Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1653: If (the) Baseball Were Different

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the incredible longevity of Dodgers Spanish-language voice Jaime Jarrín (who’s outlasted his own son in the broadcast booth), break down the new, universal-DH-less health and safety protocols for the 2021 season and MLB’s adjustments to the baseball’s construction, the Elvis Andrus–Khris Davis trade and the unprecedented positional profile […]

How can I try to explain? When I do, he turns away again It's always been the same Same old story From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen Now there's a way And I know that I have to go away.

I know I have to go. Hello and welcome to episode 1653 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Limburger of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing pretty well. I was just thinking back to a discussion that Sam and I had way back in 2016. This was during Vin Scully's last season. We answered a listener email, this was episode 856, about who had seen the most MLB games in history, and we concluded that it must be Scully, or if it wasn't Scully, maybe it was Connie Mack,

but we couldn't really come up with any other candidates. We figured maybe some other longtime broadcaster or writer had rivaled those two. But I was just thinking maybe the legendary Dodger Spanish language announcer Jaime Jarin, who is still active and has now said that he will be back for 2021, may be entering the conversation. I don't think he has as strong a case as Scully or Mack, but it's notable because his son, who was his broadcast partner, just retired. Jorge Harin, who has been in the booth with Jaime for the past five years doing radio and did some TV play-by-play before that, he retired. He said, yeah, I've done what I wanted to do. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. It's time to call it a career. And yet his dad is not retiring, which, like, that's longevity, I think. Yeah, geez.

when your offspring follows in your footsteps and does the same thing you do and retires before you do at like a pretty normal retirement age. I don't know exactly how old Jorge is, but you know, it's not unusual that he would be retiring. And yet Jaime, who is 85, is soldiering on and will be starting his 63rd season with the Dodgers very soon. He's catching up with Vin, who had 67. And that's got to be up there. Like, that's an incredible career. I mean, he's been with the Dodgers since their second season in Los Angeles, 1959. It's pretty amazing that the Dodgers had both Scully and Harin at the same time for decades and decades, like two of the longest tenured broadcasters ever.

And they were feet away from each other for many of those years. I don't think that he would be quite as prolific as Scully when it comes to seeing MLB games for a couple of reasons. One, he grew up in Ecuador and didn't see an MLB game or, according to his Wikipedia page, a baseball game, period, until he came to the U.S. in 1955. So Scully had a head start seeing games when he was a kid. And then for his first several seasons in the booth, they had the Spanish-language announcers call the game based on Scully's account. I think they weren't actually traveling with the team.

They were recreating it for the Spanish language listeners. So those things probably suppress his career total somewhat, but it's really quite a record that he has amassed here. And when you get up to 63 seasons of covering games for one team, there are not a lot of people who have been in that territory. So just wanted to give him a little salute because we probably don't talk about him as much as we should. And when you outlast your own son and just keep going with no end in sight, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, I think that we tend to overuse the phrase has forgotten more about baseball than we've ever known. And I think that this kind of proves the point that it's overused

because we really ought to sort of reserve that for folks who are in this tier because good God, I can't even conceive of all the things that he must know about the game and the, you know, the trends that he saw sort of rise and fall over the course of his broadcasting career that we just think of as historical footnotes and that he was able to view and then discuss in rich detail. So yeah, gosh, what a thing to be able to say. I wonder if he gives his son grief. Getting a little comfortable there, are we?

I know. What a quitter. Jeez. Yeah. He won the Ford Seafrick Award, the Baseball Broadcasters Hall of Fame Award in 1998. Wow. He's been a Hall of Famer for more than two decades, and he just keeps going. And he had a sort of Scully-esque career in terms of just his wider accomplishments too, because he's been the Spanish language voice of the Dodgers for decades, but he's called, again, I'm cribbing from his Wikipedia page here, but he's called 19 All-Star Games, 25 World Series. He called the inaugural World Baseball Classic.

He has called more than 30 championship boxing bouts. So like Scully, he is not just a baseball broadcaster. He called the Thrilla in Manila. He has done some major news broadcasts too. It's really quite a career. So that's a real treat for anyone who has enjoyed listening to him all this time and basically spends the entire Dodgers time in Los Angeles, which is amazing. So long may he broadcast and continue to climb the career leaderboard for game scene, which I wish we could actually look up, but it's just something we need to speculate

about. Indeed. So we have a guest today who will be joining us for an interview segment, Andrea Williams, who is an author who just wrote a biography of Effa Manley, the major figure of black baseball in the Negro Leagues and the only woman in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. She'll be joining us to talk about her book and about Effa Manley and about the legacy of the Negro Leagues today. But we have some news to get to before that. So I don't know where to begin.

I guess we could start with the fact that we now know what the season will look like, more or less, when it comes to the game on the field. I'm not barring a last-minute change. Up until first pitch, I am not going to assume that anything is set in stone, and maybe not even then. But we do know the health and safety protocols for the 2021 season. And I guess we can talk about the big takeaways, which would be that a couple of the major measures from last year, the seven inning double headers and the automatic runner rule in extra innings will be making their return in 2021. They will be making their return, but not the designated hitter. No. Which is interesting because, and we don't have to belabor this point, but I think it's useful for us to remember that that was included as a function of the health and safety protocol

last year. Right. Which was kind of weird. Yeah. It was strange at the time, and I think we all noted it to be strange, although we were sensitive to, I guess, the potential it had to further limit the exposure that pitchers have to injury, I guess. And they got hurt so much as it was by adding additional stress. But yeah, that's no longer the case, I guess, according to MLB. It's hard to look at this and not think, well, they were just trying to use the DH as a bargaining chip. So it makes sense that after not getting what they wanted, the expanded postseason, they didn't just say, oh, well, we'll give you the thing that we were holding out as the incentive. So I don't know if this is just pure pettiness and sort of negotiating for the upcoming CBA talks or whether it's

just, well, the health and safety concerns that existed such as they were last year no longer are as pressing when it comes to the DH and pitchers. But for whatever reason, it looks like, again, barring some last minute amendment to this, there will be no NLDH in 2021. And the clubs and the, well, I should say MLB and the MLBPA worked through a number of sort of more detailed and expansive protocols related to covered personnel, which will remind listeners includes players, but also, you know, coaches, umpires, a limited sort of designated population of front office personnel who are going to be in close contact with the field on any given day. They've expanded and sort of

fleshed out some of the protocols that those folks have to comply with both during spring training and during the regular season and the postseason to try to limit baseball's exposure to the virus given that they are once again not playing in a bubble. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for trying to successfully design around any potential edge case. That being a person in the world that is still experiencing a pandemic might have to deal with. There is sort of leeway in these rules for covered personnel to actually face disciplinary action in the event that they violate these protocols. Teams can face disciplinary action as well. It is sort of funny is definitely the wrong word, but funny within the context of the pandemic to

see how they are parsing the places that folks can and can't go. So for instance, no indoor dining, seems smart, can do outdoor dining, but not at like a casino or outside of a bar. That, too close. Too close to potential exposure. So they're trying to thread the needle here. And obviously, we're going to have to wait and see how successful they are at this. I'm trying to think of other sort of notable things to emerge from this, Ben. The players have to wear the contact tracing

bracelets now, which is kind of creepy. But this is something that has happened in the NBA and NFL. I think it was mandatory in the NFL. They have to wear these bracelets that beep when you get close to anyone and just say, no touching, no touching. No, it's some kind of alarm. But it tells you when you get too close according to the social distancing guidelines. And then if there is a positive test, then that enables people to see who were you close to so that you can do contact tracing. And, you know, maybe a little less big brothery. And I think they only have to wear it when they're like doing team activities or they're in team facilities. So I don't think they have to wear it 24-7 necessarily, but definitely one of those weird signs of the times. So that and some stricter penalties for violating some of these measures are in place now. Penalties for violating some of these measures are in place now. So they are taking a harder line, maybe trying to do this in a more rigorous way than they did last year and learning from some of the mistakes that were made.

And also on the field, I guess, you know, they've now gone to the 26-man rosters with an expansion to 28 in September. The rules about position players pitching are out now, so you can just use a position player to pitch whenever you want. And as we mentioned, the doubleheaders and runners on second. And the traditionalist in me still sort of instinctively recoils at both of those, I think, especially the seven-inning doubleheaders. But there are, I think, especially the seven inning double headers. But there are, I think, legitimate health and safety reasons to have those in place now. It's just that I think after they've been in place for two seasons and a full season, presumably in 2021, it'll be tough to dislodge those, I think. So if you are someone who's in the camp of hating these things and

wanting to go back to the way it used to work, I think the longer it's in place, the harder it will be to revert to tradition in 2022. So it seems likely that these will perhaps be permanent parts of baseball going forward. Yeah, I guess we should also say that, and this was a point that I think folks had wondered about going into this phase of season planning, players will not be required to be vaccinated for COVID, which is a, I will not pretend to be enough of an expert or any kind of an expert on the legality of requiring that. I imagine that this bargaining session is when something like that would have been determined, but both the league and the players association are going to strongly encourage players to undergo vaccination and we'll do some education around the efficacy of the fda approved vaccinations so

that seems like an important thing to mention which you know there's i think this is a another good example of the the weird tension that arises of trying to conduct any kind of a season at all in the midst of a pandemic, because on the one hand, you want them to be safe. And it seems like the best way to ensure that safety is to say everyone has to get vaccinated before they come to camp, so that we can try to limit transmission within the player population. But of course, many of the folks who are players aren't, depending on the locality where they live, necessarily next in line for limited vaccine doses. And we definitely don't want people hopping the line just so they can play baseball. So this seems like a, you know, sort of an uncomfortable medium place that they reached, which I again, I imagine is is being determined as much by the sort of strangeness around requiring vaccination to go to work that might make some folks uncomfortable, but everyone should get vaccinated anyway. So there's that part.

And then, Ben, Ben, we have to spend one moment on a thing that will only matter in spring training, but is going to make a subset of baseball Twitter very crazy. And it is not the seven inning double headers. And it isn't even the runner on second and extra innings. Have you familiarized yourself with the rules around re-entry in spring training? No, I have not. Ben. Ben.

Yeah? This is from Ken Rosenthal's report in the athletic under the playing rules section. Substitution rules in spring training shall be relaxed, allowing for re-entry for all pitchers so in theory a pitcher could pitch a couple innings might even just pitch to a couple of batters exit and then come back in and pitch again toward the toward the back half of the game interesting this is only clearly clearly a spring training phenomenon because um this would be madness and would upend the entirety of baseball. Indeed, I think that we would stop having baseball if this were casually slipped in. But they're trying

to be mindful of pitcher usage. Everyone's going to be ramping up in a normal way after a year of very abnormal ramping up and sort of getting ready. And so this is what they have come up with. But I don't know, Ben, I think I'll probably get at least a thousand words out of this at some point during spring training. I think this may have been a thing in summer camp last year as well. So this might not be new, but I don't recall how it went or if anyone actually made use of this allowance last year. I wonder how often teams will actually take advantage of that because you do see teams

are generally wary of having pitchers sit for a long time and then pitch again, right? So if a pitcher's in the game and then there's a long rain delay, very often they will make a change because they figure, oh, well, this guy has been sitting there for a while. He's not warm anymore. He's stiffened up. We don't want to bring him back out there. So I have a hard time imagining, especially in spring training, when you're just getting guys ramped up again. And we saw last season about how disastrous it can be when guys do not get adequate time to build their arm strength up. It seems unlikely that a lot of teams would be doing this, right? Would be pulling people and then saying innings later, hey, come back in. I could imagine maybe like a situational matchup

type thing. Like I guess the three batter minimum is still in effect, presumably. I don't know if it's in effect for spring training specifically, but if that hasn't changed, then it's not like you could just, you know, bring them in and out from batter to batter, like sort of a Waxahachie swap situation. I guess you could bring in a guy for an inning when you're going to have a few lefties or righties up, and then the next inning is different. You bring back the previous pitcher or something like that. But other than that, it's kind of hard for me to imagine many teams actually choosing to do this all that often, but it'll be weird if they do. Yeah, it will. Can I bake your noodle with one more weird thing?

Sure. So the rules sort of break up spring training into sections that are clearly meant to get guys back in the flow and put innings on their arms, and then a time toward the end when the games have to be nine innings and are sort of supposed to resemble actual gameplay in a more real way. So for spring training games, this is again from Rosenthal, for spring training games that occur between February 27th or 28th through March 13th, the retiring the side rule will be relaxed.

Defensive managers may end an inning prior to three outs following any completed plate appearance, provided the pitcher has thrown at least 20 pitches. Huh. Wow. It's like an Effectively Wild email show out there. Yeah. I mean, it's like an effectively wild email show out there yeah i mean it's spring training and again we spend a lot of time every year encouraging people to not get overly fixated on spring training stats and to sort of appreciate the environment in which they are played and and and all of that but i know that there are folks out there who enjoy keeping score no matter

what baseball they're watching and i I want you all, you spring training scorekeepers, to be mindful of how this makes you feel because I think I'd be interested in talking to you about it at some point. Yeah, there's going to be some messy scorecards. Anyway, if you're upset about seven inning doubleheaders continuing and the automatic runner rule, well, at least you can take solace in it seems that there will be only a 10 team playoff so no expanded playoffs for this year and another year of nldhs and i'll just say like i can't imagine how bad pitchers are going to be at hitting this year it's gonna be so bad they hit okay so hit 128, 159, 163. That's a 322 OPS, a negative 18 WRC plus. They struck out 44% of the time. So now they've taken an entire year off from hitting,

not that they were diligently trying to be better at hitting before, but they basically forgot about it for a year. And then I think probably a lot of pitchers assumed that there would not be hitting in 2021 either. So whatever preparation they might've done for that, they probably let slide. So now you have pitchers who have not hit in quite a while and probably were not really prepared to hit coming back. And I guess as someone who generally is in favor of the universal DH, I am maybe kind of happy that they will just be so terrible that even defenders of pitcher hitting may just have to acknowledge, okay, this is just embarrassing because they will be so completely futile. So enjoy the last season, savor what I imagine will be the last season of pitcher hitting if you are someone who will be sorry to see this

go. But boy, I think this will probably cement in some minds just how necessary or how advantageous the universal DH is because I have to think that pitchers will be worse than ever at the plate this year although wouldn't it be wild if someone came back and was just like i've been quietly working on my swing for a year right yeah i don't know that that would have been the best use of their time but i guess it would have paid off it may be someone who decided to opt out of the season because what if mike leak what what if Mike Leak who I think still as of today is not yet signed to a major league contract or a minor league contract for that matter so he might be a terrible example of this but Mike Leak opted out of last season because of

concerns around the pandemic and wouldn't it be wild if he you know he's an athletic pitcher and what if he came back and he was just like, I'm going to hit 15 home runs this year and bat like 240. It's not going to happen, Ben. But like, I don't know. It would be cool. Yeah, some swing change that happened while players were away. Anyway, future generations of analysts will have to keep all of this straight in their minds. So there was a universal DH in 2020.

And then there wasn't a universal DH in 2021, and then probably there was a universal DH in 2022. It's a little less clean this way. Then again, future generations of analysts will probably be excluding 2020 from their data sets anyway for any number of reasons. Another small change I saw is that players will have access to in-game video this year. So we talked about how some players had complained about the absence of in-game video and some had even suggested that it was responsible or partly responsible for their struggles. They will not have a communal video room anymore, but they will have access to in-game video via their dugout iPads. And the thing that I love about this is that catcher signs will be obscured on the footage in a nod to the sign stealing scandal. And I just wonder what this will look like and how they will do that. Will the catcher signs be obscured? Will it be pixelated like people's privates on Naked and Afraid on the Discovery Channel?

Will it be blurred out? Will it be like blurred out? Will there be like a black box in front of the catcher signs? And how do they do that? Like I assume there is some automated way with, I don't know, machine learning or computer vision where they don't have to have someone manually go in and blur out the catcher signs on every pitch. I assume there is an easier way to detect where the catcher is set up and to block that out, but that will be weird looking, I think. But I guess that's a good idea.

That's a good way, good compromise to give hitters access to that video without causing concerns about sign stealing. Yeah, it seems like an appropriate way to address that problem. And it'll be interesting then given as you noted that you know there were guys who said that this had a material impact on sort of how prepared they felt at bat to at bat in the course of a game if there's any change and of course it will be hard to isolate to the presence of video because there are so many things that go into whether or not a hitter is having a good year but i I wonder if, like, does this make, like, was Javier Baez's reaction,

because he was one of the guys who said that this was a problem for him last year, right? Yeah. Didn't Baez say that? So was his reaction upon hearing this, like, excitement? Or was he like, oh, no, what if I struggle again? No excuse anymore. Yeah, which, again, I think that the conclusion we reached is that if you have a

piece of preparation taken away from you it might not be uh responsible for for all or even some of your dip and performance and there were any number of things that a guy could point to last year and be like look this is just their pandemic man like there was a lot going on and baseball is hard and so we will elect to not be sassy if you if one of the guys who raised their hand and said that this affected their prep continues to experience a dip. But I would feel nervous because I fear public opprobrium. So yes. And if you're someone who objected to the way that MLB managers would wear their masks,

which was pretty shoddy for some of them. Some of them really seemed to be complying, but others were definitely like put it below your nose or have it hanging off one ear or something. And now each club is supposed to appoint at least one face mask enforcement officer, the FEO, and fines will be issued for noncompliance during games. So unless you're on the field, if you're in club facilities or in the dugout, you're supposed to actually be masking up and there'll be someone who is actually watching you to make sure that you do it. And I think I saw something also

about how there will be some counseling available or therapists or people who can help with psychological health, mental health, as well as actually trying to prevent players from testing positive, which I think is good given what we talked about with Andrelton Simmons and with who knows how many other players who were having a hard time dealing with those protocols and the world at large last year. So we'll link to all of this if you want to read all the rules yourself. So one other notable change that we should mention here is that the baseball itself will be different. The baseball itself will be different on purpose for once,

and actually in a way that is being disclosed by MLB. It's not clear exactly what the effects of this will be, but MLB has made some changes that seem calculated to at least slightly deaden offense and reduce the home run rate. So this was initially reported by Ken Rosenthal and Eno Saris at The Athletic. I am reading here from their report. This is citing the MLB memo that was sent to teams last week, which said, in an effort to center the ball with the specification range for coefficient of restitution, that's the bounciness of the ball, Rawlings produced a number of baseballs from late 2019 through early 2020 that loosened the tension of the first wool winding. This change had two effects, reducing the weight of the ball by less than one-tenth of an ounce and also a

slight decrease in the bounciness of the ball. So it seems like the ball will be slightly less heavy by 2.8 grams or less than 2.8 grams. And the core, the coefficient of restitution, will be reduced by 0.01 to 0.02, which I know means nothing to anyone really because it's not a scale that people are familiar with. But basically, it'll be a little less bouncy. It'll come off the bat a little less hard. It's not clear exactly what the effects of this will be. There is a precedent in the KBO in Korea just a couple years ago. They made some slight changes to the ball to decrease home runs and offense. And on the surface, they were sort of similar. In Korea, the core was reduced by 0.01 to 0.02, so sort of similar. Although in Korea, the ball actually got a little heavier when they made those changes, so it's not quite the same. So the MLB ball is getting a little less bouncy and also getting a little lighter. The KBO change, which was pretty drastic, slugging was down by like 14% and homers were cut by a third. I wouldn't expect something that dramatic here,

but you never really know because small changes can produce pretty large effects as we have seen over the past several seasons. Yes, they can. I mean, I appreciate the sort of new instinct toward transparency here. I do think that it would be useful at some point for there to be a more comprehensive conversation on baseball's part that is public facing because this memo was sent to clubs. And so I still don't think there has been much of a reckoning is maybe too strong of a word, but it isn't super far off from what I mean that there hasn't been much of a forward facing conversation with fans from the commissioner's office about the ball and what conversation there has been has been prickly and kind of defensive as researchers

have pointed out that there have been changes and that like there's not been much in the way of an acknowledgement of that even after the league commissioned a study and then you know got results back and was like yeah what study science so that's a very um abbreviated way of describing the back and forth for the last several years around the ball but i think that a new instinct toward transparency is good i think that informing clubs of what the expected character of the ball is going to be is good i imagine that there is some amount of frustration on the part of teams that there is a potential for offense to dip slightly. How much, like you said, we don't quite know given how these small changes can have a big

impact, but might be offset by other stuff. But you know, they've been constructing rosters a particular way with sort of an expected offensive environment in mind. And while this change might not be a significant one, it is a change. So I wonder what the sort of candid reaction in front offices was when this went out, because on the one hand, you and not just with team folks, but with the folks who watch baseball, who I think a lot of the reaction that I saw on Twitter to this from just fans of the game was, so now we're going to have fewer home runs and that's what we like. So I still think there's a disconnect between the sort of aesthetic preferences of fans and the conversation that's being had there and what the league is is trying to do and there there needs to be a more active bridging of the gap there and it needs to be beyond just you know hey here's a memo to gms that we assume one of you will leak

to right yeah yeah and stephanie apstein at sportsrated just wrote about some research that Meredith Wills conducted on the 2020 baseballs. And she seemed to find, despite the fact that MLB said that the balls had not been changed, that they had experimented with these changes that they'll now be implementing in 2021. But according to Rawlings and MLB, they didn't actually use those new balls in games in 2020. use those new balls in games in 2020, but Meredith seemed to find a couple different kinds of balls, different models that were constructed differently and maybe behaved differently within actual game used balls from 2020. So there's just a lot of shadiness that it seems like has gone on and there's no smoking gun evidence that MLB has actually tried to change the balls until now with an eye toward increasing or decreasing offense. But it seemed like at worst, there was some kind of secret conspiracy at best. They just couldn't really control the manufacturing process. And it seems

like they have really tried to get a handle on that now. And we'll see. They've tested this. Reading again from The Athletic, the MLB memo includes a footnote that now. And we'll see. You know, they've tested this. Reading again from The Athletic, the MLB memo includes a footnote that says an independent lab found that fly balls that went over 375 feet lost one to two feet of batted ball distance with the new ball. That also sounds like no big deal, but every 3.3 feet of distance increases the likelihood of a home run by 10%. An analyst familiar with the physics and math of this situation said the relationship was So if that's it, then you might not even notice this really. But I think it's good that they are trying to clamp down on this, that they are being at least slightly more transparent about what they're doing, though perhaps not transparent enough.

And there's a long history of MLB or the baseball manufacturer changing the ball from season to season. And sometimes that's been public, sometimes it's not, and it's just entirely inferred. So it's nice that we know there is some difference here, even if we don't know exactly what the effects will be. I should also mention one other change, which is that the number of teams with humidors installed will be doubling from five to ten. And that doesn't necessarily mean that offense will be decreasing in those parks. We associate the humidor with reduced

offense, but that's because we got to know the humidor first in course field and in chase field. And in those environments, installing the humidor and keeping the baseballs in them did suppress offense. But it really depends on what the conditions were that the balls were being kept in before and the environmental conditions of the particular park. So in a lot of places, a humidor wouldn't have that same effect. So this is more just about ensuring consistent conditions across parks. And probably we will eventually get to the point that every park will have a humidor. And I think that's probably for the best. We talked on the seam shifted wake episode about how important it is to have that kind of consistency in feel and behavior from baseball to baseball,

now that how you hold the ball matters so much and is something that pitchers pay such close attention to. So still a lot of uncertainty about how the drag will differ on the new baseball and the reduced drag has been such a big contributor to the increased home run rate to the extent that the changes do deaden the baseball and decrease home runs. I think the conundrum here is what this will do to offense now that we are in such a home run reliant and home run centric brand of baseball. Right. If you take away the dingers or some number of the dingers, then you're reducing scoring, but you're not really doing anything to counteract the lack of contact. And that's the thing. I think

we've talked about deadening the ball as a potential solution to the lack of balls in play. And it could be, it's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you do have hitters adopting more of an all or nothing approach now because the ball is traveling so well, then yeah, you might as well swing for the fences because you've got a good chance of knocking the ball over the fences. And so if you deaden the ball a little, well, you are maybe balancing things out and making contact a little bit more rewarded. That's good, I think. On the other hand, if hitters have all adopted this approach and you don't really do anything to address the underlying issues of just like velocity and how hard it is to make any kind of contact, even if you're trying to these days, then you might just have the same strikeout rates or really even higher because pitchers are now coming back into the equation

without the scoring. The baseball being as lively as it was, was really propping up scoring. We do have less contact, but we don't really have reduced scoring. So you may end up in some kind of like hybrid of, you know, 1968, like year of the pitcher with a lot less contact, like 2014 before the ball was juiced and, you know, scoring just cratered. And that wouldn't be great either. So I think deadening the ball is potentially part of a solution, but you probably also need to do something to make it easier to make contact, whether that is moving the mound back or reducing the height of the mound or changing the strike zone in some way. Just fundamentally, you still have pitchers who are bigger than ever throwing the ball harder than ever. And until you

do something about that, I don't know that you can really significantly counteract some of the trends that we've seen. But we'll have it for a whole 162 games, Ben. Yes. So we'll get some data at least. Yeah. So just a couple transactions we should touch on before we get to our guest. There was a unusual trade that was made, and I don't have a ton to say about the trade, but I do want to say something about a player who is affected by the trade. So over the weekend, the Rangers and the A's made a trade. The Rangers sent Elvis Andrus and catcher Ramos Garcia and $13.5 million to the A's for Chris Davis, he of the.247 batting average,

and catcher Jonah Heim and a pitching prospect, Dane Acker. So this is an unusual swap, an intra-division trade of pretty prominent veteran players. I guess it's just kind of a case of both of these players have seen better days and have had better fits on these rosters. And Andrus was sort of displaced on the Rangers roster. He's been the, I think, opening day shortstop for the Rangers every year going back to 2009, but he was already seemingly bumped from that position and was going to be in some kind of utility role. So the A's who just have not done a whole lot this winter needed a shortstop. So now they get one and the Rangers get Davis. And I guess it's maybe a

sign that neither team really expects either of these players to rebound to come back and bite them, which usually leads to some reluctance, especially when you're talking about trading a long tenured player to a division rival. So Chris Davis's days of hitting 247 are maybe behind him. He's hit 220 and 200 the last couple seasons and is projected for 232 so neither of these players is quite what they were but it's an odd one we don't usually see intra-division swaps and particularly for veteran players who have been with those teams for a long time right yeah I think that so when when Eric Longhagen wrote about this for us for Fangraphs, I think he noted that the two most notable pieces in the trade were actually Jonah Heim, who you mentioned, and Andrews. So I think that that's the sort of real pull to be had here. But yeah, it is a bit of an odd one. It seems targeted to just detonate the hearts of both fan bases so i i you know our thoughts go out to the the a's and rangers fans here who are looking around going like hey

wait wait a minute what exactly is this about these are two historically valuable and really beloved figures in our franchises but yeah it is it is a bit of an odd one, the division swap. I really wish the A's would do more. I guess you could say that for the past 20 years or so, but they keep making it work somehow. I don't know if it will this season. But the reason I wanted to bring this up was just to mention one of the, I guess you could say, beneficiaries of this trade is Isaiah Kiner-Falefa of the Rangers, who was already in line to be the Rangers starting shortstop this year, displacing Andrus, but now I guess doesn't have the incumbent looking over his shoulder.

And I just wanted to mention just how odd and wonderful Isaiah Kiner-Falefa's career trajectory has been because it is so unusual to do what he is doing here. Being a catcher, coming up as a catcher. Now, granted, he was originally a shortstop. I think he was drafted as a shortstop. He played in field in the minors. So it's not as if he is coming to the position fresh, but to have been established in the big leagues as a catcher, the position fresh, but to have been established in the big leagues as a catcher and then to move to third base where he won a gold glove last year and then to take over as a starting shortstop, it is pretty unprecedented, unprecedented at least in recent years. And I'll link to a Fangraphs article about this. I will also link to Andrew Simon's article about this at MLB in

December when it became clear that Kainer Falefa would take over the starting job. Simon sort of ran the numbers and looked for comps, and there just really aren't any. So reading from Simon's piece here, Kainer Falefa will enter 2021 with 73 career games at catcher and 17 at shortstop. The only other player to log double digit career totals at both positions in recent years is the Reds' Kyle Farmer, who has spent 19 games behind the plate and 16 at shortstop since 2017. Before that, you have to go back to Dave Cochran and Jamie Quirk, who both last played in 1992. Now, assuming Kiner Falefa does go on to receive significant playing time at shortstop in 2021, he will find himself in practically uncharted territory. Among all players to debut since 1900, only two have spent at least 50 career games at both positions. Bobby Bragan, who debuted in 1940, and Mo Berg in 1923.

So no one has done this in more than 70 years. And if you factor in the fact that he spent last season at third base, he could become the first modern player to spend at least 50 career games at catcher, shortstop, and third base. So he is trying to do something that really no one has ever done. And there have been players who have made like the catcher to up the middle switch, you know, very successful players like Craig Biggio or Dale Murphy going from catcher to second or catcher to center field, but going from catcher to gold glove winning third baseman to starting shortstop. And looks like he actually has the skills to do it. That is pretty singular and pretty impressive.

But then they should make him pitch and then he can hit and then he will. What else can he do? That is a very strange trajectory. Yeah, because those skill sets do not tend to overlap. Overlap with one another. No, they do not. They tend to be distinct from one another. Once you get past the you are all baseball players of it all, they tend to diverge fairly quickly. So yeah, that isers are kind of a class of their own. I mean, catchers, you know,

sometimes late in their career, if their knees can't handle it or something, they'll move to a corner very often, you know, left field or first base or something, but to go from catcher to shortstop, even with kind of Fluffa's background as an infielder, you know, and the metrics totally support it. Like he seemed to deserve that cold, and he spent some time at shortstop and tiny sample, of course. But in that tiny sample, he seemed to do very well. So it's not really a stretch. It's unusual, but it seems like he can do it.

I guess the question will be, can he hit? Because that has not really been a strength for him historically. But as a shortstop, well, I guess in this era, shortstops hit quite well. But maybe the offensive bar is not as high as it would be at some positions. And he has more time to work on his hitting now. I think that's something else he said. As a catcher, he had an open stance and it didn't seem to work that well for him, but he just didn't have time to devote to hitting better. And he changed his stance somewhat last year, and he did hit better than he had ever hit before, although still below average.

So we'll see if we can carry that over. But, you know, we talk a lot about multi-position players and we admire them. And Kynar Falefa is a kind of multi-position player we just have never really seen. So kudos to him for doing that. And I guess for the Rangers for empowering him to do that. And the last transaction we wanted to mention was the Braves bringing back Marcel Ozuna on a four year, 65 million dollar contract with a team option for a fifth year that would bring it to 80 million.

Yeah. That, of course, broke hours after. Yes. it to 80 million yeah that of course broke hours after yes after we thought we'd actually got through an episode for once without big breaking news happening after we stopped but i walked into the living room and said aloud oh i'm glad that that the bauer news broke when it did we got a good pod in and now we're done working for the day and And then baseball said, oh, Meg, you silly. You've never learned, have you? Yeah, I think that this reunion is surprising if what you thought was going to drive Ozuna's eventual placement this year

was the DH getting settled either in his favor across the league or that it would send him to an AL team. But I think that this is clearly a move on the Braves part that says, yes, we will use him in left field every day for 2021. And then we fully expect to have a universal DH after that. And he will slot in as the DH for the Braves there. So I feel for him because I think that his market would have been, even if he had ended up with a shorter deal, he might have earned more per year as a result of that. But I mean, for a guy who has had sort of a complicated statistical case for his excellence,

there have been times when he's been really, really good. Like he was excellent in 2020. There have been times when he has been hurt and so has produced less well. He's always had sort of impressive peripherals and stats that suggest that his production on the field should really be higher than what it has ended up being. So he's a complicated case. And even though I think there have been some sort of infamous defensive gaffes, he's not, you know, terrible in left, but he's not really a standout defender either he's the kind of guy who will do really well as a designated hitter and i imagine that

you know the the braves are probably one of those teams clamoring for mlb to take a health and safety view of the universal designated hitter as they proceed in their negotiations with the union but he's a good bat he continues to be employed by atlanta i don't know i don't this is another one where if you had told me he was going to an nl team i imagine i would have thought he would go back there the braves still have some work to do i think that their starting rotation projects and kind of a not underwhelming totally but less whelming that That's not a thing then. Should be.

I think that given some of the performances that we saw out of their rotation last year, people might be surprised to see some of the projections for those starters going into 2021 is a better way of saying that. So they are still in a sort of looking up position when it comes to the Mets, depending on whose projections you're looking at. Maybe it might be in a tough spot with a lot of ads to make, but I don't know. Did this surprise you that he ended up back in Atlanta? No, not really. I guess the terms were also a little less whelming if we're going to make that a thing now. I think he got a little less than he had been projected to get by various places at the start of the offseason, whereas we've seen others equal or surpass their projected contracts.

And he got less than George Springer and JT Real Muto and DJ LeMayhew, and he had a comparable or better 2020 season. I mean, he was really almost the best hitter in baseball. 2020 season. I mean, he was really like almost the best hitter in baseball. I guess only Juan Soto and his teammate, Freddie Freeman, were better than Ozuna. And this was the year when, yeah, in the past he had had these peripherals like stat cast stats that suggested he should not exceeded the underlying numbers. So when you consider that he's only 30, that he's coming off that season, abbreviated as it was, you might think he might get longer or more than he did. But yeah, I think it is really the defensive concerns. It's sort of like the opposite of for years he had these better underlying offensive stats than his actual stats. It's kind of the opposite with his defense where he has like pretty good defensive stats and yet not a very good defensive reputation and not very good defensive highlights. And as Jay Jaffe pointed out in his piece about the signing, it seems like his arm has really suffered maybe from the shoulder injury he had a couple of years ago, which I guess is no longer hampering him at the plate but does seem to be hampering him in the field

and last year Atlanta mostly used him as a DH as opposed to an outfielder and it just seems like that's how teams see him and value him now he will be according to Alex Anthopoulos the everyday left fielder in 2021 and And they've got some other good gloves in that outfield, so it shouldn't be a complete disaster. But yeah, I guess long-term teams just don't think he can hack it out there, which again, some of the metrics are pretty strong. He is a former gold glover himself, but it seems like he's lost some speed and lost some effectiveness and certainly lost some arm strength out there. So I guess that's just how teams see him. But Atlanta now retains that really imposing, you know, murderer's row-esque middle of the lineup that it had last year. had in 2020, but he still should be pretty good. And so I think, yeah, it might be a little surprising to people that the projections at least don't see the Braves as a lock to win this

division. Far from it. In fact, looking at both the baseball prospectus projected standings and the fan graphs playoff odds, which made their debut this week. And I guess that is one of the most notable things that stands out from that page is that the Mets have the best playoff odds in the NL East. And then it's Atlanta after them. And it's not like it's a huge gap. It's, you know, two or three projected wins.

But given that the Mets did not get some of their top targets this offseason, I mean, they did quite well. They did add Francisco Lindor and James McCann and other free agents, but they didn't end up with Real Muto or Bauer or Springer. And the Braves brought back Ozuna, which I guess it's unusual for the Braves to make a major multi-year signing. It's been a while since they've done that.

They've kind of been the kings of the one-year free agent deal lately, so they're making an exception here. But even so, with the players they've brought back, with the players they've added, like Charlie Morton, the projections still see the Braves as a not first-place team, which I guess does come down to, as you were saying, some concerns about the rotation where you have guys who have success but not lengthy track records or maybe some injuries in there. So the projections aren't totally sold on them being top of the rotation guys. It's not as if the Mets rotation doesn't have some injury concerns of its own to navigate.

But when you've added depth as they have, and you have deGrom, and you're going to get Syndergaard back at some point, I think that those things sort of added up together tend to be a bit more imposing than what Atlanta is putting on the field. Although, you know, as you noted, the difference that we're talking about here is not significant when it comes to, at least for the Mets and Braves, when it comes to the fan grasp projection. So, you know, still time to shift around, I suppose. But yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I know Ben Clemens is working on a post. You told me about some of the notable findings from the playoff odds page, and that might be up by the time many of you hear this. But just, I guess, what stood out to me other than the top of the NL East there is that you have the Blue Jays in second in the AL East ahead of the Red Sox in the Rays. Rays in fourth place in the playoff odds, maybe semi-surprising to some people. And then I guess a lot of it looks as I would expect, other than maybe the only other surprises that the Brewers are projected to make the playoffs

as the NL Central division winner. And again, this is like less than a win of projected difference with the Cardinals. But, you know, I think after the Arnauto deal, people would have expected to see the Cardinals at the top there. Yeah, I imagine that the magnitude of the difference will definitely be a thing that people note when they talk to us about it and give us their impressions of our projections. Yeah. And this can all change a little between now and opening day with injuries, with playing time changes, et cetera, with some late transactions or signings.

So it's not the official preseason projections yet, just a snapshot of where things stand now. But it's good, I guess, that there are some surprises every year. Like, you know, thereoda is wrong about them or whatever. And then you have to hear about that all season long, unless the projections turn out to be right. And then they don't really bring that up again at the end. But, you know, you want most of them probably to align with what we think. And I also feel like, you know, because we're tracking this stuff all off season long, because Fangraphs has projections up all winter, like the playoff odds are not up all winter, but projected records and projected war totals are a year round thing now. So it's not like you're going to be completely shocked by what the playoff odds say in early February. But I think in comparison to the past years where we didn't have those resources all year

long or at all, frankly. And so you might've been surprised when those projections came out. Now I think our expectations are kind of calibrated throughout the off season, but it's still good that there are a few surprises here and there. Cause you know, if looking at it in this supposedly objective or unbiased or algorithmic way is not ever telling us anything or telling us something different from our own opinions than what use would it be. And sometimes our sentiments will be right, and sometimes the projections will be right. And I tend to bet on the projections over my own gut feeling, I guess. But still, I'm glad that they

differ at times. I think that really what you want them to be is comprehensible, right? And there are going to be times when the projections are off, as you noted, and there are going to be times when you might have a lot of conviction that they're off in a particular way. And I think that there are instances of that that are well documented at this point. Like we all get that the way that we are projecting and estimating Kyle Hendricks' ERA is just wrong, right? We are not capturing an important aspect of his game in the projections, and we often overestimate his ERA sometimes to a whole run a year. So there's stuff like that where I think that it is okay for your opinion opinion of it to diverge I think that what you really want is just to be able to understand why a particular thing might look

different than your expectation and then yeah like more often than not when it comes time for us to pick you know division winners and playoff teams and do all of that that we hate doing but realizes a part of our jobs it's it's very easy to rely on the projections because what quite often you look at them and you're like yeah that makes like that makes sense like i can see the the strengths or weaknesses here that might put a team you know a couple wins below another i think the the thing that is probably the most i don't know if alarming is the right word but you know there are just a lot of teams on here that are not projected to be very good yeah that's consistent with fan graphs and and it's consistent with pakoda too you know i guess i will note that there are some differences in the ways that we have

constructed these like i know that the the bp folks are just assuming a continued universal dh which i can't imagine is is moving the needle that much for any of these clubs, but is a difference. But yeah, there are just some teams on here that are projected to be pretty bad. And we thought they would be pretty bad. And those ones, I guess, you know, when you see the Orioles or the Rangers or the Mariners or the, my God, the Rockies, 95 losses. That's a lot of losses, Ben. The Pir. 95 losses. That's a lot of losses, Ben.

The Pirates, 96. That's a lot of losses. I think the one really bad projection on here that is a bit disappointing to see, just because it was so fun to have them be a part of the playoff conversation, even if they only made it because of the expanded format, is the Lily Marlins.

Yeah, right. Not projected to be very good ben yeah and uh because we've talked a lot about the nl west race i will note that post bauer the playoff odds have the dodgers with a 59.5 chance to win the nl west and the padres at 40 and everyone else good luck better luck next year so the dodgers do have an edge again there Although it is not a really huge one But both of those teams have playoff odds over 92% I guess the Padres at 92.8, Dodgers at 96.4

So it seems very likely that they will both make the playoffs Even with a 10-team playoff field And yeah, other than that, it looks like the Orioles are projected to narrowly edge out the Pirates in the race for the number one draft pick in 2022. Man, that bottom of the league is... It's a competitive race. Oh, goodness. It's at the bottom. Orioles, Rockies, Pirates, Marlins, Rangers, Tigers, Mariners.

Mariners, not your year. No. When is it? Someday. All right. I will link to the playoff ads if you want to go check those out yourself. We will take a quick break and be right back with Andrea Williams to talk about FMA. And that's where the hornets stung me And I had a feverish dream

With revenge and doubt Tonight we smoke them out You are ahead by a century You are ahead by a century as our listeners know 2020 marked the centennial of the founding of the negro leagues meanwhile this year has seen mlb finally recognize those leagues as major leagues and while she didn't put up stats in a box score, you can't really tell the story of the league's history without discussing Effa Manley, co-owner of the Newark Eagles and a key figure in the league's operations. Her story didn't receive the attention it was due when we did our series on the Negro Leagues last

year, but luckily for us, there's a new book out on Effa and the Negro Leagues now called Baseball's Leading Lady, Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues. And to discuss Effa and the Negro Leagues Now, called Baseball's Leading Lady, Effa Manley, and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues. And to discuss Effa and the Negro Leagues, we're thrilled to welcome that book's author, Andrea Williams, to the show. Andrea, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, we thought we'd start, and all of the rich detail you bring to her life and the Negro Leagues will likely make this challenging, but for our listeners who haven't yet had a chance to read the book, can you briefly summarize who Effa Manley was and what role she played in black baseball? Yeah, Effa Manley co-owned with her husband Abe the Newark Eagles.

They actually started out in Brooklyn their first year in operation, but moved to Newark and she ran the team. Essentially, she acted in what we know today as the general manager position. So all of the player contracts and negotiations, but she also did a bit of PR work and made sure that the surrounding community knew what was happening with the team, with games. It was really important for her to use the platform that she had with the team to give back to the black community. She scheduled barnstorming trips, you know, all the road games. She bought equipment and made sure there were enough balls for the season. All of the fine details of running a ball club she handled while Abe pretty much was out on the road with the team and did all of the actual scouting for new players.

But she also played a really important role in the overall operations of the Negro National League, of which the Newark Eagles were a member. So Abe was officially the treasurer of that league, but Effa again kind of stepped in and handled most of those duties. So for all of those reasons, in and handled most of those duties. So for all of those reasons, including, you know, her involvement in integration and making sure that the black teams were ultimately compensated, eventually compensated, I should say, for for their players. She is the first and only woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. So I wanted to ask a little bit about your own background. You grew up a Royals fan, you studied sports management. I think you've said that you aspired to work in a front office and maybe be a GM yourself. And you also spent some time working at the Negro Leagues

Baseball Museum. So how did that experience and perspective inform how you approached EFA's story and how you chose to interweave your own past into the larger story of black baseball in the Negro Leagues? Yeah, it was really all of my experiences that that I think led me to Effa and really like drew me to her personal story. I went to school in I went to Georgia Southern and graduated with a degree in sport management and ultimately planned on pursuing a dual JD, MBA. And wanted to take a break though, because I was from Kansas City and had been away for four years in Georgia.

So the plan was to kind of come back home maybe for a year or two and take a break before moving on to grad school. And I got a job at the museum. Bob Kendrick, who's the president now, had just created the marketing assistant position. So someone who would be working directly with him and hopefully lightening his load a little bit. It's a nonprofit, so everyone wore many hats and there just weren't enough hours in the day.

So yeah, I kind of harassed him a little bit. I'm sure I've said this like in every interview that I harass him. So I'm sure he probably hears this and laughs about it. But I called him daily for a couple months easy and begged him to hire me. And also I joke that like I did all of the things wrong as a woman, like starting out her professional career. I did not negotiate my salary. I was like, just tell me when I can start. I mean, he could have said, we'll pay you $10,000 a year and I would have showed up with bells on.

So, but it was, it was a really, really great experience. I had these visions of working in a front office, but, you know, it was always, you know, as we do looking for, for mentors, looking for examples of people who had walked the road that I hope to one day travel and had been successful at it. So yeah, when I learned about Effa Story via a tour, Bob giving one of his incredible tours and telling me a little bit about her, and then I dug in deeper myself, she was all of the things. She was all the things that I, at the time,

wanted to be and wanted to do with my own career. And how did you think about balancing sort of the portion of the book that is her story versus the broader context of telling the Negro League story? Because I think the detail that you bring to both is so incredible. And it really helps to set the stage not only for sort of the place that she was, the role she was playing in the Negro Leagues, but sort of the broader role that the Negro Leagues played in the Black community. And I'm curious how you thought about weaving those two together. Yeah, I would say that was probably the most difficult part of the book, aside from the actual writing. Ha ha. No.

Writing is hard. We're sympathetic to that. Of all of the hard things, that was the hardest thing. Now, it was important to me because, particularly because this was written, you know, with the intention of being of service to children. I wanted to write a book for kids first. You know, a lot of times we get books that sell really well for adults and then they're repackaged as a young reader's edition.

And I wanted to start out with kids in mind. And in doing that, I understood that there will be many kids, I mean, adults too, whose knowledge of the Negro Leagues is pretty limited. So I wanted to be able to provide that proper context. I didn't think I could jump into Effa's story and not just talk about what she did, but its significance, you know, the significance of what she did without also explaining, well, here's the significance of the Negro Leagues on the whole. Here's why we have the Negro Leagues.

You know, here's the great work that Gus Greenlee did to revive the Negro Leagues in the 1930s but then also here's Rube Foster who created the first successful Negro League in 1920 and then oh by the way Rube Foster was already you know he'd been one of the best pitchers of his time and really was knee deep in the black baseball experience because he played on so many of these independent teams that traveled around the country in the in the days pre-organization so he really understood what it would take to take you know what was necessary in order to take black baseball to the next level so I felt like all those things had to be you know on the plate if you will and if people could really get and understand get

everything that I wanted them to get from Ethel's story. You know, I feel like a lot of times with kids, especially, we teach history in these like snapshots in time, and then we leave it up to them to connect the dots or find the context on their own or not, which is I think what happens, you know, I think for me as an adult, you know, there have been many things that I've come, you know, come in contact with in my own reading and research and I'm like, oh, okay. So I knew about this thing over here, but I didn't know how it tied into this thing

over there. So I wanted to answer those, kind of assume the questions that readers would ask if I just gave them a Negro League story or just an effa biography and answered them on the page before they had time to ask, before they had time to, you know, close the book and then go to Google to, to get more information that wasn't already provided. So I was trying to, you know, my editor will attest to that. It was this constant, like, yes, I know you think this is important and it is, but how can we give them enough that we're not also giving kids this like 500 page monstrosity that no one will want to read so yeah what appealed to you about telling

a story and the story of the negro leagues to a younger audience the book is kind of geared toward kids and young teams although anyone could learn from it and enjoy it i think but it seems like you had that audience in mind. Yeah, I think all of us as writers, I think there's something. Every time we go to the page and do this really, really hard work of writing, it is always because we need it. We need the work. And so for me, I wish that I had had this story when I was younger

is what it comes down to. I knew I was always a huge sports fan. I mean, I grew up in the 90s. So yeah, there was the Royals, but there was also the Mariners. And then, you know, there was the NBA in the 90s, which is still like the greatest era of all time. I don't care what anybody says, I'll argue with the wall. But, but I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to be I was I was really intrigued by the business side of it. And oh my gosh, if I had had a book like this, that, that talked about, you know, what we as a community were doing. I mean, if we, if we look at the professional landscape right now, we are there.

And we meaning black people, like we, we are there as athletes, a hundred 100%, like no one ever questions our athleticism. But, you know, understanding that we also have a place that we deserve to be in or more than qualified to be in the front offices is still a conversation that we're having entirely too much. And I think a lot of that is because we don't understand the history, right? Like if we, if we really understand that, you know, black people owned and were running teams, you know, in, in the 1920s and 30s and 40s running entire leagues, really, how does that change the trajectory of kids now? Like, I think it's great. You know, I I'm raising four athletes and I think it's great that they want to, you know, I've got a, I've got a son who wants to, you know, be the first athlete to win a World Series championship, a Super Bowl and an NBA championship. And I'm like, I don't know how that's going to work, but good luck.

I support you. I support all the kids. But also, I'm like, all right, so then are we going to like, do we want to own a team after that like and I'm not saying that I'm pushing them towards that but the the the paradigm shift that I that I hope a book like this will will present for kids is really what it's about because I know what it would have meant to me I ultimately still found my way to this to this track of saying okay yes I would love to be you know a female general manager of a major league baseball team. But I think that was just because I was just really that into sports and really paying attention to all of the ins and outs. And I worked at Kauffman Stadium when I was in high school and all that kind of stuff.

But yeah, I think it's important to really show what is possible in the realm of sports. You don't have to be crazy fast or crazy strong to participate in this multibillion dollar industry. part of it, but these teams offered a sense of community and were a major source of jobs and income for folks from executives down to coaches down to ticket takers. And they had room, even if she had to kind of press the issue for someone like Etha at a time when she just wouldn't have had that opportunity elsewhere. And I think reading the book, you can tell that she was clearly aware of their social power. And I think appreciating all of that makes clear what a loss it was when Major League Baseball sort of integrated at the Negro League's expense and poached a lot of their good players. And as you said,

eventually compensated them, but not sufficiently or quickly enough for their operation to continue. So I'm curious how important it was to you to sort of complicate our general understanding of integration, which is always presented by Major League Baseball as a uniformly positive advance. But it's clear that things were lost in the way that it was accomplished. And so, yeah, I wonder if you could talk about that part. Yeah, I mean, I think it's my job to complicate. I love that you said that.

That is like in my bio, it's going to now say complicator because I think that's important. I think when we engage with history as kids, as adults, I mean, part of, again, part of the reason for wanting to write this book for kids is so that, you know, when these kids become adults, right, they have a better understanding of the world and, you know, our, our country, our American society and how it was designed to work and allow to work for so long. And hopefully they can take that accurate information and then build us a better tomorrow. But yeah, I think we, for so long, we've gotten, well, for a while, for a while actually there was no interest in these stories at all right like who wants to talk about you know the Negro Leagues because it was this

this finite moment in our history and oh black people were over in the corner and who really cares because major league baseball that was the big show the thing that mattered um and then we got to a point where you know we wanted to talk about these things more and we saw value in that and you know as we tell the story of Jackie things more and we saw value in that. And, you know, as we tell the story of Jackie Robinson, it is who gets to tell the story. Once we decide that these stories are worthy of being told, who gets to tell them? And we've always put the pen in the hands of white people who have whitewashed our story. Every, every Jackie Robinson story, you know, if you, if you, if you go to a bookstore right now and look in the kids section and you want to find a book about integration there's plenty there there's

plenty of Jackie Robinson books they're always told through the white lens of that experience they're told they're told through the story of the Dodgers of Branch Rickey you know making making this this this historic step and bringing this black player in and what it was like for his teammates to have this black player come in and oh my gosh how long did it take them to warm up to him and yeah there's some Jackie in there too and how he turned out to be this incredible you know player on the field who was so magical that he could deal with the torture and the abuse and still be great as as Branch Ricky demanded that he be but we never hear the other side of it we never hear about the the black team that he came from the black community that he came from when Jackie Robinson comes out of UCLA

baseball is his worst sport he goes into baseball because that is really the only opportunity to be a professional athlete to make money playing sports and so yeah Branch Rickey is able to find this guy and to bring him in to integrate Major League Baseball because the Monarchs had provided him a professional home and had continued to develop him. That's the reality of the situation. So it's important to talk about all of those things. It's not to change, to lessen Branch Rickey's impact.

It's to view it more accurately. It's to say, okay, here's the good that came from this, but then also here's the bad. Because if we only talk in a positive light, if we coddle the feelings or the legacy of a Branch Rickey, what we end up doing is diminishing the feelings and the legacy of black baseball, of people like Effa Manley, who were put between a rock and the poorhouse and not able to, you know, effectively stand up on behalf of their businesses, because if they would have done that, they would have been accused of hampering progress, of getting in the way of integration, which, to your point, was always seen, even in the black

community, as this inherently good thing. So you mentioned that there are a lot of books about Jackie Robinson. There are not as many books about Effa Manley, and her life story is compelling. She's a compelling character. She was prescient about what integration might mean for the Negro Leagues. She was unique in her time in terms of the role she held. She's the only woman in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and yet she's less well-known to the average fan than

other figures from that era of baseball history. So what first drew you to her as a subject, and what would you want people to know and take away about her? Yeah, there are a couple books about Effa Manley for adults that are out, a couple biographies, and I actually relied on the work of the James Overmeyer and Bob Luke, who are Negro Leagues historians for, for my work. It was definitely instrumental, I think. And I wish that, you know, as, as Americans is that we, I mean, A, we can argue about whether we read enough overall, but certainly I think there is a general aversion to nonfiction,

overall, but certainly I think there is a general aversion to nonfiction, particularly when it is more academic in nature. So I definitely don't want to say that there's nothing out there, but I was acutely aware of the fact that F a story needs to be brought perhaps to a wider audience. And so I wanted to do that still, still doing it in a nonfiction format, of course, because I think we benefit from still having this accurate, you know, detail rich exploration of her life before we get to the point where we're doing like the historical fiction and kind of taking creative liberties with it. But yeah, I think in terms of what I hope people take away from it, I think it's just what, if we really understand Effa and what she was able to accomplish in the thirties and forties and really what, what all of her, her colleagues, you know, who are running baseball teams, who are managing baseball teams as black people during

that era. If we are, if we, if we consider what they were able to do, then I think it just really sheds a different light on what we can accomplish today as black people. I think it also, too, puts more of an onus on white Major League Baseball to open up these doors of these front offices, right? So if Major League Baseball says, OK, we're elevating the status of the Negro Leagues, that doesn't just apply to the players. It applies to the executives and the managers. Now, Effa Manley didn't just run a baseball team

that happened to win a Negro World Series championship. She ran a championship level team that was also of Major League status. She is the same as Branch Rickey. So we have to consider that now. Now, if we say, well, okay, do black people have the experience? Are they cut out for the front offices? Now we've got all this rich history to point to because again, they're on the same level. And so now if we were doing this much, then why are we not allowed to do it now?

I think that puts that in stark relief. Now we can really get down to the nuts and bolts of that conversation. Yeah, I think you kind of anticipated my next question, which is that if the last year has taught us anything, it's that many adults, particularly many white adults, could stand to learn a lot more about the history of black baseball, which I think is part of why your book has appeal for both kids and for older fans who are trying to fill in really noticeable gaps

in their own understanding of the game's history. And so I am curious sort of what you hope adult fans take from this era of baseball and its many problems and how those have shaped our understanding of the game today and who populates it, right? Especially as it pertains to the relative dearth of black ball players, coaches, and executives that we see in Major League Baseball today. coaches and executives that we see in Major League Baseball today. Yeah, I think like in my coverage of country music and the issues with racism that it has and has always had, I'm saying the same thing over and over again, that none of these issues

are by accident. Everything is intentional. Everything about the way country music looks is intentional. Everything about the way Major League Baseball looks is intentional. Everything about the way country music looks is intentional. Everything about the way Major League Baseball looks is intentional. What we have to understand and what people can get to understand, can begin to understand if they really sit with this book and really understand everything that's on the page, is that you don't have to be the one to set the intention. You don't have to be the one to say, okay, well, I don't think we should hire any Black

people as general managers and we certainly shouldn't let them become owners. You don't have to be that person. But it matters that someone did it before you. And if you're not actively disrupting that, if you're not actively counteracting that you are just as complicit as the people who set the intention. So we can't look at Major League Baseball and the fact that there are relatively few black players. There's even fewer black executives and there are no black owners without going to this really critical period of baseball history. It's not just black baseball history. It is baseball history because Major League Baseball decided as they went and looked towards integration, they said, okay, we're not going to let black players in en masse, right? We're going to cherry pick a few, right?

So now we can still see, we can see the parallel to today. There are a few, yes, these really outstanding players, but there's really, has there ever really been a space for an okay black player? No. Is there space for an okay black player? No. Is there space for okay white players? Of course. But even at that, even if they said, okay, well, let's take Jackie and let's take Campy and let's take Don Newcomb, we don't want any of your black executives or your

black managers. Right? And we can see that parallel today too. We will take the best of your players who you cultivated and developed, but we don't want you. we don't deem your services necessary or appropriate for what we're doing over here in Major League Baseball. That persists.

We're not going to bring in your teams on the whole, kept in place so that you still have your ownership structure, so that you can still make this money and give back to the black community. That persists today. We don't have ownership in Major League Baseball, even though at one point we had ownership in baseball and Major League Baseball has now said we had ownership on a major league level. Why are we gone now?

Well, again, if we look back at the history, we see exactly how it happened then. And if we understand that intention, then we understand the intention that it's going to create to rectify that. And I hope, yeah, I hope people will get that from this book for sure. So as you've alluded to, your book came out right around the time that MLB announced that it would recognize the Negro Leagues as major leagues, which provoked a lot of responses from people who supported or opposed the decision. And you posted a couple of twitter threads about it at the time but we'd be interested in hearing how you feel about it today and what you see as the benefits

and any drawbacks i don't remember what i wrote on twitter but i i stand i didn't delete it so i stand by it um hopefully what i'm gonna say now matches but but no, I think I get why people are like, Clinton Yates penned a really, really powerful piece for the undefeated that was basically, we don't need you to say this. And it was everything that I would expect from him and I 100% understand where he's coming from. We as a black community did not need that from major league baseball. We knew what we were doing. You know, we, we knew that we had the best of the best. We knew that our teams were great and on a

major league level back then, even when, even when branch Ricky and, and other executives wouldn't acknowledge it. But I think it's important. I think it's important because we need white people. We need Major League Baseball to understand or to acknowledge what we already knew. Because again, if we're going back and we're looking at what happened then and how it impacts the now, it is all a direct result of the fact that at that time, Major League Baseball didn't consider the Negro Leagues of Major League status. When Branch Rickey says, I'm not going to pay the Monarchs for Jackie Robinson's contract, I'm not even going to talk to the Monarchs. You know, I'm not going to pay Effa for Don Newcomb's contract. In fact, I'm not even going to have a conversation with her. That is because he deemed black baseball less than.

Had he considered, had this 2020 announcement come in 1945 or 46, we would have had a different outlook I believe. But it didn't happen then. So yes, it is way too late. It is immeasurably late, but it is still important. It's still important because we need to undo, we need to undo or at least shine a different light on the past. Now, if we fast forward another 50 years and people are digging back into this history and someone wants to write another book on Effa Manley and that really critical period of integration,

now with their pen, they have to write it in a different way because now even Major League Baseball has said that these teams and these leagues were on the same level, that they were Major League status. So how much more heartbreaking is it that that integration happened in the way it did, that the Negro Leagues were killed in the way they were? I'm sure that the answer to this might be long, but are there other, who are some of the other figures or sort of periods of time in black baseball history whose stories you would like to see get a book-length treatment in the future as we continue to, you know, benefit from the great research that many Negro Leagues researchers are doing and fill in the gaps in the historical record of most fans? Yeah, that, yeah, I could go on forever. But I think for me, what I would like to see more of is an emphasis on those managers and executives.

I think that's really important, again, because I think for the Black community, it is important to understand, you understand, you can see the world around you and if you hear no so many times, you think that you deserve the no, you don't even believe that you should have a yes anymore. I think that happens to a certain degree. And so I think it's important that, again, we understand what we were doing back then, what we were capable of back then, how powerful, how resilient, how resourceful we were back then.

And again, I think it's important that white people see us, not just as the guys on the field or on the court, that they know that, I think they know, but that they will be forced to reckon with the truth that we are more than just that. So yeah, I actually, one of my agency mates, he's a kid lit writer and his name is Varian Johnson and he's working on a book about Rube Foster, which I'm really excited to see and it'll be for kids too. So again, starting young and start helping kids understand when they are still young and in school, what, again, how this world

was designed, how we can, how we can look at the truth and then unpack it and resolve it to create a better future. But honestly, my favorite character, if you will, from the Negro Leagues era is Gus Greenlee. And like, we never talk about Gus Greenlee. I feel like he should be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He was on that special ballot in 2006 when Effa was was inducted, but he just did not make the final cut. But he he is the one responsible after after Rube Foster's league dies in the late 20s, you know, in part because Rube Foster himself had passed away. But then also because of the Great Depression, Gus Greenlee brings back, he revives the Negro League. There's a second Negro National League started in late 1932, and they play their first season in 33.

He is responsible for the East-West All-Star game that was played every year at Comiskey Park. That was the event for Black folks. It was the social event that everybody had to get to. And he had his own field. He built his own field, Greenleaf Field in Pittsburgh, and was really just this fascinating guy who made his money in the numbers game, so technically illegal, but then took it all back to the Hill community in Pittsburgh where all the black folks live.

In the book I reference him as the King of the Hill because he took the money that he made and was constantly sowing into his people. When his people, because of the Great Depression, couldn't find work, couldn't pay bills, he gave them the money, he covered rent payments, he covered doctor's bills, but then also was really, really instrumental in pushing black baseball towards its golden age in the 30s and 40s. book like this. And I'm curious what you learned about Effa as you went on, whether you grew to like her more, like her less, you know, appreciate certain aspects of her life or career more than you had coming in. Yeah, I mean, I will never, I don't know that I could love Effa anymore, which is probably, I should probably be, you know, a little more objective about my subject, a little more objective about my subject, but I just, I think she's so important to,

to our history in this country. And again, for me, I just had such a personal connection to her first as someone, you know, who, who wanted to work in baseball and in a front office. But now as someone, as a woman who, you know, is, is, is, is fighting for things that I believe in is seeing issues in the world. And instead of just saying, oh, sucks that it's like that, you know, is really trying to do the work to make things better. You know, before Effa gets to baseball, she leads a boycott of a Harlem department store because they wouldn't hire black women as sales clerks. So the Effa that we see in baseball was already cultivated in, you know, in the 1920s and 30s in Harlem. And I just love that she showed up all the time. Every time she

saw there was an issue, she showed up, even if it meant going against the grain, even if it meant saying the things that no one else wanted to say. And that is, that is super inspirational to me. Is she human? Of course, you know, did she, did she, you know, have flaws or make some missteps as we all do? Of course. But I think the overall lesson to be learned from her story is that it is possible to change history. It just means that you probably can't play by the rules. Right.

Well, we've been talking to Andrea Williams. You can find her on Twitter at Andrea Will Wright. And you can find the book, Baseball's Leading Lady, Effa Manley, and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues, wherever books are sold, of course. But if you are interested in supporting a local bookseller and picking up an autographed copy, you can get them from Parnassus Books in Nashville. We will link to that. We will link to everywhere else you can find it. And Andrea, it's been a pleasure having you on. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It was super fun. All right. Before we leave you today, I will plug one other piece of writing about Effa Manley. Our former guest, Shakia Taylor, wrote a great piece about Manley for SB Nation last April called Effa Manley's Hidden Life. It's about Manley's racial identity and her family background and how she presented herself as white or black at different times and to

different audiences and how she navigated that question. I will link to that. Please go check it out if you haven't already. And I should also mention that Shakia's piece on Effa Manley is nominated for a Sabre Award in the Historical Baseball Analysis or Commentary category. You can vote for the Sabre Awards up until this Friday night. And while I'm mentioning the Sabre Awards, I should note that Meg is also nominated, along with Ben Clemens, for their piece about redrawing the minor league map and how the contraction of the minor leagues will affect access to baseball. Meg and Ben are nominated in the contemporary baseball analysis category. So you can vote for both Shakia and Meg if you'd like to.

A lot of other former guests and friends of the show are nominated in those categories and other categories too. So I will link to where you can find all of those pieces and make your voice heard. You can also make your voice heard by supporting Effectively Wild on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going while getting yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners have already signed up. Amber Brown, Craig Cunning,

Dan Shattuck, Jack Weiland, and Feargul O'Neill. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and Firgul O'Neill. 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 for me and Meg coming via email at podcast

at 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 with another show a little later this week i'll see you then Bye.