Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1805: Up to Eleven

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley ask their audience how to handle their team preview podcast series with the resolution of the lockout still in doubt, then banter about Shohei Ohtani becoming the cover model for MLB The Show 22, “Big Boss” Tsuyoshi Shinjo pioneering a new model of major league manager for the Nippon Ham […]

Hello and So big, you're just guess, if you don't already know the answer, what adjective the Athletics Evandrelic applied to Tuesday's meetings between MLB and the MLBPA? I don't know. I read his tweets, but candidly, I don't remember what adjective he used. Let me guess, though. I'm going to go with heated. Ding, ding, ding. Was it really?

It was heated, yes. I swear I didn't look again. You could have pre-written that. I made fun of that last week. It's always heated or tense or something along those lines. Yes, contentious. It's never convivial or anything. You can kind of bank on heated.

So no deal done as we speak here and not a ton of new details to discuss, which brings us to something that we wanted to put to our audience. Because historically speaking, we would be starting our season preview series like this week. I think this is roughly when we do it. Traditionally, what we've done, at least for the last few years, is 15 team preview episodes, two teams per episode. And we start with the teams that are projected to be middling, and then we work our way out. So we eventually end up with, I don't know, the Dodgers and the Orioles as our last preview, the best and worst projected team. This year, we don't exactly know what to do because we don't know when the season is starting, or if the season is

starting we're what less than two weeks away now from when spring training is supposed to start certainly seems like that's not going to happen on time and there could be a deal done i think you know up until let's say march 1st that's a date that i've seen bandied about as kind of a cutoff for okay we can actually still make opening day, which is scheduled for March 31st. But we just don't know. We don't know when spring training is going to start, how long it's going to be, when opening day actually will be. And so we're trying to figure out what to do with our team preview pods, which were weird in 2020 because we started them the normal way and we didn't quite finish before COVID hit.

And then there was like a four-month break and then we came back and finished the team previews. And then I guess last year it was more normal. But this year we have a few options potentially. And one option is that we just start them now or next week and just plow ahead as if the season is going to start when it's scheduled to start. The problem with that, of course, is that a lot of teams are not done or not close to done. I mean, half the free agents are still free agents, basically. So there's a lot of work to do. And if we were to do previews now before the lockout ends, then we wouldn't be able to include all of the signings and transactions that happen after that point.

And we wouldn't really be fully previewing the team or the season. It would just be a snapshot of where it is today before that flurry of trades and signings. So that's one option. Another option is we could wait as long as possible and just cram them all in. So usually what we do is two preview pods per week and then, I think February 25th, and we could still get them all in before the regularly scheduled opening day. Or we could continue to play it by ear and just see what happens and maybe opening day will be delayed and we'll have more time to do previews. Or another option is we just scrap them for this year or do them in a different form and i know that some of our listeners thoughts and opinions of the preview series vary some listeners love it some listeners think that they're the worst episodes we do because they like when we do

weird stuff right and not your standard season preview type material which we try to make fun but it's still season previews. I think it does help us bring in new listeners because we do have people on who cover those teams and those people promote the pod to their audiences. And there are quite a few people who find us through the season preview series and then eventually get hooked on our brand of weirdness, hopefully, or they go away because this is not at all what they were led to expect. So there are pluses and minuses and, you know, it's not always our favorite thing to do. I mean, we do our best with it, but it can be a bit of a slog with scheduling, especially with

all kinds of reporters who are in spring training and juggling where they are and what they have to do and how bad their wifi is and all of that. So it's nice to know what your topic is, but it can also be a lot of legwork to schedule, not that that's our listeners' problem. So we're just kind of putting it out there. What should we do? And we could do just a compressed preview series as well. We could just do by division or some sort of really quick lightning round preset question sort of you know just narrow it down to the most important stuff and and just speed it up because strange circumstances call for strange preview series so if you feel like letting us know what you want us to do maybe we can put a poll up or something but uh we're trying to navigate that these days yeah i think my

instinct is to to try to do something a bit broader understanding that we will cover any meaningful free agent signings and trades that unfold after the lockout is done and a new cba is agreed to so it's not as if we won't you know when carlos correa signs we're gonna talk about it and guys like don't worry we're gonna let you know what we think that means for whatever team he ends up signing with so selfishly perhaps my instinct is to do like division previews or something more compressed i don't want to skip them entirely i don't think i mean in moments of weakness, I suppose that not having to do them would be nice. But I think it's good to preview the season in some way. And I do think that there are people who really like them and look forward to them.

So I don't want to completely abandon the project, especially for those folks who find them useful as they're gearing up for the year. So I don't know. But I'm also mindful of the fact that, and again, this isn't necessarily our listeners' problems, but like, Ben, have you thought about how much work we're going to have to do between the end of a lockout and when opening day starts? We're just going to be busy people and we're going to have to be bothering also busy people to come chat with us. So these are the things that we're trying to balance and figure out. And we hope that people will give us their thoughts and also be forgiving as we try to navigate what, you know, as you said, is a very unusual and weird circumstance.

All right. So we will figure something out there and we don't have to go in projection order if we were to go team by team just because the projections are still sort of up in the air because rosters are so one idea you floated before we started recording is that we could talk about teams that seem to be set that do have most of their business done presumably or teams that just don't seem like they'll be very busy after action resumes that is an option or we could just get all the boring non-contenders out of the way. Or we could just focus on questions that don't depend so much on the rest of the roster. Just, you know, prospect stuff or things that we know will be part of the story for those teams, as opposed to this position battle going into spring training,

which might be completely different by the time the season actually starts. So there are options. But yeah, write in, let us know what you think, post in the Facebook group, the Discord group, wherever we will see those conversations. And thanks for your thoughts. Nothing hooks new listeners like talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates. All right. So a few other things here. First of all, I suppose we should acknowledge that the cover model for MLB The Show 2022, as expected, as speculated, as hoped for, is Shohei Otani, which is somewhat historic in that he is the first Asian athlete to grace the cover of a North American sports game from one of the four major North American sports. So that is exciting in men's leagues, at least. And he is the first angel to be on the cover of MLB The Show, which is sort of a sad commentary on the angels vis-a-vis Mike Trout, I suppose. But I am very much here for the era of Otani being on the cover of everything, which can't quibble with that. I guess it's good to have one big book that does not have Otani on the cover.

But both of the books that do and then also the cover of MLB The Show 22 have the same standard design, which is what you would expect. I mean, you have your two-way player on the cover. Obviously, you're going to have him in both of his guises, right? So they all have him as a pitcher and also as a hitter. And so I'm looking forward to seeing what modes, if any, MLB The Show builds in to take advantage of the two-way cover model, just because two-way players has not really been a strength of that franchise. I know that technically there was a way to create two-way players and play as two-way players in MLB The Show 21, but it wasn't that well implemented from what I can gather. And it

was hard to manage. And it was tough to have a pitcher who also DH'd in the games that he pitched the way that Otani does. It just wasn't fully fledged. So you couldn't quite replicate Otani season. But if you're going to have otani on your cover then i imagine you would make it a priority to fully support a player like otani in every mode of your game so looking forward to seeing what the emphasis on otani actually does for that video game but i think it's cool that he is everywhere these days. So this obviously portrays my ignorance of MLB the show, but Ichiro was never on the cover of MLB the show? No, and I guess Ichiro's arrival predated the show. I guess the show's predecessors may have been around by that time, but I think 06 was the first one that was actually called the show sure and the

predecessors like the the mlb series went back to 97 or so but no i you never had each row like the the cover athletes going back to mlb 98 the predecessor series bernie williams was on the cover of that game and i mean a favorite of mine so i support that cal ripken jr mauve on chipper jones andrew jones barry bonds sean green cover boy of mlb 2004 eric chavez on mlb 2005 and then vlad guerrero senior and then since the show started that branding began it's been david ortiz david wright ryan howard dustin pedroia joeia, Joe Maurer, Adrian Gonzalez on MLB 12, Andrew McCutcheon, Miguel Cabrera, Yasiel Puig, Josh Donaldson, Ken Griffey Jr., Aaron Judge, Bryce Harper, Javier Baez, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Shohei Otani. So yeah, no eTro. So yeah, no eTro. So that's wild to me.

It is, yeah. That's surprising. I mean, so I guess in fairness, in 2007, so like the first year after they had really gotten their feet under them, why didn't they put A-Rod on the cover? He was the most valuable player in baseball that year. Was it because he was unpopular, Ben? It might have been that. Yeah, he was never on the cover.

Man, Curtis Granderson sure had a good 2007. That's not the point of this conversation, but look at that. Good for you, Curtis. They should have put Chase Utley on the cover, because it would have been funny, because he's cantankerous in a charming sort of way. I guess Ichiro was the 13th most valuable position player in

baseball in 2007 by Fangraph's War, so I guess just not good enough. David Wright was second. So, you know, no slouch. But Nardonez, wow. Anyway, I'm just remembering some really good baseball players now. That's all that I've started to do over here is be like, yeah, Alfonso Sariano. What a year you had.

Yeah, it is odd. And at least according to the Wikipedia page, there were international covers for the franchise and Korean covers and Taiwanese covers, but no Japanese covers, which I guess explains the lack of Ichiro as well. So yeah, Otani is breaking another barrier here. And I hope they kind of build the game around him a little bit or at

least I'm sure they'll go to great lengths to model Otani in the game and capture all of his greatness and his mannerisms etc so looking forward to that just generally happy about the takeover of Otani and appearing on all of the baseball media. And this version of the show will be on all the consoles appropriately as well. So last year finally came to Xbox after years of PlayStation exclusivity, and this year will also be on Nintendo Switch. So if you have any kind of console, you can play MLB The Show 22 with our man Shohei Otani on the cover. So that should be fun.

I enjoy both that he as such a singular talent is being sort of appropriately given this mantle and also that he seems to be fine taking it on, right? Like I always worry about fame being, well, like a human rights violation, but burdensome in a less dramatic way of expressing it. And like, you know, like Mike Trout seems thoroughly uninterested in doing a lot of this stuff and you know we've talked about that as a problem i'm doing air quotes to add nauseam but it's just it's it's nice when the player who should be recognized in this way is recognized in this way and it's nice when that recognition is seemingly based on what he said

in in the press like not burdensome but something he views as an opportunity and something that's exciting for him and so it's nice it's just a nice thing plus you know so many show a puns available to us oh i know just like and they pass them all up i mean you'd think just like a one-year rebrand or something right i mean just mlb the show just take the lop off the w on the end or have him block it out on the cover or something right i mean just mlb the show just take the lop off the w on the end or have him block it out on the cover or something yes they did not opt for any of those things well it's you know it's it's early like there's still marketing to be done here so we shouldn't count them out but yes it it is well it's it's something i wouldn't be able to resist which is

perhaps why i don't work in corporate pr right yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity. I don't think there's a localized version of the game in Japan, as far as I know. And there are some franchises that are more popular in Japan or more popular there than here, just sort of Japanese language baseball video games. So I guess that could account for it. But given the popularity of PlayStation and baseball, and now with Otani on the cover, you would think that there'd be more of an effort there. So maybe there will be. Anyway, always happy to see Otani celebrated in any way, shape, or form. And while we are talking about Japanese baseball, I just wanted to bring up, I don't know whether you saw the latest look debuted by new Nipponham fighters manager, Sioshi Shinjo, but it is incredible.

I don't know whether you saw his outfit last year when the fighters hired him as manager, and he showed up at the press conference looking like a bad guy from the yakuza series like he had this entirely red suit on with a huge collar like kind of this like disco style yeah i'll send you and of course i will link to all of this on the show page but i just sent you his latest outfit that's when he showed up to spring training i believe i'm also sending you his fit from his introductory press conference last November. This is what he wore, and he told the media that he wanted to be addressed as Big Boss,

and I believe most of them were happy to oblige. And Shinjo, I mean, he's just been a character for a long time, going back to his playing career and his brief time in MLB. He was with the Giants and the Mets in the early 2000s, and he was quite charismatic even then. And I really admire that. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a big Mets fan and fondly remembers Shinjo from his time with the Mets and he was saying that being a weirdo in sports is really damn hard to do like it kind of drums the weirdos out or it makes the weirdos suppress their weirdness yeah and Shinjo has never had any of his personality suppressed and he's like a legitimate celebrity in Japan.

I mean, going beyond baseball, like he has his own fashion line and he's on TV as just sort of a celebrity who got famous from baseball, but then kind of parlayed that into more renown, I think. But he is not at all conforming to stereotypes of what a manager should look like or dress like or be called. And I am fascinated by this experiment because he's about as unorthodox a managerial pick as one could imagine. And maybe even more so in NPP than here. Not that we have any managers like this here, but I would say at least in some respects, we have any managers like this here but i would say at least in some respects japanese baseball culture is more conservative and conformist and shinjo is just completely breaking the mold in

every way i mean he just turned 50 i think last week so happy 50th to shinjo but he looks great he's in great shape he is you know he's model-like looks. And he actually tried to make an MPP comeback like less than two years ago, I think, in 2020. And, of course, he had a long and fairly illustrious career in MPP and finished that career with the fighters who have hired him now. But raised a lot of eyebrows when he was hired because he can only be himself and there is no one at all like him. So he looks like, yeah, Tom Cruise crossed with like, as I said, like some villain from Yakuza and WWE's Shinsuke Nakamura or something. Like it's all of those things crossed and yet distinctive as just Shinjo, and he is not dialing it jacket he's wearing in the other photo, the most important of which is, are there pieces of real baseball mitts on his jacket? I can't tell.

Those are mitts, right? Yeah, there is dimension seeming to this. Yeah, they're distorted, though. It's like the fingers of the gloves are longer. It's sort of psychedelic, some kind of Dali style baseball gloves. It's almost as if they took the glove and undid all of the stitching that binds the front of it to the back

to help elongate and distort some of the thingies, the digits that are here. But at least in the photo that you sent me, it appears that there is like enough sort of texture here that I'm only able to conclude, I'm forced to conclude that there are bits of glove just like on this jacket, not exclusively, but and also, oh, I hadn't noticed the shoes

until this moment. Oh, the shoes are exquisite. The shoes also appear to... He's wearing jeans under his baseball glove. It's kind of like he's wearing these shoes under the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Yes. It's kind of like a raincoat style thing with a WWE belt kind of and Tom Cruise top gun glasses and like blindingly white teeth. Yeah, and he does sort of have that like, you know, cruise of a certain Mission Impossible era hair too.

Yes. So he's working with that. Are these jeans boot cut? I guess what is the appropriate fashion statement for a jacket like this? I mean, how do you – I could see getting to the point where you've assembled the jacket, you have the shoes, and then you're like, oh crap, I have to wear pants.

I think he could probably fit that, the ball in his hand that he seems to be tossing as he's just walking through an airport. Is this an airport? Into one of the many gloves that seem to be sewn onto this jacket. Look, I'll say this.

I want people to be themselves. Nothing about this is bothersome. It is a lot. Like we can say it's a lot. It's a lot of look, but it is a look that he seems thrilled about. So I think he should be himself as much as possible. I don't know that I would ever have the confidence

to ask someone to call me big boss. Like I guess I am a boss in a way, not in like a, you know. You could go by big boss. Yeah, managing editor me big boss like i guess i am a boss in a way not in like a you could go by big boss yeah managing editor slash big boss right no no thank you that's that's that doesn't sit well with me that doesn't fit my vibe we never hear about vibes at the at these negotiations between the pa and the league like it would be great if if everyone just dropped a tweet that was like you know they didn't get anywhere but the vibe was good that would be great if everyone would just drop a tweet that was like, they didn't get anywhere, but the vibe was good. That would be nice. The vibes are heated. Yeah. So anyway,

this is delightful. Yeah. It's like manager meets runway model. He's just like the most manager you could imagine. And I don't know. Maybe it's part of his line. Fashion line? Oh, it has to be, right? Promotion, I would think.

But no one seems to know what to expect from him exactly just as a manager. I've read a lot of the English language coverage from people like Jim Allen and Jason Coskery who've been on the show before. And it seems like the mood is perplexed maybe about hiring partly like he does seem to have some baseball acumen obviously and relates well to the players and certainly the media and I guess part of the thought is that he will just take the spotlight away from the players which could be good or could be bad like in a way he is lifting the pressure from them somewhat because the manager is getting all the attention. And I found this piece in the Kyoto News from last November, headlined, Ex-Major Leaguer Shinjo Projected to Bring in 53 Million as Fighter's Manager.

That is 53 million US dollars, 6 billion yen. And there is a professor here who came up with an economic estimate of the benefits to the region of hiring Shinjo. And this might be one of those suspect economic estimates that we hear about with ballparks all the time. But still the idea that you can hire a manager and he'd projected to boost attendance at the team's games by about 5% and shore up advertising revenue and sales of fighters' goods and upon-ham merchandise. That is assuming that the fighters are a competent team, that they remain among the top three, and the benefits would be halved, this professor said, if the team performs worse. Although I guess if the team is less entertaining,

then maybe having a manager be entertaining might be more valuable in some ways. But this kind of goes against everything that is happening in MLB now because you used to have celebrity managers sometimes. And maybe back when baseball dominated the sports discussion and pop culture more so than it does now. But you had managers like Casey Stengel and Leo DeRocher. I mean, these were like famous people who would go on quiz shows and people knew them, right? Or they'd have cameos in movies. And now you don't get that so much. And if anything, you probably get less personality from managers. Managers are just kind of middle managers now, right? Like they're supposed to keep the clubhouse running in an orderly fashion and implement a lot of the front office's guidance and be the go-betweens really. And they're not seen as people who you want to distract from the players or to be big personalities really. And Shinjo is just, you you know the polar opposite of that and I guess the fighters

do have a history of being somewhat unorthodox this is of course Shohei Otani's old team and so they have had some managers and GMs who have been unafraid to go against tradition and try things like dedicated two-way players and they have a new manager now and a new GM and it's a new regime but there is that lineage there but it's just really fascinating to see what he turns out to be and he doesn't even seem totally sure what kind of manager he will be either but he he had some really interesting quotes that uh maybe I can read a few selected ones but it but it's kind of hard to tell whether he's joking or not because he's kind of playing a character. He's like half mascot, half manager. And I don't know whether this is serious or whether he is just being an entertainer here because that's partly what he was brought in to do.

So he said, honestly speaking, I was more surprised than anyone by the offer. On the one hand, I wondered if it was okay for me to do so he said honestly speaking i was more surprised than anyone by the offer on the one hand i wondered if it was okay for me to do it on the other i thought maybe i was the only one for the job well i guess if you don't think you're the only one for the job you probably don't then ask people to call you big boss right you have like to be asked to ask people to call you that requires like a confidence we won't call it hubris we'll just say a confidence right it requires you Right. You have to be asked to ask people to call you that requires confidence. We won't call it hubris. We'll just say a confidence. Right. It requires you to look around and be like, I'm the biggest boss.

Yeah. Right. And he has joked, I guess, about like not even having a coaching staff, which doesn't seem like a great idea. He did say, I'm absolutely not going to aspire to win the championship. say, I'm absolutely not going to aspire to win the championship. He said, if you have too high a goal, it might not work. You win one game by staying loose, then win another and so on. In that way, if you're in the pennant race in September, you can say, well, let's try to win it all. And I kind of like that attitude. I think it is expected for managers in Japan and maybe everywhere to just say, yeah, we think we have a championship club here. We think we can go all the way. And Shinjo is saying, I don't know, you know, that's not our goal explicitly. And maybe that puts too much pressure on the players and we'll just try to win one game at a time, which is another kind of cliche. But I kind of like that, that he is setting a different goal

there. I think that it allows you wiggle room and it's sort of an acknowledgement of how strange an endeavor it is to like play a season because there are plenty of things that you can do exactly the right way with good process and get crummy results. Right. And so I think that there's a realism to that that is sort of interesting when thinking about someone who's like, I am the big boss. who's like i am the big boss that called me big boss right so it's a it's a a multi-colored dream code of an approach to the world really if you think about it ben yeah yeah jason wrote in the japan times last week so far everything has been all about shinjo in the nippon ham universe he is the sun and everything else is merely in his orbit eventually though the fighters are going to have to put a team on the field and play games but he says the big boss show will most likely continue early on in camp as attention remains fixed on what shinjo will do or say next the benefit though will be that the fighters should be able to work in relative peace while the spotlight shines on the manager so yeah i was

just gonna say i wonder how his players feel about this, because on the one hand, you know, it is a shift of focus away from them. But that might be welcome in some instances, especially early in the season when you're, you know, getting back into the swing of things and trying to figure out where you fit and whatnot. So I wonder how I wonder how his guys feel about all this yeah i could see some of them resenting it potentially at least eventually but maybe they would also welcome the distraction just being able to go about their business in relative peace but yeah i would be fascinated to see something like this happen in mlb i mean what's the closest like the most sartorially adventurous manager we've had in recent years is probably Joe Madden, right? Yeah. And not all of his adventures were successful somewhere, but he's gone through various incarnations and looks over the years. But really, he can't come close. He can't hold a candle to the big boss.

I guess that we have seen in recent years more of a shift toward the eccentric gm and i still think that's a relative rarity because you know the ivs tend to be eccentricity out of you but you know like we have depoto and we have preller and you know you have sort of that kind of especially in contrast to some of the more buttoned up front offices like you know the the trading gunslinger type i guess the most like personality driven manager we have right now i guess madden is an answer to that you know i don't want to call him personality driven because that feels disrespectful to like all of the life experience he brings but like you know dusty is like kind of larger than life in his own way right because

he's just been in the game for so long he carries so much perspective with him you know i think because of his his age and experience he's you know sort of elevated and distinct from a lot of his contemporaries and then you have like the like i have to be so careful about how i characterize this well then you have gabe capler let's how I characterize this. Well, then you have Gabe Kapler. Let's just leave it at that, right? So then you have like the Gabe Kapler type where it's like, there's definitely stuff going on there. And some of it is, you know, it might not be like interesting from a sartorial perspective, but is kind of curious at moments. I mean, Dusty has his toothpick, which is kind of iconic, but the toothpick

cannot compare to this getup. And apparently he also joked, I question whether it's a joke, about having his players and also having himself descend to the Sapporo Dome surface from the ceiling, which he

once did as a player, and no one could really tell whether he was serious about that. He also said, I enjoy thinking up tactics and translating them into action. And Jim Allen writes, he looked completely serious about being the innovator of a tactical revolution that will sweep Japan as teams learn to, quote, score without getting hits, which does seem like it would be a pretty valuable skill if you could score without getting hits which does seem like it would be a pretty valuable skill if you could score without getting hits now whether that means he's gonna double down and triple down on small ball and manufacture runs maybe that's what that means but i don't know it's also possible that

all of this larger than life character masks a serious scholar of the game like he had a long career he was known for being diligent in his preparation and keeping himself in shape and everything and it might be kind of like casey stengel where it was sort of a smokescreen for this smart baseball mind right and yeah he was incredibly quotable and you couldn't always understand exactly what he said and he looked like no one else but also he was a great manager at least when he had the players at his disposal to implement so it could be something similar with shinjo where yeah maybe it's a side show maybe they're just trying to sell some tickets

maybe this will backfire horribly or maybe it will turn out that he is not just surface he is also substance and that this was kind of camouflaging a brilliant baseball mind all along. But at the very least, I think he is making the atmosphere more permissive for people to be themselves and also potentially for players to be themselves and not to have one set way of doing things and to embrace strange mechanics or whatever works for them as opposed to having some rigid system where you have to learn to play a certain way or express yourself or not express

yourself in a certain way so in that sense i think it is a breath of fresh air so i wish him well yeah i think that you know there are plenty of very stuffy sort of buttoned up managers who get crummy results and so we shouldn't assume that just because someone is sort of a freer spirit and has a more expressive posture that they're automatically going to be bad at it like we don't know yet we'll find out that's the great see this is like the great thing about baseball because we're just gonna we're just gonna find out because they're gonna play some games and then we'll be like oh that's a good team or a bad team yeah but i don't think that, you know, playing the game the right way necessarily leads to success.

Those seem to be not perfectly correlated to one another. So we have no reason to think that playing it in a way that's a little looser will result in bad results either. Yep. All right. And lastly, I guess we should maybe bid farewell briefly to Tom Brady as well. Tom Brady, the baseball player. I conflicting reports about whether he was retiring or not. He is, and he has a very long Instagram post to show for it. And so baseball Twitter was, of course, bidding goodbye to Tom Brady, the baseball player and the former Expos draftee.

A lot of people were noting that he was, by some definitions, the last active athlete who was drafted by the Montreal Expos. That is presuming that Ian Desmond doesn't continue to play. And I guess it's also excluding Bartolo Colon, who has continued to pitch professionally, although not in the majors. But Tom Brady, of course, famously drafted by the Expos in the 1995 draft in the 18th round, but only that low because he was committed to going to be a quarterback in college and his football career was clearly going to take precedence there. So the Expos just took a flyer on him in the 18th round and offered him a good bunch of money, maybe not formally, but they basically offered him like second or third round money because he was seen as sort of a second round talent as a catcher and opted for football. And don't think we can say that he chose unwisely. I think that he he was so good and thus despisable from an

on-field perspective in like a really useful way but one that also carried with it an understanding of just how incredible his career was and I think that what he did in Tampa is pretty remarkable not just in football but just in professional sports generally to leave your your franchise after that much success and then immediately take another team to the Super Bowl and win is pretty remarkable I will say that the Patriots Super Bowl against the Seahawks is one of my more traumatic sports memories and I want it to stop being replayed when they play one another more than anything in the entire world but like that trauma wasn't really Tom Brady's fault per se. So,

you know, I can let him off the hook for that part. I don't know. I don't, I don't think of him as like a baseball guy. And I especially have trouble thinking of him as a catcher. Yeah. Like I could see Tom Brady.

Doesn't Tom Brady seem like he, he would have to be a starting pitcher. Like just in terms of our understanding of him within the context of football and sort of the intensity that he brought. And he often looked like he was just going to murder people if they disappointed him. And some of that reads as big starter energy to me. So the idea of him, when you're the catcher,

you get to be involved all the time and you're sort of helping your your pitcher be the but can you imagine if you were a pitcher and you shook off tom brady what he would do he might beat you up he might just throw his his protector off and his mask at you and then beat you up so i don't know that there's like a there's a fine line between having leadership qualities and being sort of dictatorial in a way that I don't know. I think that catchers want to stay more toward the leadership side than the dictator side when they're thinking about their vibe. Catchers called or known as the quarterback of the infield or the defense, right?

So it makes sense in that way. In that way. But he has big starting pitcher energy to me. I doubt he regrets it. Do you think he gets to eat bread and stay up late now? Yeah, I don't know. Have a strawberry finally? Right, having a strawberry.

Right, I mean. I don't believe that story. Do you believe that story? I don't think that's real. It's kind of like the Gabe Kepler stories, which you were just alluding to, about him spitting out ice cream or whatever. Everyone's like, that's charming.

And I'm like, that sounds like disorderly to me. But anyway, I don't believe the strawberry thing. As a child, surely he had a strawberry. Yeah, you'd think, right? One time, even just on accident at a sleepover. It's like, oh, we get to stay up late and we get to eat strawberries. We're so transgressive. Yeah, I don't know what kind of arm he had as a pitcher,

but famously pretty good arm, Tom Brady. So I imagine he might have been able to make it as a pitcher. But as a catcher, he was also known for having a good arm, obviously. But he really like it sounds like he was the total package. retrospectives of his high school baseball career with quotes from former Expos executives and scouts who saw him and signed him or wanted to sign him, drafted him. And they are all extremely complimentary about him. And it's hard to know whether there's a halo effect about his baseball career once you know how his football career turned out and what kind of personality he became. Maybe you look back even more fondly on his baseball career. But from those accounts, at least, it sounds like, I mean, he was a legitimate talent, like kind of a Joe Maurer-esque catcher, you know, sort of similar frame and had the leadership ability and the good face and all of that and could call a good game and had a great arm and also had some power. He hit, I think, 311 in high school with eight homers in 61 games, something like that.

But people talked about how he was a leader and just inspired his teammates and all of those things that you would assume would be true probably of Tom Brady. But right-handed thrower, obviously left-handed hitting catcher. And it sounds like he had it all going for him. And scouts at least said, yeah, he could be a future all-star type talent. The coach of his high school baseball team said that he had seven catchers who went on to play professionally, and Brady was better than any of them. And Brady also went to the same high school as Barry Bonds, which is kind of cool. Potentially the goat in multiple sports went to the same high school,

but it's really kind of an interesting what if, although less interesting, I guess, because when you turn out to be the best of all time, there's not that much intrigue in asking, well, how good would he have been at baseball? Not as good as he was at football, I it's safe to say almost certainly like i suppose there is a timeline where he is the best baseball player to ever live or whatever like that i guess we have to acknowledge that that is a possibility but he is quite literally the best quarterback to ever play football yeah and

and sometimes i mean one of the arguments for choosing baseball over football for a multi-sport athlete is hey you'll get less banged up you'll have a longer career right like i don't think that applies to brady either unless he was going to be carlton fisk or something like right 20-year career in the nfl and was still playing at a high level at age 44. So tough to beat that, especially for a catcher. So he got the longevity. He also got the fame and all of the other trappings that come with being the best ever at your sport. So yes, I think he chose wisely. But there's a lineage of guys like that, the Kyler Murray's and the John Elway's who had some hypothetical baseball career. And you wonder if although in this case i guess it's more

interesting to wonder how would football have been different without tom brady than it is to wonder how would baseball have been different with tom brady so a football without tom brady yeah a lot of other fan bases probably would have been happier over the past 20 years, I guess. I mean, it's such an interesting thing to contemplate because I and I don't say this to take anything away from Tom Brady, even though I guess I am about to do that. But he's not a listener, so it's fine. It's like, you know, how much how much of Tom Brady's success is Tom Brady? Like, what is Bill Belichick without Tom Brady? That might be the most interesting question to contemplate.

And we've gotten a preview of it, you know, at various points in Belichick's career, obviously. But when you think about his most successful eras, they were sort of peas in a very strange and at times gruff pod. So that's an interesting counterfactual to contemplate. But yeah, I guess, uh you know fare thee well go eat a strawberry stop trying to sell me crypto i don't want to do that no thank you apparently the expos brought him in for a workout after the draft and or it was really just a meet and greet they

were giving him the vip treatment and trying to seduce him away from his football career and so they paired him up with some players major leaguaguers, minor leaguers, one of whom was F.P. Santangelo. And I guess they thought that those players would help talk Brady into the baseball life. And instead, just the opposite happened. And they were like, dude, what are you doing here? Like, go enjoy college, like be the big star at michigan you know you don't want to ride the bus in the minors for years and years and maybe never make it so they kind of talked him even more into playing football which he probably would have done anyway but you know anyway it's uh sad to see the last expo sort of go i guess i've had this thought before and i i appreciate like where he was drafted in the nfl relative to what his talent ended up being but like the sort of underdog quality to it has always seemed odd to me particularly after he had success and seems especially strange when like you had teams that were quite interested in signing you for like overslot bonuses.

So I'm just saying like, I don't know. It seems like you maybe were invested in that narrative and it didn't fit. I don't know. These are just thoughts I'm having that I'm sure we won't get any emails about at all. Right. All right. So what we did want to talk about was another email from a listener named Ben and his wife, Kristen. And they wrote to us this week, and this is Ben writing. He said,

Since we got married, my wife and I have made it a nightly ritual to watch a few minutes of Ken Burns' baseball documentary before going to sleep. We usually stick to the episodes in black and white. There's something about the use of still photographs and the period-appropriate music that lends itself to cuddling up in bed and drifting off to dreamland perhaps this is an indictment of the documentary itself it literally puts us to sleep every night but i think we would just call it soothing that's a much kinder word and i would call it soothing too because sometimes we hear from people who use effectively wild as a sleep aid yeah and i don't take that as an insult either all right we've watched so much of this documentary that our favorite lines have become part of our lexicons.

For example, my wife will often recite what Don Little said to Marv Grissom after Willie Mays made that improbable over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series. Little had relieved Sal Magli and was brought into pitch to one batter, Vic Wurtz. It was Wurtz's long fly ball to center that Willie Mays caught. Now with Little being relieved by Grissom, Little waited for Grissom to reach the mound, then handed him the ball and said, I got my man. That's a great story. This is the line my wife will often use after putting one of our two children down to bed while I'm still trying to wrangle the other. All right. ventured off into the episodes covering more recent years and watched the last episode,

The Tenth Inning, which came out in 2010, 16 years after the first set of nine innings was made. It made us wonder, it's been 12 years now since The Tenth Inning. Is Ken Burns planning to produce an 11th? One of the starkest moments in the most recent episodes is a writer and Giants fan musing about whether he will ever see a Giants championship in his lifetime. Little did he know that there were three to come in the next five World Series. We'd love to see him interviewed again after all that postseason success. So our question to you both is, if Kent Burns consulted you on what stories should be told in the 11th inning, what would you include? And there has been some speculation about an 11th inning happening at some point I think back in 2010 when the 10th inning came out Burns suggested that maybe he would make an 11th inning in 2020

Obviously that didn't happen But at the time he said that if he were to do it He would start with Armando Galarraga in the imperfect perfect game But that was a long time ago. A lot has happened since then. He was also asked about this last April on the Hollywood Reporter TV podcast. And I will play a brief clip from that here. I'm curious from your point of view, after an unprecedented season like 2020, are you tempted to explore that with an 11th inning, having already obviously done the 10th? I made to explore that with an 11th inning, having already

obviously done the 10th? I made a huge mistake after the 10th inning. People said, you're going to do an 11th? And I said, well, I suppose, meaning no. But if the Cubs won the World Series, yeah, right? Because that was the last remaining big domino to fall after my Red Sox won, which was one of the reasons we made the update of the 10th inning. Not the only reason, but many other things, steroids and strikes and money and Yankees and Braves and stuff like that. So we, yeah, there's one. And I think the pandemic season sort of adds yet another storyline that we could do it. The problem is bandwidth. You know,

the older I get, the more projects I'm working on because I'm just greedy. You know, I want to do, I have, if I were given a thousand years to live, I wouldn't run out of stories in American history. There's just, you know, you just feel that urgency of time and you want to keep doing it. So it's finding that sweet spot to do it. So basically he said he'd like to. He just has to find the time. So it could happen. And he went 16 years between the ninth and 10th innings. Maybe he'll go 16 between the 10th and 11th, and we'll get this in 2026 or something, in which case we have a few more years of history here that we don't even know about yet.

But based on what we do know now, we just wanted to briefly talk about what the big storylines would be or what the theme of the 11th inning would be if we could identify one. And just to recap, I think the ninth inning, the original doc aired during the 94 strike, right? And sort of ironically ended on the note of saying, oh, the World Series has survived everything and has never been canceled. And it was just then. But that's when it ended. So the 10th inning basically picked up from 92, which was more or less where the ninth inning had left off. mid-90s labor strife and the strike and the steroid era and Barry Bonds and the Yankees dynasty and the internationalization of the game and Cal Ripken and Red Sox Yankees and the Red Sox breaking their curse Burns of course is a big Red Sox fan and I think it ended with the 2009 World Series I think that was the last thing covered although maybe the second half of that decade was sort of skimmed over. But that's where it ended. So, you know, 2010 on what would have to be the focuses of the 11th inning. I would feel for Burns a little bit because I think that some of the themes that you would have to highlight in order to do justice to that decade of baseball without centering how data has altered the way

that we understand the game, how we understand who's good in the game, how teams go about developing players. And then I guess from there, you would use that as an entry point to some of the strange profit and winning incentives that the game has experienced over the last decade, whether it's spending some time on the phenomenon of tanking as it's sort of broadly understood or the decoupling of profit and winning, because that's clearly been an important, if unfortunate, theme of the last decade. So I think that that's probably where you start. And that maybe gives you a natural transition into talking about sign stealing right because you kind of have to end it with that or maybe not end it but you know the what

happened with Houston sort of has to be a part of that conversation so yeah that's sort of the beginning and then gosh you could do an entire episode on the pandemic and its effect on baseball right yeah I was listening to a little bit more of that Hollywood Reporter podcast, and they did ask him about the Astros and the sign-stealing scandal. And he sounded sort of underwhelmed by it, like he kind of poo-pooed it. And maybe he wouldn't if he actually made the documentary. But his take was basically like, oh, you know, this goes back to Bobby Thompson. Like, this isn't new.

You know, if you have some awareness of of baseball history then this is just the latest incarnation of that and of course it goes back well beyond bobby thompson but it was such a huge story yeah and it was a bigger story than bobby thompson and really any previous sign stealing scandal because of the way it came out and the fact that it came out with a player who went on the record to talk about it and just a couple of years after the fact as opposed to decades down the line. And so it was still very fresh and a lot of those players were still on that team and it was just so scandalous and also you could hear it. There was auditory evidence of it happening so you didn't have to rely on hearsay, essentially.

So for all those reasons, it was obviously just an enormous story. I don't know whether it had a huge effect on the course of baseball history. I mean, obviously, like there were crackdowns on sign stealing. But beyond that, I don't know whether there will be continued reverberating effects. But yeah, I mean, in the 10th inning, he talked about one form of cheating and steroid use. So he would have to find some time for not only science doing this one, but also sticky stuff, presumably. And yeah, I think if you were going to try to come up with one framing device so that you're not just saying, and then this happened and then that happened. Probably, yeah, like the analytics era, right?

Which had already begun when the 10th inning aired, but was a little less prevalent then and you can sort of see the arc of it now. And not that I would want the whole thing to just be about like three true outcomes and strikeouts and pitcher usage and all of that. But that has been a really big part of baseball history over the past 10 years. So if you wanted to hang a bunch of other trends on that, then that suggests itself as kind of the most obvious thing. Like, yeah, I mean, you could talk about the economic changes, as you said. It doesn't really lend itself to riveting documentary material necessarily.

We don't even have the books. Just talking about payouts from MLBAM and revenue sharing and big broadcast TV money and all those national deals and all of that. You'd have to mention that, but it's not super fun to talk about or hear about, I guess. So maybe it is more entertaining to keep the focus on the field and the way that baseball tactics have changed and the player development changes and the skills that are emphasized now are just generally like velocity going way up over that period or strikeouts going way up over that period or just pitcher usage changing starters going much less deep into games like that would have to be a big part of the theme of the 12th inning is gonna have a gambling component to it right like if we're thinking about the things that are sort of big monumental shifts in the way that the sport thinks about itself obviously analytics has a much bigger impact on the play that we end up seeing on

the field and you know how players are selected and developed but it's still wild to me the shift the sort of philosophical shift toward gambling has gone on and i understand that like you know when people say that they're like what about pete rose and it's like well pete rose is doing like a very specific bad thing so like that is i get why that is invoked but it is i think importantly different than like having a sports book at the ballpark but holy crap there's gonna be sports books at several ballparks it's yes not just one ben several there was news about that this week right with nationals the cubs maybe cubs d-backs are reportedly going to be in that business soon so you know if we look ahead to kind of

what the next offshoot of the way that the league understands like how it funds itself and makes money you know that is going to be the the next weird frontier and we probably can't even anticipate the the stories that we're going to end up telling as a result of that i don't know that the league can either which might mean that they should slow down a little bit but that's a conversation for another day yeah so much has happened in the past decade that I don't know if it's recency bias or not, but it seems like it's been more eventful than a lot of previous decades,

at least just in the overhaul that's happened in the way that the game is played and the economics of the game. I mean, you could start out with the Giants, presumably, and their playoff runs and their World Series and Buster Posey's injury and the Chase Utley slide and the changes that came from that. But you also have the Cubs breaking their curse, which is, you know, if you had to pick a single baseball story of that decade, it's probably the Cubs finally winning the World Series, right? it's probably the Cubs finally winning the World Series, right? And I think that Burns has said and said in that podcast that he joked about having to bring the documentary back if the Cubs finally won a World Series, and they did.

So you'd have to talk about that too. And then you do have, you know, you have Trout. You have Harper. You have Otani. Of course you have Otani. That's got to be in there too. You have Otani? HFX, StatCast, just like, you know, robot umps in the minors, just all of that has to be part of it too. And I guess the question is like, who's the signature team of that period?

Which is a question that I considered in an article at the end of 2019. I wrote an article for The Ringer about like, what was the team of the decade? Which is sort of a silly prompt because you end up spending the entire time defining what you mean by team of the decade. Is it the team that won the most games? Is it the team that won the most championships? What is it? And ultimately it came down to the Giants and the Astros for me. And I went with the Astros not just because they had been successful, like you could certainly make a case for the Giants just based on winning the most rings, but I went with the Astros because I felt like they were the most emblematic on tanking. And then they were a team that built up one of the best super teams of all time, and certainly

of that decade. And they were a team that was associated with the changes in player development. And I published that piece just prior to the revelations about sign stealing. And so I did get some Giants fans who were mad mad at me were tweeting like, how about now? And in a way, though, I think that only strengthened my case. Because my case was not the Astros are the most virtuous team of the decade. Like, if anything, they're the most nefarious. But they are the team that was just like at the center of all of the scandals, all of the innovations. Like, it was just all astros you know and maybe they're

more villains than heroes or they're anti-heroes or some combination of both but whether it's sign stealing or sticky stuff or whatever like whatever big trend happened during the period from 2010 to 2020 like the astros were at the center of it so yeah i don't really regret that decision i guess so the astros would have to be a big part of the story yeah as would the giants i think for different reasons and then probably the dodgers have to be in there too and then the cubs just for that lone world series so i think you'd want to have and you know those those teams could be an entry point to some of this stuff too just given the success that they have had from a player development and drafting perspective like i think you can't tell the labor story of the last decade you know you certainly would want to talk

about sort of how badly the relationship between the players association and the league has frayed and what some of the idea like reasons for that sort of those issues are but i i think you also can't really tell that story without talking about the minor leagues in the international space right like you can't talk about labor in the last decade of mlb without talking about you know for instance the last big scandal before the astros stealing scandal, like everything that happened in Atlanta. And you can't talk about the last decade without talking about minor league contraction and how the experience of the minors has really galvanized that piece of baseball and that space in baseball and the people who occupy it to try to advocate for themselves and you know assert a

right to a living wage so maybe he just has to do a whole new doc like you know doing 10 years in i guess it was a a wild project to try to do all of the history that preceded that in the number of innings he had but i think you're right that so so much has happened and some of our understanding of its importance to the history of the game is definitely recency bias, but also, if only so that we could get more photos moving across the screen in color. I think I'm advocating for a much longer doc you could do, you know, and you could do a chapter on analytics, you could do you know and you could do a chapter on analytics you could do an inning on labor those are of course related concepts you could do you know you should have like one fun

actual baseball inning i think right like you could just have a very long home run oh the ball oh my gosh oh my gosh so much has happened that's uh i don't even know how to sum that up because we're still wondering what the heck is going on. But yes, the debate about the balls construction and the record home run rates would have to be part of this. And also, I guess the last day of the 2011 regular season, if you just want some fun on-field action, that would be part of the story too. I mentioned Trout and Harper and Otani. I mean, Kershaw's got to be part of the story too i mentioned trout and harper and otani i mean kershaw's got to be part of the story of that decade too so yeah i think the 10th inning was like a top of the 10th and bottom of the 10th it was like four hours yes i think you might need

more than that to really do justice to the story of the last 10 years of baseball and now it's more than 10 years it's 12 years and you've got the whole pandemic season And who knows What comes next with the next CBA And do we lose games Again because then that makes this Work stoppage a bigger story as well And then are there bigger On field changes in the next few years

You know do we get a mound Move do we get robot umps Whatever all of these changes that are being Tested more aggressively in IndieBall in the minors could be coming to a MLB ballpark near you. So that could be part of the story, like baseball finally confronting its issues with contact or pace of play and trying to modernize or appeal to a younger audience, etc. So, boy, there are just a lot of threads to follow here. So you better get started on this before much more history happens. Yeah.

Gosh, the ball. I don't know. I feel like baseball needs to get its act together. This is too much not on the field stuff. Yeah. I can't wait for the emails we're going to get being like, what about this thing? And they'll be like, yes, that is also a thing that we need to or like, think about you could do you could do episodes on the way you could do an episode entirely on the ways that baseball is and is not living up to like some of the, you know, diversity and inclusion initiatives. Sure. Right. Like you could do an episode on the women who are coaching now and all of the folks who, you know, probably should be getting those opportunities and still aren't like there's just all kinds of stuff happening.

Yeah. And the original baseball doc was pretty good about shedding more light on the Negro leagues, at least by the standards at the time, and obviously introduced Buck O'Neill to a wider audience and talked about Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. But maybe you could also talk about the reclassification of the Negro Leagues during this past decade. And I don't know whether it would make sense to cover the centennial of the founding of the Negro Leagues and some of the events that happened around that or just go back and add another supplemental Negro Leagues episode now that there's so much data available and so much more research that's been done for sure you know so it's kind of opening Pandora's box if you're like yeah we'll go back and do even more about those earlier eras but particularly

with the Negro Leagues there's just much more that has come to light. Yeah, we have so much more information. Yeah, yeah, we could do a really good job of telling more of that story with a lot of richness and texture to it in a way that even five years ago, 10 years ago, we couldn't really do quite the same way. Yeah, that would be great. You'd probably want to say something

about like Bonds and Clemens not getting into the Hall of Fame as a ca to the whole hall of fame debate right yes following up with how the writers have handled or not handled that era and ken to be clear for whatever reason you end up listening to our silly little baseball show i am not asking for an entire episode on hall of fame discourse i want you to know that is not a thing that i am asking for i entire episode on Hall of Fame discourse. I want you to know that that is not a thing that I'm asking for. I'm saying that it is a thing that you probably have to reckon with in some way, shape or form because it sort of

completes a chapter of this story that you started to tell, but it doesn't need to be an entire episode. It should be as little of it as possible. Just like go talk to Jay and then be done. Yeah, the WBC, I guess the WBC started in 2006. I don't remember whether that was mentioned at all in the 10th inning, but that's become a bigger deal at times, I guess.

And there are some tragedies, too. I mean, the deaths of Jose Fernandez or Oscar Tavares or, you know, maybe kind of the reckoning with domestic violence that has happened in MLB over the past several years. It's hard to know how to balance the on-field and off-field stuff, but that's been pretty significant too. So, and all of the slowdown in free agency, I mean, that's related to the labor situation, obviously, but boy, there's an awful lot of material out there, Ken. So get cracking.

Yeah. I mean, the nice thing about asking for more Ken Burns baseball from Ken Burns is that I imagine we'll have a lot fewer notes about it than we did Tom and Jerry. Yeah, probably. I would think so. I would think just a lot fewer notes. So we'll be like, yeah, it's mostly OK. Yeah. You know know it's a

complex game with a rich history and the longer you wait to tell its story the more episodes you have to do and we live in a like 10 to 13 episode max kind of world so gotta get cracking yeah I don't know if you need a 12th inning because the zombie runner usually ends the game after 10

or 11 sadly but yes, I would encourage him to do this. I think it would be nice if Ken Burns baseball could be continually updated, you know, eventually maybe by someone other than Ken Burns, I guess when that becomes necessary, but it is a great resource. I mean, there are certainly some things there like, you know, some of the stereotypes about Ty Cobb, for instance, that I think the original documentary plays into. And some of the subsequent biographies have exposed just how much of that was really fabrication or exaggeration by an earlier biographer, Al Stump, who was just really trying to make a buck and make the story as sensational as he could and kind of take advantage of Ty Cobb. And then that reputation was solidified by subsequent works, including Ken Birdson's Baseball, I think. So I don't know if you can

go back and try to correct the record a little bit. But even if you just let what was done stand and just continually add to it, it is probably the best resource. I mean, obviously, you have to have, like, a lot of time. It's like, what, almost a full day of Ken Burns' baseball? Oh, yeah. I mean, it basically is. Like, if you count the 10th inning, I think the running time is, like, a day. Essentially, it's, like, close to 24 hours at this point.

And if you add in an 11th inning, then it's definitely going to be a day or more. So you have to be in the mood. But I guess, you know, if everyone can get into eight hours of Beatles documentaries, then if you're interested enough in baseball and American history, then maybe you can do three times that for baseball. So just to have that be an up-to-date resource would be a good thing for baseball and it would also really help out mlb network which is just running kevin costner movies and ken burns baseball on a constant loop during the lockout so more programming i don't want anyone to hold me to this because i might be misremembering it in the fog of this protracted lockout situation but i think i remember that like they hit they started running ken burns baseball

like day one of the lockout and i was like you are using that material far too early this is going to go on much longer what are you doing why are you using that now yeah we do need can i can i offer an unrelated thought that this is making me think of the circumstances around it are really bad but it has been cool how much how many old games that i had like not seen or not seen in a long time are on mlb network and i would just offer the following programming note to mlb network which is that when when the lockout ends and you guys decide you can talk about the existence of living and active baseball players again, you could show me less Costner and more old games and rebalance that programming in a way that I think a lot of people would enjoy because it's pretty cool to scroll through MLB TV right now and be like,

oh yeah, they're showing me that game and look at that. Look at how fast it was yeah or like look at you know there's peak pedro cool i get to engage with this for a couple of hours so i'm not saying that the circumstances are good and look you know a little a little costner is fine although you should just play 30 you should play 13 days that's not a baseball movie but it has kevin costner in it and it remains underrated. But you could play more old games with the

current stuff and I think it would help to answer what Burns has doctored, which is weaving the tapestry and filling the holes in our historical understanding of the game. I'm sure that Ken Burns would agree. I don't think that he should be the sole arbiter of that right there are a lot of different perspectives on baseball

like i would be really excited to see documentaries from other documentarians who come from different backgrounds and walks of life and have a different perspective on the game you know maybe the maybe the answer for ken is that like he does you know one more inning and then he kind of under the umbrella of his framework sort of lets a different person take over the next one and we can see how they understand the game like that would be really cool because at the very least someone with a different haircut i say that with affection but like it's been the same for quite a while all right well yeah you're right and i think fangraphs really is uh exploiting a market inefficiency here by adding photos yeah time when photos are not available via mlb.com

it's like hey if you want to remember what these guys look like now you can go to fangraphs.com yeah yeah it's like it's us and bp with all these happy faces look at there's freddie freeman you remember freddie freeman how he doesn't have a contract yet? Well, he's right there on the homepage. You can see it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Look at this big boss mobile that Shinjo rode into spring training. I don't even know what you call this vehicle.

It's like a combination motorcycle, except that it has three wheels. It's like motorcycle in front car and back there's probably a name for this but that's what he showed up to on his first day in spring training he also uh surprised his players with a firework show at spring training and the fighters are selling big boss gear at the team store. What? They're in the Big Boss business. Gosh, I can't imagine that this gets very good, you know, like miles per gallon. This doesn't seem fuel efficient at all.

It's like you're, what is this? It is like a car. It's like a car and a motorcycle had a weird baby. And then we added leather seats. So, you know. Wow. I think we need some of this big boss merch though. I think we

might need some of this. I want the big boss tote bag. And maybe the mug. I'd like both of those. Can we order these online here? I mean, probably, right? Oh, can't ship to the US rights right now no oh no devastated replace girl boss with big boss i like this better god yeah i should replace it with something all right maybe the 11th inning can just be about shincho or it can just be about otani too that can just be a whole episode i

forgot to mention the gq cover when i was listing off otani's uh recent cover model ops not just uh bill james handbook and ron chandler's baseball forecaster and it'll be the show 22 but also gq yeah i mean like you need to really run the gamut from least to most horny and i think we put like the bill james handbook at one end of that spectrum and gq at the other i'm just saying like that's that's the run i don't know whether the ron chandler baseball forecaster or the bill james handbook is at the extreme end of that spectrum but somewhere in the same region those are some words that i don't know that i needed to put in a sentence together but i did it i did it i am an owner and a proud owner of at least one of those books. No shots.

Just saying. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastfangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. We need your emails now more than ever amid the lockout. You can follow Effectively wild on twitter at ew pod you can find effectively wild on reddit at r slash effectively wild thanks as always to dylan higgins for his editing and production assistance and we will be back with another episode a little later this week talk to you then The way the season sounds The eleventh hour now When coal is cut across the sky It's saturated dye

In actual emergency now. It's really going down. Curled up by the fireside. It's 96 tonight.