Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1305: Corbin McCarthy

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo’s Venezuelan Winter League MVP chances, the latest scuttlebutt about banning the shift (and why it reflects the right impulse but the wrong solution), and the Nationals’ Patrick Corbin signing, the suddenly scary NL East, and the offseason market so far. Then (25:44) they bring on just-retired, […]

How many days will it take till you know the plan? And how many suns will pass before you understand? You were banned, banned, banned Hello and welcome to episode 1305 of Actively Wild, a baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs and our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Try to remember how this intro goes. Joined, as always, by Penn Lindberg of The Ringer. I think I mostly got it. I got Fangraphs and Patreon backwards, but anyway, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. That was pretty good. First time in a couple months that people don't

even recognize this intro to the podcast killed it but they'll recognize this part williams astadillo is up to 160 at bats with the caribes de a longer word in the venezuelan winter league he is leading his team now in batting average at 356 he's got a 910 ops he's up to five home runs seven walks still just the one strikeout williams astadillo has three times as many stolen bases in winter ball as he has strikeouts. It's going pretty well, I think, all things considered for Williams. Yeah. Can't believe we had a Minnesota twin for much of the season on the podcast yesterday,

and neither of us thought to ask the obvious, just the obligatory Williams-Estadillo question. I'm embarrassed. I'm also embarrassed. In fact, I think you still have Oliver Drake's phone number. I might just have to call and be like, hey, wait. But you know, how much overlap? He finished the season with the Twins, right? Yeah, he was there for a decent amount of time. So he was there for the Estadillo sensation. So I apologize for our listeners. You all think that we talk about Estadillo too much when in reality we have not talked about him enough. But anyway, he is currently fifth in the Venezuelan league in OPS.

He is presently fourth in batting average. I believe Harold Ramirez, the leading hitter in the league, was recalled from Venezuela now that he signed a minor league contract with the Marlins. I think that all sounds about correct. So if there is an MVP for this league, which there probably is, it's a sports league, Williams Estadio has a pretty good chance of ending up the most valuable player, which he should because he is. Yeah. So we're going to be talking to another major league pitcher on this podcast, Brandon McCarthy. I guess he is no longer a major league pitcher. He is just recently retired and is figuring out what to do next. But we had a wide-ranging conversation with him. Kind of odd that this is the first time he has appeared on this podcast.

You would think that he would have been on before, but we made up for lost time and had a good conversation with him. And we will talk to Brandon a bit about this too, but we should get our own little banter about it out of the way. Suddenly the conversation about banning shifts has resurfaced. We cannot kill this conversation. It was, what, has it been three years? Has Manfred been commissioner for three years now? Whenever it was that he first took over, I guess longer than that, one of the first things he said was just floating this possibility of maybe banning the shift. Now, he said a lot of things, and it was just, you know, keeping it in mind. It's just an idea, but it has not really gone away. And Jason Stark wrote an article on Wednesday for The Athletic where he suggested that there is some momentum toward this actually happening, that there is some sentiment in baseball in favor of this. And so now we can probably repeat all the things that we've said about this on this podcast and in writing a few years ago. Take it away. I there there are so many different ways to go at this. I think that what the idea of banning the

shift is because I think it begins from the foundation of overstating what I think is the actual consequence of the shifts in the game. We see that it is there everywhere. We see that the shift is not going away. There are partial shifts, etc. But once again, fundamental level, if you look at how Major League Hitters have done on just batted balls in play over the past several years, there's really not that much of a change. We don't have the counterfactual. We don't know what things would look like without the shifts. Maybe the hitting would be even better, but for as many ground balls as disappear to the pole side,

there are ground balls that compensate that go the other way. So there are certain players, of course, mostly left-handed, but some right-handed who are hurt in particular by the shift. And if you tweaked the shift or banned the shift, those players would stand to do a little better, but that would also mean that other players would do worse or they would lose their opportunities. And so I'm not sure how much banning the shift would accomplish. Some of the conversation seems to circle around the idea

that if you do it, it incentivizes more spray hitting because now all of a sudden pulled ground balls aren't going to be swallowed up. But I think, and I don't have math for this really because all these things are a lot more complicated than you think, but if you open up more territory to the pull side on the ground, you are therefore incentivizing more pulled grounders. Pulled grounders go hand in hand with pulled air balls and hitting for power, and you actually increase big swings and wanting to hit to the pull side which is kind of boring it's the opposite of spray hitting which i guess baseball likes it's

the opposite of contact hitting which i think baseball wants this does not seem like the chain i don't think this seems like a positive change in any real meaningful respect and i think it could actually make some of the some of baseball's issues worse I don't know do you have a different opinion not really I mean I think people just overstate the effect I think they look at some of the trends in the game and they say we don't like these trends and hey at the same time these other things have been happening the shift has been happening and therefore correlation and causation and it must be the shift causing more strikeouts and more of a three-trap-comes game. And I just don't know how much that is actually true. I think that there is

a perception that hitters have gone into launch angles and are trying to get the ball in the air more because of the shift, and maybe that is playing some small part in it. But I think really it's just that fly balls and line drives are generally better and more valuable than ground balls, whether the shift is on or not. And so hitters don't want to hit the ball on the ground. And yeah, for certain of those hitters who are really getting jobbed by the shift, yeah, they may have more incentive to hit the ball in the air. the shift, yeah, they may have more incentive to hit the ball in the air, but on the whole, it's just a winning strategy that I think hitters should and would pursue whether the shift was on or not. So I just don't think it would make that much of a difference. I mean, there's a question about how you would even implement this. Would it just be, well, you can't move this guy to that

side of that base, but that to me is just separate. How you would actually do it is just, that's a different conversation from whether you should actually do it. And I just don't think it's the primary driver of any of these trends that we're seeing. I think it's all about velocity and people throwing unhittable breaking balls and being more willing to do that. And I don't think this would really do anything to curtail that. You wrote a long time ago about the notion of moving the mound back. And it seems like if there is a big change that baseball would need to make, which is not even clear,

but if baseball wanted to make a big change that would increase contact and therefore increase action and all that stuff, you move the mound back. You have explored this in some detail baseball has messed with the mound before and it's the most obvious way to counter the effect of increased velocity so maybe that feels a little radical but then designating where defenders can and can't play is i think no less radical so you know what even if you had a rule where it's like well two players have to be on either side of second base and then you just have a guy who's basically playing behind second base anyway, and you still have most of a shift regardless.

So I don't know. There's so few details that are actually out there in the public. It's not clear that this is actually going to happen. I think the pitch clock is going to come first, which is another radical change. As we've talked about before, we're both in favor of some radical changes to sort of nip some negative trends in the bud. But this shift one feels like it's interpreted as a bigger deal than I think it would actually be. Yeah, and that's the other thing. I don't want to discourage MLB from making some changes because I think it should make some changes. And it hasn't really made any significant changes to the way the game is played in decades. And at this point, I think these trends are not going to just fix themselves. It's not really cyclical.

So you do have to step in and do something. But I think this would be one of the least effective things you could do. I think you could move the mound back. I think you could change the size of the strike zone. I think you could deaden the ball a little bit so that it's not as advantageous to try to hit the ball in the air. I mean, there are a lot of things like that that you could do.

You could change the way that pitchers are used, number of pitchers per game, something like that, so that pitchers would have to pace themselves and not throw quite as hard. There are a lot of things you could do that would directly address the problem. And I don't really think this is one of them. And I think not only would it not really fix the problem, it's kind of anathema to me, the idea of just restricting competitiveness and tactics and strategy. I mean, you might have to do that at times, but if you can avoid doing that, I think that's good. I think innovation is good. I think if one

side develops a strategy, then they should reap the rewards of that strategy, especially if there is possibly a counter strategy out there that hitters just, you know, partly out of difficulty and partly out of stubbornness just haven't really seemed to embrace the idea of bunting or going the other way. I mean, it's hard. I get that. We're about to talk to Brandon about just how otherworldly pitching is right now. So just, hey, go the other way with it is easier said than done. But I think there's some amount of that that could be done that isn't currently being done. And so if you haven't explored that option and just that kind of organic counter to these trends, then I don't know.

I don't think you deserve to have the rulebook changed to help you out. I know this exists in a broader context of other professional sports who have made changes to how people can be aligned, what kind of plays are possible. Basketball changes its defensive possibilities all the time. Hockey has messed with line passes and the nets and the icing and there are other rule changes. I don't know all of them. Football has made changes. I can't speak to those either, but baseball has made far fewer, and it has made changes in the past, of course,

and there's a certain element of like, oh, baseball should be free of all restrictions. No time, no rules. Just kind of let the players do what they need to do. And, of course, leagues should make changes if they feel like the sport is getting away from what would be its most entertaining product, or at least its most familiar product. Totally support that. I think now I'm just repeating what we've already said,

but banning the shift doesn't seem to do much to me to make baseball better relative to other more significant changes they could make. And even those significant changes might not necessarily need to be made. I had pointed out some time ago that this year, league-wide velocity didn't actually increase, or at least it didn't increase that much compared to what's happened in previous years. I don't think that there's going to be a shift away from prioritizing pitchers who throw hard, but it's possible that the velocity gains are slowing down, if not plateauing, in which case hitters deserve a little time to catch up league-wide offense is still fine maybe we are not hitting for a continued strikeout increases i don't really know but it's still i'm happy to still be in the information collecting phase and i i'm not convinced we're

yet in the we need to make a change phase aside from things like time limits between pitches and whatnot are are welcome because i think they they don't make that much of a difference. But that is a change that could stand to be made that wouldn't make the game worse. Yeah. And I wonder what other unintended effects there would be. Like we've talked about the fact that there's all this extreme positioning and shifting maybe makes teams more willing to play certain guys at certain positions who don't have the skill sets traditionally associated with those positions so you can put a max muncie let's say at second base or something and you can get by because you can just position players in ways where that doesn't hurt them quite as much and i don't know like

maybe that would actually help address the problem like if you actually do need the speedy slap hitting guy to play up the middle, then maybe that does increase contact rates. So, you know, there could be some way in which this would help. That's not even like directly related to the offensive effects of the shift, but more the defensive effects and what kind of hitters are in the field and in the lineup. So there could be some benefit there, I guess, if you see that as a benefit. But I don't know. I mean, I have enjoyed the intellectual exercise

of watching as teams figure out shifting, not just the standard overshift, but shading in a data-driven way, and then four-man outfields and five-man infields and some of the more adventurous stuff. And that is all interesting. I mean, we were watching baseball 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago, and shifts were rare and reserved for certain hitters throughout history. And so if shifts went away, like,

would we stop watching baseball? Probably not. Like, we all liked baseball in 2005 or whatever before Joe Maddon helped start this recent wave of shifting I so you know I guess we would just get used to it and now that we have seen it and it gets taken away will we miss it I don't know is it more entertaining to see fielders moving from pitch to pitch and hitter to hitter I don't know that that enhances the spectator experience or not. Maybe it would just go away and we wouldn't miss it any more than we miss like the intentional walk or the fake to third throw to first move. Right. I think the viewing experience would change almost not at all. And maybe this is one of those things that like everything else, baseball implements at the lower levels. I don't know how much shifting takes place in like the lower minors,

but it must happen to some extent to at least get players familiar with the alignments and to test out strategies so maybe the best compromise would be for baseball the designated league where they ban shifting or or implement some rules and and see how that goes it doesn't necessarily need to go straight to the major league level because i don't think that it should but yeah the viewing experience hardly changes maybe it goes a little faster if defensive players are doing less moving between batters or something but that time is already basically dead anyway since batters take forever to walk into the box and they listen to their music all the way through so i don't know as we always say whenever these rule changes are discussed like we're in we're stuck like we're we're already the baseball people

if i stop watching baseball i lose job, which is my career. So like I enjoy baseball and I have to watch baseball. I don't know who this would gain, but, you know, I don't think that these real changes being discussed are necessarily about immediately gaining fans. It's just about making the game better and hopefully that improves the viewing experience. And I don't think that a change like banning the shift it sounds really dramatic but i i don't think many people would even notice

yeah i like the sentiment of hey maybe we should step in and do something but this just does not seem like the first or the second or the third thing that you would do it's just maybe it's something that you could actually get approved by the players, which we will talk to Brandon about, and that's obviously been a sticking point for pace of play stuff. And so maybe Manfred thinks, well, this is something that players kind of agree with us on, or they wouldn't miss this, and we could get them to do this, and that would be a win. So maybe it's partly about that. Anyway, I hope it doesn't happen and that other things happen instead, but we will see. The idea is clearly not going away.

Speaking of other things happening, the National signed Patrick Corbin. Do you have any opinions on the National signing Patrick Corbin? Well, best pitcher on the market, now off the market, and this is a blow to you in the off-season agent contracts draft, I believe. You took the under on MLB Trade Rumor's six-year 129 prediction, and he ended up getting six years 140 with some amount of deferred money, I suppose. But no opt-outs, nothing too complicated. And he went to the Nationals, and now the Nationals have quite a top of the rotation. This is not their first move of the offseason. We talked about how they've already remade their catching position with Kurt Suzuki and Jan Gomes.

And that, in a way, is like a bigger upgrade because it was coming from like replacement level catchers to now a pretty good catching tandem so i don't know it doesn't seem like there's a lot of movement when it comes to bryce harper but at this point nationals seem pretty good even without bryce harper all right we've we've seen this before remember the nationals had like scherzer and jordan zimmerman and strasburg and doug fisterister and Gio Gonzalez wasn't so bad back then. So like, oh, right, it's another Nationals super rotation. It hurts to have gotten chosen wrong in the free agency prediction game. I didn't think that we were going to see Darvish-level money here, which is – it is interesting, and I support the idea of teams, or I guess at least one team, just into Patrick Corbin's breakout I think that the

the overarching idea that that we're seeing in the baseball market is that if you if you flash big upside you're still going to get paid because everybody just wants stars and if you if you're just kind of boring and you're fine but you're not really like a star level player or you just haven't shown that you're a star level player then you don't get that money and it's going to be interesting to me to see what the final terms are for Yusei Kikuchi and see how that compares to Patrick Corbin, because I would imagine they project similarly. But, you know, Corbin has now been one of the best pitchers in baseball without a question just last season, and Kikuchi was not.

So even if you might think of both of them as maybe three-win players, Corbin might be a six-win player again. It's hard to say. His development was fun because he didn't really change that much between the previous season and this last one, but he added like a fourth pitch, and I might write about this again, but Corbin's bread and butter has always been his slider,

and his slider is very good. He's actually a comp that's put on Kikuchi. kikuchi is another lefty who throws a slider a lot but not only did petra corbin start throwing his slider almost half of the time going all lance mccullers but he introduced like a pitch that moves almost identically to his slider but it's like five to ten miles per hour slower and i don't know how you do that because it's, I don't think it's a different grip. So unless it's like he's actually slowing down his arm or something and throwing it. But in any case, some people classify it as a curve ball. I think it's basically the slider and he just throws it softer. It's the pitch he tends to throw earlier in the count.

He tends to throw it more in the zone as opposed to burying it at the feet like he does with the slider. It's just a little shift in strategy. and it's like we hear about pitchers adding a pitch every season people try to do it in spring training sometimes it works out great sometimes it doesn't but patrick corbin is fun to me because he added a new pitch which is basically his old pitch except it's not in that he just throws it slower i don't know why that works but it worked great for him he was amazing yeah and that's kind of the rich hill thing like rich hill just instead of throwing one curveball suddenly started throwing all different kinds of curveballs and different shapes and different speeds and different locations and so

it might all get classified as curveball but in effect it's a lot of different breaking balls and yeah it really worked he was like 50 percent sliders or slow curves or whatever you want to call the two of them combined and i think there's still concern like are you just gonna pitch your arm off doing that but i mean i don't know that there's evidence that it is more dangerous i think if anything the evidence seems to suggest that throwing fastballs is the worst thing you can possibly do and subjects your arm to the most stress. And, you know, he didn't even have a good fastball before, and that's why he made this change. And so he's really good. I mean, as we talked about, his year was kind of disconcerting because he just lost velocity in the middle of the year.

because he just lost velocity in the middle of the year. And during that period was not bad, but did miss fewer bats and get fewer strikeouts. And so it was kind of unexplained, at least publicly. And so you wonder, well, could that just happen again, but be permanent this time? I don't know. But obviously the Nationals feel pretty comfortable with it. And at this point, the NL East is going to kind of be a juggernaut all of a sudden after being like the weakest division for a while now. I mean, the Mets are upgrading, the Phillies are upgrading. They're both just scavenging from the carcass of the Mariners and the Phillies will probably have some spending ahead of them. I mean, they were one of the teams that was very much in on Corbin, and odds are they will move on a starter or Machado or Harper or someone pretty soon. And now the latest rumors have possibly Real Mudo going to the Mets or the Mets talking to the Marlins. I don't know if they have the prospects for that anymore, but maybe Real Mudo stays in that division too. And then you're talking about possibly four really good teams and the Marlins. Yeah, and so you have four really good teams in the Marlins in the NL East.

In the NL Central, the Cubs are good, the Brewers are good, the Cardinals are good, the Pirates aren't bad, and the Reds keep sniffing around good players because they think that they're ready to start shifting forward. And then you have the NL West where the Dodgers are really good and the Rockies are fine. The Diamondbacks seem like they're trying to get worse. The Giants are bad. The Padres are up and coming. But at least in the National League, there are very few teams who seem like they are

just out and out bad. This was already true last season, but it's going to be even more true this coming season, at least as far as Corbin is concerned. There's a perception, and I think rightfullyfully so there's a perception that teams know just a lot more about what's going on than we do in the public and for whatever it's worth as corbin goes specifically i was asking around because his whole weird like mid-season velocity drop was almost unprecedented like he kept pitching well but he just all of a sudden lost like three miles per hour and some of it started to come back near the end of the season, not all the way,

but it came back, and I was asking around like, hey, privately, did anyone figure this out? And the responses I got were, no, we don't know. So even teams, when it comes to Patrick Corbin, are like, we don't really know what just happened, but he had a good season, so maybe we don't want to make too big a deal of it. So was Patrick Corbin hurt? Nobody knows. He's healthy enough to pass the physical and to keep striking everybody out even while he was down velocity. So just an outright weird

season. I thought that the weirdness and his Tommy John background would have caused him to make less money than you, Darvish, and here I am. I was wrong. I've been penalized. Well, it's good that the guys at the top of the market are making money, but I don't think that really changes anything. Like I've seen some people suggest, oh, well, Donaldson got a decent salary for a year and now Corbin's getting money and maybe the free agent market is back. And I kind of doubt it. I mean, I think for the top guys, yeah. And I think it's just that there are more appealing elite type players this year than there were last year. And so Corbin's going to get paid and Machado's going to get paid

and Harper's going to get paid. But the guys who were not getting paid last year, I think probably still won't be. And we were talking on non-tender day, we were podcasting during it. And every time we refreshed MLB Trade Rumors, there was another guy who had just been non-tendered, despite being like a pretty productive or high profile player, just because teams don't really want to pay those guys close to free agent prices if they're fifth year, fourth year arbitration guys. So I think we're seeing the same sort of thing. It's just maybe a little richer market this year, albeit not nearly as rich as we were all

wondering whether it would be years ago when we were looking ahead to this free agent class as the best of all time. It is interesting to look around and it seems like so many of the good teams are focusing on trades to improve. For for the Mets, for example, looking at MLB trade rumors right now. And that's great. Trades are available. There are players to be traded. But it's like if all the good teams are basically just trying to trade for help, free agents have to go somewhere. And so I don't know, you could have conceivably, not that Patrick Corbin is an example, but you could conceivably have a lot of free agents signing with like the second tier teams who could then try to push into being in like tier 1B. I don't know. This is looking ahead, but I think the trade market tends to be ahead of the free agent market anyway.

But I also think there's a little bit of element of free agency is boring if you work for a team and trades are more fun. If you work for a team and trades are more fun, I don't know how true that is, but it does feel at least anecdotally like teams are just more interested in trying to trade when they can now. All right, so let feels long overdue. I was surprised to learn that Brandon McCarthy was never on this podcast before, but we have the former Major League Baseball player and now currently newly retired Major League Baseball player, Brandon McCarthy. Hi, Brandon. How are you doing? Guys, how are you guys doing? Doing very well.

And you're in an interesting phase because you are newly retired after having done something for your entire life and so what uh you you get to go back and spend time with family i know i know before this you had some opportunity to play with your daughter which is maybe not something that you had the most ample opportunity to do as a player but what does the first few months of retirement as a baseball player look like it looks uh it looks a lot like the first few months of the offseason um more or less so it this is starting to enter into like a new a new territory where i don't have to work out i don't feel this like impending dread that okay christmas is around the corner that means the season's a month and a half

away from that i've got to really get going i have to start throwing this is i just realized i can continue to eat whatever i want and i worked out yesterday for the first time in about two months and i was like all right i can do this at my own leisure now and so it's it feels weird to not be really tethered to anything but it's uh it is also a little bit of that stress relief of okay i can breathe and just sort of live life normally now do you feel like a civilian now have you crossed the barrier between professional breathe and just sort of live life normally now. Do you feel like a civilian now? Have you crossed the barrier between professional athlete and just mortal human in your mind? Are you just one of us now? Yes, very much so.

It doesn't, there's no, I haven't gotten a special favor. I haven't gotten anything in a while. I don't expect any anytime soon. So it's, I've very much melded back into, you are just a very tall person who's walking around on the street now. Yeah. And it's probably only a matter of time before they pull your blue check mark on Twitter. You're no longer, no longer one of the important ones. That's exactly true. As you, as you reflect, I mean, I remember it wasn't, you signed a four-year

contract to the Dodgers. Of course, before that you graced the cover of ESPN the magazine you've been on the podcast but you've also at least recently been on Freakonomics so what do you consider like the coolest thing that happened to you during your career if if podcasts even count as a contender yeah podcasts aren't up there um I would think the uh like a tearful hug from Frank Thomas before game one of the World Series will be my standout slam dunk moment there was nothing I don't know that anything if you ever wrote a story

that just I grew up with massive Frank Thomas fan he was pretty much the reason I just I stuck with baseball for years and if you were writing kind of the overall story about this if this was going to be a movie that would be the final moment of before game one. Like he, I think the emotion of not being able to play in game one of World Series. And I was, I happened to have the locker next to him.

He just needed someone to hug. And it was like, all right, well, this is, this is fairly ridiculous. But that's the one moment that for me stands out as, as being above the rest. You were not a small person, but what does it feel like to be hugged, just enveloped in the bulk of Frank Thomas? He wins. I don't think he's ever lost a hug. I was curious. Obviously, last winter, you were traded from the Dodgers to the Braves, and that was one of those transactions.

There were a lot of people involved in that transaction but with with the way the baseball industry is has gone recently i think people are getting a better understanding of of how transactions are guided by money and and you can look at that trade you could say you're brandon mccarthy you signed a big deal there's matt camp is in there adrian treacon gonzalez is in there scott casimir prominent player charlie culberson major leaguer but the public analysis and i think the team thought processes were that trade was a matter of shifting money around and i was i was wondering how does it feel as a player involved in a trade to know that at that point you were mostly being seen as a contract as opposed to a player and a human i mean i i think if i was younger it would have been much more of like a hit on my

ego. I think I knew where I was in my life cycle, my career, that that was probably going to be my last year. So you're kind of past the point of taking things really personally. And I don't know if that would have been the case for everybody else there too, but I think there's, you're pretty used to like the dehumanizing effects of, of trades and roster moves that they're just kind of, you're a name, you're a set of statistics more or less and maybe not that that simplistic but you're pretty used to it enough to when it does happen and it's something like that that you try and ignore it you just okay i'm gonna go be a brave now and i'm gonna go try and play well there and the same way matt's probably thought this is

another chance to be a dodger i can go be good here and same for everybody else but the reality of it you know in the back of your mind is something different yeah and you were pitching in the world series with the dodgers last year largely the same team so what's the experience as you're kind of retired your career is over and you're watching all these guys who you were just recently playing with on the same stage like are you pulling for that team is it weird to be at home and done with baseball? And a lot of those guys are back on that platform again. As for rooting for them, it was very different. It was very much like a half and half. It was like completely happy if they won. And then you also somehow at the same time, don't want them

to win because that's the team that traded you. So it was really, I think it was my way of sitting on the fence and being happy in either scenario. As like the being at home it hadn't really set in that I was done yet I guess I mean I knew I was done but it just felt like any other year if you're just watching the postseason and watching guys that's maybe everybody's favorite time of baseball to watch every year and so I I really don't miss many postseason innings because I think it's baseball in its best version so I watched all that and I didn't look at it from my own lens. I just watched it to enjoy the game itself. I should ask about that because it is, the postseason is the biggest stage when you have

the best players, the best teams, especially now you have the only good teams in baseball all make the playoffs. And even though the playoffs have been very exciting in the 2017 World Series in particular, I was curious when you were watching the playoffs, you know, before that, you're mostly at games or participating in games, maybe watching fewer games on TV. But postseason games, 30 minutes longer than the average regular season game, there are a lot of breaks. Did you feel like this year's playoffs or just the playoffs in general were able to

keep your interest? Or do you agree with someone like, say, Joe Maddon, who said, I saw in an article this morning, saying he watched the playoffs on TV this year and thought, you know what? I actually see what people are talking about when they say that there's a problem with how the game is played and conducted. Probably a little bit of both. It keeps me there because I just enjoy it. I don't know. I would say I watched probably most of

the games but there was probably some here and there where it was like that's that's enough I'm not going to watch this yeah I agree with it to a point that it's it's not as enjoyable to watch anymore I think some of that is the devaluation of the starting pitcher and I don't mean that from a this is what I used to do I just I think there was something to like the overarching narrative in a game being based on a starting pitcher it's like there's this kind of focus on one guy and then it was like the offensive stand out would emerge in each game and and then once it got deeper into the game you get into like a team narrative it kind of like revealed itself slowly now with starting pitchers coming out earlier it just kind of feels like this melee and sometimes that's for good sometimes that's

for worse so i get what he's saying but this one still kept me pretty attached. But I do find that in the regular season, it's a little bit harder for me to watch now than historically. most of it and for us I mean that's just something that we thought as spectators for you that was your job I would imagine it's a little more personal and pitching for the Dodgers I mean that was a team that kind of changed the way starting rotations worked and would put guys on the DL for a little bit and bring them back and use more starters than the typical good team uses in its rotation and just kind of being there for this evolution of the times through the order effect and just the changing definition of the job, are you feeling like you're getting out at the right time

that that job is just changing so much? I mean, do you get why that's happening? Do you think it's gone too far? I certainly get why it's happening. The math behind it, the concepts there certainly make sense. Whether it's sustainable too far. I certainly get why it's happening. The math behind it, the concepts there certainly make sense. Whether it's sustainable long-term, I don't know that every team in the league can go to that idea. Houston still had pretty good starting pitching this year. I guess if you're blessed to have four or five really, really good starting pitchers at

any given time, then sure, you go to that. But I think we've found another filler for other organizations. I hope it doesn't become the norm, but I understand why it's shifting that way, I think. How open are you to just the amount of creativity that's going into baseball now? I mean, really, we might as well just talk about that. There was a Jason Stark article that came out this morning, which is, in a sense, nothing new, because Commissioner Manfred has been talking about like banning the shift since he was new in the job. But how open are you to the idea of making radical changes to the baseball rulebook just in order to try to maintain some sense of what baseball is supposed

to be and keep it from getting too far away from where it used to be? God, I don't know. There was rumors about this with the shift thing all year and then i had arguments with people over this that i don't know what people think this is going to accomplish it brings maybe a few lefty hitters back into a few more hits a year i don't i don't know that this has any huge effect the way people are thinking people get annoyed with the shift when you know someone hits it against the shift and they get a hit and then a pitcher gets mad and then the same thing is next year once you know that this exists a ball rolls through the four hole now you're going to get mad knowing we could have had someone there why did we get rid of this stupid rule i don't i don't know i mean you're talking about probably two and a half hits a game maybe three hits a game that go away but

all those being singles and i don't know i uh i think there's i think we've opened the box enough now it's not just a whole bunch of ex-baseball people sitting in front offices now and we'll all kind of just go back to normal and when you've when the smartest guys from mit are running baseball teams you know their job now is to keep poking and prodding and find the holes find the gaps there's no reason to think that if you just make the shift go away, they won't find some way to adapt around it. People keep thinking you have to innovate. This feels like just such a tiny little band-aid to put on something that won't fix anything larger. Yeah, I think there's a misperception that it would do more than it actually would. But if this came down to something that the players had to approve, do you think they would? I mean, do players still dislike the shift? Are pitchers still bothered by it? Would fielders rather not have to move around if they don't have to? That's changed probably a lot over the course of your career because you saw it really come in and become this common strategy.

yeah i uh god i would think they'd probably be in favor of it but i i can't even say with any certainty i don't i don't know that enough people totally get the the idea that i had to use the blackjack analogy a couple times this year to explain it to people like it's not a guarantee it's just you just know are you supposed to hit on 16 or not like it's just it and then play it over 100 hands does it work out in your favor it was just you have to kind of like realize it this different way other than that actual one right there got through the hole so that the shift is bad and i don't know if there's a full understanding of it exactly so i would assume they'd be more more apt to just to do away with it yeah you would hope that maybe someone like bud norris isn't necessarily a union rep at these meetings, but that's a different

conversation. When you were pitching in front of the shift, which is something that, of course, you were active as the shift sort of appeared and blew up. Did you find that there actually was a way to pitch into it as a pitcher, or does it just feel like the hitters are going to pull the ball when they pull the bar and spray it when they spray it? Yeah, I tried very little to pay attention to where people were positioned. Pitch into it, I don't know if that was the end. I've always said that I was kind of slow thinking on the mound. There were some people who were hyper aware of everything and can play with it, can do it. I've seen James Shields shift his defenders behind him and it worked for him.

To me, I just didn't have that level of control on the game, I didn't think. And two, I thought with my actual assortment of stuff with a sinker cutter and then like pitches going two different ways I didn't think the hitters approach could be in one direction where he's only going to do one thing here and I found myself getting beat like up the middle more than maybe that so I thought I thought shifts didn't necessarily work in my favor unless we really covered up the middle because that's the neutral approach to pitches going two different ways. And outside of that, that was about the only thought I ever gave it. And the rest was just once the ball is in play, you guys pick it up and throw it and I'll throw the next pitch.

Yeah, because there's been some analysis that suggests that even though the shift makes sense, in theory that there are some pitchers who just seem to nibble more when the shift is on, and maybe it backfires because they end up walking more guys anyway, and it doesn't end up helping you. So I don't know if that's the case, whether you've talked to guys who've said that they've felt that or how you get them to just forget about where guys are behind them. I mean, maybe that's just something that over time you get used to it. Yeah, I mean, Kershawaw i used to drive him nuts he hates

when outfielders play back um he doesn't like the shift he's like just let me give me the ball let me get the outs i'll take the little the roller hit that that we might get an out but i just then i at least know that i kind of won that a bat as opposed to i beat you and then you still got to roll the ball through the six hole and then he hates blue pits so i i can see the mentality of it i can see some people at doing something too because it once you do turn around and a ball rolls through the six hole there's a shift you there is something that goes through you of this feeling of unfairness and and then you're just mad at the world right i don't know how you rewire yourself when you grew up high school college minors whatever pitching a certain

way and you have batted balls going a certain direction. And then, you know, maybe it'll take you three, four years to mentally understand that, oh, now those balls are outs or hits as opposed to the previous 15 years of evidence. You can understand. It's like when a website changes its template, then people are just – it takes them like a month to get used to it. And before that, everyone's just furious. it takes them like a month to get used to it and before that everyone's just furious and i mean i guess you could say the same if you're if you're brian mccann and you spent 25 years and that ball was a single every time then all of a sudden you woke up one day and that ball you hit well just to the left of the first baseman is not a hit anymore for the rest of your career

that same level of frustration has to set in of like well why am i being screwed here i don't know during your career did your like twitter cred get you any clubhouse cred at all like did your teammates care when you would have a good tweet did they get your twitter jokes uh probably some did i don't i never engage much i i look at tweets it's like just a little like like a cat taking a dump in an alley where they just like, leave it there. I'm not going back to this ever. Like you call, this is all your problem. I very rarely would go revisit them, I guess. And sometimes somebody might mention something to me or ask me what I was talking about, but never too much beyond that. We, talking to some players before I can think of some in particular, Ben, you might be able to correct my estimate here, but we've been told by various people that maybe 5% of the baseball playing population could function as normal humans outside of the game. Is that about in line with your estimates? Function in what regard just uh i don't know maintain perspective and be able to get by in the day to day have a regular job maybe not just be whatever it is that you need to be in order to

succeed and maintain the skill level as a professional athlete no i would bet the number is probably close to like a 55 like i find like the majority of them are just shockingly normal people who just are good at one thing or or this just happens to be the thing they're good at right now at this period of their life and then there's this yeah i would say the smaller percentages is the people who this is the only thing they can do and they're just kind of stuck in that time period in life but yeah i'd say it's 50 55 in terms of now these are functioning people who who can do what they want in life and will move and adapt pretty easily. What would you say the mood is among players right now when it comes to labor issues and looking ahead to the next CBA and the changes in the free agent market and trying to get younger players paid, if that's something that veteran players even think or care about?

For my money, it's not angry enough. I don't know if they're seeing it. I tried to tell people this year, I think this is something that's probably coming down the road. I don't know what, but it just last year wasn't good. It was worse than I think people thought. They saw Arrieta at the end get a deal and it felt like people got money. It was like they didn't see all the extra pieces, the beginning of the non-tender wave happening, which is continuing this year. Those are precursors to nothing good happening. So I hope they stay vigilant.

I know the guys that are very involved are extremely involved. It's just can you rally younger guys behind you? Can you support the younger guys when there is very much a class system, if you look at it, which doesn't really exist inside the game, but if you really stopped and broke it down to labor issues there's guys with a lot of money and there's guys who are trying to make money and that will always kind of be the players association issue but otherwise it's i hope they they're on top of it because it could get it could start to move against

them pretty quickly yeah it's such a young game now i mean just the the talent is kind of skewing younger and younger by the year, it seems like. And so all this production is concentrated among these guys who just got into the league, but there's still a seniority and a hierarchy in clubhouses and kind of a deference to guys who've been there before. And of course, the guys who've been there for a while, I mean, hopefully they're mentoring the young guys and helping them break into the league and adjust. But also the young guys are the ones who are taking their jobs. So there's always going to be some kind of tension there.

And I don't know how inclined older players are to lend a helping hand to younger players once they themselves are no longer younger players. You don't see that many major leaguers advocating for minor leaguers and getting those guys paid, even though when they were minor leaguers, they would have liked to make more money. Right, right. Yeah, it's always going to be kind of a weird balancing act and not an easy one, but at some point, somebody's going to have to really sit down and try and hash out what it is that they see the future being it's funny i think like five weeks ago our idea was to have you on to talk about sign stealing in the world series but now we're just going to talk to you about the labor dilemma that major league baseball is facing do you do you find that there's been so much talk last offseason this offseason it's only going to continue until something changes that the

the middle class in in major league baseball and free agency is is dying you've got the top of the market still getting paid patrick corbin clearly doing just fine but you've got guys in the middle who are who are struggling and do you think that that conversation detracts from attention that's put on low minor league wages or do you think it's valuable to have a conversation about player compensation overall and that it increases interest in in both of them boy it's a good detailed question that i don't have a conversation about player compensation overall and that it increases interest in both of them? Boy, that's a good detailed question that I don't have a good answer to. I don't know if we're just at the beginning of a life cycle of a new conversation that will take place over this offseason

or next offseason before the true frame of the discussion that's taking place before we understand it, or if it should be had now, but I don't think I have a good answer for that. Yeah. Well, the other thing that complicates it is that there's so many guys who are embracing stats and technology and data that wasn't available when you came into the majors and are making changes based on that, that, you know, you can have a guy who is not making a lot of money and suddenly he will change something and he'll be worth a lot of money, but he's not making it. And you were kind of like one of the first guys really openly to embrace that and to

say, here's what I want to do. Here are the changes I can make and the pitches I can throw to get to that goal. And now that's seemingly become a lot more common and there have been a lot of breakthroughs like that. So it's kind of an exciting time. I don't know where the limitations lie there, but in terms of players just looking at this information and taking advantage of it in a way that they didn't before. Yeah, and it's the one place I really advocate for the Players Association

is paying attention to these things and trying to see these trends in advance instead of having to react to them because, like we said, it's the smartest guys at mit's we're running team they're the ones who they're figuring out the next trend and they're forcing it that direction and then the player association is forced to react their players are forced to react uh try to see some of those in advance like they're not they're not all just fast oncoming trains some of them you can see from a little bit of distance and say all right this this I need to hop on top of. And the hitters with launch angler and just putting the ball in the air, some pitchers, I did it for a little while, get the ball on the ground, and then now throwing up in the zone and elevating, getting more strikeouts. If you see some of these things

coming in advance, you have to react to them quicker. And you can't be, the slower you are stuck in the mud, the easier it is for you to be the guy who falls behind. And I now a guy has to look at his career if you want to play 10 to 15 years you have to think in that time you're going to have probably two to three career reinventions yeah it's going to be a rare skill set that you just get to do what you do from the day you walk in the league till the end you might just have to to kind of go with the flow and and see if you can adapt the new way now that you are effectively removed you're not only no longer in the union, but you're removed from the clubhouse. You're not surrounded by players for eight months of the year. What do you feel like is going to be your responsibility or how much influence do you think that you're going to be able to have now that you're still paying

attention, but you were removed from the context in which you existed for 15, 20 years? I really don't know. I'll be, you know, I think there'll be some individual player relationships you maintain and some with clubs. And if I work in the game, you'll keep touch points. And a lot of that would still be more player-based where you're reaching out to players and trying to help guide them through. I don't know. I think kind of time will dictate that. You could just get up and walk away and never see the game again. Or you just stay connected, take a job, do something that, that keeps you close to it. I'll, I'll kind of let that natural flow happen

and see what my, what value I do actually have. Yeah. That's kind of a strange thing. Like, I think we all go through that just non-baseball players. Like when we leave college or something and you go from this context where you're around your friends all the time, you're living with them, you're like spending all day with them. And then suddenly you're on your own and you're like trying to keep in touch with people in some way. Like Jeff and I work from home and we'll go entire days without seeing humans other than like our wives slash fiancés and it's got to be kind of like an extended school college situation when you're in baseball and you're around all these guys who hopefully you mostly like for seven eight months of the year and seeing them every day and then suddenly you're gone from that and I mean you're keeping in touch with all those people, I'm sure, but it's not the same kind of atmosphere. Yeah, we have a wedding this weekend to go to. Quique Hernandez is getting married, and so we'll go this weekend,

and it'll be a lot of Dodgers people, so you're catching up with guys that I haven't seen or at least played with in the last year, and then you realize that's going to become more the norm where it's just this gap, this gap, this gap. I've had this thought a couple of times in the last few years with especially with young players and this year with acuna and realize all right we're playing together this year but it could be 15 years from now and i'm i'm almost 50 years old or i'm 50 years old and and he's still playing he's in the middle of career and this weirdness of like i've been gone for for a decade plus and i'm still watching one of my

ex-teammates play like I think that'll be when it really becomes very surreal and this weird feeling of semi-connection to it. The next few years will be a little strange because it'll be summer when I want to take golf trips and you're reaching out to guys. You're like, oh no, he has to pitch tomorrow. I'm that guy that forgets the baseball schedule. But I think it's going to be years down the road when there's still guys that I know or guys that I liked who are still playing and driving. That was a lifetime ago. In terms of your mind for baseball and now that you are retired, have you been approached since you retired for any sort of broadcasting opportunity because, I mean, we all watched the playoffs and now you don't have a broadcasting background, but you can see that when you have like a former player,

maybe a Hall of Fame player, hypothetically, in the broadcast booth who's been removed from the game for so long that maybe they just don't know how to talk about what the game has become. And it seems like, at least in theory, there would be interest in having someone with like your perspective. We've seen how good Chris Archer has been on broadcast sometimes. So is that something that's ever come up in the two months or so? Yeah, there was quite a few outlets reached out. There was some conversation about it. Biggest holdup for me being my daughter is two and a half, turns three in the

spring. And nobody major seems to film in Phoenix, Arizona or do their main things here. So anything with a more intense travel schedule or anything that really forced me into like a life similar to what I was living, but without actually playing baseball, it just wasn't something I could sign on with. I might still do some things and kind of see if I have an appetite for it. But for right now, it was pretty prohibitive, just the idea of being away too much and if it was it was like what did i what i retire for i could i could keep playing make make more money playing and still be away it was i had to find a happy medium there yeah and was that kind of the the ideal way to go out with a young team that's on the rise and like acuna coming up and albies and just like seeing the

the next generation and the excitement of a team that's kind of coming together. I mean, you know, going out with a World Series or something would have been nice, but in terms of just passing the torch or getting to see this next generation in front of you. Yeah, less with the offensive talent and more with the pitching talent and just seeing the nonsense that's happening weekly. I think we had one week this year where we saw three different pitchers hit 104 against us. It's just such a fast, like, oh, this isn't for me anymore. It's like I'm still decent in my own little pocket, but it's being made very clear to me that you're no longer really welcome here.

Your services aren't required. It's changed so fast fast so quickly so radically that combined with health issues and me not really wanting to have a surgery and kind of grind through and go through like the baseball laundry machine and try and bounce around it was it was much easier for me to accept that these guys are very good they're very very very good um better than i than I am. I don't need to chase this down anymore. It's their turn. Yeah. And did you transition into the veteran mentor role? Does everyone do that once they get to that point? I mean, I guess Peter Moylan was on the staff, so you're young compared to Peter Moylan. Happy 40th, Peter, by the way. But I mean, it's like you and Anibal Sanchez, and then there are a lot

of young guys. So like, does everyone just get to the point where you just start dispensing advice that you wished you knew when you were young? Or like, is that only a role that certain people end up gravitating to? Yeah, I think it depends on the person. To me, if someone had a question, or if I saw something that really stood out, then then sure being hurt the whole second half of the year was you know mentally i i more or less turned off it was just it had become very real that that was that was it once i knew what was laid out in front of me options wise and i was like i can't really come back and once you have that feeling you just become disconnected to that group but i was when i was around it was if someone had a question if i could do anything great but earlier the season, it was just little bits of things here and there with Nuke and

Fawlty, guys who were starting to get some time and really figure themselves out and who they are. It was if I can help them in any way, I will. Guys like Pete, Pete's great for the bullpen. He's been there. He has such a personality that he's out there. He's accessible to everyone. That's a perfect role for a guy like him. Do you think that leadership roles just sort of emerge from a clubhouse that's put together, or is it something that you feel like teams actually should have to prioritize to make available?

I think both, and I think teams have started to do a really good job of that, putting different people in those roles in places. Word spreads so fast in the game now that guys get marked with labels good and bad. And there's so much talk about front offices and sabermetric front offices that remove the human element. And I found that the last few years it's become farther from the case

that they see the math behind things, but they also are becoming very, very aware and understanding and appreciating the human element and bringing in people who are leaders and those clubhouse guys. And I think they've done a really good job of that and and then some just emerge naturally you just find out just even even the guy like ozzy always who's who's still relatively a kid has a tremendous personality is just a natural leader has that and it's like well that pops into your clubhouse and you somehow have a 20 year old leader on your team and he can lead the 19 and 18 year olds on the, but that's still a very valuable thing to have.

I talked to you once briefly in a clubhouse. I don't even remember who I was asking you about and I don't even know. I'm always awkward in clubhouses, so who knows if I even introduced myself. I probably just started randomly asking you a question weirdly, but I was asking you about catcher framing and throwing to good receivers and how that feels for a pitcher. And with Atlanta, you guys had, I think, probably

the best right now in baseball in Tyler Flowers. Was that something that the staff talked about a lot? Like how appreciative are pitchers of that skill they're probably appreciative it's not something that's outwardly discussed you know someone's good at it or you or someone tells you hey he's at the top of the leaderboards but it's i think it's one of those things that's a little bit hard to see in real time especially if you're not really tuned into looking for it when you're on the mound you rarely notice you just know i want that pitch i thought that looked like a strike so if it's called a strike it's just like good it should strike. If it's called a strike, it's just like, good, it should have been. If it's called a ball, then it's everybody else's fault. It's harder to pay attention to. The more I became attuned to it the last few years,

I could start seeing it in real time when you would get one earned for you. He did a hell of a job. He made that one a strike. It's not a large discussion, but I think guys are aware of it. Yeah. I guess over are aware of it. on their performance based on the tracking tech and there's a lot less variation statistically speaking from umpire to umpire is that something that you noticed like do you find yourself getting less frustrated with umpires over the years or does that just never abate yeah i i tried to the same way i didn't pay attention to shifting i tried to pay no attention to umpires it was just call a strike call a ball let me move to the next pitch. And I think it helped me mentally to not get lost in a funk if I lost a call

or if I felt like I was being squeezed. So, yeah, I guess I could say it feels tightened up a little bit, but I wouldn't. Truly, I paid so little attention to it over the years because it was a thing that I tried to consciously remove from my thoughts that I wouldn't be the best gauge in noticing. I do think, going back to like the banning the shift discussion, thing that I tried to consciously remove from my thoughts that I wouldn't be the best gauge in noticing. I do think, going back to the banning the shift discussion, I think if they just told umpires, you're not allowed to call lefties different than righties. That whole first pitch

strike away to lefties, just being like a free if the catcher catches it, it's a strike, the same way with 3-0 to lefties. I think there's enough of those over a season that if the strike zone was actually fair to lefties as the way it is to righties, you'd probably bring some of those lefty hitters back into the game where they are actually able to hit against the shift a little bit because they get to find the strike zone again. I would fix that before I get rid of the shift. I'll forewarn you, this is a big question, but going back to what you had said, you saw probably like 104 miles per

hour three times in a week. We know that every team has like 10 guys who can throw a breaking ball at 90. Everyone's brushing triple digits. We know that that trend hasn't really abated. Do you think that baseball does or will have to do something given what pitchers are doing, or do you figure that as good as those pitches are, hitters will inevitably just respond and react and be able to keep up? I think in my mind I can see a few more revolutions coming with pitchers where it starts to tilt into a place of where you're kind of getting to the 60s, the late 60s, where it's like, okay, something's got to happen here. I think there's probably more of those coming.

This year kind of showed me that don't ever doubt the hitter's ability to at least keep pace. We faced – I can't remember that. There was an opener for Tampa this year who sits probably about 100-101 and sinks it. Ryan Stanek maybe? No. Another one?

Yeah, exactly. That was this discussion in a nutshell but it was legitimate sink and it was 100 101 and he was hitting spots against us and we just waffled him and it was distinctly i remember freddie freeman double the left center and then marquez lines a ball right back up the middle and then he throws a pitch to camargo out of third and camargo hits it in the bullpen it was and when Mark Dekas came in I asked him you know what is this what's what's happening this is and he's like I don't know we've seen so much hundred lately that it didn't feel any different like it moves it's good but we just got ready and it was there it was that just blew

me away that that line of speaking where it wasn't like you stopped and you called your family about just having seen 101 this wasn't like front page news this was just here was a guy who did this and i know exactly how to hit this now and i think we'll see more of that with people you just adapt or die but i do think being that there's still only so much time to react that if the hitters that the pitchers do a few more things eventually the fight could become close to unfair yeah do you feel like if you were coming up now you would be one of those guys like throwing a hundred like is it the training that is doing it and adding velocity or is it teams doing a better job of finding guys who are capable of that like where are all these guys coming from yeah i don't think it's i think

it's just guys are i think there's a mental component to it. I think when I came up, if you hit 93 or hit 94, you were throwing hard. And God forbid, if you sat 92, 93, you threw hard then. So in your mind, that was the number you aimed for. Now it feels like nothing. So if everybody else you've seen is sitting 95, 96 and 98, 99 means you're throwing hard. Then mentally, there's something new to go for. And I would think there is probably a training effect in your mind that I'm going to throw that. And I think a lot of the bodies that throw hard are physically capable of throwing harder because you can train for it or just

mentally. That's what I find acceptable. I'm going to go after that. I don't know. Did runners actually get faster or did they just start believing you could run a sub four minute mile and a little bit faster and a little bit faster? I think there's some of that effect going on that will probably discontinue. I was curious, you pitched for Arizona, of course, which had a certain kind of, let's say, front office and hands-on management. And then you went from Arizona to the Yankees, a very progressive analytical organization, and then the Dodgers. And then you went from Arizona to the Yankees, a very progressive analytical organization, and then the Dodgers. And did you have a meaningfully different experience in terms of the instruction and the information that was provided to you during that sequence of

transactions? Yeah, I went from very little to a good amount to the Dodgers being quite a bit, or at least as much as as needed you could get everything you needed and then they were willing to support the people working with you as much as they could behind so whether that information got to you or not was just based on you asking for it but it was going to make a difference for you the catcher had the information the pitching coach had the information so on it was one of the things I've as I've looked back at my career Texas was in a building portion while I was there and figuring things out. And then I laid to Oakland and we're all very familiar with Oakland and what they've done. And then you go

backwards and you go to Arizona and it was very much like, oh, none of this is here yet. And then leaving there and it's the Yankees and then the Dodgers. And then this year with Atlanta, where they're putting all that in, it was fun to see different organizations at different stages in that cycle. So I feel like I different organizations at different stages in that cycle. So I feel like I've seen everywhere on that tree of just full-on nothing to it's in full bloom and kind of just giving me a unique perspective on what this looks like each step of the way.

Yeah, this probably isn't an easy question either, and I'm sure it varies case by case and player by player, but there have been so many cases where something will come out about a player's past and fans then have to reckon with, can we even support this player? Can we watch this team? Should this team just instantly get rid of this guy? You know, it could be some terrible tweet that is unearthed.

It could be some domestic violence allegation, all of these things that surface and suddenly you're not really thinking of this player just as, you know, someone who swings bats and throws pitches, but what he has done off the field and what he believes and what he thinks. How much of that is a conversation in the clubhouse in cases like that? uncomfortable being on teams with these guys? Is it all just kind of swept under the rug because you have to be with people all the time, every day for months and months at a time? I mean, how much is that, you know, kind of behind closed doors, something that players discuss or that makes them uncomfortable? No, it's very much something, not swept under the rug, but it's something that you just, I don't know, it's like an ant colony. Like you just put something in front of them, you just have to walk around it and keep going. Like you're still trying to get somewhere.

So you can't just bog down and stop. And this is the only thing we talk about and discuss. And I would assume some are different. You know, this year we were there with Newcombs and we addressed it quickly and everybody moved on and everybody really liked Sean. And I think we understood what had happened there. He was forthright discussing it. So it was like, all right, this was an easy one to just kind of go,

all right, what's next? We have to go do BP now. Let's go back to work and he can deal with it from here on out. Our involvement is gone. Fortunately, I was never in a domestic violence situation where you really have to make a judgment on a person or really have to, I don't know how you would handle that. I don't know what that exactly looks like inside a clubhouse, but I don't know. It just kind of like, it sounds terrible, but there's sort of like a willful ignorance to all of it where you just have to, I have to do what I have to do today

and go to work. And if something much, much larger happens, then I think you'd see guys really, really stand up and do something. But for the most part, it's a selfish enterprise and you're so busy on a day-to-day basis that you don't have the time to worry about what someone wrote when they were 17. You just don't really have the bandwidth for it. Yeah, I don't know.

We don't want to put you on the spot and ask what you do if you were in a situation like the Astros clubhouse this year. But sort of along the same lines is what you're talking about a little bit. I don't know if you've heard, but there's this president that the country has. And when you spend all day on Twitter, like I have to by necessity, you're exposed to certain circles. Everybody hates one another on Twitter. Everybody hates one another on cable news. Everybody seems to hate one another in the country. But as you're talking about, when you are in a baseball clubhouse with everybody coming from very diverse backgrounds, you basically need to make sure that you just have the trains running on time. You got to get ready for the game ahead

of you. You have to make sure your heads are focused. So to what extent have the baseball clubhouses you've been in been able to sort of, I don't know whether it's transcend or just ignore the larger political conversations and polarizations that have existed in broader society? Well, the first, I mean, the thing that I always try to remind people, like it's, we're talking about a room full of like 20 to 28 year old guys, which is not the most like politically inclined age group and demographic, I guess at that point, like it's, I think if you even had a group of 20 to 28 year old people who are in law school and then we're beginning to be lawyers they're probably not really into it they're just very like head down selfish trying to get where they're going in life and then eventually you settle

into a place where you think about other people and notice all right here's how politics affects people or even myself so there's not much discussion in that way like the more the crazier bits sure pop into conversation and people talk about those, but the rest, I guess it's just, you just try to avoid it. One of the beauties to a baseball clubhouse is really how diverse they are. I could be wrong. I don't know if there's a truly more diverse like sport,

at least that exists in the States. Maybe soccer has a potential for that, but you know, a room where a small handful of guys from the Dominican and then Venezuela can exist with a couple guys maybe from japan with rural white guys and urban white guys and then it's black players like it's a very mix and it all just kind of goes off and there's rarely there's no tension along those lines you just accept and like all right these are my co-workers i'm gonna go to work and and everybody kind of find a love for one another and there's a lot of un-p elements to a baseball clubhouse, but that's part of where

the beauty and where a lot of the acceptance comes from. You realize there's different ways of discussing this in different cultures and these different people. And so most people don't get too offended by the things happening around them because they realize everybody is getting a pretty equal treatment here and jokes are being made at everybody's expense. And then it just becomes, all right, are you a good enough baseball player? Can you exist in this clubhouse? And this underpinning is just baseball, not your identification, I guess. We've been asking all this important and heavy stuff so we can at least move on to something

that's a little bit different. And that was since you are retired as a player and and you mentioned that you had been approached with some some broadcasting opportunities which for for the right reasons you've turned down are you interested in in staying involved in baseball in in some capacity are you interested you know we've seen someone like dan heron for example stick around and work for a team as as a strategist we've seen a lot of other players who decided they wanted to coach or do private instruction. Is baseball something that you want to stay involved with for the foreseeable future? Yeah, at least short term to feel, you know, is this what I want to continue doing with my life or is it time for me to move on or is it time to me to try and think about doing more? I'll probably take a job

here soon with a team. And I'd had a few discussions with teams about some different roles. And so at least it gives me something where for the next year or two, I know, all right, I'm doing something. I can set my head on a task and try and learn the game from the other side of the white lines. And then from there, I can really gauge, is there a passion there for me to continue in this line of work or is it time to just kind of say goodbye to the whole thing altogether last thing uh we wanted to ask you remember you got your your first career hit off Tyler Chatwood this is going back to to I think mid-summer 2013 but you you did pull something off this past season you had the first and second extra base hits of your career.

I think it was Herman Marquez and David Hess. You hit a couple of doubles. Are you proud of anything that you ever pulled off at the plate, or is it better that that's just something that you want to sweep under the rug? No, I was getting good. I was no longer overwhelmed. And so the actual end of my knee had been really hurting in that the last game I pitched this year against Baltimore. It was, it had gotten really bad. And so I knew

this might be the last game, at least for a while until I could get something done on the knee. And the last ball I hit, I actually, I felt like I crushed it. And as I was going to the first baseline, I thought, oh shit, I just hit a home run. Like that's, that's it. So it was like a half jog. And then I realized it was falling short short and so i took one real hard step to get going to make sure i get to second and that's when my knee really went i got to second base and i was damn near in tears i was like well that was really bittersweet like that was a fun double i felt like i crushed it but it wasn't a home run and now this really hurts i don't know if i can pitch it so no the devil still means something but at least the first hurts i don't know if i can pitch it more um so no the double still

means something but at least the first one was like all right if i whenever i retire at least i can say i had an extra base hit and yeah i wasn't i wasn't overwhelmed at the plate anymore i felt like i i had a clue of what i was doing okay okay so actual actual last question i wanted to ask you related to that feeling overwhelmed how long what is it like like your first time stepping in against a major league pitcher versus your, your hundredth, you batted like 167 times or something like that. And you no longer felt overwhelmed by the end, but you're seeing guys throwing 95, 97. They have their breaking balls.

What, how, how much adaptivity can you actually do as a non elite hitting human being? Quite a bit. And I think pitchers always talk about this like, okay, if you gave me a season, what could you do? I'm not really bullish on myself, but enough to where I felt like, all right, if I was younger and you sent me to the minor leagues for a while,

I feel like I could somewhat hit. I could like keep myself above water. I could do this. Like it didn't feel overpowering. And I think part of that is like a kind of like a Dunning-Kruger effect of being a hitter where it's like, all right, I do this. It didn't feel overpowering. And I think part of that is kind of like a Dunning-Kruger effect of being a hitter where it's like, all right, I get this. I think I see this. And then you realize nobody's actually pitched you a game plan

or tried to fully get you out yet. They just accept you don't get yourself out. And then that would be a whole new nightmare to encounter. But at least it was enough where, all right, plus V-load doesn't feel – I very much felt like the way hitters do where it was like I would see 97, 98, and you go, it's firm, but it didn't feel like someone was throwing a lightning bolt with you, and you could tell when someone threw 92, and it was like, boy, that felt really slow. I could see that a long time.

It didn't mean I could do anything with it, but at least visually to me it was. So there is quite a bit of adaptation that happens. You can see breaking balls out of the hand. You can see what's a good breaking ball, what's a bad one, and things start to kind of make sense to you. I'm actually the only person on this podcast who has not been seriously injured by being struck in the head by a baseball. You and Jeff both have that in common. I broke my nose. I got hit by a baseball in my nose, but that doesn't quite compare.

That counts. I broke my nose. I got hit by a baseball in my nose, but that doesn't quite compare. That counts. Has there been any real movement in the last year or two toward some sort of protection solution? I know there are various inserts that look a little less goofy than the original ones do, but I don't know. Do you see any kind of permanent solution, or is that just always going to be a hazard of standing really close to hitters who are trying to hit balls really hard? Yeah, I haven't heard anything in the last couple of years or any progress. I haven't heard really anything there or any discussion about it. So as far as I know, it'll just kind of be we'll just keep going as normal until something happens or until someone actually comes up with something that really is functional and solves the problem all right well we will let you go and get on with your post retirement life if you have any controversial christmas song takes to debut here i guess you

should save those for the the podcast i'll save those for joe and mike so yeah mike can have an aneurysm on a podcast. Okay. All right. Well, we would tell people where to find you on Twitter, but everyone already follows you there. So we can look forward to seeing what you do next. And it's been fun watching you and also kind of having you as a conduit to clubhouses that the rest of us could enjoy and appreciate in a way that we can't with a lot of baseball players who maybe are like that in private, but not in as public a way. Right.

But thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me. Well, the news about the Paul Goldschmidt trade from the Diamondbacks to the Cardinals broke too late for us to talk about it on today's episode, but that's okay because we have another episode coming up very soon and we will have thoughts. I also see that after we spoke, Joey Gallo tweeted that all he wants for Christmas is for the shift to be banned. As much as I like Joey Gallo and want him to succeed, my mind is not changed. Sorry, Joey, but he did lay down some nice bunts against the shift this year, so good for him.

All right, that will do it for today. Thank you for listening. And thanks to those of you who support the podcast. You can become one of those people by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already gone there and pledged some small monthly amount to keep the podcast going.

Derek Huntington, Dan Bracey, Andrew Patrick, Reed DeWolf, and Tom Dwyer. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming. I know we haven't gotten to emails for a while, but we will get there someday. Podcast at fangraphs.com is the address. You can also message us through the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will, they start to tell you as quick. Exhuming McCarthy.

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