Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1218: Commission and Omission

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the dominant Justin Verlander and the Astros’ historic pitching pace, the still-struggling Dodgers, and the prospects of Blue Jays prospect Vladimir Guerrero Jr., then talk to author Rob Neyer (16:28) about becoming the commissioner of the West Coast League, the future of baseball in Portland, and writing his […]

I heard his son got famous and he went nationwide Coast to coast with his dad by his side I don't know if that's true But I've been told It's real sweet to grow old You know high is my last hope Chavo Guerrero Coming off the top rope

Hello and welcome to episode 1218 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Jeff Sullivan of the Internet, joined as always by Ben Lindbergh, also of the Internet. Hello, Ben. Hello. I guess I should say Fangraphs and The Ringer. I'm at Fangraphs, he's at The Ringer. We should always be branding so that people go to our websites and allow us to be paid indirectly.

So during this podcast, we will be talking with the new commissioner of the West Coast League, Rob Nyer. And we will also be talking with ESPN senior baseball editor Christina Carl about a variety of topics for both of them. But before we get to that, you are smacking your lips as if you have something that you would like to say. Well, nothing particularly pressing, but we've gotten a couple emails from listeners about Justin Verlander just sort of inviting us to marvel at Justin Verlander, more or less. So Trevin just emailed to ask, essentially,

if this is the best that Verlander has ever been. So he says, last night, the Astros broadcast claimed that Justin Verlander is pitching better as an Astro than he ever did as a Tiger. This seems like a bold claim, considering he won the MVP and Cy Young Award in 2011. However, he has an ERA of 1.05 in 15 regular season starts as an Astro. So is this the best version of Justin Verlander? Has Verlander ever had a stretch of 15 starts where he has been this dominant? And FanCrafts makes it very easy to answer that question just by looking up every 15 game No, Justin Verlander has never had an ERA this low in a stretch of 15 starts. You can park adjust that. It's still true. If you look at FIP, for instance, it is no longer

true. He did have better stretches at the peak of his Tigers period than he has with the Astros. But basically, yeah, Verlander is about as good as he's ever been. It kind of depends, I guess, if you want to ding him for the low home run per fly ball rate and look at his ex-fip or something and say that that will regress and correct itself. But more or less, this is peak Verlander again. And it's not just a matter of what Verlander is doing. So last year, as I wrote about a few times, the Cleveland Indians set, at least according to Fangraphs, an all-time record for pitching staff wins above replacement. It wasn't just their starting rotation. Their entire pitching staff was good for 31.7 war.

That was the highest of all time, and I think I put that over a 162-game pace. So the Houston Astros, Verlander and the rest of them, have already been worth 10.5 wins above replacement in 45 games. They are on pace to be worth 37.8 more as a pitching staff. Now, of course, with any extreme data point, you expect it to regress and the Astros will allow some more, etc. You know how this goes. But they're currently on pace through nearly a third of the season to exceed the all-time record by like almost 20%, which is just absurd, especially given that the Astros share a division with like three other pretty good, at least average-ish. Look, they're not in the AL Central is the point. The Indians set their record, and they had a terrible division.

And the Astros are on pace to shatter that record and they're in a far better division so Justin Verlander very good Garrett Cole very good all of the other ones also very good except maybe Tony Sipp I haven't checked in he's not very good but the Astros are just absurdly good yeah Justin Verlander has seemingly gotten a little bit better with the Astros maybe uh but also they're just all they're they all great. He was also really good shortly before he was traded to the Astros, which is part of the reason why he was traded to the Astros. But it is obviously a really impressive career. I mean, the career trajectory of Justin Verlander is highly unusual, obviously, to decline the

way he did in 2014 and even a little bit after that and to lose stuff and velocity. And yes, we found out later there was a core injury and a tricep strain, and probably that had something to do with or a lot to do with the sapping of his stuff. But it is uncommon, obviously, for a pitcher to lose velocity, lose effectiveness in his 30s, and then get it all back, and maybe then some. So, you know, we always kind of default to Hall of Fame case. I mean, yeah, I think Justin Verlander has to be a Hall of Famer at this point, if any starting pitcher is going to be a Hall of Famer at this point. We can't really judge by historical standards when you're talking about that position. Yep. So let's see what else we got. I can tell you that right now there is a game

that's going on right now, but in the standings, the Marlins, the Padres, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are all in the same place. So I think we've all been expecting the Dodgers to shake this off, and I still expect that at some point they will, but boy, they suck. The Dodgers have as bad a record as teams who are expected to be two of the worst teams in baseball. This is just one of those convenient reminders that the projections can look wildly incorrect. The Dodgers have gone 1-9 in their last 10 games. They have Justin Turner back, but they don't have their mojo or anything else back. I don't know how long this is going to go.

I remain convinced on every single given day that the Dodgers are going to start winning and just pull off that thing that did when Yossi Alpuig first came up when they went like 42-8 or something over 50 games and set a record for a hot streak. But this is really incredible. It's just really incredible to see a team like this collapse entirely. time, they seemed so set up long term. And if anything, they seem more set up now or they did two months ago. I mean, just the payroll, the market, the young talent, the peak prime talent. I mean, there is no reason why the Dodgers should be bad now or anytime soon. So I ran through some reasons why it could happen. You know, basically injuries is the obvious reason, and that is kind of what it takes, I guess, to make the Dodgers bad. You have to take away both of their best players, I guess, certainly both of their best position players. I know that

Justin Turner is back now, but has barely been there, and Corey Seager, gone for the year. Clayton Kershaw has been hurt and not quite his usual self. Rich Hill has been on and off the DL, mostly on. Other people have also been hurt. So, I mean, partially it's just that. It's just you have a huge injury stack. It's kind of like what happened to the Rangers a few years ago, where they seemed totally set up too. And then they just had historic injuries strike all of a sudden and it's funny because the Dodgers have had tons and tons of DL days over the past couple years just because they've constructed their staff really in a way that they seem to think there is some maybe

advantage to acquiring pitchers with injury histories at least if you have a payroll like the Dodgers do and so they've gotten the Rich Hills and Brandon McCarthy's and Brad Anderson's and all of these people. And predictably, they've ended up on the DL. And the Dodgers have used the 10-day DL, of course, pretty liberally. So they've had lots of injuries, but they've also been great. And it hasn't really affected them at all. And now they have a different kind of injury, I guess. Now they have Corey Seager injuries and Justin Turner injuries, and those aren't the kind of ones that you can easily come back from. Yep, and Andrew Tolles has had some sort of setback in AAA. This is getting really into detail about the Dodgers, but they're bad. They have the same record as the Marlins. Maybe when this podcast is done being recorded, they will have different records. I don't know which team is going to win, but they're playing again on Thursday,

so I'm going to move on here because we're going to talk to Rob Nair in this podcast about the West Coast League. I was reading an article about one of the league's newest teams. It's the Port Angeles Lefties. I don't know why they're called the Lefties. I asked Rob after the podcast. He also doesn't know why they're called the Lefties. Some people are Lefties, but presumably they are not all Lefties. They probably do have left hands, but...

They're just very liberal. I was wondering that as well. So the mascot of the team is a marmot. And I can say here from the article, team officials wanted to name the squad after the Olympic, as in the Olympic Peninsula, where Port Angeles is. Name the squad after the Olympic marmot, but the licensing fees to the Marmot outdoor clothing company were too costly. We will just not print the word Marmot on our uniform, the owner told a crowd of about 80 at the Verne Burton Community Center. Anyway, so I didn't want to talk about that, even though now I just did. But I want to read you a line here.

There's another team in the league called the Victoria Harbor Cats. That's Harbor Cats with camel case and Harbor Cats with a U in a harbor. It's a Canadian team. So the Harbor Cats are co-owned by someone named Jim Swanson. And there's a quote in here that I think he meant as a compliment referring to players in the summer wood bat league

for college players. Meant as a compliment, easily could be interpreted as an insult. And I'll just read the quote. There are nights when you watch our games and you might as well put our guys into mariners and oaklandese uniforms and put them in safeco field and you might not know the difference swanson said i don't know i you might know the difference i think maybe but yeah i think you probably would although it does say here a bellingham pitcher's fastball was clocked at 98

miles per hour at a Victoria game this summer. And it wasn't an aberration. It's not like we had one guy throwing 90 plus miles an hour, Swanson said. It happened every night at our ballpark this year. Ben, how many people were breaking 90 with these stoppers? I don't remember. Oh, I thought you were going to say breaking 98. And the answer would be no one.

90, maybe one, maybe two maybe two yeah it was pretty rare there were people in that league who could do it but not a whole lot no i assume that matt chavez was responsible for doing everything good that happened in the league on the offense and the defensive side yeah he was not a two-way player although who knows maybe he could have been all right i guess we should get to our guests do you have any any thoughts on Vlad Guerrero, the younger, just because everyone constantly seems to be talking about Vlad Guerrero. I can't go to the Facebook group or open Twitter without being confronted with something about Vlad Guerrero Jr. And obviously he is hitting right now as we speak 415, 459, 696 in AA. That is why there's a lot of impatience and frustration that he is not

already in the major leagues. Of course, he is also a 19-year-old person. He just recently turned 19, and he just recently got above high A ball, so that would be part of why he is not in the majors, and then, of course, there's service time stuff to consider. But is this an outrage? Should we be outraged that Blackarer is not on the Blue Jays already? I'm not convinced there are many stories in baseball that warrant any amount of outrage, but I know that people have to express relative outrage. He is probably major league ready in that he is almost certainly better than at least

one or two position players on the Blue Jays roster maybe almost all of them who aren't Josh Donaldson and of course you can look at Ronald Acuna and you see here's another 19 he's 19 right not 20 maybe he's 20 I don't remember he's very young Acuna he's 20 yeah 20 great whatever have you already mentioned how Guerrero is doing the Acuna thing where he gets better at every level yeah that's true too Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would not be the first 19 year old to be in the major leagues and he i think that with with prospects now i think we we have seen a pattern i think toward uh toward pitchers coming up younger because i think that teams are increasingly of the perspective that first of all your stuff is the sharpest when you're young so you might as well

use it and pitchers have the least wear and tear when they're young so you might as well get those innings out of them and i think that you just as a pitcher you don't need to prove so much in the minors because if you have the stuff to get minor leaguers out you probably have the stuff to get major leaguers out so i think that we're seeing that trend but i also wonder with with position players it maybe it's a little similar to like with how college football has gotten to the point where it's almost like a professional league and that's not social commentary that's just that the players are so good and they're handled with so much diligence and they're they're training so much that they are essentially professional caliber not all of them but i wonder also now if in the minor leagues especially at an advanced

level like double a and when you have a premium prospect like vladimir guerrero jr who's the best prospect in the minor leagues i wonder if he's just been raised and developed in an environment where the minors are just developing players at a more professional caliber, major league caliber, than they used to. So, of course, it would be seldom precedented for a player to reach the majors after playing so little at an advanced minor league level. But I wonder how much that history matters, because you would figure Guerrero is facing harder stuff in double a than maybe people used to in

double a and he's facing tougher pitchers and tougher competition and he's just has better training methods now than minor leaguers ever did better facilities so i i don't know how much the history matters here i i wonder if teams are going to enter an era or if we're already entering an era where minor leaguers are bumped up more aggressively because the elite ones certainly feel like they are deserving. Yeah, I did some research some time ago, I think, about debuts and whether there had been a change in how long people spend in the minors. I think I've seen something more recently. in how long people spend in the minors, I think I've seen something more recently. As I recall, there hasn't been that big a change in the average MLB debut age. Yeah, it was Henry Druskell at Beyond the Boxscore a couple of years ago did that research and found that even though the majors were having a youth movement,

there wasn't really any trend toward younger debuts. You'd think that maybe there would be in some cases, just because, as you're saying, instruction is better. We have better stats for the minors. You can tell when someone is ready. On the other hand, there are probably fewer examples of guys getting rushed and brought up when they shouldn't be up and they aren't actually ready. So maybe those two things kind of balance out and it looks the same, but it's actually a more enlightened age of prospect promoting. Yeah.

It would be nice, though, if we were to enter an era where players were coming up sooner, what that would also mean, potentially, is that players are hitting free agency sooner. And so, you know, if Guerrero were to come up now and he's 19, he would be free agent eligible when he's, what, 26, 27? But, you know, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Yeah. Well, that is probably one reason why he's not up and why the debut age hasn't fallen. Teams don't want to start the clock. Anyway, we'll see him sometime soon.

I guess the Jays just have to figure out what they'll do with Josh Donaldson. He's at third base. He's going to be a free agent. He won't want to DH even though he has his shoulder issues. Maybe you don't want to put the 19-year-old at DH and stunt his defensive development. If he keeps hitting, it won't be long one way or another. So we will take a quick break and we'll talk to Rob Neier about becoming a commissioner this summer and also about his upcoming book. That'll be a pretty quick conversation.

And then we will have a longer, more substantial conversation with Christina about the prospects of the first female GM in Major League Baseball and the obstacles that have to be overcome there. Both Rob and Christina are people I read when I was just getting into all this stuff. I'm sure the same is true for you. And they were both instrumental in my career and at least in Rob's case, your career, I suppose, as well. So happy that we can have them both on. We will be right back with Rob. Well, I'm sitting here thinking just how sharp I am. Well, I'm sitting here thinking just how sharp I am. I'm an underexisted West Coast promo man

Alright, so now we are joined by author, person, and commissioner of the West Coast League, Rob Nyer. Rob, hello, how are you? I'm well, thanks. How did you become commissioner of the West Coast League? What does that even mean? What does it mean? Well, my primary job, the one that I'm contractually bound to do, is essentially mediate any disputes between owners. I think that what you want in a commissioner, in this league anyway, is someone who can step in and say, look, I know you guys can't agree on this particular thing. It might be a scheduling issue. It might be a discipline issue with a player who, maybe a player comes into town and yells at the fans and the owners of those two teams aren't

exactly sure what should happen to that guy. Because you can have all the rules you want, but there's always going to be room for interpretation and there's always the chance for a dispute. I think last year, there might have been two or three things that would have required some mediation by a commissioner. If there had been one, there was not. There was a president. There have been, I think, four presidents in the last five or six years, and they decided to go back to the commissioner model, which they hadn't had in a while. And as far as how this came to be, I think it started, it was just a really great timing for me. They had the league, the owners of the league had decided to explore the commissioner model again last winter. And right around that same time, I happened to give a speech at a

banquet about baseball. And one of the West Coast League's owners happened to be there. And he, for whatever reason, thought I might be a good fit. So for people who don't know, what is the West Coast League? It's very easy to explain because everybody has heard of the Cape Cod League. And this is basically the Cape Cod League of the Pacific Northwest. For college players or incoming. I believe they're players who are coming out of high school, entering college are also eligible. I'm not sure if we have anybody like that in the league or we'll have anybody.

But it's basically in our league, a lot of players who are coming off of their freshman or sophomore seasons and older, too. But I think mostly those two classes so the cape cod league is the big league everybody's heard of the cape cod league there's even been a movie about it and there's also the north woods league which is quite successful popular in the in wisconsin minnesota the upper midwest i believe they have 21 teams it's not as close to that and so they're sort of of the big college summer league in the Midwest. And then the West Coast League is the big college league in the west of Mississippi, we always say. And we play from, got 11 teams, and we play from late May, basically when all

the schools are out, through the middle of August. So hidden in there, was that a reference to the 8% Rotten Tomatoes scored Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle summer catch? Yes. I have not seen it. I probably should, just so I can say that I have. It's probably part of my job now to have seen that movie. But I understand it is not highly regarded by the cognoscenti. So obviously the leagues here are different, but Ben has a certain amount of experience with a smaller baseball league.

And a small league like this might be relatively short on revenues. So what are your weekly responsibilities? Is this a seasonal but full-time opportunity, or is this more something where maybe you'll be handling disputes for what adds up to five or 10 hours? Well, I mentioned my contractual duties. The dispute part of it, aside from those two or three times perhaps during the season, should take up very little of my time because there really aren't that many of them. And most situations are pretty well prescribed by the rules. Now, if there is a big dispute, you can wind up having to do talking to a dozen people to find out what actually happened. So it could get intense.

Most of the time, no, this is not going to be a full-time job. I'm still going to be looking. I'm just finishing my book that's out next fall or this fall, and I'm going to be looking for other projects. This could be a full-time job. I mean, there is certainly enough work that could be done. I'm just not being asked to do that much work. But I'm doing things like one of the things we'd like to do in the league, like everyone else, is expand our use of technology, which we don't really do a lot of now. This is the first

season when we're going to have streaming video for every game, but it's still relatively low level. But we would like to do all the things that people are doing with the technology that you can, wearables and TrackMan, all those sorts of things we're going to be exploring. And I know some people who were in those businesses and, uh, it's easy for me as the commissioner, as opposed to a single owner, uh, to, to actually go out and make a case why we should be doing these things. Um, so, and, you know, and then there's just going to all the ballparks and checking in with people to see what's going on with their franchise and what we could do to make the league better. One of the tremendous perks of this job is it's essentially, you know, I have a travel

budget and I have every intention of visiting all 11 ballparks this summer. of visiting all 11 ballparks this summer. And as Jeff knows, and then maybe not as much, there's really nowhere a baseball fan, I think, would rather be once they've experienced it than a game in the Pacific Northwest in June and July and August. So I'm going to be traveling all over from, you know, in the South Bend and Bend, Oregon and Corvallis, Oregon are our two southernmost teams.

And then the two northernmost are in Victoria, British Columbia and Kelowna, British Columbia. And then there are seven teams in between there. And I get to visit all those ballparks this summer. This job will be very different from being a Major League Baseball commissioner. But if there were one that you would model your commissionership after, who would it be? Look, there's only one commissioner who I admire at all, really. Because that makes it easy then. Maybe two. I mean, I think that both Barjamati and Faye Vincent were able to at least maintain the appearances of independent and the perception that they had the best interests,

not of the owners or the players in mind, but the best interests of the game itself as an ongoing enterprise. And look, I can't pretend to be objective. I'm being paid by the owner, but when there's a chance to make a decision or form a relationship that benefits everyone involved, that's what I would like to do. And it may well come, there may well be, there may well be situations where I have to decide in favor of the owners because they're, they're the ones that are paying me. But I think you need to have limits. And I also hope to keep in mind the interests of the players. I mean, these are kids who are coming from most of them from the West, but not all of them. Players come

to the West Coast League from all over the country, some of them thousands of miles away from home, and every one of them has a different story and potentially different problems. And Ben, you know that as well as anybody having been around Stompers for a season. They've all got their own stories. They all have their own goals and their own dreams and their own problems. And I'm sure that's going to come up over the course of the season. So if we had more time, then we could just talk about you being a commissioner of this league for the next hour. But because we are short on time, I would like to pass on to you a question that I get

probably every single week, probably multiple times every single week. And that comes down to the question about Major League Baseball in Portland. Every time that I get this question, I think I wish I were Rob Nair so that I could answer this better. You have answered this question a zillion times. The city has grown over the course of you answering this question, but where would you put the current status of Major League Baseball coming to Portland? It seems farther along than it ever has before in terms of the organization, the efforts that seem to be behind bringing, somehow acquiring a franchise

that would play here. At the same time, I wouldn't say that it's closer now than it's ever been or than it's ever seemed to be, because it seemed as if there was at least a measurable chance of getting the Expos to move here before they team in D.C., but that didn't have to happen. Just because something happened doesn't mean it was preordained. That deal could theoretically have fallen through somehow. Who knows? I mean, all it would have taken was a few Washington, D.C. council people who weren't willing to be bought off, I think. And there was a mechanism in place at that time to fund a major league stadium here, at least a temporary stadium. So it could have happened 10 years ago, whenever that was. It just didn't. I don't think we have that measurable shot right now here because nobody knows where

this team is going to come from. Expansion? When is that going to happen? Are the A's going to move? I doubt it. The Rays? Maybe. So I think what's happening now is instead of saying, okay, there's this franchise, let's go get it. They're saying, let's build all of the things we would need if a team were available. But right now a team isn't available. And there's no 35,000 seat ballpark that's coming next year or the year after or the year after.

But there are some, obviously there are a lot of people who are putting a lot of time and I don't know how much money, that's another thing we don't really know yet, but a lot of time into this effort. And unless somebody shows me otherwise, I feel like they're sincere in their efforts and they seem to have some pull, if not politically, at least maybe financially behind the scenes. So essentially my answer when people ask me is there are multiple huge questions that simply have not been answered yet. So it's impossible to know what the chances are, whether it's 1% or 50%. I don't think anybody really knows. Well, for now, the Portland Pickles are the only show in town. So I guess that's good for the West Coast League.

Good for me. Yep. Good for the league. Yeah. So I know that we have to let you go so that you can finish your book so that it can come out on October 16th. It's called Powerball Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game. Maybe we'll have you back on when it's actually out and we've read it and we can all talk about it in detail. You have to have me because you're both quoted in the book. Oh, excellent. All right. Well, that's an automatic interview then. But do you want to give people a quick plug, a quick preview since it can be pre-ordered now? Oh, sure. A few people will get this reference. It was pitched to me as an updated or a modern version of a book called Nine Innings that Dan O'Quinn wrote 30, some 30,

almost 35 years ago now. And Dan embedded himself with the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles to a somewhat lesser degree, and then wrote about a particular, a game those teams played. Well, he, he, he wrote about baseball using that game as a lens to examine baseball. using that game as a lens to examine baseball. And this book, an editor came to me and said he wanted to do an updated version, which I thought was a great idea. I didn't embed myself the way Dan did, and I didn't spend four years working on it the way Dan did. I spent six months working on it.

But I was able to speak to a number of players in this particular A's Astros game that I write about. It winds up largely being an excuse for me another way, it's a reported book because of all the baseball people that I was able to speak to. But it's a fun, dramatic game, but it's really more about what baseball has become. I call it postmodern baseball because I think it's gone a step beyond what we thought of as modern baseball just 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, most of your previous books have been about the past of baseball, historical aspects, and I guess with the exception maybe of Feeding the Green Monster, where you went to see the Red Sox every day for a season. But I know that you like digging into newspaper archives and microfilm, and I'm sure you're finding ways to do bits of that even in

this book. But do you enjoy writing about something where the people you're writing about are alive and interviewable and everything is kind of contemporary and modern and pressing? Or do you like just getting your hands dirty and dusty and digging into the archives? Well, it turns out that I really enjoy doing both a great deal. And I knew I loved the historical aspect. And in this book, the one sort of dive that I did historically was I wrote about the history of infield shifting probably more than anyone else has. I was only able to do that for a few pages because that's what the whole book is about, but I did a little bit of historical research on that subject. But for the most part, no, it's all modern stuff. And I really, the older I get, the more I enjoy talking to people, you know, not random strangers on the street. That still makes me a little uncomfortable, but I'll do it. It's a little awkward, but I really have come to enjoy speaking to people about baseball. And, you know, whether it's John Thorne,

baseball's historian, MLB's official historian, or just going to the ballpark. And I mean, I spoke to probably 15 A's and Astros about this project, for this project, and they were almost all delightful to speak to, gracious and insightful. And I mean, it's kind of what you dream about as a kid. You want to be around the players and talk to the players about baseball. And then that kind of got away from me. That just didn't become my career in part because I didn't try to make that my career. But now I have had a chance to do some of that for this book and I've really enjoyed it. All right. Well, I'm sure that we will all too. So according to the West Coast League treasurer, Rob Neier has a really great demeanor and a ton of upside. You can access that on Twitter at Rob Neier. You can pre-order

Powerball right now, Powerball, Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game. And Rob, good luck with the commissionership, commissionerhood, and we will talk to you later this year. Looking forward to it. Thanks, guys. Okay. So we'll take a quick break and we'll be back after a pleasure to be joined by ESPN MLB Senior Editor Christina Carl. Christina, how are you? Pretty good. How about you, Joe?

I'm doing very well. Listeners don't know this, but we've been trying to record for like 45 minutes or something. It's been infuriating. I don't know why this hasn't been down to a science. False positivity. This hasn't been down to a science. False positivity. Everyone is always in such a great place to have a polite conversation after they can't get computers figured out. So anyway, you recently wrote an article that was titled, Where Will MLB's First Woman GM Come From?

So I think that we've seen a good amount of anecdotal evidence, at least, that teams are hiring more women. At least when teams do hire more women, it is more likely to be written about. So in a sense, there has been a good amount of progress and movement. But how much progress would you say that there has actually been in this regard in at least getting some sort of gender diversity within organizations? Well, I think coming from a terrible place, if you want to, I mean, put it in the perspective of like, you know, as old as I am, I mean, I can talk to somebody like Kim Eng and we came out of college the same year, same college. And like, you know, so we can look at it from the perspective of, well, when she was getting into the industry almost 30 years ago,

it was pretty terrible. But, you know, so if you take that long, really long view, then things are great since then. But I think it's also fair to say that between Kim and say the last couple of years, it wasn't that much better. And so I think what's really remarkable is the developments just in the last couple of years. And this is really coming from MLB itself. as the developments just in the last couple of years. And this is really coming from MLB itself. And certain clubs are doing particularly well. I think we can point to the Mets as, you know,

like having a success in, you know, how many women they've hired in the front office. The Cardinals are doing well. But I think remarkably, you know, like it's pretty universal. But, you know, like you can talk about individual numbers of women in individual front offices. But I think the general trend just in terms of within the last two years you've seen and really since their diversity initiative really got off the ground. I think you've seen hiring up like by 40 percent. You're talking about like 130 women or so in working in baseball operations jobs specifically, because I think the other thing, and I know I can be long-winded, but the other thing to mention about this is that,

you know, for me, it's not about, you could see how baseball might easily tweak its numbers in terms of overall hiring of women. If you hired women in say community relations, media relations, business ops, business development. But I think what we're all interested in as fans, as analysts, as people in the baseball industry, are people who are going to end up potentially being in a position to make calls about who's on the field, who's playing, who's getting drafted. That's what sets baseball apart from, say, an insurance company is not, you know, is the product. And so like, you know, the people who

are making an impact on the product that brings fans and puts them in the stands, that's kind of where we want to see that kind of progress and see women getting into those kinds of roles. And so the fact that, you know, again, we're like up over 130 women working in baseball ops specifically from my perspective is, you know, something where you gotta, you gotta credit the industry for making a ton of progress. And of course the industry has changed a lot in its hiring process in other ways, in the sense that people who look at the game the way that we tend to would never have been hired for baseball operations jobs 30 years ago. So in that sense, I guess there's even less of an excuse is maybe one way to put it just in that you no longer have to have played Major

League Baseball to get these jobs. And in fact, many people, even most probably GMs at this point did not. So you can't really point to that. It's not like that's the state of the game anymore, where that made that point that, you know, somebody like Kim getting into the industry when she did in the early 90s, you know, like in a sense, she wasn't just blazing a trail for women. She was blazing a trail for pretty much anybody who hadn't been a minor league player or, you know, hadn't played the game like at any level, you know, like in the sense that Kim was a great softball player, a true grinder for the University of Chicago Maroons, but she wasn't somebody who had played, you know, at the major or minor league level. And so the fact that she could get as far as she did, you know, I think that there's an interrelated phenomenon there where I think, you know,

in the same way, and this is interesting because when you talk to the people in MLB about candidates and the number of women who are being brought in, particularly, I think, in terms of statistical analysis. And then we talk to the women themselves and they're making the point that for them coming into baseball, it's very much like working in a STEM field in the first place. The challenges of being in that kind of workplace where you're if you're working in science or technology, engineering, mathematics, that if you're working in those kinds of fields, you're already, you know, they're not intimidated by the fact that they're coming into this because they already went through college, you know, and already kind of had considered fields that were like this. So they're not worried about that. And so, you know, that's where, again, I think the interesting thing about that is the relationship not only between saver metrics and finding women who can get into the game, but also in terms of people with the confidence and ability to work in that kind of workplace when they don't necessarily come from a, quote unquote, pure baseball background. So you were one of the one of the original co-founders of Baseball Prospectus.

And of course, for anyone who who read the older volumes of baseball prospectus it was delightful for its its uh cutting outsider perspective but a sort of a two-part question was it ever your interest in uh in getting a job within the game and as the second part have you ever been approached by an organization to fill a baseball job yeah actually i did initially i'm sure sandy alderson or the A's don't still have the letter I wrote after I went to spring training the first time back in 1992. I went to spring training and then went to the now gone Pink Pony and drank with a bunch of baseball people, including Sandy Alderson's dad and a couple of journalists and drank to my credit or discredit,

I don't know, but drank them under the table and put them in cabs and then gave them my name. And we talked about baseball at great length. And then they all encouraged me to apply for a job with the A's. And then I did. And then I never heard back. And so not that that's a surprise. I mean, I was just, you know, like somebody fresh out of the University of Chicago, whatever. And I did not have an analytics background. So fresh out of the University of Chicago, whatever. And I did not have an analytics background. So history major from the University of Chicago, probably not somebody that, you know, writing clips, writing for the Chicago Maroon, the newspaper of the Chicago Maroons, because we apparently don't have a lot of other things to call ourselves. Anyways, yeah, it wasn't going to turn heads. So I never felt bad about that but

I didn't get considered and but on the other hand at that point I was also discovering the internet and not necessarily in the Al Gore sense but but finding the internet and using that discussion groups and meeting with the people who I would end up helping co-found Baseball Perspectives because Gary Huckabee, for whatever reason, thought I might be able to write a little bit about the game. So after that, teams now, you know, I don't think I've ever, I'm trying to think, I mean, I've been asked to write a lot of different things, but by a lot of different people. And I've been asked by MLB to do writing in the past. But yeah, no, since then, no, I have not been approached. But I'm admittedly not one of the truly clever people

in the world of sabermetrics, I would say. I mean, compared to folks like Nate Silver or Ben Lindbergh or Dave Cameron or a bunch of other of our colleagues and peers who really are the sharper knives in the drawer. I was never one of those. I was really kind of more of an entertainer as a writer and analyst. And so on that level, you know, like I really kind of never thought of that as an outlet. I will choose not to take offense. I am not being approached either, so don't feel bad. So you mentioned in the article, and I wrote also when I wrote about Sherry Nichols, the sapermetric early innovator earlier this year at The Ringer, but there have been... And that was a great piece, by the way. I mean, it was awesome to see Sherry get her props. Yeah, well, she definitely deserves it.

And it has been notable that there have been more women hired in quantitative and R&D roles. It's still very much a minority of those positions, but at least we're maybe into double digits, it seems like, or just about. So that is a good thing. On the other hand, I guess from a when will we have a woman GM perspective, I don't know that it advances us all that much closer, right? Because we haven't really seen a pure quant become a GM yet. I mean, we've seen people with certainly analytics expertise and backgrounds and maybe people who were involved in that side of things. But we haven't really seen the person who is hired from the internet to do analytics take over a team. There are people like your old colleague Keith

Wollner is running a department, I guess, and overseeing people, but if he's not the GM of the Indians, it seems like there's still, I guess, a bias, and I don't know whether it's a sensible one or not, against just kind of people who came up in a purely statistical capacity taking over a team. So in that sense, maybe it just leads to another reason to say, well, we will pass over this qualified female candidate for someone else. Well, I think that's where, you know, like, again, that's why I think what's remarkable about baseball's initiative and recruiting women is that they who essentially doesn't just come from the analytics perspective. Again, I think, you know, the industry is in a better overall place in that people can do this and that. They don't have to just be, you know, just because organizations have scouts and analysts, you can have people who are scouts and analysts by themselves. And so when you're looking at some of the candidates who are coming up, I mean, they both get it on the analytics side and they're coming at it from the analytics and scouting side, and they're developing themselves as candidates who are

worthy in both regards. So in that sense, I mean, I look at it, you know, like, that's why I think Kim, where Kim got to, and her capacity to be a general manager, I think is unquestioned, because, you know, like she was that kind of candidate who had the diversity of experience and background and understanding of the game that she deserves to be taken seriously as a general manager candidate still. But, you know, the future candidates that are being cultivated within the game today, the ones who might, you know, 10 years from now. And again, I think that's the thing to emphasize is that, you know, the people they're recruiting now, we're talking about like 10 years, you know, before they get maybe a shot in an AGM job. And then they start entering into the conversation of potential general manager candidates. kind of demographic lull between Kim, who got there so early and deserved consideration for most of the last 15 years or so, versus, you know, the women that are bringing in now who will eventually be general manager candidates. But you're talking about people in their 20s

who aren't really going to get, you know, that opportunity for maybe 10 or 15 years, because that's kind of the career pace that people work in, in baseball. And then when you also talk about like, I mean, look at how young general managers are today. Anyways, a lot of these people aren't going to go away overnight. So it's like, you know, the number of the limited number of opportunities, you know, if there are only 30 jobs, and there's plenty of reason to keep people in their 50s and 60s around because they're really good at those jobs. It's going to be it's not going to be easy.

But I think that baseball has taken the smart approach of by hiring and creating so many potential candidates and creating so many potential openings. You know, it becomes something of a I'd say a logical eventual destination. The game will get there, that there will be a point in time where, you know, unfortunately, it might be 10 years from now or 15 years from now before we have another candidate as promising as Kim. But eventually, I think we will. I mean, that's one of these women that are being hired now is ultimately going to become the first general manager in Major League Baseball, or first general manager in Major League Baseball, or first female general manager in Major League Baseball. I know a lot of people say that they feel old when they see like Ronald Acuna or Ozzy

Albies on the field. But for me, I think it was seeing that the Toronto Maple Leafs hired a 32-year-old to be their new general manager. And he's only the second youngest GM in the NHL. Anyway, we're all past our prime here. That's what this podcast is about. So it's easy when you look at whether it's a general manager in baseball or a president of baseball operations, you can say, well, we don't have a woman because they're not... Look at the

pool of candidates. There aren't many women there. But then it kind of trickles down and you think, well, why aren't there very many women in that pool? And it's because, well, there aren't very many women in the lower levels. And then there are a bunch of different ways to enter a baseball organization. But I think the way we're all most familiar with is, like Ben said, you are sort of someone who writes on the Internet. And then you get scooped up by a team because teams love to scoop people up from the Internet so that they can't be public anymore. up from the internet so that they can't be public anymore. So then you have this whole trickle down effect where one of the concerns that might be facing the industry today is that there just aren't very many women who are doing the sort of analytical baseball writing on the internet. So how do you address that? How do you get more women? I know with Fangraphs, we of course would love to have more women on staff,

but it's just more difficult to find them. So how do you drum up the interest in getting people to start writing so that then they can get hired, so that then they can get hired, so that then they can get promoted? Where do you start? How low do you start so that you can build a foundation here? Where do you start? How low do you start so that you can build a foundation here? Well, I think clearly, you know, BP and Fangraphs, you know, have done a great job, I think, of making sure that the opportunity exists. But I think you're kind of like blending two different kind of challenges. Because I think of, you know, like when I think of, I mean, look at Megan Rowley or Stacey Gatsulius or, you know, like there are plenty of women who are writing in baseball and writing in places like that. But they're not necessarily quantitative analysts who are going to get hired in a research and development job any more than I would.

you might think of as potential quants who you'd hire for an R&D job, you know, come with a very different skill set than just being able to write an entertaining story that uses some of the outputs of great research or great statistical tools and analytical information that are out there. So I think, you know, it's, you don't want to totally like, you know, kind of put those two things in the same place. I mean, I'm not Keith Wollner. I was never going to be, you know kind of put those two things in the same place I mean that I'm not Keith Wollner I was never gonna be you know like but in the same way that someone like I think it you're almost like in trying to tease it out and look at it on the other side to find quants who can write who want opportunities to write publicly and do their findings I mean I guess I I look at the example of a Julia Prusajic who after she leavesfts, is going to be going into the Cardinals analytics department this summer.

And you're talking about somebody who, she did an internship with MLB or MLBAM and did some really interesting work there. But it didn't get a ton, like her model for deciding when to go on sack flies was one of the presentations at the Sabre Analytics Conference this year. And it was really interesting. But, you know, she was kind of already on the track to winding up in a major league job and did in part because, you know, like her ability as an analyst had already been identified before she had to spend so much time and say, I don't want to say the career penalty box of building up the sweat equity at Fangraphs or Baseball Prospectus or anyplace else and getting a name for yourself in a venue like that because she was already talking to the

people inside the industry who might end up hiring her. And so that's where, you know, I think it's kind of a this and that opportunity where I think, you know, making sure that those opportunities continually exist at outlets like BP and Fangraphs, while also, you know, like initiatives like what MLB is doing in terms of reaching down to college campuses and telling women that one, this is a career opportunity that exists for you and advertising that opportunity. And then, you know, so inc a career opportunity that exists for you and advertising that opportunity. And then, you know, so inculcating that kind of expectation that, look, you could come here and work and you'd get a great opportunity and you could do something that might be a lot of fun. And if you're game for investing the time, you could do this in baseball. And I think on a

certain level, fan graphs and baseball perspectives and the sabermetric community at large kind of has to almost take the same approach where encouraging women to think that, hey, there are outlets for me to write. I can do my own thing. I can start my own web page, podcast, you name it, draw some attention myself, get opportunities at those kind of outlets. And maybe then eventually through that, if you're the kind of person who wants to go into the R&D field, like wind up in a major league front office or wind up like us and talking about people in major league front offices. And we've been talking about this as a gatekeeping issue at the upper levels. And to some extent it is, it's not that there aren't already women who could be GMs out there, but I think part of it just goes all the way down, right?

Because if you're a young girl who is not encouraged to play baseball or is even prevented from playing baseball or is not encouraged to get into the game, then you're less likely to grow up to be a woman who wants to work at baseball and is even trying to do that or had the thought cross her mind. So it is something that I think, not that you say, oh, well, it needs to be a complete overhaul of everything. And so there can't be a woman GM for decades. But I think it would just be harder to ignore the surplus of qualified candidates if we were kind of welcoming women into the game from an early age the same way that historically we have with men? Well, I think there, I mean, like the way one baseball insider said it off the record was like, how can you ignore 51% of the talent pool? And that's where, yeah, it's kind of dumb. But, you know, I'm also coming at it from a perspective of, I, it's kind of dumb. But, you know, I'm also coming at it from a perspective of I think it's kind of dumb that Kim hasn't gotten an opportunity already.

I mean, I know, you know, I mean, I find it frustrating that, you know, like however many mistakes we might see, you know, I mean, what would we call A.J. Preller's mistakes? We call them ethical lapses, monumental screw up. But I mean, how many times, I mean, they came down pretty hard, of course, in Atlanta and change things up there. But, you know, I'm just sort of like, look, if whether it's through the interview process, or you name it, I just sort of like end up with this, you know, you hate to make the accusation that when she's invited to interview, it's a box check. But, but it's immensely frustrating when you look at the kind of screw-ups that some people are allowed to make and are allowed to continue to make in Major League front offices. And yet, someone like Kim is not getting that opportunity to just do a great job and be a GM. I mean, maybe this is another reason why I kind of root for expansion for two more teams, just because it's like, you know, I don't want to see that

career window shut for Kim when, you know, like, because I look at that alternative timeline, which is the people who are being hired today getting to that point where they might get to the same kind of consideration that she got. But, you know, because I don't want to wait 10 or 15 years. I'd rather see Kim Kimming get a shot at being a major league GM this year, next year, sometime soon. This dovetails nicely with the other guests that we have on this podcast with whom we briefly talk about expansion, possibly to Portland, Oregon. So we have now we have a theme. We have a theme to this podcast. So you, of course, have your own unusual personal story, atypical for the industry. And you wrote an essay for the You Chicago magazine a few years ago where you sort of explored your own personal background a little bit. But, of course, you're one of the co-founders of Baseball Prospectus.

You started coming out as a trans person in 2002, 2003. And, obviously, you've gotten to the point now where you're a senior baseball editor at ESPN. And a lot of people would look at you and say, you're living your dream job. And I think you would probably, if you took a step back, explain that you're living your dream job. But how has been your own experience of sort of not so much within MLB industry itself, but your own experience of inclusivity with baseball, with sports writing from the outside. I've been really lucky. I mean, I think that's where, you know, like my experience is, for better and worse, pretty unusual within the realm of trans people in general, particularly

in our society. I mean, I know that's particularly controversial right now. And I'm probably supposed to avoid politics as a topic and anything that anybody is supposed to hear in public. But it's pretty hard to avoid when you talk about the things that we're talking about. So, you know, but yeah, on transition. But, you know, like, again, I mean, I hate to go off chica escuela here, but, you know, baseball has been very, very good to me. And that's mostly because people in baseball have been really, really good to me within the sports writing world. we didn't know how they would feel about the fact that I was on BP's initial slate of people who would, we wanted, who wanted access and needed access to do their jobs. And so we didn't know how, you know, the old fuddy-duddy BBWA, mostly made up of aging white men, was going to feel

about this. But those aging white men rock because they sat there and right away, like, said, nope, she's in. uh again that's something we're good on the bbwa and my question to them then was you know like well then if i do have any problems with access at the ballpark you know who should i talk to and you know in no uncertain terms uh the jack o'connell like sat there, well, if anybody fucks with you, you come to us because nobody fucks with the BBWA. And that was awesome to hear. But, you know, I don't know. I just, again, nobody in the industry, like nobody within baseball has given me a problem. And so, you know, in a large sense, you know, like that's the way it ought to be. And so, you know,

just to have coworkers say, like, I'm not getting a personality transplant just because I'm transitioning from male to female in terms of who you're going to see in the workplace and who I am, you know, that experience is a model for the way it ought to be in terms of people sitting there and saying like, what, I'm still going to want to be really boring at length on the subject of baseball. So, you know, like that's not going to change. I mean, like, you know, and I'm still going to want to be really boring at length on the subject of baseball. So, you know, like that's not going to change. I mean, like, you know, and I'm not going to, you know, like, you know, like this is, I mean, I look at it from the other side as well, where, you know, just because I transitioned, find it funny, you know, like when I hang out with LGBT friends and they sit there and say, like, you know, they might might i hate to uh you know stereotype over

much but like you know like ah there was one crew of friends where in washington dc where i first came out that you know they they all were talking about show tunes and they looked at and my friends looked over and said well christina you've been pretty quiet and i'm like i don't have anything to contribute here you want to talk about baseball i don't sorry. I just, I can't, I'm not, I'm sorry. You know, like just because I transitioned doesn't mean I'm able to contribute in all of the ways that I guess I'm supposed to be expected to, but, and to live up to a stereotype. So shame on me. But on the other hand, it's been interesting because I think, you know know like i've also run into i think if we have time i have two particularly funny anecdotes i think which you know like the

first time i went into or went back after i had transitioned and went back to the ballpark was at old rfk to watch a nationals game and uh go into that And so I sit down in the press and no sooner do I sit down in the press box, then this ancient geezer from AP like looks over and says, well, honey, if you need help keeping score, I can show you how, which, you know, no, no. I mean, set aside that it was a large, like really complicated, like one of the work, my score books. So it's like, you know, not your average score book. And it's also, you know, I'm halfway through. So I don't know who he thought was filling out the rest of it, but then to, to, to then say that like just casually

was kind of like, wow. Okay. That dude, you were not awesome. Okay. good to know. But the other thing that I thought was funny was the first time I went to, this was in 2011 actually, and so I go in and you know I don't know what to expect but you know Bud Selig and is going to address the VWA as he always does and tell the same jokes that he tells at every public appearance including you know like the same Sal Bando joke that he tells every and it was just like the guy had a routine and it was boring and it was like you know watching like somebody like you know it was like watching a Catskills comedian just like run through is like oh god you've been telling the same jokes for 60 years well but so like he

has been telling the same jokes for 60 years at every public appearance so it's like so you go in you know you're gonna get the rubber chicken you know you're gonna get the boring speech you know you're going to get the rubber chicken, you know you're going to get the boring speech, you know people are going to ask questions, and you know he's not going to answer them very well or very directly. But the funny thing is, is that this was the first time I'd gone in after I transitioned. And so it was funny because after I get there, and Amanda Comack, who at the time was writing, I think, for the Washington Times before she moved into media relations with the National, she runs over to me and she's like, oh my God, thank God you're here. It's such a sausage fest. And I laugh because one, that's like the awesome welcoming gesture that I couldn't have asked of her, but that she volunteered, which was awesome. So it's like, okay, that's great. I've been included and yet you're pointing out, oh yeah, but we do have another bigger problem than just my being trans here to talk about, which is there aren't enough women in the press box.

And so, you know, to be numbered among the women in the baseball industry from the outset by the women in the press box has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. One of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I mean, to have people like Susan Slusser, you know, first woman who was president of the BBWA, like, you know, check in on me and say, see how things are going. Great beat writers like Carrie Musket with MOU.com, like, you know, being reliably friendly or Megan Montemaroe, like now with The Athletic. I mean, I end up finding that there are just awesome, awesome women in the industry that I just, I'm honored to be counted among. So is there anything in closing, I guess, that MLB can take from other leagues? Have you looked into that at all? I know that there are various institutions that put out grades for racial hiring and gender hiring, and MLB generally does not get good grades in those areas. And some other leagues, I hate to like, you know, like look at it as a scoreboard where, you know, you're comparing them to how other sports are doing. Because

again, I forget if I put it exactly this way in the piece I did for ESPNW, but I look at it as baseball was looking at a talent problem and it's kind of trying to solve it in a baseball way, which is that you start from the bottom up. You start from the farm system up. You develop a pool of prospects and then you groom them to become the top executives that you want them to be. And so in that sense, I mean, Kim Ang really did blaze that trail in a large sense for how other women will do that job today and pursue their careers today. But the great thing is that I think there isn't a front office in baseball today that isn't looking at qualified women and saying, well, we can hire her and give her a shot and give her the same opportunities. I think that the thing that's remarkable about the industry today is that when I look at candidates like Hailey Alvarez with the A's or Amanda Hopkins with the Mariners, those are the blue chippers. Those are the easy hires because they were already baseball people.

So hiring them is an easy front office decision. I think what's more remarkable is, you know, the professional development program that MLB has created under Renee Tirado's leadership and Ty Brooks to kind of create this twofold opportunity where people can both, that they're looking not only to encourage front offices to hire women and look at women seriously, but they're also reaching out to women and finding the candidates and working with them on their own professional development and essentially grooming a pool of people and grooming a set of expectations for an entire generation of women in college that if you're interested in going into baseball and you have the chops, they're going to help you get there. I think it's a great, if I owe to be 18 again is one of those things i think we all wish for a lot of reasons but although i think some of us would probably still wind up in the same place still writing uh irreverently about the game anyways but uh if you wanted to get into a front office i think this is this is a great time to be 18 and and uh thinking about like your opportunities

personally when i was 18 i was writing every single day about the Seattle Mariners, so I definitely don't want to go back there. Yeah, that is a job that is probably worse today than it was then. I guess maybe Mariners were good at the time, at least. Wrong. Oh, okay. Well, they were good before then. They were good at some point. All right. Well, we will end this here. You can read Christina's article. We will link to it. And you can follow her on Twitter at Christina Carl and also see her work at ESPN. Christina, thanks for joining us. Ben, Jeff, definitely a pleasure. All right, that'll do it for today. By the way, I meant to mention this about Verlander when we bantered about him early on. He has, on an inning-per-inning basis, been brilliant and just about as good as he's ever been before. But it's true that he is not going quite as deep into games. He still qualifies as a workhorse by 2018 standards. But, of course, 2018 standards are different from even 2011 standards. He threw 251 innings that year,

and no one's going to get there now. So that's not necessarily a knock against him that he's just not being allowed to go that deep into games. But because he's not, he can kind of air it out a bit and save a little less for late in the game. So that's relevant if we are trying to compare the different eras of Justin Verlander. Also wanted to mention on our previous episode, we talked about the question from Spencer about whether you can hear the difference between balls and strikes. Jeff and I proposed one reason why that could potentially be true. A few of you have written in to suggest another, including Adam and Matthew. Their idea is that maybe the microphone placement that is

carrying the sound of those balls and strikes to us makes balls and strikes sound different, just because of where the microphone is positioned and where the ball ends up if it's a strike compared to if it's a ball. I don't actually know where the microphone is or whether that would make a meaningful difference, but it's plausible, or at least as plausible as anything related to this topic is. Another follow-up from that episode, we did a question about Mike Sirotka, the former pitcher, versus Mike Sirocca, the current Braves pitcher. It was question about Mike Sorotka, the former pitcher, versus Mike Soroka, the current Braves pitcher. It was about whether Mike Sorotka's career would be a reasonable expectation for Mike Soroka's career, even though Sorotka hurt his shoulder and didn't last very

long. Well, the day after that episode, Mike Soroka went on the DL with a strained shoulder. Anyway, still hoping for Soroka's sake that he surpasses Sorotka. And hey, what do you know? The Dodgers won 7-0 on Thursday. They beat the Marlins, whom they now have a better record than. Justin Turner drove in five runs. Corner turned? Time will tell. So that ends our slate of podcasts for this week.

You can, of course, support us on Patreon. Help ensure that there are many more weeks to come by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount, as have the following five of your fellow listeners, Lucas Apostolaris, Quinn Stack, Gabriel Gutierrez-Saldate, Ray Danner, and Dawson Allen. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts as podcast hosts say. Thanks to Dylan Higgins, yet another Portlandite, Portlandian, for his editing assistance.

And please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you very soon it's not inside me to forget her just understand how I'll be feeling on that day It's just like seeing her For the first time Again It's just like seeing her For the first time again.