Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1655: Seven Minutes in the Heavens

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the de-naming and possible renaming of the minor leagues, the Andrew Benintendi trade and the state of the Royals, and what they would add to SABR’s list of the 50 most noteworthy moments in the evolution of baseball analytics over the past 50 years, then (30:00) bring back […]

🎵 It's just so on my mind You're on my mind Hello and welcome to episode 1655 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I feel like I've lost my bearings because the minor leagues have no names now. Minor leagues don't have names anymore. They may have names again in the future. But currently, they have no names other than just AAA East, AAA West, AA Central. It's just the level and then where they are geographically because the agreement was finalized, the 120 teams.

because the agreement was finalized, the 120 teams, they've now signed the contracts that they were offered, quote unquote offered. All of that is sort of cemented now, the new structure of the minor leagues. And as part of that, at least at present, the old names have been stripped away. Although JJ Cooper, who came on not long ago to tell us about how all of this will work, has tweeted that these are probably placeholders and that there will be some sort of branding for these league names to come yeah i i fear that the camping world yes presents triple a baseball and i guess like that will be disorienting not only because we have names that were league names that we've been accustomed to for such a long time and that have such a rich history in baseball,

but because it's going to take at least two years for all of us to get our heads around who's at what level now and who's affiliated with which major league organizations. And so I just imagine that I will feel very confused for the foreseeable future. And I don't know that East or West or, you know, AAA East really helps to ground you in who is naturally in that grouping any better than, you know, the Doosan, Power West or whatever they're going to call it. But it is tremendously disorienting, which is hardly a surprise given the nature of the exercise, but is going to be confounding nonetheless. And it's concerning to me as an editor because I imagine that people will get confused. And my spidey sense that we need to make an adjustment in copy is just going to really not be there. So I'm just going to have to look it up every time to be sure. Yeah, I didn't have the entire affiliate structure of every team memorized before.

There were just so many teams and there was so much, you know, musical chairs every offseason where some affiliates would change. Obviously, some had long-lasting relationships, and so I would know them, but I'm not someone who covers the minors or goes to a ton of minor league games regularly. So if you had asked me to reel off every affiliate for every team, I couldn't have done that prior to this change, but now there will be an even greater adjustment period. Yeah, it's like when I was first getting into baseball, I remember that being something that it was a little initial hurdle where I had to remember, okay, the Cal League, what level is that again? And the Southern League and the Eastern League. And it's not only do you have to remember the level designations, but then also the leagues, but there was some character there and something like something like the international league which had been a name of a league for centuries you know decades for such a long time it would be a shame to lose that and turn it into like the hockey system where they're like corporate sponsors you know scotia

north division and the hondo west division or whatever even if everyone will just call that the north division or the west division it would simplify things if it were just AAA East, AAA West, but it would be boring too. They should have major labor unions buy the sponsorship rights to all of the levels just to make ownership uncomfortable. AAA brought to you by the AFL-CIO. What now, guys? We'll sponsor a minor league, the Effectively Wild League. Contact us. Oh, poor pitchers. a minor league, the Effectively Wild League. Contact us.

Oh, poor pitchers. I suppose if they're effectively wild, it's fine. Yeah. So we've got a guest today. It's a returning guest. Shannon Towie will be joining us soon. She works as a systems engineer for NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And she's also a big baseball nerd like us.

And she's been working on the Mars 2020 mission. And next week, February 18th, the Mars Perseverance rover will be touching down in Jezero crater on Mars. That is Thursday. Shannon has been working on that mission for years. She came on with me and Jeff on episode 1320, just a little over two years ago, to tell us about that.

And now the big day is almost here. So Shannon will be back to preview the landing and the mission and also catch us up on being a Mets fan and her incipient Dodgers fandom and some other baseball talk. So we'll get to that soon. I guess just a couple of newsy things to chat about first. There was a trade that was somewhat notable. The Royals and the Mets and the Red Sox made a three-team deal here, the headliner being Andrew Benintendi. Do you have thoughts? I guess I should read out the exchange here. The Mets got outfield prospect Khalil Lee, and then the Red Sox got Franchi Cordero and Josh Winkowski, and Ben Attendee went to the Royals.

And then there are a bunch of players to be named later as well. The Red Sox get three of them, two come from the Royals and one from the Mets. I mostly think that the Royals are sure weird, Ben. Yeah. I mean, I think sure, Ben. It's fine. I don't quite understand why the Mets had to be involved with this whole thing. But good for them.

I mostly think that the Royals are a real weird baseball team. I feel like there's just this collection of guys who are like the nice. And Benintendi is better than this but um well Benintendi is maybe better than this I don't know how good Andrew Benintendi is anymore and I'm not trying to be snarky like I I don't know about I don't know about him anymore I feel as if they have added a number of guys who are nice you know they're nice role players. I'm trying to remember exactly what part of the potted plant they would be in Boris's analogy. But, you know, guys who supplement a very strong core that is ready to contend because you need depth and there's value in having productive

veterans who can, you know, be good bench bats and six starters for when somebody in the rotation gets hurt. And I feel like some of those guys have found their way to Kansas City, and I don't know that their core is there yet to take full advantage of those guys. So I just find them very confusing. But I do like that they are, you know, like if you're a Royals fan and you're going to, well, you're probably not going to go to the ballpark much this year, but if you're going to watch your team, like having competent and productive big leaguers is better than not. So I guess that's fine,

but I mostly just find it very strange. But I also don't know that I believe that Franchi Cordero is ever going to hit enough and make enough contact to be a productive big leaguer. So if that's the trade, you know, then that seems fine. It's very odd to me. Yeah, he's been tantalizing multiple teams now for a while. And he definitely hits the ball hard when he hits it. Oh, he sure does. He runs fast, but he doesn't hit it all that often or he hasn't to this point.

So I don't know. It's not a bad player to take a flyer on given the skills, but he hasn't been able to put it together yet. So yeah, the Royals, it's an intriguing mix of veterans on short-term deals and some promising prospects. And you can start to see the core that could get them good again. Probably not this season. Their playoff odds post-trade are about 10%,

but it's kind of coming together and kudos to them for trying to be interesting or respectable. I don't know exactly how they see themselves, whether they believe that they're a legitimate 2021 contender or whether they're just trying to surround their prospects with some mentor types not that like andrew benintendi is a super grizzled veteran he's he's only what 26 or something and very young in the face yes very young in the face yeah but it's like benintendi in addition to who are the the other royals who've been added i guess uh greg holland back again wade davis carlos santana yeah mike minor right mike minor michael a taylor yeah it's a bunch of them what a weird team yeah i mean they're hard to get a handle on and and so has benintenti as

you said i mean he looked like he was going to be, if not a superstar, like a legitimate all-star type player perhaps for years to come and has just regressed since his breakout in 2018. Took a step back in 2019 and then missed most of 2020 with an injury and didn't play well when he was on the field. So I don't know. The bloom is off the rose a little bit after the Rookie of the Year runner-up season and the follow-up campaign and that incredible catch in the 2018 ALCS. But there's still something there. It's just, I think, as Dan Szymborski documented, he seems to have gone to more of an aggressive approach.

He does have the contact skills to support that, but it just hasn't really paid off for him. Yeah. I mean, I hope for his sake that he is able to sort of rally from where he was, but it was disconcerting last year and the sort of shift toward a more aggressive approach at the plate did precede the injury. So I don't think that him simply being healthy is going to be sufficient to totally restore things. But it also means that he could presumably make another adjustment that would put him sort of back in line to being a more productive guy. But you know, I'm sure that for Red Sox fans, it has to be a bit of a bummer because he,

you know, he was what the last of that outfield to kind of make his way out of town. So it does feel like that era is pretty firmly closed. Yeah, RIP Killer Bees. I guess we'll see where Jackie Bradley ends up signing. But yeah, that seemed like it would be just sort of a foundation for years to come. And now a couple of years after a world championship, it's disassembled. So it's not like a Mookie Betts style. I mean, obviously he's not that caliber of player and this is not a huge salary dump because Benintendi is not making a ton and they included some money

and sent some money Kansas City's way to get better players back. So maybe that reflects some lack of confidence in a Ben Attendee bounce back on Boston's part, but it's surprising to see that group dismantled so soon. And this whole off season, we had to do a winners and losers post at the ringer just on the MLB off season, and we all did some blurbs. And one of the losers I picked was people who had homegrown Stars jerseys because they're going to have to edit them or alter them or tear them up or something because there have been a lot of players this offseason who had spent their entire careers with one team up until this point who have been on the move. Some via free agency like George Springer, Jock Peterson, but many more as a result of trades

and some real superstars, Arnato and Lindor and Carrasco and Snell, and then also players like Elvis Andrus and Colton Wong and Ben Intendi and different circumstances involved there. And this is not new in the free agency era. This kind of turnover is sort of a constant, but we have been bidding

farewell to a lot of players who were institutions with teams and we're still reading rumors about you know chris bryant trades or matt chapman trades at least yadier molina and adam wadenwright are still in st louis so there's some things we can count on and like we said now all those raise fans with chris archer jerseys can get jerseys can get their jerseys out of storage. Yeah. All right. Well, the last thing I wanted to mention before we talk to Shannon, Sabre has been putting out these 50 at 50 lists over the past few months. This is Sabre's 50th anniversary.

It was founded in 1971. So they've been putting out lists of, you know, 50 best players or most notable players or off the field figures or baseball cards or baseball films or TV shows over those 50 years. And the latest one that they did is really up my alley. It's the Sabre 50 at 50 analytics list. They've picked the 50 most notable milestones in baseball analytics since the founding of Sabre. And I should mention this also, these are meant to be companions to a book that is about Sabre's 50th anniversary, which is called Sabre 50 at 50. But this one specifically is of interest to us and I think to a lot of our listeners. And I will link to where people can find it. It's kind of a good compact summary of the last 50 years of baseball research and analysis. So I don't know if anything stood out to you that was surprising or oversights. I'm sure it was impossible to get everything onto this list. And I think it's pretty good. I mean, just sort of scanning it, I think they did a pretty good job of cramming everything in here. of lumped together a number of Bill James ideas and concepts and innovations under that umbrella. Because otherwise, like for the first couple of decades of this period, it would be largely Bill James just owning this field more or less. So there's a lot of that, but I think they did a good job of thinking of some unsung or underappreciated accomplishments that do deserve to be on here, as well as some of the latest innovations.

Yeah, I think that it's a pretty comprehensive list. When I looked at it, I initially thought that it was perhaps a little much that the Babbitt, Pocota, Warp, and Eckstein attorneys at law had made its way in because that feels kind of minor. But I struggle to think of a thing that I necessarily would shift into it in its place. But I feel like this captures a lot of the spirit of the past. I don't know. Gosh, they go all the way back to the 70s. Do you ever have that thing, Ben, where you refer to a decade that was a long time ago

and you're not doing enough decades? I was about to say, and that was like 30 years ago. And I said, that is not remotely true. No. It was like 50 years ago, Ben. Yeah, we're old now. Boy, Friday. But I think that this covers a lot of it.

And gosh, some of these websites, they sure look better now than they did. Yeah. Yeah. Effectively, Wild did not make the list, but founding of Fangraphs made the list and the founding of Baseball Prospectus made the list. And some notable stats that we cite all the time on here. So it's, you know, Pakoda and RetroSheet and Project Scoresheet and OPS and Baseball Reference and Voros McCracken's BABIP Research and Moneyball and Fire Joe Morgan, PitchFX, StatCast, etc. Yeah, I didn't really find fault with the inclusion of anything. As you said, the Parks and Rec reference is sort of a silly one,

as much as we appreciate Mike Schur saluting Sabermetrics on the screen. And the list is somewhat Saber-centric, as you might expect from Saber's list, justifiably in most cases. But for instance, the Saber Analytics conference is on there, but not Saber Seminar, which started a year earlier. But I think a lot of these are really major innovations. I guess just a few things came to mind as things that I would have tried to find a spot for, although again, it's hard to figure out what I would have kicked out. One thing that I thought of is pitcher abuse points or just the concept of pitch counts. And pitcher abuse points is not a metric that is commonly cited anymore, although Baseball Prospectus still publishes it or did until very recently. So it's not so much

that the system of pitcher abuse points, which was like looking at the number of pitches that starters had thrown beyond their hundredth pitch and then doing some math to try to quantify how much more risk that was adding of injury. I don't know that that system exactly as it was defined proved to be perfectly predictive or super influential, but I think just the concept of pitch counts and the idea that 100 is some kind of cutoff, I think that really did make a major impact. And I think that there were teams that took cues from that. And if you look at when pitch counts really started to fall and when 100 became almost

this ceiling of sorts, I think it was right around the time that BP really popularized that idea and put out that metric. So I think that probably deserves to be on there. And again, maybe it's gone too far. Maybe teams are too rigid about that 100 pitch limit now. But the impact that that had and how that really got lodged in the brains of every manager and every front office, I think to me, that probably deserves a spot. I think one thing that wasn't really represented on here is just the trend of analytics people getting hired by teams.

Like a lot of this is just sort of the sabermetric community and bloggers and writers making these contributions. But it doesn't really capture the migration, you know, into teams that has happened in a huge way over the last couple decades. And so I would probably try to find a spot for maybe Craig Wright getting hired by the Rangers in the early 80s as the first person to have the title sabermetrician and work for a team. He was sort of a trailblazer in that respect. And then I guess Bill James getting hired by the Red Sox and just the avalanche of hirings that followed after that, Keith Wilner and others. And the fact that Hein Blum and James Click are GMs now after having started as BP interns and writers, I mean, that's a milestone moment. Just the fact that you could go from total outsider to ultimate insider, and not just as a stat head, but as someone who's leading a

department and being the public face of a front office. I mean, that's a huge shift. And as we've discussed, not all of these are positive changes, like the pitch count thing. Maybe that's not an entirely positive change, but just in the way that it's shaped baseball. That stands out to me as something you really couldn't have possibly conceived of in 1971. And it probably did help save some pitchers' careers just by preventing the worst overwork at an early age. Yeah, and I think that they get at it some with the idea of performance tech, but I would perhaps have liked to see that. And here I'm asking for like a

200 word blurb to better define an entire aspect of the game but i think that i perhaps would have liked to see player development as its own evolving field represented in here and how that is intertwined with analytics and it's part of a lot of these but maybe that instead of parks and rec maybe that one but i i don't have a you know perhaps they should have taken the approach to 50 that we do to the top 100 at fancraft where it's like well it's 100 and so yeah yeah i was thinking maybe brian bannister using pitch fx data to adjust his pitch mix and start throwing a cutter and then talking about that publicly that seemed like a landmark moment to me that foreshadowed the role that analytics would play in player development and the fact that players were often the ones driving that

innovation stratomatic is not on here which i think is probably just because strat predates 1971 right it was invented before that but that's been such a formative influence on so many sabermetricians. So it'd be nice to have something like that on here, like Diamond Mind or Out of the Park, some sort of really sophisticated simulator that has been used by front offices or has influenced people who went on to work in baseball. I thought a little bit about Doug Pappas and the work that he did on the economics of baseball and gathering salary figures

that just were not really publicly accessible and some of the marginal wins and marginal dollars metrics that came out of his work. And this, I don't know when you could exactly pinpoint this too, but just the concept of index stats of just, you know, OPS plus and ERA plus and ERA minus and WRC plus. I mean, that is such a big part of the way I consume the game now. I mean, that's like the first stat that I will look at or cite.

And I don't know exactly when that dates to but just the idea of you know having the 100 baseline and then above that or below that is better or worse depending on the stat and that being something that accounts for park effects and and all of that and is just kind of a one number thing like that to me you know along with war and and vorp and win shares and and those metrics which are on here just you know these these are offense only or pitching only or they cover one aspect of performance. But just as a handy frame of reference, I think that has changed certainly how I talk about or understand the sport. Well, I think an easy to explain reference, right? right like having having the ability to say that 100 is average and every point above that is a percentage above average i think that there's a sort of comprehensibility to that that is really

useful when you're trying to help someone else understand why you think about the game in a particular way and in a way that is like a nice introduction to advanced stats that helps you build up to other sort of all-encompassing numbers like wins above replacement. So I think that's a good add, Ben. I like that. Yeah, the only other ones I thought of, in some cases, there's some influential stats that are similar to stats that are represented on here. So like UZR, for instance, is not on here, but DRS is on here. Sherry Nichols and her work on defensive average, there are some similar zone-based defensive systems. So if you have 50 spots, maybe you don't put every single one on there.

And there are cases where one person gets the credit for something that was sort of a group effort. So catcher framing is on here, of course, as it should be. And the blurb says Mike Fast was the first to measure the effect of catcher framing is on here, of course, as it should be. And the blurb says Mike Fast was the first to measure the effect of catcher's pitch framing. That's not technically true, as I think Mike would acknowledge. There were earlier researchers like Dan Turkenkopf and Max Markey who were doing that work that Mike built on and refined and popularized in the private sphere. My friend Alex Rubin, a co-worker with the Yankees who discovered framing in 2009, a couple of years before Mike's work was published. But I did wonder if maybe Jay Jaffe would get a

nod for Jaws and, you know, Burt Blyleven's induction is on here. I think that's a good pick that I'm not sure I even would have thought of. But just, you know, as someone who was propelled into the hall by the campaigning of Rich Lederer and other analysts who were taking a sabermetric approach to advocating for that player, which was then followed by Tim Raines and Edgar Martinez and Larry Walker and Mike Messina and hopefully Scott Rowland and others who were kind of cause celebras of the sabermetric community. So that was good. But I think Jay and Jaws, obviously war is on here and Jaws is, you know, made of war. But still, that has changed how we talk about and think about the Hall of Fame.

A couple others I thought about, A's manager Steve Burrows citing his use of Dick Kramer's Edge computer system in the early 80s. I think Tony La Russa did too. That was a pretty primitive system, but just the idea that a manager was spitting out stats from a computer and using that to set lineups and play matchups, and then saying so publicly, that sort of set the stage for much more deeply ingrained use of numbers to make in-game decisions. for much more deeply ingrained use of numbers to make in-game decisions. And of course, some of the systems like linear weights or the research that Tom Tango and others did on tactics and the third time through the order penalty, etc., is already represented on this list.

But still, the idea that a manager was actually trying to look at and use this information was pretty revolutionary. There was also a company called AVM Systems that I wrote about at Grantland several years ago. They were mentioned in Moneyball because they were sort of this secretive, behind-the-scenes company that was tracking every play for years in baseball and came up with these outcome-independent metrics and value stats many, many years before they were available publicly and really before MLB was ready for them. But their system powered a lot of what the Moneyball A's implemented. And I think Christina

Carl coining the term three true outcomes is pretty important. Again, Forrest McCracken's research, which led to BABIP and FIP, that is on here. But Christina coining that term predated that research, I believe, and led to us thinking of those things as a concept, which again, in the long run, may have done some damage, but definitely a paradigm shift there. And I think Victor Wong's prospect valuation model at the Hardball Times, published in 2008, I think that established a framework that has been repurposed by a lot of subsequent researchers to figure out what a prospect is worth, what a draft

pick is worth, and I think that has seeped into front offices now too and has changed the sorts of transactions that we see. And then also Felix Hernandez winning the Cy Young Award with a 13-12 win-loss record in 2010, when a lot of pitchers had more impressive win-loss records. That was sort of a sign of the times and indicated a shift in how players were being evaluated by media members, at least. The only other thing that occurred to me is maybe baseball between the numbers. Just for me personally, that was hugely influential. And there are a lot of, I mean, the hidden game of baseball is on here and the diamond appraised and the baseball abstracts and all sorts of great books and baseball between the numbers,

at least for me, like that was the thing that got me hooked. The book is on here as well. But yeah, BBTN for me, I think was the thing that really got me into it. I guess it came around at the right time or I found it at the right time. And the writing is so good in that book. Yeah. I was just about to say the pros in that doesn't get the recognition I think it really deserves. Yeah, and like the book, you know, the analysis is brilliant, but it's written for sabermetricians, really, by sabermetricians. It's not the most lyrical or relatable language. It's just straight up studies and research and results. And it's clear and I think presented in a coherent

and understandable way. But I think Baseball Between the Numbers is a good introduction if you're someone who's not sold on this stuff yet and you don't want to take the hardcore course, you don't want to plunge right into the deep end, you want kind of the 101 version. And when you look back at the people who contributed to that book, it's like half of them are working for front offices now, it seems like. I mean, James Click is in there and Keith Wollner and others. So that was the caliber of the analysis that you were getting. And you had Nate Silver writing about wind curves and all of these influential concepts. So that shaped my thinking. And there are a lot of great books on here. So

I see why there may be a limit. But that was the one that came to mind as if I could find a spot for someone else or something else that might get on there. Well, hopefully they'll do 50 most influential books and then we can give all of them their due. I mean, if we're going to do film and TV and baseball cards as we ought, then I think that having a dedicated reading list would be good just because I like to give other people work, I guess. Yeah. Well, I'll link to this list. And if you read it and see any notable omissions, feel free to email us and suggest what you would do. But I think it's a cool exercise and I think they did a pretty good job with it.

So we will take a quick break and we'll be right back with Shannon Towie to talk a little bit of baseball and a lot of Mars. Theoretical themes, radical schemes Chasing our dreams on our mission to Mars Tomorrow will say that this is the day We'll be on our way on the mission to Mars All right, well, as promised, we are happy to be rejoined now by Shannon Towie, who is a systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a software engineer for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, which cut that short to make it to this podcast. Hopefully not. Hopefully you accomplished everything that you had to do there, but we thank you very much for coming back on. It must be a busy time for you. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me back. I'm excited to chat

about the mission and what we've been up to and maybe some baseball things. We'll see. Yeah. I want to start with a baseball thing. I believe the last time that we had you on, someone from the Salt Lake Bees heard your podcast appearance and contacted you about throwing out a first pitch. Oh yeah, I did get to do that. That was a delight. I love minor league baseball. I didn't see a highlight of you totally screwing up and throwing like 50 cent or something. So I assume it went okay. Look, it was a little outside. We'll say that. And it may have been a little low. But that was yeah, that was great. That was so much fun. Yeah, they reached out to me. We actually led a there's a planetarium in Salt Lake City that was doing

kind of like an outreach program with them. And so I got to go and like before the game, we chatted about, you know, Mars 2020 and robotics, and they did like a cute little setup of driving these little like Lego robots around a track. And it was very cute. And I got to answer some cute questions from kids. It was totally delightful. Yeah, that was great. Back in the days when we used to be able to go to ballparks and see baseball games, and they actually played minor league games. I can't wait for that to happen again. We didn't know how good we had it. I know. But yeah, that was totally a delight.

So I want to ask you about the mission and the landing and what you've been working on, but I guess we could ease into it with some baseball stuff. And we talked last time about the Mets because you're a Mets fan. And I was just looking at some of the replies to the tweet that you sent when you were on the podcast a couple of years ago, and some Mets fans responded to it. One said, please help build a communication system that connects the Mets front office to reality. I remember that one. Another person said, as a fellow Mets fan, I have to ask, how can we send the Wilpons to Mars? So a lot has changed since then. It's been a busy, eventful offseason for the Mets. It's been a bit of a mixed bag, some highs and lows, but a new regime,

at least. So how are you feeling about the Mets? Because projection systems right now seem to really believe in the Mets as NL East division winners. Yeah. I mean, we've been burned before by the projection systems. I will say, I will say it has been, I will say it has been a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster through the whole, you know, Wilpon selling the team, the Steve Cohen situation happening over the past year. And definitely some highs and lows during this offseason. I mean, the Mets, in terms of baseball, they've definitely, I think, gotten better. So that's good news. And there have been, like, I've seen some interesting, like, tweets the past couple of days about, days about you know possible trades to come so we'll see if that pans out and so i'm again hopelessly optimistic i think i end up at this point pretty much every year around this time like we're almost ready to start spring training i'm always like med type train is, you know, on the tracks, you know, and then around, you can tag up again around May and see how I feel. And I noticed that the Dodgers have also made their way into your Twitter bio. So it has to have been a very strange year. What was

the experience of rooting for the Dodgers through the pandemic like for you? Yeah, the Dodgers, it was definitely, I guess, a bright spot, I think. And I think a lot of Dodger fans can really, I mean, no one could go to games. I usually in normal years go to many Dodger games, which is why I consider myself kind of a Dodger fan now. I was at the time during the whole playoffs, like on the East Coast at my, I was staying with my parents for a few months then, and they were all rooting against the Dodgers. So that was kind of me on my own supporting them. It was definitely a strange fan experience. Sometimes I forget that they actually won the World Series and things remind me of it. And I'm like, oh yeah, that was nice. I will say it was definitely, at the time, I think baseball can be a nice sort of distraction

from everything else that's going wrong or, you know, stressful things in your life. And I think having the, being able to support the Dodgers through that post-season was something that made the pandemic a little easier to bear, but I am very excited for whenever it happens to be able to actually go to games again. Yeah. How would you compare sort of the depth of your feelings for the two teams? I guess you can't compare world championships because the Mets haven't won one in your lifetime. But how do you think it would compare? I mean, did you feel something like you think you might feel if the Mets won? Or are the Dodgers just kind of a casual interest just because?

The Dodgers are a little more casual. I mean, I was excited. I mean, I was obviously rooting for them. I mean, they had a fantastic team. It was hard not to root for them. You know, I really admired their approach to building a team. I think, you know, it's a good team. It'll be really excellent again this year, but yeah,

definitely, you know, if it came to a playoff series between the Mets and the Dodgers, I would be rooting for the Mets. I would be alienating my Dodgers friend. Hopefully they would forgive that given the longevity of your Mets fandom. I'm curious, there's, you know, Ben and I recently have been talking to a couple of folks about some of the breakthroughs that physics has brought to baseball. Here we were thinking that all of the low-hanging sabermetric fruit had been picked and there was nothing new

to advance the sport. And then a seam-shifted wake comes along. And I'm curious if you're able to find time to keep up with all of the physics advances within baseball and if that part of the game is still interesting to you because suddenly I'm feeling a little out of my depth because I only did two years of high school physics and didn't pursue an undergraduate degree. Yeah, that's a good question. I've tried to keep up with a lot of the advances recently with physics and baseball the past couple years. I do think it's extremely interesting. And I think there's still a lot left to learn about the specifics of how a baseball flies through the air. Like, I am really kind of like fascinated by the idea that that's still not known in detail, there's still things to learn about that and I think that will

continue I definitely if there are baseball people in physics or physics people in baseball I think that's like there's definitely a lot more to to study there and you know I definitely feel like things have taken a step more in the physics direction the past couple years and I think that will continue they'll only continue so i'm excited to see that don't think you need to know physics to know baseball but i think that there are some interesting you know studies being done and how those relate on a detailed level and really sort of enriching the knowledge that we can have like publicly about about baseball through physics is a really cool advancement in the past couple of years. That's very generous of you.

No, you don't need to have a whiteboard writing out equations. Yeah, good news for both of us. Yeah, true, just relief. So you've been waiting for next week for a really long time. Not as long as you've been waiting for a Mets World Series win, I guess, but still years. I mean, even the last time we talked to you, which was more than two years ago, you knew the exact date, February 18th, 2021, that the rover was supposed to touch down. And that is still the case. So what is it like to have that date circled for so long?

And how have your emotions and your anticipation ramped up as that date has approached? Now I'm actually at the point, I think a few days ago or maybe a week ago, I got to the point where I was starting to be actually anxious about it. It seemed like a far off date for a long time. Like, as we said, last time we talked, it was like two years ago and we've done a lot since then. But then, and even recently, it seemed that kind of a distant future. It's been very busy. There's been a lot of work that we've had to do in order to prepare for surface operations. And we couldn't have anticipated the pandemic still happening. That was an extra, you know, kind of cog in the wheel of our planning and what we thought we would do versus how things are

actually going to happen. But yeah, it's been, it is really emotional. I've worked on Mars 2020 since pretty much when I started at JPL, which was in 2016. And so it was very surreal to watch the rover being built at JPL back when we could still go to lab as software engineers. And it's even more surreal knowing that it's now, it's at Mars. Like that's insane. Yeah. I was going to ask you how the pandemic changed your workflow because, you know, on the one hand, once it launches, the rover's on its way, but you can't really, it's going to get

to Mars no matter what the events here on Earth are. So how has your day-to-day changed and what have you been able to do in person with your colleagues since this all started? Yeah, I'm a software engineer, so I've pretty much been working from home since last March. I've only been to lab once or twice to pick up things. since last March. I've only been to lab once or twice to pick up things. That being said, on landing day, if you turn to watch, you will see our ops engineers on lab. They will be in mission control.

There are certain things that they have to do on the onsite computers, but everything pretty much that can be remote has been made remote. Like many other organizations, we had to quickly adjust to that last March when the lab pretty much closed, except for, you know, essential people. And that's kind of been what we've been operating under.

Like I said, I was on the East Coast for a few months towards the end of last year. And so that was kind of a blessing and a curse in a way that I was able to spend more time with my parents and take care of things that they needed. But also, like, I do miss seeing my colleagues on lab every day. I do miss going to lab. And it's definitely something that, you know, two years ago, we wouldn't have even conceived of, you know, I was looking forward to going to launch, which I didn't get to do because of the pandemic. And even at launch, I was like, well, you know, it'll be over by landing. And then it's now landing and it's not over. So we still can't have any great, you know, parties or watch parties or things like that. And that's, I think, definitely something that in the future, I'll look back on and kind of like be upset about.

something that in the future I'll look back on and kind of like be upset about. But for now, it's, you know, it's the way that things have to go. We can't control or build geometry. So we are going to Mars. Right. And so this is how it is. You'll just have to delay your, your Dodgers World Series party and your landing party and have one big bash when it's safe. Exactly. Exactly. So we've barely left our houses for months, but Perseverance has traveled, what, about 300 million miles or something like that over the past seven months. So once it gets going, it's not hard for it to keep going, but it has to stop. And it has to stop not too suddenly and land softly enough that it doesn't ruin all of your hard work so for Mets fans the seven minutes of terror is when Edwin Diaz enters in a safe situation but for NASA it's something else and so I guess it's not your primary

responsibility to figure out how to land this thing but I'm sure you're at least a little familiar with how that works. So what will have to happen next week? Yeah, so how it will work is basically, if you tune into the broadcast, you'll see the Sol Zero team and the EDL team, they'll be at JPL monitoring all of it, so much to get back up to when the rover enters the upper atmosphere of Mars. And we do have a seven minutes of terror, as you referred to. That's a time in which a lot of things can go wrong, but we can't do anything about it. The spacecraft has to land itself. And it has a lot of tools to do that safely. We've improved a lot. The basic sort of structure is the same as a Curiosity landing, in that we have a parachute stage and we have a sky crane, which is basically this, it's pretty much a spacecraft in its own right,

and it has propulsion systems. And so it'll hover over the surface and then lower the rover to the ground gently and safely. All of that, however, when it deploys, has to be done autonomously on board. And so it'll be a stressful time for everyone because we won't, we can't do anything, like we can't interject. All of our work is done by then. So we're just waiting to have it talk back to us and tell us that it's been safely landed. The improvements since the last time when Curiosity landed, our landing site is a lot more complex in that it's more dangerous. Desert craters where we're landing on Mars, and it's an ancient lake bed. And so it's really scientifically interesting. And there are a lot of really cool rocks and cliffs around it that could give us insights to

whether or not life exists on Mars and how that developed and how the water situation was on Mars, you know, billions of years ago. That's all very interesting. But in order to land there, we had to really be confident that the spacecraft could land safely there. We wouldn't have landed Curiosity there. The major improvement software-wise was this system called Terrain Relative Navigation, which is basically a really fast image processor on board that can recognize things like sharp rocks and pointy features that we don't want to land on and navigate the rover before the sky crane lowers the rover to a safe spot inside its potential landing ellipse.

So there's been a lot of development in the the past i think it's 2012 was when curiosity landed so almost 10 years since then there's been a lot of improvements made on the software side and the autonomous operation side to allow us to land in more like risky but more scientifically interesting areas on mars and mars 2020 will be landing in one of those. So it'll be scary and it'll be very emotional. But I think we're definitely prepared and in a good spot. The ops engineers I've been working with the past couple of years, like the whole team is amazing. So I have full confidence that the mission will end.

And that's really like when the mission starts. A lot of the systems that I've been building are surface operations only. And so from my perspective, when they touch down on the ground is when a lot of the software I've been building like comes into play. Yeah, it's something that always gets me choked up

and I'm not a particularly weepy person in general, but if you want to get me going, like, just show me the people in mission control, just like watching something touchdown that they've spent like huge chunks of their lives and pulled off this incredible engineering feat. And then there's hopefully this moment of relief and elation. And just seeing that, I always just, I find that to be a really inspirational moment. It's amazing. And a lot of people don't know that even after we land, a lot of those people have a grueling schedule ahead of them. In the first many days after we land, there's a long sort of checkout process, transition process into normal surface operations. So a lot of the ops engineers have to work on Mars time, which is what we call the schedule where you have to go into work 40 minutes later every day because the rover sleeps at Mars night

and the Martian day is around 40 minutes longer than the Earth day. So they'll be, I'm not jealous of them. I get to work a normal schedule besides being on call, but they'll be working on this very difficult through the middle of the night sometimes, changing every day schedule and more power to them. They're excellent people.

I know when you were on last time with Ben and Jeff, you talked a bit about the samples that would be collected on the surface with the eye to those being returned to Earth eventually by a future NASA mission. And I wonder if you have any sense of what the projected timeline for such a return would be. I know it's probably a rude question to ask you to think about the next mission with this one just about to touch down. But when would folks on Earth get to have that stuff returned to them? And what are some of the things that you're hoping that we're going to learn from those samples? Yeah, I think currently the timeline for that Mars sample return

is a mission that JPL is working on in concept design. I think that they did pass an important review towards the end of last year with NASA in terms of, you know, kind of checking it out, making sure that it was feasible. They have a partnership with ESO, which is the European Space Agency, to help out with it. It will be later in the 2020s, for sure. By the time the samples return back to Earth, we're probably talking like 2030. There's a lot of things that are still a little up in the air about the mission, but it's being actively discussed and developed as we speak, and it will happen. But yeah, it is several years away.

And part of the reason why we want to bring samples back to Earth is that despite all of the capabilities on the rovers, both Curiosity and Perseverance, there's still a lot of work geologically and biologically that people can only do in their Earth labs. And we want to be able to have pristine samples taken from Mars that scientists can look at as closely as they want to. In Mars, science ops, we're pretty limited in terms of capabilities compared to what Earth labs are capable of. We can do a lot of science remotely, but there are still things that, and even things that we might not know we're looking for, that are a lot more easily progressed by scientists on Earth. The whole timeline of life on Mars is obviously a huge open question in the field. Martian geology is very interesting. And the

possibility of life on Mars is also very interesting in terms of how life could have originated on Earth. And so all of the open questions that we could learn from mars are probably like better served by scientists being able to dive into them on earth even though the river can do really good science on its own it's you know on earth you have a lot more capabilities yeah and this is a really busy month for mars in fact the mars 2020 mission is is the last of three to arrive at the Red Planet just this month alone. The UAE's Hope orbiter just got there a few days ago, and China's Tianwen mission just arrived there too and is in orbit, and is there some level of coordination to make sure, well, we didn't all pick the same landing spot or we're not going to bump into each other in orbit? That's a good question. We definitely look out for things like that, like collisions with other spacecraft. We haven't coordinated in terms of science with either of those missions.

They are really exciting on their own. I'm glad that they're more spacecraft or on Mars. NASA has certain, I don't know, international agreements that kind of, especially with China, restrict us from coordinating directly with those missions. But we are interested in the science that they can provide. And there's also a benefit to having more spacecraft orbiting Mars. In the future, we expect a lot more spacecraft to be operating on Mars, and these spacecraft will have to

communicate with Earth through orbiting spacecraft. So it's always a benefit to everyone to have more options open for Mars infrastructure purposes, to have the ability for all of the spacecraft that will be on Mars to do more science and be more productive together. So what part do you play in getting Perseverance's transmissions back to Earth or talking to the rover? Yeah, so when we talk to the rover, we do it directly to the rover itself. But most of the data that the rover sends back is through the Mars relay network, which is what I was referring to the set of orbiters that are orbiting Mars. I worked in ops for MRO for a number of years.

I may have talked about that last time I was on this podcast. MRO is a Mars orbiter that has been in operation since 2006 in Mars orbit. And it plays like a pivotal part in relaying both engineering telemetry data that we analyze, my software analyzes to make sure that the rover is safe and that the state of the rover is known. In addition to science data products that are large, the orbiters have much larger high gain antennas. So they are a lot more efficient real time data back during EDL. So a lot of the telemetry that you'll see during the landing is being played through MRO. And that was a huge effort to be able to have that capability.

And the orbiters are definitely the unsung heroes of every Mars mission. And I think a lot of people who maybe aren't super familiar with the work that NASA has been doing in these missions in the past think of, you know, landing as sort of the be all end all. And clearly you can't do anything that comes after that if the landing isn't successful. But for our listeners who aren't as familiar, how long do these missions last? And will you remain engaged with it for the duration or will you start to cycle off onto other projects? Yeah, for that later question, that depends on JPL's resource allotment. The rovers themselves, all of our Mars missions are designed to last as long as possible. The prime mission is two years. That's when we have to collect the number of samples that we said we would for Mars 2020, which is like one of the major mission success criteria. But the rovers themselves

are designed to last pretty much indefinitely. Curiosity has been operating since 2012. We had the previous servers, Spirit and Opportunity, both lasted many years. And Curiosity will probably outlast those due to the power system being different. Both Curiosity and Mars 2020 are nuclear powered, so they don't have to have the solar power. So the missions themselves to Mars, if we've spent the time and the resources to send something to Mars, they'll last as long as possible. And even many things that you would think of on the engineering side that would kill the project, there are ways that ops engineers have found to keep the spacecraft operating like way outside its originally designed criteria which is like very cool and

they'll be around as long as possible i think curiosity mars 2020 it'll be like 10 years at least i think and in terms of how jPL works in terms of like funding and stuff the funding for missions that are in operations does go down every year and so you have to in ops find ways to become more efficient cross-train people through different subsystems and stuff that's sort of a normal case the the work that will ramp up at JPL will be like Mars sample return and our next flagship mission, which is to Europa, that will launch somewhere on 2025 or 2026. So a lot of Mars 2020 people will end up working on that. But yeah, the Mars missions, we definitely have a vested interest in keeping them running pretty much as long as they possibly can. And even in some cases beyond what we thought was possible.

as long as they possibly can. And even in some cases, beyond what we thought was possible. And I think one thing that Jeff asked you last time was, what are the most common questions you tend to get when people find out what you do? And you said that one of them was about politics and the presidential administration and how that affected NASA. And under the Trump administration, I guess NASA's budget actually increased a bit, although still to a minuscule amount in the grand scheme of things. And now there's a new presidential administration. I saw that Joe Biden has a moon rock in the Oval Office. That's very cool. I'm jealous.

I wish I could just request a moon rock. Yeah. And NASA set some pretty ambitious goals about getting humans back to the moon in the next few years and to Mars in the next 15 years or so. So what's your level of optimism about the federal support for those initiatives in the Trump era, as we spoke last time, I'm not sure if they had confirmed the NASA administrator yet, but we actually were pretty lucky as a federal agency to have an administrator who wasn't actively trying to kill the agency. securing funding for NASA and making even making our science missions a priority. A lot of JPL ability to do science will only be furthered by the federal government now that Biden is in charge. I think we'll have a lot more support. And I think that it's very exciting that they have, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, the press secretary for the Biden administration said that they were still committed to the Artemis project, which is the landing people on the moon in 2024. We'll see if the money is there for that. But I think it's very encouraging that the new administration believes that that's a focus for them. And I think that NASA's ability to do science and perform space exploration will only be increased in the next few years. So very optimistic on that front.

Yeah. The last year has not been a banner year on the earth's surface, but it was a pretty exciting year and a lot of landmark accomplishments when it came to spaceflight and space exploration, which was sort of bittersweet, like, you know, when crewed missions to the ISS resumed and NASA and SpaceX's partnership and some of the other cool missions elsewhere in the solar system. A lot of that was great to see. And it would also be nice if we could figure things out at home here, but hopefully we can do a little bit of both. I was reading earlier this week about an idea for a nuclear powered rocket that could maybe get astronauts to Mars in three months or so, still speculative. For astronauts on Mars, I don't think a lot of people realize how much larger of a logistics problem it is than going to the moon um in terms of you have to you know

it is a several month trip there um if you launch in the best launch window like the reason why those other missions have gotten to mars in the past couple weeks because we all launched in the mars launch window which is when earth and mars are closest together if you launch outside of that window you can get to one or two years travel time based on current propulsion systems. And so when we send astronauts to Mars, it'll likely be at least a year and a half long mission for the astronauts. And to support them just in being able to live and do their jobs, it will take a lot of effort before and during that mission to be able to keep them happy. So I do think that the astronaut mission to Mars will happen probably sometime in the 2030s.

A lot of the technology that we're demonstrating on Mars sample return are things that will be used in that, like the launching from the surface of Mars, rendezvousing with an orbiter above Mars, and then sending that back to Earth autonomously. All of these things are steps that we want to be able to demonstrate that we can do robotically before we send humans to try to perform them. And so every Mars mission that we're doing right now and through the next decade is paving the way to being able to send humans to Mars. Mars 2020 Perseverance also has this, there's a tech demo instrument called MOXIE, which is an instrument to create oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere, which will be very important for both rockets and humans on Mars. And so these things are done kind of strategically as a both rockets and humans on Mars.

And so new things are done kind of strategically as a step towards getting humans to Mars. But that mission itself is, it will be a lot. It will be a lot. So one more thing I wanted to ask you, I don't know if everyone's aware of this, but I think it's really interesting. I wrote about this last July when Perseverance was launching, but we've all become very used to trying not to contaminate our own environments over the past year, wearing masks, washing our hands, whatever it takes to avoid getting infected or infecting others. And that's something that NASA has always taken great pains to do with its own missions to other planets that might

potentially harbor life or might have at some point. And as you mentioned, Perseverance is going to be trying to find evidence of ancient life on Mars. And so it's pretty important to make sure that the life you are detecting is not life that hitched a ride from Earth. So there's a lot of care taken to try to sterilize the spacecraft and make sure that there aren't any unwanted passengers. So again, I'm sure not the primary responsibility of a software engineer, but something I'm sure you're familiar with. Yeah, we have, there's a planetary protection office at NASA headquarters that has a say in the landing sites, especially on Mars and the various degrees of certainty. You have to be that your spacecraft is clean before you can land on those.

There are specific places that could be more habitable to current life that they restrict from landing on for the specific purpose. The rover we shipped out March 20th to Florida last February and it stayed at an Air Force base for a day or two before it got shipped onto the plane. That was having a, at that time that had the only known coronavirus patients in the US at it. And we talked about that at meetings of like, make sure we didn't bring COVID to Mars. Oh my gosh. There's like a little bit of extra discussion about that. But we ended up pretty positive that the river is very clean. But both at JPL and at Kennedy Space Center, they do a really excellent

job at making sure that we're not, we don't have bacteria or viruses hitching rides. Of course, you can't be perfect, and you don't want to be the person that claims that you found life on Mars when it was really the life that you brought to Mars. Right. But, yeah, I think we're definitely, that's definitely a concern that NASA pays a lot of attention to

and that everyone who participates in space exploration should pay attention to. Well, the last time we talked to you, I think we said maybe you would want to work in baseball someday and it seemed like you might entertain that possibility, but I think you said that you needed to make sure that the rover landed first. So I guess we're almost at that point and then you can decide if you want to turn your attention elsewhere or stick with exploring the solar system. So I guess there are a lot of possibilities. I love baseball. I don't know if I'm going to leave though. Baseball is definitely in a state now that's super super interesting and it was still two years ago but i think even more

now with the you know technology advancements that's been made it's super fascinating the amount of data and analytics that's possible in baseball now and i am excited to see how that changes over the next few years but we'll see i think i don't know i like working on mars now i'm a martian well we wish you luck with the landing we wish you luck with the mets i don't know if there's like a traditional best of luck message that you're supposed to send to someone whose spacecraft is landing like a break a leg don't break anything we have nothing breaks we have a lucky peanuts tradition in jpl so like back in the in the 60s jpl was really in a bad spot because we had tried to land on the moon in the early 60s several times and failed and one in one situation we even just

missed the moon entirely and it was pretty embarrassing. And the lab was on thin ice before Ranger 7. And Ranger 7 actually succeeded a landing on the moon. And during that landing, the mission control engineers were passing around peanuts. And so ever since then, for any landing in mission control, you'll see this next week. You'll see they'll be passing around peanuts in mission control. So hope for a good landing all right well we'll be watching and following and hoping for the best and if it's anything like some of the previous rover missions that will do a lot of great science and send back a lot of interesting images for all of us and you can find shannon on twitter at shannon towie. That's T-O-W-E-Y.

If you need anyone to throw out a first pitch, I guess she's willing to have a second shot at that too. Yeah, I can get a strike next time. Yeah, and her website is shannontowie.com. Hasn't blogged about baseball in a while. I guess you've been busy sending a spacecraft to Mars. I've had other stuff going on. Yeah. All right. Well, it's – Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. Great talking to you. And maybe we can have you back on in the future to dissect how things have gone. Yeah. For sure. Thanks so

much for having me, guys. All right. Well, if you haven't heard Shannon's first appearance on the podcast, I would recommend going back and listening to that because we didn't cover much of the same ground. Again, that was episode 1320. One thing we talked about that first time that we didn't touch on this time was the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which will be landing along with Perseverance and sending back some of those cool photos that we were just talking about. It only flies for 90 seconds or so at a time, gets 10 to 15 feet off the ground. But this is the first test of powered flight on another planet and could be a proof of concept for future flying missions on other worlds.

Obviously tough to get something to stay up in the air in the thin Martian atmosphere, but Ingenuity is going to try to show that it can be done. And it's kind of cute looking. It's like four pounds. It's got these big rotors rooting for ingenuity, too. I should also mention you're probably aware that some people have come from NASA to MLB front offices, like Sig Meidel, the Orioles assistant GM who used to be a NASA engineer. believe, in recent years, which is part of an ongoing brain drain in MLB R&D departments, which RJ Anderson wrote about for CBS Sports last year. I'll link to that piece. But you have low salaries in MLB front offices. You have low-level analysts who can't really get heard by the decision makers. Maybe they're part of big groups and don't have a lot of individual clout. And of course, teams are cutting back across the board as well. And there have been some MLB R&D people who have gone over to NASA and hopefully are finding fulfillment there, contributing to science

in an important way. But that is something for MLB teams to be aware of. There are greener pastures out there. So pay your people if you can. And most MLB teams can. You can also pay us and help support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Burke Wasson, Spencer Von Hirschman, Chris Ainsworth, Daniel Daniel Brennan and James Rosenheim thanks to all of you I should also mention

that we will be starting the team preview podcast series next week it is that time again in fact we're probably a bit behind schedule but it looks like spring training

and this season are starting on time so we should start our team preview podcast series too and hope that it does not get suspended before we finish as it did last year

for many months so stay tuned for that you'll be seeing those preview podcasts in your feed sometime soon in the meantime you can email me and meg at podcast at fangraphs.com you can also message us through the patreon site if you are a supporter 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. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, a long weekend in some cases, and we will be back to talk to you early next week.