone: (scratches his chin). What do you mean?

Lester: Do you think GMs around the league are willing to take that kind if risk?
Stone: Last I saw there were more than a few bragging about bringing truckload of cash to the winter meetings.

Lester: Fair point.
Stone: Morty called it a combination of cock fight and a pickle measuring contest.

Lester: (Laughs) Oh my.
Stone: Said he was gonna find which was the dill and which would go full polski wyrob.

Lester: (Laughs again)
Stone: Either way, $21M buys a lot of pickle.

Lester: (collecting herself) I’m sure it does.
Stone: At least that’s what Uncle Morty says.