Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1809: How Harmful Would a Longer Lockout Be?

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball equivalents of a stat about the New York Nets’ former big three, review Rob Manfred’s comments to the press about the labor situation (with an emphasis on his assertion about MLB teams being bad investments), Stat Blast (29:05) about players who batted at the bottom of the […]

But if you give me just one more chance, I swear I will never lie to you again. Because now I see the destructive power of a lie. They're stronger than truth. I can't believe I ever hurt you. I swear I will never lie to you again. Please, just give me one more chance. I will never lie to you again. I swear.

Hello and welcome to episode 1809 of Detectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. There's a big basketball trade consummated shortly before we started recording here. This is not a basketball podcast, so we will not be giving you in-depth analysis of James Harden going to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for some Sixers players, including Ben Simmons. But it did make me think because some people were sharing the sort of tragicomic stat about the Nets when they have had their big three on the floor at the same time, right?

They put together what was supposed to be a super team. And then for various reasons, refusal to vaccinate, inability to stay healthy, etc. They have played 16 games in total together over the course of multiple seasons, and they've gone 13-3 in those games. So in that sense, the plan of putting together Kevin Durant and James Harden and Kyrie Irving worked out great. The only problem is that they have almost never played together. That made me almost envious because we don't have a perfect equivalent for that sort of stat in baseball. Kind of the plus minus, you know, when this guy is on the floor or on the ice and when he's not and how does the team perform differently and what are the ideal alignments of players on the floor at any particular time. And in baseball, that doesn't work so well because any one baseball player doesn't make that huge an impact. Typically, you can have a great player and still a lousy team or a lousy player and still a great team. And so you will occasionally see the team has gone X and X when this guy is in the lineup and Y and Y when he's not, right? But it is often not all that dramatic. And it's also not that trustworthy because the samples are sort of

small and a sample of a certain number of baseball games is less reflective of the team's true talent than the same number of basketball games, for instance. So I sort of wish we had that. But generally in baseball, you're running out the same people as often as you can. And it doesn't really matter that much if this player is on the field at the same time as that player. They're kind of doing their thing regardless for the most part, other than, I don't know, maybe a pitcher-catcher battery that happens to work well, particularly together. I guess that's one case where you could see it. And I guess, you know, we give some credence to the idea that you can have like a particularly

effective like double play combo, right? Like you can have a shortstop and a second baseman who work well together, I guess. I mean, I think that there is like a benefit to some amount of familiarity from a fielding perspective, but also I don't think that that stuff gets, how do I want to put this? Like the potential for that stuff to get like really badly goofed because of lack of familiarity, I think is a lot lower in baseball than it would be in other sports, right?

Because you're like really what you want are competent players I think is a lot lower in baseball than it would be in other sports, right? Because really what you want are competent players who can do their part of whatever that sequence is well. And I would imagine that they can do that with a fair amount of flexibility in terms of who the other pieces of the sequence are. And so their just underlying talent is probably going to be more important than their being like familiar with one another. So yeah, it's a weird thing i guess yeah pitcher pitcher and catcher is probably the place where the magnitude of an effect there with a particular set might be the most both measurable

and obvious but yeah i don't know it's just our sports just works differently that's okay yeah it's just a different thing about it is yeah it it's just like it's a different sport. Now, I know that there are frustrated 76ers fans who might wonder if Ben Simmons would be better at baseball than he was at basketball. I don't know. It's so weird to watch people snark about other sports and other transactions and players because I can tell I'm in the flow enough to kind of have a general sense of it. But I just feel so it's the best kind of gossip, I think, because it's like, oh, there's mess over there that doesn't impact me at all. And so I can just be like, I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds juicy.

You know, you just get to really enjoy it. I have listened to other people's podcast segments about this. I have a passing familiarity with the situation. And that's all i need to have yeah i i like you know it's like oh yeah you guys are you guys sure are angry about jump shots i think i don't know man you do i guess sometimes in baseball you get the this team has gone this and that when that player hits a homer or doesn't hit a homer, you get that kind of stat. And it's never really contextualized. So you don't really know, well, is that abnormal? Is that special? Because if you do the team-wide

stat where it's like, oh, well, when this team hits no homers, it goes this and that, and it's very bad. And well, yeah, that's typically the case and has become even more of the case. And so you rarely get a baseline or an average where you actually hear, oh, this is extraordinary and it's meaningful because it happened in a large enough sample. So you just don't get that all that often. Maybe there are some cases. I remember for a while, at least in one of the seasons when Mike Trout was out, it might have been this most recent season, at least for part of the time, it was like the Angels had a better record without him than with him, at least for quite a while.

And it's like, well, they're not a better team without Trout, but that can happen. Or maybe he is hurt, but someone else is healthy or someone else is hitting better. And so you can't really influence a team all that much, even if you're Mike Trout, at least over the short term. One example that did come to mind when the Royals were good in the middle of the last decade, they had their ultimate outfield for a while. And I remember writing about this in 2014 at Grantland because they had this special alignment where they had a decent defensive outfield all the time, really, but it got extra great in the late innings because they had Alex Gordon they had Lorenzo Cain but they would put Gerard Dyson in as a defensive replacement and then I think he

would play center and Cain would move to right and Nori Aoki would not be in the outfield and then that was like the ultimate elite unit and I did write about that and it actually held up like the Royals ultimate outfield versus their non ultimate outfield. There was a significant difference in terms of the batting average and slugging percentage that they allowed on balls in play or balls in play in the outfield. And so you could actually detect that, but it's fairly rare, I guess, that you get that kind of thing just because benches are not big these days. And there are so many strikeouts and all the rest. And so maybe there are fewer cases where you have the elite defensive outfielder

who comes in in the late innings as a regular thing, right? And I think I remember also writing about the Royals' late innings effort that year or 2015 or whenever it was because they had the great late innings bullpen combo and I think I showed that when those pitchers were pitching it was like when they had a lead heading into those innings they were way better than the league average of teams that had leads heading into equivalent innings whereas they were not better than the league in In other cases. So it was like when they had a lead. And they could deploy their late inning arms.

They were like an elite team. And otherwise they were not. They could not necessarily come back. To beat you as often. Although they certainly did that in the playoffs a lot. Those were just fun teams in general. I miss those Royals teams. They confounded us at the time.

But they were a lot of fun to watch and talk about. Anyway something those Royals teams. They confounded us at the time, but they were a lot of fun to watch and talk about. Anyway, something that came to mind, but mostly today on our minds, is the baseball labor situation, I suppose, as it has been a lot lately. I do have a stat blast that maybe I can sneak in at the end of this segment, just because I don't think we're doing an email show this week, but Rob Manfred took the stage and he addressed the press as he rarely does these days on Thursday. And I guess by the standards of Rob Manfred press conferences, it was not the most disastrous, but he certainly said some questionable and eyebrow-raising things. I guess the main takeaway is that there is still no labor deal, obviously, although there is reportedly a proposal from the owners finally

coming this weekend, and perhaps they will finally budge a bit. We will see. But there is no delay yet to spring training, no change in when it's supposed to start which is soon you know next week but no official delay yet he talked a little bit about the fact that the two sides seem to be on the same page when it comes to the universal dh he phrased it i think as an agreement but of course there is no official agreement on anything yet, but they have provisionally agreed that they both want the universal DH, as do I. And the eradication of draft pick compensation, I suppose, is something that he also mentioned, although there would still be a form of compensation. It's just that you wouldn't have the qualifying offer system exactly it would just be awarding draft picks to teams for losing free agents based on the quality of the player which

is something that we used to sort of have in the past like type types of free agents and classifications and then there would be questions about well how do you determine which type and classification that player is but he described himself as optimistic, which may or may not be an indication of anything. And he did note that there are some considerations that come into play with how much you can shorten spring training, which is very relevant right now. And given all the injuries that we saw in 2020 and to some extent last season too, they think that a minimum of four weeks would be necessary.

So less than the typical six-week spring training, which has for quite a while now seemed longer than it needs to be. And I guess that would mean that the owners still get paid for most of the games that they would have. I don't know. I guess they would mean that the owners still get paid for most of the games that they would have. I don't know. I guess they would lose some games theoretically. But if that is true, if they want to have at least a four-week spring training and opening day is scheduled for March 31st, well, you can look at a calendar and do the math. There's not a ton of time left for an agreement there. But I guess that was not maybe the most notable thing

that he said because he did step in it at least once. Yeah. Question. Would you say that owning a baseball team is a good investment? Rob Manfred. You know, it's interesting. We actually hired an investment banker, a really good one, actually, to look at this at that very issue. If you look at the purchase price of franchises, the cash that's put in during the period of ownership and then what they're sold for historically and we'll return to that word the return on those investments is below what you get in the stock market what you'd expect to get in the stock market with a lot more risk time for finance meg to weigh in okay so look i think that first of all all the best answers with, we talked to an investment banker.

Because who's investing in teams now, Rob? You know? You know who it is? They're guys who know investment bankers. That's neither here nor there. Actually, it's very here. So I think that there's been a lot of analysis over the years into what the exact profitability of owning a team is. And obviously, some of that analysis is hamstrung by a lack of complete information because we don't have

access to teams books. And so being able to say precisely what they have realized in profit is difficult. But I think that this strains credulity, right? This sounds like it is not true. I think that there may have been periods of time in the past where perhaps, depending on what was going on in the league then or the length of the period over which someone owned a team, that they are perhaps less profitable than they are now, that they are maybe something akin to the return you would get if you were to just invest that money in an index fund. But I think that when you think about the amount of money in central revenue that teams are taking in, when you think about, for some teams, what they realize in revenue sharing, when you think

about the money they make from their regional sports contracts, when you think about the money that they make in terms of ancillary businesses that are related to them owning a team but are not tied to the team directly. So the real estate deals that they do, the new gambling money that is going to come in to some of these teams, just considering all of those things, it strikes me as unlikely that teams are not making money just every year. And that's before we consider the franchise value that these teams accrue over time. That's before we think about the money that owners are able to gain access to by leveraging those franchise values and those assets to secure loans,

for instance, to do other kinds of stuff. that's before you think about the tax benefit that owners are able to realize by offsetting money they make elsewhere with potential expenses that they incur as part of owning a team. So I think that there's been a lot of analysis. I imagine that this comment is going to inspire a lot of analysis to see if there is any version of this statement that seems like it could be true. But I think even if you don't want to get into all the nitty gritty of the money, I just, in my experience dealing with very wealthy people in a financial context, they don't tend to like get excited about investments they know are going to be bad. That's not the way that they operate financially. And we have seen so many people eager to enter this space, right? When we think about

why franchise values have gone up and up and up and up and up, it's because when a team's ownership group is ready to sell that team, they make a lot of money in that moment, right? The Royals sold for a billion dollars, right? It's a different sport, but the Denver Broncos are up for sale and the anticipated sale value there is $4 billion. So these tend to be very savvy investors. And that doesn't mean that savvy investors don't get taken in or make mistakes or end up buying a lemon. That absolutely happens. But he asked an investment banker to analyze this. And I started out by snarking.

But I just point out that the typical owner these days, the folks that are jumping in to try to get into the baseball business are the exact kinds of people who are doing this analysis, right? It's private equity. It's, you know, it's folks who have made their money in hedge funds. It's folks who are doing, you know, like special purpose vehicle, this and that. These tend to be very sophisticated investors. It's not just people who are like, I have a lot of money and I'm really excited about baseball. Some of them might be really excited about baseball, right? They're definitely, you know, I think that like Steve Cohen gets involved in this stuff in part because he sees a profit opportunity and because he thinks it's really cool to be able

to say, I own the Mets. I mean, I don't know how his mileage has varied on that statement over the last little bit, but in general, right? Like it does seem like that is part of the motivation for him, right? This is his new weird art that he's purchasing. So that definitely exists here. But when you think about how baseball as a business has generated money, real money, in real time money over the last couple of years, and then you couple that with the value of these franchises, I think that this statement strikes me as wrong and perhaps heavily dependent on the historically, right? That might be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Yes. Maybe they went back centuries. Sure. I mean, this seems like, yeah, they hired an investment banker to torture the stats in such a way that this could conceivably be true. It's much like when you get some study about public funding of a ballpark and you get an economist or someone to tell you that it will generate a zillion dollars for the local community and you're looking at it in the most favorable possible interpretation of every piece of information that you could. And right, it's not even just the historically. I mean,

who knows what you'd expect to get in the stock market. I mean, he didn't say an index fund. Maybe he means if you're a bad investor and you buy lousy stocks and you lose a lot of money. I mean, who knows? There are ways you could parse this. And he is a lawyerly sort. He is a former labor lawyer turned commissioner in large part because he was a labor lawyer and quite successful at that. And I'm sure there is a way in which what he says here is technically correct, the best of the thing. And there's plenty of data out there to suggest that. And I've seen people suggest that historically, and historically the last couple decades, let's say it's something like a 12% return or 12 plus percent return owning a franchise.

And that's just in terms of the franchise appreciation and the sale price that you get from that i saw travis sachik tweet on thursday that since 2002 the return in the s&p 500 has been 308 percent and for mlb team values over the same span it's 564 percent so i think if you were to take a more objective look at it he would would find, and again, that is aside from any other operating income that you might have or other collective benefits of ownership or the fact that are associated. You mentioned a lot of this, but I think even if you just took a more limited look at it, or if you just look at the fact that people are still lining up to buy sports franchises and MLB franchises too, and these people are at least to some degree smart business people and would not make investments that they thought were bad or that had been bad

over the long term. So when you have billionaires queuing up to bid on teams when they become available, sure, maybe there's a little bit of marquee value that comes from that or just pride of owning a sports franchise and being a big wig in your community. But it's not just that. And I think especially when Manfred said that the risk is a lot more, I don't think there's much risk at all for most of these owners, for one thing, because almost all of them at this point are independently wealthy or the baseball team is just a line item in some larger business. Baseball team is just a line item in some larger business. But also just looking at the historic trends, there's not a lot of risk. There may have been risk at an earlier point in baseball history when you were establishing those franchises when it was less of a big business. But these days they are inheriting institutions and they are not going to go away. So I think there is not a lot of truth to this at all. going to go away. So I think there is not a lot of truth to this at all. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that every year you realize as much money as you want. I imagine that 2020, even with the

television deals to fall back on, was not a banner year for a lot of franchises, but I think the idea that you are not going to realize very substantial return with minimal risk is just a canard, you know? And I think that from the perspective of sort of advancing these negotiations, a kind of harmful one, right? Because we're not dumb. You know, I just, part of what I find so frustrating about this is that I worked in finance. I dealt with hedge fund clients. I don't think that you need to have that kind of background to look at a statement like this and just have it ring false. And so I think that it would be nice if we were treated like adults who aren't dummies because we're not generally. And the players certainly aren't. And I can't imagine that this rings true to them or feels good when they know what the league is realizing every year in their television deals.

And they know more about the individual team finances and the league's finances than we do but i have to imagine they look at this and they're like what are you talking about man like this is great business and it's a very strange position for manfred to put himself in right because he should be extolling the strength and sort of stability and and real potential of the sport. And from a business perspective, this is part of it, right? Like he started his press conference talking about blockchain, right? The potential of NFTs and all their related nonsense. And we might think that that stuff sucks, but like there's clearly money to be made

here. And so it just strains credulity. I don't think you have to say, well, you know, there's a lot of risk of risk here it's like i don't know who's risking games right now rob right yeah or even the fact that the owners don't seem desperate to get a deal done here and didn't even really in 2020 either so if they were hemorrhaging money here maybe they would be taking a more aggressive tone or a more responsive tone. Although, as Rob Manfred pointed out, phones work two ways. Oh, man.

That's another comment he made. I just, I, yeah, yeah. So many, there are some spicy meatballs in a transcript that only is four pages long, really. Yes. So I don't think that anything that was said here is all that surprising. I do think that it is interesting to hear him position the owner's sort of stance and tactics. I think that if you read this, it seems to me that their understanding of their position is very similar to what it was before players could really engage with these questions in an easy

to find way on social media. You know, we've talked before about not wanting to overstate how much the average fans impression of these negotiations has changed over time because we obviously engage with a pretty curated segment of the baseball viewing and writing population. But I don't know that people are buying this line of thinking to the same extent that they were before. And I don't know that that's ultimately going to make all that much of a difference in these negotiations, because clearly we don't have a seat at the table. And the amount of pressure that fans can exert in these moments, I think, is for better or worse,

pretty limited. But in terms of how it's going externally i don't i don't know that this is reflective of sort of the moment you know manfred talked about not being on social media and i think that's probably good for him because it wouldn't be very nice like rob they're not saying nice stuff about you on twitter so maybe stay off there but i do think that it means that he is perhaps like missing out on understanding where a lot of people are sitting now i i imagine that he has plenty of people who like have to engage with right so it's not like he's completely immune from this stuff or completely ignorant of it but i don't know he talked about how he was you know he was the last guy he got the last deal done and i was like rob we know Rob, we know. Yeah. Like, we know. Yes.

Yeah. And he sounded, I don't know if it's aggrieved or disappointed or what, that the players are maybe not quite rolling over to the extent that they had in some previous negotiations. He said that this has been a little bit different than some earlier ones, but maybe there is a reason for that. Anyway, I think, yes, just look at the actions, not the words. I mean, if people who can afford to buy baseball teams are still lining up to buy baseball teams, then they probably do think it's a good investment regardless of what they or what Rob Manfred, their proxy says. But you're right. I think that has kind of been a constant of Rob Manfred's regime

is not talking up the product. And I'm not one of these people who thinks that baseball is not as popular as it could be because MLB is bad at marketing the players or whatever. I mean, that may be true to some extent. It may have been true to some extent, but I don't think that moves the needle in a really obvious way. If MLB has a good marketing campaign, is that going to suddenly catapult it to the NFL's popularity or something? I don't know that the league itself has that much direct control over that, but it is true. I think that while Rob Manfred's job really is just to get deals that are advantageous to the owners and make them money, and he is doing a pretty good job of that historically, you'd like to think that maybe part of that would be making baseball sound appealing, making it sound like something you would want to be involved in and follow and watch. And so much of his tenure has either been removing the romance from baseball by boiling things down to a hunk of metal or whatever he calls the World Series trophy, et cetera, or by making it sound like baseball is a disaster and

everyone is losing money and it's just in dire straits and also the product on the field is not compelling and there's some truth to that and in some ways I'm more sympathetic to his position than the player's position at times when it comes to things like pitch clocks etc where sometimes it seems as if the players who are sort of impeding progress that personally I would like to see but you definitely don't have Rob Manfred really being a great ambassador for baseball. That is not one of his gifts. He has gifts, but they are not gifts that are all that advantageous to fans. Yeah. And I tend to agree with you that the league's marketing successes or failures,

they matter, but I don't think they matter as much as they are often made out to matter. But I do wish that we were treated with an assumption of sort of being able to parse, excuse me doing a swear, parse better than we are, whether it's this stuff, the ball, there's just a long list of things where we have been talked to as if we can't critically engage with the subject matter. And I don't think that that's the case. And it makes us, or I'll speak for myself, it makes me feel distrustful of it because generally when someone is treating you like a dummy, they're trying to pull one over on you. So I'm not a party to the negotiation. So maybe Rob doesn't care about that. But I don't think that it puts him in a position where he is seen as a compelling steward of

the game. And I don't think that it tends to line up with the reality that we see, whether it's the profitability that we are able to deduce from the league or the way that the ball behaves or whatever it is. We can engage with this stuff critically. And often when we do, we come away saying, well, why'd you say it like that? That was obviously wrong. And that's not a great position for the commissioner to be in. I think you can be a vocal and passionate advocate for the side that you have to represent here without doing that. So I find it disheartening. I do. Yeah. All right. Well, we do have a guest today and we'll be talking about more disheartening

stuff, I guess, sort of. So just let me hit you with a quick stat blast here, unrelated, so that this entire episode is not disheartening to some degree. Here's a stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day step last. Okay, so we got a question from a listener and Patreon supporter named CJ Pentland, and he emailed us to say, For the past while, I've been interested in how formerly elite hitters will still hit high in the lineup despite being well past their prime, such as Miguel Cabrera hitting no lower than fourth in 2021, which is pretty wild. I had not realized that.

I think he hit lower than fourth, but he didn't start a game lower than fourth. Not that the Tigers had a gangbusters offense, but still. I first thought of this when Albert Pujols still regularly hit third, fourth, or fifth for the Angels. I wondered if he'd ever move out of the classic power hitter spots, which finally happened in 2019 when he batted lower than fifth for the first time since 2001. And then in 2021, he regularly hit seventh before being released. I thought of this again when watching a Blue Jays-Yankees game in early 2021. On April 13th, Jay Bruce, shortly before he retired, batted ninth. He's never exactly been a feared slugger,

but I was a bit surprised to see someone like him hitting ninth. He had 319 career home runs entering that game. So my question is, has anyone with more career home runs at the time of the game started a game batting ninth in the lineup? Maybe I'm overlooking some obvious examples, but I feel like it's rare for any power hitter to hit so low in the lineup even when they're past their prime. Similarly, for when Pujols batted seventh in 2021, did Barry Bonds, Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth, or A-Rod ever start a game that low in the lineup when they had more career homers? Or if it's better to take this in a non-StatBlast direction, why does it take so long for someone like Pujols to move down in the lineup?

Is it out of respect to his past self, a belief that he can still hit like he used to, or simply a lack of better options to hit there? So I pose this question to frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson, who did his magic with his RetroSheet database. And he produced a spreadsheet, which I will link to on the show page, that notes every time a player who had already hit 300 or more home runs started a game batting sixth or later. Just started a game because sometimes sluggers will be in a lower lineup slot because they'll come in as pinch hitters so sure that is not really in line with the spirit

of the question so when we look at the sixth and seventh spot in the lineup ryan writes you might be surprised to see how many huge names have batted there especially later in their career of the 28 players in the 500 homer club, 23 hit in the 6th or 7th hole at least once after hitting 300 homers, and 17 did it after hitting 500 homers. In total, 8,492 games have occurred when a 300-plus homer hitter batted 6th or 7th. Only A-Rod and Henry Aaron have done it with more homers than Pujols, but considering only Ruth and Bonds are also above Pujols in career homers, that doesn't seem very notable. When we look at the eighth spot, it gets more interesting, however. Only 35 players in history have batted eighth after already having 300 career homers, and only one member of the 500 club, Jimmy Fox, has done it.

But even this isn't totally exclusive. There are names like Dave Winfield, Andrew Jones, Jason Giambi, Alfonso Soriano, Mark Teixeira, Harold Baines, Andres Galraga, etc. Maybe not many Hall of Famers have done it, but many Hall of Very Good Guys have. In total, there were 425 games split among those 35 players. So that takes us to the meat of the question here. Batting in the ninth spot and starting a game in the ninth spot with 300 homers under your belt is exceedingly rare.

It has only happened 43 times by eight players. 42 of those appearances came since 1993. And in chronological order, they appear. Lance Parrish, who did it for 27 games from may 1993 to september 1995 a period during which he had 317 to 324 homers ron gant did it two times may 16th through may 18th 2003 when he had 321 homers.

Tino Martinez did it in five games from May to October of 2005, when he had 334 to 339 homers. Ivan Rodriguez did it in three games from September 19th to September 22nd, 2009, when he had 305 homers. Andrew Jones did it once, May 14th, 2011, he had 408 homers. Miguel Tejada did it four times, May through June 2013, when he had 304 to 306 homers. And finally, the player who prompted the question, Jay Bruce, did it in two games in April of 2019, did it in two games in April of 2019, when, as CJ said, he had 319 homers. However, the all-time leader for most career homers prior to batting ninth in the lineup was 508 homers when on August 19th, 1945, Jimmy Fox decided he would be the starting

pitcher and bat ninth. That year, the final season of his career the hall of fame first baseman and occasional third baseman and catcher also decided to pitch in nine games starting two he had 113 ops plus in 80 games playing the infield and pinch hitting and a 249 era plus in his 23 innings pitching which is one of the cooler ways to go out, I guess, especially for someone with a Hall of Fame career. He batted and started a game in every position in the lineup that season. I guess he did not start a game in the leadoff spot or the eighth spot, I think, batting ninth. And again, he was in the 500 homer club by that point. And he had an odd late career. We actually talked about that in a recent episode, how he tailed off very suddenly and steeply, possibly as a result of a concussion that he had suffered earlier and some-way burst at the end of his career when he was not as much of a fearsome hitter, he did actually bring up the rear in the batting order as a 500 homer guy. And he is the only one. And I guess Andrew Jones is the only one who has done it with more than 400 homers. So it is indeed as unusual as CJ suspected.

I love Jay Bruce's 2019 line so much. Yeah. It's the, Ben, it's one of the best dumb things I've ever seen. I don't know, we talked about it at the time. Yeah. And I've talked about it since. But any line that's 216, 261, 523, that's such good stuff what a what a what a ben what a great year he had he had 24 singles and he had 26 home runs it's just it's just the best thing i've ever seen

in my life so pretty good yeah yeah in 2021 when he batted ninth he hit 118 231 235 and that's when you know that it's time to bat ninth or retire and he did both of those things he did both of those things but we should just you know there there aren't a lot of occasions to talk about jay bruce's 2019 line there's this doesn't, you know? Not even on this podcast does it come up as much as I'd like it to. And so I saw it in and I'm going to take it because when you hit 24 singles and 26 home runs, like you got to pause and think about your life.

And I guess he did. And he has plenty of time to now. So yeah, as for the part of the question about why this doesn't happen more often i think there is some reputation effect that comes into it right i mean talking about poo holes specifically the angels were not exactly murderers row during his later years with the team so that was part of it as well but i think a lot of it is just that yeah you have a certain status and it is still seen as a demotion when you lower someone in the lineup. And when it's someone who has accomplished a lot in the game, they may not take that well. There could be clubhouse blowback and at the very least an uncomfortable conversation about it and maybe you still believe that the player has a little left and could bounce back and ultimately if you look at simulations and studies the difference between someone batting

in this slot versus a slot one or two lower is almost negligible i mean over the course of a season you're talking like a runner two probably if we're talking about just a single lineup spot so it's almost just not worth the political effects i think and considerations that come into play so i think yeah and some of it might just be looking at someone and hearing their name and still seeing them as the player they once were as opposed to the player they presently are. So there might be some delusion that comes into it as well. But also it's just kind of awkward, right? To say, hey, you fearsome slugger

who is going on to a Hall of Fame career or has accomplished so much in this game, you're batting eighth today. So it's just a tough message to send i suppose yeah it would be a it would be a rough one i think that we have talked in the past about the you know so rarely do you get to decide like how you're gonna go out when you're a baseball player so few guys get to be you know david ortiz they get to go out on a great season and have that be the thing this is the end that many more players meet where the game is telling you in ways that are felt in your

body and also clear on the line of card like where you stand and I have to imagine it's really rough so you know I I don't know that I'd I'd want that either I'm feeling right I might be done now and this is perhaps another sign that it's time for me to hang it up. And there's the salary issue too, which came into play with Pujols, right? I mean, you could say, oh, sunk cost, we're spending that money one way or another, but it probably looks a little embarrassing to you if your guy who you signed to a giant deal and is maybe one of the highest played players still on your team is batting at the bottom of your lineup, you're sort of acknowledging, okay, we're not at least right now really getting our money's worth the way that we hoped we would, right? So I think

part of that is you have to swallow your pride as an owner or an executive. And sometimes the executive or the manager is not the person who was there when that deal was signed and so you might not feel quite as responsible for it but that's probably part of it too is that you're kind of conceding that this player is not what he once was and also not what you once projected him to be perhaps yeah all right so let's get to our guest and this is going to be labor related also. And this is prompted by the idea that I've been seeing suggested that a lockout or any kind of work stoppage that causes games or part of the season to be canceled would be disastrous,

right? More so than usual, even. Obviously, no fan wants to see any games canceled, but I think there is a perception that if it were to happen again, that baseball just might not bounce back from this, right? There might not be any coming back from baseball missing games now. various people and in various terms, but I guess I could quote Joe Sheehan, who I believe will be joining us on our next episode to talk about some of these issues more, but he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, having a lockout that affects the 2022 season when the fight over the 2020 season is fresh in fans' minds is an error. This isn't 2002 or 1998 or 1994 when baseball could place its audience on the line and be confident it would roll a seven. It needs some distance from waves hands in disgust. It needs money. It needs more Otani and Franco and Soto. It needs to build back goodwill. So the idea is things are not that great and things haven't been that great lately. And there are a lot of negative stories and there's a lot of competition for attention. And we had a pandemic shortened season. And so it would be especially disastrous if there were to be games lost now. I was just reading Chuck Klosterman's new book, The 90s, which is about the 90s. And it is a baseball book. It has a whole chapter about baseball in the 90s, which is partly about Michael Jordan playing baseball. It's partly about the strike, and it's partly about the steroid era.

And I'll just read you a paragraph or part of a paragraph from that chapter. What happened in 1994 hurt the ethos of baseball, and the consensus was that this had been a strike where absolutely everyone lost. Yet on paper, both sides won. The players stopped the salary cap and saw their salaries grow faster than ever before. A decade after the strike, the highest paid player in the league made almost four times what Bobby Bonilla was earning in 1995. The value of franchises dramatically increased. Hey, we were just talking about that. A club like Cleveland, valued at $103 million in 1994, was worth $292 million 10 years later. Even if you adjust for inflation, pretty strong return. The owners had banked on

the fact that no matter what they did, sports fans had no other summer option and would inevitably return, and the owners were right right so that's the contrasting view that maybe you can miss some games or at least you could at an earlier era and it's kind of okay in the long run and then chuck does talk a little bit about the idea that the steroid era or the home run race in 1998 sort of saved baseball which is something that you hear often right that maybe cal ripken saved baseball or maybe the something that you hear often, right? That maybe Cal Ripken saved baseball or maybe the steroid era and the home run race saved baseball. And I think even that is a bit overblown. And I've written about that before, that attendance and revenue really

returned to or exceeded their earlier levels or made bigger percentage increases in the years after the strike, but before the 1998 home run race than they did during or after the 1998 home run race. So the game was already well on its way back, if not most of the way back already by then. But these are the two views, right? Hey, you can weather a strike and maybe there'll be a short-term dip, but it'll all be fine in the long-term or this will be an apocalypse. This will be the end of baseball as we know it. So we wanted to try to figure out which one is more accurate.

And we are going to talk to someone who has studied this, a sports economist or economist who studies sports at Kenyon, Jarrett Treber, a professor of economics who has written about this subject before. So we will be back in just a moment with Professor Treeper to discuss. I am a liar. Yeah, I am a liar. Yeah, I like it. I feel good. Oh, I am a liar. All right. We are joined now by Jarrett Treeper. He is a professor of economics at Canyon, where he does economic analysis on amateur and professional sports, as well as non-sports related subjects. And in 2016, he became the lead author of a study for the Journal of Sports Economics called Empty Seats or Empty Threats, which attempted to assess the impact of

work stoppages that cancel games and sometimes cost us seasons in professional sports. Professor Treber, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So your study was primarily focused on the NHL, and there haven't been a ton of studies on the effects of baseball lockouts or strikes in recent years because there haven't been baseball lockouts or strikes in recent years, which has been nice, but that streak has ended. So given that you did spend some time reviewing some of the literature about the effects of previous work stoppages in baseball, what's the consensus or what's your understanding of what effects, if any, there were of the 1994

to 95 strike in MLB or earlier work stoppages that caused canceled games? Yeah. So some previous analysis had found that there wasn't much effect. Somebody looked at the 1981 work stoppage and then one of the 90s as well and found no impact. And they even looked at whether or not work stoppages that didn't affect games affected attendance. And they did not find that to be the case, the idea being that maybe people are tired of hearing billionaires argue with millionaires about issues until they just got tired of the sport. But they didn't find that stoppages that affected games or didn't affect games had any impact on attendance. Schmidt and Berry, these two pretty prolific authors, they've done a book on wages of wins. It's pretty well kind of a freakonomics of sports.

They did a study that looked at several different sports to see if work stoppages matter. And they just they didn't find anything that lasted. And then in 2006, Victor Matheson did a study that looked at baseball, basically going back and critiquing what Schmidt and Barry had done, replicating what they had done, but said, hey, you know what? In about the time that they were recovering from the baseball work stoppage in the 90s, right after that, they started building a bunch of stadiums as well, and maybe that was masking the impact. And so he controlled for that. And he did find that the work stoppage in baseball had a longer lasting effect on attendance once you accounted

for the fact that there were stadiums built after that, right? So if those stadiums hadn't happened, attendance, you would have been noticeably lower was the idea. So that was what I'd seen in baseball. And just methodologically, when you're conducting studies like this, what is sort of the baseline expectation of attendance and attendance growth that you would see in a sport like baseball? Because I think that part of what fans struggle with when they're trying to understand what the impact of a lockout is in analysis like this is sort of how would we know what attendance would have been had there not been this huge destabilizing event? So what's sort of the methodological approach to trying to answer that question? Well, that's a good question. So what they were doing was what

Schmidt and Berry were doing. And then what Matheson replicated and what we did in our study for hockey was intervention analysis. So you're kind of looking at, you're not necessarily just looking at attendance in any given year. You're kind of looking at attendance in a given year compared to an average, right. And you're seeing how it goes up and down. So you kind of have some expectation of where you might expect attendance to be relative to where it's been in the past and seeing, you know, did events change that, right? So something happened in a particular year and did that have an impact on attendance relative to, you know, some baseline of where it's been before. So that kind of gives you an idea of not necessarily trajectory of attendance just continually growing, but an idea of how it affects, how it looks relative to what it looked like in the past.

That's kind of what they did, and we replicated that. So there's ways of standardizing data until you kind of account for the fact that some of the years there's more teams, more games, those types of things. So if you standardize it in a way to kind of create a baseline and then compare from that baseline, you can see, okay, how does this event affect it relative to some baseline, if that makes sense. So you extended that work to look at some subsequent NHL work stoppages. What did you find about the impact of those lockouts? So we did pretty much the same thing they had done in baseball we did for hockey. work stoppages. What did you find about the impact of those lockouts? So we did pretty much the same thing they had done in baseball. We did for hockey and found that they've had three substantial work stoppages. And we found that the one in the 90s didn't seem to have a lasting effect. But the subsequent ones in 2004 and 5 and then 12 and 13,

The subsequent ones in 2004 and 2005 and then 2012 and 2013, they did seem to have some effect. So our takeaway was that you did it once, we let you go. You did it twice, we started to have an effect. You started to irritate us enough that we left. And so we did what they had done with attendance, but then we went a different step and we said, okay, we're going to move away from this intervention analysis, what it's called, event analysis, and just looking at pure attendance over the league as a whole, we said, you know what, maybe we should look at revenues, right?

So it's possible that attendance stayed the same. So there was a stoppage. Fans were mad. They didn't want to go as much, but teams responded by lowering their prices, and so fans said, okay, I'll come back now. Right. But that's still indicating that fan demand decreased, right. And that firms had to respond by lowering their prices. Well, that wouldn't necessarily necessarily be captured if you were just looking at attendance, right. So we thought looking at revenue might help shed light on that, right. Cause revenue is going to be attendance times prices. And that's where we found the impacts after the second and third work stoppages in hockey.

And I guess the most recent work stoppage at that point when you wrote the paper had only been a few years prior to that. But what kind of lasting effects did you find? I mean, when we're talking about lasting effects, how long do those linger? Or if we say there are no lasting effects, what kind of timeframe are we talking about? Because, how long do those linger? Or if we say there are no lasting effects, what kind of timeframe are we talking about? Because there is typically a dip in, say, year one after the work stoppage, right? But is the idea that there's a total rebound by year two or year three, or is there any specific period of time when things are supposed to recover? Yeah, right. I mean, that's a good question, right? And that's effectively what the previous studies had found was,

yeah, there was a dip either kind of in the year that the work stoppage happened if the season wasn't canceled, right? But that by the next year, it was totally rebounded, right? So if fans were upset and they were showing their displeasure by not coming, it only lasted one year, right? It was pretty much

thereafter coming back. So that's largely what we had found if we were looking at attendance. But when we turned to revenues, we found evidence suggesting, so between the second and third work stoppage in the NHL, revenues were lower than they effectively would have been had that work stoppage not happened. That's how we would interpret our findings, right? So they were long enough that it was about an eight-year period, seven-year period. Now, to the extent that what we didn't do is say, okay, let's look and see if this was bigger in year two, but smaller in year seven. We just kind of had, let's see if there was an impact that revenues seem to be smaller in that period generally. And so it's possible that it wore off, right? It just didn't show up. We don't

have fine enough gradations in our results to see that happening. But there is, I mean, if it did wear off and it wore off enough, that would, to some extent, offset that. And so we would expect that variable we use not to show effect, and it did. So I guess the idea would be that, yeah, it seemed to be there and it seemed to be lasting, right, in the NHL. Now, again, after the third effect, third work stoppage in 2012, 2013, we only had data for two years after that. So it's hard to say if that lasted six years or eight years or something along those lines, right? six years or eight years or something along those lines, right? And is there anything to indicate that the duration of the stoppage impacts the degree of sort of resistance that fans have to returning or giving revenue? Because I could imagine that if you're a fan and you lose some games, but not very many, and then you get back to playing the

sport, that the effect that that has on how you engage with it would be potentially quite different than it would be if you lose an entire season. Yeah. I mean, when you miss a, you give up a whole, you know, the world series or you give up the Stanley cup, it seems like you're really going to irritate fans. Right. And so they, that's when you most likely going to see it. And then, you know, NHL, they lost an entire season. Right. So you might've expected if fans were really going to be mad, they might've found something else to do that year. And actually there is a paper that looked at whether or not they went and watched minor league hockey more and they did. Right. But the evidence suggested didn't stick around. They came back to the,

to the age scale, not necessarily in mass. Right. Or we find that there's some impact, but yeah, we don't have any variable in there that accounts for the duration of the work stoppage. But the fact that the work stoppage is all varied across time, right? So one, you lost the whole season and the other ones you lost basically half a season. And the fact that we didn't find a bigger impact on the one where you lost an entire season. We did find an impact and it was important, but it wasn't necessarily any different. The one in 04 and 05 wasn't necessarily, the impact wasn't bigger than the impact we found for 12, 13. But you would think you could certainly see that as being the case, but we didn't have that level of disaggregation in our data to take a look at that. But yeah. think that findings about one sport or league would not be generally applicable to another?

I mean, is the NFL sort of the same as MLB or the NFL or NBA in these respects? Or do you think that some leagues are more or less vulnerable just because of their structure or the way that people consume them or how popular they are in the first place? Yeah, I'm not sure. It used to be that baseball was America's pastime, right? Maybe it's something that still is. Maybe it's been passed up by football. So you might think those sports would be insulated the most. Fans are going to come.

They want this. They need this, right? If they lose it for a year, they're going to come back. Maybe, you know, but we don't seem to be finding that, right? Schmidt and Berry, when they kind of did their analysis of all those sports, they didn't find any lasting effects on anything you might have thought the nhl in especially in some areas in the united states would be susceptible to that and i that's an interesting paper i think to their idea to take a look at would be uh whether or not the strike

effects are very across teams or at least cross regions right because you might think of in the nhl the teams in the south they've got a fan base that might not be all that diehard, right? So the baseball, I would suspect baseball, football, basketball, I wouldn't really think one would be more susceptible to fans leaving than the other. This is going to require some speculation on your part, but some of the mechanics are the same when we look at sports that have experienced multiple stoppages. I'm curious what you might think the pandemic does to the way that baseball could recover from a prolonged stoppage, because in some ways what happened in 2020 was very much not the sports fault, right? They

couldn't play when they weren't playing because of the pandemic, but they were slow to return in part because of protracted negotiations between the league and the players about the exact terms of that return. And so I'm curious what you think that might do to affect the way fans view a prolonged stoppage this year if we are to get one. Yeah, I forgot about the issue that delayed the return in the pandemic. That's right. There was a labor talk. Maybe that's a good sign. Yeah, right. or labor talk. Maybe that's a good sign. Yeah, right. To the extent that consumer preferences were altered in some systematic way when it comes to how they consume sports, they could respond

differently. Maybe they found other alternatives or maybe they found, hey, you know what? There was something I didn't even know existed because I couldn't leave my house or I couldn't leave my area. And, you know, they started to consume that a little bit. And, you know, if they're forced to do it again, they might say, you know what, I'm going to keep looking down that, that rain. I mean, we've got the development of e-sports, right. And so that's kind of an industry I don't understand really at all, but I know it's out there. My son plays video games and I know that there's people that are playing Madden football and they're competing. And so maybe that's going to be more of a draw than I would have suspected.

And so maybe we start to see some of that. I'm not sure, right? I do think the advent of betting is really going to help keep fans coming back, right? The fact that that's a bigger role. So now it's not just, I want to watch the game because I like the game. It's I want to watch the game because I have something riding on the game, right? More and more. There's all these in-game bets and all that kind of stuff.

So I think it might insulate the sports a little bit more from fans leaving. Yeah, I think that's partly what prompted this conversation is that I keep hearing very doom and gloom sentiments of what this work stoppage could mean for MLB if games are canceled or part of the season is lost. You know, to borrow an old MLB slogan, I think the idea is that this time it counts, right? This time it's going to be catastrophic because of some of the conditions that Meg mentioned, where you did have a shortened season a couple of years ago. And then, as you said, you know, there's all kinds of competition for eyeballs and entertainment time. There's all kinds of competition for eyeballs and entertainment time, and you have kind of a fractured cultural landscape as it is, where aside from the NFL, it's hard to say that there's anything that really constitutes a monoculture anymore. And so if you go away for a year or part of a year, then there are just so many other options, and people might realize, oh, I didn't even notice it was gone, and I was just as entertained as I always am. And then you might not be able to come back from that. So I think even in 94, I believe, you know, the idea that baseball is the national pastime even then was maybe a bit overblown. I

think maybe twice as many people said that football was their favorite sport even 25 years ago. But I wonder, you know, just there is that idea that I keep seeing bandied about. And it sounds, you know, plausible, at least that, OK, maybe in the past it wasn't so bad and baseball bounced back. But this time could actually, you know, be a body blow in a way that previous work stoppages weren't. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it seems pretty clear that both sides are a little bit worried about it. Right. I mean, you had baseball when it's been many years now since they've had a work stoppage. Right. It's been pretty, pretty good relations.

And I have to believe that some of that is we can't continue to jerk fans around like this. Right. But I think if it's been long enough and that's part of one of the things we did in our papers, we said, suppose that fans are not coming back as much but they gain because their costs go down. It still might be best off for them. So they might even know, yeah, we're going to lose fans. This is going to cost us, but it's worth it. I'm not sure, right? I'm curious. I'm curious if there's any change in the effect, and I imagine this is difficult to gauge

because you'd have to have a pretty solid understanding of fan sentiment, but I'm curious if there's any indication there's a change in the effect either on attendance or revenue depending on who fans perceive to be responsible for the work stoppage, right? We've heard a lot of talk about how the fans' view of the players in the age of social media has changed and that players are able to interact with fans much more directly and have been able to provide a pretty compelling counter-narrative to MLB in terms of who is responsible for the delays in the CBA negotiations and a potential continued stoppage.

So does the party that fans view as responsible matter at all? When you guys – I got the email from you guys a couple days ago. I was kind of going back and looking at that, and that's actually something that came up to me. I was like, oh, I wonder if we could redo this analysis and see does the winner or, like you said, perceived winner or loser matter. I mean, to some extent, in our analysis, the 94-95 – and it depends on if you're adjusting it historically, right? I think there it was perceived that the owners won, but over time, I think it was seen as a victory for the players because salary growth didn't stop at all right but then the subsequent ones were viewed as the owners winning right and so you're sitting okay to the extent that the first one was viewed

as a player's victory and there was no impact the next two were viewed as uh owners victories and there was some evidence that fans you know went away and didn't come back, at least some of them, then you might think, yeah, maybe fans are willing to forgive if it's the players that are driving it, but not as willing to forgive as if the owner is willing to drive it. I think that will be interesting. I mean, I hope that we don't lose games from this baseball, but when you're an economist, you're looking for data being created, right? So if it is, it'll be another opportunity to analyze, right?

What's going on? What's driving these things? And does it matter? And to it is, it'll be another opportunity to analyze, right? What's going on? What's driving these things? And does it matter? And to some extent, I think you're right. It may have changed over time. Back in the 80s and the 90s, we didn't really understand exactly how wealthy some of these people were or what the issues are, but now everything's out there. And you're hearing about team values. The Broncos are supposed to sell for $4 billion, right? That's an, I mean, millions is one thing, billions is another, right? And so if people are going, geez, that's how much teams are worth, these owners should pay the players more, right?

So I do think that that could matter, but I don't have any evidence suggesting whether it does or not. Right. And I really hope that I don't have that data to work with. Right. I really hope that we don't have that data to work with. I really hope that we don't have any games canceled. Right. That's the silver lining for our audience. If we don't get baseball games, at least Jarek gets to do a follow-up paper potentially. So that's something. I wanted to ask because you said that it may be the optimal tactic for the owners or potentially, I suppose, even the players to hold out depending on what kind of concessions they get if you assume that the historical trends

hold and things will bounce back within a year or two or three. Do you think that that calculus has shifted even further in that direction because of the fact that MLB teams at least seemingly are less dependent on attendance as a piece of the pie revenue-wise just because you have huge broadcast deals, you have centralized money coming from things like the MLBAM sale, you have revenue sharing, you have all of these sources of income that are not directly tied to how many tickets you sell. are not directly tied to how many tickets you sell. And maybe some of the reserves are depleted by the pandemic, but it seems like the amount of money that an owner can rake in from a team on a year-to-year basis or even over time via franchise appreciation seems like it's less tied to how many games you win and

how many people show up to sit in a seat. Yeah, I mean, I think if you were going to do this kind of analysis, right, going forward, you might be less interested in attendance than you once were, right? For some sports anyway, right? Yeah. And you'd really need to focus more on overall revenues, not just ticket revenues, right? You need to be looking at broadcast revenues. And to some extent, those are insulated because they're usually long-term right you're looking at five to ten year contracts with uh networks and so although i think

in the nfl when they were their last time i believe their contract had stipulated in it what happens if there's a lockout or something like that right so but uh so but yeah clearly it's these revenues beyond tickets is, is huge, right? Baseball is still important. Ticket revenue is still important because there's so many games, but you know, even that's getting dorked by broadcast revenue. So, cause really what we're interested in is fan demand. And before the fans could really only show their demand by showing at the

ballpark. Now they can show their demand by tuning into live streams, tuning into all these other types of things. And so really that's what you need to be looking at is how our fans responding. They're consuming the product in more different ways than they were before. And so we should be looking to how all of those responses are, right? Maybe they come to the park as much because maybe that's the diehard fans, but the ones who are on the fringe, you say, you know what?

I like baseball, but not that much, right? I go somewhere else. Those are the ones you should really be concerned about. The ones on the fringe, you say, you know what, I like baseball, but not that much, right? I go somewhere else. Those are the ones you should really be concerned about, the ones on the margin. I mean, we, you know, in terms of what the ISA should be concerned, I said the owners and players should be concerned about the diehards. Yeah, you're irritating them and you should be concerned about that too, but they're probably going to stick around. The ones on the margin that might affect how much revenue you collect and therefore how much money can be paid out in salaries, you know, they might have a lot of other interests, right? They're tuning into a lot of other things they can stream and those types of

things. So I think that's important, right? That's an important piece of information that they really don't have a good beat on. Yeah, that sort of segues into the last thing I was going to ask, which is whether we're not necessarily measuring the wrong thing, but at least getting an incomplete picture. Because if we're looking at short-term revenue or attendance, then yeah, you're capturing people like me, people like Meg, who are not going to be happy necessarily if games are lost, but we're still going to be paying attention to baseball on the other side of that thing. But could it be that you don't capture a new generation of fans, right? I mean, if you're hooked, if you're hardcore, and you're kind of pot committed, then you're going to come back. But maybe you just don't

become a baseball fan, because one way you become a baseball fan is by going to games and following a team, right? And if that option is off the table for kids, let's say, who are kind of in that crucial sweet spot where you often develop an attachment to a team or a sport, then I wonder whether the actual effect maybe might not manifest itself for years, for decades, where you might see some sort of blip, you know, where it's like the birth rate or something when you see, you know, major world events and there's a pandemic and the birth rate goes down or something. And maybe that shows up in aging of the population decades later or something like that. I wonder whether there could be an effect that would show up for sports leagues and might be hard to trace to that work stoppage because so much time had elapsed and other factors could be contributing to it.

But maybe it's kind of hidden in the data somewhere. Yeah, that's a great point. And you're right. You understand, right? It's probably hidden. It'd be great. It might be tough to tease out. And to the extent which group is likely to be influenced, I was, I don't know how old I was.

My teens, I guess, when the World Series was canceled, right? And so had I been 10 years younger and really into baseball, but I kind of like baseball and basketball and football. and really into baseball, but I kind of like baseball and basketball and football. And I got totally disenfranchised with baseball because I couldn't watch it. And they irritated me and all my interest got somewhere else. And if there were a whole bunch of me like that, then I grew up and I'm not a baseball fan later on. So, yeah, I mean, that's definitely a possibility. And obviously, Major League Baseball is concerned about that because participation in little

leagues is down and they're trying to figure out how to boost that up, not because they necessarily need more players, right. But because they need those people, those kids to become fans. And if anything takes away from that, then they're, they're in trouble down the road, 15, 20 years. And then, you know, and it's not just 15, 20 years, it's however long that person could have been a fan for now they won't be. Right. So I definitely think that's a good,

it would be hard to tease out in the data it would almost be interesting if you somehow had you know you could ban to you know okay we're looking at the people who were a certain age at that time and we have data on their likely how often they're going to games how much they're consuming you know 20 or 30 years later that would be fantastic It would be really interesting to look at consumer behavior in that way. But certainly, I mean, baseball is clearly aware of the thing of, you know, the fact that their popularity depends on popularity of the game of baseball at a young age. And so if you do anything to dissuade people from wanting to play baseball or watch your product at a young age, it's going to affect

what they're going to do at an older age too. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we've given you some ideas for further research here and hopefully MLB will not provide any additional data for you in the near term, but I hope not. I really hope not. Yeah. All right. Well, we have been talking to Jarrett Treber. He is a professor of economics at Kenyon. We will link to his paper that we've been discussing on our show page. And if you want to hear more from him, I guess apply to Kenyon and register for his sports economics course. Thank you, Professor Treber. That'd be great.

I love it. Yeah. Thank you for having me. great. I love it. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Well, of course, after we finished recording, Scott Boris found the perfect way to sum up what we talked about in our intro segment about escalating franchise values for teams. Here he is, as quoted by Evan Drellick, 20 years ago, MLB franchises were UFOs, unidentified and financially overlooked. Today, that UFO has landed in the clubhouse with a true definition, ultimate financial opportunity. Players are aware teams are coveted by investors and smart owners will not sell.

UFOs, not unidentified and financially overlooked, but ultimate financial opportunity. He always says it best. You know, that was on the tip of my tongue. If I'd had a few more minutes, I probably would have come up with UFO also. But that's why Boris is the best. submissions last time, but we got one more after that episode from a listener who I believe prefers to remain anonymous, but wrote, I was surprised no one wrote in suggesting Brandon Nimmo. On Mets radio broadcasts, Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo regularly refer to 3-2 counts when Nimmo is at the plate as a Nimmo. Brandon is so proud of his ability to draw walks that he sprints to first base when he draws ball four. Nimmo is a better than average player, but as working the count is

such a big part of his approach as a hitter, I thought it might fit. And yeah, I think it does. Nimmo's a good one. He's got some pop, but then who doesn't these days? So adjusted for the era, he's a decent choice. And two more responses to the conundrum of how and whether to raise a child as a fan of a particular team. Luke wrote in to say, hearing the discussion the past couple of episodes about how kids picked their favorite teams, I thought I'd share how my oldest picked his teams. I'm a Cubs fan in South Georgia and hoped my son Andrew would follow in my path. When he was first discovering sports when he was about five, he would watch games and highlights with me. He naturally was drawn to Mike Trout, as there always seemed to be a Trout highlight in 2012 and 2013,

but he also gravitated to the Pirates at that time. It took me a few days to figure out why, but he liked them because they had Andrew McCutcheon. He said he liked them because he and McCutcheon both had the same name. He became a Bengals fan in the NFL for the same reason, he liked Andy Dalton. Ten years later, that's finally paying off for him. So basically, my kid isn't a Cubs fan because I didn't think to name him after the best Cubs player at that time. I'm sure now he's okay not being named after Alfonso Soriano.

And one more message in that vein from Brian, who says, I wanted to mention a New York City dynamic about raising kids of different fandoms in the city. New York City is a city of immigrants, and that includes baseball fans who bring their love of different teams to the city. My wife and I are Red Sox fans raising two boys to be Sox fans in Brooklyn. We encounter fans bring their love of different teams to the city. My wife and I are Red Sox fans, raising two boys to be Sox fans in Brooklyn. We encounter fans of all kinds of different teams,

to the point that my son's Little League team didn't even have a majority of the kids rooting for New York teams. It's hard to generate animosity for a different fan base in this environment. I can't say this would be the same in another locale. A big key is extra innings and streaming games. It is much easier for families to sit down with their kids and watch their favorite team, which because it is Yankee Stadium, where A-Rod did something great and he decided his favorite team was the Red Sox and his favorite player was A-Rod, probably because of the reaction of so many people in one place. You don't know what kids will latch on to, but so much of it is what you expose them to. So the theme of some of these

emails is that you can control this. The theme of some of the others is that you have no control at all. I guess it's a case-by-case basis you do have control of whether you support this podcast which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks such as exclusive bonus episodes every month and access to the Patreon-only Discord group. Hilary Kirby, Jacob Barak, Carol O., Russell Bryce, and Nicholas Paluja.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and many other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance, and we will be back with one more episode before the end of the week.

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