Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1460: Live from New York, it’s Effectively Wild!

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley host a FanGraphs Live! event and EW taping at Subculture in Manhattan, featuring three panels comprising seven guests: “Major League Update” (current events and New York baseball) with FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe and The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler and Mark Carig; “Baseball By the Numbers” (sabermetrics and Statcast) with FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards […]

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 1460 of Effectively Wild. This episode was recorded live in New York on Thursday night at Subculture on Bleeker Street. It was a Fangraphs Live event and Meg and I emceed. We did three panels back to back to back, no breaks in between, one on general interest baseball news and some Yankees and Mets, one on stats and stat cast, and one on scouting and the evolution of player evaluation. You'll hear many of your favorite Fangraphs writers and former Effectively Wild guests. So you're going to hear the whole thing right now. We had a great time. And as a podcast, this will be the longest episode ever of Effectively Wild.

More than two hours, seven guests. So settle in. What you eat or what you wear I want you to join Together with the band There's a million ways to laugh Everyone's a fan Come on and join Together with the band Hi, everyone. Very prompt.

Thanks for coming out and hanging out with us. Welcome to Fangraphs Live. Very official name. We want to thank you all for joining us, especially our Fangraphs members. I'm Meg Rowley, for those of you who I haven't met, and I'm joined, as always... Almost always, by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, everyone, and thanks to everyone listening to us and Effectively Wild and our Patreon supporters who are here or not here.

Thanks to all of you. We appreciate it so much. Just to give you guys a sense of what we're going to do tonight, this is our illustrious MLB slash Yankees Mets panel. It'll be followed by baseball by the numbers, which was my desperate way of describing what Mike Petriello and Craig Edwards will talk about, and then our delightful prospect boys will finish out the night for us. So I'm going to allow our panelists to introduce themselves, and then we'll get going here. So, Lindsay, you want to kick us off? Yeah. I'm Lindsay Adler.

I cover the Yankees for The Athletic. Mark Carrigg with The Athletic. I used to cover the Mets. Jay Jaffe, senior writer of Fangraphs. And can I get all the Yankees fans in the house to say hello? I'm surprised! You could lean in a little less

if you wanted to. And can I get all the Mets fans in the house? Okay. That's a good distribution. Not too bad, even. That's happier than normal, by the way. Yeah, I was going to say you're all very enthusiastic. I didn't hear any Mets fans shout the number of rings, though.

Ben came to play, is what we've learned. And I guess with that, we'll start with some Yankees and Mets questions and then shift to all the bad, awful things that are happening around baseball. So I'm going to start by directing this one at Lindsay, who, as you all know, is the beat writer for the Yankees, for the Athletic. When Brian Cashman discussed the Yankees season at the end, when they were dismissed by the Astros, he said, we failed in our final game, but it wasn't a failed season. We're going to get into some specific areas of need for that roster in a second, but what do you expect their overall approach to be this offseason?

their overall approach to be this offseason? I think they have an understanding that this is the time to go for it. I think they really understand the deficiencies with the roster and the team and how things kind of shook out in 2019. But I think Cashman is very correct that it was not a failure. It was remarkable in a lot of ways and I think this is the time that they should really kind of look away from increasing in the margins and yes I know you guys are all waiting for us to announce Garrett Cole so that's what I think would be the best way to go into 2020 for them. Yeah, I guess that's the next question, right?

Because I think the contrast when Yankees fans saw Garrett Cole and Justin Brewander and thought, we don't have those guys, so maybe we should go get one of those guys. So is this going to be a starting pitcher-centric offseason? I mean, there was the Paxton acquisition, so it's not as if they paid no attention to that, but we've heard so much about the bullpen of doom with the Yankees and I wonder whether

we will shift back to actually going after starters again. Yeah I think it's interesting thinking about Patrick Corbin last year and how everything played out and how they just kind of weren't willing to give that extra year and I just think when it comes to Garrett Cole who's the best pitcher on the planet

I think you know shying away from that final year, I don't think that's really, it should not be a consideration for him. And I think they understand that they have a couple front line starters. Obviously, we all saw James Paxton take really great strides midseason. But, you know, they have a rotation of a lot of mid rotation guys and so I think up and down everyone everyone knows that that should in fact be the priority and the best way to improve the rotation very very quickly is is right there this can go to Lindsay but it can go to any of you also so DJ Gregorius is a free agent. When I wrote this question, Greg Bird was still on the roster.

DJ LeMayhew, Glaber Torres, Miguel Andujar, Mike Ford, Gio Urshela, Luke Voigt, they all remain. Last year demonstrated the value of depth. I think that the Yankees got a lot of flack for the LeMayhew signing and then looked around and were like, aren't we smart? And so they've shown that depth is important, but obviously there are a lot of other places, including the rotation the rotation that they want to spend some money How do you expect that infield situation to shake out? Well, you know I think that they saw enough good stuff out of out of Taurus and shortstop that they could probably let let DD go But if they do that, you know, I mean things fall into place to some extent You've got DJ at

second base, then you've got Voight and Mike Ford at first base. You've got Andujar and Gio Urshela at third base. But you still have to find room for somebody else who could play shortstop on the roster. So, you know, you're going to want some kind of insurance slash depth in there. But, you know, the other thing you could think about trading from surplus, you could think about the possibility of trading Voight, even though his value is maybe a little bit depressed right now. You could think about trading Andujar, even though, again, his value is a little bit depressed. I mean, he's kind of a guy without a position given how bad he is at third base and, you know, the assumption that he's not going to make strides that quickly. So it'll

be very interesting to see what happens. I think he just put a first baseman's mat on Andujar, no? I mean, that's a possibility. And then you've got a whole lot of inventory to clear out there if you're thinking about the rest of the roster. Until they all get hurt

and then we end up having... Until they all get hurt. But you can't go into a season carrying three first basemen and no backup shortstop. Yeah. Fangraphs doesn't endorse three first basemen on the roster. I tend to think that's a bad idea. Speaking of guys who get hurt, should we have a moment of silence for Jacoby Ellsbury's

Yankees career? Remember all the good times? I like the line somebody asked, how are we going to remember Jacoby Ellsbury's Yankees career? I like the line, somebody asked, how are we going to remember Jacoby Ellsworth's Yankees career? And I was like, maybe put him on a milk carton, because most of us don't remember it. Jay also came to play, my goodness.

So it's very easy to be snarky about that, right? But what blew my mind is that when you walked into the clubhouse, there was literally no trace of his existence, which I've never seen before from a team, for a player that was still technically involved or employed by the team. Like, it was beyond not having a desk in the office. It was just like, your name wasn't even on the little board when you're in and out. Like, I mean, nothing.

Like, it was like, he just did not exist, right? He works from home. Yeah, I mean, he did still have a locker at the beginning of the year, but then everybody started dropping like flies, so then it went to Gio Urshela. In the two years being around the team, I never once spoke to Jacoby because Brian Cashman, citing just not needing to pay him a per diem, let him rehab in Arizona during spring

training. And then the one week he was in Tampa, I happened to be back in New York. So yeah, never even covered the Jacoby experience. Wow, they screwed him out of the per diem? Yeah. Well, Cashman also told us exactly where he was working out in Arizona and said something along the lines of, if any of you want a project and I was like I gotta go. Lindsay we kind of asked you about this when we had you on I think earlier this year but the way that they were able to replace everyone with people who were better than the people who were there originally somehow even though none of us had ever heard of any of them and they all had career years at the same time.

Is that maybe not repeatable to that degree, but do you believe that that is a skill that this front office or coaching staff or player development staff has? I think it's definitely a skill. I think they've done a really good job of acquiring players from teams that were not as smart as them. Look at Luke voigt coming from the cardinals and playing for let's start with playing for mike matthini when he was there you

know look at dj lemahieu and mike talkman coming from the rockies which from everything i've learned it sounds like the rockies are still in the freaking dark ages it's an odd organization yeah the nice way of putting it yeah so I think they do a good job of finding guys who have not been put in the best situations. I think there's probably some luck, some fluke, but between Voight and Tauchman and I guess DJ, the next time they make some random trade for some dude I've never heard of

and I don't even tweet about it, I'm just going to assume that he's going to be a contender for next year's AL MVP and just save myself the grief. They don't make random trades as a thing, right? So let's go back. This is before pitch framing became something we all talk about and acknowledge. This is way back when. Francisco Cervelli, that's how long ago this was. He had been like their entrenched backup. And literally the last day of spring training, this is how freaking hardcore cash, they trade him away. They trade him away to San Francisco and they get back a dude named Chris Stewart.

And people are like, what the hell is this? Like why are they, this is like a nobody player, why are they doing this? Well they'd been on the framing stuff. And if you look back, Stuart had, you know. So at the GM meetings just, what, last week, I was talking to somebody from a team that we would consider a smart team, quote unquote. And he was like, we're just talking about something else at the end of it, and he's like, he had this like look on his face, like, dude, what's wrong?

He's like, damn it. The Yankees are always on the right players. I'm sick of it. Yeah. Right? Like, they're always on the right guys. And then on top of that, they have the money to always on the right players. I'm sick of it. They're always on the right guys. And then on top of that, they have the money to spend on the good guys. They're going to sign Garrett Cole. That's what they're waiting for.

If you listen to that, that tells me, as Lindsay was saying, dang, they know he's a good player. They're not afraid to spend money, and they're always on the right guys. And as much criticism as they get here for not winning in, what, 11 years like the other good teams in League are still terrified of that yeah except but but I mean to what they do seem to be afraid to spend on either lately I mean they you know the Corbin

example and obviously they weren't you know factors at all in the in the Machado or Harper sweepstakes. And that makes some sense given the areas of depth. So Harper came up in this conversation we had, and he's like, that's a player who's obviously very good, but is that the guy that you back up the truck for? I think you can make the argument, no, it is not. Whereas a Garrett Cole, let's say, very obviously is one of those guys that you back up the truck for.

Right. I wonder what it's like to have not won a championship in 11 years. It's the Yankee fans here. It's torture. Torture for them. My postseason drought can drive and is going to college in the fall. We're very excited for the postseason drought. Early returns are good. I think because we have so many Mets fans here, don't worry, we are going to talk about the Mets and we'll start that right now. So unlike last season or offseason, I should say, when Pete Alonzo and Jeff McNeil's roles were sort of up in the air, we weren't quite sure how that was going to settle. And there was a ton of churn on the roster. Guys at the prospect level going out, you know, major leaguers coming in. The 2019

Mets look pretty set apart from the rotation. They obviously are going to have to deal with the loss of Wheeler. What do you guys think that the Mets are going to do? Is that an internal replacement? Are they going to look outside the organization? Are these Mets fans going to get to cheer for Garrett Cole? You're not going to, but I'm going to look outside the organization? Are these Mets fans going to get to cheer for Garrett Cole? You're not going to, but I'm going to ask the question that way anyhow. What do you think the approach is going to be to the rotation? Well, outside of getting Harvey back?

I mean, it sounds to me like they're probably going to focus on the bullpen and I've heard that they're thinking about Lugo and Gasolman as potential rotation guys. They've got players that they can trade. I mean, Dominic Smith is somebody

that they could use to get a real arm. J.D. Davis doesn't seem like he's going to fit if you're actually thinking about a real center fielder and putting Nimmo and Conforto at the corners and maybe seeing if Yohannes Cespedes is still alive. It's weird.

It was proof of life the other day. You didn't see him do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the Mets are just such a mismatched collection of parts and have been for like 10 years, it seems. Like no real center fielder except Ligares. Too many infielders of certain types.

They need to be making trades. What types are those, Jay? They need to be making trades. J.D. Davis doesn't have a position. You can't play him at third base. You can't play him in the outfield either. I don't know. I think they have

a lot to deal from if they're willing to deal. They seem so scared to make a mistake, though. But I think they sound like they're going to focus on the bullpen rather than the rotation. I guess this is sort of the opposition research question, but which teams in their respective divisions should fans of the Yankees and the Mets be worried about this offseason? Or focusing on just biggest needs?

Obviously, the NL East is very competitive, and almost every team is competitive in that division. So I guess which will be the big mover if there is one, if there's like a Phillies from last offseason, let's say? I mean, to me, they all have the potential to do something. I mean, we've already seen the Braves get active with the bullpen. They still need a starter. They still need to figure out who's going to play third base for them. The Braves, the Nationals, and the Phillies all need a third baseman. You know, obviously Rendon and Donaldson.

Yeah, if only there were a really good one available. Rendon and Donaldson. Yeah, if only there were a really good one available. Rendon and Donaldson are both free agents. I mean, I think one of those guys is going to sign with one of the teams. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them escapes the division. But you've got a lot of needs on all those teams, Strasburg being a free agent. It wouldn't be a surprise if either Rendon or Strasburg goes back to Washington, but certainly not both, so they're going to have big needs there.

The Phillies, obviously, I think they've already spent money last year, but it didn't work out for them, so you think that they're going to have to do something. And third base being a real weakness for them with Franco, that they're going to be a player for Donaldson. They're going to be a player for Cole, perhaps. It seems like there are big moves waiting to happen all over the division, and obviously the Nationals right now are the team to beat

because they won the World Series, but any of those teams, I think, are capable of being a serious threat to win the division next year. Dude, I like the desperation in Philadelphia, right? Because we had to measure that, right? But at the end of the day, these are human beings. And you've got an owner who's sticking his neck out and spent all that money.

And then they stunk. And then now they've got some clear needs. And you've got a GM that might be on thin ice. To me, that is the perfect storm of they've spent some money. And now there's a little heat at their backs. And, you know, I think bringing Girardi in was a really good move for them. He'll clean a lot of things up there.

I know you can go back and forth about what a manager does wins and losses wise, but I think it's indisputable what they do culture wise. And I think Joe has a track record that is very strong and sort of exactly what they needed. So for me, it's Philadelphia that's most intriguing, moving forward, because the swing there, if they act on this desperation that I'm overplaying,

but like there's still an element of it there, I think makes it really, really interesting moving forward. I mean, I would just like to know what Boston's problem is, really. I mean, the idea that... It could mean so many different things. Yeah, that's very true. I'm in New York.

That's a safe joke. You know, I don't see them getting better next year if their plan is to shed payroll. The one I really think to be afraid of for Yankees fans is the Rays. I mean, they're so smart. They make all these good decisions. They were in very heavily on DJ LeMayhew. So, you know, they're seeing the same things.

I didn't particularly find their team this year to be a lot of fun, but I found them to be really clean, and I think that's a really great starting point. And I think it's nuts that they could win this many games last year and then Go the way that they did They take risks. I think that's why Tampa is such a great pick. They're like Charlie Morton I mean man what a year and they hired Jeff Sullivan the risk involved They have fewer glaring holes than than of the other contenders in the division.

You look at that roster, it's like, yeah, you could use an upgrade here and here, but rotation-wise, if you assume that Blake Snell is probably going to bounce back somewhat, they look pretty solid. They need additions around the margins, whereas they don't need something right in the middle.

Maybe we want to take the temperature of the crowd. Would you like us to use this as an opportunity to talk about Carlos Beltran and then use that as a clunky transition into the Astros? Or would you rather that we move directly to the macro stuff? Choose your own adventure. Yeah, clunky transition? All right, that what, all right,

that sounded like enough, so. Before we get to the, like, little Mets part of this, so Callaway clearly was not one of Brody's guys, and now the Mets have new management, Stalwart, a fan favorite. I'm curious what you guys think this is going to mean in terms of actual changes for the Mets, because it's always hard to tell what's going to matter with the Mets. Is this going to matter with the Mets? You don't have to answer this. Why are you looking

at me? Don't look at me. You just have a good institutional knowledge. You look guilty. I know. You do look guilty. Well, did they change owners this off-season? I don't think so. No. Oh, okay. Well, I'm going to say no. It's probably not going to... I mean, that's not... Like, look, I think the Beltran hire was cool in a lot of ways.

Like, I think there is a credibility because of his resume. No doubt about that. Sure. I just think, like, with any... any like these organizations are giant ships right and like to move directions on them like I'm not sure that a manager or even a couple players is enough to do that that's got to come from upstairs and so that's not to say it's impossible for them to win I'm not saying that I'm just saying that that hurdles to get there are still in place. And so that makes it kind of tough

to be like, oh, things are going to change. Never has the articulation of ship been more important than it was in that sentence. I thought it was going in a very different direction. I keep coming back to that stupid Mickey Calloway quote about 85% of the decisions he makes go against

analytics, which I've referenced 18 times in the last six weeks. And Meg can vouch for that. When Brody came on, there was so much comment about how they're beefing up the analytics department. And if the manager is not using that stuff, well, the general manager, if he's going to succeed, he needs a guy who's going to at least utilize some of what he's given there and be on the same page. And this seems like a better situation with that. you know, hoping that you're going to last in this job and not, you know, expect that there's going to be more harmony in that relationship than there was with the guy you inherited from the previous regime. So, you know, on that note, I have to think it's going to be better. Now, there's still, obviously, with the Mets, the ownership situation and the pension for meddling and all that that you have to get past, and it's all very well documented, but I guess I would be optimistic

at least until I see how it plays out in terms of the first time they hit a real snag. Yeah, there were a few days there after the Beltran hiring where I think no one was mad at the Mets about that. It seemed like they hadn't made a mistake. And then suddenly their new manager is enmeshed in the biggest scandal of baseball. Then what happens?

Yeah, not ideal that it turns out that Carl's Beltran may have been very integrally involved in the Astros sign-stealing scandal. I mean, for all we know, that was a selling point. Maybe the Mets are interested in stealing some signs. We hear you know about analytics. Tell us more. This is something that potentially could hang over the team. I mean, we'll see how the investigation goes and whether particular players or managers or coaches

or front office people will bear the brunt of this and whether you could talk about suspensions. But you, Mark and Lindsay, you've written about just how pervasive this stuff seems to be and how it does seem to be on a lot of teams' minds and how teams are trying to defend against it. So where do we go from here? Do we get some sort of sweeping changes?

Can we get rid of signs entirely? Can we just do telepathy? I have to think the asteroids were trying that, and then it didn't work. And they went to the sign stealing scheme instead. I'm like, oh, the men with goat steels are gone. I'm just here to tell the jokes. That's my purpose tonight.

It's remarkable, since that story dropped, how many conspiracy theories are now coming to light. Because I can't tell if this is like an episode of Get Smart, like the shoe phones and whatever. I've heard so much crazy stuff, vibrating Band-Aids, flashing lights. I mean, it's stupid. Okay, so at the GM meetings, there was a subcommittee that was called together to discuss cameras taken to the ballpark by scouts.

Because a lot of times now, to do pitch tipping, scouts will pull a camera out and train on the picture and then download it, send it back, and people go through and try to figure out if there's any tipping going on. At no point did they talk about not having cameras in the seats. It was more a debate about don't aim it at the dugout. So what that tells me is that it just implies that accepted level of whatever you want to call it. Cheating, espionage, scouting, spying, whatever. There's always going to be some element of it and it's so ingrained that even in the midst of all of this,

nobody seriously took the obvious answer, which was do what the NFL does, take those cameras out of there and everybody uses standard feed. No one really discussed that, which made me laugh, even in this context. So I think that's what makes this so difficult to tackle. It is so ingrained in the game, right?

Like, I mean, cheating in baseball is as old as baseball. Right, like there used to be one umpire on the field. The term cutting the bags, that's because you, if you're that one umpire on the field keeping an eye on the ball, guys rounding third at the turn of the century knew you didn't have to touch the bag. All right, and this kind of stuff happened all the time, and the times changed, yet the idea remains just as persistent,

which in one way is sort of cool because baseball is awesome like that. But there's also what the Astros have allegedly done, and I don't have to enumerate those reasons why it's terrible, if it's true. I don't have to enumerate those reasons why it's terrible if it's true. Yeah, I think it's very clearly in baseball's best interest if this remains to the Astros. But, you know, bless your heart, Rob Manfred, that everybody knows that is not the case. I was really interested to see his statement where he was like, we have no reason to believe that this is happening anywhere but Houston

when, by my understanding, teams are just complaining about each other and this shit all the time. So I don't know why anyone would have a reason to believe it's just Houston. That might be the most oblivious statement that a commissioner has said in the last 30 years, which is saying something given the legacy of Bud Seelig. I just want to understand. There's just no way that he can possibly believe that, given the reports that we're

hearing, the rumors that we're hearing. That doesn't pass the smell test to even the most casual fan. No, I don't get it. There's the whole steroid scandal played out and Bud Selig buried his head in the sand and wound up in the Hall of Fame anyway.

But, you know, I just want to understand why you would say something that when it inevitably spreads beyond the Astros, you're going to have to walk back. I have a theory. I mean, that is if you go after too many teams, you start to compromise the base of support that Rob Manford has in terms of holding on to his back. I have a theory. I mean, that is, if you go after too many teams, you start to compromise the base of support that Rob Manford has

in terms of holding onto his job. Dun, dun, dun. And that kind of goes into, if you wanted to stop the cheating part of it, you know who you punish in all of this.

You don't take the draft picks away. You don't hammer the front office or whatever because they'll work around that. Okay? What you do is you hammer the owner.

Yeah. Okay? You really want, because what would happen if... He has a police escort. I heard that. The owner who's been accused of war profiteering? It is kind of

incredible that there isn't just someone being like, so, we have an image problem. Maybe we don't bring the cops out for a crane. That was going to be the next question. The punishment. Discipline the Astros. What's your fantasy for how we punish them for their

bad behavior? And keep in mind there are children in the front row. You punish the owner. If you punish the owner on this, seriously, if you punished Crane and you hammered him with a fine, like a really, like, and told the rest of the world what that fine was, the other 29 owners are going downstairs to the executive suite

and baseball ops and going, knock this crap off right now. If you're doing it, I don't want to know about it, but stop it, because you're going to cost me a lot of money. But I don't see that happening for a lot of different reasons, but I think that's, to me, the level this should take. That's the scope this should take. It shouldn't just be punish the Astros as a one-off because you did something bad. It's putting some teeth behind the statement

from when the Red Sox went through this, where the next people that get caught are going to get really punished for it. Do it. Actually do it. And you start at the highest levels. You do it in ownership, to me. Yeah, it's kind of weird right now because we talk about the Astros, but if the two names that we've heard, Alex Cora and Carlos Beltran,

are now working for other teams, you're punishing teams that don't have, I mean, well, okay, the Red Sox obviously have their own, you know, history of this going back, but Alex Cora wasn't involved in that. You know, Carlos Beltran, you know, hasn't done anything with the Mets that's, you know, actionable, you know, to penalize the Mets. So that real problem I think it has to it has to go higher up I mean I think that you if if it could be shown that that uh Jeff Luno was was aware of what was going on I think you have to suspend him um I don't know if you can go as far as kind of a lifetime ban type situation, the way that it happened in Atlanta, but you start to think about serious penalties at the executive level

that would get some notice in terms of the awareness of front office people in all this. And this can't happen without some awareness of front office people. I mean, it's not like Alex Cora and Carlos Beltran are the guys that are pulling monitors in and making sure that the video hookups are all there. Yeah, I just think, I mean, the Astros pick late. Money is basically nothing to most of these teams. It's insufficient. It's, I mean, at the end of of the day if Houston cheated their way to a World Series they still have the World Series you know who who gives a crap about a couple draft

picks and obviously front office people will say I do but in the grand scheme of things it's the rare situation where you wonder you know would you trade draft picks for a World Series and here the answer is definite but I think Jay as you said earlier I think and not to accuse the the league office of any skullduggery but I think if you punish the owners you're putting the league in a tough spot you're putting Rob Manfred in a tough spot and I think at that point you almost look at it as a conflict between his interests and not pissing everyone off and preserving the integrity of the sport and i don't know what you do in that situation it seems like it's going to get messy because you would just think that anyone who's going to be punished for this will say well

what about them though they're doing it too or it was self-defense we had to steal signs because they were stealing our signs and that may not excuse what you were doing but if you just you know cast dispersions on enough other teams then maybe they just can't punish everyone and once they bring that up in the investigation then you're kind of obligated to go down that road too and who knows how many teams this ends up kind of bringing into all of this we'll see go yeah I don't I don't know if other teams really want it to spread I mean at the end of the day the whistleblowers you had were Mike Fires and Danny Farquhar and I think that says a lot yeah this is instructive though too in a way because if it weren't the Houston Astros made so many people mad in baseball that there were so many folks that couldn't wait

for something to happen where they can go get their comeuppance. That really is like, and I know it's been said, but we're only talking about this because they made people mad. And it's always that honor amongst thieves kind of thing. You kind of let stuff slide. literal thieves in this case literal views well so that was a bummer before we get to questions though we're gonna we're gonna come up again and i'm going to ask each of you to say what you would change about baseball a rule a change, paying the minor leaguers, what would you do at this moment, at this juncture, to make baseball more

compelling? And before any of you start, we're going to have a stand mic sound guy who I can't see. There's a stand mic for questions, so it's going to be in the center aisle here. So while they're answering that question, you can follow the spot and queue up to ask some questions once they're done. Thank you. Friends.

I have a lot of things. You can't say pay minor league players and expect me to say anything else. But kind of along those lines. I mean, you know, I could say shorten the schedule, players' bodies are taking due hard, blah, blah, blah, but no, the entire compensation structure just needs to be flipped. You know, the idea, and I really thought about it a lot thinking about Jacoby Ellsbury last night of getting underpaid in your prime years, getting overpaid in your late years. It's done. It's broken. It's not working.

There's no reason that Aaron Judge should be getting paid less than almost anyone in that goddamn room. You know, Aaron Judge, Gleyber Torres, should not be underpaid to the extent that they are. And that, to me, is the big thing. Making less than relievers. Some of, yeah.

I mean, like, the Yankees relievers are all good, but generally. Yeah. Since you stole my answer um i don't know what exactly it would be but just find a way to get the ball and play more again because like i'm really sick of watching dudes just strike out all the time like i get why it happens and i get you you know, all that stuff. But it's still entertainment. There's still an aesthetic value to the game. And it's ugly right now. I think it's just ugly.

And I'm going to do the OK Boomer thing. OK Boomer. But I agree with him. Back in my day. I do too. I grew up in the 80s, all right? And that's when I started watching baseball. And you know what they did?

They put the ball in play, and they ran. And they ran balls down to the gaps, and they stole bags, and like they took chances, and you know what? That shit was fun, all right? It was fun. So I would like to see that again. I love homers too, great.

But you know, I would also like to see the athleticism back in the game. So I think whatever it is that you do, find a way to get guys to put the ball in play again. Yeah, I think tweaking the strike zone has been a time-honored mechanism of restoring the balance between pitchers and hitters. And I think that you can do things about that. You can experiment with it maybe in spring training or in the minor leagues to get to encourage more balls in play. I think this is something I've been thinking about, not just along that line and change, but thinking about when we talk about baseball and we talk about analyzing baseball,

start caring about batting average again because batting average is fun. Think about the MVP arguments. I'm not saying DJ LeMayhew should be MVP, but there's a reason people care about DJ LeMayhew. It's like you're hitting 330, you're putting the ball in play, you're doing things, guys are

running around on the field, he's not striking out. There's fun there. Let's stop talking about caring about batting average as being the scourge of... It's a connection to casual fandom. It's a connection to the game's history.

It's something that I think, from the analytics side, we've gone too far overboard in working against, to de-emphasize. And this is something that kind of came up in my book a little bit, a thread that I wish I'd pursued a little bit more. But the more I see it now with what Mark's talking about with the strikeouts and things like that, give a shit about batting average again.

But what wins and losses, no? No. No, okay, still stupid? Still stupid? I mean, it is Fangraphs. We have to draw the line somewhere. I'm new here. We're so glad you're here.

Are folks keen to ask questions? You should queue up to the mic, you should ask questions. Oh, brave souls. He's going to be like, don't you see my kid in the front row, stop swearing. So I certainly didn't expect to come to a Fangraphs event and hear people sort of romanticize batting average, but there's something to that. Just curious, maybe two questions. One to Lindsay, does Hal care about winning? And then somewhat relatedly, Hal Steinbrenner, that is.

House time runner, that is. Somewhat relatedly, how aware is Major League Baseball, and how big a problem do they think it is, that it seems that at any given point in time, you only have 20% of the teams trying to win? I mean, most of these teams can be in the constant cycle of rebuild, try to get to some level of mediocrity, oh, we lost our window, tear it down again.

Yeah. First of all, I really love your son's Pitching Ninja t-shirt. It's fantastic. A nerd in training. Great. Very good. We are sorry about this. I mean, a little sorry.

Yes. How? It's nothing he hasn't heard at home. Jose Altuve, maybe? No, Hal cares about winning. And I think something that, you know, it's not my job to stump for Yankees ownership, but I think when we talk about the Yankees are not spending, there's a little bit of a boss filter or something like that.

I mean, they have like 210 committed on the books now. When we talk about teams like, oh yeah, Atlanta's going for it. And I don't know, last I looked, their payroll was like 160. It kind of puts it into context for me. I think a lot of that money obviously is going exclusively to Giancarlo Stanton and Jacoby Ellsbury. But no, I mean, there's a commitment to winning, and I just think that, you know, kind of from Howell down to Cashman,

they're really trying to do it just in a different way from what most Yankees fans are used to, and I think it's totally understandable that that's really frustrating, especially with this, you know, terrible, awful 10-year championship drought. But, no, it's... Like humanity. How old are you? Good question.

I'm 11. Oh, so you saw one. Okay. Congrats. That's the same way that I saw Nick's championship. So I want to keep the line moving because we do have a tight schedule to keep to. Thank you for your question. I'm sure we are going to get to the motivations of ownership here, but why don't we hear from

this gentleman here? Hi. I hope this didn't make my last question redundant that I've been wanting to ask for the last 20 minutes. But I'm not sure the way to put this but I kind of think about are we getting to a point where I know owners were always cheap but are we getting to a point where the economics, this fatalistic capitalism thing where we view every baseball team is just a corporation we only care about

and I know there's another how thing is is profiting becoming at odds with winning the World Series? Because a lot of Yankee fans think that how is just content with, and yes, they spent $210 million, but obviously you can make the argument that 20 years ago we had the same payrolls back then when you adjust for inflation, average payroll. Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think the most recent collective bargaining agreement did a lot to de-incentivize winning.

And the slow growth of the competitive balance tax threshold compared to the inflation of salaries, the amount of money that goes into revenue sharing, the increase in television and advanced media revenue, all these things have insulated teams from, you know, they've insulated teams, like there's a bigger disconnect now than there was before, you know, between winning and profitability. profitability and you know there's there's less pressure on these teams to win to make whatever nut they need to make and this has all happened you know you know kind of without most people really being aware of it but if you compare you know where the where the game was five ten years ago we're in a really bad spot because of this collective bargaining agreement. And the players union, I think, messed up pretty badly in terms of accepting some of the terms. And progressively, the union is much less powerful than it was 20, 30 years ago. This is a real problem.

And also, the fact is that just about every team, it's corporate ownership now. And so, of course, you're talking about bean counters more than you're talking about family ownership the way that used to be the model within baseball. Yeah, I think that's, you know, the thing Cashman keeps saying is that paying a competitive balance tax at the end of the day helps their competition. And I think it's kind of disingenuous, but I understand the sentiment. But I also think the last thing Major League Baseball should be doing is punishing the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, these enormous market teams for spending. You know, it's the inequality in baseball is still there. You know, it's the inequality in baseball is still there. The top teams are still going to be at the top because instead of spending on, you know, top tier free agents, they're spending on information Boris you know feel about him how you may more difficult because he cannot just go over a general manager's head

and plea to ownership and you know get the emotional response unless it's San Diego thank you for your questions we'll get the fellow behind you here. And before other people queue up, we're going to end this one at 8.15, so I told you to line up and I lied terribly because I am the worst. But we will have other panels with other questions, so if we don't get to you, be appropriately mad at me but don't leave. Yeah. So I guess kind of continuing on that theme a little bit, seeing the Mets over the last year has been really interesting. Because in a lot of ways, they were kind of shockingly watchable in that they made the bad decisions that were fun.

You know, like Jeff McNeil gave a shit about batting average. And I'm really wondering how you guys feel either like the perception of the Mets kind of plays into that, number one, and number two, how your role, which is obviously making good decisions and analytically-based decisions kind of is at odds with that idea of making these decisions that are like, there was no reason for the Mets to open their window, and they're like, we're going to do it anyway. You just said what the overarching theme is here. I think it's great that there's science in baseball.

I think it's great that teams are making informed decisions about what they're doing. But what also has happened is that the analytics that we love, that we're all sitting here, that it's sort of one way we process the game, it's also been weaponized by really rich people that don't like to spend money. Simple as that, period. Just put a period on it right there.

So it used to be that you could make emotional decisions, as you preferred to here in this weird-ass off-season last year, and you would see a bunch of teams do that. But I also find it funny in that there's this romantic idea that at some point in baseball, all the teams were competitive. Go take a look at World Series champions in 1901 to 1950. There's a reason the Yankees won all those championships.

They were good, and they had all the resources, but you know what? There were like three, four teams in the American League that didn't give a crap. They just straight up didn't care. All right? Like they did enough to get asses in the seats because back then that's how you made your money. But like you're telling me the St. Louis Browns were a well-run operation for all that? Like, I mean, there were just teams that rolled over to Kansas these days. I've never said that ever in my life.

Right? Not once, right right not even one time so you know like look at look at like those teams back in the washington senators right st louis browns kansas city philadelphia a's they were just so non-competitive for so long so this idea that oh everyone had a chance back a day no they didn't no they did not take a look look. This is normal, almost. Right? I just have one comment for you. Don't. You're going to do it. Okay, boomer. There it is.

I am very sorry to ask the rest of you to sit down, but I couldn't possibly ask us to do anything more than that. So we're going to do other questions for other panels. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. Let's give a round of applause for our MLB panel. Bring your twin out with you.

And now for our twins. I said I wasn't going to bring it up, but I really lied. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. For those of you listening at home. Mike is the one with the brown shoes. Mine are gray. So very different. We will

ask the two of you to introduce yourselves for our listeners at home and also for those of our fans in the audience who might not know you. My name is Craig Edwards. I write for Fangraphs. I'm Mike Petriello. I write for MLB.com and I used to write for Fangraphs. First of all, Fangraphs employees are our favorite.

We entitled this panel Baseball by the Numbers, which we could have done for any of these panels because we're all into stats. But we're going to go in a slightly different direction to start. I am curious how the two of you approach idea generation at this time of year because well we did have a couple of free agent signings which is surprising given that it's before Thanksgiving but generally this

time of year is a little quiet we don't have new Major League Baseball how do you guys approach getting ideas going and Craig as your, I will not hold any of this against you. I'm going to guess you're going to say something similar, which is that this time of year isn't that bad, right? It's not that far from the end of the season. You can still kind of wish cast all sorts of players to all sorts of teams. Like February is when I want to die. I keep telling my wife we're taking three weeks off in February

so I don't have to think about baseball. Because at that point either everyone's signed or it's like oh, God, this free agent is still on the market. I can't think about him anymore. Right now, it's like, oh, these are the 10 best places for this free agent. Or here's something cool we're working on. I generally have a little notepad on my desk or a saved Google Doc where it's like I'll come across ideas. I get a lot of value out of random generic beat writer reports Well, they'll like they'll think the story is oh

This is gonna be the story for the winter and like buried in the seventh paragraph It'll be and this guy's working on a new curveball or something and I'm like, oh wow That's awesome. And I'll write that down and I'll come back to that. That's it's not that bad this time of year I like the vacation strategy. It's just like go away. Yeah February no partner run out the clock. I think that at this time of year, you're focusing on the free agents and you're taking a look at where they might go, but exactly what sort of trajectory they're on.

But also, you spend the entire season, especially the playoffs, focusing on what's going on, like in the games and how players are improving and how you think they're going to do. And and so you get to take a little bit of a step back and say, take more of a broader view of what's what's happening in baseball and whether you want to take a look at you know the financial aspect or you know that all those things are fair game I guess and when you don't have time to do them in the regular season. So what do you both think about batting average? Underrated? Is it is it properly rated at this point? You'll never believe what Jay said about this. Playing the hits huh?, you and I were both talking backstage about how we are statistically illiterate, and yet we do this job. Basically, I'm an English major, you're a history major, and this is what we do. So I guess the question is,

how statistically literate do you have to be to do this job or how much should you know what kind of mistakes can you make and not just programming mistakes but conceptual logical mistakes well I like to think we're a step above illiterate that would be really bad what I do is I surround myself with people who are far smarter than I right so I might have an interesting question that I'm never gonna be able to find the data for because I don't know enough code, and I'll go to Tom Hango or Jason Bernard or Travis Peterson, who I'm saying

because I know he's out here somewhere, and I say, I heard a clap, very good. One clap. And I'm like, listen, I really wanna know how did this guy do in X and condition Y, and someone will write up code for me. I'm not a data scientist, I never pretend to be, but if I offer any value at all,

it's hopefully to take this really complicated, dense data and explain it in a way that's both understandable and somewhat entertaining. And if that works, great, but I don't think I could do it without the people I work with or the resources of Baseball Reference or Fangraphs or Saband or any of this stuff. Yeah, I think that you have to have a certain level

of trust and sort of figure out who you can rely on to sort of spit out things that you can maybe not completely understand all of the, I don't know, insides, but that whatever number comes out, that you can help people understand exactly what that might mean. You don't have to understand the way a formula works in order to understand why it's important. I guess that leads to my next question, which is how did the two of you interact with more subjective data points? So like the, you know, the prospect reports that guys like Eric and Kylie write, how does that, it is data, it's a different kind of data, but it's still data.

How does that factor into not just idea generation, but how you understand players and how you do your work? Well, I think part of this whole analytics is that when you don't see players, if you get enough of plate appearances or pitches or whatever it is, that you can understand what's going on. But a person who sees someone, they're going to know more about exactly how they

might project and and how they're going to do when you don't have the data because for a lot of for a lot of players you know they're facing different competition they're you know the they're in different leagues they're different age and having sort of an eye on exactly what's going on is going to give you more information than 100 plate appearances. Yeah, I think that's right. I use it. I mean, it's information, right? Like I usually start with the numbers because that's what I do. But if I want to get more supporting evidence, I'll go to Kylie and Eric or MLB Pipeline or whatever. And the guys who have the eyes on these players that I've generally never seen, especially the prospects,

and you'll see the report that says, oh, you know, this guy has a great rise in fastball, and then hopefully the movement and the spin rate numbers align, and if it does, great, it gives me more confidence, and if it doesn't, then I've got something to dig into. I kind of picture you at work, like, rolling around in all the StatCast data, just, like, diving into it like Scrooge McDuck.

But somehow you... That's accurate. That's true. You emerge from it with articles and leaderboards and products and stats. And so I wonder what that roadmap looks like and how do you decide what the next priority is and how do you refine it and how do you figure out this is how we're going to communicate what this thing is? Yeah, that is a great question and that is what I spend...

Thank you. Meg wrote it. Thank you, Meg. You're welcome. Yeah, I mean, my job is weird in that it's not the same job every day. Sometimes I will just go and spend eight hours being a writer and outputting some content. And sometimes we'll have meetings. Like tomorrow I have a meeting with a couple of people who we're to try to figure out how to come up with a positioning metric.

We don't have that right now. What teams do a good job of that? I don't really know how it would look. Like we'll talk about the way it might look. But as far as new metrics go, it's generally me, Tom Tango, Darren Willman, Jason Bernard, Travis, a couple other people, Ben Judlewicz. And some of it's just this is the obvious next step. Like, for example, right now we have an outfield defense metric we don't have an infield defense metric we have like 95 of an infield

defense metric but we're trying to figure out what we call it how does it work what does it look like on baseball savant it's not just coming up with the metric and writing about it it's okay now how do we put it out there in a way that works and then because i do work for the man you know there's a lot of other business interests that are involved. It's like, okay, how does this get into a data feed where our partners can access it? And that's the super boring stuff I don't actually like very much.

But that is the difference between working for David Appelman and working for an enormous company. But there's a lot of people involved. I call David Appelman the man. Just call him David. What was the question? I guess we'll get to you in just one second. I guess related to that,

any time that you're generating new metrics, there are going to be times that it works exactly the way you want it to, and there are going to be times where you have some missteps, which is part of how we figure out anything around us in the world. And I'm curious what the experience has been for you guys when things haven't worked quite the way you wanted and how you approach iterating that versus just saying, you know, we're going to scrap this and go back to the drawing board

and find something else. I mean, I know you guys had route efficiency, and then you realize this isn't working quite the way we expected it to. We're going to go a different direction. So I'm curious how that process works for you guys had route efficiency and then you realize that this isn't working quite the way we expected it to. We're going to go a different direction. So I'm curious how that process works for you guys. See, that one's a good one because I get to throw everybody else under the bus. Terrific. I didn't work there when route efficiency came out.

And Tom didn't and Darren didn't. And it was really like a day one stat with a lot of people who were like, well, meaning. But we didn't have data scientists for baseball at the point., well, meaning, but we didn't have data scientists for baseball at the point. We didn't have Tom and we didn't have like Darren and myself. And it was one of those things where it's like, this is a cool thing we can measure. I hope it works. And I think if you could go back to day one in 2015 and do it again, it probably would have been looked at as more of a beta year. Then let's just throw everything against the wall on day one and see if it works. Because you realize like it's one thing to measure something and it's like, is it meaningful?

Is there context? Right? That's maybe the stuff we didn't do so great that first year. And then we put a lot more effort into doing now. So for example, route efficiency didn't work because there is no context in the sense that A, sometimes you don't want a good route, right? And every good route was between like 95 and 99%, which big deal. So that didn't work. And we kind of depreciated it and came up with something, you know, catch probability and jump and all this other stuff. But you're right, sometimes it works great. Like sprint speed has worked reasonably well, we have the names we expect at the top and Albert Pujols is always at the bottom. So that works out pretty well. We haven't gone back to that one that much.

But every year at the end of the season, we like refocus, you know, expected weight on base, all that kind of stuff based on what actually happened. Baseball changes a lot every year as you may have noticed, but yes there's always like an iterative process. You say the baseball changes every year? What's that? The baseball changes every year? I'm sorry? The baseball changes every year? I still blame things that don't work at Fangraphs on Dave, and he's been gone for a while, so I'm sympathetic to that answer. So what are some of the big questions that are left out there to be answered, and also, I guess, to be answered by us as opposed to people with teams,

if there are any still, because there are certain data sources that we don't have that teams are putting to great use but we just kind of look at and drool at from afar so what's the left for us to figure out what team should be doing and I guess also trying to figure out if it's actually gonna make baseball better or worse because turns out that not everything makes baseball better even if it is efficient i mean i think the interesting thing about how that works is there's only 750 you know active baseball players there'll be 780 you know on opening day rosters and it it shrinks uh the talent level that that we see and you, players are getting better and better. And it's harder to figure out exactly, you know,

how players are aging and how good player development is. And so it's changing the way that we think about how players age and, you know, what you need to do with player development, whether, you know, you need to bring up players younger or 23, 25. I think that what we're trying to answer is what has changed between what we thought we knew 10 years ago and what's going to change 10 years from now. If something in the CBA changes and we will

have to rewrite all the things that we know in terms of player valuation, in terms of war, like I don't think that we can predict exactly how baseball will change, you know, if they add two teams. That completely changes, you know, where you're getting players from and, I don't know, like how it will work out. Those are questions that we don't have answers to. I think you asked kind of two different questions there, right? Like from a team perspective, it's more about, you know, what you can track and how you can make players better. I feel like someone I know wrote a book about exactly that. And the gap has shrunk. Like, like yes are the astros still better than the

tigers certainly right but is it by as as much as it was a couple years ago probably not so i think you see teams because they built an mvp machine oh paperback coming out next year yes it is um so i mean there's still somewhat to be learned there, but I feel like we're not quite optimized and all that. But the fact that I use the word optimize is kind of distasteful to me. That's the other question is like, how do we get baseball back to being more entertaining? And I remember being on MLB Network with Brian Kenney in like, I don't know, 2014, even before StatCast. And we would joke like, yeah, hey, we're doing a great job of making baseball smarter, but is it better? Is it more fun? And the answer to that was like shrug emoji, you know, and I think all of the news events of recent days would kind of support that. So I do think there is a

secondary and not necessarily team productivity priority that baseball still needs to work on. I guess if we could like focus in on a particular aspect of the game, I guess if we could focus in on a particular aspect of the game, setting aside optimization as sort of a concept, what is the area where you think we have the greatest work still to do? Is it, I mean, the obvious answer here feels like defense, and you can say it's measuring and attributing defense in an effective way, and that'd be a fine answer, but where do we have the most work to do? Because I think there is this sense that teams don't really bunt anymore the astros didn't issue an intentional

walk until they got to the postseason like the optimization has pretty much run its course but we thought that we were pretty optimal a couple of years ago and there's still stuff to do so like what's the next thing that you're excited to engage with and measure i mean i do think it's just getting more granular in what you can measure. Like you said, baseball is pretty optimized in a lot of ways, but it's less about finding good players and more about how you make them better. And some of the stuff we can measure and some of the stuff we can't. Like there's stuff that teams can measure in camps

because they'll put wearables on the bat, but stuff they can't do in the major leagues. Hopefully the technology will improve very shortly that will allow us to do stuff like that. I mean, we still think we know how each guy should swing, but we probably don't. You know, JD Martinez is a great example. A lot of guys who aren't JD Martinez.

That still feels like the next step to me. I mean, we can get a lot better at stealing signs, I think. Wow. You know, there's some technological advances that I think would help out. You're trying to differentiate the two of you in terms of your outfits versus responses. Heel turn. So I guess, Mike, we should ask you about broadcasting because you're a broadcaster now. Weird.

It turns out that you're good at it and everyone likes it. And that's probably an area where things have changed since the early days too because I remember the first nerd casts and I don't know if this was one that you were involved in or not, but it was like the game was kind of on in the background, but we were just like not really talking about it. We were just talking about stats.

It was one of our effectively wild Patreon. Yeah, right. Well, the first one I was not involved with. It was just a bit wild or whatever they call it. It was like the game was on a screen, but we'll just talk about stats while the game's going on. I've done those too at MLB Network. It's hard.

Now you call the game like regular broadcasters, and it seems like you don't go way out of your way to shoehorn in stats. You're obviously well prepared and you'll drop little tidbits. But mostly I think what people really appreciate about it is that it just seemed like there was a lot of enthusiasm for the game. And a lot of excitement about what was going on in the field. So that was a big part of it, I think, even more so than just the numbers, but how do you prepare for a broadcast like that? wildly over preparing the answer to that I Appreciate the kind words and we had a lot of fun, but I do not consider myself a naturally skilled broadcaster

I don't have the experience and even now I speak way too quickly, you know But I'm supposed to be the guy who knows things So I feel like I need to live up to that, you know It's not good enough to just know this guy's a good defender and he doesn't have much power You know, I feel like I need to know at least like four things about each guy And then with the SPN games, first of all, I was extremely formula fortunate to be put with Jason But Eddie and Eduardo Perez who I knew by reputation I didn't really know them

before I worked with them and it turns out they are two of the greatest people on earth. Baseball talents aside, they are just a lot of fun to hang out with. And I go back to I think something that you wrote where you referred to the term baseball grumps which I appreciated and I took to heart

and I'm like I don't ever want to be that. You don't strike me as grumpy on those broadcasts. Thank you. There's a lot of problems with baseball right now. There are a lot of problems with baseball right now. But you can still appreciate in the context of a single game, the athletes are amazing. The quality of play is super fun. And as far as stats go, it's a little different whether it's like a quote-unquote nerdcast,

because then there's like a primary broadcast so you have to set yourself apart but i also did some regular games during the season with with like john shamby you don't go as deep i don't think anybody cares about you know expected weighted run base even weighted runs creative plus i'm never going to talk about wins and rbis because they don't tell the story you know most people in this room, I assume, would prefer WRC Plus to OPS Plus, but the difference is it's not that much. Batting average. It's not going to be batting average. It's never going to be batting. Is that your next book?

Oh, I can't wait. Anyway, I avoid it entirely, mostly, because I'll just say, this guy was 15% above average. I was watching a late season game for just random teams, and the local broadcast was like, this guy was 15% above average. I was watching a late-season game for just random teams, and the local broadcast was like, this guy hit.285. He's had a really good offensive season. I'm thinking to myself, this guy's not any good,

and I looked it up, and he had like an 80 OPS plus. And it just comes down to, A, have fun. If you can't have fun, what are you doing here? And, B, try to tell an accurate story, even if you don't go super nuts into the stats because there's only so much time you have to explain it anyway I think that like I mean Jason's incredible I I remember I hope I'm not misremembering the timeline of this but like there was a week where I saw Eduardo call a game a major league game and then immediately pivot to the college

world series and I was just like how do you know all the things it's just incredibly impressive I think related to that we we have the benefit at Fangraphs, and Craig can speak to this, of being sort of in a bubble. You're all wonderfully informed about baseball, and we don't have to spell out war as wins above replacement and put it in parentheses before we use it. At MLB.com, you're writing for a slightly different audience, but Craig, you still have to think about balancing this.

How do you guys think about balancing sort of the educational aspects of using advanced analytics versus just telling a story to the folks who are already bought into that? I imagine this comes up in broadcasting, but it still comes up in, you know, the work that you do with Fangraphs. Yeah, like my, if I go to a block party, my neighbors don't know what Fangraphs is. You know, it's still like. We need to get you a hoodie yeah I mean you have to be you have to really love baseball and then you know you want to you have to you have to want to learn a little bit more and I think that when writing at Fangraphs I think generally speaking the audience you know has an understanding so and you know when I was talking about trust before there's I

think there's there's a trust that if I say someone is a bad defender or someone is a bad hitter that people people will say okay I I can go look at that players page and and understand that maybe I don't need to say he has an 80 way to run straight plus I can just say he's a and understand that maybe I don't need to say he has an 80 weight or unscrupulous plus I can just say he's a bad hitter and you can't get bogged down when you're writing articles about including every single stat that somebody has. If somebody wants to look that up they can but otherwise you try to tell the story of what the player is doing as best as you can without getting completely bogged down in the numbers.

Yeah, for me it's a little different because I have this background, writing at Fangraphs, and it probably took me like two years to get over the culture shock at MLB.com. Yeah, I bet. I went there with sort of this idea in my head of like, I'm going to bring a piece of Fangraphs to the masses. And that works so much. It really, it gets tedious after a while to have to write a whole paragraph explaining what the stat you're trying to explain is. Sure. So there's, there's some of that, but I feel

like as time has gone on, you know, fewer people think RBIs are the story or that batting average is the story. So that's helped. And in writing for the masses, I've just tried to only go as deep as I need to to tell the story. Like if I'm trying to say this guy's a good hitter, I'm not going to go into like the deepest stack of stat. I'll say, oh, he's 10% above average. That works. Yeah, I guess like what is your perception

of how analytically savvy, not the folks in this room are, we're all geniuses, but like the average baseball fan how has that shifted in a mainstream kind of way or do you think that it's still mostly my grandpa who's like rba well i hope so we uh we turned off the comments like two years ago which is great so i mean that's had somewhat of the effect of the people I hear from are the people on Twitter who are probably a little more

biased to be statistical. I mean, I try to write these things in terms of my uncle, who is a Mets fan. He's a smart guy. He's a very successful lawyer. He's a huge baseball fan, but he's not a stats nerd. And I think of it like, if I'm writing something that I think he will understand and appreciate without glossing

over, great. I mean, there are certain times where I can't tell the story I need to tell unless I'm like going into the deepest metric because it's the whole point. But I think, you know, the general appreciation of all baseball fans has risen over the last three, five, 10 years.

I mean, it has to. It's not just Fangraphs anymore. It's not just BP. Like everyone, mainstream outlets are using analytics. Yeah. So we're going to ask them one more question and then you're gonna ask questions so I'm going to invite people to queue up at the mic if you want to ask Mike and also Craig questions. You'll have to differentiate them because they're wearing the same thing. So if you could answer any baseball question in

your wildest dreams and maybe your wildest dreams aren't about answering baseball questions I don't know that's okay too but if you can and you had any data that you could bring to bear and could be something that we actually have or something that teams have or something that no one has what would that thing be I didn't think we were going to get to this question, so I didn't prepare an answer. But I think that if I could predict sort of owner behavior in terms of what would happen in the next CBA based on different changes, that's the thing I would want to do the most.

I think that over the past few seasons, we've seen spending sort of stagnate and I don't know the best way to improve the sport and whether or not increased spending in free agency is the right thing to do. But I would want to know if we do Z, or if this happens, how will owners and teams react in terms of spending on free agency if we made it five years instead of six years, or arbitration was set at this amount or minimum salaries. For me, how this board is going to go in the future based on the next CBA is the thing that I would want to know and it's obviously incredibly hard to to predict that behavior if you figure out how to predict

the future of baseball we would be very interested in that at pangrass.com I would probably just you know gamble yeah that's a thing you can do now, apparently. I would want to know if Babe Ruth could really hit Adam Modavino. I think that would be fun. That's a good answer. If I could really go nuts, I would like a list of the headlines we missed of the last year and a half of potential Jeff Sullivan articles. I would really enjoy that. And I guess topically, I would like to know if Derek Jeter was actually a bad show of stuff is there a question about that?

you know like but specifically okay I guess we will go to our question mic maybe turn the spotlight on so we can actually see the person asking the question hi how has writing about baseball for a living dulled or enhanced

your baseball fandom? And I was thinking specifically about whether you ever, like, you're flipping through the channels late at night, and you come across a baseball game, do you ever think, ugh, work? We both started out as team bloggers, right? Yeah, yeah. I did Cardinals. Dodgers. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess there's two answers to that. One is yes. Like, my job is not to focus on the Dodgers. I focus on the third teams. Part of it now is just having a family and living on the East Coast means I don't stay up for Dodger games anymore. I still, I guess I consider myself a Dodger fan, maybe in the same way you consider yourself a Marin fan.

I'd like to see them win a damn thing. I would also like to see the Mariners win a damn thing. I get that's selfish. They made it to the World Series a damn thing, you know? I would also like to see the Marriott's win a damn thing. Yeah. I mean, I get that selfish they made it to the World Series a couple of times. I'm not as much of a Dodger fan as I once was, certainly. You can't be if you have this job. I don't know anybody who works in this kind of position

who still considers himself. Maybe you do. Are you still a hardcore Cardinals fan? I mean, I pay more attention to them. Yeah, me too. I still hope that they win. Yeah. I don't cheer when I'm in the press box because that's not allowed.

Right. Well, I mean, we were really mean and made you go cover them in St. Louis to then. Yeah, they got, what, one hit over three days while I was there. I was like, oh, this will be so fun for Craig. He'll get to go cover a Cardinals postseason run. And then I was like, oh, no will be so fun for Craig. He'll get to go cover a Cardinals postseason run. And then I was like, oh, no, I'm a really mean boss. I will still see the Dodgers when they come to New York. And if I'm watching a slate of West Coast games, I will still focus on them.

But am I a fan anymore? Not so much. I mean, I remember what I used to do. And honestly, for a large portion of my my life I thought I was just a lazy person and it turns out there's just a narrow band of things that I gave a shit about and one of them is baseball and so being able to watch baseball on a regular basis has been incredibly you know a fortunate opportunity for me. And yeah, I mean, there's some days where it's work, you know, that's just, that's part

of it. It's still work. That's why they pay you to do it. But on most days, it's I get to wake up and think about baseball and, you know, answer questions that I myself am curious about. Thank you for your question. Thank you. Okay, this is specifically more for Mike because you do the Top 10 Right Now series.

How do you, when you're doing something like that, and the best example I can think of is Bregman going into this year, how do you weight it when there's a big difference between actual performance and expected performance on StatCast? Going into this year, Bregman was second among third basemen in WRC Plus and ninth among ex-WOBA. So how do you balance that out? That is a good and timely question, because I just got an email four days ago asking

me to come back and do it again for next year so that's a really it's a good question and I tend to look at it as who do I think will be the most productive in the upcoming season and I think a big part of the difference for Bregman is he's got the short wall on left and that's that's not going to change whatever else might change with the estros I think that will still be there. I mean, third base obviously is a ridiculously deep position. I have my initial list of 10, and the next 10 could be a top 10, because they're awesome. He's probably

going to be on top of it, mostly just because I know that'll annoy Rockies fans. But to answer your question, I'm more interested in what the production, I think, will be. Sometimes I'll look at the underlying metrics and say, oh yeah, I think more interested in what the production I think will be. Sometimes I'll look at the underlying metrics and say, oh yeah, I think this guy's got more in him. Even if some of Bregman's home runs are what you might call fortunate, he's still going

to get those next year and they're going to count. They're going to put runs on the board. So I'm not going to take that away from him. That's a good question. Thank you. Hi. Thank you. Hi. Thank you. My question is, so teams have obviously put in a ton of resources toward finding and building better baseball players.

What do you think teams, or what are teams doing, or what do you think teams should be doing toward building more and more serious baseball fans? I have a personal Interest in the answer to this question I have two daughters and a son and I would hate for any of them to fall through the cracks So I'd live with regret for the rest of my life

I will actually answer a question. I think for someone in your case, I don't have kids, but I would imagine making baseball affordable for people to actually go to in person, I think that's probably the most concerning thing to my mind. Ben Clemens and I are going to have a piece on this at Fangraphs when I get home from this trip. But I think that's the most concerning idea to me for minor league contraction because

it is an opportunity for fans to go see in-person baseball in a way that's affordable for a family and so the idea that we would make that enterprise harder is really concerning to me but i think the the broader sort of macro answer for major league baseball is to have more competitive baseball teams. Cause I watched a lot of like mid 2010 Mariners and I'm weird, but a lot of people just didn't. And so, cause apart from Felix, like that, those teams were bummers. They were bad bummers. I'm going to have to introduce you to Travis out there. He is a Mariners fan.

So I think that fans don't expect to have their team win every day I mean I expected my team to win every day when I was a 2001 Mariners fan because that was a weird time but like you don't expect your team to win every day but it means something really significant if they could and so I think balancing that out so that fans can look around and say well yeah we could be in this even if they're not. If they can say that in a way that's reasonable, I think it makes a really big difference to their experience of the sport. I think exposure is the most important thing when it comes to fandom. I think that when I think about when I was a kid,

I didn't have cable and there was there was like a game a week and that was the game that I would look forward to watching because it was actually on the TV and I could see it and so if it's exposure to minor league games or making kids able to go to major league games on you know somewhat regular basis I think that it's important to make sure that that people especially when they're young because the when they're young that's the 10 year old is the fan that turns into a fan of the 30 year old that's going to baseball games and and I think that making sure that you know whether it's like the Facebook or the Twitter feeds that the baseball has been doing over the

past few years those are the type of things that are important to make sure that there's still free or cheap access to games so that people can learn about it and appreciate it. Because, I mean, I'm biased, but I think that when people watch games, when people go to games, they fall in love with it. I agree with both of you guys, the cost thing especially. I took my son, who this summer was three, and my dad, and we went to a Mets game, and it was great.

He had a blast. He has no idea who won the game, nor does he care. But you know what he remembers the most is we stayed afterwards because it was a relatively fast game, and he got to run the bases. And around second base, he got to high-five Mr. Met, which he thought was, like, the coolest thing in the entire world. You can't do that at every game, obviously, but that's some of the value, I think, of the minor leagues

is there's, as my wife likes to call them, shenanigans, which are valuable to a lot of people. Mike, are you the one we should talk to about the blackout rules? Is that your... Well, I can say this. I have no input into how those work, but I'm sure I agree with 100% of you. Thank you very much for your question. Yeah.

So, Mike, I was an MSTI reader from back in the day. day so Wow great to meet you but I think you can't comment on this I think the sign-stealing completely overshadowed the baseball conversation which as watching Will Smith's warning track fly out in my head over and over and over again I think like is anyone talking like, testing the batches of baseballs before the season or anything like that? The conversation is just, like, stopped completely, right? Ben? Well, there are other things to talk about these days, I guess. You replace one story with another, but, I mean, the testing seems to be going on all the time. Obviously, I have no direct insight into this,

and I don't know if Mike does either, but it's something that the panel that was convened last year that put out some findings about what was going on with the ball has been reconvened, and my understanding was that they were getting ready to prepare something at the end of the postseason, and then the ball changed again, which maybe kind of threw a wrench into things so i think the last thing that rob manfred said about it was that they would be taking some more time to study the matter and putting something out uh before next spring so you know i i think think the messaging or lack of messaging has been frustrating at times for us and for many fans.

And I don't think it's ideal that conditions keep changing the way that they do. So it would be nice if we could get that back under control. But from what I understand, no one seems to know exactly what's going on. No one's going to ask the commissioner a question about that right now if you can get close to him. Well I mean he has been asked about it many times and he always has an answer. It's not always a great or satisfying answer and not always the same answer but I know that there are a lot of people who are studying those things you know and have a lot of expertise and it turns out to be really difficult to figure out why the baseball behaves the way it does, which you'd think we'd have a pretty good handle on that after 150 years or so. But we have all these new ways to measure

every aspect of it that we were just never even looking at before. And it turns out that all these tiny little changes can produce these very large changes. So I think people are still trying to get a handle on how this keeps happening, but hopefully we won't be talking about it ping-ponging one way or another for the rest of the foreseeable future. If only MLB owned the company that was producing the baseballs. Craig is our sass. If I've learned anything about this, kind of what Tabenja said, this has probably happened like 15 times in baseball history.

We never thought about it. We haven't measured it quite the same way. That's a great question. Thank you. Yeah. Howdy. So, you know, I think when StackHast was first being developed, there was, I guess, a little bit of controversy about the idea of some of this public data or public sabermetrics being put behind a black box.

And on some level, it does feel a little bit like the discourse has gone from, let's say, 40 people arguing about their favorite version of war to, oh, here are bankrolls. And I'm just wondering, both my view on the inside and those of you on the outside of MLB, how you guys feel about, let's say, the state of open data in baseball right now? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question. Like I said, a lot of these decisions happened before I worked there, so I'm speaking

like third hand on some of this. But I do remember in like 2014 or whatever, when the introduction was made, essentially, that people were like, this is great. I remember Jeff, he was like, we're going to call this OMGFX. It's going to be great. But at the same time, people were worried like, oh, we're not going to get access to any of this. That would really suck. And I think what has happened has been kind of trying

to walk the middle. Like, obviously, exit velocity, launch angle, spin rate, all this stuff is out there. And a ton of good analysis has been made from some of it. And then obviously the teams who essentially manage all of it, they own the company, they want to keep some of it private. I appreciate that people think I have a private Slack channel with Rob Manfred, but I've met him like twice.

So in some of this, I don't have a lot of insight to offer other than we've tried our best to put out as much as possible, whether it's output metrics or raw data, and we continue to put out more and more, and hopefully that continues in the future. We'll do one more, and then the two of you should be the first people for the next panel. That's the way that it should go. Yeah. So with the teams and with certain subsets of the MLB fan base all having this seemingly insatiable appetite for more data, just gathering it however you can and knowing as much about everything that happens with baseball as possible,

and this is open to about people who are, at the end of the day, just doing their jobs? Yeah, I think it's going to be a major bone of contention in the next CBA negotiation. We've seen other professional leagues be a little bit. We've seen other professional leagues be a little bit, I mean, there's a lot that you can say about the MLBPA's approach to the last CBA negotiation, but they actually did have some carve-outs for personal information and then also making sure that, you know, I'm not pointing at you. It's okay. I'm here. Stuff like StatCast wasn't used in arbitration, for example, because the data behind that isn't always transparent. I think that it's a really tricky ethical question because on the one hand, it is a big part of job performance for these guys. It is also incredibly personal. And as we move toward medical data being tied into performance data, it's going to get even more personal. So I would imagine this is going to be, you know, among the many, many things that the Players Association has to focus on in the next

negotiation, this is going to be a big part of it. Because like the NBA was way ahead of this stuff. And teams are sort of iffy in terms of what they want being public versus what they want private, because they have an incentive for people to not know all the stuff about their guys. So that wasn't really an answer. But I think you're right to identify it as a as an area that we don't have a good answer for right now and we're going to need a better one thanks yeah I think that you know as long as it's there's you know both parties have a say that's the important thing and that's what's gonna happen the next CBA and like you you mentioned, there was a carve out

in the last one in terms of, you know, if a team gets this personal data, that the player also gets it as well, and as long as both parties go into the situation understanding exactly what information is being collected and what can be done with the information, then I think that as far as ethically it goes, I think that it's okay that both parties agree to it.

It's like Sam said, the next frontier for baseball analysis is philosophers. That's what we're going to need for this. Thank you both. I'm sorry for making fun of you matching. Let's give a round of applause to Craig and Mike. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

Oh, Kylie, I didn't even have to play the reggaeton horn. Yeah, come on out. Hey, guys. They're very sassy. Hello. Hello. This is Fangraph's Unplugged, the prospect edition. Guys, introduce yourselves. I'm Kylie McDaniel.

I'm one of two prospect guys. I'm Eric Langenhagen, the second prospect. Thank you. You're welcome. We were recently surgically removed from one another. Multiple people have asked, like, you guys aren't literally joined at the hip. What's going on now?

Well, I mean, you have to go to games in different states, so that wouldn't work so well. We're going to get to the panel proper in a second, but the audience here knows you as guys who were recently surgically removed from one another. If you ask some of the commenters, I might be a woman. Oh, yeah. Do you want to talk about which organs each of us got? but the audience here knows you as guys who were recently surgically removed from one another. If you ask some of the commenters, I might be a woman. Do you want to talk about which organs each of us got?

Not specifically. Feels like an after panel kind of special. The kid's gone, so. I guess that's true. Hot start, hot start. Hot start. We will go into another thing, which is that Eric is our lead prospect analyst. Kylie is our other prospect analyst and also kitchen enthusiast. But you two are about to add another title to your resume, which is published book author.

Yes. Yeah. Tell us about Future Value, you guys. We've got a big announcement. You're getting breaking news. Eric and I wrote a book called Future Value. We finished it this morning. Woo!

Thank you. They the publisher told us to stop sending them words. That's not a, we're not kidding. We had a contracted word count. We started creeping above. He goes, oh, we've got like a contracted word count. We started creeping above.

He goes, oh, we've got a maximum word count, and we're now 20,000 past that. They were like, we're so surprised. I was like, I had to do your raise list. I am not surprised. They have to publish the book in such a way that the spine of it is thicker than their normal publishing process. It comes with a magnifying glass.

You'll get all the words. That's what we're dealing with now. How badly will it be hacked apart so that it can fit inside the book? You wrote a book. It is called Future Value. That's right. We're supposed to try and sell it. You're supposed to talk about the book.

What's it about? The way I've been describing it for about? Oh, it's... The way I've been describing it for months now is that it's like kitchen confidential, but scouting baseball. We each have a little over a decade in the game in some capacity now. So it's very experiential

as far as stuff that we're writing about from our experience. And then there are a lot of like scout stories there are infinite numbers of scout stories and so there are you know dozens of those in the book and it is like sort of a best practices you know

we outlay like where what the state of the industry is now and where it might be headed and some of that is fatalistic but it's hopeful, I think. We make an argument for scouts in the book. Yeah, I think we had a lot of bases where originally the publisher was sort of suggesting some ideas like, oh, it could be like a follow-up to Moneyball.

People thought after Moneyball, scouts were going to get cut out and numbers were going to take over. And actually kind of the opposite happened. And they're like, oh, now with TrackMan and StackHaston and these sorts of things, that is actually happening a little bit. And nobody's really written about the interaction between the tension between those two things

and sort of how we got here in recent years, how it's going to go in the future, what people behind the scenes are saying, but off the record. Because you can't really get an R&D director with a team to tell us, hey, here's how we do metrics and try to cut scouts out of the process but we know a lot of these guys and so they'll tell us if we don't put their name on it and not a ton of people are like sort of have some experience in both the scouting area here's how to

scout here's how you run a scouting organization here's what the astros were doing which we thought would be a lot of anonymous sources and now it it's all public stuff, but they're doing some stuff, guys. But yeah, and so just going through all that, and then when we're writing about how to scout things, we talk to scouting directors about how would you recommend we write about this, and they give us stories, and we ended up with probably too many stories about, I got in a fight with a guy in a draft room, and that guy was not my friend anymore, and then I drafted Roy Halladay, and I'm just like, wow, I didn't realize there was that good of a story about that. I'm kind of curious what you guys think about the fate of scouts.

We are so steeped in it that the paranoia is, you know, coming through the other side of our phone every day. So, I mean, you dealt with Houston for an extended period of time, and they were sort of the first ones to decide, you know, screw it, we're going to take this approach. It seems to be spreading to other places now. You can guess where. Milwaukee fired a bunch of scouts. David Stearns is a former Houston Astros AGM.

Orioles. Yeah, the Orioles had a lot of turnover. Probably don't have the infrastructure to get rid of scouting at this point. The information infrastructure needs to be in place before you can start doing that without sacrificing seeing players. But what do you guys think? Are we looking at a scoutless baseball

sometime during the course of our lifetimes as we're living in some sort of nuclear apocalypse where there are also no scouts. This still has baseball, but no scouts. Yeah. And will we still have jobs? Follow up. Before you answer that question or I do,

we will do this bit of business. Where can people preorder your book, you guys? I didn't edit. I saved the URL on my phone. It is triumphbooks.com slash future value we have a special coupon code

that we will put in the well I know what it is now I found it it's FV20 you get 20% off the book if you pre-order it now on the end of the year

the book which is called future value it has a subheading I forgot what it is yeah what is it they told us it was good yeah one half of the subtitle is the battle I forgot what it is. Yeah, what is it? They told us it was good. Yeah, one half of the subtitle is the battle for the soul of baseball.

There you go. That's the important half. Okay, now Ben can answer that question. I like that. Yeah. I mean, people... Are we good pitchmen? Is that what's happening here?

Is we're like professionals? You have months to practice this pitch for the book. Yeah, you gotta get it. This is literally the first time we've done it. You gotta get it. You just finished it this morning. I think you're doing fine. It's the old Charles Manson had his parole hearing

and he's in the mirror like, Charles Manson. Emerson Drive wall. Definitely talk about the Manson family every time you talk about the book. It'll get better. This is clearly going to get edited out of the podcast. It's a gift for you guys. Well, I think people have been predicting

the demise of scouts for a while right and there are more of them than there used to be they keep multiplying so it's only in the last few years i guess that there's really been any sign of that doom that people have been foretelling for them that it's actually happening because you kept opening up more and more markets for them right and those markets didn't have track men yet, and so you needed a scout there. And so I don't know when we get to the point where every school, every college, every high school has a track man.

Every scout's carrying mobile units. Right. Wherever you are, you have that. Yeah, right. And every international player just goes to a facility where all that stuff is wired up and so you would think that at some point maybe it can't support the same number of scouts that it's been supporting without all of that technology i mean teams will always pay lip service to like well we need to get

to know the players and we need you know makeup intuition and all that and that's certainly important but i don't know that that was ever easy to predict anyway. There have been a lot of good makeup guys who probably didn't actually have good makeup, so it's tough, I guess, to add value when a lot of the things that you used to write in a scouting report now are just automatically generated. I think that that part is true,

but I also think that we're in a moment where teams want more and more data, and that's what scouting generates. How you interpret it, the tools that you use on top of that, how analytically savvy those people are is going to vary. The number you might have of cross-checkers

might decrease, but it seems like there will always be space for someone who can tell you, that kid's not here anymore. This is what that fucking curveball looks like, right? Did you have him removed? I think his dad was disappointed in us.

Maybe he was over-served. For anyone that thinks things are already going too far, like there's teams getting rid of scouts, it's like, well, the team that just won the World Series is one of the most aggressively non-progressive teams there are. And there are teams like, I think, Tampa Bay that is perceived as a very progressive team. And we know of instances where they should have made a trade on paper and decided not

to because of a guy's makeup. So it's like, there are teams that are still doing this. And I would almost say that when the time comes that you think all 30 teams are actually disregarding scouts completely would be the best time to do it. So it's obviously always going to exist at some point, and it's always going to be a part of the various teams' processes. But some teams are actively trying to cut it out as a way to be more efficient, sometimes to then spend money other places,

sometimes to just be efficient for efficiency's sake, which then gets you bad PR, which gets you worse data, which then eventually will catch up with you. So there is, like, if you bad PR, which gets you worse data, which then eventually will catch up with you. So there is, like, if you go off sort of the deep end of trying to turn it into, like, the most corporatized thing on Earth, it seems like it would sort of eat its own tail and kind of all the efficiency you're chasing you to lose it. It's an uroboros.

That's what the word is, Kylie. I am smart, and I know what that means. There you go. That's a little editor note from me to you. Plus, you need scouts to steal signs from the dugout, as we've learned. It's the human element, really. It really brings the charm to cheating. Do you want me to do the list question?

Sure. All right. Play to the crowd. Yeah, so we're not going to get to the Mets and Yankees lists at Fangraphs for a while, although we did kick off our list coverage this week, so go read those. But if you each had to pick a guy for both the Mets and Yankees fans here who they should be excited about but maybe don't know that much about yet who who's on your radar so my two would be man the Yankee system is very deep and there there's a lot of interesting

young Latin American talent in the system. There's a shortstop that they got from Cuba, Alex Vargas, who was originally supposed to sign a deal with Cincinnati. They had agreed to, I think it was like $3 million. But because the Reds were in the penalty box from signing Cubans the year before, or two years before, they had to wait. Cuban players. Cuban players. Cuban players. Right.

So they had to wait. So they said, okay, we have three million for you, but we have to wait until the following July, even though you're eligible in this one. The Yankees traded for pool space, offered him two and a half million, and he took it, and now it looks like he's going to be a star. At least he has a chance to be. This is the guy who scouts

who were in the Dominican for extended spring training or in Florida for extended spring training and then saw him for a little bit in the DSL before he came to the GCL. This is the first guy, first name out of their mouths. Brian Cashman at the GM meetings,

I asked him specifically about this group, the Kevin Alcantara, the Gulf Coast League group, the Rookie Ball Kids, and Vargas is the only name he mentioned. I was having, like, specifically teams were asking for him already last summer as, like, a 17, 18-year-old. Which is probably what, like, if he's in the draft,

he'd be, like, top 20 picks, like 10 to 20, something like that. Yeah, I think so. I think... I've seen Nunez went in the 40s, and he's better than that guy. He's much, right. So he's basically, like, a first-round pick.

So that's why, yeah, he's a guy. And then the Mets prospect is from here. He went to Holy Cross High School in Flushing. His name is Jalen Palmer. He was at Kingsport this year, 6'3". You know, like the young Jason Wirth sort of Cameron Maben build, but at shortstop. Had a growth spurt late in high school. Teams weren't really on him.

Signed for, I think it was 200K in the 22nd round. He had a good year at Kingsport, and there's like real juice for someone who's who was like billed as raw coming out of high school. I don't even think he had a college commitment. I don't think there were even colleges properly on this guy, and

he had a breakout year at Kingsport. So, you know those are my two uh for the mets i would say brett baity was their first round pick so if you're like a intense uh meds prospect fan like this prize is super surprising uh but i he was an interesting guy for this past draft because he was over 19 on draft day and that is like traditionally uh well progressive teams or teams that use like a model will say that like age for high school hitters is like a huge variable or if the guy's 19 move him down a ton if he's 17 move him up a ton and this guy was 19 but there's an argument to be made that he was

the best high school hitter possibly in the last couple years he might be plus hit plus plus power play third base and when I went to see him this past spring he's at a big powerhouse high school in Austin, Texas that Baker Mayfield and some other football players are from, he was playing basketball, he came out late and so you had to go in a couple weeks after the season and start to see him play and I saw him walking around and he's like 6'3", 230 and you're like

this guy cannot play third base and then you watch him in infield and you're like oh this guy's got really quick feet like playing basketball has really helped him a lot and after talking to scouts they're like yeah oh, this guy's got really quick feet. Like, playing basketball has really helped him a lot. And after talking to scouts, they're like, yeah, this guy can probably play third base for, like, at least the next five, six, seven years while he has this level of athleticism. And if he could be, you know, 60 hitter, 65 power, play third base, this guy is, you know, could be Nolan Gorman. He could be all those different sorts of third basemen that are just kind of cruising through

that are high in the top 100. But because he's 19, he kind of has to do it a little more quickly he's a little more like a college player so he's a guy you can sort of we'll give you permission to scout the stat line if he's hitting well uh in full season ball next year you're allowed to be excited and if he's not then you know Mets are Metsing. How about Yankees? Uh Yankees I would say uh you mentioned Vargas and Kevin Alcantara I think Alcantara is really exciting I have said that he's what everyone thought Louis Brinson would be just like six six, four center fielders, huge tools.

He's like 18. He has like insane body control. He would probably be playing football in the SEC if he was American. The guy I'll bring up is also Michael Escato, who played in the DSL this year. He's 17. He would be another guy that would probably go

like late first round if he was in the draft this year. Some guys with the Yankees have compared him to Martin Prado, which is not like the most exciting like MVP level guy in the world this year. Some guys with the Yankees have compared him to Martin Prado, which is not the most exciting MVP-level guy in the world, but this guy signed for 300K and now he has real trade value

and teams are interested in him. He's sort of a hit-first, can play everywhere in the infield, great instincts, everything's average to above. He's performing. He's a guy that I think will sort of... The guy that traditionally I think we would be a little lower on, that doesn't have huge tools, isn't huge physically, and now since we have sort of the guy that traditionally I think we would be a little lower on that doesn't have huge tools isn't huge physically and now since we have sort of like you know how often they hit the ball hard things like that that we can quantify guys would really get to feel like a Jose Ramirez

type early this guy's a lot of those markers that I think he'll be rising on other lists but you can read ours and see that he's good now so you were just talking about how the nationals are at one end of this spectrum of traditional to analytically oriented, and then the Astros are maybe at the other end, and obviously you can win both ways, it seems like. So since we're in New York, I guess tell us where you would put the Yankees and Mets on that spectrum, but also are the opposite ends of that spectrum getting farther apart, and what does the distribution across 30 teams look like? getting farther apart?

And what does the distribution across 30 teams look like? Well, the Mets are certainly moving closer toward the progressive end of the spectrum. They've hired more analysts than they've had in the past. So that's happening. What they're going to do on the pro scouting side, I'll be interested to see. For the last several years, they've had no one scouting the lower levels of the minors. You can see it in the history of the trades.

Someone laughed. That's unfortunate. You've got to cope if you're a Mets fan. I don't see any Mets people on the backfields of Arizona. They haven't traded for anyone beneath full season ball for quite a long time now. So I think that they're going to start adding scouting down there. It's important to just have background on guys even if you're not acquiring them. So I think that stuff is coming.

We talked to people about this recently, like for the book, because we do have all 30 teams on like a matrix in the book of where they are on the spectrum and how successful they've been at it and specifically within the last couple weeks I've had a front office person with a very progressive team say the Mets need to be further to this side of the spectrum the changes that they've made recently

dictate that. The Yankees are way way up in the upper right corner of that spectrum where they've had a ton of success. They're one of the best organizations in baseball. I think we both think they're the best. Yeah, we've been told, I was specifically speaking with some amateur scouts

that are sort of bemoaning the fact that they're getting squeezed out of the game, and I go, who's the best team to work for? And this is a guy that's never worked for the Yankees, and he goes, oh, the Yankees. That's the team you want to work for. Yeah, so another front office executive told me that they have many times more analysts than most other teams.

They're just hired as consultants, so they don't have to be listed on, like, a role of employees. So there's more going on behind closed doors with the Yankees than even people know. So I don't know. The interesting question that I don't quite have an answer to, I don't think, not off the top of my head was, is it becoming more polarized? Well, I think teams are more aware of the spectrum because I think 10 years ago it was like, money ball happened, oh, we're all aware of this, we've chosen our positions. And now, I think I've mentioned before, there is a high-profile scout with a team who was asking me, like, hey, you know, draft's in a couple months. Like, what do you got? We're going through players.

And I was mentioning, like, talking about Brett Beatty. I was like, oh, this guy's, you know, because of the age, like, a lot of progressive teams aren't going to like him. And he goes, yeah, we don't care about that stuff. And I go, why? And he's like, don't tie it to me or say it's this team, but we're anti-lytics. And he was, like, very proud of it. And I was like. They made a word for it. Yeah.

It seemed like he had workshopped it and was like waiting for applause. They have internal t-shirts printed up. So now he'll know what the response was to that laughter. I will say no one told us during the course of as we were circulating this spectrum of teams, no one said, oh, they

should be further to the left. Yeah. Except for, I think, Texas. I think there's definitely teams that are perceived as traditional that are behind the scenes making moves. And then you'll sort of see, oh, on Twitter, they hired a bunch of hitting guys

that have been on Twitter that are very progressive in that way. And they hired a couple analysts, and we'll hear about it six months after they did. And then we'll see a trade they made. And I think Detroit was one of those teams where we thought they were all the way to the end of traditional and they we have started noticing like seeing high-speed cameras and like scouts uh doing different things and like they're having a pitching lab and like

they seem to have like fixed casey mize in a way that um some teams may not have been able to and you're like all right well they clearly have like the fruits of it even if they're not like seen as like popular uh among the teams that are progressive, but they're actually making moves in that way. And Cincinnati just hired all the driveline guys. It's like, all right, wherever they land in terms of success or exactly what they're doing, they are clearly trying to move in that direction

or sort of get the cream of the crop or the benefits from moving in that direction when they were not in the past. I'm curious then when, so you have a perception of particular teams being traditional to progressive, good at certain parts of scouting, player development. Where does that come into your evaluation of prospects, right? When guys move from one organization to another, like now this pitcher is in the Yankees organization. Do you sit there and say I'm gonna throw 100 pretty soon

and where do you think that should factor into your analysis so we get asked this all the time I ask you this question a lot of the time well it happens in chats too because it's also like oh the Yankees have so many people in their prospect class is it because you because they're the Yankees like you just give them more guys because they're popular it's like no like the idea is that this guy gets traded he'll have the exact same ranking with another team you have to treat them independently But what we've said is if a team that has a long track record of being able to make adjustments and improving players in a specific Way like the Dodgers have like a very specific

mechanical thing that they'll do with guys with their swings that Cody Bellinger does and Max Muncy did and all these other guys have done before if they take a guy that we think has the potential To make that change and then it looks like he made it then we'll move him a little more quickly than we would with the Team that has no track record of doing this we think has the potential to make that change, and then it looks like he made it, then we'll move him a little more quickly than we would with a team that has no track record of doing this. So it's not necessarily that they get moved up because they're with this team, because if it hasn't happened yet, it's not a thing.

But if they do it, we're like, oh, this is probably gonna stick, because they've done this before. Right, it is one of the things that separates, it's an important separator between what we're doing and what a scout or a scouting staff does that you know you if you're a scout you're projecting what the player would be if you were on

your team with your player development staff and we don't have one and so we have to yet don't limit us we've never talked about this but this is interesting it's healthy to talk about it I'm really stressed can you guys hold on for like another 45 minutes

while Kylie and I... No, no, but ideally it's not a thing we consider just for the sake of a sort of neutrality, but it's truly some of our subconscious. It's like, oh, Jaron Kendall was drafted by the Dodgers. We're more optimistic about him getting what was a swing issue in college that was undermining incredible physical tools dodgers we're more optimistic about him getting what was a swing issue in college that was undermining incredible physical tools we're like more optimistic

and so we do we probably to some degree um but some of it is just that the teams are better at targeting those players anyway like those players are talented there's also a suggestion if we're worried that jaron kendall for vanderbilt is not going to hit and then the dodgers take him in the first round it's like oh maybe he has some quality we didn't know about. If a team that usually fixes guys sees fixable qualities in this guy that we didn't see before, you won't necessarily move because of that. But we just sort of, you pay a little closer attention when that happens because it's an unexpected thing happened.

And so you just sort of like, let me keep an eye on that guy and I'll check his stats a little more often than the other guy. Do you want to tell the Jaron Kendall story? Go ahead. The scout had an in-home meeting with Jaron Kendall and asked him what his like what he was passionate about and most pretty standard like boilerplate questions

just going on the list. I like baseball. What would you be doing? Men's fashion. Apparently a lot of people interested in men's fashion here don't find that funny and well like a lot of scouts were just like what we're out bad makeup right there that's it they were done let's move on i love the idea that like the length of the yankees list is what's driving clicks to the yankees list and not the fact that it's just the Yankees, based on the guy who had, like, I'm going to quote, rings ready to go over there.

So is there a team that's on the verge of joining that group of teams that you were both just mentioning, like, oh, I need to pay attention to this player because this team just drafted this guy? I think Minnesota in general has been doing a lot of smart things. Well, things we would do, which I'm going to grade as smart things. Smart. Yeah, smart.

You're getting the book wrapped down now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here we go. Yeah, so they, with the new group of Derek Falvey and Thad Levine, they've now sort of been around long enough. Like we're saying, Baltimore, they haven't put down the infrastructure to necessarily do everything they want to do. Minnesota's now had that time. Obviously, at the big league level, they have more success than maybe their payroll

or their, like, pedigree would suggest. And there are things underneath the surface in terms of, like, player development, guys they've been improving, people they've been hiring, processes, things like that, where it seems like they're moving in that direction, where they can sort of be one of those teams where if they take a guy up high that we didn't like,

we'll be like, what did we not know about this guy? Yeah, so Cincinnati and San Francisco on the player dev side. Baltimore and Atlanta. And where else is the Astros DNA? Where else has that gone? On the analytics side.

Arizona on the in-game management stuff. Stuff that the Rays are doing with matchups in the middle of a game, depending on game state, altering your personnel, prioritizing positional versatility on the big league roster, that's a very Arizona thing now. Yeah, I'd say if we're trying to make a list of the teams

that are perceived as some level of traditional, not all the way at the progressive end, the teams that are moving in that direction, those are the ones that seem to be getting results and doing it in the way that most agrees with how we and people we talk to tend to think. Okay. So I'm curious, we had a question about the state of the baseball itself earlier. And so I'm going to ask the two of you, how has the uncertainty around what the future liveliness of the ball is going to look like affected player evaluation for the two of you, but also on the

team side to the extent that it has? They have more information than we do in terms, like we'll get some average exit VLOs, some spin rates, things like that to give us like an idea of where someone stands in the general hierarchy. They're obviously going to have stuff on every single pitch. And so I think they can probably pinpoint the kinds of guys that are benefiting more from whatever it is the baseball is doing. They probably have, obviously, more track mandate in AAA to tell how that ball may or may not be different or how the parks or the pitching may affect that. So I think the teams that we think are the smartest, this gives them another variable to be smart with and continue to make good decisions. Whereas I think we probably, Eric and I, would fall more where the more traditional teams would be.

They're not as good at this because we both either don't have the information or don't know what to do with it. We're just like, yeah, some more home runs. So I guess we'll just make home runs less important in our evaluation when it's in AAA, and otherwise we'll wait for someone to tell us we're wrong. There's probably a weird layer of hitter that exists in some Goldilocks zone that has been helped by that extra couple feet of flight ball distance. We don't know who those hitters are.

It has made evaluating stats at AAA, so towards the upper levels of the minors, traditionally the thinking is the level of talent is more uniform, you can trust the statistics a little bit more. But the ball changing there has made that hard. We just don't have that innate feel for what a good stat line in the PCL is anymore because it is so drastically different now that the ball was made different there.

It also, I mean, we're talking mostly about hitters, but I think it's also given us trouble with pitchers. Pitchers, yeah. Arizona list, and we're like, Taylor Widener, we thought he was really good. His, like, sort of command and stuff kind of backed up, and then he was also in AAA and got whacked around, and we're like, all right, did he get a little bit worse or a lot worse, or was it the baseball, and would that change in the big leagues

or in AA? Like, we can't really square where he is exactly, and I think having, like, comprehensive AAA stack cast or even track man data, which we don't have, would probably shed some light on, light on where he is on the spectrum of how much is he at fault and how much was he the victim. Knocked around by the ball, basically.

The victim of some bad circumstances. This was the minor league leader in strikeouts two seasons ago who had an 8 ERA last year. Not a great trajectory. You talked about seeing high speed video and high speed cameras show up all around the game, and you two have been taking high-speed videos yourselves.

Not of ourselves. No, I mean, not on the internet at least. Not for public consumption. Yeah. Continue. So how has that changed how you evaluate players? What do you look at differently? What can you see that you couldn't see before?

Well, so we've been taking it from the open side of hitters, right, so you can see the swing mechanics. And our thought initially was that we'd be able to try to calculate, because we know the frame rate of the cameras, right? You know how wide the plate is. And so in theory, we were hoping to calculate exit belows in places where we ordinarily wouldn't be able to. Bat speed, which is really just like an angular velocity calculation. Spin rates too. We've had trouble doing some of it because there is degradation as the ball approaches the plate of the rate of spin. We haven't figured out how to account for that yet.

But the things that we have learned are who is good at spinning the baseball in a way where the seams are uniform, which is important. Spin axis, we've seen, we've been able to see that. And it's just helpful visually to see the importance of that. We knew it was important because that's a thing that can be measured. And teams have been targeting pitchers with a certain range of spin axes for a little while now. Yeah, like we'll text each other like, oh, I just saw this guy that we know is 94-96,

but he's got like perfect backspin on his fastball because he just changed it, so our off-season data didn't have that. Oh, I bet these teams are probably interested in him, and oftentimes you'll check with those teams, and they'll be like, yeah, he has improved a lot. How did you guys know? We're like the little camera with the pictures. And then on the hitting side, we've noticed, and this is just purely visual,

that hitters are missing because of location. It's always because of location, not timing. So when hitters are swinging and missing on the high speed, it's just so much easier to see that they are on time, but the ball usually vertically is where they're missing it. And so much of this is so intuitive, right? Like if you're swinging a bat this way, and a ball is moving either one of these two directions,

it's not going to hit the barrel if it's moving effectively in one of those two directions. I can't believe no one thought of this. We had to have like thousands of dollars of equipment to tell us these things. Who were the ad wizards that came up with this? But if the ball moves like this, there's still bat there. And so don't acquire pitchers whose balls move like this.

This is the approach these brilliant teams have begun to take. I would also say there were... Kylie, I noticed you wore your scout pants. Thank you. I'm feeling fancy. Another thing I found is because when you zoom in, the lens gets kind of long, I get a lot of scouts making fun of me, which I don't like. But after they make fun of me, a lot of times we won't be able to tell

what pitch a pitcher is throwing, if it's a curve know, is it a curveball, is it a slider? And usually you can look at, like, the movement and the speed and have an idea of what the movement tells you, but you can't see the grip. And the way the video works is when you take it, it then renders on the screen so you can watch it while the next pitch is coming. You can be like, oh, he releases it like this. And when I was watching Team USA where there's a pitcher from Minnesota Max Meyer though probably on the first or second round this year and he was throwing this like cutter at like 90 and everyone's like we throw 95 So that's probably a four seamer and then the cutter I guess he's probably just like holding like a cutter going like this and then we noticed when we're just like watching it rendering on

The camera that he's like he's spiking his knuckle So he's throwing like a spike curveball, but he's throwing it like a slider So he's throwing a spike slider, which no one had ever heard of. And all the guys behind me are like, what's a spike slider? That's not a thing. You're just making it up. Like, I'm just some idiot. And I go, here, look at it. And he's like, oh, yeah, it's a spike slider.

Thanks, guys. They didn't see your scout pants, so they didn't take you seriously. They don't know the, yeah. There's a level of authority that comes with this. I'm into men's fashion. Very good. Very, very good. Okay, so we're going to go to Q&A in just

one or two minutes, so if people want to queue up and give preference to the two folks who couldn't ask their questions. Oh, they're ready. Good job, guys. We can't let you guys go without talking about the biggest news in the minors, which is realignment,

constriction, the proposal that MLB has put forth to radically change the organization of the minors. I think we all recognize that there are some issues with the way that the minor leagues are currently constituted. This proposal is very radical. This is a much longer question. We could probably do an entire panel on this, but in two minutes. If you could reimagine the miners, would it look like what MLB is proposing, or would it look very different? What's your take on this? There's a case to be made that they are doing some things that would be beneficial for some of the stakeholders in this. Obviously a lot of these places that they have earmarked are ones that are not making a ton of revenue and this is while they are subsidized by the owners.

So like they're paying for all the players and these teams, a lot of them are still not making money. So like this is not a viable business. Now that being said, a billionaire is subsidizing a thing that people want to exist. That doesn't mean you should stop subsidizing it. So it doesn't mean just because it's not a viable business, like you know, corn subsidies and whatnot,

some things get subsidies. It's fine. But there is also an argument to be made that there are more players, drastically more players in the minor leagues than have a chance to make the big leagues. There would be a case to be made that there should be fewer slots in the minors

to then concentrate your resources onto the players that really have a chance. And then that would spring up a more robust independent league system where those long shot players can go. But again, if some of these, you know, small Appalachian towns that are not viable businesses unless they're subsidized, if they become independent league teams, now they have to pay the players, which they clearly couldn't do.

And then player pay goes down even more. And it's like, well, that's probably not great either. And so then you're just sort of like, well, you could do do a cold economic thing this is helping the owners and it might be good for baseball and then it's like pretty clearly bad for fans and also might be bad for baseball so you can kind of argue either side and I think there's gonna be a bunch of unintended consequences if it happens this way but I also think this is probably a we're gonna leak what is a pretty extreme plan and sort of see what people think and then we'll do a more moderate plan it'll seem like we're the heroes that that took our foot off the accelerator

and saved some stuff. I generally agree with Kylie, but... Thank you. We can't really see out there. Has anyone here worked for a minor league team? By round of applause, is anyone... Okay, so there are some of you. So I worked for the Philly's AAA affiliate for a number of years,

and I do think we should avoid discussing publicly minor league teams as if they're mom-and-pop shops. Their minor league team owners are... Right, millionaires. Yeah, and there's a lot of groups that own eight minor league teams, and run them is definitely the opposite of a mom-and-pop shop. I'm also curious to see the list of politicians who sent the recent

letter that has been made public about preserving the minor leagues. Who is on that and who was signing off on the preserve the sanctity of baseball and the you're our lord whatever it was. The freedom and apple pie act. Right. That was

trying to lock up minor league pay. I'd like to know who those two are. I wonder if minor league owners, which are in some of these small counties across America, the minor league ballpark is... I hate for those places to lose a sense of community. Those are hubs of commerce, and the people who run that commerce

are probably powerful within that community. They have influence. And so I wonder where the overlap is of the people who wanted to limit minor league pay as a way of preventing this new solution. I said that in scare quotes for people listening to the podcast. Thank you. Where is this coming from? What is the motivation for the folks on

the political side? And also from MLB's point of view, taking some of these places that might have stayed in the last 20 years and essentially ending them as companies, they're going to have to cut some big checks. So it's not like they're just cutting it free and there's no cost involved. They're going to have to cut, I would imagine, millions of dollars in checks to make this

happen. So this would be a long-term solution that's not going to include bringing some teams back. So it's a pretty fine thing. So maybe a more moderate step would make more sense since we don't really know how it's going to play out. We have these giant spring training facilities in Arizona that most of the year aren't really being used. And that's a bummer.

And the idea of using those more frequently for player development is positive as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I don't live there. You get to see more players. That would be nice. But then you just have all these vacant ghost town stadiums across the country that have their proposed but potentially dubious ways of filling with lousy baseball. And those backfield games have oftentimes no culture at all. There's no one there. There's no music being played. There's no fans. There's no concession stands.

If you take it from an Appalachian town and stick it on a backfield, it loses a lot of charm. But you could also say the players that won't seem, they're losing a lot of the experience as well. Yeah. Let's go to some questions and turn the spot on again, please. Okay. Yeah, there they are.

Awesome. Hey. Oh, prepared. All right. So, yeah, I've been waiting to ask questions for a bit, but okay, let's go. I haven't even wrote it down. Every player seems to be going through some sort of decline or progression, and you guys were talking about some of the different things that you notice

before a player maybe gets better or is getting worse. I love you guys' prospect lists. I'm all about it. Eat it all up. I'm just wondering, when are we going to see a list of big leaguers scouting reports? I mean, if players are always constantly adjusting and getting better and there's all these factors,

why do we just have it for the minors? So that is a great idea. Thank you. It is a thing we want to do and have the board on the website that is currently like our evaluations and rankings of all the minor leaguers

just have a little check box that you can click and then all the big leaguers will join. We've been talking about it for years and have actually made moves in that direction, but it's quite an undertaking to dynamically update 900 players or whatever it is all at once. There's things going on in the background of

the thing that populates the board on the website that is preparing for that sort of future. There are problems with that because the players are constantly changing and there are only two Eric and Kylie's. And so that's...

We have to figure out how we're going to deal with that. The solution involves cloning. I was going to say, are there two of each of you? Because that would make less easier. One of the Kylie's plans my outfits. That's a great question. It's a good question. It's a good question.

It is a thing that is on the horizon if you're looking at the horizon from a helicopter or a tall building. As a thing that is still receding, but will eventually get closer. I mean, I eat it all up. I have my own website with a bunch of different stats, so whenever you guys can release it, I'm ready. Terrific. Thank you so much. stats so whenever you guys can release it i'm i'm ready terrific thank you so much all right so with um like the minor leagues getting smaller which will make it easier to watch players but

there's so many minor league teams and players out there that when you're watching a guy for like two or three games how do you tell like this is something that it could just be a bad stretch or this is something that could mean he'll struggle in the big leagues? Right. So the problem of small samples visually, typically that means throwing the results of an outing out. During the course of a game, we don't really care who's winning. We're not concerned with what the box score is. Performance is a thing

that we derive our opinions about over time. The lower the level, the less the actual outcome matters. It's more the process. Right. If a guy, let's say a pitcher has great stuff but has a terrible outing, we're more concerned about the stuff aspect.

And then we also are looking for a reason maybe that that guy failed as I mentioned before with like just this like how a pitcher does this sorry Meg. Like is telling if a guy is throwing 96 from a low slot and he's getting shelled that now tells me there's something maybe there's something else going on here, why this stuff isn't playing the way the radar gun says it should be playing. And then we're also sourcing. We're talking to scouts and front office people. So our in-person looks

are cross-checked by folks in the industry. So there's not a biodiversity problem. We're getting a lot of different opinions about each individual player. So that helps with our rate of failure as well. And I would also say there's a common feeling when we're doing a prospect list and some guy pops up and they're like, hey, this guy was in the DSL and he had 100 this year.

We're like, oh, we didn't know about this guy. And I go look at his numbers and it's like four strikeouts per nine. ERA was eight. He's 22. And I'm like, there's a big gap between he throws 100, but I'm on the prospect list but this guy looks like he should be released based on what we have here and then i need someone to fill that gap and if they can't fill it then i'm going to skew toward the results might be telling us more than him throwing 100 because he might have done it once and now he's heard and

there's there's like all kinds of different things to fill in that gap and that usually tells you what's in that gap will tell you i think where he needs to be it's a good question thank you uh this is a two-parter the second part I think is harder so feel free to ignore it um oh it's like being back in grad school indeed uh first part uh I I think it's pretty obvious that at the the lower levels you've seen people like Kyler Murray who have opted out of doing baseball because they want to do football because it's much more lucrative. They've got an easier shot to make a lot of money. I'm kind of curious if that's sort of endemic at the lower levels when you've definitely got more multi-sport athletes. And then on the second half, kind of on the more future of the sport, I work in education.

One of the most interesting things of the year has been the Chicago teacher strike. And it took a lot of winning hearts and minds to actually make that strike successful. I don't really think I have to speak to the rest of the room because it's all Fangraphs folks. I think we're pretty all anti-owner and pro-player. But that's definitely not the general public perception,

especially because Tony Clark is the union leader. What does Major League Baseball and the players associate especially have to do to kind of win those hearts and minds and, you know, if eventually we get to a strike, ensure that it's in the service of the players and not necessarily in service of the owners? So the reduction of the minor league is a problem as it relates to your first question. That type of prospect, the two-sport flyer, someone was an excellent college football player somewhere, played high school baseball and knew an area scout. That goes away.

There are no more lottery tickets like that in the minors anymore if that happens. So there's that part of it. Kyler Murray was such a strange situation. I don't know. The thing that is selecting athletes away from baseball is socioeconomic disparity. Baseball is expensive to play, especially where you're being seen by scouts. It's often on the travel ball circuit. You have to fly to Fort Myers. You have to fly to Arizona. You have to pay to play on some of the high end travel ball circuit. You have to fly to Fort Myers. You have to fly to Arizona. You have to pay to play on some of the high-end travel ball teams.

They all have their own uniforms. College scholarships aren't full, which they are for basketball. That's a problem as well. So there are a lot of youth athletes selected out of playing baseball simply because you need 18 other people to do it. You can't just go with six other friends to a park with a basketball and a list of supplies and shoot around. So I think that that's a problem. And then as far as the players' union question goes,

it's an attention problem. Our attention collectively, I think, is very divided. It's pretty splintered. There's a lot of stuff for us to know about, for us to be worried about, for us to be thinking about day to day. And it's hard when the players' union cares about millionaire athletes for people to go,

yeah, go millionaire athletes for people to go, yeah, go millionaire athletes. So I don't know. We have to talk about it as a microcosm of a bigger thing. And I think that's what we're trying to do at the site when we can is point at baseball and say that, hey, this is a thing that's happening culturally everywhere through a lens that you, a person who has been digesting baseball your whole life, can understand.

And I think most fans interact with baseball as like rooting for Laundrie. And rooting for Laundrie is much more closely associated with the owner who's less likely to go away as the players who will very likely go away at some point. And so I think it is, I want to root for outcomes that help my team. And so that includes supporting the owner in general terms uh because that leads to wins where supporting a player means you're rooting for 10 different players on 10 different teams and so i think if you know the sort of lower information not quite as rigorous fan that wants to see what's going on at the game they're not going to think about like well yasmani grand all like didn't take that four year 60 million dollar deal because he wanted to set a better precedent and now he's

effectively actually getting 90 million over five years and that's like that doesn't really light anybody it barely lights me up I almost fell asleep during that sentence so it's like it's hard to get someone excited about that when it can be hey your team traded for so and so and now you're going to win the World Series like that's very easy to understand so I feel like they just

have an easier argument to make which then puts the onus on the Players Association to be, like, even more correct and more specific and better messaging, which, you know, we'll see if they're able to do that. I believe in precision, but I think you talk about Mike Trout. You talk about how these are, we've never seen better baseball than we're seeing right now.

Like, they've never been better as players than they are in this moment. And no one gives a shit about the owners because he's not on the field. Mike Trout's on the field. So you talk about Mike Trout. I mean, I think that you're right that there is a disconnect between laundry and player and people are not sympathetic to millionaire athletes. But like they really like watching Francisco Lindor. They really like watching Patrick Corbin pitch a baseball. And gosh, aren't the Nationals glad they had him because they won a World Series because

they had like four pitchers and they paid most of them a lot of money. So I think that that's the connection, right? Because like your kids don't care about the owners of the Yankees or they don't care about this. I mean, maybe they care about the Steinbrenners. I don't know. Maybe they're weird kids, but like they don't care about the owners of the Yankees. They don't care about the, I mean, maybe they care about the Steinbrenners. I don't know. Maybe they're weird kids, but they don't care.

But they care about Aaron Judge. So I think it starts there, and then you get specific with how it's a reflection of a larger question we're asking as a society and a community about a lot of other things. So that's my lefty answer. And how many owners do you like more the more you learn about them?

But then how many players do you like more the more you learn about them? It's like you see Len Doerber in the All-Star game when he's mic'd up, like hopping around. I'm just like, oh, that's why everyone likes baseball is that. Why is he not the president? This is the most charismatic human being on the planet. And then you see like a headline with Tom Ricketts in the title and you're just like, I don't need that.

Let's go back to Lindor Trout. Thank you for your question. We do our part to talk about Trout on this podcast and at this site. It is 9.45. We want to open the bar up again, which we cannot. We'll do one more

question. He's got a Puig Destroyer shirt on his arm. Okay, never mind. I take it all back. I didn't see the shirt. Hopefully this question is a little lighter, but might be more difficult to answer at the end of the day. I don't know. Like Meg said, we're all pretty smart baseball folk in this room, I would say. And I assume I'll learn more about this

when I purchase Future Value available for pre-order now online we're going to hire this guy I can sit at Thanksgiving and I yell at my relatives about WRC Plus and F4 versus B-War maybe eat some turkey instead

I don't know man I just need the stuffing and the mashed potatoes but at the end of the day when it comes to prospects I'm reading three or four different lists written by different people. And then it's up to me to be like, oh, Keith Law hates my dudes. I'm going to fade his list. I'm going to look at this. This list looks better. Like, how can I, as somebody who, if you showed me footage of Jason Dominguez hitting something, I'd be like, yeah, he definitely hit that ball. How can I be a smarter prospect report consumer?

That's a great question. Yeah, that is a really good question. We are keen to know the answer to that question, as an aside. That's the thing that, honestly, I think we struggle with. I think that's part of why Fangraph's prospect stuff hasn't gone mainstream.

Like, it's just... We chose not to sell out. I was going to say, I thought it was the Manson references might have had something to do with it. I don't know. I was just thinking about it. Everyone's going to say...

What are you going to do? Everyone's going to say they liked our early stuff. You're getting in on the right ground floor, guys. Anyway, the process that we follow to try to properly assess

players is, I guess, what I have you focus on. We ask questions, where should have Big Leaguer X been on a prospect list? We're sort of reverse engineering a lot of stuff. What are expectations, I think? What should the layperson expect from a person ranked 80th on a top 100 list?

It's really not... It's like a couple of words. Yeah, it's really not that much. And so I think those are the things that we're trying to instill in people. We tried to do it last year with a bar chart of potential outcomes. The Louis Brinson Kylie brought up earlier, for years Louis Brinson has been this high risk guy. There's never been a single scout who's like, I'm totally sure that this guy will be a star,

no doubt. Some teams have little boxes that they check on the card that say, this has a chance to be this but he's more likely this and it's it's not exact trying to assess those probabilities at all but it does exist and the outcomes are narrower for some than they are for others and it's been hard to try to impart that to readership because assessing players is a very visual thing and understanding a concept like variance and how it applies to different buckets of players is not an

intuitive thing. It's not something that they are exposed to watching big league games 160 times a year. I'd also say if you're more verbally inclined or a creative writing person or whatever, if you read our reports, you can usually tell if we're really excited about a guy or whatever if you read our reports you can usually tell if we're really excited about a guy like if you read the wrong i remember i wrote the wonder frank the

first pass on the wonder franker report last year and i tried to figure out what was wrong with him to keep me from calling him perfect and so if you read that you can be like all right he's like first on the list but like that he's like really first on that list and i think there are definitely guys on every list where it's like, oh, this guy's in AAA. He's been pretty good. He's probably going to play in the big leagues. He might be a fourth outfielder. He might be a third outfielder.

It's going to be a pretty milquetoast-like reading report. And you can be like, all right, that guy doesn't seem like maybe they're super excited about him. I wouldn't necessarily say feel free to move him down because we put him where we think he should be. But you get an idea of the flavor of what that guy is, whereas the guy in rookie ball where it's like his exit velos were this his rate of hard hit balls was this like michael scotto he has qualities in common with jose ramirez the odds that he will be jose ramirez is two percent or whatever it is but jose ramirez is an example of a guy that like everyone sort of missed on like not just us a bunch of teams could have had him and they didn't have him the sort of high contact but not doesn't

look physically like most all-stars look kind of guy and I think we actively will look for this guy does some stuff we like but we don't like you know we don't think he has upside when the concept of upside I think is a little overrated and so you look at Escoto and you're like okay well this guy does a lot of stuff well he's never failed before he does look like some guys that are all-stars so let's consider him as he could possibly be an all-star instead of saying well he didn't get two million dollars and he doesn't look like he could play in the NFL so like why do we like this guy and so looking backward at sort of misses or guys that we miscalibrated or like certain kinds of like you know kinds of plate discipline that are not necessarily as predictive we now can talk to friends with teams and they'll say oh this guy's got 40 pitch selection and 60 aggressiveness in

the zone and things that we could always sort of say in general terms, and now we have numbers behind it. And so I think we can kind of zero in on guys. So I think between looking at how many pieces of evidence we have as a proxy for how good we feel about it and then also looking at sort of like the level of emotion behind it, because there's a couple guys, I think, on every list

where we're like, you can tell we're excited, but we put them where we think we have to put them, but it's like, if you had to pick somebody, you'd probably pick that guy. And then the other thing I'd say is watch bad baseball. The reason Jason Dominguez doesn't register to you when you watch him on video is because that's like the talent you're used to watching on TV

when you're watching a Yankees game. But if you see that guy on a backfield full of 20 kids who don't really have a chance or aren't as physically developed, that's where you see how it stands out. And so going to a high school state championship game or a St. John's game and watching players at that level is going to give you context that you didn't have before. It will be illuminating and make like, make you appreciate Big League Town more, too. I was watching the World Series with an area scout, and we were a little over-served, but, like, we were giggling with...

It was just incredible watching what these guys do when you're sifting through, you know, high school and college players. And if you want to learn more about how to scout, there's a book called Future of Value available for pre-order now. Tell me more about it. You're getting it.

You're getting it now. Where can I order it? Excellent. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to our Patreon supporters of Effectively Wild. We appreciate you. We appreciate our Fanagraphs members. We're going to open the bar back up.

We have to be out of here at 1030, so I'm not going to say to drink fast, but I am going to say that the bar is going to open again. And you should take advantage of that to the extent you want. But thank you to our panelists and to all of you for coming. Thanks, everyone. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks to everyone for listening, and thanks to those of you who came out to the show. It was fun to meet everyone.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Thomas Burton, Eric Wolff, Sarah Luthie, Joshua Blanchfield, and Brian Kelly. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And you still have time to join the Effectively Wild Secret Santa.

Registrations close early next week. A couple hundred people are already in, including me. You can contact me and Meg and Sam via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are already a supporter thanks to dylan higgins for his editing assistance we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week you can see us everywhere so what makes you stop and stare Look at them dead eyes back to the ground Try to see my way around Don't try to accuse me