Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1412: Everything is Invented

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about FanGraphs’ completist coverage of the frantic trade deadline, the backlash to a perceived lack of activity at the deadline and whether the deadline was really a manifestation of baseball’s structural problems, the appropriate balance between trying to win now and trying to win later, what we can learn […]

Why is this happening to you? You're not a child. Why is this happening? You're too much on your mind. Things creep up on you when you are fast asleep. You are dreaming, you are sleeping. You are stuck to the sheet. When you are sleeping, you are stuck to the sheet Hello and welcome to episode 1412 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. I'm happy that you are awake and covered enough to talk to me today. You had a busy Wednesday. My brain is pudding.

My brain feels like pudding. Yeah, it ended up, you know, we should have known. We just should have known that after a month of sitting around saying, Hey, it seems like we're not going to have a lot of deadline activity. That every team in baseball was like, want a bit? Yeah. Well, some people apparently think that there wasn't enough activity and we're going to talk about that a little later in the episode but

if there had been any more i don't know how you and dylan and rachel would have made it through the day because i don't know how you put up as much content as you did in a very short time that was that was that must have been a record day for fan graphs just in terms of posting stuff. Yeah, I think that it was. I think Appleman has confirmed that that was a record number of posts. Yeah, we could not have done it without Dylan and Rachel's editing assistance, which was invaluable. And of course, our staff did a very, very good job of responding to a lot of trades very quickly. did a very, very good job of responding to a lot of trades very quickly.

So thank you to all of them and for everyone trying to wade through all the many, many trades that we had on the site. We appreciate you reading. Early in the day at Fanagraphs, like many media companies, we have a Slack that we use to assign articles and stuff. And we had some stuff ready to, ready to roll for the day. And we were sitting back ready for things to be, you know, kind of quiet. And then, and then things change. But at 840 in the morning, my time, Craig Edwards sent a message to the Slack that said more like trade deadline. it's all craig's fault really yeah he opened

the floodgates yeah well dylan messaged me in the middle of the day and was like how are you dealing with this madness and i was like this is madness like nothing nothing has happened but of course i hadn't written anything to that point and of course we work for different sites with different mission statements and i work for a non-baseball exclusive site and so for us to do a post on something it has to rise to a certain level of newsworthiness so i think we had a stroman post and we had a bauer post and we had a granky post ultimately and then bauman did winners and losers and Cram did something on teams that didn't do anything. But we weren't doing like a Nick Castellanos post or a Rocky Gale post, which you did have on the site.

So if you just made a decision like we're just going to do every trade and there will be some sort of audience out there. There's someone out there who roots for that team and will probably want to know what this meant for his or her team. So why not? Yeah, I will admit that I wanted a Rocky Gale post just because Rocky Gale is, you know, if you had asked me as the managing editor of Fangraphs yesterday who Rocky Gale was, I would have said, sounds like a character on like the Muppets. Yeah, I definitely did not know Anything about Rocky Gale Didn't know about Rocky Gale He existed and was a baseball player Yeah sorry Rocky we didn't know about you

But then I saw it come across the transom Click click click and I was like Well that's a name that needs to appear on Fangraphs.com And that needs a headline So there it was Yeah it was a very busy day But it's you know it's an exciting, it's one of those days where you go to bed and you feel like you have accomplished a thing and you have

worked hard. And so it is satisfying even as you are very tired. And so, yeah, I like deadline day. I've decided I like it. Yeah, it can be stressful at times when I used to do transaction analysis at Baseball Prospectus. I didn't love it because I felt like anything could happen at any moment. And I prefer to know when I'm writing something and try to structure my life around that rather than, uh-oh, a trade happened. I have to drop everything and do that. And at BP, occasionally we would have like an all hands on deck sort of situation, like on a deadline day or winter meetings where people would be kind of on call to pitch in.

But for the most part, it was one or two people who were sort of breaking down every move. But I assume that at trade deadline time, you kind of put the call out because a lot of these sites like Baseball Perspectives and Fangraph crafts have always had fairly limited full-time staff so we have lots of contributors but we don't necessarily have a lot of people who are just doing this all day and can just drop everything and respond to things immediately so i guess people were just pitching in as they could yeah we were fortunate in that you know the the full-time staff is a bit more sizable than i think it's been in years past. So, you know, we had folks ready on the full-time side and then we had a number of contributors who, and I mean this as a compliment to all of them, were just, I think, willing to neglect their other professional responsibilities to write transaction analysis for us. So,

yeah, we were lucky that folks were around to pitch in because as things started to hit, I did have a moment where I was like, oh, well, I guess we're not going to cover some of these here trades. But we got through the queue. I did make Craig go and sort of reconcile our slack and what had been claimed to Roto World just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. And that did not prevent me from having a dream. And I don't know the player that was involved in the dream because dreams are not always good and

logical like that. But I had a dream that there had been a major transaction and we just missed it. And so I woke up at four in the morning and then realized that it was not real and was able to roll over and go back to sleep. Managing editor nightmares. Such a strange set of things that I both have to worry and care about. Yeah. That's the one recurring nightmare that I have is like a school dream of just like I have a test or a paper due or it's finals week or something. And somehow I neglected everything until that point.

And now I just realized it's all due tomorrow. I never have the like I'm not wearing pants in a crowded room dream. Or I guess maybe occasionally I've had the something is chasing me dream, but not that often. Usually it's the I have something due and I didn't do it dream, which is not fair because like I hit my deadlines. I take pride in that. I know it's important.

And so I don't really find myself in that situation very often where I realize that something is due and I just completely blanked on it. But in my dreams, it happens all the time. And it's almost worth it to me for the feeling that you get when you realize that it was just a dream, which is one of the best possible feelings, I think, because there are times when I just realize I'm not even taking that class. I don't take classes anymore. I will never have to take a class if I don't want to ever again. And I don't have tests and I still have things due and deadlines and adulthood comes with its own terrors and responsibilities. But that particular terror, I don't have to deal with anymore.

And I like that. Well, and I think that it's the dream that i have i have two they are different versions of the same dream so i occasionally have a dream that i have to go back to goldman and work at goldman and like and do a job there that i did not do like i have to trade like energy futures and i'm like i don't know how to do that i never did that and now i have to do it. It seems hard, so that's a bummer. So there's that dream and then the other version of that, my version of the I've been in a class all semester and didn't realize and now I have to take the final

is that I was supposed to have been editing Rotographs, which is ably edited by Paul Spohr already, but that I was supposed to be editing that this whole time and no one told me. So that's the current version I have of that although i did have the goldman dream last night too but in the goldman dream this time around some colleagues from fan graphs appeared on the trading floor and were like no you don't have to be here you just come with us like oh let's get out of here so i i don't know if i should like share that with my therapist it's like a breakthrough

and anxiety or something i was like yeah I don't have to be here. That oil can just sit untraded, won't it please? Wow, that's heartwarming. Yeah, it was nice. Wow, your nightmares are turning into happy dreams. Yeah, we're working on it anyway. All right, so I think it was probably best for you and Dylan and Rachel that there were not more moves

made on deadline day because they literally would not have fit on the homepage. I'm not sure they did as it was. But there has been sort of a backlash to the deadline in the day since. And I wanted to talk about that because Sam and I were joking on our trade deadline roundup episode about how when it did look like nothing was going to happen, I was going to try to come up with some take where I would tie this to the off-season lack of activity and the issues with the economic market as a whole. And this is the latest manifestation of that. And baseball is broken, blah, blah, blah. And then we kind of left that off.

And I didn't end up writing that article because lots of stuff ended up happening. But that article has been written. Yeah. That take is definitely out there. So even though there was a lot of late activity, it was evidently not enough to appease some people and some smart people. So I wanted to talk about that and whether that is a reaction that we should be having, whether that's a fair response to this particular trade deadline. And I should just say, I think I mentioned on the most recent episode that this was the most players traded in July on record. And Ben Clemens followed

up and he did some analysis at Fangraphs on Thursday about how it was a really busy deadline day, the most players traded on a deadline day and not the most war but like a pretty typical amount of war yeah and not a low amount of war so granted maybe you would have expected this deadline to be a bit busier because of the unified trade deadline but once the dust settled there wasn't really any clear evidence in terms of the number of trades, the number of players exchanged, the number of war traded that this was out of the ordinary or particularly slow. Like it took its time getting there and maybe that means something as Sam and I were discussing. But ultimately, there was a lot of stuff that did get done. And so I kind of went to bed thinking, well, crisis averted and we don't have to do the think pieces. And what does this mean for the state of the game and the hand wringing? Because everything kind of worked out and we had all this stuff break after the deadline that we found out about and cranky got traded and so on and so on. But we have an article from the excellent Ken

Rosenthal who wrote or his headline says the trade deadline is the latest example of the life getting sucked out of the sport. And he said that it's risk-averse GMs and they care too much about prospects and they're not making the impact move. And that this is the latest manifestation of a fan-unfriendly movement in the game as a whole that we've been talking about in other areas and i think he made some good points in here but i'm not sure i agree with the thesis or whether this deadline actually was emblematic of that but i wanted to kind of talk it through so what were your thoughts about that column so i I think that there are, like you, there are parts of this that I agreed with. So, and I want to add the caveat to this that like,

I think that we sometimes in our public analysis, certainly in the way that fans react to activity or inactivity at the deadline, that there is less of an appreciation than there perhaps should be for the fact that, you know, it takes two to tango, right? Like you can be in search of talent and be willing to pay a significant price for that talent. But if you don't find a willing trade partner, it's hard to do that. So I think that, you know, sometimes teams will talk about like the trades untraded, the trades undone. And that is a means of making excuses for their inactivity but some of it is very genuine that they would like to be more active than they end up being and you know this is just kind of how that stuff works out so right with that caveat in place i think that ken is

right to point out that the like the yankees and the dodgers who are teams that are in positions of strength within their divisions, but are presumably planning for October baseball, not for their current situation, not making more impact moves when there are places of obvious need on their rosters and places of need that will matter significantly in October is a little disheartening. And we, of course, don't know what they tried to do and were unable to do and why they weren't able to do that with sort of perfect clarity. But that's sort of disheartening.

On the other hand, like the Astros traded for Zach Greinke. Yeah. And that's pretty great. I do think that the Astros making that move does allow us to sort of skirt a conversation that might otherwise be uncomfortable about how invested some contenders were. But I think that that's a positive sign. I think that the return that the Diamondbacks got in that deal is a positive sign for a different classification of team, one that isn't trying to win this year necessarily, but is signaling with some of the

prospects that they acquired that they don't want to be so far away from contention that, you know, they're, they're planning for dudes who aren't going to be able to contribute until 2022, right? Like they're getting guys that are going to be in the majors in fairly short order. So, uh, I thought that was encouraging. The, the Mets ended up having kind of an encouraging trade deadline, even if they maybe traded their way into not being able to trade Noah Syndergaard. Now the Mets next year are going to have a pretty fun rotation. It'd be pretty good. So that's exciting. I think that the Giants electing to strategically sell pieces but not throw in the towel on their current season is, you know, we have to see how all of these deals sort of pan out in the next couple of months.

It's always a little strange to do this sort of grading so early after they've been completed. But they've seemed to try to thread a needle anyhow of not throwing in the towel on this year, but still trying to get better for the long term. So I think that there are definitely some moves unmade that were discouraging, but it ended up with some teams that we were prepared to be pretty critical of ending up in a position that I think sets them up for not only long-term competitiveness, but long-term, short-term competitiveness. These are moves that are being made to be competitive in the very near term or next season. So my impression of it changed,

but I do wonder how different my impression of it would be without that cranky deal. So quoting Ken here, he said, the sport suffers from an overriding lack of urgency. The deadline needs to be as juiced as the baseball. Instead, too many teams place inordinate emphasis on the future, blathering on about discipline and process. Why should a GM play for today when he can delay the evaluation of his performance until some distant tomorrow? So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I guess one thought, and Ken mentions this but doesn't really make the connection that I was making as I was reading it, which is that there were these teams, some of which you just mentioned, like the Mets and the Giants and the Reds maybe.

I mean, Sam and I were talking about these are teams that are kind of out of it, or at least if you took a very dispassionate analytical view and you just looked at the playoff odds, you would say, yeah, they should have sold. And they didn't. And that's, I think, one reason why there weren't more moves made or some of the top contenders didn't make major moves because those teams opted not to sell or they put a very high price on those players because they weren't very motivated to sell. the opposite of this argument that the teams are just kind of saying all that matters is the future and we're just going to be very analytical and risk averse i mean the giants the mets these teams were saying yeah we know that we're probably not going to make the playoffs this year but we're still not going to sell and the giants were not going to deal bum garner and we're not going to

deal will smith because they wanted to at least make a token effort at contending this year and see themselves maybe as contenders next year. The Pirates are another one. The Dodgers were trying to trade for Felipe Vasquez from the Pirates, and the Pirates evidently put a very high price on him in part because he's just good and he's under team control for a while and very affordable contract and all that, but also because they seemingly reportedly see themselves as possible contenders next year, which I don't know that they actually will be. But if that's part of it, if they were like, well, we're not going to trade Vasquez to the Dodgers because we think we could contend next year, then that is competitive to this. That is teams trying to win. It's thwarting maybe the Dodgers' plans.

And Andrew Friedman did say that he thought that the Dodgers were aggressive and it just didn't work out. But I think, as you said, it does take two teams. And if a lot of the teams that would have been sellers, if we were going strictly by playing the odds, decided that they weren't going to sell, then there just weren't as many guys out there. Then some of the top targets that we had been talking about all month turned out not really to be available. in part at least because the Mets have been playing pretty well and maybe they want to take a run at this thing this year or they want to talk to him about an extension or resigning him and they look at what they have right now, which is really impressive when you look at DeGrom and Sindergaard

and Stroman and Matz and then the young hitters in their core too. And you figure if they keep Wheeler around, I mean, that's one of baseball's best rotations next year. They should be able to contend. And the Mets, of course, are a team that invested in their roster over this past winter, too. So I don't know. To me, it just seems like that is an example of teams maybe going against their long-term interests because they're trying to win. So there was a lot of that happening, too.

Yeah, I think that it's hard to, how do I want to put this? I would have liked for, say, I think you can make an argument that some of these rosters would have been in a more defined and definite position going into the deadline if they had made more moves in the offseason, right? I'm sympathetic to that argument, right? Like the Giants, if what the Giants wanted to do was occupy this in-between space where they are both trying to stay in contention while also rebuilding, well, they could have signed some guys in the offseason that would have furthered that goal one way or the other, and they opted not to do that.

And so you might make the point that they could have had a more active deadline as buyers if they had decided to be contenders earlier. But I don't think that once teams are in sort of mid-season mode and they decide not to be overly reactionary to, you know, playoff odds one way or the other that you can necessarily fault them for that i don't think that it's an expression of teams being sort of cynical about their long-term projections like you look at the the prospects that the pirates reportedly wanted from the dodgers and i don't know that i would have traded any of those guys either for you know for a reliever that would seem like a gross overpay and would seem like sacrificing competitiveness down the road, not five years from now, but next

season that might be important to them. So I think that we can bemoan sort of the general disinclination that some teams have to really go all in while still saying that this isn't necessarily a symptom of that particular problem. That problem exists, but I don't know that this is an indication of that. Even I have been pretty hard, as have many on Cleveland and their anemic response to the position they occupy in their division right now. But even they went out and figured out a way to address some of their needs, right? Like Puig is a better player than several of the guys, even though they have played well recently. I got a lot of grief about this in my most recent chat.

I understand that they've played well recently. They've played a very soft schedule. It's all fine. Getting Puig is a good move. So like they, even they went out and did some stuff to address the position that they find themselves in. I think that for this particular deadline, the competitive environment and how competitive the current playoff race is for some teams is more responsible for the amount of activity we saw and sort of the quality of that activity than a consolidated deadline or teams being reluctant to win right now. I don't know. I don't know if I agree with Ken. I don't like disagreeing with Ken. It's uncomfortable. Ken's good at this. I like Ken. Yeah. And I get what he means, but I don't know that I am quite

sold. Right. And some of the teams that were not so active this week, like the Phillies added Dickerson. They didn't do a whole lot, but no team was more active than the Phillies over this previous winter. So I don't think we can completely forget about all the money they spent and the trades they made at that time. A lot of what you do is over the winter. And sure, it's nice to supplement that in season if you can too, but it's not like they've been sitting on their hands for the past year. They've been pretty busy or the Twins made a lot of offseason moves. They only added Dyson really on deadline day, but they were pretty busy over the winter. Okay, they didn't do much of note But they've also assembled A super team here So we've got these teams that are Just plain better than the best teams were

Several years ago, I think And that is a credit To how they built their teams However that is, it's different ways But I think when You didn't really have 100 win teams There was a period there where there was just No such thing as a 100-win team.

And now you've got the Dodgers and the Astros and the Yankees and these teams that are just unassailable. So they really do have fewer upgrades to make in season than I think some of the contenders used to. It's not to say that they can't get better, but they're just really, really good already. say that they can't get better, but they're just really, really good already. And I don't know that it's fair to criticize the Dodgers so much because as Sam noted on our last episode, A, they've been very aggressive at previous deadlines. They traded for Manny Machado. They traded for Hugh Darvish. They've gone out and gotten the best player available at the past couple of deadlines. So they are willing to do that. And B, they are about to win, what, their seventh consecutive division title? Right.

They're the favorite in their league to win the pennant, and that would be their third straight pennant. Whatever they're doing is working really well. And they've also had high payrolls over the past decade or so. And yeah, they have the market size and everything, but they've spent. And maybe you could lump the Red Sox into that group who didn't really do anything on deadline day either, really didn't do anything. But they have done a lot. They won the World Series last year with the highest payroll in baseball, and they've incurred luxury tax penalties

and draft pick penalties. And they seem to sort of max out what baseball teams are willing or able to spend these days. So I don't know. One day of not doing anything doesn't erase all of those other days of doing lots of things to me. And also, like, what is the optimal amount of going for it? How aggressive should you be? Because when teams are looking to the future and saying they want to win in the future, they're still saying they want to win at that time. And that is friendly to fans who will be said for trying to build a sustainable team that doesn't just burn bright for a few years and then collapse, but wanting to make sure that you do hold Bellingers and resisted the temptation to trade those guys. And that is a big part of why they have this foundation where not only have they won every year for a long time now, but there's no real end in sight.

So, I mean, that I think is an admirable thing too, to show some restraint occasionally and not be like the GM equivalent of the vroom vroom guy who's just going for it constantly like you do want to have some moderation and you know factor in the future because those are seasons that matter too and you know you want to have a good team every year ideally so they seem to have done the best job of anyone of making this just a replenishable resource. And I think there's something to be said for that approach. Now, all of that said, and I don't disagree with you, I will say I loved the Granky deal.

I loved the Granky deal. I admire greatly the idea that a team that literally has the best record in the American League is set up for a long playoff run, has a good rotation, has top of the line guys. It's just like, what if we, knowing that competitive windows don't last forever, even when you draft smartly and have excellent player development and are willing to spend money, they don't last forever. next season if Garrett Cole decides not to come back what if we just went and got better and positioned ourselves to be the best team in the American League and a lot of stuff can happen in October and all kinds of crazy shenanigans can go on but really what if we just put a very very very good baseball team on the field and they went out and did it and so I understand the impulse to want teams, especially contending teams of various sort of shades of contention, right? You know, to go out and say, look, what we want is to win a World Series and we're going to back up moves to do that. But I do agree with you that the deadline is not the only time that teams are able to sort of declare that intention. They can do that at a variety of times in the calendar. You can definitely do it in the off season. and i don't think that anyone can look at the dodgers and say like well they don't

care about going to the world series like i think that franchise wants a world series went real bad but i do get when people are like you know it's really great to stick against that cranky right it's really great to go get granted like they can't do this now so they just decided to do it now instead of in august right it's really great to go get Verlander and be like, we're going to go win a World Series. I don't know what you guys are doing over there, but what we're going to do is go win a World Series. That is a posture that I think is important to baseball. I don't want to let contenders off the hook too, too much, but I do agree with you that we should, we should probably take a more

comprehensive view to, you know, sort of how long teams can be making those declarations and sort of the window that they have to do that is not just in July. It's also in, you know, December. And so we want, we want teams to say that what matters to them is winning all along the way and all throughout the calendar. And so it's nice when they do it in July, but it's also nice when they do it in November or January, as the case has been recently. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, I really admire and enjoyed the Granke trade too. I don't know that there were multiple Granke's out there to be had. Like Granke is one of the best pitchers in baseball. So it's not like anyone could have just traded for a Granky if they had been aggressive enough to do that. So I think it reflects well on the Astros. And it does kind of make other teams look bad by comparison because they didn't do that. But I don't think they all could have made an equivalent move to that one right and that's the thing it's like we're in a situation where

you do have enough teams that have a viable shot at you know taking a wild card spot that there there is going to naturally be a limit to how many big deals like that you can you can truly execute within such a short period of time. But it is cool when they happen. Yeah. I don't know. It's just like you can't be good at all times, I don't think. It's very difficult to be good every year. The Dodgers are doing a pretty good job of it, but not all teams are in the Dodgers situation. So historically speaking, teams go through good times

and then they go through bad times, and that's always how it's been. And I think one thing that's changed is that maybe teams are willing to be more publicly open about when they are embarking on a bad time or they are intentionally embarking on a bad time, like a controlled burn sort, so that the forest fire is not as bad as it would have been. They're just saying, well, we're going to be bad, but we think if we just kind of control the terms of how and when we're going to be bad, then maybe we won't be as bad for as long or we'll be better on the other side of it. bad for as long or we'll be better on the other side of it. Admittedly, I think teams have the freedom to do that today because they're making so much money before they play a single game that they can count on being profitable or staying afloat even during those down years, even if they essentially tell fans to stay away for a while. And that can be a problem that can

be non-competitive and give teams a reason not to invest when maybe they should. But I think there is something to be said for that because there were a lot of teams that made a token effort at contending every year or didn't say things that would turn their fans off and say, we're not going to win this year, but they weren't going to win that year. And by pretending that they were or acting as if they were and making some level of investment, but never enough to really get over the hump, then you had teams that were just in this no man's land for years and years where they were never winning 50 games, but they were also never winning 90 games. too. So I don't know how you do the calculus of is it better to win 73 games every year or is it better to win 60 for three years and then win 95 for the next three years? I don't know. But I think some of the offseason stuff, some of the spending, like all of this does come back to the economic structure of the game and how young players

are not paid what they are worth on the field. And if that did change, then yeah, maybe we would see more activity at the deadline because teams would have less incentive to hang on to their prospects because their prospects wouldn't be worth as much. And that would be probably a good thing for baseball. And that is something that will be at the heart of the upcoming CBA negotiations, of course. But this deadline, to me, there's always a tendency to make everything a referendum on the state of the game and baseball's dying and it's broken and we got to fix it. And this one, just to me, it seems like a little bit of trying to fit a pre-existing narrative, I think, to twist this into the best example of that. Yeah, I do think that there is something to sort of having a skeptical posture toward teams saying, well, we're really going to win sometime, right?

We're committed to winning in the future. being skeptical of that assertion is a reasonable skepticism because it can often just feel like and end up leading to kind of kicking the can down the road. And then you look around and you're like, my team hasn't been in the playoffs in a long time and there hasn't been a great product on the field. So I don't think that fans especially can be faulted for wanting to see results in the more immediate term. And I will say that the one part of this deadline where you just felt like, I don't know, I don't know if this sort of honesty, we'll call it honesty, is encouraging because at least people are saying what they mean instead of sort of dissembling about what the competitive window really means. But someone might want to pull Ross Atkins aside and say, hey, buddy, you know how you don't win hearts and minds

when you have two of the most exciting prospects in the game and what you're talking about is turning 14 years of control into 42 years of control. First of all, that sounds terrible on its face. And second of all, what does that even mean? What does that mean about the next time that the good people of Toronto and really Canada more generally are going to get to watch your team in the postseason? Ross, buddy, get it together.

Not great. Not great. So this stuff does operate within an existing framework of baseball and an existing economic system, like you said. And so I understand how the impulse to tie all that stuff together is going to be a very strong one. And they are related concepts, right? The situation that teams find themselves in in July is not unrelated to the situation they put themselves in in November and December. And so we can't say that those things are not totally linked. But I do think that there were a number of teams, as you said, this year that sort of

decided, you know, we think that our odds are good enough. And so we're going to try. Or there are teams who went out and made a splashy move. And then I think the number of teams that sort of failed to land players that met an obvious roster need didn't strike me as an unusually high number. Those teams certainly existed, but it didn't strike me as strange that the Angels couldn't find a good starter or that the Red Sox couldn't find a bullpen piece.

Although, really, you guys, it's just like, man. You know who they could have signed? A long time ago. They're existing closer. It's just never going to not feel like a bad choice. But anyway. Yeah. Well, I don't know if he, based on his performance thus far, would have been the solution.

But then again, his performance thus far is probably affected by the fact that he sat out half the season. So, yeah. But there were other teams, the Braves, making lots of bullpen moves. Yeah. Lots of teams made bullpen moves and the Red Sox did not. And he said, Dave Nebraska was very open about we're not going to win the division. So how much should we do for this one game wildcard, which is true. true like ken said in his article like there is some logic to that like yeah it's just not worth as much but it's still not what your fans want to hear i suppose not that fans are like oblivious to the realities right i think they understand that you have a much lower chance of winning the world series if your shot is at a wild card than it it is a division title. But yeah, when you have people saying that or you have Atkins talking about the 42 years of control.

Buddy. The impulse. I understand why they're trying to do that because they are not currently a good baseball team. And so one way that you become good is by stockpiling young players. And they are under team control longer and then they get good and you get to keep them and you supplement that core like it's really difficult to build a very successful team just through spending money right signing free agents and trading all your prospects that's pretty tough to do like generally you do have to

draft well and sign international free agents and develop them well and have this young core that's pretty tough to do. Like generally you do have to draft well and sign international free agents and develop them well and have this young core. That's kind of always been the way you win in baseball, or at least it's a really nice start. So I get that he's trying to do that, but maybe don't put it in those terms. Just say we're really excited about the young promising prospects we added to our team

and we think they're going to be really good soon, and it's going to be the core of the next great Poojays team. Don't just refer to them by name. Yeah, say their names. And Y fans should be excited about them. Hey, we just got six years of control in this trade, and then we acquired seven is that what's gonna go on the back of the jersey ross like years of control with the number yeah like come on man

so and so all of that to say like we we get it we understand the the issues at play here and i think that you're right that there's a little bit of overfitting going on here, but not entirely. I mean, there is merit to some of these complaints. And yeah. And the thing about the Red Sox is like part of this is also you exist not only within the context of labor, you exist within the context of your current season, but you exist in the context of your immediate season. And if you're the Red Sox, you probably figure we have a little bit of a goodwill wiggle room here right because we are literal reigning world series champions although as a mariners fan i'm like oh you're gonna turn your nose up at the

wild card excuse you sir well this is maybe a good way to segue into something else I wanted to talk about, which is the Chris Archer trade one year later. And Sam made a comment on some episode a couple months ago that we could probably do a whole episode on the Chris Archer trade. And we're not going to, but I did do a whole article on it. here because this is a case where a team did decide perhaps irrationally that we are good or good enough to make a win now move and this was the pirates of course last july 31st trading chris archer to tampa bay for austin meadows and tyler glasnow and a player to be named later who turned out to be Shane Boz. And this now looks like a complete disaster. This is like the trade that everyone looks back at and thinks, how did this happen? This ran off the rails so quickly. And a lot of articles, I was reading things leading up to the deadline.

And everyone was writing like, well, Cleveland would like to get a Chris Archer package back for Bauer, and Toronto would like to get a Chris Archer package back for Stroman. And I saw that connected to at least three different players, and it's like, good luck with that. Yeah, wouldn't we all? Yeah, this is not something that happens all the time. But I tried to delve into what went so wrong here and what we can conclude, if anything, from this trade. And I think what is sort of striking about it is that it was not like a day one disaster. It was not a trade that we all immediately reacted to and said, the pirates are out of their minds, and this is the steal of the century for Tampa Bay.

There was certainly acknowledgement of the risk that the pirates were taking on and the ways that this could backfire. But I looked back at articles from the time and Jeff's post and things that other people had written about what they were thinking when this deal went down. And I think it was generally thought that this was a fair-ish deal. It wasn't out of nowhere. It wasn't like the example that I used in this article and an executive provided a quote about was the Shelby Miller trade, which was immediately like, what in the world is happening here? what in the world is happening here? And that has turned out to be just as bad as everyone thought at the time. But that was like you could see it immediately. But it's very rare for that to happen these days. And that's partly because of some of the things that we've been talking about,

about teams evaluating players in similar ways and having similar goals. And so you don't get these massive mismatches that you got in that deal where you had Dave Stewart, who was this old school player turned agent turned GM, who was going about his business a little bit differently from most people in baseball. And no one who's running a baseball operations department right now is operating in that way. And so I think there's less potential for this kind of trade. But what is really kind of shocking was just how quickly this went from being perceived as, well, it's ballsy, it's risky, but we get it to like, oh no, they would want that

one back because this happened on July 31st. And like within a month, I think it was pretty clear that everything that possibly could have gone wrong had because Archer was not very good. So like his first three starts were pretty lousy and Glasnow's first three starts for Tampa Bay were great. So Glasnow was out pitching Archer immediately and then Meadows was immediately tearing it up in AAA for the Rays. And then at the major league level, the Pirates went 10 and 17 that August and the Rays. And then at the Major League level, the Pirates went 10-17 that August, and the Rays went 17-10. And it turned out that the team that was trying to win now was actually

not as good as the team that was sort of trying to win later. The Rays were trying to thread that needle that some teams were trying to thread this year, where they thought they were good enough to be pretty close to contention, and yet they were trading Chris Archer I don't think they knew they were a 90 win team but I think they thought they were pretty close and yet they were dealing Archer but they were trying to get guys who were close to big league ready back but it's just worked out way better than I think they expected or anyone expected. And now a year later, you look back on it and it's just like this legendarily terrible trade. So I think there are a few lessons to be learned from it, but also just like, wow, sometimes we don't see these things coming.

Well, and like a trade that does not have the potential seemingly, and of course we could be proven wrong, but seemingly does not have the potential to flip back the other way, right? Like I think about another big deal. So like when the Mariners traded Tywon Walker and Cattell Marte to the Diamondbacks and got back Mike Channinger and Gene Segura, the initial sort of analysis of that a couple of months into the deal was, wow, the Mariners really pulled off a steal here because Cattell was not yet the Cattell Marte that we see now. And Tywin Walker was hurt. Maybe he wasn't hurt yet, but he was like sort of middling. And then he's obviously been injury prone since then.

And people were like, wow, and this Mariners team is winning a lot. And they were going to surge to the playoffs. And now Gene Segura plays for the Phillies. And Cattell Marte was an all-star. And Mitch Hander had an injury that none of us should ever describe in detail ever. And so even though he had a very good season last year, his start to the season even pre-injury this year has been sort of middling. And so sometimes you get trades where it can really swing, you know, depending on the performance of those guys. And you end up, when it's all said and done, being like, both teams got a lot of value and they won baseball games because of this and it ends up being fine.

And this one does not feel like that is going to be true. I mean, even for a while, like, we all knew that that Shelby-Miller deal was bad and we thought it was weird. But then for a while, like, like dance b swanson was kind of and underperforming and it's like well maybe it won't be quite as bad and now it's like no it's really really very bad but it took a minute after the initial round of bad we had a period where we thought maybe this will be you know downgraded from disastrous to just sort of not good and uh that has swung the other way but there was was, like you said, very quickly, it seemed like the Archer deal was like,

this is off the rails. This is quite bad. Quite bad for Pittsburgh. And when the player to be named later was named in mid-August, that swung it further because he was a pretty highly regarded prospect too. How did that? I remember it coming over on Twitter and several people simultaneously,

both on Twitter and in the fan graph Slack, being like, wait, that can't be right. That can't be who they got, can it? Right. So Dan Szymborski shared some numbers with me from his Zips projection system at the time of the trade and currently. So I think one thing is when you're making kind of a win now and the other team is making a win later move, you don't really expect the future war to be equal on both sides. Like you're kind of comfortable if you're the team that's trying to win now ending up with fewer projected war because you're getting the war right now or at least that's the idea when you really need them. And it's like Andrew Friedman actually just said this week, if you expect to win a deal from a value standpoint in July, you're not going to make deals. So you have to be willing to accept that like surplus value wise, maybe it doesn't look so great for you because there's time value there and it's good to get those wins now when you're winning

so that's kind of what it looked like according to zips at the time the trade was made archer who was under team control not just for the rest of last season but also 2019 to 21 so he was projected to accrue 9.9 war during those three years and then glasnow and meadows were projected to get 17.8 war from 2019 on during their team control years so a little less than twice as much total war were supposed to be coming from glasnow and meadows than from archer which if that's what had happened that probably would have been an acceptable trade-off because the pirates were winning at that time. And if they had to give up some war in 2022 or three or whatever,

they would have been fine with that. But now the same projection system has downgraded Archer to 3.7 war in that three-year period and upgraded glassnode meadows to 30.1 war so in the past it looked like those two prospects would be worth about twice as much as archer in total now it's like 10 times as much almost it's such a big gap and i guess it could change in theory like glass no hasn't pitched since may he's got an elbow thing he's supposedly okay but he still might not come back this season and meadows has cooled off a little because he's started the season as like the hottest hitter in the league. And since then he's, he's been okay. So, you know,

maybe it, it won't look quite as bad as it did in May, let's say, but I think it, it looks very bad and it's hard to imagine it going the other way because the Pirates were supposed to win now. And instead the Rays won now and also figured to win later. So there's just no positive outcome there. And really, you could say that the Pirates were an example of a team that was too aggressive and that didn't take a coldly analytical look at where they were in the standings and their actual outlook. Because at the time they made the trade, they were three and a half games away from the wildcard. They had a 13% chance of making the playoffs, and they were 55 and 52. And they admitted, GM Neil Huntington, President Frank Coonley, they said that their recent play had changed their plans, that they were going to be sellers or non-buyers, but then they had a hot streak. And they went 15-4 in the 19 games leading up to the deadline. They had like a Giants-esque hot streak right before the deadline, and they kind of bought into it, not just to make a 2018-only move. Archer was under team control

for a while, but they wouldn't have made that move, I think, by their own admission, if not for that hot streak putting them in a position where it looked like, hey, maybe we could win this thing. But if you had taken the 30,000-foot view of how good that team actually was and what their outlook was, they really didn't have much of a chance of making good in that season. And so you could say that it hurts their team and it hurts their fans and i think pirates fans were pretty excited at the time that that was like a cool kind of move it was like hey the pirates they're finally going all in and it was kind of confusing that they did because they had traded cole and mccutcheon that january and it's like pick a lane what are you guys doing here and also like at previous deadlines

they they hadn't really invested and they're just kind of notorious for not spending on their team in general but it was like this one time at least they did and it was like okay you know you guys you're you're going for it and that was sort of something to be celebrated except that would Pirates fans rather have Glasnow and Meadows for the next few years now than the rest of Archer's contracts? Yeah, of course they would, and maybe that would make them more likely to win in coming years. So I don't know. There are times where you can get swayed by a hot streak and think,

all right, let's roll the dice here, and then it comes back to bite you. I think that maybe the takeaway from this and we like we we know that there's often a premium placed on players who are acquired at the deadline because teams really want to acquire them and there's a limited market and i think that maybe the takeaway is that like people should just uh like you said they should pick their lane and then they should commit to their lane they should commit to the lane they're in because if the Pirates had decided to spend money, which I know will never happen, but if they had decided to spend money in that off season, they could have been in a very different deadline position because maybe their decision-making isn't based on the fact that they are on a hot streak,

but that they are leading their division. Or perhaps they aren't doing those things, but they have already acquired players through signing or trade in the offseason. And then they say, look, we know that we're not set up to win right now despite our best plans, but we're not going to panic. We like this course. We're going to stay this course. We're not going to sell off prospects who are going to be valuable to us next year. We're going to keep those guys and have them be good next year. And of course, it's always difficult to assess these things because who's to say what would have happened to the prospects in question if they had stayed with the Pirates, pirates right we have seen several instances

garrick cole being a good one of of players who have improved pitchers who have improved once they have left the pirates uh system so who knows what happens to glass now but all of that to say there's a ton of uncertainty always whenever they're if if you hear a loud uh plane going overhead i apologize the blue angels are practicing and they are uh it is cool except that you feel like your house is going to explode so we will not do a long digression on my take on the blue angels which has changed since i have been a tiny child but anyhow i apologize if there's background noise so anyway we we don't know what's going to happen with any of the players prospects are not that are moved at the deadline.

But I do think that teams don't tend to make the best decisions when they are trying to adapt a plan on the fly. And it's also often unclear if it's really the front office that's trying to adapt that plan or if it's ownership that's trying to adapt that plan. And so all of that to say, including with my Blue Angels digression, that teams should just commit to winning in December and then it and then it'll be fine or it won't be. But at least you're like, hey, we try real hard. Mm hmm. Yeah, you could make the case in retrospect that maybe Archer was not the guy to make that move for. Like he was in his third straight season of having an era over four at the time that the pirates traded for him and he had had better fips in each of those years and he had been very good in previous years but it had been a while since he had been like actually really good at preventing

runs which is of course what pitchers are trying to do so you could say that maybe there was a little bit of an overvaluation of Archer. I don't know. But I think also the point that you made there, that's something I wrote about too, because when trades are made, it's not like you're just shuffling pieces and this person's projected for this many future war and you're trading this many future war for that many future war. Sometimes the future war changes because of the change in teams. And sometimes it can change very dramatically. I don't think this was of scenery helped a little bit. And Glasnow got to go from the bullpen right into the rotation. And that was probably a confidence boost. And sometimes just going somewhere new

and new coaches and new voices. And it's just a shock to the system. And it can be good to get that fresh start. This wasn't like a Astros and Ryan Presley kind of case. I don't think it wasn't quite that dramatic. But I think it is still quite that dramatic but I think it is still the case that somewhat recently the Pirates were the team that had the reputation for

players or at least pitchers going there and getting better and if anything it is the opposite now that has swung quite quickly and I think that does apply to Archer because he was quoted last month being quite frank about how he's had a difficult time fitting into the Pirates pitching plan which is sort of this one-size-fits-all philosophy maybe it's gotten a little less rigid but he said he felt some pressure to conform to their model for pitching which continues to be throw lots of sinkers and throw inside and get grounders. And that doesn't suit some pitchers so well. And particularly like Archer, he had thrown a sinker in the past, but he had a good slider and he went to Pittsburgh and he's thrown more sinkers and fewer sliders and pitching

to contact. And he's just not really that guy, I don't think. So it reflects quite poorly on them when pitchers are just not free to do whatever it is that makes them the best pitchers they can be. And whether it's Morton and Cole going from Pittsburgh to Houston and just being way better, or Archer going there and not being himself, or just the lack of breakouts that Ray Searidge had developed a reputation for in the first half of the decade. And I know the Pirates also lost pitching coordinator Jim Benedict to the Marlins.

I think he's with the Cubs now. So maybe that played a part in it too. But it's just sort of striking how a coach can develop a reputation as a pitcher whisperer and he's a miracle worker and he has pulled all these pitchers off the scrap heap and made them great. And then either he falls in love with that system and tells everyone to do it, and it doesn't make sense for everyone, or this particular group of players doesn't listen to him and implement it quite as well, or conditions in the game change where it's not so advantageous to throw sinkers anymore and teams are realizing that sliders are just better pitches generally unless you've got a really

incredible sinker and so the game has changed around the pirates now where the competitive advantage that they had found now seems to be a competitive disadvantage and they just keep banging their heads against this wall and it's like you can see it coming it shouldn't be this easy to see it coming like when garrett cole was traded everyone was writing like oh he's going to be better now because he's just going to throw better pitches more often it seems like a very obvious thing but the pirates just didn't tell him that so it is odd how that can very quickly swing from one extreme to the other yeah and you know teams are some teams are conscious of that sometimes to their own detriment i think that the quote i will remember this trade deadline will remain the the mets being concerned that if they traded

players to other places they'd get better yeah so they wouldn't get the return they deserved that still is just the wild that is the wildest quote that is that is as wild for different reasons but as wild a quote as as atkins quote yeah that's a wild quote that is a great that is a that is a wild thing to admit in public but anyhow so at least it was a report it wasn't yeah i guess it wasn't brody saying it the way that i can set it that's true but still still yeah so yeah i mean there is something that we should acknowledge about like deadline analysis i mean this what you've done here is different right because we've had a whole year's worth of performance and we can look back and be like this is objectively bad But there is something very silly about the fact that we write about these trades right now at all. It is fundamentally,

it is guessing. It is often quite a very informed guessing, right? And we are often right, but we are also very often wrong. And so, you know, if we had our druthers, we wouldn't write about trades until six months later and we wouldn't write about drafts until five years later, but we can't do that. So we just do the very best we can, and we often say smart things for good need from teams that are also trying to do all of those things in sequence with very similar sets of tools and very similar player valuations, which is another reason, as you noted, that this Archer trade is sort of silly because, you know, presumably you would be able to assess these guys equally. So it's a very hard thing and I am sympathetic to it, but sometimes it goes wildly wrong and sometimes you get Zach Greinke. So that sounds good. While we're on the subject of the Pirates, is there anything that we should say about the suspensions that were announced on Thursday for the Tuesday Reds Pirates brawl? People should stop fighting.

This was a fight that I think was, I mean, there was the one very, very good photo that emerged from this fight. I'm conflicted because I'm very much over the brawls, but the photography this season has been exquisite. It has been very, very good. The Yasuo Puig taking on an entire team photo from earlier this year,

and then the Amir Garrett taking on an entire team photo from this time. It's a fun, very highly memeable genre of picture. But people should not fight. It's very silly. It is a bad way of conflict resolution. It breeds further conflict, as evidenced by these reds and pirates players who

just seem to want to knife one another uh in a way that is very aggressive i think that the suspensions were warranted it was what i saw somewhere on twitter is 40 games worth of suspensions um i think it is interesting that was it hurdle or was it the someone on the Reds who was penalized not only for the role in this fight but for how many prior ejections he had had I thought that was funny yeah am I remembering that Hurdle was suspended for two games and David Bell was suspended for six games yes for coming back on the field following his ejection escalating the incident with his aggressive actions his club's intentional pitch at marte and his numerous ejections this season i couldn't spending you for getting ejected a lot yeah it's like hey man we get it you gotta cool it you gotta cool it now we we're not gonna

take this anymore i think it's good you have to there need to be sufficient consequences to short circuit whatever that immediate anger impulses in people which i understand is a hard thing to short circuit we all have moments where we are blustery or too angry and then we feel badly about it later and you need to you need to make the problems of future you the problems of present you and so i think that the discipline needs to be pretty strict i still think it is one, that Puig was allowed to stay in that game as long as he was. That remains a truly strange thing because he had been traded and he just kept playing baseball. And I wanted very much for him to know he had been traded and to decide to fight anyway.

It does not appear that that was necessarily the case, right? I think we think that he did not know that he was now an employee or soon to be an employee of the Cleveland Indians, but was still an employee of the Cincinnati Reds. So the context makes it all the more interesting, but people shouldn't fight. We're not delighting in it. We're saying don't fight.

We are saying props to the photographer who managed to get that very compelling shot. But don't fight. Fighting is bad. I like managers getting suspended for their roles in the fight. I agree. Because they've probably either implicitly or explicitly contributed to the tensions. Oh, yeah. I mean, the hurdle the pirates are Oh, yeah. If they're, I mean, a hurdle the Pirates are always throwing inside.

So maybe that leads to more tensions and they're doing that supposedly for an advantage. And they think that if you throw inside that it helps you in the rest of that at bat. You know, Saris just wrote

an article about that, but he was suspended for the club's multiple intentional pitches thrown at Dietrich this season. So MLB is basically saying, hey, we know that you're telling these guys to throw at them or you're not stepping in at the very least, and you should be because you're the adult in the room. So I like that.

And Keone Kella was suspended for 10 games for throwing in the head region of Dietrich, 10 games for throwing in the head region of Dietrich, which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but by baseball suspension for beanball standards, 10 games is pretty hefty. So that's something. And Amir Garrett got eight games for single-handedly attacking the Pirates, which in a sense brought its own punishment upon him. But this is additional punishment for that. I just, yeah, I'm not laughing because I'm delighted that he did it.

I just, you know, it was an evening that had seen trade activity. So I did not immediately, I did not watch this fight live. I did not have this game on. Clearly, these teams have been sort of joshing at each other and engaged in some wrestling throughout the season. So when I heard that there had been a fight, the only angle that I was interested in was the Puig part.

And I did not have the game on. And I thought, oh, I'm going to turn this on. It's going to be fairly standard. You know, a guy's going to throw inside and the other guy's going to squawk and then the benches are going to clear and the bullpen will run out to do nothing and so the managers will stand there hugging each other while they fight air quotes and it'll be your standard fare and then i turned it on and i was like this is this is aggressive in a way that is quite unusual even within the realm of baseball fights. He was just ready to fight the entire team by himself. And I will say it was disconcerting.

You know, a lot of the time when bench is clear, they aren't really, there's just a lot of like standing around and no one's really trying to inflict damage. And it's, you know, it's a chest thumping kind of a thing occasionally it does escalate in a way that seems quite bad like you know uh you know when when harper and strickland went at each other that was bad when the tigers and the yankees brawled 17 000 times in one game a year or two ago and uh and gary sanchez just like kidney punched miguel cabrera that was bad but often it's just it's just a bunch of testosterone fueled silliness but amir garrett

wanted to hurt someone like he yes he pulled back and was ready to wallop another person so it was i thought i was going to watch one thing and then i turned it on and quickly realized that I was watching a very different genre of film and I didn't like it yeah but yeah it was dramatic at least so last thing I think it's a new month which means that Sam wrote another article about the Hall of Famers Mike Trout passed last month and July was a busy month For Mike Trout passing Hall of Famers He passed eight of them And he had a good month And he leapfrogged Ed Dalahanty Gary Carter, Bobby Wallace, Frankie Frisch

Barry Larkin, Ron Santo Alan Trammell And the underrated Johnny Mize And as always the best part of these pieces Is reading Sam's little Recaps of each Hall of Famers career And why we should appreciate them and yet why we should not appreciate them quite as much as Mike Trout. And every time it's like, well, this guy's best season was as good as Mike Trout's sixth best season. There's a line in here that Mike Trout's average season is as good as the typical Hall of Famer's best season, which I don't know that he actually crunched the numbers on that or whether he's just sort of saying that based on eyeballing this stuff. But that sounds about right.

And that is kind of amazing to think about. But I think my favorite part of this piece was in the Bobby Wallace section. And as Sam notes, Bobby Wallace, probably one of the least known Hall of Famers, good player, but played a very long time ago, 1890s to I think 1918. He played for a long time, but he was a glove guy. He hit okay, but he was best known for his glove and seems to have been a very deserving Hall of Famer, but was not very well remembered. And there's a quote in here about one of his great contributions to the game. And this is Wallace himself quoted in his Sabre bio. He says,

As more speed afoot was constantly demanded for big league ball, he's a shortstop by the way, I noticed the many infield bounders which the runner beat to first only by the thinnest fractions of a second. I also noted that the old-time three-phase movement, fielding a ball, coming erect for a toss, and throwing to first, wouldn't do uncertain hits with fast men. It was plain that the stop and toss had to be combined into a continuous movement. So Bobby Wallace just like invented throwing. He just, he invented, as Sam says, he is generally credited with inventing the now standard continuous motion of fielding and throwing, which I had not thought of as something that had to be invented, which I really like this anecdote because when Sam and I were talking the other day

about getting a head start on 3-2, he was saying how that's probably something that someone had to think of at some point, like, hey, I can run. There's no downside here. I can just get a head start, full count, might as well. And he was saying it probably took decades for someone to think of that. And there was probably a backlash when they started doing it. And I hadn't considered that. And I really hadn't considered this. And this is like Bobby Wallace came up in 1894. So baseball had been played for, you know, like 50-ish years at that point. It wasn't like a brand new sport. And Major League Baseball had been played for like 25 years almost.

So it took a while to invent like fielding and throwing without just standing up and taking your time and really making those two separate movements, which is kind of incredible because I really like thinking about things that we take for granted that had to be invented. When I look back at medieval art, for instance, and people say, why were they so bad at drawing in the Middle Ages? And that's probably not true. I'm not an art expert, but I know they placed more of an emphasis on symbolism back then than realism. And so they weren't always trying to accurately represent figures, let's say. And they had inferior materials to work with. And that was probably part of it. But also part of it was that they just hadn't really discovered perspective yet. And they hadn't done anatomy.

So they didn't really know what bodies were supposed to look like. Yeah, it's where all their hands are weird in medieval art. They look very wispy. Yeah. And their heads are the wrong size. You're like, what human has ever looked like this? Right. And I can't draw, but I feel like I grew up around a lot of people who were just almost instinctively really good at drawing.

Maybe they worked harder at it than I realized. almost instinctively really good at drawing. Maybe they worked harder at it than I realized, but like I think of that almost as just like a natural knack that you have to be able to look at something and then represent it on the page. But like it took humans like many millennia to figure out like, oh, you know, farther away objects should be smaller than the closer ones.

And that's how you can tell that they're farther away objects should be smaller than the closer ones. And that's how you can tell that they're farther away. And like the idea of foreshortening and all these things that the Renaissance artists came up with. And that to me is kind of wild that like we had to think of that and have this system so that we could make drawings look like things in real life. And that's kind of what this is to me. make drawings look like things in real life and that's kind of what this is to me like people had to figure out how to throw the ball over to first base pretty quickly which just seems like it should be a pretty instinctive thing it does seem like it should be an instinctive thing but it just well the thing is nothing had forced it to be instinctive until they got faster yeah and that's and wouldn't you rather you would rather instead

of throwing on the run that's that's risky that can go awry we see that go awry all the time you'd rather come set and and throw and you just didn't have a reason to not do that more optimal thing because uh because it didn't matter because you didn't have to and then people got faster and oh no something gonna work gotta gotta figure out a new thing yeah which is also because it didn't matter because you didn't have to and then people got faster and you're like oh no something gonna work gotta gotta figure out a new thing yeah which is also when people say that the 90 foot base pass are like divinely inspired and it's the most perfect thing ever a it was i think the process of some trial and error you figured out how long the base pass should be because that's how long it took people to get to those places but also there was like a give and take there where the runners started running faster

and then the fielders had to actually throw in a continuous motion right and so it isn't as if that 90 foot distance was perfect forever it was like one side got better at covering that distance and then the other side got better at getting that distance and then the other side got better at getting the ball over there faster and that whole process has continued i i guess it's still impressive that even though sides have innovated and guys have gotten faster and fielders have adjusted everything that we're still using the same length base pass that bobby wallace was and whether it has forced these adjustments or not, it still works. So that is kind of cool.

But it's not just like this divinely inspired thing where we discovered on a stone tablet that it should be 90 feet. Right. Kind of, there's a reason why it's 90 feet. But this was wonderful. Well, and I like, it's just, I don't think we ever talk enough and it gets, it would get, it would get boring. And so I get why we don't do it and we would sound sort of twee and sentimental.

And so I understand that too. But like, I don't think we talk enough about how hard, how hard it is to be a baseball player, how hard baseball is that, and then to be able to adapt the already hard thing, to do an even harder thing, and to do that within the course of one's career. And to be able to not only make that adjustment, figure out what adjustment it is that you need to make to have the confidence to do it. Can you imagine the first time he tried this in a game? people were probably like, sir, what are you up to here? Bobby, what is this bit of business that you're engaged in?

And he was just like, no, like the guy's faster now. I got to figure it out. Yeah. Right? And he did it. That's great. Yeah.

These guys are amazing. So I'm going to take back every single thing I said about the trade deadline because the fact that we don't talk about this stuff and Mike Trout every day and instead have to spend time on other stuff is an indication that the other stuff has failed because we should talk about this all the time because it's amazing.

Mike Trout's amazing. And the guys he passed are amazing. We should talk about them every day. I also love very much that Bobby Wallace decided to be an umpire and then was like, I don't want to do that. And he went back to playing. field and he could kind of play anywhere. And I think it was Doc Adams on the Knickerbockers who figured out this seems to be the best place to stand. Like, it seems like a lot of balls are hit over here. So, and then everyone was like, yeah. And everyone was like, Hey, Doc Adams, you're onto something, but that is a good place to stand. And that's how we end up with these things. So it wasn't like the founders perceived that this was the perfect place to put this person.

It was like they figured it out. And it's just the best because at any point along the way, they could have not done any of these things. And the game would be worse for it. And it would be less entertaining. And who knows if you and I would even have the jobs we have as a result of that. And there are people in both of our lives who we know because of this. There are people in our lives who we know because Bobby Wallace was like, I'm going to be an athlete.

Right? That's amazing to think about. It's all a crazy miracle because it doesn't have to be like this at all. As you said, it is not given to us on stone tablets. It is all made up. And we managed to make up this great thing i mean and along those lines some people have been tweeting us about the play that jeff mcneil made yeah right field in the mets game where what he was in

chicago right and chicago they were the first team way to the foul poles and so there was a play a ball that was hit very close to the netting down the line and Jeff McNeil just cannonballed into the netting and he caught this ball because he accounted for the net I guess and he realized that he wasn't going to go head

first into the stands that he could just kind of carry him off of this net and so he planned for that. And that is now going to be a defensive technique. Like probably that'll be something players practice. And maybe, I mean, this would have happened. Someone else would have done it inevitably, but it's like the Jeff McNeil play now. He's like the first guy to do this. And as other teams do this netting and extend the netting in every ballpark and i'm sure this sort of play has happened in japan and korea and other places where they've

had the netting extended for a while now but but that's the the thing like the rule changes something changes and players adjust so that you could say well i i'm not going to catch this thing because i i can't go all out because there's a net there now. But alternatively, you could just say, yeah, I can just run as fast as I want and I'm not going to get hurt because I'll just land softly in this net and I'll bounce off it and I can make this cool catch. It's really, it's just the best thing. And I feel very tired and I will, you know, I'm sure that people are listening to this episode and they're like there have been certain points at which meg has not made as much sense as she typically does and it is because my brain is pudding and so i apologize for that but like

it's just the best it's so good and it's such a good reason to be tired and uh it just it keeps giving us ways to be better and i uh, yeah, it's just the best thing. Can I share my cranky quote before we go? Oh, yeah. I was going to say we should end on that happy note, but no note could be happier than this. No note could be happier than this, but now I have to find it again because I sent it to you in Gchat.

I'm going to, oh, okay, I found it. So I have shared previously my delight in cranky quotes. I think I was talking about this with a friend and I was trying to explain why I found it funny. And my friend asked, do you think that he was joking? And I was like, I don't know. And that's why it's great because I don't know. And I don't ever want to know. I don't want to know more than I do now.

So this is from a couple of years ago after the Granke trade happened. Somebody tweeted this at me. I do not know if, I don't know what piece this is from. I imagine that Andrew Joseph who, who tweeted this must've written it, but if he did not write this piece, then I apologize. Manager Don Mattingly had called a serious team meeting, but Granke, who never speaks out, stood up and got the room's attention. He said, Some of you guys have been doing the number two

and not washing your hands. It's not good. I've noticed it even happening earlier today, so if you guys could just be better about it, that would be great. And then he sat back down. It's so good. I love several things about this this but my favorite thing is that he did not call this

meeting which would have also been great as an aside he hijacked his manager's meeting to implore his teammates to wash their hands after going to the bathroom yeah and the fact that he called it doing the number two. Doing the number two. One does not know if he objected similarly to people who did not wash their hands after doing the number one, but the number two, that was a bridge too far for Granky, and he had to say his piece, and he did. I noticed it even happening earlier today. Yeah.

Has he been following players around? He's been watching them. Yeah, Has he been like following players around? He's been watching them. Yeah. Has he just happened to notice this because he was in the bathroom at the same time? Or is he like camping out there to catch players in the act? Yeah. There's a lot of things about this that we will never know.

But wondering about them will bring me joy for the rest of the day. Yeah. And everyone laughed once they realized that he was evidently serious which is nice because this is the kind of thing that like you can imagine like no one likes the like workplace busybody who's like policing other people's behavior at the office or something but when granky does it it's great because he's granky and he's one of a kind and i think everyone just appreciates his perspective on things yep yep houston astro zach cranky that's gonna take a little it'll take a little adjusting when will he start he just started yesterday we're recording this on thursday so i

guess that probably what that puts him on track for Monday? Yeah, depending on off days. Depending on off days, yes. Yeah. Yeah, that'll be fun. This anecdote was in an Andrew Joseph article, but it was evidently originally in Molly Knight's book. So good job, Molly, getting that anecdote. Yeah, that is a great anecdote.

Goodness. I do hope that someone will write the Zach Greinke book or that he will write the Zach Greinke autobiography someday. I don't know. Maybe it's best consumed through anecdotes like this, but I want more. I want more, but I feel like it would take a very particular person. I don't know who that person is would just take that writer to player matchup would need to be just right because i could also see him being not forthcoming if he did not feel that the the

arrangement was right so i hope he finds that just right right or just a book that's a collection of other players talking about granky and telling their granky stories. That might be even better. Yeah, I have a book of Ishiro quotes that I got at the Seattle Public Library big book sale, and it is delightful. So maybe we just need one of those. Yeah, that'd be great too. Maybe with like a little commentary by Granky at the end of every story

where he explains what he was thinking at the time. So what I was thinking was that, you know, it's pretty gross when people don't wash their hands and it would be nice if they wash their hands so thought i'd mention it all right get some rest and thank you we will talk again next week sounds good one more thing i meant to mention rob arthur wrote a piece for baseball prospectus last month about how ejections are up significantly this season. We've just seen more players and particularly managers tossed, I think right up there with 2015 when there were more ejections because of the tensions about pace of play rules being enforced. We haven't seen that sort of rule change this season, so it's kind of curious that ejections are way up. Rob in his article speculated that

it could be because of growing unrest about umpires making mistakes behind the plate now that robot umps are getting discussed more seriously and implemented in the Atlantic League. Players and managers may just be less tolerant of human error by umpires, but all of these brawls fit into that trend. So I will link to Rob's piece as well as many of the other articles that we discussed today. That will do it for today and for this week. Thank you for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks. Ryan Giles, Eric Edston, Timothy M. Stackhouse,

Andy Kleinberg, and Ben Gosby. Thanks to all of you. or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can also go pick up my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It is the story of the player development revolution driving today's game. And if you like it, please leave us a positive review for that too on Amazon and Goodreads. It does help us out. We hope you have a wonderful weekend,

and we will be back to talk to you early next week. I landed right on target, but the target rolled away. And it left him pointing nowhere. You could hear the children say, he's a fella, a man who invented himself. He's a fella, a man who invented himself.