Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1543: The Best Baseball Spectator Experiences

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s proposed in-game distancing measures and what degree of difference from the norm would prevent the game from still looking like baseball, then draft and discuss their favorite highly specific ways in which to follow a baseball game, whether in person or from afar. Audio intro: Sloan, […]

Listen to the radio Where did everybody go? There's silence all around the globe I say it again, come on in Voices in a static fade Riding out the echo waves Moving in and out of things I say it again

Cause I'm going back Good morning and welcome to episode 1543 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast. Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, and I'm joined today by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, both of you. Hi. Hello. What's up?

Doing a podcast. All right, we're going to talk about baseball viewing experiences that we like in a minute, but I believe, Ben, you first have some banter. Yeah, this will be quick and related to what we're going to do for the rest of the episode, I think. But over the weekend, there were some reports by Jeff Passan at ESPN and Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick at The Athletic about a draft that MLB produced and sent to the Players Association about the safety measures that would be taken if baseball resumes. And it was not the complete draft and it's not final and it's subject

to negotiation and all of that. But there were some specifics there about off the field measures and testing and so forth. But there were also some specifics about what baseball would look like on the field. And some of it sounded a little bit like what you and I talked about, Meg, not long ago when we tried to imagine social distancing baseball. And then Ben Clemens blogged about it in greater depth for Fangraphs. But I saw a tweet. So this was a tweet by Clinton Yates, who writes for The Undefeated. And he took a screenshot of part of Passon's report that details some of the ways that baseball players

would be kept apart on the field. And so I'm just going to read this. And it says, high fives, fist bumps, and hugs would be prohibited under the plan. What could be sadder than that? Hugs prohibited. I mean, it makes sense, but to ban hugs. So going to have to ban trades too Yeah, exactly As would spitting tobacco use And chewing sunflower seeds Fielders would be, quote, encouraged To retreat several steps away

From the base runner between pitches First and third base coaches are not To approach base runners or umpires And players should not socialize with Opponents. A ball will be thrown away After it is touched by multiple players, and throwing the ball around the infield will be discouraged. I wonder if multiple players includes pitcher and catcher,

because that would mean you'd have to throw every ball away. So I don't know, maybe they're exempt. And pitchers would have their own set of balls to throw during bullpen sessions, and personnel who rub baseballs with mud for the umpires must use gloves and there are various other measures like these but this was kind of attention getting because of the high fives and fist bumps and hugs being been anyway clinton yates excerpted this and said this is not baseball and he elaborated on that in some additional tweets and how this really bummed him out and it seemed like the replies to his tweet,

people were largely agreeing with him that this was not recognizably baseball to these people who were weighing in, that this is too far, just even aside from the safety concerns, that this is just distorting the game too much to bring it back. Like if you have to bring it back without these things, then don't bother bringing it back at all.

And I wonder whether any of you had that reaction to these things or what would be far enough from the norm that you would say this is not baseball and you would have that opinion, too. Well, I'll say two things. I did not have that reaction. I think I focused more on how likely it is that the league will be able to police behavior that is just muscle memory for a lot of these guys, right? That is so habituated that I think it'll be a difficult habit to break them of. If you watch the KBO broadcasts, there are a lot of tentative, oh, I went to hug you. I can't. Sorry. You know how human beings sound like Muppets.

But my reaction was not that. I mean, there have been times in baseball's history where this very much was baseball. There's a rule still in the rulebook that has just not been stricken from the record for whatever silly reason that I think was mostly meant to prevent players from unionizing. I think it had an anti-labor bent to it. But there is a rule against fraternization in the MLB rulebook right now. They're not supposed to, with members of the other team, fraternize or control, and they're not supposed to interact with people on the stand. So there

has been a version of baseball that looked like this previously. It's pretty far in the past now, but it's not baseball. It's just not modern baseball. I also think that people probably lose track of exactly how many balls get cycled through in a game already. So it will certainly be more. And I don't mean to downplay how this will affect guys as they, you know, are used to, you know, yakking it up at first base and hugging each other and being pals. We've built whole marketing campaigns around base and hugging each other and being pals we've built whole marketing campaigns around them all liking each other but i think that some of this stuff will be a little less noticeable and some of it will feel very disquieting and unusual we're helped by

beltray already being retired yeah good point because then we would really feel the loss of people messing with his helmet now it's like please don't do that you might get him sick yeah so we don't have to contend with that at least yeah yeah maybe he was just trying to stop the spread of diseases all along who knows but the only part of this i mean all of it's kind of a bummer obviously like it would be weird to see the ball thrown around the horn or whatever but that doesn't mean that i think it's not baseball or that i wouldn't want baseball to come back like that but the only part is like if it does affect like infield positioning or like yes you can't hold a runner on if you're a first baseman or you have to stand in a certain place or not stand in a certain place then maybe it starts to actually affect the competition instead of just the cosmetics. And, you know, that might

be a problem. So I could see someone objecting to that. The rest of it, I just feel like, well, you know, everything that's happening in our lives right now is a little different from how it usually is, right? So we could say this is not life and not continue living, but like instead we've all just kind of accommodated and adjusted, or at least a lot of us have. And we go on. So, you know, I wear a mask outside right now, which is not something that I would have ever considered doing a couple months ago. And when I see someone who's not wearing a mask, I think of that far differently than I used to. And so I think we've all kind of adjusted and that it's okay with me if baseball

adjusts in sort of a superficial way too. Yeah. I think it's like wherever the line is where it stops being baseball, I think these things are maybe like one and a half percent of the way there. I think you can go a long, long, long, long way before I don't think it's baseball. My rule of thumb is if there's a T, if they're hitting off a T, then I would stop thinking that's baseball. You got to have a pitcher and a batter that are in confrontation with each other and everything else is details.

Some of it would be more jarring than other things, but if the players decided on their own last year to quit throwing the ball around the horn, I don't think we would have thought that anything like had changed fundamentally about the game it's a um ancillary detail in the the matchup between the pitcher and the hitter and the fielders so i think that there is no to me personally there's no way that any version of baseball that i consider not baseball is going to be played this year.

Like they're, what I would consider not baseball any longer is so far off the deep end that it's, I don't even have to really worry about like one of these proposals accidentally being it. Yeah. I think the question that I do think about a lot is what is canon? What will end up being canon? Yeah. And I think if you had, I mean, there are various ways that they could play the season that I would probably not consider it canon. And a month or two ago, I would have thought that was significant. But at this point, I don't even really care about that. I think that you could play a season that isn't real, isn't part of the lineage. And I would be fine with that too, to be honest. I mean, this is an extraordinary moment in history where everything is temporarily very different. And

there's not going to necessarily be a perfect solution, obviously. We're all in danger. So yeah, even if it's not baseball, I would be fine with that if that's what it takes to play baseball. Yeah, I'm with you. I wonder how the defensive positioning stuff will sort itself out. It's between plays. Can you read that part again? It says fielders would be encouraged to retreat several steps away from the base runner between pitches. Encouraged.

Encouraged, yes. And presumably they would still be able to hold runners on. Right. Butouraged, yes. each other when you don't need to yeah but that there's obviously going to be fielders and hitters and runners standing next to each other because the catcher has to stand next to the hitter for instance and unless they outlawed base stealing then the first baseman would have to hold on the runner at first so i would think encouraged is a pretty i don't know it's just a reminder word i would think yeah but who knows i mean don't know. I have not generally been investing that much emotion into any of these proposals because it's a long way from here to there. And I don't think that in this emotional state, I can handle focusing a lot of my emotions on

imaginary plans for baseball that are going to be rewritten 5,000 times and maybe never come to pass. Yes, I agree. All right. That's all I got. So we're going to do a little bit of a draft here, a non-competitive draft, more of a conversation starter here. And this conversation starter goes like this. We're each going to pick our favorite ways to consume baseball baseball games specifically so not not our favorite ways to engage with the sport but our favorite ways to actually consume a baseball game and with as much specificity as possible so i don't know i don't know what megan ben are going to draft but probably it's not going to be like number one tv number two

radio number three in person but more specific than. And I think this is just kind of a chance, I think, as we reach the, what, six-ish week, seven week, I don't know, we're a quarter of the way through the season now, what would be a season? And so it's just kind of a chance to acknowledge what is missing from our lives, which we know it's an ever-present thing that is missing. The missingness, the sort of absence is always there. But this is just to kind of acknowledge it and talk about it and romanticize it and really miss it and grieve it properly. And that's kind of it. So Meg and Ben have agreed to do this. Yeah. Yes. All right. So Meg and Ben have agreed to do this.

Yeah. Yes. All right. So should I, since it's such a kind of a broad and somewhat abstract prompt, would you like me to start? Sure. You may, yeah. All right. Well, I've got two picks lined up.

The third one, I'm not sure yet. So I'm still working on the third pick. But here's my first pick. I really like when I'm listening to a game on the radio in the car and I'm driving somewhere I'm far away from home maybe I'm going somewhere that's far away or maybe I'm returning from somewhere that's far away but either way I am I have gone a long way my leash is all the way and the radio is breaking up and I hate that I was just gonna say I like it if that's not happening I like it when it's not happening. I like it when it's not happening as well. I love it when... The thing about it is if you have a three-hour drive, you can have the

whole game on and that's fun. But sometimes you have a six-hour drive and there is a point where you're going to run out of baseball game. You're just going to run out of leash. and when it starts to break up but you can still hear some of it you can hear it and then you can't hear it and then you can hear it and then you can't hear it to me it takes this thing which baseball which is like it is a sort of a classic like never-ending product it's like a it's a staple it's a thing that just gushes out of canisters at you. And you just get like, you never run out of baseball during the six months. There's just almost always baseball on. And then you finally reach this point where suddenly it becomes scarce and your relationship

to it changes. And instead of being a thing where you're, you have on all the time and you barely have to pay attention to it or listen to it at all. Now, all of a sudden, it's scarce, it's precious, and you have to really listen hard to make out what's going on. And you get these little nuggets of game action that break through the static and you are able to sort of piece together one last inning in that way, just a couple of words at a time. And I know that sounds really annoying. I hate that so much. It's frustrating.

I agree. It is very frustrating. In the moment, it's extremely frustrating. But it also, I have such fond memories of a handful of cases where I have successfully heard either the end of the game before it finally broke up completely or a crucial part of the game or where I have gone out of one area into this sort of staticky, fuzzy, broken up place. And I have bridged the fuzziness until I got into a new metro area where I could pick up the game again. So in that last one, I'm thinking of the 2000, I believe 18 ALCS between the Astros and the Yankees. And there was this incredible long game. And I left when it was starting. And I

drove down Central California and reached a point where I could no longer hear it. And I was just barely picking up. Like there was some incredible inning ending play where someone got thrown out at home, but I couldn't figure out what had happened and how the out had been made and whether a run had scored on the play. And then I was just picking up a word here and a word there. And after like 15 minutes, I started to finally pick up the LA feed of the same game. And there was another, I mean, there's another, when I would go up to my grandfather's cabin as a kid in the middle of this meadow at night, you could hear pick up Giants games. You couldn't really pick up any of the games on the radio until dark. And then you could just slowly start to pick it up as dark would come and it would

never be clear you would never have a good clean feed but you could stand in the middle of a meadow and you could hear enough to pick up the game and so those are really precious memories for me i remember like kind of feeling like i listened to matt williams become a star over the course of a week that i spent up at that cabin, and I would just pick up bits and pieces of the game. The most extreme version of this is actually if the notion here is that it is enjoying the precious bits of baseball when baseball becomes extremely scarce. The most extreme example of this is when I was flying back from Connecticut in 2016. And the Giants were playing the Cubs in the NLDS. And the only cable channel that I had that was sports themed was, I think, maybe like ESPN.

And the game was on ESPN2 or it was on TBS or something. So I couldn't watch the game, but I could follow the game through the crawl. And so every like, you know, two and a half minutes, the game would update. And they had the score, the inning, and then the bases situation. So who was on base, and I was watching the Giants completely melt down and blow like a big lead to the Cubs one base runner at a time. And that's a really precious memory, too. So these are like you say, Ben, it can be very frustrating when the time but but because you have to work for it, it creates a really lasting memory. And I remember all those games, like I just remember them much more than I remember the games that I didn't have to work for.

Yeah. There've been situations where I've been kind of cut off from baseball and maybe I'll draft one of those situations. And when you're in that spot and you get any little snippet of baseball, it's so precious to you. So I do understand that. Although specifically the car radio situation, I mean, I'm not in this situation often because I don't have a car and don't drive, but I have been in this situation. And, you know, maybe when I was a kid, we used to drive up to my grandma's house at the time in the Adirondacks, which was six hours each way. And we used to go every weekend, which in retrospect, I can't believe we did that. But we really loved it up there. And so that would coincide with games on the radio sometimes.

And if I knew that we were going to lose the signal at some point in the game, I wouldn't even really want to listen to the part that I could hear because it would just make me anxious because I would know that I was going to get cut off at a certain point. And the other thing is that if you're in the car with other people, then there's an etiquette aspect to it where like, maybe I want to listen to this broadcast enough that I'm okay putting up with some static and some other song cuts in randomly in the middle of an inning, and then you make a turn and suddenly the signal is strong or something. But the other people who probably were just humoring me to begin with and didn't really even want the game on the radio, as soon as there's any hint of static, they're like,

all right, well, time to put on some music or something. And so I would feel bad about that too. Like the first second I heard static, it was like, oh no, they're all thinking we're losing the station. Now I can change it. So I felt this pressure about it sort of slipping away. And that just made it kind of anxiety inducing for me. Very true. There's a version of this that I relate to very strongly, but it includes an element of suspense and not frustration, which is that my moms have a house in the North Cascades. And there is a point when you are driving there in the summer and you can take highway 20.

And so you're going up the North Cascades highway. There's a point when you get out of Winthrop where it's not that the static cuts in and out. It's just that you lose, you lose the radio and then it cuts back in, in Darrington. And if you can time it right, you get a little bit of game action. And then you just have to wait and imagine what might be going on from that moment until you can get radio service, radio service, radio signal, a signal, reception, there you go, back in Darrington. And that can be very fun because you're sitting there like, well, I wonder if they'll rally. I wonder if they'll hold this lead. I wonder if, you know, insert X baseball thing here.

But the in and out, very frustrating. Not a fan of that. The suspense, good. The in and out, very bad. Oh, okay. So I don't like when it just drops out entirely and then you have 15 minutes of dark. I like to hear, even if it's just one word in that 15 minutes, one word is all it takes. That's it.

Just one, like, outside. That's all it takes for me to stay into the game. And so when it drops out entirely and then you're just like, okay, how long is this going to be? I find that to be quite frustrating. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's one of the reasons I love that drive up central California is because sometimes you, like you definitely go through some really, really ugly periods for the reception, but you usually never go more than like

five or five or so minutes without being able to hear a word if it's, you know, especially if it's nighttime. Like I remember the other thing there's this, I don't know if this is true or if this is just one of those things that you read in like business books or something, but there's a belief or I don't know, evidence or research or something that shows that if you make it hard to read something, like a harder font to read, then people remember the content better. And so like you're working harder, you're focusing, you're concentrating more. And something about it makes it more memorable. And like I remember hearing Mariano Rivera draw a bases loaded walk on Sunday Night Baseball, and it was in the middle of one of these Central California drives. And I mean, everybody,

I guess, remembers Mariano Rivera drawing a bases loaded walk in Sunday night baseball. But I really remember it, I think. So, yeah, I don't know. There's something that really makes it very, I don't know, that makes it a lot more memorable to me. Yeah. I don't know if this is a separate pick. I'm not going to take it as one because I know I've been in this situation, but I can't really recall specific instances. But it usually occurs in the car, which is when you pick up a game that you're not expecting to be able to pick up. So it's nighttime maybe, and the AM signal is traveling

farther than it usually does. And I don't know, the ionosphere is just right. And so you can pick up the signal that you had no idea you could get wherever you are. And it's this great surprise because you thought you were way out of range, then suddenly you got baseball so i think when it's scarce when you're not expecting it it's even more precious as we were saying yeah all right that's my pick i used to sit in a parking lot in orange county and listen to an extremely fuzzy padres feed when i was in my first year out of college because i wanted to listen to to baseball on the radio yeah all right all right who's next i can go okay okay so i have to preface my pick by saying that i'm nervous to share it because i worry that it will make me sound self-aggrandizing or too too big for my britches so i wanna i'm coming to you too and to our listeners with a a sincere vulnerability

i'm building it up way too much we should pause we should pause and spend 10 minutes trying to guess i know i want to guess it's while you're on long runs while you're at the gym no uh while you're doing something else incredibly industrious no when you're was it when you're doing something else incredibly industrious? No. Was it when you were hosting the women in baseball? Okay. When you're something about the scoreboard, the giant scoreboard? No. You're playing shortstop? Nope.

Okay. I don't know. Okay. So I sometimes experience, and I imagine this has become less frequent actually over the years, oddly enough, less frequent since I became a full-time baseball media person with fan graphs. But I've had the experience while watching baseball, especially at T-Mobile Park, what is now T-Mobile Park, of sometimes being recognized by folks at the game.

And I think that that's because there are too few women who do this job. And for a while, I was quite focused on, you know, Mariners stuff. And so it was more visible in the Mariners realm than I am now. And I like talking to folks about baseball, but I don't enjoy the feeling of being observed or worrying that I'm being observed at a game when I'm there just to like hang out with my family or, you know, watch a pitcher who I haven't seen live before. And I have a beer in my hand and I might be wearing a Mariners cap. And so I feel self conscious about having team gear on. And, you know, it's not every time it would be like every fifth time at T-Mobile. And then my imagination, which is quite active, would fill in the gaps and

think, well, it's not every fifth time. It's just that every fifth time is when someone says something. Right. Right. And that feeling was reinforced by one time going to a baseball game and sitting there. I went by myself and I sat there and I watched the game. And in the seventh inning, a gentleman introduced himself and said that he knew I was Meg and he had been waiting to say something. Which I will point out, seven innings, long time to maintain an information imbalance like that and he had seven innings to work on a on a less less threatening he was very nice about it he wasn't he wasn't creepy or anything but it was just you know i was sitting there i was like gosh what if i like you know picked my nose or something and he saw

it and he knows who i am i'm not not anonymous. So one of my very favorite ways I have discovered to consume baseball is at the fall league in Arizona, because there are two things about it that are great. A lot of the guys who are playing are fairly anonymous and that creates a certain kind of baseball. I mean, they're top prospects often, and they may be well known to a subset of the folks in attendance who are like there to see their guys, right? Their guys of the future. Like if you're a Mariners fan and you go to fall league last year, you are just crazy go nuts excited to watch Julio Rodriguez play baseball.

But in general, you know, if you were to pull fans at those games, they could probably name maybe a 10th of the roster at any given time, right? They can name their guys, but probably not a lot of other guys. And so there's that part, which just adds an interesting dynamic. But also I can just, even with a media credential on, just watch some baseball. And I feel delightfully anonymous. It is like I am sinking into a warm bath of just my fellow folks, and I have no name and no allegiance, and I don't have to worry about whether I picked my nose for seven innings and a person just said, hey, by the way, I know who you are, and I've heard you tell stories on a podcast before. And so this is a specific issue that I think

media folks sometimes experience. And it is only a very tiny sliver of the world who knows who I am at all, let alone could pick me out of a lineup. So I am not saying that I am famous or fancy, but I am saying that there are not enough women who do this. And so sometimes you're a little easier to spot. And then I went to the fall league and no one knew who I was. And it was great. And I just watched baseball. And some of the baseball, you know, was kind of bad in the way that sometimes prospects have a bad day.

But some of it was very exciting. And I got to see guys play live whose blurbs I had edited for our prospect lists and I developed opinions about them that were you know over too small a sample to matter but that's fine because I just got to sit there and think about it and I thought about that and I didn't think about whether the people around me knew who I was and so yeah that that's a thing that I like. That's a way to consume baseball that is quite enjoyable. And that's my story. Wow. I congratulate you on being famous.

No, that is not the takeaway. When there was a rule of thumb in the newspaper game that for every letter to the editor representing some viewpoint, that there were a thousand people that that letter represented who just hadn't written it. And so if someone thought that you were too whatever, then you needed to take that seriously because a thousand people actually thought that. Most of the ballpark is sitting there thinking,

I know she's Meg. I know she's Meg, yes. She can't hide it from me. I'm very insignificant to, like they're like, you're like on the planet, 50 people probably actively invested in my well-being. And that's a lot. That feels fortunate. I feel lucky.

So that's all it is. And then there are a couple of people who are like, hey, that gal does puns sometimes. And one guy who might be like, yeah, and in the third inning, she picked her nose. So we've got a uh all right so we've got radio breaking up and you can just barely pick it up and we've got a respite from the crush of fame i have so many regrets now i mean i think that it really makes well you know this is all of our right? And I think that there is a part of watching any baseball game where you feel like it is, I don't know, like that it is a break from your job. And I don't know, maybe that's not what you're saying, because when you go to the Fall League, you're on the clock.

And so maybe it doesn't have anything to do with being off the clock at all. But I see, yeah, that's the escape, the escape aspect of it. I mean, baseball is the escape for so many, you know, more stressful things. And who wants to be stressed? Right. All right. Well, my pick, I feel sort of silly taking this with the first pick, because really, if you gave me a choice of this or any other way to consume baseball, this would not actually be my first pick.

But it's something that I think of fondly, which is falling asleep to baseball. And I know that's something that you have done on occasion, Meg. And I think it's just the perfect ending to a week. Obviously, paying active attention to baseball is great, too. I would not want to do away with that. active attention to baseball is great too. I would not want to do away with that. But at the end of a week, especially, or any night when you just happen to be on the couch or wherever you are, and you don't have anything important to do, and you don't have to pay close attention to that game for rooting reasons or for professional reasons, and you can just put it on with the knowledge

that you will doze off at some point during the game and that it's okay. And that maybe you'll wake up again during the game and it'll just be like you skipped a few innings. Or maybe you'll wake up and you'll see the MLB TV logo that just says the game is over. Or if you're watching on TV, maybe you'll just see some entirely separate program that has nothing to do with baseball, or it'll be like the post-game show or Yankeography or something. If you're watching Yes Network, they have a million documentaries about Yankees on that channel. But I just really like that feeling of letting go. And if something exciting happens in the game and it keeps you awake longer than planned, that's fine too. But it's pretty rare for me to do anything or listen to anything while I'm trying to

go to sleep. Usually I don't really fall asleep in front of the TV. I stay up as long as I can. And then when I know that I can't anymore, I just go to bed or something or I turn off the TV. I don't generally fall asleep with things on in the background, but baseball on in the background is a really pleasant way to do it. And it's probably harder, I would guess, for you two as West Coasters than it is for me on the East Coast, where if you've got West Coast games going, then you're good until the early morning hours. There's

usually something on. And I think Friday is my favorite because Friday your work is over and I'm sure many people listening under normal circumstances have social lives and go out and do exciting things on Friday, but not me. And really, even when I was younger, this was kind of all I wanted to do at the end of a week was just unwind with a little bit of baseball and eventually just fall asleep to it. And it's very soothing and calming. And I know that some people will say baseball is boring if you can fall asleep to it. But I think just the tones, the sounds of the ballpark, the sounds of the broadcaster's voices, all of that can just kind of lull you into a peace. And once your work is done,

then that's perfect. And, you know, maybe it's a little difficult to do depending on your living situation. Like I remember one time last season specifically when Jesse was away on a work trip. And so I was by myself with my dog and she was curled up on me and we were on the couch and it was a Friday night. And I don't even remember what game was on. It really didn't matter if I could have just chosen a random one, I would have, but it was very peaceful. So I missed that. I love this pick, Ben. I've been thinking since we talked about watching KBO and what that was like on one of the past episodes of Effectively Wild, who knows when, who knows what day it is or what time, but I was thinking about why i enjoyed falling asleep

to the kbo so much and i think that i don't imagine i am alone in this experience but i think part of what the experience of sort of pandemic brain has been like for me is this time like marked by like a hyper vigilance with nowhere to put it a feeling of needing to be vigilant but like in my house you know with nowhere to go and not really doing anything and so much of baseball is having this thing on in the background that you can zone in on but also zone out of yeah and a lot of times for me that manifests as doing work while baseball is on but the ultimate version of zoning out is just falling asleep. And it felt very good to assume that rhythm again, even temporarily, and to see that it could still have that effect, even though obviously we are still in the midst of the

pandemic. So yeah, good pick. Right. And over the years, people have told me, or I've seen people say that they use this podcast to fall asleep or that they fall asleep to this podcast. And at first, I wasn't sure how to interpret that because I don't want to be putting people to sleep. That seems like it would be a bad thing. But if they find our voices and discussions soothing and it's something that calms them or if you're alone in your place and you want some voices on to be company, then I get that. And I'm glad that we can be that for people. And if they fall asleep during the episode and are able to remember roughly where that was and go back to it in the future, I guess that would be good. But whatever gets you to sleep.

Some people have difficulty falling asleep. And so if this is an aid for that then even better maybe baseball can be that for people i love this pick because i am glad to know that this works for you one of the things that i actually find most frustrating about baseball is that it does not work as a sleep aid for me it is impossible for me to fall asleep while watching or listening to baseball i it has probably happened before but but essentially never. And I do like to listen to things while I go to sleep, but it needs to be something that is pre-recorded.

And I like to watch things and fall asleep, but it needs to be something that is scripted. And so the best sleep I get is the final act of big blockbuster movies. Like once the explosions start, I'm in the theater, I just close my eyes and I get the best nap. I sleep through the last 25 minutes of every Fireball movie and it's the greatest. I listened to, well, there's a printer going. Hang on. I'm going to wait for this printer. That's okay. We're all trying our best here. All right. I like to listen to podcasts, things like that as well. And you know, a handful

of times every year, I'll, uh, it'll be time for me to go to bed. There'll be a game on and I'll think, ah, I'll try it again. I'll fall asleep listening to this baseball game and I can't do it. If something is live, I think no matter what it is, if something is live, I can't fall asleep. I have to see what's going to happen. So baseball has completely failed me in that sense and cost me so much sleep because it keeps me up for hours and hours. And I am really glad that it works for y'all because I would love to fall asleep to baseball. You know what I do instead? I'm curious to know what each of your sleep tricks is normally. My sleep trick is when I have to fall asleep, I just start thinking about Mission Impossible movies and I start retelling the plot from the first scene on

and I just sort of tell the story and I never get more than like 20 minutes into the movie without falling asleep. So that's my trick is I recreate a narrative of a plot-driven movie. See, that would not help me because it's a very weird thing to know that Tom cruise will

probably perish making one of those right he's gonna be like i have to yeah and so then i guess now yeah he's gonna go to space so it's like you know we're all this is bleak we will all depart this mortal coil at some point but it's weird to know impossible know exactly how he will do it. It's not a funny thing, but it's an anxiety-provoking thing. But I take your general premise, even if those movies are good but stressful. I just stay up so long that I'm really tired. We all worry about you, Ben. Yeah, that's true.

Like in an active way. We worry about you because you're our friend and we like you. Meg, do you have an automatic sleep maker? No, I don't have trouble falling asleep. I have trouble staying asleep. But the thing that I was once instructed by a therapist to do to help with that, sort of calming the anxiety or the brain spinning, which forces me to stay awake when I wake up at three in the morning because I think about all of the things on my to-do list, it isn't so dissimilar from yours. It just takes a slightly different form, which is like I was encouraged to think about the objects in my bedroom and describe them. And I found that to be a good bit of advice that has helped me to sort of quiet the spinning impulse.

So it's sort of the same thing, but with fewer explosions and a lot less Tom Cruise. Yeah, it's very good night moon. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I'm going to try that. I like taking a little while to fall asleep. It's a good time to think about things.

It actually sort of disturbs me because Jessie goes to sleep in like a minute or like less than a minute. And it's not like she was a Navy SEAL or something and she like trained to fall asleep instantly because you have to in a combat situation it's like she just it really it kind of like i'll be talking to her well she'll say something and then next thing i know she's sound asleep and it's like how did you do that and it's like sort of like alarming for me because you know how they call sleep little death and it's like the separation between consciousness and unconsciousness just seems to be so small sometimes that I don't know how you slip from one state to the other in such an easy way. But I have never done that, so it's very foreign to me. All right. My second pick, I have probably described this weird habit that I have that I discovered a couple years ago.

described this weird habit that I have that I discovered a couple years ago. But specifically, I like to do this during the workday, during day games, and especially if there's like a 9.30 game, 9.30 my time, that starts in Cincinnati, and then you just have baseball all day long. So I like to drop my daughter off at school and then brew some coffee, make a breakfast burrito, start watching baseball all day long. And the way that I watch baseball now when I'm alone, I don't do this when anybody is around because it's too embarrassing. Although somehow not embarrassing to tell everybody that I do this, but it is a funny looking thing. And I can't even do it with the windows, with the blinds open because neighbors will see me. But I watch a pitch while I'm

standing in front of the TV. And then I walk one lap around the inside of my house, which I could say my house kind of has like a circular pattern. And so I go around through the dining room, through the living room, through the bedroom, through the other bedroom, through the hallway, and then I'm back in front of the TV. And that lap takes pretty much exactly as long as it takes for a pitcher to get the ball back, get a sign and throw. And so I can walk for like miles and miles throughout a game without ever really even having to stop. And if there's games on all day, I can walk like five games worth of miles. And that's like I can easily do 25,000 steps in a day of watching baseball.

And anyway, the point of it, though, is not the steps. The point is that I can no longer watch baseball if I'm sitting down without immediately losing focus and having to look at a separate screen. And then once I'm looking at a second screen, I start to tip over. And before I know it, I'm laying on my side staring at Twitter for nine and a half hours eating Halloween candy. And I just made her laugh. My daughter laughed at that one. First, that's a first for this show. And my life falls apart over the course of a game. And so I really need to be able to stand up somehow while I'm watching a game or else I need to be if someone else is watching with me and I'm talking, then I don't do that. But if it's just me in a game alone in a room, then I immediately will start watching a different screen. just looking up to see like, oh, well, how much movement does this slider have? But, you know, then you change tabs and you're seeing if anybody replied to your baseball tweet. And then before

you know it, it's, it's gone and then a game passes. And so I need to, uh, I need to stay standing up and I need to stay away from the screen. And so what happens is I watched the pitch. And then as I walk around the house, all I have in my head is like seared in. I have the vision of that pitch and I can see it kind of like it burns into my retinas. And I know like I file it away. It doesn't get lost. It's not just this, you know, mass of baseball. Like each pitch is its own little like entry into my brain.

And then over the course of the game, I actually do start to see the patterns and understand which pitches, remember which pitches matter. And I have a much better recall of everything that happened in the game. And so the, I, I feel like I am very focused on what's actually happening in the game, uh, very attentive. And it makes me feel not like three hours passed and I didn't do anything, but that three hours passed and I studied quite diligently what was happening in baseball. So I like to do that for an entire day from like 930 a.m. until school pickup. Are they even going to make Halloween candy this year? I've been asked three or four times what I think is going to happen with trick-or-treating this year.

And I keep on amending what I think is going to happen with trick-or-treating this year and I keep on amending what I think is going to happen it's a good question anyway well I'm not nearly that active when I'm watching baseball I will happily sit on a couch for three hours and not move so I admire that I don't think the layout of my apartment would suit that as well as yours maybe I don't know. Yeah. I, sometimes I'll just walk from one end to the other, which is a slightly, if I, if it's a fast worker,

then I can, I can't do the full loop. So I just walk straight out of the room and then straight back in the room, or I'll just do the loop around the kit, the wall between the kitchen and the TV room, which is like a half the distance. And the same, it still works.

The key is to leave the room and then go back in the room., which is like a half the distance. And the same, it still works. The key is to leave the room and then go back in the room. And so your brain is constantly having to kind of, I don't know what it's doing. It's staying. I think there is a thing where going into and out of rooms causes your brain to have to like be more alert to danger or something. Like I think there's some evolutionary thing about doorways i think i remember reading something about like the significance of doorways for the evolutionary brain anyway when i if you leave the room and then go back in the room something happens your brain is is more alert and it never shuts off

entirely it never goes into like that sort of internet coma that it otherwise would be. I appreciate this, my version of it. I enjoy exercise, like not in a, not in a way that matters, not in an influencer kind of a way, but like I like going hiking and being active. I hate being on the elliptical, but like that's often the way that I have to do cardio because I have a bum hip and you know, modern life up time you got to be in the city anyway so I like watching baseball while I'm I'm doing a task that I don't like but feel to be necessary which feels sort of like a version of this but with fewer doors okay I I'm so maybe it works without the Well, I do have to go in and out. I mean, not lately.

I haven't, you know, they're all closed now. But in the before time, you have to go in and out of doors in order to get to the elliptical. Because it's not in your house. How convenient would that be? But then, you know, it's like a car. The resale is not good. So better go to a gym. All right. My wife has suggested that I might get a treadmill someday.

And I don't know if I would ever do the treadmill. So I'd be interested to know if anybody successfully watches baseball on a treadmill. Because that would still keep me standing up. I think a huge part of it is that when you sit down, your body starts to shut off. And so just standing up and walking is probably a big part of it. off and so just standing up and walking is probably a big part of it but i i feel like if i were if i still only were looking at the screen instead of like leaving the room and then coming back i don't know if it would work as well your turn meg oh is it my turn top that i like a lot of mine are ending up being kind of work focused i feel like this is the thing that sam is more likely to have done

than ben just because of the kind of overlap that we sometimes have in terms of our desire to look at faces but i really enjoy putting on the wrong game when i'm going back to research something you know like sometimes you're sometimes you're clicking through the calendar on mlb tv and you think in your head that a game, the game you want is on a particular day, but it's on a different day. And, um, you know, we know, we know what happens in baseball after the fact, but you, you might not know the score of any individual game over the last week. Like you might've missed them. Um, and so sometimes I will go back and I will be trying to research a thing to take a bunch of screenshots or some nonsense, and I will pick the wrong game. And it takes me a while to one, realize that it is the wrong game. Sometimes if I'm not there to watch a particular starter, it might take several innings to realize it's the wrong game. then i have this very strange and wonderful experience of not knowing the result of a thing

in the past which is hard to accomplish i've been impressed by how little i've known the immediate next morning after kbo action that has happened very late at night uh my time so that's been nice because it hasn't been spoiled and it's very hard to not spoil stuff that happens in the past but sometimes you just miss a game like you're like i don't know not spoil stuff that happens in the past but sometimes you just miss a game like you're like i don't know what happened in that game between the tigers and the royals and so you you stumble into this strange pocket in space time where you don't you don't know what happened in the past and you gotta kind of feel your way through and sometimes you find something interesting often if it involves the tigers and the royals you don't find anything

interesting at all but i mean even even they have their moments so that's a way that i like to engage with baseball do you ever have the thing where you you need to look up a game and it's a double header day but you didn't realize it was a double header day and you end up watching or or you end up having to guess which game it is sort of a thing like Like you see, they don't necessarily list it, which one is the one that you're looking for. And so then you click and then you get the wrong one. So you find that relaxing, that satisfying to be led into a kind of a corner

that you weren't expecting where something interesting might be happening. Like you stumbled into where the real party is. Yeah, it allows me to sort of maintain a sense of discovery over something that, you know, has been decided potentially for weeks, just based on the timeline of when I get around to writing about stuff sometimes.

So, you know, like I find that very satisfying because we know so much, even, you know, in game, depending on where your stream is relative to real time you might have games that are going on ruined for you or ruined is the wrong word but spoiled in terms of what the action is going to be so it is rare to be able to find your way into a complete surprise when it's not live and so i enjoy that sometimes i will be looking up you know i i'm gonna try to come up with an example but like i don't know i'm looking up some sequence that happened in a game in the seventh inning

of a game and i am sort of pulling the the little progress bar over to get to the seventh inning and i actually will be very kind of careful to not look at the eighth inning or if i'm looking at the box score of that to try to like look at the sequence to try not to see what happens after because just knowing what happened in this game that's years old that i'm not writing about have no interest in and i'm not going to watch to the end of it makes me less interested in the seventh inning that i'm actually trying to watch yeah Yeah. I don't know why. There's a real need to not know the next

thing that's going to happen to pay attention to it. Alright, for my second pick, I am going to take watching baseball kind of covertly, so consuming it or listening, watching, whatever, in a situation where you're not supposed to be watching a baseball game.

And yet you have found a way to do that and get around the rules. So for me, the number one way that comes to mind is when I had a bedtime as a kid. And it will probably not be a surprise to either of you that I did not care for the concept of bedtime. I still don't, but I don't have one now, which is one of the great things about being an adult. But even as a kid, I resented it. I didn't want to go to bed. I think I have a different circadian rhythm or something than most people, and yet I had sort of the standard bedtimes. And I always wanted to find a way to get around that somehow, and one way would be listening to

baseball games. So I know this is sort of a romanticized thing. You hear people from earlier generations talking about this, taking a radio to bed and not falling asleep to it. This is different from my first pick because in this case, I'm actually trying to listen to the game. But this was always really nice, you know, because it would be like, all right, time to turn off the TV, time to go to bed. But if I had a little radio and some headphones with me, then I could sneak it under the covers and listen for a while. And I remember specifically, and I know that this happened to me in 2001 World Series Game 3. And by that time, I was like 14.

So I don't know if I still had a bedtime or what, but I was supposed to be in bed. It was a school night. And it was a long World Series game. And it started at 830 Eastern. So it was probably pretty late at that point. And I remember listening to the Yankees radio broadcast at the time. And that was the game when Scott Brocious hit the really memorable home run off Byung-Yong Kim to keep the game going. And that kind of blew my cover because I just like whooped or something when Scott Brocious hit this home run as I was silently listening under the covers. And I think I then negotiated my way back to the TV after that. And I was just like, look, I'm up and this is amazing. And this

incredible thing just happened. And so my mom relented and let me go back to watching. But I don't know. That was probably later than most of the cases I'm remembering where I probably had a stricter earlier bedtime. And if I could listen to baseball, A, I felt like, oh, you can't stop me. I'm a rebel. You tried to impose bedtime on me and I'm not having it. But also it was just nice to listen to the broadcast,

and it's kind of an intimate way to listen to someone talk. It's like in your ears in bed, not to make too much of it, but a lot of people don't like John Sterling for valid reasons, I think. But for me, kind of growing up on John Sterling, when you've lain in bed with John Sterling by yourself, so to speak, it forges an attachment that I think you don't have if you didn't grow up with that person. That's why we all tend to like our local broadcasters and their foibles and tics, even if they're not really great, objectively speaking. So I have very fond memories of that, the bedtime situation specifically. But you could expand this to any situation where you're not supposed to be consuming baseball. Like for us, this doesn't really apply anymore. But I think if you can watch or listen to baseball

at work, which is almost like a separate pick, I don't know if either of you was considering it, but I have had in earlier professional lives, like boring office jobs that were kind of tedious and didn't take up my entire attention. And if there happened to be a day game on while I was at the office, it was great. It was like a three hour respite when I didn't need to figure out how to occupy my mind because I could keep doing this monotonous thing that I was supposed to be doing, but have baseball on in the background. And, you know, maybe depending on your workplace, that's okay. Or maybe it's not and you have to sort of sneak it but if i could get through three hours of an eight hour boring work day because baseball was on that was a great gift

yeah or like um not that i have ever done this because i am present and emotionally available for my friends but like at a wedding maybe. Oh, yeah. Wasn't this a sort of an ongoing storyline in your life that you were going to a wedding maybe a year ago, and maybe you were watching a lot of baseball? Was this the bachelorette party weekend? I did try to convince a friend who did her bachelorette in Scottsdale to have one of

her activities be us all going to a Diamondbacks game. But she said that the other people attending, well, she would enjoy that. The other people attending probably would not. And she was the one getting married, so she got to decide. I was nervous. I went to a friend's wedding last November. Remember when we went to weddings and there were people around us? And the person getting married is a baseball sort. He works for a team. So there were other baseball people there. And I could tell early in the evening that we were trying to do this dance where we were like, hey, we're going to be here in the wedding, and we're not going to talk about baseball because everyone will be annoyed and bored by us.

But then by the end of the evening, when people had perhaps had some drinks, that broke down and the baseball sorts all sort of clustered together and we're talking about it. But there was not baseball on at that point because it was a December wedding in December. Because, you know, except for Ben, people who work in baseball don't get married during the season generally. Yeah, I got married during the playoffs in mid-October.

And at that point, I wasn't seeking out baseball, but I was kind of aware of it and worried that something momentous would happen. Not that my editor would have made me write something for my wedding. Not that my editor would have made me write something for my wedding, but I didn't want to miss the highlight of the playoffs or something and not be able to respond to that call. So yeah, at that point, I was not really paying attention to baseball, but I think one of my friends did take my phone away anyway, just in case. That's a great pick. I had the getting caught listening in bed experience a few times as well. My probably the top three memories of listening to baseball I wasn't allowed to are listening during the reception of my sister's wedding, listening while I was watching the movie Eat Drink Man Woman.

watching the movie eat drink man woman uh i had somehow gotten my parents went out to the movies every weekend every saturday night and i had done something to get in trouble and so i was not allowed to go do what i was gonna do i was i think i was supposed to go bowling that night or something like that but i uh got in trouble. And so as part of that, I had to go with them to dinner with my grandparents and then to see Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. And I snuck my Walkman in and listened to a baseball game during that. And also the last one is our church had a cry room where mothers of young infants could take their crying children. young infants could take their crying children. And there was like a microphone, like a speaker that the service would be played in into the room. And I somehow, I mean, this had to be the most transparent thing in the world, but we didn't have any infants at the church. And so I would go

watch, quote unquote, watch the service every week in the cry room. And, you know, if the Giants were playing on the East Coast, the game would start at 10 a.m. So halfway through the service, I could turn to the baseball game. Yeah, church. I forgot about that one. I definitely did that often because I was not and am not a churchgoer by choice, but I was sort of dragged to church unwillingly throughout my childhood every week. And so at a certain point, I did start bringing a radio there and sneaking in something and I would try to sit on the end of a pew or sit in one of the back rows or something so that it would be a little less obvious and have just like one earbud that was kind of concealed.

But yes, that got me through some interminable sermons. So that's a nice one too. All right. Good pick. I wish I'd had that pick. All right. My last one is when I go to my... This doesn't really happen much anymore.

When I lived with my parents, we would have what were called baseball dinners, which if the Giants were playing again on the East Coast and the game would start at like four or maybe five and would be televised, which not all the games were at that point, but you might get, you know, half the road games would be televised. Then my mom would cook dinner and then serve it in front of the TV and we could watch a baseball game while we were eating dinner. And I really feel like a huge thing that's lacking in my life is I almost never get to watch baseball with people.

My immediate family is just not that into it. I don't really, I both don't really have a lot of friends who are into baseball where I live. And I also don't really, I mean, I don't really go out that much in the evening and like spend an evening out watching baseball with people. Like, I've got dishes to do. I've got things at home to do. So I very rarely watch baseball, sorry, with people.

And I think that baseball is a sport that just demands that you watch it with people. I have not done a good job of making that fit into my lifestyle, but it is such a good sport for watching with people because all of that dead time, instead of being a burden, a drag or something you have to wait through to get to the next pitch, it provides space for you to converse and it gives you something to talk about and it doesn't demand your attention too closely. So if your conversation ends up going off topic, off baseball, that's totally fine as well. But if you don't have something pressing to talk about, it gives you a lot to talk about. And if you share a particular team with somebody and you can watch baseball with them,

it's a wonderful sport for that. And I don't know, I think I remember there being this thing where like some, like there are two types of people, people who prefer to converse face to face and then people who prefer to converse sitting shoulder to shoulder next to each other, not looking at each other. And I am very much the latter. I don't really, I really, I like to share an activity with somebody where the point of the interaction is not to be interacting, but to be doing something else together. And baseball is fantastic because you're both watching the game, your relationship, you're not forcing the relationship to exist for the game, your relationship, you're not forcing the relationship

to exist for the sake of the relationship. You just have a companion. You have someone who's walking on this, you know, the road of life with you throughout a baseball game. And I find it very satisfying. So like I said, I don't watch that much baseball with people anymore, but I have a really good friend who I watch baseball with when I'm in town in the same town as him. And he, despite me being a professional baseball writer, he is 100% sure that I'm wrong about everything. And and we'll like just we'll just happily tell me what's up, like what's what in baseball. And then I have my dad, I watch a fair amount of baseball with my dad. And he sort of sees us, I think, as more like equals. He will ask questions, and he will also give opinions.

And it is, you know, a nice in the middle, like a shared experience. And then my mom, who revealed fairly late in life that she hates baseball. And she just held her tongue for most of the years I was growing up. Wait, what? She doesn't hate baseball, but she doesn't like listening to it on every car trip. And she doesn't like watching it. And she doesn't like the sound of a TV blaring. And she's glad baseball exists and that it means something in my life. But we all thought that when we were listening on road

trips, that like everybody was into the game. And she was just so selflessly letting us listen to the game. And she didn't tell us that until I was probably like 16. And it was a total shock. But she does love baseball dinners, I believe. Maybe she's waiting to tell me that she doesn't like those either. But she loves baseball dinners. And she's she's waiting to tell me that she doesn't like those either, but she loves baseball dinners and she's great because she knows some about baseball. And she also asks a lot of questions about baseball and has a good time watching it. It is a really, it is actually kind of a novel thing. I think when she watches a game, she only has, she probably only wants to spend about a half hour on it, but she enjoys it. So we had a baseball dinner maybe a year ago when I went up last summer and it was so fun. It was really fantastic to all be looking at the TV like some version of The Simpsons eating, eating like I'm sitting on the floor.

They're sitting on the couch. We're in a different room watching, watching the game. And she's showing off how much she knows and it was fun and so i i sometimes i think that i need to really make a resolution that i'm gonna actively seek out more baseball watching with other people because right now it's a little bit too too much of a lonely experience but that's how it is right now yeah yeah i would say the same thing i think i'm taking like you know while falling asleep and all these things. But if you had to ask me, like, what was actually the best baseball watching experience of my life, it would be going to games with friends. Like, those are my best baseball memories. It's just not something that happens that often for me

anymore. Like, you know, last year, I think I went to one game as just a fan, you know, for fun. And when it happens now, it's always fun because usually I'm going with people I haven't seen in a long time and we're sort of reuniting over baseball. Like last year, I went to a Yankees game with the people that I had been interning with for the Yankees in 2009. And we hadn't seen each other since 2010, I guess. And the one of us who is still working there got us tickets and we hadn't seen each other since 2010 i guess and the one of us who is still working there got us tickets and we all went to a game and it was great and i've had a lot of experiences like that like just as a kid like in high school or something just going without even making plans in advance just like you know going up with a few friends and buying some cheap upper deck tickets

or something to some unimportant game. I mean, I have great memories of very important games too. Like the day after I was listening to game three of the 2001 World Series in bed, I went to game four of that series, the Jeter and Tino Martinez game. And that was great. And I was at the Aaron Boone game and I've had a lot of those great memories, but just going to some meaningless game has often been really fun too just with a good group of friends and I went to a Mets game on my prom night with a few other friends who did not attend prom like I did not and we just went to Shea Stadium and just saw the Mets play and I think Tom Glavin pitched and I don't really remember that much about it, but it's a fun thing that we all bring up to each other and we're still

friends because like I went to an all boys grammar school and an all boys high school. So at that point, like collectively, we did not know a girl unless we had a sister, I think. So like going to prom wasn't really an option, like with a date. So, you know, we had to figure out something to do and we went to a baseball game and, you know, like I'm going to one of those friends' weddings in October, I hope, if weddings are happening. And the other one was a groomsman at my wedding. So, you know, we stayed together and maybe that's more memorable and better than what a lot of people did for their proms. I don't know. But it was great at the time.

So yeah, if you can go to a game with friends, that's probably the best. It just doesn't happen enough for me anymore. That's a good one. It's sort of related to mine. Is it my turn? Yeah. It's my turn now, right? So the job I had before I got hired by Fangraphs was a job that the organization does very good work, but I did not enjoy my job. And I especially did not enjoy my job toward the end of my job because I wanted to

be writing about baseball and I wasn't. So I was pretty over it. But one of the nice things about working in the office that I did was that it was in downtown Seattle and it was, you know, it was like a 20 minute walk to T-Mobile. And so my favorite way to consume baseball during that era of my life was to, on Fridays, walk down to the ballpark and go to a Friday night game and hopefully meet up with some of my baseball ecosystem friends here in Seattle to watch it. But there was just this, with each block that would pass away from the office and toward the ballpark, I could feel the weight of this job I didn't like and the experience of working that I wasn't enjoying kind of fade away and feel like I was walking toward the thing I wanted to be doing, even if I was going there as a fan and, you know, planning to drink a couple of beers and hang out. So that feeling of, of arriving into the

ballpark and suddenly feeling like I had time in the space that I wanted to be in, that I didn't have to rush down there, that I could take a leisurely stroll. And if it took an inning to get to our seats because we were all hanging out you know catching up and and talking about ball then then that was fine because we had time i had i had nine innings at least to to hang out and do that in a place i liked so that resonates pretty strongly with me now where this is my job and i think that we're doing work i'm proud of but i'd really like to be in a ballpark and i I don't imagine that that's, it probably won't even happen as a media member this year, depending on how access gets sorted out when the sport returns and certainly won't happen as a fan.

So the barrier to that being a place that I associate strongly with baseball is different now than it was then. But I look forward to it being gone. Yeah. Yeah. And you're lucky to have T-Mobile which is just so beautiful and one of my favorite places to go to a game and I think for me part of the reason a small part of the reason that I don't do this much anymore is just new Yankee Stadium is not as pleasant a place to see a baseball game as old Yankee Stadium was and yeah that's partly nostalgia, but it's not entirely nostalgia. Like I used to be able to get these cheap seats in the upper deck at old Yankee Stadium, you know, medium Yankee Stadium, not the old, old one, but the intermediate stage. And you could get these cheap seats and the upper deck was so close to the field

that it was just this perfect view. seats and the upper deck was so close to the field that it was just this perfect view. And now it's recessed as a lot of ballparks are because you have to have space for luxury boxes or moats to keep the poor people out of the front rows in New Yankee Stadium or whatever. And so everything is farther away and it's just not nearly as intimate and obviously not as historic and not nearly as grimy in a very pleasant way. So I do like Citi Field, which maybe is better than Shea was, but Old Yankee Stadium I really still miss as a fan. Did you generally know that you were going to go?

When did you make up your mind to go to the Friday game usually? It kind of depended. Sometimes it was a spontaneous, hey, I don't have anything going on, and I would look at one of the resale apps and see, oh, I can, you know, I can get in for 20 bucks. So what else am I going to do? May as well head down there. What, you know, what sort of crew of folks can I muster to join me? Sometimes it was a little more planned out than that. But often it was close enough that it allowed for that kind of spontaneity, which was also nice. That is, I'm so jealous of that experience. I never had a convenient, I don't think I ever really lived where it was convenient to go to the ballpark. And I feel like I am missing that experience in my life of just going to the park. A lot of times when I go to a park, I look around and I look at the apartments kind of

wistfully and think people just live here. Right. Yeah. There are a lot of much more meaningful reasons to have sports stadiums sort of close to cities and not far out, not the least of which is that it facilitates people taking public transit and not having to drive. But being able to walk from my office down to the ballpark and have that be quick and doable and, you know, a decision that could be made on the fly. You know, I remember when Yokuma threw his no hitter, I ended up sneaking out of

the office and watching the last little bit of that game in a bar. But I thought for a minute, I was like, can I sprint down there quickly enough that I can get there before his half inning comes up again? And I figured that I just couldn't, couldn't quite do it. But it was close enough that I had to think about it, you know, how quickly I could motor down there. So it was really, it's a really nice thing. Have either of you ever gone to a game that had already begun where something was happening in the game and you thought, oh, I'll go join that game?

You know? No. No, I've been tempted, but I haven't done it. I have not either. Yeah. All right. Well, my last pick, our last pick, is consuming baseball when you are far from home

and baseball is your link to home. So there are various ways I've done this. Like, when I was pretty little, I used to travel a lot with my family. My mom never traveled as a kid, and so she always wanted to travel as an adult, and so I traveled a lot with her as a kid, and now I never want to travel as an adult, so I guess it's sort of a cyclical thing like that but when I was in Europe or something and this would be like the late 90s let's say and I was playing fantasy baseball I always wanted to set my lineup and check my team and at that time it was not so easy to do that and so we would be wandering around looking for internet cafes in Russia or something. And, you know,

they weren't on every corner at that point and you couldn't always find them, but it was always like my overriding concern. Like we were seeing some historic building or monument or something. And I was like, all right, well, where's the internet cafe? Cause I gotta go check my fantasy team. So I have a lot of memories of that. And of like, I don't know, in Europe at the time, the hotels had like, if you opened up the hotel menu, like the one where you would watch the movies or something, they also had like kind of a proto internet, like teletype service. I don't remember what it was called, but it would like show you news headlines and updates and things. And some of them had sports scores and depending on where I was they would have baseball scores eventually like after all the soccer scores and who knows

what else and so I would wait and wait and they would cycle through all the other sports scores and then eventually they would flash the baseball things and I'd see it for like one second or if I was in England maybe on BBC World or something they would eventually show the baseball scores and you'd just see a snippet of it. If you saw a highlight, it was like, oh man, manna from heaven or something because you were actually getting a little clip of baseball. And this I don't miss. I don't want to go back to that world at all. That was far worse than what we have now. And people older than we are remember that just domestically. I mean, it was hard to watch baseball for most of baseball history.

So I think we're far better off now. But specifically what I'm remembering is when I went to college in D.C., that was the first time and still the only time that I ever lived away from New York for any long amount of time other than, I guess, the Stompers summer in Sonoma. any long amount of time other than, I guess, the Stompers summer in Sonoma. And really, like, one of my primary concerns was, how am I going to watch baseball? Because I was still a fan at that time. I still rooted for the Yankees. And it was like a major consideration in like where I was going to go to college was like, will I be able to watch baseball? And when I was still in high school, MLB TV wasn't around yet. And so I was really weighing like, well, I can't leave New York because how am I going to watch the Yankees? There's just no way to do it. Like I'm going to decide my higher education and maybe the course of my life by the availability of baseball games. it was sort of a factor. Like I didn't put that much thought into where I went to college, weirdly. Like I figured any of the options I had probably would have been pretty good and I wasn't studying something specialized or whatever. So I ended up going to Georgetown mostly because a lot

of my friends were also going there. And I figured, well, I'll go with them. That'll be fun. And that was most of my decision. I didn't even visit before I committed to go there, but I figured it would just work out. But by the time that happened, so 2005, I guess, was my freshman year. And by that point, MLB TV was around. And I think it started in 2002, I think. And it was far worse than it is now. It was like a little low res window and it got gradually better, but it would be very choppy and it wasn't a pleasant viewing experience. But I subscribed to MLB TV and I subscribed to XM radio. So I had like a redundancy. So I had multiple ways to watch when I was there. And I was kind of apprehensive about leaving because I hadn't yet. And my only

experience of really being away from home without my family to that point was summer camp, either before or after sixth grade. And I had been pretty homesick and that was several years earlier, but I was still somewhat concerned. How am I going to feel? And a big part of reassuring myself that I could do this was, well, I'll still have baseball. I'll still have that tether to my life here and to my childhood. And it was really nice to have that, to be in this place that was away from home and I was on my own, but I still had this thing that made me feel like I was home watching baseball or listening to baseball the way that I always had. So I found that very comforting. And, you know, we get emails from people every now and then, people who are in some country

where they didn't grow up and they're there for work or whatever and baseball is like their link to home so i think that's very nice when it works out that way yeah yeah speaking of watching covertly i remember i took a an opening day off and i kind of i remember like kind of getting in trouble because like the teacher actually called me on where I had been in that previous class. And I didn't really have an excuse because I just stayed home to watch opening day and I had to fumble for some excuse or maybe I even came clean. I don't remember, but it was kind of awkward, but I, I did that when I wasn't supposed to be doing that. And that was nice.

You got Ferris Bueller yeah i guess so i don't think i like this one but i sort of like watching every once in a while i go to the east coast very rarely in my life but when i do and there's a game on the west coast that starts at 10 o'clock and the east coast there's something about it that feels very thrilling to me i wouldn't want to do it for more than two days but there's like a game starting at 10 at night yeah it's nuts just goes forever it's great i love it yeah i kind of love it too i want you to find ben a young person i mean we're young but like a really young person like a 20 something and then i want you to tell them and an american because i think that this is more prevalent abroad than it is here still but about internet cafes and then i want you

to make them watch the net oh with sandra bullock and i want to know what it's like to watch them watch that movie so yeah that's what i would like please i watched that in a bad movie club i think that i had with some friends and it it was fitting. It was very bad. It's very bad. I just remember that she's a hacker, and you can tell because she has a computer, and she's sassy. So that's how you know she's a hacker. All right.

All right. That was fun and sort of sad and bittersweet, but I guess we'll all be watching baseball again someday. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking to see where the net is streaming right now. It's so bad, Sam. The only place it's streaming is Crackle. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that feels right. That feels like it's found its level. Yeah. Sam, you said that you're very rarely on the East Coast. And I am sad that Saber Seminar has officially been canceled for any number of reasons. I think those, I don't say that as if it is not the right decision. I think that was the wise choice, but it is just a real bummer. But we have fallen into a nice annual tradition where I ask you,

hey, Sam, are you coming to Saber Seminar? And you go, hey, maybe. And I know you're not gonna. But, you know, sometimes I'm like, maybe you will this time. And now, now that's gone. Yeah. Well, the same thing happens for the winter meetings. And then last December, they were in San Diego and I still didn't make it. So I think it's probably time to quit trusting me. Yeah.ig and i both noted your absence craig was like maybe he'll come for dinner and i was like craig yeah the all-star game the all-star game was going to be in los angeles this summer and i actually was going to go to the derby for that we were going to go to disneyland is that did we plan that no i mean you would have

been welcome to join us but you know we were going to to do an all-star event for Fangraphs, and Sean Dolinar wanted to do a Disneyland trip, and he's like, do you think that people will make fun of me if I ask? And I was like, no, I will go with you to Disneyland. So we were all going to go to Disneyland, and now we need people to buy memberships so that the site doesn't have to go away. So things have changed pretty dramatically and rapidly for us.

On that note. On that note. Well put. All right. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening. By the way, Meg and I devoted our previous episodes to exploring the uphill battle that

the players seem to have to climb when it comes to public perception in the financial dispute between the MLBPA and the league. Well, relevant to that discussion, over the weekend, the AP's Ron Blum reported on a 12-page presentation that the league sent to the MLBPA last week, and a few people have gone over it in detail, Rob Maines at Baseball Perspectives, Craig Edwards at Fangraphs, and they have found what appear to be some significant distortions or omissions or creative accounting, let's say. I will link to both of those articles. Worth checking out. Here's how Joe Sheehan concluded his Monday newsletter. This is an issue owners raised to backfoot the players. All these leaks over the last week are meant to soften the ground for financial concessions,

to turn a docile press and a let's-go-with-uninvested-in-the-issues public against the players. That's not the act of a partner, it's the act of a group of people who still have the reserve clause and collusion in their bloodstream. The owners, not the players, pick this fight. And I think there's some truth to that. There are two sides to this issue, but one side sort of seems to have started it, and unsurprisingly does not seem to have been entirely honest about it. Check out the links in the episode summary or on the show page or in the Facebook group for those and other articles discussed today. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going

and get themselves access to some perks. Cameron McSorley, Clive Matthews jonathan sieg or sigh brian bayer and eric b thanks to all of you while i'm at it i might as well thank rock kim too you can join our facebook group approaching 10 000 members at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild if you're already a member but you have a great baseball friend on facebook or a fellow podcast listener who is not a member, invite them. The more the merrier. You can also keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. I want to go by and I'll watch you. I want to go by and I'll watch you. I want to go by and watch you now. Sam, I envy your ability to be a good whistler. Yeah, I... I'm a terrible whistler. That's not my main whistle. That's a whistle that has accidentally developed in the last few years of my life, which I use sort of subconsciously when i'm either stressed or more more to the

point like kind of when i'm holding my tongue which i was not here but like if i'm holding my tongue with say somebody in the house is uh you know got me in a bad mood and i just sort of start whistling and it's not my usual whistle. My usual whistle is through my tooth. My front tooth is... You're like Negan in The Walking Dead. Your whistle is like a threat. This is more of a sigh that developed into a whistling technique

where I'm really just sort of breathing. Breathing instead of trying to whistle. And it's very soothing. I find this a very soothing breathing technique. Yeah, I can tell that you are a whistler and I am not one because you have multiple and I don't do any. I do love to whistle. I like to whistle when I'm walking down the street

and I have not yet, I'm not sure what the etiquette is on public whistling. I get the feeling that it seems like in the moment it always seems fine. It seems like who could be against this? But I guess I have a vague sense that public whistling is considered obnoxious, but it's only a vague sense. I couldn't trace where that comes from yeah i have that sense yeah from feeling it myself but you find it obnoxious when people whistle yeah and i probably do it too but it always sounds tuneless to me if it sounds like a song and i can identify it i don't mind it but it usually doesn't sound like that to me you can whistle a happy tune as it were interesting interesting