"Rube" Waddell

33m

George Edward "Rube" Waddell (October 13, 1876 – April 1, 1914) was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). A left-hander, he played for 13 years, with the Louisville Colonels, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Chicago Orphans in the National League, as well as the Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns in the American League. Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and raised in Prospect, Pennsylvania, Waddell was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Waddell is best remembered for his highly eccentric behavior, and for being a remarkably dominant strikeout pitcher in an era when batters were expert at making contact. He had an excellent fastball, a sharp-breaking curveball, a screwball, and superb control; his strikeout-to-walk ratio was almost 3-to-1, and he led the major leagues in strikeouts for six consecutive years.

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Hello, and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts, because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Noah and I'm going to be managing this team of misfits, but to do that, I'm going to need somebody to kick dirt on behalf of.

So first up, two men arguing about who gets to be in left field, Heath and Cecil.

Okay, I'm the coach's son, so I am pitching, and Cecil, you get left field.

Okay, I don't care.

Comic relief pitching.

Got it.

And also joining us tonight, two men who strongly disagree with Tom Hanks about how much crying there is in baseball, Eli and Tom.

Okay, to be fair to me, I didn't realize that the catcher wasn't squatting on anything when I gave my opinion.

Hey, some people just can't take a joke or a punch.

Right.

Yeah.

And obviously, we wouldn't bother fielding a team if we weren't filling up those stands.

So before we get going, I want to take a second to thank all the people who listen to the show, whether or not they're patrons.

But I want to thank the patrons more, though.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

Today we're going to be talking about Rube Waddell or Waddell.

Waddell.

And Tom, you picked a sports thing, which tells me this is probably a really good fucking story.

Are you ready to prove me right?

I am, Noah.

Noah, this story goes hard in the paint.

I think it's a real touchdown.

All right.

So, Tom, what is a simultaneously entertaining and time-padding way to eventually tell me who Rube Waddell is?

Look, baseball is boring.

Agree.

It takes a long time, and most of that time, most of the players aren't doing anything other than waiting to maybe do something later.

It is, in fact, such a boring game that an entirely new version called Banana Ball was recently invented.

It's taking off in popularity because it was built on the idea that if baseball were not boring, people would actually enjoy watching it.

In fact, the only reason most people who enjoy watching baseball is because they really enjoy the statistics.

As a spectator sport, it it leaves everything to be desired, which may give you cause to wonder why today I'm writing about baseball player Rube Waddell.

And the answer is simple.

It is because unlike baseball, Rube Waddell may be the least boring person to have ever lived.

For sure.

The universe gave him to baseball to balance him out, and it didn't work.

It somehow didn't work.

Now, Rube wasn't always called Rube.

He was born George Edward Waddell in 1876 in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

He was one of five children, but none of the others have a Wikipedia page, and they don't matter.

There you go.

Hey, Wikipedia writer listeners, I want a manner.

I like to matter.

George was, from a young age, both athletically gifted and something of an eccentric character.

His sister recalled that George rarely attended school, preferring instead to play ball, go fishing, or follow fire engines around.

His love of fire engines was not some passing fad, nor was this an abstract love.

George was known to follow fire engines not just to admire the engine, but they would also run in and start doing some light firefighting on his own, just in whatever he happened to be wearing.

Hey, George, can you not wear the high-cut jorts if you're going to get wet?

Is that

look?

I know autism awareness is better for the world, but I do miss when history was just like, huh, this guy just fucking loves trains.

He loves them now the family lived on a farm and george grew to be an impressively powerful man he stood 6'1 he weighed 200 pounds and he worked the fields from dawn to dusk pausing from time to time to strengthen his pitching arm by hurling rocks at birds

and obsessively following around fire trucks in his jorks there was also that

dude was fast too we haven't mentioned that but he was just like following fire trucks

catching up to them he was so strong the locals complained that in games he hurt their hands with how fast he pitched.

And many in town didn't want to play with him.

And they said he was too powerful for friendly neighborhood games.

Okay, there's one in every town.

Same guy who's doing like the violent side tackles during the practice drill, and you're just trying to do like basic whatever.

He almost drowned you at the town pool like several times every summer.

You get that panic when you're being held underwater.

It's terrifying, fucking Joe.

I like that it hurts, like the pitches hurt their hand.

They made fucking gloves out of straw back then.

What the fuck are you talking about?

By 19, George was pitching for the Butlertown team, but George is about as committed and focused on pitching for the local team as he was when he was in school.

Meaning that he was known to just arrive late to his games, stop and play with children in the stands in the middle of the games, or just walk away and go fishing if he got bored.

Is he trying to find a series of more boring things?

Well, hey, guys, you know, then he left fishing to go watch a period drama on Netflix, you know?

Fuck, man.

So, like, that sounds bad, but to be fair, Major League Baseball pitchers didn't stop going fishing in the middle of games until they added the pitch clock the year before last, right?

Like, that's how I recall.

As distractible as he was, he was a damn good pitcher.

And the following year, in 1896, he joined a struggling team playing out of Franklin, Pennsylvania.

And it was here that George got the nickname Rube.

The catcher called out to the 20-year-old kid, all right, Rube, let's see what you got.

And the nickname just stuck.

George was now Rube, and the die was cast.

Though Rube didn't stay with the Franklin Penn team for very long.

Yeah, he wandered off to go fishing.

Yeah.

Okay, this catcher was like, all right, Rube, dude, you're from Franklin, Pennsylvania, too.

You're just like, relax.

In 1897, Rube had a chance to pitch for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he was cut before he had a chance to play a single game.

Now, though the reason isn't known, it's most likely and no bullshit because he just wandered off too often during practices.

Told you.

Yeah, I feel like too often isn't even very often in this instance.

Rube was recruited to play ball for Volent College, where he was not required to attend any classes.

He was supplied with all the chewing tobacco he wanted, and he was paid $1 per game.

Okay, the pinnacle of fair treatment for student athletes until four years ago.

Yes.

A wad of chaw wrapped in a dollar bill.

Cool.

Rube was such a dominant pitcher that he led Vollant to victory in all but one game of their season.

And that sounds great, but Rube was actually so dominant that the other colleges, they just refused to play against Vollent as long as Rube was on the team.

So Rube's college days were over.

Rube went on to pitch for a number of local teams before signing on with the Louisville Colonels of the National League, where he pitched well, but also began his drinking career.

Inconsistent at the best of times, drunk Rube, and spoiler, he's going to be drunk pretty much from here on out, was even less reliable, which caused him to be traded to the Detroit Tigers.

We would never do that to you, Heath.

You're fine.

How is he?

I'm sorry, but how is he less reliable than just went fishing in the middle of games you're like i don't even know what the next notch on that dial would say

now when you're a professional baseball player you're supposed to only play baseball for your team but root didn't give a shit about that rule and he would just randomly go off and play in sand lots with kids or join a local club team and play local games and he would do this even while he was out traveling with the tigers So it didn't take long before he was fired.

Okay, I kind of like this though.

He was doing the almost famous thing and just drilling kids with

instead of diving off the roof into a pool.

Over the next few years, Rube bounced around from Louisville to Columbus to Grand Rapids, back to Louisville, then to Pittsburgh.

Despite all the moving around, Waddell led the league in ERA, which is baseball math for good pitching.

Whip is bad.

Nerd.

Nerd.

Walks and hits burnings pitchers.

That's why it's fine.

It's fine.

You want to get B-A-B-IP in the nerds.

Those are sounds.

All those hits.

But he was so difficult to work with, he was pretty much constantly getting suspended for being drunk, showing up late, or just, again, wandering away.

Okay, I feel like suspending a guy for already having left is like when you're like when you tell your dog to walk away and ignore you so you can feel in control for once.

Come on.

He suspended himself now eventually the guy managing the team in milwaukee connie mack borrowed whatell to finish out a season on august the 19th 1900 roop threw a 17 inning complete game what

which meant that he threw every pitch of that 17 inning game which he won himself by then hitting a triple

that's weird too we have a walk-off triple it should really just be a single or a double that's weird to like make it into a triple because you know whatever it's fine or

Mac was impressed and decided he needed Waddell on the team, so he lured him to Milwaukee with the promise of days off to go fishing.

Waddell arrived and promptly threw a shutout.

And that last pitch of that 17-inning game was hard to hit because his arm detached and wound up in the catcher mid too.

Bright,

Jesus.

Also, by the way, imagine what a hard fucking job lure people to Milwaukee is.

Wow.

The problem was that no one could really keep track of Waddell.

Sure, he was bounced around a lot from team to team, but again, he would also just randomly disappear.

And in the offseason, he took that disappearing to a new level.

One season, he didn't return when scheduled, and the team was in a panic looking everywhere for their star pitcher.

And they eventually found him working in a circus wrestling alligators.

I'm sorry.

Come on.

I thought it was weird that the bleachers never emptied when there was a fight between me and this guy.

This is all starting to come together.

I'm just impressed they found him.

Somebody on the team was like, hey, we should probably check the alligator circus.

And it works.

Now, oftentimes, Waddell would show up late to games, missing the start of the game and throwing coaches and managers into a frenzy looking for him.

He was often found fishing or playing marbles with street kids.

I bet he kept the marbles that he won.

I bet he kept the ones that he won.

He throws them really hard at the same time.

When you get them batter, like blast flying everywhere.

Pegging kids with marbles.

He stays rubbing us to the fucking wall when I do that.

In Jacksonville, Florida, he was late to a game because he was asked to walk in a parade after gaining a measure of local celebrity for swimming out into a lagoon and wrestling an alligator just for fun in front of a crowd of onlookers.

I feel like there were a lot more alligators back then.

They're everywhere.

The bar to parade entry was a lot lower.

I don't think the bar in Jacksonville has changed, dude.

If you out Florida, Florida, man, Jacksonville will still close a few fucking roads for it.

And even when Model did show up to the games, he was notoriously distractible.

So much so that manager Huey Jennings, quote, used to go to the dime store and buy little toys like rubber snakes.

And he'd go to the first base coach's box and set him down on the grass and yell, hey, Room, look.

Eventually just pretending to have something in his hand, but not really, just being like, hey, Rube.

Physical object.

What do I have?

Now, Rube.

Down, down, down.

Stop.

Now, Rube could also be thrown off his game by his own thoughts.

On one notable occasion during a game, one of the managers invited him to go hunting after the season was over.

And he offered Rube the use of his bird dog for the hunt.

For the rest of the game, Rube was so preoccupied with questions and thoughts about that dog that he forgot entirely about the game, even though he was supposed to be playing in it.

Fans of opposing teams knew this, and they would sometimes bring their pets into the stands to distract them.

It often worked well enough that Waddell would wander off the pitcher's mound and just pet dogs instead of playing baseball.

Fucking fancy.

That's why you need Airbud Relief Pitcher.

There you go.

Golden Reliever.

Golden Reliever.

Don't take this the wrong way.

Are you, Rube Waddell, in sort of a Highlander situation?

You do have to tell us.

I do need you to tell us.

No, I don't have to tell you.

That when people say they play for the love of the game, most of them, if they are professionals, are, of course, lying.

They're playing for money.

I understand entirely.

Rube, however, did not give a fuck about money.

In fact, Rube, in his entire career, never took his full salary.

Instead, he asked the managers to dole out his pay in $5 increments.

Because if he ever got more than $10 at a time, he would just disappear for weeks or months at a time.

All right.

Well, speaking of disappearing, it's time for a quick break and a little apropos of nothing.

Steve Rank three.

Oh, come on, Jones.

That was a ball.

No.

Was two.

Was not.

Hey.

Hey, kids.

What's going on?

What are you doing?

Oh, um,

hi.

You just playing baseball?

Yes, sir.

Let me play.

Can I play?

Sure.

Say, aren't you a professional baseball player?

Yeah, that's me.

Professional baseball player.

Right.

Well, baseball player.

Well, we all was just.

Oh, man.

Is that your dog?

You mean Scruffy?

Yeah, let me pet him.

Can I pet him?

Sure, mister.

You can pet him.

Nice.

Anyways, I was telling my pa the other day

that we might not want to stay down in the cellar, you know,

since there ain't no more work these days.

Well, what did your ma say?

Yeah.

Well, ma ain't been back for more than a spell now, ever since her sister got home.

Oh, she gets a stick.

You get a stick.

I hear that.

I'm mighty sorry.

It's all I have.

I just wonder some winners if she's thinking of me, you know.

I remember those Christmases when she was all sitting around the fire.

I didn't know we had much money.

I know we didn't have much of anything, but in those moments, I can't help but think I was truly happy.

Truly part of a family, you know?

Yeah, he's getting inside.

I got inside.

Oh, he's got say uh, mister,

do you have a baseball game today?

Yeah, ah, ah, fuck.

Yeah, I gotta go.

I gotta go.

Bye, doggy.

Bye.

Nice guy.

I have the rickets.

Yeah.

Okay,

how about that one?

Nope, got the poison one.

Come on.

Seriously?

I told you guys.

Hey, fellas, you ready to finish recording the show?

Almost.

We were just testing Tom's bad luck.

What bad luck?

Oh, okay.

So, you know how nothing ever works out for Tom in any way, ever?

Well, it turns out that statistically, it's actually very impressive.

Yeah, for example, he just picked the only poison poison jelly bean out of the whole bag six times in a row.

Really big bag.

Tom, if you're ready to turn your luck and your eating habits around, why don't you try factor?

What's Factor?

Cecil, were you disguised as a plant?

Yes, I was, Noah.

Yes, I was.

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All right, guys.

Thanks.

Looks like my luck is about to change.

Tom, piano.

That's like four this week.

Yep.

That's five.

And we're back.

When we last left off, Tom was dreaming of a life where he could just wander off and go fishing during apropos of nothing.

Tom, are you ready to awaken from that wistful hope and tell us more about this dead guy?

Oh, something should happen to your family again.

Shouldn't have breathed.

Anvil?

When manager Connie Mack ended up working with the Philadelphia Athletics, he was desperate to get Waddell on his team, but no one knew where he was.

Mack had to hire the Pinkerton Detective Agency to track him down.

Quick, fellas, somebody dressed like a fish.

Waddell was fishing.

I told you so.

I told you so.

The Pinkerton agents convinced Rube to come back east and pitch for Connie Mack's athletics, which Waddell agreed to and promptly led the team to the 1902 American League crown.

In 1902, he became the second pitcher to throw an immaculate inning, striking out three batters in nine pitches.

He finished the season with 24 wins, 210 strikeouts, despite joining the team midseason.

This was the first of six seasons that he led the American League in strikeouts and won 10 games in July alone.

Yeah, and 9.7 in war was second only to Cy Young that year.

He's very impressive.

And that immaculate inning, second only to Bugs Bunny.

He did that one slow pitch that struck out three guys.

But like, other than Bugs Bunny,

fucking impressive.

The next year in 1903, Wadel struck out 302 batters.

The second closest that year was 115 strikeouts behind Rube.

As quoted in the American League story, Wadel began the 1903 season sweeping in a firehouse in Camden, New Jersey, and ended it tending bar in a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia.

And between those events, he won 22 games for the Philadelphia Athletics, played left end for the businessmen's rugby football club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, toured the nation in a melodrama called The Stain of Guilt, courted, married, and became separated.

This is in one year, from May Wynn Skinner of Lynn, Massachusetts, saved a woman from drowning, accidentally shot a friend through his hand, and was bitten by a lion.

It was a very busy year.

Okay.

Well, Tom, you haven't been bitten by a lion yet.

Okay, I'm pretty sure that exact same sequence that Tom just said happened to Rudolph Giuliani right before his latest car accident.

All of that stuff happened.

Oh, my life.

That's crazy.

All right, so some detail on the lion incident.

Oh, thank you.

I was going to ask about it.

What El was supposed to be on tour doing his his performance for The Stain of Guilt, but he was no more committed to being in a play than he was to playing baseball.

Rube ditched his own performance that day to go to a different show because that show had lions.

And it turns out Rube didn't like the lions.

So he punched one of them.

Okay.

Which bit him because it was a lion.

Because lion, yeah.

Okay.

So from what we already know of this guy,

I feel like nobody has any questions about the lion punching.

He seems like a lion.

How the fuck he winds up in a play on the other hand?

That feels like a better question.

Yeah.

The Wizard of Oz, maybe.

Just punching the line.

Do you have any more details about the stain of guilt?

I have a bit more, Heath, about the stain of guilt.

Rube didn't do a lot of book learning, and he didn't intend to learn any lines just to be in a play that he was touring with, but he was nonetheless in that play, and he did have lines.

But Rube just improvised every night and no one seemed to care audience loved him because he was a huge hulking presence and he had the ability to throw the actor playing the villain of the story across the stage with ease hey guys I just invented pro wrestling right now

notice he's Rube Goldberg

and it's because of the wrestler Goldberg and despite all of his successes Connie Mack was forced to suspend Rube the final month of the 1903 season because Rube he just randomly signed up for and was simultaneously playing for a couple of different semi-pro teams on the side just for kicks.

As genuinely impossible as he was to manage, he was also a generational talent.

So everybody just kind of had to deal with it.

The following year, Rube struck out 349 batters.

That was 100 more than the runner-up.

That 349 strikeouts set a record that lasted more than 60 years and remains the American League record 102 years later for left-handed pitchers.

I feel like if we give it to someone else, he'll just wander back from wherever he's been fishing and win it again.

Okay, so best in the American League for a left-handed pitcher, I feel it undersells this a bit.

I looked this shit up.

There are five seasons in major league baseball history with more strikeouts than that.

Two were by Nolan Ryan and two were by Randy Johnson.

So like a total of three other people have ever done better than he did.

That's fucking 100 years ago.

Nuts.

In 1905, what else?

Peak season, there was a contract dispute.

This is not about money, but crackers.

You see, to save money, teams used to have the players share a hotel room.

And hotels in 1905 commonly just had one bed, which means the players also had to share a bed.

And Rube, he had a habit of eating crackers in bed, and evidently he did so in straight-up cookie monster fashion.

So much so that his bunky, Assie, insisted that his contract be revised to add a clause forbidding Rube Waddell from eating crackers in bed.

And that clause

was added to his actual legal contract for employment.

Ossie was Rube's actual best friend also, and he still wanted the cracker thing in writing.

Think about how many crackers that had to be.

But one, Tom, in bed?

In bed with one fucking cracker ever.

Are you kidding me the worst part was is that he would just jump into egg wash and then jump into a bed full of crackers right afterwards and roll around

I feel like if you think a contract is gonna stop Rube Waddell from eating crackers in his bed you're a lot of things but his best friend is not one of them you are not all the fucking paper your host says no crackers I punched a lion today

I beat up eight children.

Now, despite the cracker kerfuffle, Wednel was on fire.

He won the pitching triple crown, finishing the season with a 27 and 10 record, an ERA of 1.48, and 287 strikeouts.

He tied the league in saves, which makes it kind of a quadruple crown, but I guess that's not a thing.

But then again, when I looked up the triple crown, that's not even a real crown you get to wear.

So I think they're all just lying to us about the whole thing.

Also, saves weren't a stat yet.

So everybody tied with zero, I guess, technically.

They went back and did it.

He didn't have any saves.

It's fine.

Now, had the Cy Young award been invented at this time, he would have beaten Cy Young for that award.

It wasn't just that he was good.

He was fucking nuts to watch.

And when he was feeling cocky, which was nearly always, he would put on a show waving his teammates off the field.

and then striking out the side.

In another famous instance, he ordered all of the outfielders to come into the edge of the outfield and sit down in the grass before striking out the side.

We're not saying fuck.

You say lions.

Fuck.

In an exhibition game in Memphis, he pitched three entire innings with only his catcher on the entire field with him.

Despite two close calls, he struck out every hitter for all three of those innings.

Did I ever tell you guys about the time Heath beat me at ping point when I had a paddle and he had to use the TV remote?

I've actually practiced with that.

I've done VCR cassette, VHS cassettes too.

I got used to using weirdo cats for that.

Oh, and he also saved a department store once.

Now, remember when I said he would just chase fire engines around and then run into burning buildings?

Well, the same year that he was setting records, he came across a fire in a department store and he just ran inside of it.

And there he discovered the source of the fire was a flaming oil stove.

So he picked up the flaming oil stove and carried it outside.

And then he made the firefighters sit on the sidelines and watch him do it all by himself.

That's like a whole thing.

I thought Tom was going to say he struck a guy out with it.

I thought Tom was going to say he punched it.

Now, sadly, after the department store flaming stove and quadruple crown year, things began to turn on Rube.

And the whole time all this has been happening, Rube has been drunk.

And like, not a little drunk, but full-on Heath drunk okay it just didn't affect his performance on terrible but but rube was struggling and facing a spate of injuries

a

lion

rube was struggling

lions earlier and he was facing a spate of injuries and personal problems his relationship with maywyn skinner had disintegrated his best friend catcher ozzie schreckengost and he were on the outs and connie mack was just done with with him.

He was sold off to the St.

Louis Browns for $5,000.

Okay, so I feel like all three of those problems are rooted in the crackers in bed thing.

Yeah, probably.

It's fun, though, when you find a big crumb later.

Also,

he's fucking Superman.

Let him eat cracker.

Who fucked up?

I care.

And you don't make it when you're big.

You're a normal person and he's an X-Man.

Let him have a cracker.

Even as he was falling apart, he was still the best player the game had to offer.

The same year he was traded, he set an AL record for striking out 16 batters in a single game.

The owner of the Browns tried to keep Waddell in the straight and narrow during the offseason by employing him in the winters to hunt his land for him, but Rube continued to drink and to implode.

Married again, divorced and married and divorced a third time by 1910, things were not looking good, and he was traded off to Newark.

Yeah, you can't get any more rock bottom than winding up in Newark.

Shortly thereafter, he was out of the majors and he bummed around the minors for a while, dominating, but a complete personal disaster.

In 1912, during spring training, there was a massive flood nearby, and Rube left the training camp to pile sandbags by the river, and he helped to save the town from the rising floodwaters.

Unfortunately, he also contracted pneumonia and then tuberculosis, neither of which is good for you.

He entered a a sanitarium, but those were nothing.

And it was still years before antibiotics became a thing.

And Rubadel died in 1914.

He was 37 years old.

Wow.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

I wasted the first 37 years of my life.

Right?

Yeah.

And are you ready for the quiz?

I am indeed.

Okay, I think we can all agree that Ruboadel clearly died right before he was going to start doing porn.

Yeah.

What was the best title that he had planned ahead, but then he died?

A

the mound visit with Rube Waddell.

B

backdoor slider.

C,

lions and tigers and bad news bears.

And D,

if you filled it, he will come.

Or E,

Baktua.

There it is.

Bakatua is so good.

That's so good.

That's got to be the answer.

You nailed it.

All right.

Okay.

Who was the best baseball player to go fishing with?

A, Mike Trout.

B,

Barry Pons.

C,

Greg Haddocks.

Or D,

A-Rod, and Real.

Well, I know these are all baseball player puns.

I recognize Barry Ponds, so I'm going to go with Barry Ponds.

It is Barry Ponds.

Astor.

Brings his own fish.

I was wondering who you'd be more upset if he picked Barry Ponds or A-Rod and Real.

I couldn't tell anything.

Yeah, also Asterisk.

Yeah.

Pretty sure.

All right, Tom.

This was an excellent essay, but A,

I very clearly had dibs when I created a draft in our mutual future episodes folder called Baseball Weirdos.

B.

Now I'm...

Now I'm out of baseball weirdos except for Ty Cobb and his story isn't it's real now don't do that one.

See,

that was pretty rube of you, Tom.

That was so bad.

We don't know.

That's the answer, though.

That's the answer.

I don't know.

Who can't tell?

Who wins?

Who is not there

to make me say this?

Oh, if Technology is at this point,

Cecil S.A.

Eli wins.

Neat.

I want a Cecil S.A.

Okay.

All right.

Well, for Cecil, Eli, Heath, and Tom, I'm Noah.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We're going to be back next week.

And by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can keep yourself entertained by listening to our past shows backwards to hear all the great satanic messages that we hit in there.

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And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com.