Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1001: The One After 1000

Episode Date: January 3, 2017

Ben and SB Nation’s Grant Brisbee banter about baseball ads, then talk about last season’s forgettable baseball stories, Grant’s favorite writing of 2016, covering the playoffs in person, and Barry Bonds and the BBWAA.

Hello and welcome to episode 1001 of Effectively Wild, the baseball prospectus slash about to be fan graphs podcast presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. My incoming co-host Jeff Sullivan is lazing around in Chile on vacation. So for the next five or six shows, I'm going to get various guest hosts to fill in. And when I put out the request in the Facebook group and asked people who would make good guest hosts for these next couple of weeks, one of the first suggestions was Sam Miller, which, okay, good suggestion. Good joke, guys. Couldn't do that one. But one of the next suggestions was Grant Brisby. And that request was very quickly seconded,

thirded, fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth. So here we are. Hi, Grant. Hello, how are you doing? I'm doing well. So you and I have been talking a lot about this podcast lately. I mentioned last week that when I thought about replacing Sam, there were really only a couple of people I considered or thought I would want to do it with or would be able to do it with in the same sort of way that I did it with Sam. And literally the only other person I talked to about that other than Jeff was you. So for various fan graphs and business related reasons, the Jeff route was easiest, but I would have been thrilled to do the show with you too. And I think it would have been fun. So

anyway, Jeff went on vacation. So here you are. We get you for a little while. Yeah, you skipped like straight. It's brilliant what you're doing. You're skipping straight to like a Gary Cherone album. And then when you get back to Sammy Hagar, it's not going to seem so bad. It's like, wow, this isn't so bad. It's not that Cherone clown. So brilliant, brilliant strategy. So you're about to go on vacation too. What is it with you guys and vacations? Is writing about baseball not like an everlasting vacation? It's as if I'm on the beach every day of my life. Exactly. It is the off season, so it is the time for vacations.

And I'm going to check out pandas and such at the San Diego Zoo. Oh, okay. So not quite as exotic as where Jeff would go. Jeff would go somewhere with actual pandas in their. Oh, okay. So not quite as exotic as where Jeff would go. Jeff would go somewhere with actual pandas in their native habitat, probably. Yeah, I don't think pandas and volcanoes work together. Not a classic pairing. No. So we're going to have a loose little show and talk about a few topics. I was just watching earlier today the new David Ortiz TurboTax commercial, and I brought it up to you.

Have you watched it or are you coming in cold? I'm coming in cold. I was very excited to have you describe it to me. So there's this David Ortiz TurboTax commercial where he is a tennis instructor for some reason. He's wearing tennis whites, and he has kind of a middle-aged lady come to take a tennis lesson from him. But he's hitting the tennis ball really hard because he's a baseball player who hits lots of dingers. I get it. So he's, yeah, he's taking a home run swing. And he's hitting all the tennis balls off the court.

And there's a very tenuous TurboTax connection here where he video chats with a TurboTax representative. And he asks if the tennis balls are a write-off, basically. And she says that for you, yes, they are. That's basically the extent of the TurboTax connection. So not sure if he's the perfect pitchman, but he does seem natural. I mean, he's very natural on camera. And I was thinking that it's been a while

since we've had a great baseball pitch person, right? Like we've had, you know, like the Derek Jeter sort of person who has lots of endorsements and is just on the screen doing dramatic Derek Jeter things and wearing a swoosh or whatever, but he's not really selling you on it. I guess there were some like local car commercials that he did. He was doing Ford and that sort of thing. But like the kind of, you know, Nolan Ryan, Pete Rose sort of baseball pitch man, it's been a while since we've had one of those. I don't know. I think Clayton Kershaw is a pretty good baseball pitch person. Sam really isn't coming back, is he? No, you're right. You're right.

I mean, I remember like local commercials are where it's at. And, you know, you've got Bronson Arroyo did some really classic ones you can find on YouTube where he has a little bit of a potty mouth. And that is part of the charm. Buster Posey, he gets mixed reviews. Like some people think he's great. Like he's natural and he's in these Toyota commercials and he's this really natural guy. Some people just hate him and they think he's very wooden. I think he's perfectly fine, but he's not like a super compelling pitch person. He's delightfully bland as he is in most things.

I'm the biggest Buster Posey fan around, but delightfully bland is how you're going to put it. Are we looking for candidates? Yeah, well, I don't know. Maybe it's partially a reflection of the fact that there aren't that many nationally well-known baseball players anymore. So it's a little different, whereas, you know, Pete Rose at the time was probably one of the, I don't know, top 10 or something famous athletes in the country at that time. And now I'm not sure any baseball players really crack that threshold. Maybe Ortiz comes close. I don't know. But, you know, like you had Bryce Harper in that postseason commercial about him hitting a walk off homer, which was weird once the Nationals had been eliminated from the playoffs already. But

I liked the the co-star in that commercial. I thought he sort of overshadowed Harper. He had kind of a weird delivery that I thought was appealing. But Harper has some potential. I don't know if there's anyone else. It's partially that, that maybe there just isn't anyone of the sort of stature to market to non-baseball fans. And maybe it's just that athletes are, I don't know,

like too interested in being dignified now. They're already rich. They're so safe. Yeah, they don't have to do something undignified. They don't have to lower themselves by hawking some sort of product that doesn't reflect that well on them, or they don't have to wear a weird suit or do silly voices or anything like that because

they're already rich forever so maybe the the golden age of baseball pitching in ads is over but i don't know is there anyone that you can think of who would uh make a good candidate if you were running a campaign for for some product is there someone you would call i mean i guess you'd probably call hunter pence yeah well yeah hunter pad. Hunter Pence, Johnny Quaid. I mean, I've got all my fanboy favorites. But yeah, this is like the Mike Trout conundrum. He's clearly the most exciting player and he just might be the most boring player too. And that's almost a compliment. It's almost not. I don't think that there is anyone who jumps off the top of my head that – I think there's people like Pence or like Dustin Pedroia, people who have a certain charisma that you or I might take to or you and I might enjoy. But the world at large, America in general, not so much.

I'm not – there's not that silver bullet kind of Pete Rose guy because everyone loves Pete Rose. But I'm not seeing that guy now. Justin Verlander would really entertain, I think, and be somewhat charismatic. But America doesn't really care who he is. He's just the guy who's with Kate Upton. And maybe Ortiz kind of graduated into a higher tier of recognizability this year with the retirement tour. I don't know if he was more of a Boston person before that or whether the playoff heroics had already elevated him, but he's clearly very charismatic. Did you ever watch off the bat that weird MTV2 baseball show?

No, I didn't. Should I have? Is that a neglectful that I didn't? I think it is. There was someone at the classical who was doing weekly recaps of it, but it was not a prominent show as evidenced by the fact that you are a baseball writer and you are not aware of it. I was trying to find a Wikipedia page so I could send it to you and it doesn't exist, which is very, very emblematic of that show. It was in 2014. It was one season, but it was like 20 something episodes. And it was just this weird sort of hybrid show. It was like hosted by Sway and Fat Joe and two people from the other MTV2 show Guy Code, which I had never seen. And it was like filmed at the fan cave in Manhattan, which I think no

longer exists. And they would have players come in and like throw pies at each other or something, or they'd have Fat Joe talk about baseball, even though he seemed to be very casual as a fan in his interest in baseball. And it was just like, you could kind of see what they were doing, but it was sort of like a poochy kind of attempt to be hip and relevant, I think. Content that kids crave. Yeah, right. It was a good idea, I guess, to cross over into some market where baseball has not saturated, but I don't think it worked all that well. It didn't last very long.

But the weird thing was that David Ortiz was the executive producer of Off the Bat. And it was never clear what that meant. Like there were some little segments where they would show Ortiz like on a beach by himself, like writing something. And it was kind of playful and lighthearted. But it wasn't clear if he was like being consulted on guests or he was like designing the game show or whatever. But I've been curious ever since then about what his post baseball career might look like and whether he was going to turn

into some sort of tv impresario so maybe this is the the next step yeah this is it's a gateway drug you know into the life of of being a mogul he wants to be a media mogul. Wait, I just thought of one. Zach Greinke, but as like a Kyle Mooney kind of guy. It's sort of like this post-ironic, uncomfortable with himself pitching various products. I would buy those and I think America would too. Yeah, I'd go for that. All right. So you've been writing a lot lately about Grant Brisby, which I don't know whether that was inspired by the episode we did last week where you were linking to Grant Brisby an awful lot while we talked. And maybe that gave you the idea to do some more linking to Grant Brisby. But got to admit, it's a hell of a topic. Yeah. I mean,

you wrote some good stuff. So you did a post kind of reviewing your own performance in 2016 and pointing to some of your favorite stories and then also summarizing some of the most forgettable baseball stories of 2016, which, true enough, I had already forgotten in some cases and can't believe that we ever cared about. Maybe we can start with the latter, with the forgettable stories before we really do forget them forever. The first one that you mentioned was tanking and rebuilding, which it does seem like was much more of a story before the Cubs won. And I mean, that really only vindicated tanking as a strategy, which you'd think would only encourage other teams to do it. But in the wake of the Cubs winning, no one really said, like, the Cubs victory is tarnished because they tanked for a few years and this was not actually a good story. No one seemed to care. There didn't seem to be any fallout from that. No one is really writing cautionary pieces

about whether other teams are going to copy the Cubs now. You think we're over tanking as a sport now? Yeah, because I think the term was misapplied. I think tanking to me is like the Spurs losing David Robinson and they can look into the future and they can see that Tim Duncan is on the horizon and that if they have Tim Duncan and Dave Robson, like, oh my goodness, like they're going to be the kind of team that hangs around for a couple of decades. And I'm not saying that they tanked. I'm actually not enough of a basketball guy to know exactly what they did or didn't to make sure they got that number one pick. But to me, that's what tanking is, is it seeing something in the distance that is

a lot more specific than I am a rebuilding team or in charge of a rebuilding organization. Because that, a rebuilding organization, that's something in baseball that you have to have. It's just you're not going to get 25 guys in a year's time to make a horrible team into a contender. It's just not going to happen. So I think people were calling rebuilding tanking and just sort of conflating the terms. And I don't think it applied. I think baseball is a sport that really lends itself to sort of like a long-term vision,

especially for the teams that aren't in the major markets. Yeah, and the draft pick doesn't matter as much in baseball. Exactly. It matters a little bit. And of course, there are bonus pool considerations, but the difference between the top pick, I mean, the difference between the top pick and the second pick is, I think, bigger than the difference between any other two picks, but it's still relatively small. I mean, even the number one pick is no sure thing and the drop-off isn't that huge. So the difference between being a terrible team and

the worst team just in terms of the draft pick payoff is not all that great. So if you're going to trade all your veterans and get prospects and that sort of thing, that is obviously beneficial, but it doesn't really matter that much if you go all the way and ensure that you are worse than every other team. So if anything, maybe the rebuilding teams have just gotten better at rebuilding or go about it more methodically and thoroughly. And it's not like we're seeing the worst teams get worse either. It's not like some team has broken the 40-win barrier or something. They're just going way beyond what any team has done before.

The Astros and the Cubs at their worst were just bad teams. Like they weren't the worst teams ever. In earlier eras, there were teams that were just as bad that weren't going about it in any kind of intelligent way. They were just bad by accident, basically. So in that sense, it's not that much worse or different. If there were a team, if next year's draft had that sort of number one consensus, franchise altering, the Alex Rodriguez, the Bryce Harpers, the Dumb and Youngs, the Ben McDonalds, you know, like the future Hall of Famers that you can guarantee. And there were a team that was clearly putting their worst product on the field, calling up the wrong guys from AAA,

calling up the wrong guys from single A, just doing all sorts of nonsensical moves where it's clear that they're trying for that number one pick. All right, let's slap a tanking label on it. But I've never seen that in baseball, and I don't think it exists. Yeah. And you brought up Yasiel Puig and his demotion as a forgettable story. Do you think that Puig is going to be even more forgettable in the coming year? Maybe part of you is hoping for that as a Giants fan, but do you think that he will, I mean, he has the potential to be even more forgettable and forgotten or be one of like the biggest and best stories of 2017. It could kind of go either way. Yeah, when he was up and he was hot and he was all the rage when he first, first came

up, he was hitting 440 or whatever he was up and he was hot and he was all the rage when he first, first came up, he was hitting 440 or whatever he was doing. My sort of fallback to Troll Dodgers fans was to post the Sports Illustrated cover with Jeff Francoeur and really get into it because Francoeur's start was sort of eerily similar. Puig had a little bit more patience, but it was a lot of batting average on balls and play driven, high average, exciting doubles, triples, that sort of thing. But it's like sort of going in that direction. His numbers are tanking sort of in that way where his patience is getting worse, his contact is getting worse. The batting average is just not as reliable as it used to be. So it's up to him if he's going to be that forgotten. I think he's still, what, 26? So he's not that much older than a first or second year player.

It's almost as if we got too used to him too quick. But I would be bullish on him. I think he's going to do just fine and be the Puig that we demand, the Puig we deserve. I think he's going to be just as exciting as he used to be. It's just, he needs a full season of doing Puig things to do it. Yeah. I kind of thought that too, because by the time they sent him down, he had been hitting pretty well for a while. It was kind of weird timing.

He hadn't been like superstar Puig, but he hadn't been really bad Puig either. And then he went down and of course he crushed AAA pitching and everyone said, well, he's the kind of guy who can crush AAA pitching, but maybe he can't do it in the majors anymore because he is slowed down or he's less athletic or whatever it is. And then he did okay after he came back. So it just seemed to me to be too precipitous a fall for me to write him off. You've probably seen him with your eyes more than I have. Like when you watched him with dismay when he first came up as a Giants fan, did he look dramatically different to you from when you were watching him last season or the season before? Or did he kind of look like the same guy who was just having worse results?

In a way, he looked different, but that's probably cognitive bias because I read the reports of the scouts saying he bulked up and was a little bit slower on the fastball and had a cheat on the breaking balls. He looks a little bit different, but I remember when he was in 2014, when he was an all-star, he was 23 years old and his walk rate almost doubled. And that was sort of like a rut-ro moment where he started to get this plate discipline, the one thing holding him back. And I have no idea what's happened since.

I mean, I guess it could be what the mystery scouts were saying. But that would definitely be a shock, especially at this age. I know players sort of bulk up as they get into their mid-20s, if they want to or not. But that would be a surprise. If he just sort of fell off and went that Frank Corb twenties, if they want to or not. But that would be a surprise if he just sort of fell off and went that Frank Corbett, that would, I think, stun me, even if we've seen a little glimmer of it. And then you mentioned some stories. Man, I made a Trevor story pun unintentionally. I was really going to try to avoid it. It's so hard to bring up that story without doing it. You can't do it. Literally. That part you can kind of count on that happening at some point. But then you brought up the Aaron Sanchez story also, which I think a lot of people kind of put their analyst caps on and made comparisons to previous pitchers who had been jerked around from the rotation and to relief and said, well, maybe this is something that doesn't work. And if you try this, the guy gets all screwed up and maybe he doesn't have enough pitches for this role and so on and so on. And he was just fine. He was great.

He was fine. No, no, big deal. I always just thought the idea of let's move this guy to the bullpen was a very curious idea because relievers get hurt all the time. They get hurt all the time. And I just never understood the, you know, let's just move him to the bullpen and that'll keep him safe, especially for a young pitcher who's thrown so much. I just, the lack of rest between days, I mean, it's all, we're all sort of guessing and I'm sure the teams aren't guessing so much. I'm sure they've got, you know, some secret sauce and analytics that they've figured out what keeps pitchers healthier a lot more than we have. that they've figured out what keeps pitchers healthier a lot more than we have. But at the same time, on the surface, it just seems like, okay, he's still going to be pitching, which is the real problem. Yeah, right.

They haven't figured out how to use pitchers without the pitching part. Pitching's bad, yeah. It is. You also mentioned the Rob Manfred. There's been a few times since Rob Manfred has started as commissioner, a few times since Rob Manfred has started as commissioner. And I like the fact that he will bring up new ideas or he'll acknowledge things in a way that Bud Selig probably didn't or wouldn't and was dismissive of. And the problem is that every time Manfred even sort of hints that he could be considering something, even if it's just a stray thought that crossed his mind, everyone freaks out and we all

write articles about whatever thing he just mentioned. Unlike day two of his tenure, he brought up banning the shift and everyone wrote there like, oh, it'd be crazy to ban the shift articles. I did one. Yeah, I did one. He was nowhere near like banning the shift. He just, Jerry Krasnick or someone asked him if he would consider it and he didn't completely rule it out. And so we all wrote our reaction pieces. So that happened with the DH this past year, which as you note, has not come up again lately. If anything, he has been pretty clear about the fact that he's happy with the status quo. Right. And I think he should have a little bit more fun with it. Like I think he should, you know, it's good for business. It's good for our business. It gets

baseball in the news and in front of Facebook fees and stuff. So I think he should just come out and be like, you know, the more I look at the radical realignment plan, like I'm starting to dig that, you know, Cubs, White Sox and the NL Central. What else was it? Do you remember that? The radical realignment? Yeah. I don't even remember the details. Amazing. I was so fired up about it. I was ready to take to the streets. I've never felt more passionately against anything in my life. It's like the A's and the Giants and the NL West, the Angels and the Dodgers. It was a disaster in the making, but we would have been used to it now, of course. He should come out and just say stuff

like that. I'm not so sure we should be tethered to 25 players. I think basketball's got a point. Five is a nice, clean number. And just watch us all scurry to our laptops and bang out whatever we can. I think we could have

a symbiotic relationship. Yeah, I like that idea. All right. And last thing that I want to mention from this piece, Drake LaRoche in retrospect seems, I don't know if it seems crazier than it did at the time. I think we were fully aware of how nuts it was back then. And I guess given how the White Sox season went, you can't completely rule out the Drake LaRoche effect, right? I mean, it would be more convincing if they had gone out and had a good season, but as it is, you can't say for sure that they didn't suffer from his absence. Yeah. Or, you know, it could be they were all still worried about Chris Sale's

jersey cut up incident, which is so forgotten, I forgot it for that piece. I would have sworn that was 2015. So yeah, the evidence points, it could have been, you know, Drake, Drake LaRoche. I mean, he's a winner, perhaps, maybe. Clubhouses are so crazy. That's like, we're all, you know, running these numbers and doing these sophisticated analyses and looking at pitch tracking and everything. And then suddenly all the baseball players on one team freak out about the son of one of the players not being allowed in the clubhouse. Like, what are we even doing? It's a weird dynamic. Just think about it. How much time they spend together. I mean, just on planes, off of planes, hotel rooms, carousing in their job situation for 12 hours a day, six, seven days a

week. It's going to get weird and insular and there's all going to be these sort of different expectations that we can't possibly understand. And one of them is that a clubhouse might be divided on a teammate's teenage son, his large adult son. So I'm not going to judge it. The only thing we can do is sit in the back and sort of poke fun at it insofar as what we can understand. Yeah, which was extremely easy to do in that case. It wasn't clear whose fault it was. It just seemed like it was everybody's fault probably. Yeah, that's fair. No one was innocent in the Drake LaRoche saga.

So if we can get navel-gazy for a few minutes, you wrote about your favorite pieces of 2016. And just generally, I mean, you've been doing this writing about baseball thing for a while now. How long has it been? Full-time since 2011 in general. Jeez, I don't know, over a decade. Yeah. So how has your self-perception changed? Or like when you look back at the stuff that you did or you look forward at the stuff you're trying to do, what kind of piece are you aiming for that maybe you weren't in the past or, you know, like you've started traveling more, right? You've done more reporting, more kind of long form type of pieces, like without abandoning the awesome, silly stuff that we all love, but also trying to do a bunch of different things stylistically, it seems like. Right. I mean, it's the general part of me hating most of what I write is still true. I mean, I don't think that's, I'm alone as a writer, but I still go back and I look and nothing ages well. Everything is in the moment and terrible.

And so, I mean, that still applies. And so, hooray. I think your John Bowker posts, they aged well. Oh, yeah. No, don't rule him out. He's what, 30? He can come back. This is the era of Rich Hill, my friend. Yeah, 33 years old. 33 years young, John Bowker. He's coming back. He's coming back.

I can definitely tell a difference in when I started writing full time because when I started with Baseball Nation with Rob Nair and stuff, I was working 80 hours a week. And a lot of it was writing. It was active writing and churning stuff out. And it was not so good for my mental health, but I can definitely tell a difference between my pre-2011 writing and my post. But I'm just trying to do things that I would want to read maybe five years later. So if that, I don't think that you need to put like a long form or this or that or feature writing or whatever you want to call it. But something that I can just sort of hold on to that's not let me react to what Manfred said,

more of like, you know, here's what baseball means to me. Here's a cool story I think that is, if not timeless, but has a theme that might resonate a little bit later. So that's the end goal. And if I'm able to do it, I don't know, we'll see. But that's sort of what I would shoot for. So your number one thing was covering the Indians Cubs World Series, which was obviously a great series. So there's no, I'm trying to think of a way to say this that won't make me hateable, but I don't think there's a way. But like when I am assigned to cover a postseason series, like the more I do that, the less I actually want to be there in person, I think. Like, not that, like if I were there as a spectator, I would still think

it was cool to be there as a spectator. Like, you know, I feel bad. Obviously, like tickets for those Cubs games were going for, I don't know, thousands of dollars or something. And if I can get a seat even in the triple auxiliary press box on some roof across the street where you can't see anything, like many, many people would gladly swap places with me. And I would like to do that if I were just there for fun. But as a writer, I find that I guess I'm bad at it covering games in person, right? I'm not as comfortable writing in kind of the press box environment as I am writing at home by myself, where I usually am. Like, I'm gonna like, again, sound terrible complaining about these things.

But like, you know, the Wi Fi never works in the postseason press box, because everyone is trying to use it. And there are way more people than there usually are. So if you are like me and you write like me, you are constantly having to look up stats and that sort of thing. And it's like impossible to do. And I find that it's loud, like in a good way sometimes, but in a bad way at other times. And often your view is sort of obstructed. Like unless you are a big wig baseball writer who gets a front row seat, you're going to be like out in left field somewhere. And there might be a pole or something. Like when I covered the Royals World Series, I was in

some auxiliary press box and the windows were closed and there was like a window pane right where the pitch was like going. So I would have to like stand up or crouch down to see anything and i just find that i follow the game a lot worse than i would when i'm sitting at home like following it on tv seeing the replays on the big screen watching on twitter having you know stat pages up and the box score and the play-by-play like i just feel like i have more resources at my disposal in that scenario. And also, it seems to me that there's less benefit to being in person because you don't really get one-on-one time with players

because there's just such a huge gaggle. And they do these giant press conferences, the transcripts of which are online almost immediately, and you can access them from everywhere. So that is my spiel basically about why I don't go out of my way to cover playoff games in person, but you did and you were on the road for 11 days and you were happy with how your writing turned out. So give me the pro covering games in person in the post-season case. Well, I think it sort of had to be a Cubs-Indians World Series because I wanted to make sure that I was sort of mainlining the vibes.

I'm not going to go in. I'm not going to out-analyticalize you. You know what I mean? I'm not trying to compete with someone who's a lot smarter than me. I'm not going to compete with someone who's got more access or someone who's going to really dig into Joe Maddon's brain and get an hour of his time. So my only option is to sort of pick up on the feels and go around and see what Chicago and Cleveland, how they're reacting to sort of a once-in-a-lifetime World Series. Next year, if it's, I don't know, Reds, Red Sox, I might not have that sort of same feeling.

And it might be a little bit more difficult. There might be a little bit less utility in me going to each and every game. But in this one, I wanted to go and sort of be in the stands as much as I could, which I did a pretty poor job of. But in Wrigley Field, I had a big steel girder in front of my face. I had a big steel girder in front of my face. So I get you. I missed quite a few pitches and had to look up at the monitor for a lot of stuff, a lot of replay stuff. So it might have been better if I were just home and doing my thing there with my routine. Because the routine is very important.

You've got your different tabs up. You've got your routine as far as like either you have someone bothering you or you don't. Or it's just total solitude. You have your routine as far as like either you have someone bothering you or you don't or it's just total solitude. You have your routine and it's sort of when you're at the game actually watching the baseball in front of you. It makes it a little bit harder. So I think there is some utility to it and I think I really enjoyed it, but it sort of had to be Cubs Indians. That was just a real special to go to Wrigley and really sort of soak it in and look at people. I mean, they would come into the ballpark and just sort of look around like idiots.

It was great. They've all been to Wrigley before, but they were just milling about and bumping into things and just in awe of the whole thing. And so I think it was really important for me to see that, I think. If the Reds are in the World Series this year, I will attend every game. I'll make that vow. Okay. Okay. That's a promise. That's bold. That's bold. I'll have to do a deep dive on how that happened because I can't really come up with a scenario right now. But yeah, I think you're probably more practiced than I am at writing quickly or writing on deadline. I think because you had those Baseball Nation days where you had to turn out so much and get instant reactions up, whereas I've always kind of written for places that just sort of said, hey, take your time and, you know, do a longer look or something. And because you do

game recaps constantly and have for years, I think you probably have that skill honed. Whereas for me, doing a game story is sort of a deviation from what I would normally do. So I always feel kind of out of my element and I'm always struggling to come up with something to say about this one baseball game that the dozens of other writers on either side of me are not also saying. It's like, you know, it's hard to do any kind of like really revealing analysis about one game when your editor and the copy editors are kind of clamoring for your thing so they can go to bed. So I think you're probably just better at it than I am. Well, you know, at the risk of turning this into podcast confessions, it actually might

be a little bit easier for me to do it in the postseason. And the reason why is during the year, you know, I'm writing 140 recaps of Giants games a year. And so after the game ends, I usually get something out about an hour later. The game ends, I usually have my notes or I don't and I sit and I write for about an hour. It's okay. It's bad. It's whatever. But I'm usually drinking during the game.

it's okay, it's bad, it's whatever. But I'm usually drinking during the game. And so usually when I'm writing my recaps- Especially in the second half of last season. Yes, yes. There was some imbibing. So I've got my routine and that's great. Well, in the post-season, I'm not just going to pull up a flask in the press box. I'm not just going to do it with a steward, get me a couple more. You probably wouldn't be the only one. So what I did was I paid more attention to the game somehow, and I took better notes, and I was more prepared. And so I would walk back to where I was staying every night, whether it was in Cleveland or Chicago.

I would ruminate on what happened, how to kind of approach the story, what the main points were. And then I would get back to where I was staying, and I would have a cocktail and it was very relaxing and very grown up and very responsible. And somehow I think that really helped my writing, not drinking as much before writing. It's crazy. I know it sounds crazy, but I could make the correlation that it actually helped me. So is there a way to erase all of this? Is this a little too much of a deep dive? No. But honestly, focusing on the game and

taking notes in each game was a little bit easier for me in the postseason. And maybe it's because I wasn't attached to the Cubs or the Indians like I am with the Giants. I'm not trying to write it as fanny. I'm not trying to interject my fan opinion into everything. So maybe it was like a refreshing change of pace, but that part at least was sort of a nice change. Yeah. And well, I mean, when you're doing the Giants recaps or just posting for McCovey Chronicles in general, it must be, I guess, maybe the bar for what can constitute a post is lower. Like you can write a post about, I don't know, like Trevor Brown or Jarrett Parker or something like that can be a post because it's a Giants site. And so every Giant is fair game. And it's

not like I can only write about Buster Posey and Spumgarner or something. Like every player is going to get a post at some point in the season. I have a tab open of YouTube video of Daryl Strawberry hitting a home run in 1994. I'm going to write about it this offseason. And I'm just waiting to pick my spot. And it's just opening a tab waiting for me. And no one cares. No one cares.

me and no one cares no one cares that must i guess ease your mind a little bit in that like there's probably someone on the 25 men roster who did something interesting to giants fans at some point in that game right so there's always like that little thing you can kind of drill down on whereas in a postseason game i don't know it has to be like the big takeaway or whatever the huge lesson you learned, or maybe there's just some tiny little moment you can focus on and sort of expand on that moment. But what this baseball game meant to America, like, yeah, it's a little bit in the World Series, there's a tendency to do that. Like, here's what Addison Russell means for us all. It's like, okay, dial it back there. All right. So last topic I wrote last week at The Ringer about the reappraisal that the BBWA seems to be doing with Barry Bonds and Roger

Clemens. And at the time I was writing, both of those guys were tracking at like 70% or so on Ryan Thibodeau's tracker, which is a great resource for everyone. And basically they're in line for one of the biggest single year jumps in support, at least for guys who've been on the ballot for a few years. It's not like their second year or something. And a bunch of people kind of, you know, waited because they weren't first ballot guys and then they voted for them. And it's not like their last year on the ballot when there's a big movement and a groundswell of support. It just happened. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. And it has to do with Bud Selig going in. And if he's in, then Bonds and Clemens might as well be in. And I think it has

to do with Piazza and Pudge and other guys with sort of more circumstantial PED ties, but they kind of had that PED stigma associated with them. And if they're getting in, then why keep these other guys out? Anyway, it's happening all at once. And I think probably people like us have hoped it would happen right away and have thought it was sort of silly that it didn't happen sooner. And I imagine that you have lots of feelings about Bonds as someone who watched him and has written about him extensively. And I assume that you are happy to see this development and maybe feel it's overdue, if anything. Yeah, I do. I never thought it would happen. I thought it was going to be the year 2030 and it was going to be the golden newfangled era

veterans committee of absolution. There's going to be some sort of veterans committee of the future that would get them in because they would look back and they would say, what was the big deal again? And then have it explained to them. It's like, oh yeah, that happened. All right. We don't care. It was going to have to be a new generation that just wasn't hip to the invective at the time. And so I thought it was going to be a new generation that just wasn't hip to the invective at the time. And so I thought it was going to be much, much, much, much, much farther in the future. So this really, really surprises me. I mean, it's pointing toward him getting in, both Bonds and Clemens getting in before they fall off the ballot. And, you know, the Hall tried to make, there was a hint that they limited eligibility

to 10 years specifically for Bonds and Clemens, you know, when they changed it from 15-year eligibility to 10. So I think maybe it's catching the haul off guard. And I don't know what's – I can't put my finger – like all those reasons that you're talking about, how many minds does Bud Selig's induction really change? You wouldn't think it'd be that many because we all knew Bud Selig was getting in, right? I don't think anyone was shocked that that happened. I mean, he's incredibly long tenured and generally well regarded by people in the game.

And whatever you think of him, he did a lot of dramatic things. He realigned everything and new playoff formats and lots of revenue. And I mean, you know, he really put his stamp on the game. So when I saw that he had gotten in, I was not even slightly surprised. And it's not even the BBWAA that put him in. It was just today's game committee, which is sort of the successor to the veterans committee. So the writers could have continued to hold the line if they had wanted to without being hypocritical. It's not like they voted for Selig and were keeping Bonds and Clemens out.

So it does seem sort of silly that that would be the big impetus for the change. But a lot of the writers I talked to or people who had votes when I was working on the article cited Selig as a reason. Some other people who have written columns explaining their switch cited Selig as a reason. Some other people who have written columns explaining their switch cited Selig as the reason. So, I mean, it seems like he is the single biggest reason. I mean, I guess the idea behind it makes a little sense is that you're basically saying to yourself that we have to look at bonds in the context of the era. And C-League was a part of the context of that era. And it really wasn't a big, big deal when Maguire and Sosa were breaking records and saving baseball, so to speak. So it's like re-evaluating the context of the era, which I

think is very important going back and realizing that a lot of the anti-steroid fervor came later. It wasn't as if that was just been hammered into our brains since 1968 or something. It's something that was just sort of grew on us. And then all of a sudden people looked around and said, whoa, whoa, this is out of control. Let's evaluate this, what it means ethically and all that stuff. So I guess the idea behind it is that I just have a problem thinking that there's just this groundswell of people who say, oh, well, Selig's in. Everything I thought before that, forget it. I guess I must have – yeah, I was looking at it all wrong. Like Selig's in now. Man, people spent like dozens and scores and hundreds of hours thinking about this,

really perseverating on Bonds and Clemens being dirty. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, you know, I can't hold that belief anymore. I don't know. It's funny to me. It's great, but it's funny. Yeah. So they're still at 70% through 36% of the ballots. And I kind of looked at the difference between their public and their private last year and their early public and their final tallies. And I think they'll probably end up like in the low to mid 60s, which is still going to be maybe somewhere around a 20 percentage point bump from last year, which is pretty incredible, because as you're saying, like if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said they're not going to get in on this kind of ballot. Like they had barely budged on their on their second year on the ballot. Their support actually decreased.

And then it went up the next two years, but only slightly. They were up like eight percentage points from their first year in their fourth year. So there didn't seem to be any kind of movement that was going to push them in anytime soon. And now suddenly it seems like a sure thing that they're going to get in, if not next year, then one of these couple of years. And it really is kind of perplexing that it happened so soon, but I mean, I guess it took long enough to get to this point. So maybe they're making up for how long it took them to make up their minds in the first place. It seemed like some of the people I talked to were just sick of thinking about this. Like they were just tired of like writing the same columns

every year and sending the same tweets and like parsing the same inconclusive evidence about who used what and when and what effect it had. And I think some people were just like, I'm never going to figure this out. That's like baseball writing in general. It's the same thing every year. I don't know if you readers have picked up on it, but I'm saying the same damn things every year. Basically. But they're the best hitter and the best pitcher that any of us has ever seen, probably, even if you subtract the steroid stuff so it's about time and i'm kind of curious about whether there will be a new line now like if they both get in and piazza's in and pudge is in and bagwell's in and all these guys who either like were the poster boys of pds or

were suspected to have done it will people draw the line at Manny or A-Rod or guys who actually failed a test or were suspended? Or once Bonds and Clemens are in, will everyone just sort of shrug and say, whatever, it's purely performance-based, so A-Rod can come too? Forget it, Jake. It's Cooperstown. Now, I think there might be a kind of line in the sand with, like, Mayday Ramirez, the pre-steroid fervor and the post. Whereas, you know, Bonds, when he was looking at McGuire and Sosa hogging the limelight, he said to himself, I'm just guessing, you know, I could do that if I, you know, if I took some stuff too, I could do that. And it was an ego thing and he did it.

And then all of a sudden it's like, no, no, no, that's actually really bad and we all hate you now even more. And so there's at least that plausible deniability where he might be like, geez, what did I do? What have I done? I guess I didn't really think this through. I've really hurt my legacy. Whereas like Manny Ramirez, it was pretty clear about his legacy and getting caught after the post-Mitchell report fervor. And so voters might, might take that into account. You know, if someone gets busted tomorrow, you know, that player is going to be looked at a little bit differently than say,

history is going to judge Mark McGuire. It's probably, I mean, it's why Marlon Byrd's not going in the Hall of Fame among other reasons, but I think there might be something to a post-Manny line in the sand. All right. I think we've talked enough. Thanks for helping me get through this one. Got to get through the one, the first post-Sam episode to get to the hundreds that I hope come after. So everyone knows where to find Grant. You can find him at SB Nation's MLB page.

You can find him at McCovey Chronicles. He's on McCovey Cron at Twitter. And if Jeff never comes back from this vacation, I will be giving you a call. That sounds good. It's going to be really, really awkward to bump into Sam at the grocery store. But I do what I have to do, and he did what he had to do.

All right. Good talking to you, Grant. All right. Thanks, Ben. All right. So that will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already done so. John Vanderloot, Michael Curtis, Kevin Rust, Mark Gunther and Colin H. Smith. Thank you.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Now closing in on 5000 members. You can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes. You can buy my slash Sam's book, The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to the website, theonlyruleisithastowork.com. You can contact the show by emailing podcastbaseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. I and another guest host will talk to you soon. Okay.

First Post Sam episode. No pressure for either of us. No, no, not at all.