Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1631: Ducks on the Walden Pond

Episode Date: December 19, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up briefly on their recent Scott Boras banter, then answer listener emails about what a manager has to do to get fired because of a single game, possible scenarios in which Mookie Betts enters the Hall of Fame representing the Red Sox instead of the Dodgers, whether nature excursions […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1631 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs O'Meg. Hello. How are you? I'm doing okay. Okay. We have a brief follow-up in our Boris banter from last time. Yes. Listener Dakota Bates emailed us and said i think you all missed the point of boris's comment it seemed like a pretty obvious play on words with the name of

angel's new gm perry menagian which sounds kind of like perry mason so he would ostensibly the one be the one solving the angel struggles love the show hope that helps and dakota i appreciate your email but i gotta i got a little advice a little advice from me a noted punster to you dakota and also our listening audience and most importantly scott boris which is to say that it is very easy in the pun game you know when one is engaged in the the craft of punning to uh get overly fixated on the the way the words sound. And that's really important in any kind of wordplay, right? Because your joke is often dependent on the words sounding similar or being related to one another via sound. But it's easy to outdo yourself, right? And you need to take a step back and allow the wordplay to also make some kind of general sense.

And so while I understand how Perry Manassian and Perry Mason sound kind of similar and they have like the same first name, but the pun has to stand up beyond that. The sound is not enough. The meaning has to be there, man. So I appreciate your feedback, Dakota. I think that you are i think that you are correct that that is likely what motivated scott boris in this moment but i think that we should

demand better from our punsters if only because if everyone does better i get less grief when i pun at all so that's what i have to say about that Other punsters give good punsters like you a bad name. Yeah, man. It's really rough out here. It makes me want to retire, but the pull is so strong. I can't do it. You have to keep punning to make up for the bad ones. Get some good ones out there. Yeah, Dakota is right.

I missed that point. I missed Boris's point, but I don't feel bad about missing Boris's point because it's not a very good point. Yeah, there you go. I'm okay with that. boris's point because it's not a very good point yeah so i'm okay with that however there was one other boris comment that we did not touch on which is relevant to my interests and very relevant to me right now because i just finished recapping the second season finale of the mandalorian just before we started recording here and this was a star wars related bor quote. So he has like one of these for every team, basically. Oh, my gosh.

So it's, in Chicago, you got a brand new network. In many ways with the Cubs, there's a lot of stars there. I guess when you have Star Wars, then who best to handle it than the Jedi? What? Okay. Think about who is the GM in Chicago now, because we don't want to miss the point again but jed hoyer jed hoyer the jedi oh that's really terrible truly terrible and and also and and the the bringing in a new network, I don't know.

Listen, Scott, I think that this actually proves that the analogies and the puns are for us, Ben. And also that Scott Borst reads your Mandalorian recaps. So congratulations. That's nice to know. That's how he's come to know your interest in the Star Wars beat. Oh, terrible. come to know your interest in in the star wars beat oh terrible not always even true in star wars that uh when you have wars the best people to handle it are the jedi sometimes they're the worst people to handle it but uh isn't that how we ended up with the original trilogy that the

the jedi proved to be woefully inept and incapable of dealing with the the's advance. Yeah, I watch those movies too. I know the words. One could argue that the Jedi handling that war was how we ended up with the Empire and the rise of Emperor Palpatine. It's just beyond the mandate of the Order, but we don't have to get into this here. I guess that's probably what Scott Boris,

he was not hoping to prompt that discussion. I don't know what he was hoping to prompt, frankly, but that's it. He's got a pun about every general manager's name, apparently. So we'll be aware of that for future Boris discussions. So we are just going to go straight to emails, I think this time, because whenever we say we're going to do emails and we don't start doing that immediately, we end up talking for an entire episode somehow, which is fine. Sometimes that's good too. But we do want to get to emails occasionally because we keep asking people to send them and you do, and a lot of them are good. So this one is from Derek. I swear this is a baseball question despite this first paragraph. Okay. Lucien Favre was fired as manager of Borussia Dortmund. Am I saying that right? I hope so. A top five German soccer team this weekend after losing 5-1 to Stuttgart, who is now newly promoted from the German second division this season. So, so far, a soccer question.

be a bit below preseason expectations, but it's early, but also just advanced to the final 16 in the Champions League, which theoretically means they are one of the best 16 teams in Europe, and really, therefore, the world. Ooh, okay. And going into the game, they had literally the best expected goal differential of any team in the top five European leagues. So basically, Dortmund was at least meeting all reasonable expectations before this Stuttgart game, and the powers that be decided that the single 5-1 loss was enough to fire the manager. Backroom politics notwithstanding, nothing along these lines that would result in Favre's firing is publicly known, as far as I'm aware anyway. So my question is, how badly would a single game have to go for an MLB manager to be fired in a season in which their team had otherwise more or less met expectations,

or even a four or five game stretch, which could be roughly equivalent to the 134th of a season that Dortmund's loss to Stuttgart represented. An analogous situation to fires might be the Dodgers firing Dave Roberts after a single apocalyptically disastrous game, drop the Dodgers to 28 and 22 or something. Seems impossible, but I'd also very much like to hear what single game scenarios could make that justifiable. So two things come to mind most immediately for me. The first of which I think is the likeliest and the second of which I think would absolutely result or could result in a managerial firing after just one game, but seems unlikely to

actually end up happening. firing after just one game but seems unlikely to actually end up happening so the first is like and this is gonna feel this is gonna feel unkind coming on the the back of dave roberts as an example in the email and the dodgers world series win but i would imagine that just a truly negligent truly disastrous world series like game seven game plan could potentially result in in firing, which feels like a bit of a cheat because that's like that's literally the last possible game of the World Series that coloring the perception of perhaps a temperamental owner to the point of necessitating firing. But I think that in order for that to happen, there likely has to be some amount of sort of lack of confidence to begin with. And that might be in violation of the terms of the question.

I guess the other would be if in our current era of sort of prioritizing pitching health, if a manager really wrote a guy in a start to the point of obvious both negligence and then injury. But I find it very hard to believe that that would ever actually happen. Yeah. And so those are the ones that come most immediately to mind in terms of like managerial stuff. most immediately to mind in terms of like managerial stuff now i can imagine a manager saying something outrageous or offensive or problematic that would necessitate his dismissal yes some sort of gesture or even just like berating a player or a fan or some sort of behavior that is not related to tactics or strategy or just losing the game.

Right, and that's probably, now that I think about it, the most likely actual reason that a manager gets canned as a result of a single moment or a single afternoon or evening of being at work. But if we're setting that stuff aside and focusing on on-field tactics, I don't think that there are a lot of things that folks who are currently employed to be managers would necessarily do that would without any larger context of sort of poor on-field tactics or bad sort of behind-the-scenes HR, you know, day-in and day-out people management that would result in a guy getting fired just after a single day. Right. Occasionally, you'll hear someone say that something is a fireable offense.

If you search on Twitter during any baseball playoff game, you'll probably find someone saying that about something. But I don't think there really are many or any fireable offenses when it comes to tactics or strategy. As you said, yes, endangering a player in some way that could be or just some sort of behavior or comment. But I would assume that if a manager were fired, that it was not the product of that one big loss, but that there had been some big buildup to this that maybe just hadn't even been known. And I don't know if that's the case in the scenario, the soccer scenario that prompted this question. I will link to an explanation that Derek included in his question if anyone wants to know more about that situation. But if it happened out of the blue, then I would assume there was more to the story in baseball. I would assume that there had been some sort of behind-the-scenes strife and bad blood. Or I guess if there were some really egregious tactical mistake that had been committed repeatedly, like if it's a big game and, I don't know, you do a sacrifice bunt in the second inning or something,

some terrible mistake, but it had happened before and the manager had been warned or they'd had discussions and they said, hey, we can't do this anymore. If it were part of a pattern, sure, but then it's not really a single game mistake. So there's very little that you could do or fail to do, I think, because you shouldn't really treat a single baseball game as more meaningful. Even if it's an important game, it's still one game. And you could always talk to the manager and say, let's walk through what happened there. And why did you do that? And what was your reasoning? And here's what we're thinking. You could always use it as a

teaching opportunity. So unless it's been repeated and the manager has refused to adjust their thinking then you might say well the manager got us to this point and we like what the manager does in the clubhouse and our players like the manager and good with the media like all the other things that managers do it's just hard to think of a single mistake in a game that would be so costly that it would outweigh all of those other things maybe in a pre or post game scrum he could do the and i'm using the pronoun he right now just because of who is managing currently in the major leagues but maybe the manager could say the do the equivalent of the what are you going to do stab me and say what's he gonna do fire me about ownership and then they might go yeah i mean like you're

kind of being a jerk and we don't like to be challenged so i think you need to find a new place of employment yeah yeah i'm trying to think like every every now and then we get a question about like what would happen if a pitcher threw over to first base like an infinite number of times what would happen there like what if the manager ordered a pitcher to do that or what if like the manager ordered the pitcher to keep hitting batters or something like like if if the manager just had some sort of mental break or something and then then you might say, well, we need to remove this person if only for their own well-being so that they can take some time off or something. Like if they just completely, you know, lose it in some way, obviously that would be a little bit different.

But anything within the bounds of like that was the right reliever or the wrong reliever to bring in there, like I can't imagine it happening because if the season has been successful and it's been going fine to that point, then how bad could the manager have been? Maybe if they weren't managing optimally, but it wasn't sinking the season or anything. So it doesn't seem like it would rise to the level of fireable offense. Yeah like maybe if a pitcher threw at a guy's head and we came to find out that the manager had ordered that specifically like had said go out there and bean this dude in the noggin then then i could see the the club deciding that

they need to part ways maybe maybe that might be optimistic ben that might be an optimistic assessment of the current landscape but no i think that if we found out that like a manager had like really ordered it like really really ordered not ordered it not like you know that guy he he's kind of a pain but like had said go out there and do this then perhaps it would result in some kind of consequence like firing but i don't know i think based on how they end up kind of cycling through various clubs i think you'd have to do a lot i think you'd have to do something actually pretty nasty to to be dismissed just as a result of a single game which you know i think it's probably as it should be yeah it should not be happening often yeah it should be hard to think of how this could happen because it doesn't really happen

and it shouldn't happen no if you're doing you know if put it this way if a manager does something in a single game that warrants their dismissal on the basis of their performance in that specific game they probably shouldn't have been your manager to begin with. That's as much an indictment of your process for hiring them as it is anything else. Right. Yes. Fire yourself. Resign. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Adrian, in response to a Jay Jaffe article looking at Mookie Betts and how he stacks up in the various Hall of Fame metrics, I was wondering, in light of how Mookie's career has tracked

and how many Hall of Fame measures he's already hit, as per Jay's article, is there a scenario based on performance, not preference, where he makes the Hall of Fame but wearing a Red Sox hat? So I guess what I'm asking is, what would his career arc have to look like for this to happen? Not sure if his 52-game 2014 season and last year's 54-game season

count as one or two years of eligibility for the 10-year requirement, but presuming they each count for one, that leaves three more years he needs for eligibility. So what would those three years have to look like if his career ended after them for him to make the Hall of Fame? But it would make more sense to enshrine him as a member of the Red Sox. Three three-war seasons with no further gold gloves. All-star appearances, World Series titles, or major awards. One 10-war season where Tatis Jr. has an 11-war season and wins MVP and the Dodgers don't make the playoffs. Followed by two one-war seasons. We'll say he retires to pursue bowling full-time rather than a career-ending injury or sudden decline.

It seems, well, I think that one thing that we should note here is that like a single a single day counts as a year okay um for the purposes of hall of fame eligibility so that that's just a good thing to know that and like the fact that gil hodges is the only player to have reached the 50 threshold on the bbwa ballot but not be elected are like things that will rattle around in my brain for the rest of time as a result of editing jjaffee which i say with a tremendous amount of affection don't get it twisted this is a a thing that i mean in just like the nicest way possible but the amount of hall of fame trivia that i just think I have access to. Like if I were to be, you know, like tortured by some foreign government that needed to know about the Hall of Fame and they did a memory extraction,

like they'd be shocked what they could find in there. And I'd be shocked too. So anyway. We will have to have Jay on soon, by the way. We will. Because he has a Hall of Fame ballot this year. I know. It's so exciting.

And he's announcing it in the not too distant future. It's so exciting. There are like moments that your colleagues get to enjoy. And you don't get to enjoy them to the same degree because they're not your accomplishment. But you're just so genuinely happy for people. And Jay getting a vote finally is just very exciting. I'm so pumped for him. Congratulations.

You get to decide about Curt Schilling. What a treat. I know. get to decide about Curt Schilling what a treat so I struggle to think of a scenario where Mookie Betts will make the hall of fame and not go in as a Dodger and I feel fairly confident that Mookie Betts will be a hall of famer but the length of his contract and the circumstances under which he left Boston lead me to believe especially since the Dodgers have won a World Series during his tenure, and we just don't have to worry about that. And in a season where he got pretty party MVP consideration,

I just really struggle to think of a circumstance under which he would voluntarily go in with a Boston cap. Yeah. Remind me what the deciding factor is. Is it the Hall of Fame or the player? I always forget. I think it's a mishmash. This is a great question for Jay that we will have to put to him. I can't imagine that if they said, I want to go in as X,

and they have played for that team, that they wouldn't respect the player's wish. It might be the sort of thing that the hall ultimately gets to decide, but does with significant consultation with the player, right? Right, because they don't want someone to sell their plaque cap to a team that they played with for one game or something, probably. Right, like, you know, and I think that that decision ends up being so meaningful for the franchises that that player decides to put on the cap, right? Like, you know, it meant a lot

when the Mariners finally had a Hall of Famer, right? And so I think that if Mookie decided, you know, it's actually really important to me to go in as a member of the Red Sox organization because that's where I came up and that's the club that drafted me. And the end was a little messy, but I've looked back and I've decided that my heart was in Boston. I bet the Hall would let him, but I just struggled to think that he would do that.

Yeah, I'm looking at a comment here from 2009 from the Hall of Fame president. At the time, he said the Hall tries to decide where the player made his most indelible mark. The cap decision is made by the Hall of Fame senior staff and research team. They'll look at a player's career numbers and look at the impact. And quite honestly, it's usually a no-braer. Then we have a conversation with the player because we wouldn't do something unilaterally. So occasionally there are controversies, but yeah, it's usually fairly obvious, I guess. But there is a possibility that with Mookie, it might not be depending on his career trajectory so while while we were noodling that i went to

baseball reference and i looked up what b ref has up as of the 2018 bbwa process that takes the averages by position for joss and by fangraphs war mookie betts is at just over 40 career wins i went back to fangraphs which is decidedly not the point of what I was about to do. At baseball reference, he's at 45.4, which is relevant because we're thinking about Jay's system. So the right field standard weighted with average Hall of Famers at the position. The career war number for right field is 72.7. The peak number is 42.9 and the Jaws score is 57.8. So if we assume that Mookie sort of continues on his trajectory and ends up meeting the

Jaws standard after a couple more seasons, that probably means, you know, that we would look at his Dodgers career as being roughly as productive as his Red Sox career understanding that his first season with the Dodgers was only a 60 game season but one in which he still managed to put up three wins because he is incredible and so if he if he is on a hall of fame trajectory and sort of achieves the back end of his career that is commensurate with the first half, I would imagine that he, when you take into account the fact that he will be in Los Angeles for longer, that it's a place that he voluntarily signed an extension where he won a World Series,

at least one, is, you know, going to be among the top, what, five names in terms of preseason favorites for the MVP in the NL for the next couple of years, barring some catastrophic injury or massive drop-off, the guy's only 28. So it seems likely to me that if he ends up a Hall of Famer at all, it will be the result of him having a long and productive Dodgers career, and he'll go in a Dodger. And he'll go in a Dodger. Yeah. I can't think of a scenario that I would want to happen where he doesn't go in as a Dodger because anyone we would come up with means a shorter and worse career. Yeah. Or maybe he just – he's basically like the peak is great already. Yeah.

Right? He's basically had – I mean he's only had what? One, two, three, four, five really full seasons. Right. Like his he's basically had I mean, he's only had one, two, three, four, five, like really full seasons. And so that I guess Jay looks at like the best seven for the peak. Right. Yeah. And so right now his first and seventh seasons are these partial seasons. But if he has another couple of full seasons, that'll be a Hall of Fame peak. But if he has another couple of full seasons, that'll be a Hall of Fame peak. So really, unless he tails off terribly, he will make it. And, you know, maybe he gets there, like he gets to 65 war or something. And like the peak is close enough that people say, yeah, Mookie was one of the very best players in baseball for several years and disappointing end to his career, but he was good enough.

And disappointing end to his career, but he was good enough. And then maybe there is some scenario where he could still go in for his time in Boston, where, of course, he did win a World a Dodgers player and he has, say, one World Series in each city, then I guess I could imagine this Hall of Fame staff saying that the weight of the evidence leads you to point to Boston. And then I don't know how Mookie would feel about that or whether that would be decisive, but I guess that's one way it could go. But I don't want it to go that way, not because I particularly care which cap he wears on his Hall of Fame plaque or because I want to stick it to Red Sox fans like it's not their fault that Mookie's not on that team anymore. They wanted him to be on that team. So I wouldn't want to penalize them for the decision that ownership made. They've already been deprived of seeing new memories with Mookie. So at the very least, they get to enjoy their old memories with Mookie. But really, any scenario where he ends up going in based on Red Sox time means that his Dodgers tenure didn't go so well. means that his Dodgers tenure didn't go so well.

So I want Mookie to be good for a long time because by the time this contract ends, which I guess we don't have to rehash how old we will both be when that is because it's depressing, but when that happens, he will have played for the Dodgers for like, what, twice as long almost or roughly as the Red Sox.

So yeah. I think that his performance in LA would have to be pretty middling for it to counterbalance, in my mind, the fact that he had been traded and traded in a way that was so publicly fraught to feel good about him going in with a Red Sox cap, right? If we assume that he's going to have

a Hall of Fame-worthy career, which I think we're comfortable doing, I think that it matters a lot to the fans, but I also think that franchises get a lot of, you know, there's a lot of marketing grist for the mill from a Hall of Famer, and they sell jerseys with the guy's name on the back and the Hall of Fame patch, and they do all sorts of stuff. And there's something kind of distasteful to my mind about the franchise that decided that in order to get under the cap and in anticipation of not being able to extend Mookie in the way that we kind of thought he deserved, that they would trade away a player of his caliber.

There's something about them then sort of reaping benefits of that on the back end once he's a Hall of Famer that feels just kind of yishy to me. So I think he'd have to be a pretty middling Dodger, and he has so far been a pretty excellent Dodger. Yes. This is just a really nice question because it's giving me an opportunity to sort of re-engage with Mookie Betts' 2020. And a lot about this year was bad.

And I think that that trade signals a lot about what is broken with baseball as a business and with MLB as a league. But it is really nice that we got to see mookie just like resplendent and gifted as he is on a really good dodgers team that went on to win the world series like that's a nice that was a nice little thing that we got that we didn't deserve and that we we gained out of a totally gross trade which makes it a very 2020 experience but yeah yeah Mookie wow what a year and then like a 138 WRC plus in the postseason so god bless you Mookie I wonder if yeah and not just that but really was good at everything like that good at everything just showcased all of his abilities

in that postseason yeah maybe one scenario that is not totally depressing is if he goes back to Boston for some reason, which could happen. He's not going to be a free agent, but maybe he gets traded back there for some reason. I don't know why exactly, because he's with the Dodgers and they probably won't need to trade him for financial reasons. So I don't know. But let's say they get bad or something. Which is pretty hard to imagine the Dodgers being bad like ever. But if that were to happen while he is still a productive player sometime in the next several years. And maybe the Red Sox are good. And you never know. Maybe it works out where there's some kind of veteran for prospects deal. And it's heartwarming. And it's a return to the Red Sox. And maybe he picks up another championship in Boston and has a couple more good years or something and then it could happen.

Not likely, I suppose. I like that scenario, though, because a lot of the alternatives are just, like you said, they're bummers or downright tragedies. And we don't want to entertain any of those when it comes to moogie bets or really anyone else so i like i like that that is an acceptable scenario even though i think it's extremely unlikely okay max says i was just listening to episode 1620 and jeff sullivan's comments about how much he enjoys the wilderness and how covert related shutdowns affected nature trails near him got me thinking, could getting players out in nature be a kind of market inefficiency? There's a growing body of evidence showing that being outdoors, especially in less developed

nature-y places, boosts health and well-being and even improves mood. On some level, I think the baseball establishment once understood this. The modern idea of spring training was more or less born at Arkansas's hot springs, much of which is now a national park. Along with the namesake attraction, one of the big draws was hiking in the woods. As reported by Lee Montville, Babe Ruth would incorporate hiking occasionally. Must have been occasionally. Anytime Yankees executive Ed Barrow looked at him and said, my God, you slob, off to Hot Springs. Whereupon the Babe and New York Daily News' Marshall Hunt would take off and go down there and play a lot of golf and take a lot of hikes.

It was sometimes instituted in an official capacity. The 1910 athletic spring training regimen called for a good deal of hiking, according to a biography of Eddie Collins. I suppose there's already a major contingent of players who pass the offseason out hunting somewhere, but what if teams were more intentional about it? Getting employees to spend time outside is a bit of a corporate fad in recent years, and while ballplayers are already pretty physically active and wouldn't be trading away soul-sucking screen time for time in the wilderness, you have to imagine it would do them some good anyway.

Or maybe I'd just like to see some iconoclastic wild-eyed GM or manager leading their team up into the mountains. Hopefully not La Russa, as I'd be worried about him making guys sleep on rocks or something. Just imagine Max Scherzer merging from the woods in March with a huge tangled beard, maybe wearing a fur pelt. As a person who grew up in the northwest hearing people describe hiking is always really great because i'm like what do you think we do out there yeah is that how hiking works it's not the revenant we're just going for a walk that has some degree of difficulty i think this is a great idea when i worked for Trust for Public Land, there was a lot of research that sort of motivated the desire to bring access to outdoor spaces to sort of underserved communities because there is a growing body of research from healthcare professionals about the sort of psychological

benefits, never mind the physical benefits that people have when they get to spend time in green space, right? And so I think that, you know, ballplayers are probably unique in second or third only to like park rangers or lumberjacks in terms of how much outside time they get at work. I guess that's not true. Like construction workers are often outside. There are a lot of outside professions. I'm rapidly coming up with a lot more outside professions, but they spend a lot of time outside for work. But that's different than getting to be in nature in a non-work capacity. And so I think that it would, you know, it would be nice if they wanted to be outside, but not because they're roaming an outfield, but because they're going hiking or they're fishing or camping or what have you. But I think that the one sort of wrinkle to this idea is that I don't know what the research says on this question, but my suspicion is that whatever

psychological benefit you derive from being outside might in some ways be counterbalanced when that outside exposure takes place in a work setting. And so while you might have a better off season, I don't know how those gains sort of carry over to the regular season because I don't know that you can bank like a lack of anxiety. Wouldn't that be nice, Ben? You could just bank it and be like, hey, I'm feeling taxed today. I'm going to spend down this account. But I think that people being outside is good for you.

And that, you know, equitable access to outside spaces is really good. So maybe what baseball could do in addition to wanting to get their own players out is say like, we're going to have an initiative where you can go camping with Max Scherzer. That's a lot of pressure, but you know what I'm trying to say. Yeah. If any team does this, it should be the Rays because Jeff can lead these excursions. He should just take them to volcanoes or something. I don't know if that would actually be beneficial, but he could take them to his favorite hiking spots.

But also because the Rays are outdoors less than other teams right because they play in a ballpark that is enclosed so maybe they should be the ones to try this out but yeah it's tough a because like for a large part of the year players are not together they're spread out all over the world so you wouldn't probably want to bring them back and do a wilderness excursion over the off season. I guess you're already relaxed at that point. And then during the season, you're already outdoors, as you said, playing games in the open air. But also like you're just traveling constantly.

And I don't know that there's a lot of time, right? Like when would you take a break? Like there's the all-star break. Everyone wants to go home and see their families. Other than that, it's just a nonstop slog. And so when you do have a rare off day, I don't know that you want to convert that off day into a day when there's a big team activity and you have to go do something. Although maybe that could be nice. I don't know. Maybe it'd be morale building and better than being stuck inside a hotel or something so yeah there could be something to that but yeah i don't know in spring training there are all sorts of spring training excursions that occur

although usually they're like going to i don't know play ping pong or something like i don't really recall very recent like the whole team goes and climbs a mountain together or something. Maybe it has happened. I don't know. But I would be in favor of that. It's just, yeah, if you do that in March, then is that still having some effect on you in September? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe it builds morale in some way. But as you said, I'm not sure the relaxation you get months earlier still applies. I would imagine that it's a really tricky needle that teams want players to thread, because on the one hand, you want people to be active and vital and moving around. You don't

want veal baseball players, but you also are probably really nervous when a ball player comes to you and is like, I enjoy the outdoors, because then you sit there and start to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which they injure themselves horribly and are unable to perform to the same level. Or maybe they just really respond to being in nature and no longer interested in baseball. So there's got a, you know, there's got to be a sweet spot between like grievous injury and veal and you're trying to find it, Ben. It's Friday. Trying to avoid anywhere with bears or like things that could kill you. Again, it is not really like Revenant very much. I say that though, I gotta admit something to you, Ben. I didn't see that movie because I saw the preview to that movie

and it was clear. I saw the bear part. part yeah it was clear that there was a mauling and i uh i didn't want to engage with that so i understandable i didn't watch it because they all looked very dirty and clearly some of them got mauled and i was like i'm good all right brett says on episode 1625 you attempted to find examples in other sports where size affects play. And I thought of combat sports, wrestling, boxing, MMA. So then I wondered what if baseball had weight classes, which would produce the most fun baseball? And what weights should they be? College wrestling has 10 weight classes, but I thought for baseball purposes, there should be much fewer because the vast majority of players are between around 180 to 220 pounds.

So I thought 190 to 10 to 30 and heavyweight unlimited would be the best way to go. Anyway, if baseball had weight divisions, what weights would you want to see and which would be the most fun? I like this idea because I think it inadvertently solves the contact issue in baseball. Because if you put all of the smaller guys who presumably, either because they are shorter of stature, granted some of them do hit home runs, or because they're like the Dee Gordon types, sort of little wiry dudes. the d gordon types are sort of little wiry dudes i would imagine that that way class would see a higher contact rate on average because you're going to be less reliant on home runs to score so i would want it to be really dramatic like do two and have all of the medium and big guys in you know like anyone who might have to shop at a big and tall store. We're just playing all the hits today, Ben. Yeah. In one division.

And then all of the pluckier little sprightly sorts in another. And then I think you would have two very different styles of baseball. And so then the question becomes, how do you distribute the pitchers? Yeah, right. See, I don't want this to happen. I don't either, to be clear. Like, I do think it is a very creative, weight classes didn't occur to me because I am not like a, you know, I watch football, but otherwise, like I'm kind of contact sport averse. So, but yeah, that

is an obvious one that we should have thought. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it's, it's like, A, the variety of the bodies is one of the nice things about baseball. Yes. And other sports have that too. But I think in baseball, there are obviously advantages to being certain sizes. And by the time you get to the big leagues, a lot of players of certain sizes have already been filtered out. But the fact that you still do have great disparities and that players can still be great at either end, you know, either extreme of the spectrum is great. And to see them juxtaposed, I mean, we would never get to see the Aaron Judge standing on second been among the best players in baseball at the same time was endlessly entertaining so wouldn't be good like in contact sports you need it just so that like people don't get killed and also so that it's evenly matched and there are various reasons

why it's imperative in baseball there's not much of a reason to do it. So that's why it hasn't happened and why it hadn't even occurred to us until now. As you said, there might be some potential safety benefits, for instance, but also it would be more boring. So I don't know what the best weight class would be or which one I would want to watch. weight class would be or which one I would want to watch. Like, I don't think it would make a meaningful difference for me unless it was at the extremes, like watching all those giant players or watching all the tiny players. So like, otherwise, you know, the difference between 190 and 210 or 230 or whatever, like it's meaningless to me, I think. But like, when they're all the same size, then you don't notice that they are huge or small. It's only when there's a disparity that you can see that, oh, Aaron Judge is a giant and John Carl Stanton is a giant and this other person is small, or at least by the standards of Major League Baseball players is small. So if you had all Jose Altuve's on the field, players is small. So if you had all Jose Altuve's on the field, like, I guess you could tell that they were still small, but it just wouldn't be that much fun, really. So and it wouldn't be all that noticeable. It's almost like the level of play, like if you're watching a baseball game at

AAA or something, it might just look like regular baseball most of the time to you. But if you saw the AAA players play the MLB players, then suddenly you would see the difference so you need the contrast the contrast is entertaining i think i totally agree i think that it would be a less thrilling game if you couldn't have l2v standing next to judge at second you know it's just the the variety there is one of the few reliable, sort of renewable variety resources we have in baseball right now because so much about how the game is being optimized is pushing us toward a certain and particular style of pitching and also of hitting.

And so for us to allow some of that diversity of aesthetic to leech out of the game would be a real shame. So maybe we let bears on the weight class is people and bears. I guess they'd be in the unlimited weight class, but there would be more equality of opportunity, I suppose. Like if you somehow had like every bit of the prestige that goes along with being a big leaguer, but you had it for different divisions so that there was an MLB for people who were this size and an MLB for people who were that size, then you would not be at a disadvantage for being smaller than someone else. And so you would have a chance. It would be like open to more people and more sexes and just all sorts of people could play in these games and that would be good. And

I guess to some extent that's true for contact sports, but there's still like a more prestigious division or the division that's going to get you the bigger pay-per-views or whatever. So Right. like 6-2 to 6-6 MLB or something like, you know, probably the latter would be better on the whole. And then does that mean that everyone would just watch that tier and not watch the other tier? Maybe, probably, I don't know. So the levels of play, of course, would be far lower in each of the tiers because you would just be limiting it to certain sizes of people instead of just mushing them all together and taking the best from each group. Yeah, I think that it would be interesting to see how that sort of balanced out because

the idea of expanding access is sort of inherently appealing to me. But I think that you're right. There would be over time sort of a preference would emerge. I think one thing people listening to this part of the show are going to realize is that neither of us have ever watched boxing. So that's a fair thing to criticize us for, I guess. But yeah, I think having everyone sort of mooshed together is my preference because it's the most visually engaging and surprising. And I think anything that maintains that sort of experience of baseball is good for us to have. Although it does just occur to me based on what

you said about not watching boxing, I imagine that if I did watch boxing, I would be aware of some subtle differences between the classes. And maybe if you are a certain size, then you pursue a certain strategy in the ring that you would not if you were small. And maybe like there's just more force behind the blows. And so you do certain things and avoid doing other things. And that would be the case in baseball, too. Right. Like if you had the tiny players league, then the welterweights. The welterweights?

Yeah, right. If you had that and yet you had the same size ballparks and the same ball and everything, then you would get a different brand of baseball, right? It would be a more contact-oriented game. Although, well, I'm trying to think. If you had small pitchers as well, then you would probably have less velocity. then you would probably have less velocity. I don't know, but maybe you would have more of a contact-oriented game if you did not have all of the huge sluggers, although you would not have the huge flamethrowers either, but that might make contact easier,

and maybe you would get a high batting average slap hitters league. It might not be the same as like if you're small in the current major leagues you are probably more likely to to be a less powerful player but if you are playing against people your own size maybe that would not be so evident but still on the whole i would think that there would be some differences there and so if you wanted to watch the league that was all the Adam Dunns and the Stantons and the judges, that's probably where you would go to see the longest home runs hit and everything. But maybe that would be the most boring baseball because it would be all pitchers

throwing 98 and three true outcomes guys with big homers. It would be like an even more extreme version of what we have now and what people lament now and so maybe if you had two size or weight classes you could have kind of like the contact oriented league and the putting the ball in play and speed and defense league and then you could have the slow plotting sluggers and fastballs league and maybe that would solve all our problems because no matter what type of baseball you like you would have the option of watching it might be undone by players having to accurately report their own weights and we know how they do with their height span right well

did you know they call them glamour divisions in boxing i didn't know that i'm learning so much from the boxing welterweight is just satisfying to say. Yeah, welterweight. Yeah, welterweight is good to say. Welterweight. Like light heavyweight sounds like you just didn't try hard enough to come up with another thing. It's like you got exhausted by welterweight,

and then you're like, I don't know what to do. People are going to be like, we know so much more about boxing than you. Let's tell you about boxing. And here's what I have to say. I acknowledge your expertise and don't want to disrupt it. So please don't tell me anything. Okay.

Boy. All right. I kind of like that idea a little bit. I think you'd still get some stratification and quality of play and salary and all kinds of complications. We wouldn't get there and judge in the Jose Altuve next to each other and that alone is enough for me to reject this idea I agree I guess you'd need like a whole different player development system like right need different like coaching trees and like different drills and different workouts and you'd need like whole

separate infrastructures for these two different pools of people yeah we we've just gone through this whole process where mlb cut the number of minor league teams and then they'd be like oh we gotta bring them all back yeah we gotta put the welter weights somewhere appalachia yeah all right you answered this one via email. So I suppose if you're interested in answering it for more than one person, we could do that. It's from Bobby, and he asked who to root for the MLB minor league dispute. He said, being the person who I am, I like to have a side to root for in high profile conflicts. So as I said to Bobby, this is somewhat of a complicated question. So one thing I'll just remind folks of if they have forgotten or tell folks about if they don't know, you're able to look up anyone's campaign contributions. There are a couple of sources for this. You can search for it directly at the Federal Election Commission. They have a pretty good user interface.

Open Secrets is one of many groups that tracks this stuff. And they will look at individual contributions as well as political action committee contributions. It's a little tricky to unpack this because the Save America's Pastime Act, which was originally introduced as sort of a standalone piece of legislation, ended up getting sort of tucked into a broader spending bill that had all sorts of things that congresspeople are never going to vote against. They're never, ever going to do it, which is why it's a savvy strategy, right? You stick all this stuff in, and then when you have these sort of big omnibus spending bills, everyone has their issue they

care about, and they end up voting for a lot of, even if they don't really have a ton of conviction on that particular issue. So it's not as simple as saying, well, Major League Baseball's political action committee gave X number of dollars to Y politicians, and those politicians all voted in favor of this omnibus spending bill. support you know sub minimum wage wages for minor leaguers so there's that part and then there's the the fact that a lot of different people and entities give to candidates and politicians in any given cycle and they do it for a variety of reasons and they often have a slate of issues that they are trying to lobby a politician about and often they will give to both parties or candidates or politicians of both parties because we really love to legalize bribery in this country. And so it's a little bit tricky to hone in and say, well, you know, this side is more responsible than the other. But what I said to Bobby is that I think that minor league owners, my sense is that their lobbying tends to be more local and it tends although they do i believe have a political action committee that sort of represents minor league baseball writ large

but they're trying to like secure funding for their ballparks right they're trying to get the community to pay for a new scoreboard stuff like that so they have a hand in the conditions that players experience but i think that when it comes to compensation it's just useful to remember that major league clubs are the ones that are actually paying minor league salaries not the milb franchises themselves so when you're thinking about whose interests are best served by keeping these salaries suppressed, it's going to fall to the teams rather than the major league teams, I should say, rather than the minor league teams. I think that the real answer to Bobby's question is that we would be well served to just reorganize the way we do funding of political campaigns in this country. But that wasn't his

direct question. So I will simply say that you're perhaps best off if you root for the players and the people who get to watch them and enjoy them and just let the owners regardless of level sort of fun for themselves right yeah and i guess if you're rooting for minor league owners at this point in this dispute like sure it's maybe a little too late to root for them. I think they lost already, I guess. But you can root for those teams to do well, I suppose. But yeah, often it's just like rooting for the players. And I don't know if, you know, rooting for the fans. You don't have to root for either of them necessarily, except to the extent that it is better for us or for the players or

some other people who have like no say in the situation, right? So there may or may not be one side that is better in these conflicts or more sympathetic, but yeah, often it's neither of the sides, you know, not the stakeholders that are actually experiencing the consequences. Yeah, I think that these things very rarely can be decided based on one issue, right? Like your sense of the political behavior of institutions has to be understood in its totality. And so I think that when you do that, it's kind of hard to root for owners regardless of where they originate.

But they lobby for all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. And I think that minor league pay is like a really good one to have serve as your sort of bright line, but they're gonna try to influence policy that affects their ability to operate the way they want to in all kinds of ways.

So it's a little bit tricky, but I don't think you're ever going to be like badly served by saying like, what I want is for people to be able to watch baseball in person for a reasonable price. Like you could probably win your own election on that slogan. Right. All right. This is from Tanner, Patreon supporter. He says, Howdy, folks. I have a twist on a classic baseball conversation. I always enjoy a discussion on iconic hitting stances and pitching motions, whether they ooze pizzazz like Sheffield's bat waggle or puzzle onlookers like Kimbrel's stork-like arm angle. I'm hoping the pose

tracking capabilities of the new Hawkeye technology will add a wrinkle to this conversation. Over the summer, ESPN aired a montage of Johnny Cueto's arsenal of windups partway down the linked page, which I will link if you're interested, which struck me as the perfect player for this discussion, for many familiar with his mannerisms would still recognize the stick figure turning away from the hitter before throwing the pitch. My question to you, Ben and Meg, is how many players would you feel confident you could recognize when rendered as a stick figure? Oh, man. If you were stacking the deck with the most obvious, with whom would you start?

So yeah, I enjoyed that Quado 1 too. It's not just that he turns, but that he pauses the wickle and and there's a lot of variation there so that is an incredibly obvious one but he's an outlier in that respect i mean i think that clayton kershaw's wind up is pretty easily identifiable it's distinctive you know it was at one point in his amateur career cause of concern right scouts were worried he wasn't going to be able to replicate those mechanics over the course of an entire start. I mean, I think Ichiro's batting stance is pretty noticeable.

You need it to be divergent from the sort of typical in-box stance for you to be like, oh, yeah, it's that guy. I don't know what number. 50? I don't know. That's a totally made-up number. How many batting stances and wind windups do you think you could identify? say, and I don't always know that that's true, that back in an earlier era of baseball, there used to be better nicknames or there used to be more interesting stances or something. And I think that is probably the case.

In the case of nicknames, I think a lot of it is maybe just that it sounds archaic to our ears. And it's possible that nicknames today will sound just as strange to people in a future era. I don't know. Maybe there are just fewer nicknames or less creative nicknames now. But I think with stances, you probably do see fewer strange ones, fewer distinctive ones, because I think player development has improved and coaching and instruction have improved.

And part of that is that you don't necessarily come up with some stance yourself or do what just feels right to you when you pick up a bat or a ball for the first time, but you have someone telling you how to swing or stand. And so in that sense, I think there's probably more standardization. And so you have fewer players just kind of standing in some completely weird way that you would never be taught to do. You hear that all the time about when you do see someone with a weird stance, they'll say, well, you don't teach them to do it that way or something. And so the more players who are getting taught at an early age by someone who has credentials and experience, you're not going to teach them to

do that and maybe they will go off in their own direction but probably like the the more people who just like started playing on a sandlot by themselves you know with a friend or something and just did what felt natural to them for whatever reason i would expect that there would be just more weird looking stances just more variation probably right like and you start to see even when a when someone has a batting stance that strikes you as sort of unusual in the moment you start to see other players adopt it like there was a little while where like christian yelich's approach looked sort of unique. And then you started seeing a lot of guys kind of do that very upright. And who strikes me now?

Matt Olsen has a weird batting stance. It doesn't look like it should work, and it totally does. A lot of this is how guys get in the box. That part tends to be the most. Kevin Euclid had a really weird batting stance, remember, with his hand all the way up? So, like, that stands out, or, like, I feel like Karl Crawford's was weird. I don't know. I think you're right, that over time, they start to look more homogenous, and that where we see guys sort of engage in pre, you know, before they come set, and even before they're really kind of

digging in is where you start to see stuff that's recognizable like i think if a stick figure rendering of juan soto was done i'd be like oh that's supposed to be juan soto because he's you know he's got sort of recognizable action in the box but a lot of it's very the same now yeah and i wonder maybe part of it is how accessible games are via video and everything which i guess could go either way but like if you're a kid and you often model your stance on some famous player we do see a lot more players now it's easier to watch games than it was at what time when you had to go to the ballpark variety of approaches or kind of consolidated around a single standard average approach maybe you'd be less likely to say i will you know imitate this one extreme player right because i can see all the other players and

huh maybe i shouldn't pick a stance that looks like Jeff Bagwell or something because like, you don't have to do that. Yeah. You don't see a lot of that. And I don't really recall what the origin story of Bagwell's stance is because it looks like it should be impossible. But if you happen to be a fan growing up and seeing him, then maybe you would try to imitate that. But I doubt many people could actually pull it off. Yeah, like every little leaguer in Seattle did the Ichiro, every single one. Or Griffey before him. Yeah, although the part of Griffey that got imitated the most often, I mean, people wanted to do the swing, but I think it was really hard because it's so beautiful and perfect. But then they would do the the post-home run yeah yeah or like the butt wiggle yeah yeah and you're right like there are a lot of you know sometimes

you'll watch uh college baseball i mean you won't but like theoretically one right and you'll see people do the cueto and i'm like guys yeah i'm all for it if you can pull it off yeah yeah anyway as for the question of how many we could do it's like it's really hard to say like i'd like to test myself if uh someone at mlb wants to send us a bunch of wireframe images of players like we could do a little quiz or something it would be a fun article or podcast but i know that i can recognize a lot of players when i see them oh yeah that has a lot to do with things that are not conveyed by stick figures so when it's only stick figures and it's just the stance or do you think you could recognize more pitchers or hitters this way?

Pitchers, I think. I think so, too. My instinct is pitchers. Yeah. Yeah. Although I think— Well, I'm trying to think of whether there's a broader possible range of stances or motions. Of course, you can release from many different release points right but

you could have like a side armor i guess there's more variation for for pitchers probably but i think that like my recall my sort of instant mental image of a player if you mention their name i'm trying to decide if i'm more likely to goof handedness up for hitters or pitchers. I mean, I don't think that I'm like prone to goofing that I should make clear. But you know, do you ever have that feeling every now and again where you talk yourself into the wrong handedness? Yes, yep, definitely. Yeah. I'm trying to decide who, which sort of group I'd be more likely to do that with i think it might be pitchers that seems wrong it's interesting because like pitchers have like personality traits associated with handedness almost you know right like fairly or or accurately or not people think of like

righties or lefties as as doing things differently. And they do to some extent. Like lefties on the whole throw slower than righties, which is not anything inherent in how hard a right-hander or left-hander can throw. It's just that lefties seemingly can be more effective with less stuff just because of the lack of familiarity. And you're seeing fewer left-handed pitchers when you're growing up especially. And so that has an effect. You can get by with maybe a couple ticks less on your fastball. You'd think of like a crafty lefty or you wouldn't say that about a righty, whereas you wouldn't really say that with a left-handed hitter or a right-handed hitter. You don't really

think of them as being like different types of players you might say lefties have sweeter swings right you talk about that and we've talked about why that is but i think you can get confused with a pitcher if a pitcher is like a righty but doesn't have good stuff you might think like oh he's probably a lefty but you might pay more attention to the pitcher handedness because it probably matters more, right? Because like it determines your effectiveness and therefore determines like decisions on whether you're going to pull a guy or not, which it does to some extent with hitters as well. But I think you're more conscious of it with pitchers probably. That strikes me as accurate. All right.

So I don't really know the answer frankly to how many i could do you said 50 just off the top of your head sure why not and that sounds it sounds about right to me you know like maybe what percentage of players is essentially what we're saying what percentage of players have some sort of like distinctive mannerism that you would actually be able to see in stick figures. And so you are essentially saying like 7% or something. And that seems about right to me maybe. That strikes me as right. Yeah.

I mean, like to be clear, we can, Ben, we can recognize so many baseball players. Yes. Yeah. To be clear. We are not saying that we can only recognize 50 players. That would be a problem. We'd be pretty bad at our jobs. We're saying that if you took away all identifying characteristics and features, except for movement as expressed by a wireframe model, that changes things.

Yeah, it changes things. Ben, do you have any more emails? Because I have one thing. You had asked me before we started recording, because you had a very busy weekend and especially busy day if there was anything that you missed. And I recall a thing that you missed makes it sound more dramatic than it is. So I have a thing to close on when you are ready. stick figures like for a longer period than one swing or one pitch like if i get to see them walk around like step out of the box gesture go spike the rosin bag or something like there are things that players do i think that i would be better able to recognize them if i could see them like for a longer period and not just for a single swing or a single setup. So it depends on how much footage I am given as well. Yeah, I think that that determines a lot.

And if we have a sense of relative size, I think that would determine some things too. Yeah. Okay. Tell me what I missed. So today, Terry Francona was asked about Cleveland changing the name of their club. And he had a quote that I just liked because I think it's a useful way to navigate questions like this. If for whatever reason, the offense isn't obvious to you. He was asked about changing the name and he said, He was asked about changing the name and he said, we've always said we didn't ever want to be kind and respectful toward one another and we should be aware of our relative stakes in an issue and i think that we can let that guide some of our instinct and inclination to defer to other people when they tell us how a particular thing makes them feel.

And even if we have stakes and it's hurting them, I don't mean to say that like, well, we have stakes, so you just get to sit there and be hurt. But it costs us very little if we are unaffected by something to say, you know, you're right. That makes you feel bad. Let's do something about it. So I just appreciated this because so often I think folks have a hard time talking about this stuff. And I think that for whatever reason, major league managers can get kind of wound around

the axle when they try. And I thought that Terry had a good feel for what the nugget was. And so I wanted to share that because, you know, I think it's good to recognize those when there's a useful way to talk about it. So yeah right yeah i had missed that and it was worth sharing so thank you you're welcome all right should i end with a stat blast i have a quick one here they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r or O-B-S plus And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit Discuss it at length and analyze it for us In amazing ways

Here's to daystep lost This is from Nathan, I think. It's not quite spelled like Nathan, but I'm going to pronounce it that way. And he is a Patreon supporter, and he says, In episode 1101, you defined what a journeyman is, but I was wondering if I could find the truest journeyman in MLB history. I came upon Al Seacott, a pitcher who pitched in 102 games from 1957 to 1962 with six teams, none of them for more than one season. Is this the most MLB teams a player has played for without spending multiple seasons on the same team?

And what is the highest ratio of teams played for two seasons played for for a player? So he wants to know the journeyist of the journeymen. So I sent this to our StatBlast consultant, Adam Ott, listener to the show, and he got back to me with the data, which I will, as always, put online. You can find a link on the show page if you're interested. So Adam says, I have attached a spreadsheet with the answers to the two questions. For both questions, I restricted the search to players who debuted in 1900 or later. Also, my queries considered teams that moved as separate teams.

A player that played for the New York and San Francisco Giants would have played for two separate teams in this case, which both kept the query simpler and made sense to me since the players were moving with the teams. The first sheet contains players that played in at least 100 games without playing for the same team in multiple seasons. Eddie Phillips tops that list, while Al Seacott is in a tie for 108th. Al Seacott does seem like a good journeyman candidate, though, since pitchers appear in fewer games than non pitchers leading to very few pitchers on the list

the top pitcher on the list Emilio Pagan is active making it likely he will fall off the list at some point after that there are only two pitchers Earl Mosley and Greg Hansel that are ahead of Seacott Iver stick the sheet with the highest ratio of teams per season

to players who played in at least three seasons And have a ratio greater than one The top four players all played For five teams in three seasons So yeah That's a lot of movement yeah the five teams In three seasons guys are Bravik Valera, Corbin Joseph

A couple recent players Bob Meyer, Earl Rapp And Preston Gilmette Or and Preston Gilmette. Or actually, Preston Gilmette was six teams in four seasons. Then if you keep going, you've got seven teams in five seasons. Sean Marines, he debuted in 2010. And I guess if you wanted to know like 10 seasons, like, well, Dick Littlefield played for 10 teams in nine seasons. Oh, my God.

Yeah. See, that's good. Like that is not technically the highest ratio, but I think a lot of it. It's got impact. Yeah. A lot of it comes that like you have to stick around for a while because if you're just not good enough to even make the majors. Right. That's a different classification of player. Of course but I think if you Are in the majors for a long Time and yet You keep moving from

Place to place and you know probably You're not a great player if you are moving That often but Dick Littlefield that's pretty impressive Nine seasons and Ten teams he played for Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New York Giants Milwaukee, St. Louis, Boston

Chicago, Detroit, the other Chicago. And he played from 1950 to 1958. And he was a pitcher who was like, you know, 86 ERA plus, which I guess is in that range where you could have a job but not keep a job or not keep the same job, at least. He's like a two baseball reference war player for his career, but he was always good enough to keep getting another look. So that's nice for him. Josh Wilson played for nine teams in eight years. Jason Nix, eight teams in seven years.

Daryl Johnson and several others, seven teams in six years. And I will link to that. And then, yes, as he mentioned in this first sheet, Eddie Phillips played 312 games for six teams in six seasons. So different team every season. That's just, it's got to be pretty exhausting to have that kind of career. I think he played from 1924 to 1935. It was not six consecutive seasons, but it was a different team whenever he was in the big leagues. You would just always have blank walls in your apartment. You would never know who your neighbors were.

You wouldn't have a favorite coffee shop. Yeah. you wouldn't have a favorite coffee shop. Yeah. You know, you would end up spending your entire adult life like missing the good omelet you had like four cities ago. It's just, that's rough. And we've talked about the cases of like the Oliver Drakes. Oliver Drake was on the show.

Those are extreme like single season or single off-season movement. But we're talking a period of years here and not as many years, but would you rather be the Oliver Drake who has one year where he's playing for six different teams or something, or would you rather be the journeyman who plays for one team per year, but plays for a different team every year for several years. I find moving to be very stressful, but being settled to be very calming. So I'd like to, you know, be able to get used to a place even if the place changes every year, I think is my answer. Interesting. See, I feel like for me, I don't like moving either. I don't know that anyone does or at least some aspects of the movement.

But I think I'd rather get it over with in one terrible year. Yeah, I think because at a certain point, then it just becomes like people have you on podcasts to talk about it. That's true. It's so strange. And it's just such a wild whirlwind year. And it's probably hard on you and your family. But at least it's contained roughly, like I hope. You know, it would be bad. You could be both of these things in theory as well. You could have one of these nightmare years and you could also be someone who is a journeyman over multiple years. But I think I'd just rather have a nightmare year and then get to actually settle somewhere for a while and you would i mean i guess you would get into a routine right like i you know i haven't had to travel for work in a while ben but you know in a normal year i end up

during the baseball season and into the into the season, I end up having like a trip a month generally. And I had like a good routine. I had the suitcase I wore and I knew what time I needed to arrive at the airport and I, you know, I had it dialed in. And so I would imagine at a certain point you like, you gain a level of experience with it that allows you to navigate it with greater ease and so perhaps if that's true then your scenario is the better one because you gain that experience and you can sort of bob and weave as you need to in order to adapt to a new place and then you know presumably in the off season you have a home base you return to and you're like this is familiar there's art on the walls i know my neighbors the good omelet is here like whatever so yeah yeah are there bad omelets but most of the omelets i

have are really good what if you burn the omelet what if you put too much stuff in the omelet what if you overdo the tomatoes which tend to have a lot of moisture in them and then it's kind of weirdly runny but not on purpose runny it's just wet oh yeah oh yeah there are different consistencies you if you have a preference you don't want a wet dryer omelet i am definitely a drier egg man friday okay we should probably just go have a weekend now we should go have a weekend i haven't seen the mandalorian yet so don't spoil it for me but also but i like it i am glad that you got to do it and also now that you get to rest a little bit more me too all right have a good weekend ben you too that'll do it for today and for this week thanks as always for listening you can support the podcast on patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild the following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Kyle Malaszewski, Michael Kim, Ethan, Xander Berg, and Melissa Scroggs. 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. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope that you too have a wonderful weekend and we will be back with another episode early next week. Talk to you then.