ANDRÉS GALARRAGA, PART 2 OF 2: THE HISTORY OF CHARGING THE MOUND. (Patreon)

I love this guy so much. That was probably already made clear in Part 1, which is here if you want to catch up. We already saw the Big Cat's cheerful obstinance become something of a trademark in Part 1. In Part 2, we learn that this does not reflect Andrés Galarraga the ballplayer so much as Andrés Galarraga the man.

His story is one of my very favorite stories to be found in the history of baseball, and now that I've finally made enough room for his story, I feel like I can put this series to bed. The History of Charging the Mound is, in terms of total videos, my largest project ever on a single subject, and what's amazing is that I easily have enough material to last another dozen episodes or more.

I'm wrapping it up here for a couple reasons, the first of which is more prohibitive and technical: support for Google Earth Pro, the software I use to build the world in which my projects live, is phasing out next year. Rather than testing fate, waking up one morning, and finding that nothing works anymore, I decided that jumping over to new software now was the safest call. That software, which many of you are probably already familiar with, is Blender, and I gotta say: this shit is awesome. Throughout my decade-plus of using Google Earth to produce video, it always felt like I was hacking it somehow. Every time I actually completed a project, it felt like I was dodging a bullet, because I'd used a piece of software in a way that it was not at all intended to be used. It worked every time, which speaks to how incredibly well-built that software is.

But holy shit is it nice to operate in a program that was actually intended for my purposes. At some point in the future, I hope to go into more detail about these processes, because I think it offers a lot of entertainment value and a lot to laugh at. Blender presented a steep learning curve for me at first, which I expected, but after about two months of experimentation and production, I'm already comfortable enough with it to produce my first Blender-generated project. (That should start coming your way early next month, fingers crossed.) It lets me work faster, do WAY more stuff, and make that stuff look better and more fun. There seems to be all upside and no downside, both for me and for you, the viewer. If anything, I wish I'd made the jump a year or two ago.

All the same, it was a little bittersweet to hand-draw my final shitty-looking polygon and close the book, both on that software and on The History of Charging the Mound. I've had a blast with this, and I hope you have too. Continuing it would mean rebuilding the whole damn thing in Blender, which would not be impossible. Either way, the second reason for putting it on ice is that I've been working on it for an entire year. I haven't grown tired of it in the least, but it's probably best to leave before I do.

And, again, I could not have found a more personal satisfying note to end on than the story of El Gran Gato. Telling it has been a real privilege. Thank you all so much for throwing down some of your hard-earned bucks and showing up for it. If you're interested in sharing it with your pals who aren't on Patreon, I think both parts will probably land on our YouTube channel sometime around Christmas.