SPEAKER_08: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you're a baseball fan, you might remember the 1997 playoffs. That's when pitcher LaVon Hernandez was unstoppable.
SPEAKER_03: LaVon Hernandez get out of it. Yes, he can.
SPEAKER_06: Hernandez was a rookie for the Florida Marlins and his masterpiece was Game 5 of the National League Championship Series against Atlanta. That's producer Chris Berube.
SPEAKER_06: LaVon Hernandez struck out 15 batters that game, which for context is so many batters. It was an incredible night, but a lot of his strikes, they weren't actually strikes. Hernandez was pretty consistently missing the zone. The 3-2 pitch. Got him! Eric Greg punches him out on what McGriff thought was ball four. It's his 15th.
SPEAKER_04: This pitch is, I would say, a foot, two feet outside of the strike zone. Not close called a strike. That's baseball analyst Katie Nolan. She vividly remembers that game because it really was not good.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, OK, second pitch way outside called a strike. Aggregious. Aggregious. Katie and I rewatch video from that game with, let's call it a perverse fascination.
SPEAKER_06: Almost none of the batters actually swung at his pitches. You see Hernandez just winding up and throwing ball after ball like a foot outside the strike zone. And then inexplicably, the umpire Eric Greg, he just kept making the hand signal for a strike. It was so bad. It was probably the worst umpiring I can remember.
SPEAKER_04: The outside of this strike zone, it just didn't end. It was like a never ending strike zone.
SPEAKER_08: In case you don't know anything about baseball, in the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field, one behind each base and one behind home plate. The home plate umpire has the most important job, which is calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hittable pitch, something over the plate between the batter's chest and his knees. And a ball is everything else. I remember watching games as a kid, and whenever an umpire blew it, I would say I could do better than that.
SPEAKER_06: And so I tried. I was a little league and high school umpire from the age of 14 until my early 20s. And I think I could have gone pro if it weren't for my poor eyesight, my aversion to getting yelled at, and the time I was hit in the throat by a baseball. My point is, even in the little leagues, getting calls right is a lot harder than it looks. And at the pro level, the baseball is moving at like 95 miles an hour. It's kind of incredible that on average umpires get it right about 94 to 97 percent of the time on strike calls. And umpires are getting better. The worst umpire today would have been upper tier in 1997. But the crazy high speed of the baseball means sometimes umpires are going to get it wrong. It just feels to me like it's asking a lot of the umpire to be able to recognize if it nicked the inside of the strike zone on its way over the plate or if it didn't.
SPEAKER_04: And I know we all make fun of the egregious calls, but I feel like some of them, you're not standing back there. You're not having to do it entirely with your eye. It's got to be really difficult.
SPEAKER_08: One study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That's 34000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference. Like in the LaVon Hernandez game, the Florida Marlins came out on top and a few weeks later they won the World Series. These calls can make all the difference between a win and a loss, a championship and sitting at home for six months, just wondering what could have been if he'd only made the right call.
SPEAKER_06: Given the human fallibility of umpires, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic, something that would take us up to 100 percent accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.
SPEAKER_08: Like any scenario where a human being is being replaced by a robot, there is the question of whether robots can do a better, more accurate job. And in baseball, a sport that is legendary for its quirks and its general human imperfection, there's another trickier question.
SPEAKER_06: Is more accurate what we actually want?
SPEAKER_08: The idea of replacing an umpire with a machine isn't new. In the 1950s, the Brooklyn Dodgers tested a robot umpire designed by General Electric. The GE umpire was a big machine. It kind of looked like a barbecue hooked up to a specially tricked out home plate. If the ball cast a shadow over the plate, the machine would light up a big red button indicating a strike.
SPEAKER_06: The trouble is the machine didn't work very well. It made a lot of bad calls. And if it was a night game, the robot umpire just didn't work at all.
SPEAKER_08: In the 1950s, the technology just wasn't ready and the robot umpire went nowhere. For years, the idea seemed like a nonstarter. But a few years ago, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, said he was considering robot umpires for the big leagues.
SPEAKER_06: The robot umpires of the 21st century are a lot more sophisticated than a barbecue. But modern robot umpires, they aren't technically robots. That's what a lot of people picture is, is like, you know, beep boop boop boop, kind of a like metallic thing behind home plate. What it really is, it's this system.
SPEAKER_05: That's Zach Helfand. He's an editor and sportswriter at The New Yorker.
SPEAKER_06: And today's version of the robot umpire is actually a series of HD cameras. But for some reason, the name Integrated Camera Baseball Tracking System has never caught on. So for this story, we're just going to keep calling them robots. I prefer Robo. I just I just think Robo sounds better.
SPEAKER_05: Baseball won't be the first sport to use Robos to referee games. In tennis, there's a tracking system called Hawkeye that can pinpoint whether a ball is in or out of bounds.
SPEAKER_08: And it was good. What a shot. And in soccer, they use motion tracking cameras to help determine offsides and whether the ball has crossed the goal line.
SPEAKER_06: And the goal has been disallowed.
SPEAKER_06: In fact, most major league baseball stadiums already have a sophisticated ball tracking system in place. Those were installed in the early 2000s for TV broadcasts to give fans a clear picture of what happened during every pitch. To track things like exit velocity off the bat, how fast the ball is moving off the bat, spin rate.
SPEAKER_05: It counts every single revolution of a baseball from when it leaves a pitcher's hand to when it gets to the plate. So they have these very sophisticated missile tracking systems essentially in ballparks.
SPEAKER_06: By the way, he is not exaggerating. This is based on missile tracking technology. If you've watched a baseball game on TV, you've seen this tracking system in action.
SPEAKER_08: In replays, broadcasters will show you charts and scatter plots to lay out where the ball landed inside the strike zone. But the umpires, the people actually making the calls, don't have access to this information. Only viewers do, which creates some awkward moments for fans.
SPEAKER_04: Wait, if we know that's a strike, why is he calling it a ball? It just doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he have the information I have? He should make the right call. But look, baseball is a pretty conservative sport. It's slow to embrace change.
SPEAKER_06: So for now, robot umpires are being tested on the minor leagues to work out some of the kinks and to help fans get used to the whole concept. Since 2019, robot ump technology has been working its way through the minor leagues,
SPEAKER_08: where it's called ABS for Automatic Balls and Strikes. Last year, the ABS made its way to AAA, the highest level of minor league baseball.
SPEAKER_06: I wanted to see this robot umpire, OK, ABS system in action. So I bought a ticket to watch some minor league baseball last summer in fabulous El Paso, Texas, where the hometown Chihuahuas were taking on the Albuquerque isotopes. But I got COVID, so I had to watch the game at home. And the isotopes in position.
SPEAKER_02: Riley Smith will start his last eight final warm up tosses before we get underway with tonight's game.
SPEAKER_06: Coming into the game, I was worried the baseball experience would feel totally different without the umpires, because for me, they're essential to the fabric of the game. But actually, I didn't miss the human umpires because they were still there. Fans, here are tonight's umpires. Behind home plate is Dylan Wilson. Down the first base line, Cody Oates.
SPEAKER_08: For those of you worried about robots coming for human jobs, at least in this case, the humans are safe. Baseball still needs humans for lots of important jobs, like calling timeouts or cleaning home plate with those tiny, adorable brooms.
SPEAKER_06: This robot umpire was actually a collaboration between the ABS system that made the call and the human umpire who said it out loud. I listened with the earpiece along to a minor league game, and it's more or less instantaneous.
SPEAKER_05: The ball hits the glove, you kind of hear the smack of the ball on the glove, and a split second later, you hear strike or ball. And it's funny, the strike is very peppy, and sounds very encouraging, and the ball is ball, kind of disappointed. It's a man's voice just saying ball or strike. Ball, strike, ball, strike.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_06: That's Fred DeJesus. He was actually the first umpire to use the ABS system in 2019. Fun fact, his earpiece is now part of the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
SPEAKER_07: I obviously couldn't get there as a player, so I made my earpiece made. My joke is six Puerto Ricans have made it and one Puerto Rican's earpiece has made it.
SPEAKER_06: Fred says at first he was wary about the ABS, but he came around pretty quickly. You know, when in Rome, you do what the Romans want. They wanted you to follow the system. You call it.
SPEAKER_06: I know this collaboration sounds, you know, a little ridiculous, but watching the game, I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty smooth. It didn't look like a game umpired by a sophisticated missile robot. It just looked like a regular afternoon at the ballpark. And so here's Bernard, right-handed hitter against the lefty groom from the full windup, first pitch.
SPEAKER_06: There are no publicly available statistics on the accuracy of the ABS system. But anecdotally, Fred DeJesus says it was pretty damn good.
SPEAKER_07: It was very accurate. There were times where you would go, ooh, but again, you did what that machine wanted.
SPEAKER_06: There's no dispute here. The ABS is more accurate than a human umpire.
SPEAKER_06: Fred says there were some minor glitches when he used it, but nothing that can't be worked out by the time the system reaches the major leagues. The accuracy thing is huge because there's just so much money on the line. A bad call at the wrong time can ruin a player's career. And sports betting is such a huge industry now. I get why the major leagues want a more accurate system. But a few days after watching the robot umpire in action, my doubts started to creep back in because accuracy isn't everything. Here's Zach Helfand. I don't think most people watch sports to see the fairest or most accurate outcome.
SPEAKER_05: For me, the argument comes down to efficiency and accuracy versus charm and drama and dialogue. The thing is, for more than 100 years, baseball has been played by humans and umpired by other humans.
SPEAKER_06: And in that process, we've introduced lots of small quirks and inefficiencies. For example, baseball stadiums don't have standard dimensions. So a home run at Fenway Park might just be a long fly ball at Dodger Stadium. Baseball just has all these unstandardized things. One of them is the application of the strike zone.
SPEAKER_08: Again, the textbook strike zone is supposed to be the player's chest to their knees over the plate.
SPEAKER_06: But most human umpires don't exactly follow those guidelines. There's lots of pitches that are considered hittable that don't land inside the textbook strike zone. And human umpires usually call those strikes. But the robot umpire, they've been slower to pick that up. In 2019, the ABS system was introduced to the Atlantic League, and it was programmed to call the textbook strike zone.
SPEAKER_08: But most fans and players thought the system felt off. The robot was calling a lot of hittable pitches as balls.
SPEAKER_05: So when the strike zone is so coldly unchanging, that sometimes presents some problems. When the strike zone is smaller than what you're used to, games can drag on.
SPEAKER_08: Zach Helfin says the league needed to reprogram the ABS to be less accurate in how it called balls and strikes.
SPEAKER_05: They expanded it to about maybe an inch or an inch and a half off of the plate counts as a strike, and that better represented what the real strike zone is.
SPEAKER_06: You can program the ABS to call a less accurate game, but you can't program it to do all these other things that human umpires just do instinctively. So I'm going to let you in on a little dirty baseball secret. Umpires are constantly changing the strike zone based on context. It's raining, let's move this along, let's get this over with, or one team is up by a lot, let's just go home.
SPEAKER_05: When a pitcher is struggling, there's a demonstrable effect that the umpire zone gets bigger. Sometimes it gets as much as 50% bigger. That's what they call the compassionate umpire effect. So a pitcher's having a really tough time, we're going to help them out. And they don't do this consciously. When you leave it up to the machines to decide balls and strikes,
SPEAKER_06: you're ignoring years of training and experience and intuition that every great umpire has. And you're taking away one of those small imperfections that makes baseball kind of romantic. There is a trade-off because you do lose this discussion, you do lose these quirks, these injustices,
SPEAKER_05: these twists of fate where someone blinks or gets dirt in their eye and they make a bad call, and that changes everything. I want to see how people react to that. We watch baseball to feel something, to divert ourselves. And sometimes it's nice to feel righteously mad against an umpire or to feel like you got away with something.
SPEAKER_06: OK, but let's talk about righteous anger for a minute. Because Zach is totally right. Yelling at the umpire is a part of the game. Umpires get yelled at by fans and players and mascots pretty much nonstop. Because unlike other sports, baseball centers the umpire. The umpire is right behind the plate making judgment calls on every play. And usually the yelling is fun and cathartic and professional umpires can handle it, but it sucks to experience that. Here's Katie Nolan.
SPEAKER_04: Imagine going to work knowing you could get a shard of wood directly into your face, or you could get hit by a 100 mile per hour projectile in the face on a bad day. And on a good ceiling of this job is like you make calls that get people to tell you that you suck at your job and you're the worst and you ruined the game.
SPEAKER_07: You know, I've got a video on Instagram right now that's got over three million views where the player is saying, Freddy, you're the worst umpire in the league. How did they mic you up? Now he's obviously joking, but this is what the world wants to hear. They want umpires to be ridiculed.
SPEAKER_06: And it's not just ridicule. There are stories of umpires receiving death threats or even being physically assaulted by fans. Tonight a Staten Island parent coach is accused of punching the umpire so hard it left him with a broken jaw.
SPEAKER_07: CBS2's Lisa Rosner spoke with friends of the umpire in Somerset.
SPEAKER_06: People get carried away and it can get scary. I remembered this Little League game where I made a really bad third strike call and after the game, a coach was waiting to yell at me in the parking lot. The abuse is actually the primary reason that I stopped umpiring. And it's why my favorite thing about the robot ump's isn't their accuracy. It's their ability to bring down the temperature. Zach Helfin noticed this too when he saw a robot umpire in person. Fans were a lot less likely to get into arguments when they knew it was a machine making the calls. Some fans who, as fans do and as part of the pleasure of baseball, were heckling the umpire when I was out there.
SPEAKER_05: At one point, one of the fans who did know that they were using robot umpires this season in that league pointed up at the hardware above home plate and said, you know, it's not the umpire, this is just the strike zone. And the fan was humiliated in a certain way, very humbled and was like, you know what, this is actually calling a pretty good game.
SPEAKER_06: Watching the isotopes Chihuahuas game, I remember this one at bat. So the isotopes third baseman Taylor Snyder was at the plate. Count still one and two.
SPEAKER_02: Bases juiced. Here's the pitch. Takes a call. Third strike. Breaking ball inside corner. That ends the inning. Isotopes do not score. There was two hits. So the batter, Snyder, he disagreed with the call. He thought it was inside and he was clearly furious.
SPEAKER_06: He starts to turn towards the ump and it looks like he is ready to yell. But then he didn't. He stopped himself and he walked back to the dugout. I'd never seen that before. And for me, that's a big plus for the idea of robot arms.
SPEAKER_08: Ultimately, the robot umpires are coming. They're going to be used in all triple-A games this season. Some games will use a full robot umpire system, while others will use the robot umpire as an appeal system if the player doesn't like a call.
SPEAKER_06: Robot umpires are probably going to show up in the major leagues in the next couple of years. And I know baseball purists are going to be really mad. I get that. I don't love the general idea of robots muscling in on human jobs. But I think I can live with this new technology because I'm in favor of anything that makes us see umpires as people. Even if that thing is a robot.
SPEAKER_08: More sports talk radio with Chris Berube after this. In order to stay consistent, it's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand with Canva. You can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_08: Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So we're back with Chris Berube. Chris, I am so sorry you didn't get to see those minor league baseball games this summer because of COVID. That's terrible. Thank you. I know it's like my favorite thing to do every summer is to go see some minor league baseball.
SPEAKER_06: And I used to go see the Brooklyn Cyclones all the time who play down at Coney Island and they have a roller coaster in left field because the stadium is right next to the amusement park down there. And I remember one time I went and I asked somebody at the stadium like, well, what happens if they hit a home run into the roller coaster? Like, you know, aren't you worried about that? And he's like, it's never happened. It we're not at all worried about that.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, I just love all these minor league baseball team names. The Brooklyn Cyclones is such a great name. I know. I kind of love how ridiculous they are. Like we mentioned the Albuquerque Isotopes, which that one's actually a Simpsons joke.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I was wondering that. So that started as a Simpsons joke and then became real in real life?
SPEAKER_08: That's right. So the Springfield Isotopes is the team in the Simpsons because Homer Simpson works at a nuclear power plant and there's an episode where they threatened to move to Albuquerque.
SPEAKER_06: And then the real life Albuquerque team was like, ha ha ha. That's funny. We're just going to adopt that as our team name. That's awesome. I love that. I love that one, too. I mean, the ridiculous team name thing. So that's actually a pretty recent thing in minor league baseball. So in the past, there used to be this convention where the minor league team would share a name with the major league team they were affiliated with. So say you have the New York Mets, they have a minor league team. It's called the Binghamton Mets, for example. Right. That makes sense. But in the 21st century, we've seen this big craze of picking more distinct, more ridiculous names. So in 2016, the Binghamton Mets became the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, for example. OK. I think my favorite of this is the Rocket City Trash Pandas, which are a team in Huntsville, Alabama.
SPEAKER_08: That's a pretty good one.
SPEAKER_06: It's so good. I mean, there's so I love so many of them, like the Hartford Yard Goats is a favorite of mine. The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Akron Rubber Ducks, the Amarillo Sod Poodles. It's a long list. Wait, what's a sod poodle? It's a prairie dog. I think their logo is like a prairie dog with a cowboy hat. Oh, of course. That makes sense.
SPEAKER_08: So why are there so many like this and why is this kind of a recent phenomenon?
SPEAKER_06: So the reason that they're so ridiculous is because, you know, you sell a lot more merch this way. So if your team name is the Binghamton Mets, for example, if somebody wants a Mets hat, they're going to get the New York Mets. Right. Like they're not going to get the second level minor league team. But if your name is the Rumble Ponies, you get all this free publicity like that was written up in the New York Times when they changed the name. Their whole thing is like, look, you don't have a huge budget for publicity. This is free publicity. Just go with it and, you know, unashamedly take on the ridiculous name. I guess that makes a lot of sense. I mean, but do the old school, you know, minor league baseball fans, do they like this?
SPEAKER_06: Oh, no. I mean, baseball fans are way too serious. So you can get used to anything, I think, but a lot of them don't like it because of the random word generator quality to some of these. Like Akron Rubber Ducks feels like you put it into an A.I. and were like, come up with a silly name. And they did it. But the really good ones, they actually aren't random. Like usually there is something interesting and local that the name is rooted in. Oh, OK. So what are some good examples of that? OK, let's go through the list. Credit to baseball writer Matt Snyder, who wrote about this last year. It's very helpful for my research. Hopefully this will make you appreciate these ridiculous minor league baseball team names. OK, Hartford Yard Goats. There are not goats wandering the yards of Connecticut. That's not what it's a reference to. The stadium where they play is built on an old railyard and a yard goat is a vehicle for moving cars around in a railyard. So it's a reference to the geography of the stadium. Oh, I didn't know that. But the meaning is somewhat obscured by the fact that I think their logo is a goat, though, right? Like an actual goat.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, their logo is actually like a goat snapping a baseball bat in half.
SPEAKER_06: OK, Binghamton Rumble Ponies. Binghamton is the carousel capital of the United States. Self-described. But that's why it's a reference to like this interesting local quirk. The Iron Pigs. Lehigh Valley, of course, is in Pennsylvania. That's a state with a huge steel industry and pig iron is the material that comes out of a blast furnace that you then have to refine to make steel. So it's actually like a reference to local industry. Love it. And then my favorite, the El Paso Chihuahuas. So El Paso, Texas, is it's right on the border with Mexico. And the Mexican state of Chihuahua is right across the Rio Grande. So it's a nod to the really significant Mexican influence on the city. And nothing to do with little dogs. I mean, their logo, once again, their logo is a little dog. It is not a map with El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley or anything. So, I mean, my point is the next time someone says like, oh, that's so random, like where do they come up with these names? Like, it's not random. Like there is something local about these names, which I prefer to more serious names that are kind of generic, that don't have anything to do with the place where the team is playing. So say the Grizzlies, the Eagles, you know. Or, you know, like in other sports, like the Utah Jazz, where a franchise moves to a place that once had meaning, but then, you know, the meaning is no longer relevant to the place that they land.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, the Utah Jazz used to be the New Orleans Jazz, and then they just moved the team and they got the name.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly. That was so lazy, they couldn't even come up with a different team name. Because, yeah, with all due respect to Utah, not the same rich jazz heritage as New Orleans. I think we're safe to say that.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I think we're safe to say that. Well, thank you for this tour of minor league baseball team names. I actually really do appreciate how strange and cool and now appreciate how local they are and specific they are. So thanks for that. Of course. Thank you, Roman.
SPEAKER_08: The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Bobby Lord, Matt Schultz, Rick White and all the baseball umpires we spoke to for this story. And thank you to Zach Helfin, who was also very, very helpful. You can read his reporting on robot umpires in The New Yorker. Ninety nine percent of visible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. Or Instagram, Reddit and TikTok to find links to others to church shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 P.I. And 99 P.I.
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