Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1593: When You Wish Wilpon a Star

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Justin Verlander’s Tommy John surgery, a different way to expand the playoffs, and whether MLB’s approach to playing in 2020 has been vindicated, then (38:52) talk to Defector’s David Roth about the Mets being sold to Steve Cohen, what life as a fan would be like without the […]

Nothing's in your way, now you can stand right up and run Wouldn't even change things if you took back what you've done I've tried to hang on to the past, but I couldn't keep my grasp, cause nothing lasts. Hello and welcome to episode 1593 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am all right. How are you? I'm good. It rained. It rained all weekend, Ben. Normally not a good thing. No, but yeah, in this case it's great because you know what? My air quality is good. That's good. Yeah. I'm happy for you. Speaking of smoke and air quality, we were just watching a Mets game in which something just beyond Citi Field was on fire and smoke was billowing into the game and affecting the air quality there.

And that was not a signal that the Mets have selected a new owner, but they have seemingly. Steve Cohen will be buying the Mets pending approval from the other MLB owners. And that is what we will be devoting our interview to today. One of the many contributors to our Roger Angel celebration episode, David Roth of Defector, will be joining to talk about Cohen purchasing the Mets and what it will mean to have a lot less Wilpon in David's life. The sale reportedly values the Mets at about $2.4 billion, which just proves once again that buying and selling baseball teams is really undefeated as a way to make money over the years. The Mets have been reported to have lost money, to have had annual losses in years since then,

but if you look at the fact that the Wilpons paid about $400 million for their controlling interest in 2002, though they had a non-controlling interest prior to that, and you look at the appreciation, so it's about a $2 billion appreciation in less than 20 years, and that's not adjusting for inflation, but still. And as Rob Arthur pointed out on Twitter, they were the Mets that whole time. So it wasn't as if they were the best run, most successful organization either. They were just a baseball team, one of 30. And historically speaking, that's a really good way to make more than you paid.

So the Wilpons will be cashing out mostly. Cohen will own 95% of the team. And Cohen is supposedly worth about $10 billion. He's a hedge fund manager, which would actually make him, I think, twice as wealthy as the next wealthiest MLB owner. And there are a bunch of wealthy MLB owners. So that's a notable number of billions, even by the standards of a sports franchise owner. Do you think that as MLB owners are sitting around, the ones who are remaining MLB owners, and they are trying to make the argument that, you know, that reduced payrolls are justified, that furloughs and layoffs on the baseball operations side are justified,

that this isn't all it's cracked up to be, this baseball biz. justified that this isn't all it's cracked up to be this baseball biz do you think that the royals selling for a billion dollars or the mets literally the mets selling for two undermines that case more i'm not sure i i know the answer to that question no there's so many things that undermine that case yes i'm not sure which undermines it more, but this would be a record. I think this would top the amount that the Dodgers sold for, although maybe not if you adjusted for inflation. But Cohen is from Great Neck, New York, so he has long wanted to own the Mets, it seems like, and he's been in talks to own the Mets for a while. And now that has happened, so we will talk about the implications of all of that with David. I think I want to bring up three things before we get to

David and get your thoughts on them. First, Justin Verlander will be having Tommy John surgery. That was announced this weekend and he is 37. I think he turns 38 in March, and there are not a lot of players who have had Tommy John surgery at that age. Jessica Brand in our Facebook group did the research, and Verlander will be the 11th of 1,921 players who have had Tommy John surgery to have it at 37 or older. And here are the others. Nathan in 2015 had it at 40. John Franco had it at age 41 in 2002. And Jamie Moyer had Tommy John surgery at age 47 in 2010. The incomparable Jamie Moyer. And as Jessica pointed out, all of those players made it back to the big league, somewhat surprisingly, except for Chris Coast, who was a catcher. But none of them really lasted that long or had great success after that, which is not surprising. I think Arthur Rhodes was

the most successful. He had a three-year stretch that was pretty good after he came back. But when you're that age and you're coming back from that surgery, you would not expect a lot of success to follow but Justin Verlander has said that he wants to pitch until he's 45 so from his perspective he's got plenty of time left and it makes sense to get the surgery so you know that he will be trying to come back I guess at age 39 is theoretically when he would be ready to do that. Man. And it just, you know, there had been some very real optimism that he would be coming back in the next week and looking to rejoin the Astros rotation

as they try to solidify their playoff position as we're recording on Sunday. They're, I think, three games up on Seattle. For second in the division, the Mariners are also three back of Toronto for the eighth playoff seed. But I guess that there are odds of displacing one of those is probably about the same.

Toronto might be a bit better. But now Houston will be without Verlander through October, and they've kind of held on and they've gotten some position players back. But I think that a playoff rotation that is reliant on good innings from you know a recently returned Jose Rukiti and Fran Brebeldez and Christian Javier who hasn't pitched quite as well as I think people were hoping he would when he came up and Granke at the top is just it's a very different kind of animal than than the Granke Cole uh Verlander trifecta last year. It's a team where you were already

worried about the rotation and now they have no days off in the playoffs assuming that they are able to hold on to their spot and they're without Verlander. All of that makes me quite a bit more pessimistic about their long-term chances. I think Verlander has bounced back from injury before

but there's bouncing back from injury, and then there's coming back from Tommy John, as you said. So I hope that he is able to make a good return. It would be a real shame if his career ended on a disappointing 2020 note. That just seems like it's not doing justice to what's been a really impressive, likely Hall of Fame career. Yeah, I mean, he went out with a Cy Young award, I guess, if he does go out. And in his one start this year, he pitched pretty well and looked fine.

So it was sort of a surprise when this happened. And yeah, you mentioned that rotation depth was a concern coming into this year, and it was to rely on two veteran pitchers like that at the top of your rotation. But there was more optimism than there would be with most 37-year two veteran pitchers like that at the top of your rotation. But there was more optimism than there would be with most 37-year-old pitchers because Verlander has been incredibly durable and resistant to injuries for most of his career. And I think this just kind of goes to show that you can't count on any durable pitcher continuing to be durable. I mean, when you get to age 37, maybe you're more susceptible

to things than you were before. And also it was this weird ramp up to the season with lots of pitchers getting hurt. So that could have played a part too. But coming into this year, Verlander had 14 full seasons in the majors and he had made 30 starts or more in 13 of them. It was really just that one year, that period where he was heard and it looked like he might be heading downhill. 2015 was the year when he dipped below 30 starts and he still made 20 starts that year. So you just can never tell really. And a little over a year ago, Sam and I talked about Verlander on episode 1425 last September when he pitched his third no-hitter. We were talking about how health governs how pitchers' careers turn out,

how we perceive pitchers' careers. There are a lot of pitchers who maybe had the talent or the promise of Everlander but did not have the elbow or the arm that held up to the workloads that he has sustained, and he has had that ability. That's just a rare ability that can't really be predicted and totally determines whether we think of someone as a hall of famer or a flash in the pan or a prospect who never panned out and verlander really had the best of that but even he is not invulnerable to injury so every pitcher who has a great track record for health is just

you know past performances no guarantee of future results no pitching is really bad for you no one should do it you shouldn't do it i mean i'm glad that people elect to selfishly because uh you know we like our jobs and we like baseball but it's really it's really a wildly bad thing for you and no one should do it. Don't do it. Don't pitch. Don't catch either. Why does anyone catch? I don't know. I'm really glad they do, but I don't know. I'm really glad they do, but I don't know. You sit there and you watch them and you're like, do you actively think this is a good idea, or are you just like,

this may as well happen to me? Yeah. The other thing about this injury is that I feel like there's nothing more frustrating for a fan than when a pitcher has like an elbow issue or a forearm issue. And you just know that it's going to lead to Tommy John or you think that it is. And yet months go by, you know, so like a couple of months have gone by since this problem cropped up and Chandler Rome at the time reported that Berlander was done for the season, which has turned out to be the case. But he didn't accept that and tried to rest and rehab and come back and got pretty close, two months just went by. You know, he could have been recovering from surgery. If he'd had surgery right away, then he'd be on the comeback trail already. And at age 37, a couple months is pretty important. And so it's frustrating. And that happens with other pitchers, too. periods where they're just trying to come back or they're having PRP or whatever. They're trying to avoid surgery and it doesn't work out and they end up having surgery later than they theoretically could have. And I wrote something about that like 10 years ago for BP and didn't really come to any conclusion about whether players or teams were going about this wrong or anything. I think they

have reasons to do that. Like if you're Justin Verlander, your team is expected to compete and you're 37, of course you want to avoid surgery. That could be the end of your career. So it may very well be worth trying and waiting for a couple months just on the chance that maybe it's not such a bad tear that it will be able to heal and you'll be able to come back and you'll avoid being on the shelf for 12 to 18 months. So it makes sense. It's not as if every time the player ends up having surgery, it was a mistake not to initially because sometimes it works and think there's a negativity bias where we remember all the times when it didn't. And as soon as we hear forearm strain, we assume, oh, he's done. Why even delay the

inevitable? But if it's your career and livelihood at stake, then it's understandable why you would want to get other opinions, try less drastic routes to returning. So I get why it happens, and sometimes it does work out. But when it doesn't, I found it frustrating as a fan, because I would just think, oh, man, if he had just gotten this over with, he could be coming back already. Yeah. Well, like you said, I understand why there is reluctance to get surgery. I mean, it's not an insignificant surgery.

And the ability to rehab from it successfully, I think we take for granted because it is successful most of the time, but it is not foolproof by any means. And, you know, there's the, the career part of it. And there's also the live in your life part of it. Like you can't, can't lift things with that hand, you know, you can't pick up your kids, you can't do all sorts of stuff. And I can't imagine that the, the rehab is comfortable. So I get that that frustration and i know that there are times when you sit there and you're like gosh you're gonna miss you know you're gonna miss a big chunk of another season as a result of this yeah so i get that but i i don't like having blood drawn so

i appreciate the desire to uh avoid having to you know have part of your body move to another part of your body. Yeah, right. Right? Like, there's also that part of it where you're, like, thinking about what that surgery means and you think, eh, now one part of my body that was meant to do something is doing a different thing now. Humans are amazing, but also that's kind of creepy. Yeah.

And there are times when you can wait and it won't actually affect your projected return day because maybe it'll be the off season anyway and you have a few months to spare maybe where it won't affect your actual return. So that's easier. And again, it's not that I'm saying that it was a mistake not to get it sooner or that it's typically a mistake, but there are times, I would imagine, where maybe there's a little bit of denial or just wanting to avoid the surgery so much that you do end up costing yourself time.

But again, I think it's understandable why that happens, and there are times when it works out. It's just frustrating when it doesn't, and you wonder what might have been. Anyway, Verlander's UCL had quite a run, I think. Yeah. That UCL deserves to go to UCL heaven Yeah. Anyway, Fairlanders-UCL had quite a run, I think. Yeah. That UCL deserves to go to UCL heaven or whatever happens to UCLs after they're swapped out.

Oh, boy. Another thing I wanted to mention, Rob Arthur wrote an article about an alternative way to expand the playoffs that would maybe be less distasteful to us. Sam and I kind of came down hard on the expanded playoffs permanence idea that Rob Manfred has been espousing, and I think that has been pretty roundly criticized. So instead of having 16 teams make the playoffs or even 14 or something, Rob suggested, well, why don't we just have the same number of teams but longer series? This has been suggested before. Scott Boris suggested it some time ago, probably with some Rob suggested, well, why don't we just have the same number of teams but longer series? This has been suggested before. Scott Boris suggested it some time ago, probably with some really colorful language that I don't recall.

But Rob was saying, well, if the goal is to make more money, which is basically what it seems to be by having more playoff games and more televised baseball in October, why don't we just make the series a little longer? So instead of best of five, we have best of seven. Instead of best of seven, we have best of nine. So I'm kind of in favor of this just because if we have to have expanded playoffs, which it seems like all signs are pointing to that, I would rather have this because it doesn't diminish the regular season in the same way and let in really lackluster teams but i guess there are potentially some downsides to having the same teams play each other over and over again and there's the same calendar concerns so right i don't know would you prefer this do you think this is a viable alternative yeah i think i would because it it gets you away from a lot of the disincentives to put competitive a roster as possible think you're right though that there is an

inevitability to that and i think that we should while we have to accept the fact that the post season because it is not 162 games is going to have an element of randomness to it that does not ensure that the very best team wins as we saw we see in the world Series all the time, I think that we want to make sure that the very best teams are the ones who are in a position to take advantage of the inherent volatility and randomness of a short series or a relatively short series. Obviously a longer series in this case,

but a relatively short series. So I think that if that is the goal of the postseason, you want to construct the format so that it is moving the entire regular season sort of toward that end. And, you know, for instance, like I am happy for the good people of Cincinnati that at the moment the Cincinnati Reds are in a playoff spot. Right. They have had like a good two weeks they've gone 11 and 7 in september and they are in the eighth seed but like they played pretty poorly for a lot of the season and they have been one of the teams that have sort of bucked the trend of not trying in the offseason and so i want them to be rewarded but not quite like this it's a very funny thing

the reds that's like the baseball gods are asking asking me to put my money where my mouth is. But I think that if you have a team like that, that you're going to look at those playoffs a little bit differently. Now, granted, in future years, hopefully we will be dealing with a full 162 games. So that kind of volatility in the regular season is going to be diminished somewhat. But I think we want the very best teams to play in October.

We can accept that the very best team among those very good teams is not necessarily going to be the one that wins. And I think we can live with that. But I think we want teams to try and we want them to spend money and we don't want them to sort of be managing to a mediocre middle. When Boris brought this up in 2007, Derek Jeter said nine games, it's too long. And I guess that's a concern that just a best of nine series with the same two teams playing each other over and over again might be a little boring. I don't know if people would just kind of check out on that at a certain point or check in a little late just because it would go on for a while. There's some precedent for this. in a little late just because it would go on for a while. There's some precedent for this. There have been a few best of nine world series, but not for about a century or longer. So I could see that being a concern that it just stretches on so long that by the end of it, maybe you'd just be tired of watching these two teams play each other. I kind of like it in the sense that it would make it more likely for the better team to win those series.

And something in me likes that, even as something in me kind of enjoys the wildcard coin flip game, which it's kind of incompatible that I like both of those things, that I want the better team to be rewarded. And I also like the game where it's just like, what the hell? Like, we'll just see who wins this one game and that will decide everything. And it doesn't mean anything, but it's still exciting to see. So I prefer this because it doesn't devalue the regular season and because it makes it more likely for the better team to win. But I do see that from an excitement perspective, there are some downsides. I mean, to have all of those best of three series that we're going to be watching this year think that we can view it as overstuffed and we need not be baseball writers or managing editors to feel that way. You know, there's going to be at least one day, at least one day with eight games. And you'd say to me, hey Meg, you

know, on a normal baseball day, just during the normal season, there are a lot of games. There are often more than eight. So what are you complaining about? And to you, I say, hey, hush, because we need to know what happened in all of these ones. We need to know. It's our jobs. But even for fans who get geared up and get excited and get amped,

that's a lot of baseball. That's a lot of baseball in two days. And I would imagine that in a normal year when the idea of the post-season bleeding into November is less troublesome because hopefully we will be less worried about COVID and like, you know, the potential doom of our democracy with an election right after, you know,

there's like all kinds of stuff happening this year that will hopefully not be a problem next year. So in a normal year, you could spread it out a little bit. But this year, it's a lot of baseball that we have to, or we're going to feel pressure to know about. And someone is going to say, we're going to get an email, Ben, here's the thing that's going to happen. I would bet a hundred dollars. We're going to get an email from a listener and they're going to say, hey, Ben and Sam and Meg, did you see this thing? And I bet we won't have. We won't have seen that thing. We maybe will have seen it, but we probably will have missed it. And it'll be a fun thing that inspires an email and we won't have seen that thing because it is too much on one day yeah that's a good point so i think that but i also

think that uh there's something to the nine games being a lot of a lot of high stakes baseball between the same teams it's just really such a shame that they have to be an odd number of games. That's true. Because what if you just did eight? You couldn't do that, but it wouldn't be fun. Yeah, and it would allow for some storylines to build up in those series. True. Maybe there'd be some bad blood or something.

Not that I want anyone to fight, but there could be some grudges. And you'd have the same players facing each other like pitchers would pitch twice in the series, maybe more. You could have guys making three starts even, I mean, depending on the number of off days. So it would be kind of interesting. You lose the novelty if you've seen those matchups before, but you also get to see some adjustments and what do you do differently if you just face this team once or twice already do the hitters adjust to that and do you try to mix things up in some way as the series goes on and you have potential for some exciting comebacks now you could also end up with

some situations where it's like one team gets out to a four nothing lead or something and you still have to keep playing that series even though there's like virtually no chance that the other one comes back and so you might get some really meaningless games that it's just sort of playing out the string but you might also get some really exciting comebacks that play out over a longer time and would have days for these storylines to build up and anticipation and going back and forth between cities a couple times so i would like the marathon aspect of that a little bit anyway i don't think this is very realistic that this would happen but i would prefer this to the alternative if we do have to have expanded playoffs yeah i'm going to be really curious to see the dynamic that this clear desire on both ownership and the commissioner's part to have

expanded playoffs plays in the next cba negotiation because they really want them yes they want them real bad yes and i wonder if there are safeguards that could be built in that would help to mitigate some of the competitive disincentives that we're worried about that would also therefore provide the players with a really powerful negotiating tool in the next negotiations. Because while Manfred talks about this, like, and the owners want it, and so it shall be that we know that's not how this works. You have to have a player buy-in to expand the postseason. So I'm very curious about it, and I hope that the players can use it to sort of extract some concessions that'll be meaningful to them, both to make the postseason format more palatable in the event of an expansion, and also hopefully mitigate some of the salary constricting moves of the last couple of years. Yeah, I think they will use their leverage here.

But I think, as I said on the Ringer MLB show, that the players' interests here are not necessarily aligned with ours either. So they may use this to get some concessions out of the owners. But ultimately, I'm not sure that the players are actually anti-expanded playoffs themselves. Like they might use it as a bargaining chip, but I don't think they would be as opposed to it as we are because A, they stand to maybe make some more money too. B, they probably like making the playoffs more than not making the playoffs. C, they might also see this as a way to

potentially shorten the regular season long-term, which I think most of them would probably prefer to do if it didn't cost them money. So they might sort of support this in a sense. I mean, they won't at the bargaining table, at least initially, because they have to give their okay and they know that the owners really want it. But ultimately, it's not like they're going to make some great stand against this, I don't think, because they probably aren't opposed to it for the reasons that we are. Yeah, that's a fair point, but they should be, so maybe they can be persuaded.

All right, last thing, and this probably could be the basis of a larger conversation, so maybe we can revisit it after the playoffs, but Joe Sheehan, in the latest edition of his newsletter, which arrived on Sunday, said I was wrong. And he said he was wrong about earlier asserting that the season should not be played or that the season should be canceled. the Marlins stoppage to say, we have threats to health and safety, both the players and support staff. We have threats to the competitive integrity of the season. It is inevitable that there will be more of both as a thousand people fly around the country in a pandemic. It's time for the league to cut its losses and call off the season. And so here we are just about two months later, and we have a week left in the regular season, and we'll see how the playoffs go. In theory, the playoffs should be a somewhat safer environment, even if it's not really a bubble. It is closer to a bubble than what we have had thus far. It's perhaps too soon

to say mission accomplished, but we're almost at the point where we can say they made it. And perhaps we can say that the worst case scenario or scenarios have been avoided. And so Joe says, what we know though, is that after those earliest days, MLB pulled this off. It needed to chip away at some of the things we think of as baseball to do so. And it needed a commitment from the players to frankly pass on a lot of the fun things about being major league players for a while. We had a season, and we'll have these expanded playoffs and a World Series, and whether it's Yankees, Dodgers, or Marlins, Blue Jays, it will represent the efforts of thousands of people over four months. MLB's plan worked. As we sit here with eight days left, it's impossible to defend my original position. I was wrong and the people who run MLB were right.

So I wanted to see what you thought about this. It's maybe too soon to say what the long-term effects of all this are. And maybe it's hard to say even what the short-term effects have been in terms of the testing and the resources devoted to this. Did it have some material effect on the pandemic in other ways? I don't really know. And we know that, say, Eduardo Rodriguez has possibly a long-term condition now because of COVID, but he contracted COVID before the season started. Do some of the other players who have caught COVID during this season have a similar underlying condition that will be a problem for them in the future would more players have caught covid if the season had not been played we don't know whether it's

more or less so there's just a lot that we can't really quantify and don't know and may never know but what we do know now is that they have just about completed the season, which looked very dubious at times. So is that enough for you to say, in retrospect, this was a good idea? You're glad it happened? Or is there just so much that we don't know that you're just feeling lucky that it worked out fairly well, but maybe we can't say whether it was actually a good idea or not. Well, I mean, I am very grateful that the health impacts we know about were not worse, which I don't say to minimize the health impacts that have transpired. So I want that to be clear.

But I think that we were all prepared for, you know, we were prepared for this season to like kill somebody i worried that that would happen so that not happening is always good like what do you even say about that right yeah and i want to acknowledge that i am in some ways like hopelessly compromised by my own self-interest here which which is that I truly don't know. I don't know whether Fangraphs would have survived there not being any season at all. I don't know. You know, our readers were really wonderful

and the membership stuff has been so great and people have really rallied, but it helped a lot to have normal site traffic to further membership, right? And that's not purely self-interest, right? Because it matters to you very much, but it matters to a lot of other people too. There are a lot of people who love Fangrass. And so even if their salary was not tied to Fangrass, they still find it to be a source of joy in their lives.

And so just baseball existing over the last couple months and giving us that diversion and entertainment and fan crafts continuing to exist is one manifestation of that. Again, like you wouldn't want to put that up against people getting sick or dying or anything if that had happened. But because it hasn't, seemingly we can kind of tally up the positives that have come out of this. Right. And I don't want to downplay the very hard work that a lot of people put in to make that possible. As Joe says, I mean, there are a lot of things that we don't know about and never saw that went into making this season feasible. And it was burdensome, I would would imagine for a great many people you know

a lot's been burdensome this year but whatever and so i think that that accomplishment is something to be excited about but i think that the position that there should not have been a baseball season because the risk was not acceptable is a perfectly defensible position, even if the worst of those risks did not come to pass, either because people did what they needed to do to mitigate them successfully, or because we got lucky. Right. Right. And I don't know that we have a really firm grasp on which of those things ended up sort of carrying the day. I suspect it's a mix of both, right? I think that it was probably diligence and care and fastidiousness coupled with a good deal of surprising good fortune. And so I think that you can acknowledge the success and say, hey,

this went better than I feared it would. But I don't think that you're ever wrong to look around and say, this is not a great distribution or use of resources that we know to be limited. And the risk of someone dying versus people being able to watch baseball is a trade-off that I'm not willing to make. And so they shouldn't play. And just because the worst didn't come to pass doesn't mean that that position wasn't grounded in sound sort of reasoning.

So I think that. Though I also think that the world is a better place when we're willing to admit that things went differently than we said they would, because that's just useful humility to have. And I don't say that to get a dig in at Joe in particular. I just mean in general, it's like a good posture to adopt in the world. So I don't know that he needed to rush out and

say that baseball was right and he was wrong. I think baseball was lucky. And fastidious and careful and diligent, but lucky too. And I don't recall really whether we ever said outright on the podcast that they should cancel the season. We certainly expressed serious reservations about it and thought that it shouldn't be played if it wasn't safe. And there were times when it looked like it very well might not be safe. And it doesn't shock me that we got to the end of it, at least if you go back to before the season, when someone asked me how long I thought they would make it. And I said, I thought that if they started it, the odds were in favor of their finishing it, whether it was safe or not, just because there was so much effort

invested in getting to that point and so many financial incentives that I thought they would just push forward regardless, which is what happened. And there were times where it looked like they were very close to not being able to do that at the worst point of the Marlins mess. And once that happened, I think once we were less than a week into the season and already you had a big outbreak, at that point, I think a lot of people who maybe had been in favor of at least trying it and thinking that, well, Major League Baseball's job is to try to play Major League Baseball if they can do that without endangering their players. Once we got in and the worst case scenario seemed to come to pass almost immediately, at that point, I think a lot of people were kind of in the camp of this is a farce. Let's just cancel it. And we were probably close to that camp ourselves. this is a farce, let's just cancel it. And we were probably close to that camp ourselves. But MLB and players and teams, to their credit, seemed to learn from that and improve their process to some extent. And so it seemed only right to revisit it just because we talked so much before it started about how it would go and whether it was the right thing to do that

now that it has gone, it just seemed right to talk about whether it was right in retrospect but i think you're right that while it's possible that the danger was overestimated there's almost no way to say with certainty because if you somehow simulated this strange season a million times i don't know that this would be the typical outcome right maybe this was like the best possible outcome i don't know so much of this is. I mean, if a player happened to be in proximity to someone else, you know, a hotel staffer or a flight attendant or who knows, and maybe there healthy adults and athletes, you just never know that someone might be especially susceptible to it. And all it would have taken is one person who might not have known that they were very vulnerable to this to have a terrible outcome from it. And that alone would have made it not worth doing. So it's hard to say that, yes, it was right and good.

But I guess we can say that we're happy with how it's worked out, just given how much worse it could have gone. And that it has probably been a positive that baseball has existed, certainly in our lives and the lives of our listeners over the past couple months and hopefully over the next month. Yeah. And it's a difficult needle to thread because on the one hand, for the sake of my job and your job and like everyone I know who works actually for a team's job and the players and what have you, I'm grateful that there was a season because I like having an income. And I'm glad that no one got sick i do wish sometimes that the decisions

that are made and are motivated by money at the expense of health and safety would backfire but you can't root for that in this instance because the circumstance that makes us all look around and go oh this was a terrible mistake. Is someone getting very seriously ill and dying? And so you can't sit there and say, I wish that for once the obvious short-sightedness of decisions that are motivated that way would become apparent to everyone and be so nakedly obvious that we make better better different decisions that prioritize a sense of care or well-being or caution in the future you can't really root for that in this case like once they decided to play you had to want them to succeed because the reasons that they wouldn't

meant that someone had covid it was a really tricky sort of ethical minefield to try to navigate and like i said i'm glad that they pulled it off but i don't know that them doing that really changes the calculus on the wisdom of them trying but here we are getting ready to watch it's eight games potentially two days of eight games spent yeah i know it's not just one day. I'm going to be so tired. We're going to be busy. All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back with our guest. And just so you know, if you are someone who would like to know this, there is some off-color language in this segment, which there are some swears. Yeah. We're talking to David Roth about the Mets, so it would be disappointing if that were not the case, but we'll be right back with David. Someone's walking the line too closely

Turn the tap off All right, we are joined now by David Roth, writer and editor for the shiny new website Defector.com and fan-slash-emotional hostage of the New York Mets who are seemingly about to be under new ownership. Hello, David. Hey, who are seemingly about to be under new ownership. Hello, David. Hey, how are you? Okay, so we're talking to you at a momentous time in your life when you write your memoirs.

You'll have to devote a chapter or two to these wild weeks of September 2020, because not only did you officially start the public part of your new full-time job for Defector, but you've also experienced upheaval in your part-time passion project of studying and psychoanalyzing jeff and fred wilpon so which of those things would you say has occupied more of your mental bandwidth over the past two weeks well there is a saying that there are two wolves in every man and that they i'm sorry i just always wanted to say that um they the two have been in conflict and periodically working together. It's strange.

Having a new website is cool. It's still got that smell. We're still populating it. There's a lot of stuff about it that's exciting. But also, ideally, if you do it right, then it just becomes an old website and it's just like us all doing the things that we used to do and it becoming normal and to me what that means or a big part of me doing the sports writing job that i consider normal is like three or four times a year i write like 1600 words about the mets that are just like a very lightly coded cry for help

and the possibility that i wouldn't have to do that as much or that I would be doing it differently without the Wilpons is like something that I think implicitly I had accepted that they would just always be there. their first minority ownership stake. And they're not going away. They're retaining some small part just so they can lay claim to some portion of the Mets and I guess most of SNY still. So you don't have to bid goodbye to them entirely. I'll still get to see them like leaning on the batting cage during batting practice, being like, you're not really hurt. Like that should be nice.

You've had a lot of time to get used to this idea because this has been kind of a drawn-out process and it was a will they or won't they thing and now it looks like they will pending ownership approval so you've had time to come to terms with this and i wonder what your mental state is because i've heard you talk about the possibility that this would happen on multiple podcasts in the past but now that it's real and given what's at stake in your brand, I mean, you are... No one talks about that. That didn't really... The brand changing implications. Yeah. You're the internet's number one Wilpon whisperer. Let's start with my brand, if that's okay. Suddenly, that part of your content creation portfolio might be a little

less valuable. But on the other hand, maybe things will look up for you as a Mets fan. Yeah, I mean, I honestly welcome this challenge with every element of, you know, my being that like, I think I'll still find a way to get upset about the Mets, you know, like I've been doing it my whole life. It can't all change. But so much of what, especially, you know, in the last couple decades or whatever, everything that's frustrated me about the Mets, I think I've been able, rightly or wrongly, to kind of trace it back to the Wilpons as like the source of this, that there's like a culture on the team or in the organization and that like reflects their failings as leaders and

and as you know just empathetic human beings like baseline failures of that kind and without that there i think that you know there's any number of ways that the that things could continue to dissatisfy me and keep me you know on the edge where i need to be or whatever but i don't think that they're going to be the same because there are no teams that screw up in the way that the mets screw up you know this like making people play hurt not giving your front office a budget and making every instance go case by case the owners signing off personally on every transaction and like weighing in on baseball shit like like down to like having a lefty righty alternating in your line in your batting order which is a thing that will puns like and a thing the mets do that's all from like

1954 like and when baseball teams were like a family business in that way when they were just owned by whatever like local swell you know got a wild hair and bought the st louis browns or something then like not to say that there's anything to mourn there but it was weird in that way the mets are the last team that is weird in that throwbacky way maybe that's the answer to the question i was about to ask because and this might strike you as a strange thing to say both given the differences in longevity and relative franchise success. But I have always sort of thought that Mets and Mariners fans are kindred in an odd way. And yet, having said that, I remember when I was living in New York and living in Queens and around Mets fans much more often,

and around Mets fans much more often. Mariners fans are sad and resigned a lot of the time, still invested but quiet in a, you know, we grew up listening to Death Cab for Cutie kind of way. And Mets fans are angry, not universally and not all the time, but I think that that's part of the Mets fan experience. And I guess, David, what I am wanting to ask you, and perhaps this is my own cry for help, is how do you sustain feelings that are loud

and that don't just require you to sit at home and listen to your Sad Girl Summer playlist? Like, what is it about the Mets fan experience that seems to lend itself to these, to the simultaneous self-loathing but also extreme anger and defensiveness that can be directed at other people i'm we're gonna get so many bad emails ben and it's gonna be my fault i want you to i want you to know i know that and i am sorry honestly like i think this is a perfectly fair question i mean even though like

if you if you were to take this question down to its essence, it's like a two parter. The first part is what's wrong with you? Right. The second part is why do you live like this? Right. But they're both fair questions. And like, it's not like I haven't wondered about either of them, you know, often. I think when I meet a Mets fan and there are out there, I've worked with them. I've had, you know, some conversations, usually shorter ones with them where there's people that that authentically are like, I don't know why they don't go out there and just sign Max Scherzer. People that are living in this fantasy world where they're a normal baseball team and the mistakes they make are just sort of like, they're like honest bloopers that they're like, oh, well, I guess they just thought Jay Bruce was better than Lorenzo Cain. And they did. They really did think that. Theyzo Cain. And, like, they did. They really did think that. They did think that. There's a reason for that.

But it's not just that it was a mistake. It's, like, it comes from a place, you know, that, like, it reflects ownership and it reflects the pressures that ownership puts on people and stuff. I think, you know, so obviously that's, like, what I'm describing to you is not a fun baseball fan experience, right? Like that this is the idea of entering every offseason sort of

filled with this vague sense of dread about how they're going to screw it up. And like, you know, it's sort of lit with a sort of a perverse, like amusement at the idea of being like, what if they do something like really weird? Like, what if they like just start bringing back guys? Like, what if they try Kelvin Escobar again? What if they got a good report and he can feel his fingers now, so they're going to sign him to a three-year deal? That is an uneasy way to be, but there's something also that's insulating about it because you know that it's only going to go, you know, sort of one type of way. And then also that the experience is going to be very similar to the experience in years past. That, like, you might be surprised in a positive way or you might be surprised in a negative way.

But you're never really going to be surprised that much. They're not going to be suddenly, abruptly, notably different. abruptly, notably different. And especially given, you know, the fact that, you know, not to keep belaboring it, but that I think that like, ownership's neuroses so informed the way that the team has fucked up over the years, that like, you know, more or less how they're going to make their mistakes. And it's not just the big ones, either. It's not just in terms of not spending money, it's in terms of not scouting their own system effectively, or like persistently as a friend has pointed out, mistaking their own threes for fives and their own fives for threes in terms of player evaluation.

And it is always that like, if they have a six, they generally will eventually admit that they have a guy who's like that level of player, but they're whatever the stuff that they get wrong, they've gotten wrong in a very peculiar way. And so I think this is maybe a reach. But the thing that that makes me angry about it, or that made me angry about it, is that it wasn't

going to change. But the thing that I think kept me in the fold, or at least that like made it sort of interesting for me is the way in which that rhymed with the broader experience of being alive in the world at this moment. And that's depressing. Yeah. But what I mean is that like, you are aware of the limitations, and you're aware of, you know, what is and isn't reasonable to hope for. And so within those restrictions, you can, you know, live more or less the way that we live day to day. Well, and so now we find ourselves in this new condition. And I think that one under-discussed aspect of modern sports fandom is desiring different billionaires, which is a very perverse way to live as a normal person, right? That you sit there and like, can't a different rich person view this

as as the widget that they are invested in right not the ponzi scheme billionaire but no the hedge fund right i'm looking for somebody with more money and also like an actual docket right the sec right so you know one of those and i think that there's been this, you know, there was a period of time where I thought of naively thought of sports teams as art, right? In your piece for the defector, you talked about how Cohen collects art. And I was like, this is very rare art that they might be invested in. And they get to sit there with their billionaire friends at the billionaire club and be like, why, you know, those clippers, they're out of the playoffs now but like whom are owned by the way right and i definitely it's like a it's a yacht with more a bigger crew of

better paid people right and and ballmer gets to stand on the on the side and be a maniac and stomp and yell and we're all like he sure cares about his art and then there's been a shift where it's clear that this is really just another money generating enterprise, although some of those money generating enterprises seem more interested in winning than others. So I guess question to ask you as a way to sort of start contemplating the new Mets is, what do you really imagine is likely to change here? So that's a good question. And I think the idea of like understanding these teams, this is something that I think for me came later,

you know, like I'm not young and I've been thinking and writing about this stuff for my whole life. I think understanding teams as an asset class as opposed to a sort of a civic institution or, you know, or a product, you know, that is the result of a collaboration or whatever, that like just thinking of them as a thing that rich people own and trade is something

that I kind of came to late. And I think that understanding that, you know, that that would probably be how a Stephen Cohen would view the baseball team that he owns, you know, whatever. It doesn't make it any more fun to think about that way, But I think it does sort of help set the expectations a bit better. So to me, like, what I think will change is that under the Wilpons, the the front office that the Mets have is extremely stunted and small by the standards of Major League Baseball teams. And that there's this, you know, that there just really isn't an analytics department. It's like a few interns and like a couple of guys that they have a scouting department and it's like decently staffed up, but it's not in proportion with a lot of other teams.

And just in general, they've been running this kind of like, I keep coming back to like in the things that I write about them, it's always like some second tier lunch franchise that is poorly run and then is overtaken by some type of of animals that's like basically how i describe the mets you know under the will ponds is like a quiz nose but with like a beaver infestation and in this case the the issue i think is going to be less that they're not going to operate like that that's the one thing that you can say is going to be different. Right.

But if they operate like every other baseball team, then that could mean any number of other things. It could mean that they bring in a bunch of McKinsey types and start veering, you know, in more of a, like, Luno era Astros direction. Or it could be that they, you know know run themselves like the dodgers or the red socks where there's huge revenues and a big payroll but also this like you know variously crippling sort of cost consciousness that prevents the team from like going for it in the way that teams in like the 80s used to go for it in terms of spending. And I think that Cohen has the money to do more or less whatever he wants,

but my guess is that what he wants is probably something like, more like what the Rays are doing than like what the Dodgers do. Yeah, someone asked Fangraphs writer Craig Edwards in his chat this week what exactly Steve Cohen acquired for his $2.4 billion, and Craig did not say, you know, the personal satisfaction of becoming a steward of a public institution or getting to pal around with the players and hang out at the ballpark or revitalize a sagging franchise or something. He said he gets massive paper losses, which can reduce his tax liability elsewhere, which

just really reminds you of the romance of baseball. That's why we all got into the game. I mean, he is apparently a Mets fan. Yes. Even though he may love those massive paper losses that can reduce his tax liability, he might still value some aspect of being a baseball owner and wanting this team to do well.

So those things are not mutually exclusive. It's not wrong, though. It definitely has that feeling of being like, you buy a baseball team because they don't make art expensive enough to give you the paper losses that you need. Like if someone could sell you a Damien Hirst for $2 billion, he might just buy that. He can't. And I guess it's just like anyone but the billionaire you know in the Mets case. And is there any part of you that if the Mets become competent and they stop misspelling their general manager's name in the press releases,

for instance, would you miss any aspect of that kind of Keystone Cops character that they have? They at least have a persona. And I think of that with teams that have had long droughts between championships or something and they're the lovable losers and they're associated with that curse. And I'm sure their fans hate that curse. But then maybe there's some small part of it that misses like having a strong identity that stands out from everyone else or at least for neutral followers, it's kind of fun to have teams that stand out in some respect so that the Mets have kind of an identifiable way of operating. It's a very frustrating way of operating for Mets fans, but at least it's like comic relief for everyone else. Well, I think everybody else is going to miss it more because we barely got to use the LOL Mets tag at Defector. And if it goes away, it goes away. So I think the short answer to your question is that I don't know yet. But I do think that if they become more like every other team, you know, like in some ways I would welcome that because like the ways in which they are currently not like other teams are to me not charming. And not not just because they don't

they don't work i mean like obviously i want them to win more games than they lose but again like a lot of the the willpon stuff that's distinctive like they really do want the team to win right so like i guess you give them some credit for that but they don't want the team to win if it means adjusting any of their personal priors. And so the idea that they care and that it mostly manifests through them complaining when it doesn't work or like expecting the whatever high variance 82 win roster that they built to somehow win 95 games

and then when it doesn't getting mad about it. And so the idea of them being, if they're not like that, they will be more likable. You know, that if there isn't this like sort of permeating sourness and disappointment, and if there isn't also this like Wilpon element of like, and this is like, there's many stories about this. And I honestly cannot wait once the sale is fully official and they're out to see all of the beat writers just dumping all the jeff wilpon stuff

that they've had for years on this but there's stories about him like getting in pedro martinez's face and making him start some meaningless late season game and pedro gets hurt in it and whatever and like the idea of jeff wilpon first of all should not be allowed to speak to pedro martinez except they're an intermediary like these are just the absolute opposite ends of human accomplishment to me like maybe you could text him and like but then someone reads it to him he doesn't get to see it himself the the idea so like losing that would be good but you know the ways in which like teams are normal now is like is pretty ruthless, too. It's a different sort of thing. I mean, I think that the, you know, bullying your players into playing hurt, forcing them to sort of like slow play injuries or play through stuff that they shouldn't be playing

through. That's not best practices, right? So most teams don't do that. The Mets still do, but most teams don't. But what most teams do, I mean, in terms of manipulating service time and all this, I mean, the Mets will do a little bit of that too, but they actually have done less of that than some of their peers, in part because of the fact that their owners are so weird and sentimental and stuff. But like, they really are willing to like carry Pete Alonso from day one because he's

that good, you know, last year and and it worked now they're not smart enough to try to like lock him up to a long-term contract or whatever and like again now we're debating like you know who who are you actually pulling for what do you actually want here like the reason they didn't do that is that they don't want to pay him more than the league minimum even if it's some advantageous five-year deal that buys them out of arbitration and ultimately saves them money. But like, is that something that I want to have happen to a player that I like? Like this is, once we start having to debate the same shit that we debate with every other team, then I'm right there with it with everyone else. So it's something else to be upset about, but it's not the thing I'm used to being upset about. Yeah, I think that that's been, I remember when the news sort of hit Twitter that the

Wilpons were interested in selling and then Cohen emerged as a potential suitor. And, you know, again, because I like sad people follow enough Mets fans on Twitter to have seen some other reaction. And there were folks who were jubilant. to have seen some other reaction. And there were folks who were jubilant. And my response to that was to beg them to calm down. Because I think that the concern is not that they will leave what sort of the architecture of dysfunction that the Wilpons have in place.

I agree with you that they will not. But the reason that they're going to dismantle that, he's going to dismantle that architecture and try to build something new is not because he looked around and was like well this is a bad way to treat people you know i think he will probably look around and be like this is an inefficient way to run a baseball team it doesn't work it doesn't work and that's a very that leads you to a very different set of next steps beyond sort of cleaning house and and saying like we should scout players like below double a we should do that right like the road that this sets the franchise on might be one that is inherently better just because the will ponds are that big of a of a drag but i i think

you're right that it ends up in a place that looks a lot more like Tampa or Houston. The Dodgers would be, that's the good outcome for Mets fans, right? Big payroll, winning. Yeah. I mean, the Yankees are similar too. In the sense that that hybrid thing where you can do all the fun, small market efficiency stuff, but then also spend over the top on good players. Yeah, that's what

every fan would like their team to do, because it guarantees the largest volume of good players on your roster. But yeah, it does not guarantee that you're going to be happy. It doesn't certainly does not guarantee that those players are going to be treated well or whatever. And I mean, to me, the argument for Cohen, relative to the other suitorsors was mostly the fact that like there's a one percent chance that he does something different or different ish you know that like the A-Rod Jennifer Lopez bid which was the other one that was supposedly a finalist was I mean like I think was objectively worse than Cohen's not just just because they didn't have the money, but because it was every aspect of bad ownership decisions or ownership changes that have happened.

It was all there, that it's super heavily leveraged, like figureheads designed to sort of cover up for finance capital in this case and then a few you know weirdo rich people and then also like i mean a rod in terms of i mean talking about a salary cap and how players would need to accept it of like a rod of all people talking about that before the sale went through like i mean that to me was was then saying like, we are not going to spend more than the rest of you. Like we see what you're doing in terms of this kind of slow rolled capital strike by

ownership against players. And we're going to participate in it and we're not going to blow that up. And Cohen, you know, probably will too. It's not like this guy's made a reputation for himself as like this super heterodox anti, you know, autocracy or whatever autocracy crusader but like there is a chance that he just gets you know frustrated and it's like all right fuck it we're gonna buy jt real muto and then i'll get a couple pitchers and we'll see if we can't figure this thing out whereas like a rod and them were like basically

guaranteeing low payrolls and that sort of weird, perverse solidarity that only baseball owners truly understand. at the core that they have had mostly from within over the past few years, whether it's DeGrom and Sindergaard and Wheeler and Matz, or whether it's Lugo and Alonso and Conforto and McNeil and Nimmo and Smith and on and on. I mean, that's enough that they should have been better, really. And they were not a truly terrible baseball team during that time. There are other teams that had it worse. And of course, they made a World Series within fairly recent memory. And even this year, it looks like they're not going to make the playoffs, but they've been in contention. Their underlying metrics suggest

that they should be a winning team, though that may be small consolation. And they've done it without Cespedes, without Stroman, without Sindergaard. But that's the kind of thing where you look at the injury mismanagement and some of the strange transactions and you wonder what could have been if they had even just managed to do what they were doing, but then also not do all the strange self-defeating counterproductive stuff and just operated like a normal front office in some of those respects. Then they could have possibly supplemented that core or spent more or made better moves and built around that. That's exactly right. I think what's interesting about that, I think you're exactly right. But also, like, even if the owners didn't have enough money, which I think it's generally

understood the Wilpons didn't, like that they weren't sufficiently liquid to like really spend with big market teams. It didn't matter because their best players have been on like minimums, like pre-arbitration for years. And, you know, they did eventually like, you know, they paid for DeGrom finally, and they will, I think, I hope,

like pay up for Conforto before it's time for him to go. But in this case, like they were in the position that every team wants to be in. Their best players were minimum salary guys who were already producing at a super high level. And so all you needed to do was plug a few holes here or there with veteran players and to make sure that you had enough depth that if not everything went perfectly, you'd still be able to ride it out and rely on the stuff that you know is going to work and they took that cushion and they didn't do anything with it or the moves

that they made were and this is like again the willpon stuff like the distinction between it being stupid and it being kind of like small time and self-deally that's i think the really like interesting part that like the ways in which they duffed this were distinctive again to them that like the reason that Wilson Ramos is their catcher for instance instead of it being Yasmany Grandal who they also had an offer to in part was that they really were impressed with Ramos in an interview like which is like in an interview setting like you might ask somebody uh where they see themselves in five years or what their biggest weakness is this is the way that the

mets ownership talks to catchers i frame too many pitches yeah i give too good advice too many of the right thing too many it's you know what i guess i just love leadership too much and i've been criticized for that people say say slow down on your pop times. Why are they so fast? But so stuff like that, or paying Jed Lowry, which again, you can't fault Jed Lowry for being very badly injured, so badly injured from the moment

that he signed with the Mets that he's basically been unable to even do baseball activities as opposed to even just be in baseball games. And yet at the same time, that's a real $20 million that they paid a guy who was the GM who had been an agent that they hired as their GM, then paid his client at the end of a free agent signing period where he had not, you know, otherwise gotten offers. And then the team brutally botched whatever. I mean, we still don't know what his injury is, that like all of the things that they've said

have been so vague that I'm just like relieved to see Jed Lowry at all. Right, that he's not a ghost. Yeah, right, where they're just like, we've had some issues with his left side. And I'm like, it's like the Arrested Development Doctor where I'm like, so it's gone? Yeah.

Shrapnel sticking out of it? Yeah, but it is like in all of those I'm like, so it's gone? Yeah. Shrapnel sticking out of it? Yeah, but it is like in all of those sorts of like, I don't know that like removing that from the equation. It's not to say that like, it wouldn't have been different because like, I think part of the the Wilpon thing is also just doing the absolute bare minimum and then bailing on stuff. And so they might have paid for the right free agents, but they will not have like minor league depth. They won't have depth on the 40-man roster. That's just like not the way that

they do it. And so that narrowing of the margin, not I think necessarily out of cheapness, although that's probably part of it, but also just out of habit, that like that is the way that you screw up the good hand that they were dealt is that like you wind up with the year after the world series team in 2015 in 2016 they got into the playoffs but like everybody was hurt they were like super scrappy and they lost a wild card game to madison bumgarner and that's like i was satisfied with that season by the time they got there because it was all like quad a guys and randos like playing way over their head. Like basically TJ Rivera was the best hitter on that team when they went to the playoffs.

And that's cool to me. I'm that type of idiot that likes that kind of thing. But it's like that shouldn't be where you are the season after the World Series. Like you should be aggressively, you know, identifying what works and then just giving yourself a chance to get back. And they didn't do that. So before you go, you have recently joined the ownership class yourself, you and Steve Cohen. America's small business owners.

Piece of pod, yeah. So you co-own Defector with your colleagues who started the site with you, and it is now fully operational, more or less. And I'm sure we have a lot of readers and subscribers listening. But for those who have not discovered the site yet, tell us why it was structured this way, what you're hoping to accomplish with this venture, other than not having to resign in solidarity again anytime soon, and how it's been so far. So this is our one week anniversary or whatever or eight days i guess since we launched the actual site and we had opened up subscriptions earlier and asking people for money at this moment is a weird thing to do obviously like every site

has to do it because advertising doesn't work that way. But we came to that initially. I mean, from the moment that everybody at Defector left Deadspin, we wanted to stay working together and to do what we were doing at Deadspin because we knew that it worked. You know, we knew that people liked it and that people read the site. And I think that everybody sort of knew that we were getting sort of cheated out of an opportunity to keep doing it. And the question, you know, then was figuring out the right way to sort of get back into it. And that was a long process, which is why it took us so long to do it. Getting money from a rich person before we launched was something that we looked at and ultimately wound

up not doing just because of the fact that not necessarily because we didn't want to be beholden to a rich person again after the deadspin experience, although obviously that was part of it. There's also, I think that broader goals, and this is where it gets grandiose on my part, is that like, when I started out writing and getting work and making this the livelihood that it is for me now, that a lot of that was writing for websites that just don't exist anymore. And it wasn't for lack of an audience. And it wasn't because they were badly run or anything like that. In most cases, they weren't.

It's just that they were subject to the whims of a market that is opaque and doesn't work very well in terms of web advertising and also to the whims of rich people who are whimsical and not always in like the, you know, the fun sort of like, like the way that, you know, a Wes Anderson movie might be whimsical. There's, and I want there to be that middle of the internet where I started out and where I, you know, spent a lot of time every day while working unsatisfying office jobs. And that middle of the internet is just not there right now. There aren't sites, you know, there's Twitter and everybody's there talking all the time. But in terms of things to read, you've got big organs at the top and smaller, you know, and then Twitter basically at the bottom.

And I mean, like there is a middle of it in the sense that fan graphs and baseball prospectus represent this for baseball fans. Right. And it's good. I mean, if it wasn't for you guys, like, where would we be? You know, that like, what would we read? Right. And so I want Defector to succeed because i want to stay working with these people and i want there to be you know a website to put my stupid mets thoughts on wherever those go but like i

also want this to be a sort of a template for bringing back that that part of the internet that isn't there and it may not be realistic to ask everybody for money, you know, that like I already feel with like the number of sub stacks and stuff that I subscribe to, that there's this huge element of tithing, you know, or at least it's just like, really what it amounts to is just buying people beers. You know, it's not a super big expense,

but, you know, every month I get my like Patreon and sub stack sort of receipt. And I'm like, that's kind of a lot of money. Like that's more than a New Yorker subscription by a dance site. And,'m like, that's kind of a lot of money. Like that's more than a New Yorker subscription by a Dan site. And, you know, maybe we figure out a way through bundling or through, you know, different sorts of efficiencies

to make it viable for there to be sites like that. But the alternative being, you know, sort of just hanging on under bad ownership until the moment when we actually get canned, that was obviously untenable. And I think also a future without anything but ESPN and Yahoo Sports to read about stuff on is also untenable. It's just not right. And so I think that to the extent that we can be a part of a bigger new thing, that's really what excites me the most.

David, I don't want to risk sending us off on a tangent when we're about to close, but I have to ask, where do you stand on being on time? Well, that blog post was polarizing on the site because, I mean, mostly just because I'm always late. And it was not a coded shot at me. It was based on one of those slate. So to provide some context albert bernico a wonderful guy uh wrote a blog post we love albert um wrote a brief blog that was inspired by one of those slate like our worst quarantine argument columns that they've run and in this case there was a woman in it who was basically like i don't like to be at the airport

more than half an hour before my flight leaves, which as somebody who's habitually been late for shit my entire life, I've missed one flight in my life that just reading that gave me hives. And the idea of that person then being like, that's just me. That's how I am. I live in the moment. Like the like, there's no, there's nothing like liberatory about the idea of being like i have to be at newark airport in 40 minutes like that's not a cool feeling to have like it doesn't it's nothing fun about being at newark airport either but at least if you're there you know that you're gonna get to leave so anyway albert wrote a post it's basically like be on time for

things you mutants and then some people who know me were like hey man your website is out of pocket like do you agree with this and i personally like if people want to be on time for things i think that's great i myself strive to be on time i'm often not but like i i have also like bargained with myself enough over the years that like, I'm not in the same sort of trench of late person that you might put like Bill de Blasio or 25 year old David Roth into where like periodically you just on like, so this is this is extremely tangential. Cole Hamels used to say that he's like, I feel like I should be throwing a no hitter every year. I should throw one every year and i used to periodically just uncork one of those masterpieces and just be like 50 minutes late to meet my wife for dinner and i don't do that anymore because for one thing sitting in a restaurant with somebody who's crying and mad at you shitty look feels

awful and it worked like over time i developed aversion therapy to it. Same thing with missing a flight. That's expensive and you feel like a dumbass. So in this case, I've tried to strive for a level of lateness that everybody can live with, including me. That's a work in progress. Like it still annoys people, but it just makes me have to be extra charming. So I like that challenge. Well, thank you for being pretty on time for this podcast and being charming nonetheless thank you i appreciate it we wish you the best with both of these new exciting chapters in your life figuring my shit out and my website yeah thank you and the mets that's right yeah all of these new chapters maybe someday the willpons

will just be guys you remember when you're remembering guys as opposed to guys who are always on your mind in an unpleasant way. If I can forget them first, that would be delightful. Yeah. So you can find David on Twitter at David underscore J underscore Roth, and you can read him and listen to him and subscribe to his work and the work of his colleagues at defector defector.com. David, thank you very much. Thank you guys very much. That will do it for today. Thank you for listening. As some of you noticed, there was another combined

half no hitter on Sunday in the Padres Mariners game, courtesy of Denelson Lumet and Justin Dunn. That game ended up 7-4 Padres with 11 total hits, and both Lamet and Dunn eventually gave up hits and runs, but neither one did through the top of the fifth. Exciting, I know, although this game eventually went 11 innings, so as it turned out, the middle of the fifth was not the halfway point. But I think those of us who are tracking this for some reason can count it. 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. Phil Thomas, Fred Navarrete,

Harrison Riley, Zachary Ellenthal, and Justin Compton. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg and Sam via email at podcast.fangraphs.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 a little later this week. And nothing lasts forever anymore And nothing lasts forever anymore