Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1876: Overbooked

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

With Meg Rowley on the road, Ben Lindbergh does an almost-all-interview episode featuring the authors of four new baseball books: First (3:22), Howard Bryant on Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original; second (42:45), Jeff Fletcher on Sho-Time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played; third (1:19:36), […]

Dancing Ricky Your shirt's too damp, smile for your body You got your freedom out in the open Hello and welcome to episode 1876 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by my co-host Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Meg is on her way to LA for the All-Star Week festivities, so I'm flying solo, although I won't be solo for long. In fact, I bring you a cavalcade of guests today. So here's the deal. We get a lot of baseball books sent to us. We get a lot of very good baseball books sent to us. They tend to come out at the same time of year. It's tough to find time to read them. It's

tough to find time to podcast about them. But Meg's Travel gives us an opportunity today to bring you all of those books and their authors in one fell swoop. So we've got some fun plans for next week. We'll have some All-Star Week coverage, of course, but it's also our 10th anniversary and we'll have a lot of anniversary-themed content coming your way. Today, though, we'll give you a little Reader's Digest version of four great baseball books that have come out recently or are about to come out. I'll go in reverse order here just to give you a little preview. At the end of the episode, as always, I will bring you today's past blast. Before that, I will be talking to economist and effectively wild listener Paul Oyer, the author of An Economist Goes to the Game, How to Throw Away $580 Million and Other Surprising Insights from the Economics of Sports.

Before that, I will be talking to Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt about intentional balk, baseball's thin line between innovation and cheating. Before that, I will be bringing on Jeff Fletcher, who covers the Angels and has just written a book about Shohei Otani. What, you thought we weren't going to talk about the Shohei Otani book? Come on. It's called Showtime, the Inside Story of Shohei Otani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played. And before that, I'll be talking to Howard Bryant about his new biography of Ricky Henderson. Because, of course, you've got to lead off the episode with Ricky. That book is called Ricky, the Life and Legend of an American Original.

So all of these books are either available now or will be available as of early next week. And we thought this would be good timing because you'll have a week without baseball, or at least without the regular amount of baseball. Maybe you'll be looking to get your baseball fix some other way, and perhaps you will want to pick up and crack open a good baseball book. If so, I'm about to give you four options. And none of them is a weighty tome. They're all pretty readable and not too long, which is something that I'm not sure you can say

about this episode of the podcast, but I hope you'll enjoy hearing from all of these authors. You can listen to these interviews before you read the books, after you read the books, without ever reading the books, gasp. This will just be a series of four segments, and we'll go back-to-back and belly-to-belly and back-to-back, although one of those segments contains co-authors, which further complicates the bellies and back situation. And I will put the timestamps in the episode descriptions in case you want to skip around or listen out of order. It's up to you. Choose your own adventure. So let's lead off with Ricky and hope that this conversation will be his 82nd career lead off home run. Howard Bryant is a longtime writer for ESPN, a contributor to NPR and Middle Ark Media, and the author of 10 books, the latest of which is Ricky, The Life and Legend

of an American Original. Such an American original and such a big name that you don't even need a last name in the title or the subtitle. Ricky suffices. Howard, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Thank you. I'm really interested in the contrast between Ricky and this book and your previous baseball bio and baseball bio subject, Henry Aaron, who did have to have the full name in the title, or at least the subtitle. And you have high standards when it comes to baseball biography subjects. I guess we can say that, right? You're only writing books about players who, if you cut them in half, you get two Hall of Famers. Or in Aaron's case, you could probably cut them into thirds and almost have three Hall of Famers. But those guys were great inner circle players and a lot of commonalities in that sense, but such a contrast, I guess,

at least in terms of their public perception and reputation and also in the way that they approach the game. So I think the word dignity comes up a lot with both of these guys, right, for different reasons, in that Aaron, I think, was almost exaggerated in his level of dignity, right? Everyone thinks of Henry Aaron dignity almost to the point where people remember him as someone who just sort of silently turned the cheek, which wasn't really the case. And with Ricky, I think people remember a lack of dignity maybe, or that's something that he was accused of at the time. And there was a kind of dignity to him too. So maybe part of these books was about correcting that record a little bit, but I wonder how you approach these two very different subjects who are two of the best baseball players ever but got there in very different ways, especially with Aaron, who was seen as just this steadily, consistently great player, and Ricky, just the explosive, eye-catching great player. eye-catching, great player. Yeah, well, thank you for having me on. I think it is a great question,

and it's a good thing to think about. And when I think about constructing the books, it is true that you try to take on subjects that you feel have value beyond the field, that you're saying something about the culture, you're saying something about the times as well as what they did on the field. And you're right, when it comes to Henry, people talk about dignity to the fact that the word almost becomes an insult. It's almost a, it's almost as an apology that the public uses to, for their own behavior. They absolve themselves of their own behavior because of how he dealt with what was done with him. I always said when it came to Henry, people would say, well, talk about what Henry Aaron went through. And I'd said, well, I'm happy to talk about what was done to him. They're not the same thing. And so that's a big

deal. And in Ricky's case, the key that I wanted to approach with him was so many people wanted to talk about the fact or the fiction of the Ricky stories or the Ricky in the third person or the Ricky as caricature. And that really was obviously part of it. And Ricky's obviously hilarious and he's an incredibly unique individual in all of those things. What I wanted to get at with him was, one, the fact that he absolutely obliterated the record book.

But I wanted to talk about the arc with him. I wanted to talk about how if you go back and look at his career, he was not a popular player. He was not always a popular player. He was a guy that people believed did not show the type of class and the type of humility that you're supposed to show when you're a superstar grade player. And I thought that there were so many different areas that he represented that I wanted to go after. And one of them was exactly that, that how did Ricky Henderson

go from a player that people were in awe of but did not particularly like, and how did he turn into instead someone who essentially by the end of his career was this combination of of satchel page and yogi bearer where everyone can't help but tell ricky stories the the contrast the the biggest difference in the two books was with henry I had three major problems. The first problem I had with Henry was Hank Aaron was born in 1934. I was born in 1968. So we're not from the same generation. And that is a big deal. And so the last thing you want to do is place the attitudes and the perspectives of somebody born in 1968 on somebody who was born black

in the South in 1934. That was a really big deal. The second issue that I had with Henry was Henry was from Mobile, Alabama, and I'm from Boston, so you don't want to place that Northern sensibility on somebody who was born in Alabama. And the third issue is that Henry retired in 1976. I was seven years old. I never saw him play. I never saw him firsthand. So how are you going to create this character? How are you going to create the attitude and the mood and the mannerisms of someone that you really never saw play. And that's very, very different with Ricky.

With Ricky, I saw Ricky's whole career for the most part and certainly saw his big years and certainly saw them from different perspectives. I saw Ricky as a kid growing up as a baseball fan. I covered Ricky as a professional. And so it really gives you a totally different perspective on the times that you're writing about. It gives you a totally different perspective on the person themselves, because you have a lot of, you've got first person influence on the story instead of reading what other people said and whether or not that's true or otherwise. So the two projects were very, very different in terms of how to approach them.

And also the other thing with Henry is that because of his age and where he was when he started his career, there were very few players who were alive when I was working on the book who had played for the Boston slash Milwaukee Braves, nevermind Atlanta. So the sourcing was very, very different in Ricky, where Ricky, a lot of Ricky's teammates are still alive. This pandemic hurt the sourcing on that, but you could get to people. It was really, really, it was really, really tough doing this book and realizing the number of players who weren't around, Matt Keogh's gone and Dave Henderson's gone and Tony Phillips is gone and Don Baylor's gone. That was really tough to sort of take considering that it didn't feel like it was that long ago. That was a hard thing. record, although even there, there's a contrast, right? Because it took Aaron until late in his career to surpass Ruth, and he wasn't even seen as that likely to do it until he was at a fairly advanced stage of his career, whereas Henderson just obliterated the record when he had so much

time left to go. But I also wondered about what contrast there was between the two of them in terms of them as interview subjects or as participants in the book process. Because as you note, Ricky could be suspicious or untrusting or aloof or distant at times. And I know that you covered him at the beginning of your career and toward the end of his. So I'm sure that that helped a little bit. But what did he think of the fact that you were doing a biography about him and what was he like to talk to for it? Yeah. Well, Ricky's always, you never know what you're going to get with Ricky on a given day. His mood will very much affect what kind of interview you're

getting. And in this case, in the case of this book, I was very clear that I was working on a book. And you always have to be that way because you want people to understand. You don't want them to feel like they're being deceived naturally. And a lot of guys don't make the distinction between book and magazine and newspaper article, except in one area. When they hear a book, they see money. And so I don't pay for journalism. I wish there were more money involved in it than there is. Exactly. Never have, never will. And so you want to work on a book.

And I think it wasn't until the third or fourth interview with Ricky where he began to think that, okay, well, wait a minute. This is not a magazine article. You're actually writing a book. And so where's my money? And how does that work? And am I going to talk to you? And then suddenly it becomes a much more complicated process as opposed to writing a story

and quoting a guy. So there was that and that made it very difficult in some areas. And Ricky, you know, Ricky didn't participate that much. We sat down for four or five sessions and that was fine and it was good. I would have wished that we had more, but he also wasn't being paid for this. And so I get it. I know where players are at these days, and I know that they want to be paid for their time and all of those things. And so I didn't begrudge him. I wished he would have spoken more. I think it would have been better for the book and better for his story to hear from

him because everyone should have a right to talk about their own life in a way that they want to. But I also didn't have any expectations that he was going to contribute fully because this is not an authorized biography. And you got pretty close to Aaron when you were working on... Well, Henry was different. Yeah. Henry was a negotiation.

Because when I first started thinking about Henry as a biography subject, the Bonds chase was still going on. And Henry was not doing any interviews. And Henry's team was not allowing anyone to even get close to him because they all assumed that the only reason anybody had any interest in Hank Aaron was to compare him to Barry Bonds in the home run chase and to get Henry to say something negative about Barry Bonds and steroids. So Henry didn't do anything. And I remember finally sort of breaking into his inner circle and talking to his agent, talking to one of his reps and telling him, I don't care about Barry Bonds on this book. I want to do a book on Henry Aaron. Doesn't that stand on its own?

And it was fascinating how they viewed themselves at that time, that the only interest that Henry Aaron could have possibly had to the public was in contrast to Bonds. And I was like, you got the wrong guy for this. This is really not what I'm in for. I am here for Henry Aaron. And so we ended up having to make a deal that I wouldn't even ask any questions about Henry until after the record was broken. And so once Barry hit 756, then we could talk. And I told them from the jump, I didn't really have a whole lot to say on the Bonds chase because he's Hank Aaron. Of course, that's not going to be primary.

Right. And you start the book by talking about how Ricky would sometimes enter the clubhouse and announce, you know, Ricky was born on Christmas Day. And I was also born on Christmas Day. So I'm wondering if I should be bragging about that more often. But you also talk about the reality of that story and about him being born in the backseat of a car. And it's not quite as amusing and wacky as it's often portrayed. His dad was out gambling at the time and wasn't there for his family to drive them to the hospital. So that is maybe representative of the persona of Ricky, the legend of Ricky, the semi-mythical public

understanding of Ricky. Well, and the protection of Ricky, that Ricky was very, Ricky's a very private guy. Ricky is not one of those guys who's going to share every detail of his life with you. You got to catch him on the right day when he feels like being open about, you know, certain personal details. He's really not that, you know, forthcoming about those things. And so it was really nice to hear it from him because you hear all these stories. And especially when you're dealing with somebody like Rickyicky it's always ricky henderson factor fiction you're constantly trying to sift through whether the john olerud story is true or whether do you really cash a check against

and frame a check without cashing and all the different great ricky stories you constantly trying to figure out what is real what is apocryphal. And so for him to talk about his origins and for him to talk about his beginnings in Chicago and Arkansas and Oakland, I thought was really worthwhile. And it really was part of the thesis of the book. What I wanted to do in this book, and there is absolutely a connection to the last hero to the Hank Aaron book, connection to the last hero to the Hank Aaron book. It was the fact that whenever you talk to people in Mobile about baseball, they'll talk to you about that rich Mobile history. Henry, Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, Double Duty Radcliffe, and on the white side of town, Milton Frank Bowling. I mean, it's got a huge baseball legacy. But then when you would ask

Henry about it, he would just laugh and say, yeah, you know, something in the water. We just create ballplayers down here. And I didn't love that. I was like, no, everybody came from somewhere. And when I'm working on Ricky, let's start tracing how these ballplayers got to Oakland because the Oakland roster in baseball and sport is incredible that you had Ricky and Lloyd Mosby and Gary Pettis and Dave Stewart all playing on the same team as 10-year-olds. I mean, it's incredible. And that doesn't even include the first wave of Joe Morgan and Vada Pinson and Kurt Flood and Frank Robinson and then, of course, Bill Russell. So I wanted to really dig back.

It's unbelievable. I mean, it really is. It's unbelievable how many players. And to find out that all these guys, for the most part, lived within 10 blocks of each other, it's probably the greatest concentration of talent, of baseball talent in any place ever. Right. And if not, I would like to see a list of who can top that.

Right. But as you documented, it was not just something in the water. It was not a coincidence or an accident. It was the product of these larger forces that were pushing people in that direction. A hundred percent. And that's what I wanted to get at. It was like, okay, let's explore how. How did this happen? How did you get one high school with Veda Pinson, Kurt Flood, and Frank Robinson in the same outfield as 11th graders? I mean, how does that happen? Where's everybody from? And then when you start tracing, now you know you've got a great migration story.

You start tracing it and you start talking about, oh, well, goodness, Bill Russell is from Monroe, Louisiana. So is Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers. And gee, they lived two blocks from each other in West Oakland. The same is true of the Arkansas guys. You've got Ricky from Pine Bluff. You've got Lloyd Mosby from Portland. You've got, you know, Paul Silas, the great basketball player, and his family from Hope. And then you look at the guys from Texas, Joe Morgan, Curt Flood, Frank Robinson, all from Texas. And so now you start to see that there's a bigger story here. And where they were coming from, what they were leaving, and how this migration really did shape not just Oakland, but the sports history of Oakland as well. We talk about the Great Migration in so many different ways across the country, but we never talk about it in terms of sports. How did these players get to where they

live? Where are their people actually from? And it was fascinating listening to the players talk about how that took place for them. whether all those players would have gone on to become what they became if they hadn't had that crucible of the incredible competition that they faced with each other at such an early age. Yeah, 100%. And I think that that was the piece that really sort of excited me about digging into this because I was talking to Dave Stewart about it and his family was coming from Louisiana as well. And he was saying that the nickname, what did they used to call the Bay Area? They used to call it like Little New Orleans because everybody was from down there. And when you, I believe at one point, one of the statistics was just mind blowing. It was something like in 1940, Oakland was 2.8% black.

And by the end of the decade, it was something, you know, the black population had grown something like 1,600%. And 75% of the black population in Oakland was from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas. It was huge numbers. And so these three states created essentially the city that it is today. To return to that idea of the myth of Ricky and the things that he said and the things that he didn't say, was he an active participant in shaping that persona or that reputation, or was it a product of others twisting things, exaggerating things, stereotyping him, etc.? Yeah. Well, it was certainly... Ricky was not necessarily the architect of his own narrative by design. He let his actions speak for him. He was a player. And one of the

interesting things about talking with, about Ricky and interviewing Ricky, he's different now, but very few people talk about the, you know, enjoying interviewing him. They love the stories, but those stories, Ricky did not have a great relationship with media, so it's not as though he was constantly shaping and changing his origin story to support whatever mood he was in at that time. Like Hank Aaron, however, did. Hank used to actually play games with media media which was horrible for historians or or just more fun to begin to to sift into but henry would tell all kinds of stories henry where did you get those magnificent wrists from and he

would say oh i used to haul ice in the off season and then somebody else would ask him and he'd say oh i used to have a job picking strawberries and so he would just make up stories and ricky's not like that ricky the ricky story is all from just this sort of electric persona that ricky had that there he was just one of those guys his future wife pamela would tell me that when they were in high school ricky could just do whatever he wanted he could could, there was one time when the track, the fastest kid in school came in one day and Ricky challenged him to a race and blew him off the field.

Or they used to say that Ricky used to work on his speed by racing the bus from stop to stop. And that when you got him on a field, you couldn't take your eyes off of him. There was just something about Ricky as a player where he was just good. He was just always really, really good. And that created a world around him that made people pay attention because of his unbelievable ability to be the person everybody was watching once the game started. I wondered as I was reading, as you were documenting just how unpopular at times Ricky was with

fans, with media, the often unfair ways in which he was covered, how things might be different today if he were coming up now with the same sort of attitude, given how coverage of baseball players, coverage of labor relations, coverage of economic issues, et cetera, has changed, how even though baseball still kind of cracks down on individualism, at times there is more enthusiasm and celebration, I think, of demonstrativeness and emotion and character. Do you think that the world would be ready for Ricky now much more so than it was at that time? Much more a... It's a TV game now. And I think that there would be more of an acceptance of Ricky because TV runs everything. So you could watch him and you could see. However, I think that, I mean, the coverage of the game isn't really, I don't want to

say it's that much different. I mean, the world is different, but in terms of who's doing the writing, it's, you know, the press boxes are, they're nowhere near as diverse, you know, as they should be. And maybe people would have more of an acceptance of Ricky. I think they would because of where we are today. Like, for example, the arguments over money, people are past that. But when Ricky first started, an athlete who was really advocating for what he felt he was worth at a time when there was really, really bitter labor relations, yeah, people weren't really into

that. But then again, players get blamed for money today so so maybe it's not going to be that different maybe the only difference is is that the number of zeros on the paycheck he was such a unique player it would be very interesting to see how people viewed his game i think that today today marketing and advertising and branding is so much more savvy that you could sort of create almost like a Bo Jackson type character. You create a certain persona out of that aloofness, out of that distance. And so the marketers would love Ricky more today than they did back then. In terms of the day-to-day, well, Ricky wasn't a great interview back then. So it would be, in terms of his expression, it would be very interesting to see how much

different it would be because he wasn't one of those guys who would just go take the microphone and go talk. Ricky was not somebody who really sought out being interviewed. And one of the really fascinating things about writing about Ricky now, I think, is that the game is sort of unrecognizable, at least in terms of the aspects of it that he most excelled at. And so people wonder, well, what would Ricky look like today? I guess there are two ways you could ask that question. One is what would happen if you plop down peak Ricky in today's environment? Would he be restrained by the way that teams handle the running game now? Or would he break the mold?

The other question is, well, what if a player with Ricky's skill set were coming up today and were being molded in this environment, what would he turn out to be? And you do have Billy Bean weighs in on this briefly toward the end of the book, but I wonder what your thought is on, I guess, those two thought experiments of what a modern Ricky would look like. Yeah. For the first one, I wonder if he would be, if he would be here at all. I think Ricky might make the Kyler Murray choice. I think Ricky might play football. I don't think Ricky does play in the big leagues because of where everything is going. And because that, you know, maybe because of the choice that Ricky, the reason why Ricky made his choices, maybe he still ends up

in baseball. If he listens to his mother and says, you're going to get hurt. And so baseball's got a better future. Maybe he still ends up playing baseball. Or if he feels disrespected by the draft process and doesn't get the money that he wants, or doesn't feel like he's got the pathway to get to the NFL the way he wanted to do it, maybe he still ends up in baseball. I think that a Ricky Henderson today would have real difficulty. Now, Joe Maddon disagrees with me on this because Ricky was so unique. Now, it is a different game.

And I do wonder the role of the running game, especially when you can go back and review and replay everything. It's a risk-averse game. And I did talk to Billy Bean about this and I remember asking him what he felt Ricky would be in todayverse game. And I did talk to Billy Bean about this, and I remember asking him what he felt Ricky would be in today's game, and he said he'd be Mike Trout. He said, you know, Trout has much more power than Ricky, but Ricky's got plenty enough power to get the ball out of the ballpark 30 times. Ricky still has the incredible eye. You wouldn't be able to pay Ricky enough with

the advanced metrics we use in terms of the way he can affect the game. We would probably have him be a three hitter instead of a leadoff hitter because of that combination of speed and power. And we would emphasize the power side more than we would emphasize the speed. And while he was done, while he was talking, I was thinking to myself, is having Ricky bat third and emphasizing power over speed really having Ricky Henderson? and emphasizing power over speed really having Ricky Henderson? Right. That doesn't quite sound like Ricky Henderson. I was in West Palm right before the pandemic, and I was with Bob Boone, interviewing Bob Boone and talking to Mike Rizzo, the GM of the Washington Nationals.

Mike was telling me, now back when I got into the business, GMs used to tell me all the time that an appropriate stolen base percentage was 75%. You make it three out of four times, that league average is high 60s, you're great. If you're stealing at 75%, you're in good shape. Rizzo told me that the Nationals, you got to steal at 85%. To steal at 85% and above, so essentially they want you to make it- Tim Raines or Carlos Beltran, basically.

Essentially 9 out of 10 times. He says, well, what we do is we reduce attempts for accuracy. So we will sacrifice volume for accuracy. And I'm thinking, Ricky stole 130 bases one year. He attempted 170, he made 172 attempts one year. And no team does that today. And so you do sort of wonder, Joe, where I say Joe Madden disagrees with me is in that Joe thinks that because Ricky, in Ricky's prime, you look at Ricky in 1985, Ricky stole 80 out of 90 times. He was 80 and 10. So someone like him breaks the mold because he is stealing at such

a high rate at high volume. So maybe you let him do it. But you have to wonder if they would allow that because let's face it, the year he stole, when he stole his 130, his percentage was 75%. Maybe he's discouraged the same way he was discouraged when he first got into the game. And a discouraged Ricky is not an enthusiastic Ricky. So one of the things that people don't talk enough about is when you have a job, how many jobs have we ever had in our lives, any of us, whether you're a baseball player or an electrician, where your boss just says, go and do what you do best. And you need that confidence. And so for a Ricky Henderson to have all these different rules about when you can go and when you can't,

what the repercussions are going to be if you don't make it, it's a totally different guy, it's a totally different player. Yeah. You'd like to think that if the best ever at something comes along, you would let him be the best ever. And I guess Madden has backed up his words a bit with how he handled Shohei Otani, right? And he let Otani be Otani, which was nice to see. But I don't know whether that would go for Ricky just because not only is it a matter of the percentage, but it's also a matter of the wear and tear, right? And Ricky was unfairly- Well, they don't play baseball like that anymore.

That's the other thing. The game is not- I remember talking to JP Rashadi about this a bunch of years ago when he was the GM of the Blue Jays. And he was like... First, he was talking about just the sacrifice game, give up outs to score runs. We don't do that anymore. That's not how we play. And so the ability to go out and affect the game. And one of the things that Madden was saying was, he's like, look, when we use a stopwatch, any pitcher who gets to the plate one, two, they're faster, something like that. It's over.

You can't steal. They're not going to give you the green light. One, two, one, three, it's over. You're not going to be allowed to go. Ricky was beating the stopwatch as a 38-year-old. Yep. go. Ricky was beating the stopwatch as a 38-year-old. When he was with the Angels in 97, Ricky was beating the stopwatch at a guy who was getting to the plate at one-two. Ricky was still stealing off of him. So how many baseball people, especially in today's game where managers are

scared to death, they don't have the autonomy they used to have, they don't run the game anymore, They don't have the autonomy they used to have. They don't run the game anymore. How many of those managers are going to risk letting Ricky do his Ricky thing when the entire front office in the analytics department is saying that he can't do it? You know, that you just don't, you don't take those kinds of risks. Right. And so it is difficult to envision Ricky being what he was in today's game. I just don't see it.

Now, a Ricky-like talent, I think Billy Bean is correct. I think that, I think you turn into Trout. I think you're a guy who can run who doesn't run. You're a guy who has power and the power is emphasized. And because of Ricky's unbelievable eye, he's not going to be one of those players like today who's hitting 225 and, you 225 and is hitting 28 home runs. Ricky's still going to hit 300. Ricky's still going to get his 400 on base.

Ricky's still going to get his stolen bases, but they're not going to be nearly as much. He's going to be closer in terms of steals to a Mookie Betts or a Jacoby Ellsbury or somebody like that who's getting 40, 45, maybe 50 steals at max. Right. And there is the toll it takes on you physically where he would miss games. And in retrospect, it's ridiculous that people attributed that to a lack of desire because who wanted to play baseball more than Ricky Henderson ever? He played longer than any other modern position player and he would have kept playing if they had let him, but it beats you up to run that much to have all those impacts. Absolutely it does. And I think the other thing about that was, look, if you were an outfielder

back in the day, you played 150 games. I mean, that's just the standard. You play every day, you play 150 games a season. And that wasn't Ricky. And Ricky understood the wear and tear on his body. And I think it is a fascinating thing that you look at those players. Look at Mike Trout's numbers now. Look at where Trout is. And Ricky came in around 137, 138 games for his career on average. And all he did was get criticized for not wanting to play enough, not wanting to be, not being present enough. And now they actually have load management for players.

Right. And so would Ricky be given that sort of dispensation today that he wasn't given as a player back in the 80s and 90s? I think so. But I also think that one of the remarkable things about Ricky is that he knew his body better than the Tony LaRusses of the world who, every time Ricky needed a break, looked at him as though he was lesser and viewed him as somebody who was not as dedicated or as professional as he needed to be. You can't underestimate the labor element of this. Did Ricky handle things the way he needed to handle them? Absolutely not. Because there were times when Ricky withheld services or Ricky's contract, you could feel it in his demeanor and his attitude. But you can also say for certain that all of these elements that come together create

who this player is. He's not exactly wrong. And when you look at the numbers, look at Don Mattingly, look at Vince Coleman, look at Tim Raines, look at all these 150 plus guys who had a lot of wear and tear on their body. They didn't last. They didn't last, especially the stolen base guys. Look at Vince Coleman and look at those numbers and look at Tim Raines' numbers against Ricky's numbers. You're essentially done after six or seven or eight years. And here's Ricky at 39 years old leading the league in steals.

Right. Another thing that distinguished Ricky and Raines from Coleman is just the eye and the patience, right? Ricky walked twice as often as Coleman. And I wondered about that because when some of Ricky's contemporaries were up for induction in the Hall of Fame, that was a knock against them, right against Jim Rice, who ended up going into Cooperstown with him, or Andre Dawson, let's say. And some of their defenders would say, well, this was an era where on base percentage and walking wasn't emphasized. Players weren't paid based on that, which is true. But there have always been players who intuited the

value of that or just naturally possessed it. And of course, Ricky had the crouch, he had the tiny strike zone, and maybe it was an obvious connection to make when you are as fast and as dangerous a base dealer as Ricky was, where you have to get on base to actually use that ability. But where did that come from, was that just as natural a talent as his speed or his strength, his eye and his discipline? No, I think Ricky understood the different conduits. I think he understood the different ways that the game itself is based on score and runs. So I need to get on base.

And also, I think he understood his game. I think he knew that the type of player that he was, his game was enhanced by having a small strike zone, that his discipline absolutely helped him. He's not a power hitter. He wasn't a slugger. He knew how to make the pitcher come to him. And all of that was extremely valuable. And I think that when you're looking at the type of player that he turned out to be, I think that Ricky, Willie Wilson said it, I think somewhere in the book where he said, you know, Ricky started out here to break records. And Ricky would say it, that he was here to score runs. And so I think that he knew all of those different things contributed to, it wasn't just hitting. I think one of the things about a guy like Jim Rice, and we go back to that era, I think one of the differences is that Rice didn't walk 100 times, but he was still hitting.

Those guys, I mean, it's interesting that who knew that the Dave Kingman model was going to become the model, that it was okay to hit 223 as long as you hit the ball over the fence 40 times. So last question, I wondered just about the end of Ricky's career, which never officially came, as you know. He never officially retired and seemingly you know, he never officially retired and seemingly will go to his grave thinking that he can still help a team. And he hung on forever and he was pretty productive right up almost to the end. And then he did have that

little last gasp in the Golden Baseball League as a 46-year-old in 2005. But that was it. He kept thinking that he could play. He was waiting for the call, but he wasn't necessarily seeking out progressively less prestigious opportunities to play. And I was thinking of him in contrast to his former teammate and foil, Jose Canseco, who will show up anywhere if you pay him. He will show up in your independent league team. He will do a home run derby wherever at any time. And Ricky hasn't really done that sort of sideshow aspect year where, you know, he's going to be an honorary all-star essentially and he's going to take his bows. And it seems like Ricky was never completely comfortable with that, maybe both because he could be prickly at times and people could be prickly with him, but also because he just never wanted to hang him up. So I wonder whether he was ever tempted to just be a roving player who would show up for a stolen base competition or a race or something, or whether that would have felt too much like lowering himself because he knew how good he was. Yeah, Ricky was never a sideshow. I mean, Ricky didn't play for the bombast of playing. Ricky wanted to play baseball. Ricky

wanted to compete. And I think that that was actually one of the most poignant things about him was that even when his skills were diminished, he still was willing to compete with the skills that he had. It wasn't like some sort of Barnum and Bailey thing where he just wanted to be out there and be part of the spectacle. No, Ricky wants to be a baseball player. And there's a huge difference there. And I think that, no, I don't think that he was ever... The Red Sox tried to do it in 2002. They figured Ricky was going to retire. They did a big old Ricky Henderson day. The Oakland A's did it in 98. It was the last, and people didn't know if Ricky was going to play in 99. So Ricky has actually had farewell days. The Padres tried to do it, but Ricky kept playing.

So every time you would think that this was the farewell for Ricky, and let's not forget, he gets his 3,000th hit on the last day of the season in 2001. He still plays the next year. He goes to Boston in 2002. And so, no, it's 100% right. There was no way that Ricky saw himself as going off quietly into the sunset because Ricky truly believed he could still play baseball. And I think the other piece of it too was that just from a personal ego standpoint, so much of being a professional athlete is your belief in what you see in the mirror.

And I think that there was also something about Ricky that didn't want to face, necessarily face the world without having that, even though the phone stopped ringing, just to still believe that you're still you. And I think that that was a piece of it as well. He could have retired whenever he wanted to, but I think that Ricky, in addition to loving the game, also realized how much of his identity was based on being this world-class timeless figure. Yeah. And yet it seems like his transition to quasi-retirement, at least from afar, has been fairly graceful, right? Like you'd think for someone like that, who is so hyper-competitive at everything he did from an early age and his identity was so tied up in his athleticism

and never really thought that he was done playing or that he should be done playing that you could struggle with that transition even if you're making that transition in your mid-40s. But he has a family. He comes back as an instructor. He does his public appearances. He has non-baseball business interests. It seems like he has handled that maybe better than you would think based on just how tied up he was in baseball. Indeed. And he also, I think that comes from a respect for the game and a respect for competition. The guy who people said had no respect for the game actually may have had the most respect for it in terms of knowing how hard it is,

knowing how difficult the game is to play, all of those things. I think he got that. And that's what I mean about the respect for the sport. So many times, the great, great, great players can't get away from their time. Oh, I would have worn this guy out in my day. Well, it's not your day anymore. Ricky was willing to compete with what he had. And I think that says a lot about somebody and how much they actually love the sport. Well, a biography of Ricky was overdue, and I can't think of a better person to have written it. So again, the book is Ricky, The Life and Legend of an American Original.

You can find out more about that book and Howard's other books at howardbryantbooks.com. You can find Howard on Twitter at hbryant42. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Howard. Thank you. All right, let's stick with the theme of uniquely talented and entertaining players. I will be back in just a moment with Jeff Fletcher to talk about Showtime,

the inside story of Shohei Otani and the greatest baseball season ever played. I'm joined now by Jeff Fletcher, who has had both the fortune and maybe the misfortune at times of covering the Angels as a beat writer for the Southern California News Group since 2012. The greatest fortune, I imagine, has come from having a front row seat to the Shohei Show. show. And he has capitalized on that perspective by writing a book called Showtime, the inside story of Shohei Otani and the greatest baseball season ever played, which will be out just in time for the two-time two-way all-stars appearance on the national stage next week. Jeff, welcome to a show that is already a part-time Otani podcast. So the segment fits right in. That's great. Thanks for having me. I have joked before that if I printed out everything I've written about Otani, it might be book length.

But you have actually written a book about Shohei, so you have me beat there. Here's my first question. Will you have to recall all the copies if it turns out that, in fact, it was not last season that was the greatest baseball season ever played? It was actually this season. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think maybe we'd have to do an addendum or actually this season. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think maybe we'd have to do an addendum or something to it.

Yeah, a sequel, right? This season is still not better than last season, but it is pretty good. It's different, but it's close, right, in its own way. It's funny because when ever anybody says, like, oh, he's not as good this year, I just say, well, if this were the first season he was having as a two-way player, this would be the greatest baseball season ever played. So the only reason that we think anything less of it is because we saw last season.

So, but it's still pretty incredible. Yeah. So it seems like a natural idea to write a book about a fascinating player in a fascinating season. I'm surprised that you didn't have to compete with every other Angels beat writer to be the first to do this. But I am kind of curious about, I know that there is going to be a Japanese edition of the book as well. Have there been Japanese language books written about Otani? And what, if anything, did he think of the fact that you were working on a book about him? Well, there've actually been, my understanding, is a lot of Japanese books about him. And I think that my book is actually being marketed in Japan as like the only one written by an American, you know, Major League Baseball, quote unquote, insider, somebody who's there with him all the time, as opposed to just kind of watching from

afar. So I think that that is actually a pretty big appeal to Japanese readers to see how the other side looks at Otani. It actually went on sale in Japan about a week earlier than the English version, and Amazon Japan sold out of them in the first two days. So good sign. But definitely, it's certainly an interesting topic for both countries. Yeah. Was he aware that you were working on a book about him? And did he have any thoughts on that? Yes, he was aware.

I talked to him and his agent, and they knew what was happening. And his agent, Nez Balolo, cooperated to some extent, helped me out with some things. Shohei was mostly, pretty much felt like I'd had enough of the hundred times I'd talked to him, just did my daily job. Felt like he'd given me enough from that. And he had, to be fair, as we always want to ask one more question in this business. So I certainly had a few more that I would have liked to ask, but I certainly think I still got plenty. Yeah. And the subtitle says the inside story. It's inside, I guess, in multiple ways. It's inside in the sense that you were there watching and covering it.

But he's a tough guy to get inside in other ways, too. And I think from afar, it's tough to tell what is going on inside him. And often with players, I'm not as interested in their personal lives or their thoughts. I'm not as interested in their personal lives or their thoughts. But with Otani, I'm so compelled by his performance that in turn, I also just have an inexhaustible appetite for information about him and who he is as a person. And he is portrayed as someone who is just so single-mindedly dedicated to baseball. And yet he has such a magnetic personality, too, which kind of comes through the TV screen. And you certainly hear his teammates talk about that. But have you gotten a sense of who he is as a person, what he does when he's away from the field, if he is ever away from

the field? He paints himself as someone who is just going home, going to practice, working out, eating. It doesn't seem like there's a lot there, but who knows, right? Is that just the facade, the image that he presents to the world or is that the real Otani? Yeah, I think that's the real Otani. I think you can mix video games in there. I think he likes video games a lot. And anime, yeah. Yeah, I think he's just pretty focused on baseball and just wants to be the greatest baseball player in the

world. And I don't think that you can do that and have a lot of time to lower your golf handicap or, you know, you know, do world tours of any of that kind of thing. So I think that for the most part, that is who he is. You know, I asked a lot of people around him in his circle and everybody says, yeah, yeah, that's who he is. There's no big hidden thing about him. So he's just a guy that wants to be great at baseball. And he's doing something that nobody else has ever done. So we can't really compare, you know, oh, well, you know, Mike Trout can be this great baseball player and also, you know, go on hunting trips and stuff like that. But, you know, Mike Trout is not doing what Shohei Otani does. So it's a different thing.

Yeah. Does Otani even care about weather? We don't even know. He's a mystery. Exactly. But I wonder just always about him because you would think that with such a singular skill set, it would be easy to get a big head and to feel like you're better than everyone because you are better than everyone, at least on a baseball field, or you can do things that they can't do.

And yet it certainly seems like from the outside, he doesn't have an ego like that. I mean, he has an ego in the sense that he believes in his talent and he trusts his ability, but he doesn't seem to have any sense of superiority. You know, he hobnobs with the guys on the back half of the roster. He seems to get along great with everyone from all accounts. He's a really fun teammate and just jokester behind the scenes. So where do you think that comes from, that he has maintained that sort of human sense and that down-to-earthness despite possessing the opposite of a down-to-earthness despite possessing these you know the opposite of a down-to-earth sort of skill set i think that comes from scrubbing toilets so uh when he was in high

school his high school team which was it was a uh sort of a high school program where the the players all stayed in a like a dormitory and it wasn't just like a regular high school here in the United States. And the coach was very insistent on, you know, the star players had to do like the lowest rolls away from the field to kind of keep them grounded. So Otani's job was cleaning the bathrooms. So I think that was like right away was instilled in him that just because you're the great baseball player, you know, as soon as you step off the field, you're just like all the rest of us and you have to live your life accordingly.

So I think that that is certainly the way he's, uh, he's maintained it. And he got to obviously give his parents credit for that too. And all the other people he's got in his circle, but he's not, uh, he doesn't seem to have any superiority in any way. Where were you on the confidence doubt spectrum when he first came over? Were you someone who thought it's going to take some time? Maybe all those skills won't translate. Or did you think, yeah, he can be the best player in this league like he was the best player in that league? Well, I don't think anybody thought he could do this. Anybody that comes from Japan to the major leagues, their performance declines somewhat just because the major leagues

are a lot harder than Japan. And that's just for a normal run of the mill player. Now, then you're going to add in, he's going to be a two-way player, which nobody has done. And so he's going to have all the adjustments that you face as a hitter. And as a pitcher, he's going to face both of those. And just not to mention the physical toll of it. So I think that we all thought this is going to be really cool to see if he can do it, but we certainly didn't know for sure he could do it. And then in spring training of 2018, he was pretty terrible at hitting and pitching. And I think we all remember Jeff Passon famously wrote a story that the verdict is in on Shohei Otani's bat and it's not good.

And scouts compared him to a high school hitter, and it just was, you know, he looked terrible. And I thought that was probably a little extreme. But I certainly thought that maybe this guy needs to start in the minor leagues. And they had him on a minor league deal because they signed him just like an amateur free agent. So they could have done that. But the Angels said, like said like no he's been a successful two-way player in the second best league in the world and don't be fooled by what you saw

in spring training he's still going to be able to do it and we're like oh okay and uh and then and then april 2018 rolls around and the season starts and all of a sudden he's great as a two-way player so he put away the doubts then and And then there were all, of course, all new doubts that started because of the injuries that happened, you know, between then and 2021. So there's not really been a time that you were sure that he was going to do this. And even going into 2022, because, you know, 2021 was so ridiculously good, you couldn't be 100% certain that he was going to be able to do it again in 2022. So you have to not take him for granted. And he's continually amazes me.

In the book, you describe pretty vividly the process of wooing Otani. And I talked to Billy Epler about that years ago, possibly on this podcast. And it seemed like at the time, he was unsure of exactly why Otani had chosen the Angels. But from your account, it seems like Epler deserves a lot of credit for making Otani comfortable that the Angels would be the place that he wanted to go. What insight have you gotten into what exactly it was that made that connection click? Well, I mean, Billy Epler is a really inclusive kind of guy. I mean, he's, you know, it seems like a lot of baseball GMs kind of get divided into the two categories. There's the guys who played in the big leagues, and then there's the guys who were kind of the Ivy League sort of dudes.

And Billy Epler was neither of those. So he had spent his whole career kind of bringing people together and making everybody feel included. And I think that that personality was just probably one of the main things that attracted Otani. And I think besides that, the Angels had some things really working for him. They're an American League team, obviously, when I don't think as much as Otani said he was open to the National League. I think that would have been really difficult for him, you know, because I don't think he really wanted to play the outfield when he wasn't pitching. And, you know, I don't think that he wanted to go to a place like the Yankees where he would have been in giant fishbowl. And, you know, Southern

California is obviously on the coast that's closer to Japan. So I think that all those things sort of started putting the Angels on the shortlist. And then if Billy Epler really knocks your socks off in a meeting, I can see why it's where he ended up. Yeah. And there's no way to answer this definitively. You'd have to be Otani to do that. But do you think he would make that same choice knowing how things have played out? Because on the one hand, things have worked out great in the sense that the Angels gave him free reign eventually, and they gave him the opportunity to show what he could do. And he has done it, and he has proved himself, and he has silenced every doubter. On the other hand, yeah, there's a certain disappointment, I think, with baseball fans that we're not getting to see him on better teams, on postseason teams, and also within

himself most likely, and that he does seem like someone who wants to win. and also within himself most likely, and that he does seem like someone who wants to win. So do you think he would make that same decision again, knowing that he got to live out the two-way desire that he wanted, but perhaps not the competitive desire on a team level that he would have dreamed up? Yeah, that is a great question. And certainly the Angels gave him a lot of leeway.

Like for when things weren't going well, when he was hurt, they still let him continue to have the two-way dream. And then last year, basically in 2021, they basically said, we're going to let you do whatever you want to do, you know, and we're not going to tell you you have to have days off here and there.

If you say you're good to go, we're just going to let you play. So all of that is certainly a great thing that has enabled him to become the amazing player that he is. And if he went to another team that was maybe, you know, a different environment, maybe that wouldn't have happened. Maybe, you know, after the first time he hurt, he got, yeah. A more competitive team might not have given him as much rope as he had there. Right. So he might end up being on a winning team, but he still wouldn't be what he is.

Right. You know, maybe the pitching thing would have just ended when he had Tommy. Right. So he might end up being on a winning team, but he still wouldn't be what he is. Right. You know, maybe the pitching thing would have just ended when he had Tommy John surgery. Maybe they would have said, that's it. It's over. Uh, so, you know, I think that, I think it's worked out pretty well for him. Obviously he would have liked to win. Everybody likes to win, you know, and we'll really see when he has a chance to pick his place the next time after the 2023 season, we'll see what really matters to him. But I think that he's got to be overall pretty satisfied with what's happened with his career. Yeah, personally, I wouldn't have him do anything differently because as fun as it would be to see him on a team that was playing deep into October, I just wouldn't want to take the risk of jeopardizing the two-way experiment. And that has been just probably the most entertaining experience as a baseball watcher that I have ever had and may ever have.

So I just would not want to, if I could do a butterfly effect thing or an alternate timeline where I could put him on a more competitive team, I just, I wouldn't risk it because I don't want to know one way Otani only would have looked like. I'm sure that would have been great too, but not nearly as great. And I was going to ask you about that idea of choosing that situation because that comes up a lot, not just with Otani, but with Trout, who of course has chosen the Angels multiple times, right? He signed multiple extensions. And sometimes you will hear people say, oh, poor Trout, poor Otani. They are stranded there. Their talents are being wasted. Other people will say, well, they got themselves into the situation, right? They chose it. And Trout decided to stay there for his whole career or at least sign what could cover his whole career, which he may not actually be there the whole time. But between those two making the decision to go there, it wasn't just as if, well, they were drafted or they had no choice in the matter. Do you think that there is anything to that or do you think fans should still have some sympathy with the way that things have worked out and just the disappointment there because

the Angels have spent often but have not spent wisely in retrospect. Yeah. I mean, I've obviously been asked this question a lot and I would say that every player says, you know, they just want to win. They just want to be in a winning situation. But every year there's, you know, a hundred free agents and they don't all sign with the Dodgers and Yankees. So there are other things that matter. Bryce Harper signed with the Philadelphia Phillies, who are not exactly regular October participants who have parades all the time. Manny Machado signed with San Diego Padres. It's the same kind of thing. So there's things that matter to players in their lives beyond just winning the World Series. You know, you want to

get a lot of money and you want to be comfortable in the people you're working with and the place you live. And I think in the case of Mike Tr and you want to be comfortable in the people you're working with and the place you live. And I think in the case of Mike Trout, he was really comfortable with the Angels. He likes the environment. His wife likes it out here. You know, the team treats him well and they obviously gave him a ton of money. And they're going to have the same opportunity with Otani to say, hey, we're going to give you a ton of money. And we know you like it here. We know we treat you well. It's an environment you're comfortable in, and we're going to really keep trying to win, and hopefully we can get there. And it certainly could happen that Otani could make the same choice that Trout made. Maybe he will make a different choice. But, you know,

just to answer your original question, any player has that choice, and I don't think that we should just expect they're just going to look right at the standings and say, I want to go to the team that gives me the best chance to win the World Series, period, and not take anything else into consideration. Because there's a lot of things in a person's life that matter other than winning a World Series. Absolutely, yeah. And people have been parsing that somewhat cryptic comment Otani made at the end of last season, right, about how he wants to win ever since then. Yeah. I mean, what's he supposed to say, first of all? Yeah, right. Yeah, sure.

I don't care about winning. I just am happy that I make all this money. Yeah, right. And he can't even say that the way that Chow can because he hasn't made that much money. So one subject you consider in the book is why Otani isn't even better known than he is, at least in the States, obviously. He is a global celebrity and he's as big a celebrity as you can be in Japan, but has not broken through here the way that, say, some other era-defining athletes might have in other sports. And you go through the various reasons there. And

in a sense, it isn't that important to me because as long as I get to watch him and baseball fans appreciate him for the most part, that's sufficient. On the other hand, I'd like everyone to get the same joy out of watching him that I do or that a lot of baseball fans do. So it would be nice if he could break through in an even bigger way in that sense. So why do you think that he has not become just, you know, leading the news every night kind of athlete here? Well, he's got a few things working against him. First of all, it's baseball. So just baseball in general, you're not going to get the same star power that you have with like football or basketball or, you know, any sport that is, you know, the star player is always at the center of the action in those other sports. If you turn on an Angels game, you could see Mike Trout bat for eight

minutes in, you know, a three-hour game. And you don't know, it could be the bottom of the ninth game on the line and Mike Trout is not up. So that's just the way that happens. And it's just a part of the nature of the sport. And there's really no avoiding that. So that's the first part. The second part is he's on the West Coast. So, you know, half the country's asleep a lot of times when he's doing these magical things. And he's on a team that's not good. Unfortunately, it has not been good for a lot of his time. So we don't get to see him in those prime time October games when everybody's awake. And then there's the language barrier,

which means that we don't see him on all the commercials and all that kind of thing. So I think he's still as big a star as you can get in baseball. But in just terms of like everyday American life to where everybody on the street knows who he is and they've seen him on the Jimmy Kimmel show or whatever, that's just probably not going to happen with him. But I think that that's just the nature of the life that he picked and he's still doing a pretty good thing. Have you thought about writing a Trout book or is his brand of singular greatness too prosaic to build a compelling book around? I have actually thought about it. And during 2020, when all of us were

just sitting around doing nothing, I actually kind of made some inroads towards starting it. And I sort of approached Trout about it and wasn't really interested at the time. And I think that the difference between Trout and Otani is this Otani book is really about the greatest baseball season ever played. And that is the hook to it because that happened in 2021. No matter what happens the rest of his career, we have this great season that you can write a book on. Whereas with Mike Trout, it's his whole career is the book. And his whole career is not over.

So it's kind of, you can't really write a book on it at this moment. I think you need to have him be all done and then see where it all lands. I think that's the more appropriate way to do that. Whereas Otani, we still have this one historic season to base the thing on. And that's how you can kind of do him while his career is still ongoing. And Trout, I think you kind of have to wait. You write about the history of two-way players in the book. You also write about the future of two-way players, which even post-Ohtani is pretty hazy. And you hear the word unicorn thrown around constantly and people saying that he is one of a kind. And yet some people also say, well, maybe he will crack the door open at least

slightly for someone to come along or other players will set their sights on doing something similar. So what is your current thinking on not necessarily whether we'll see another Otani, but whether just the concept of a two-way player could catch on a little more than it had before him? Yeah, well, first of all, we're not going to see another Otani. I think that is pretty clear that it's just almost impossible to have the talent to be a starting pitcher, top of the rotation starting pitcher, and a middle of the order hitter. It's just not going to happen. If anybody even has, you know, that talent, a major league team is not going to

let them get to that point unless the talent is developed kind of at an equal level. I talked to Rick Ankeel about this, and he, as we know, is one of the few people on earth who has experienced both. And he just said, you know, if you're a pitcher and you're ready to go to the big leagues, but your hitting needs like another two years in the minors, the hitting's done. You're not going to get it. So that's why he did his in two separate parts. So you're just not going to see that happen with another player. Now, what you could see is more like Michael Lorenzen's, for example. So, you know, with the Reds, we had Lorenzen was basically a relief pitcher. They also used him in the outfield. They used him to pinch hit.

So he kind of just provided roster flexibility. And I think nowadays, especially as the way they use relievers to where you really, they use them all the time and they don't want guys throwing three days in a row anymore. And, you know, you see position players pitching now just as sort of a mop-up thing. So let's say you had an outfielder who also could pitch well enough that instead of waiting until you were down by eight runs to use him, you could just use him to save your other relievers when you're down by four runs. And he could still put up a zero and you could still have a chance. So all of a sudden now you're saving all your other relievers and that's like a really valuable thing for your roster. Or you can, you know, pinch it one more time,

because you've got one of your relievers who is a decent enough hitter to, to go up and pinch it. So that's the kind of thing that I think we may see more of going forward, just as, you know, the Otani example, say, allows teams to let minor leaguers develop both ways. And then even if the development doesn't ascend all the way to the Otani level, it does get them to the Michael Lorenzen level. And we might see a few more of those. What do you pick up on or appreciate about either his game

or his personality or both covering him, watching him on a day-to-day level firsthand that people who are just looking at the eye-popping stats might not pick up on? I think one of the great things about him is he's really a big moments kind of guy. And you can tell, like the other day I was watching the game and he was at like 100 pitches and it was the sixth inning and you knew this was going to be his last batter. And I'm like, I said to somebody, watch this. he's going to strike this guy out and then he's going to pump his fist and scream yeah because he knows coming to yeah because he knows what's going and

he he builds himself up for those moments and you know he can be going through an inning throwing 97 and there gets to be a guy at third with one out so he needs a strikeout and there's one on one so he's just got such control over this talent that it's you know he parses it out exactly when he needs to and i think that is just a really cool thing that he's not just like on 100 all the time and this is what he is he he really knows how to manipulate it which i think is the only way that you can physically do what he does to is to you know have some control over it he's very funny you know i was just looking at a tweet of him mimicking the astros luis garcia's delivery and rocking back and forth and the cameras catch those things sometimes we get

glimpses of it. And often we hear about it from his teammates and that he's such a prankster and practical joker. Do you think that that might come out even more publicly, visibly in his interactions with the press over the course of his career? I guess, again, there is potentially a little bit of a language barrier there and he's just a private person. But I wonder whether that will be even less behind closed doors and more just in front of our faces as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, I think we're still mostly going to get limited to seeing, like, the Luis Garcia thing, like what he does on the field. And when he, you know, there was a time earlier this year where he was in a hitting slump, and so he was doing CPR on his back in the dugout. So that just went crazy, and people liked that.

So he is a funny guy. He does have fun, but he's not going to really have that come out in interviews or funny quotes where he says stuff that's funny because he's just not that kind of guy. But he's definitely – it's in there. And when you see him, you appreciate that it's there. But I think it's hard for, you know, everybody else who's not watching him all the time to pick up that. Yeah. He's a physical comic, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I guess we should talk a little bit about just the angels in general. how would you diagnose their ills? You go back a decade now, you've seen just about all of Trout's career and covered it, and you've written about and been asked about endlessly, why can they not put a competitive team around this generational player

and now these generational players? Where would you pin the blame or how would you diagnose the ills? Well, here's what went wrong with the Angels is they had a bad farm system that really bottomed out at exactly the moment that Mike Trout went from being just a very good player who you can trade, you know, Christian Yelich, Mookie Betts, to being a generational Hall of Fame player who you can trade, you know, Christian Jelic, Mookie Betts, to being a generational Hall of Fame player who now you can no longer trade, you know? And so when that happens, you suddenly, you can't rebuild because you can't just trade everybody around Mike Trout and just have a bad team, especially if you want to re-sign him. And you also can't improve the team around him by trading away all your prospects

to improve the big league team because you don't have any prospects. So they were kind of stuck in the middle. And so the only real avenue they have is free agency. And of course, free agency just in general is just a bad avenue because you're dealing with players who are older and they've got all kinds of red flags to them. And then if you swing and miss a couple of times at that, a la Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, then you get even more gun-shy about it. So then you're kind of stuck with nothing. So their basically only way to be good

is to be perfect on free agency and to really hope that, you know, if they only have five good prospects in the system at one time, that all five of those actually make it to the big leagues and are productive. And so far they have not been able to do that. So they're just kind of stuck not really being able to have a consistently winning team. And the biggest problem still is just the farm system. The farm system is just not productive.

You know, we look at the Astros, for example. The Astros aren't so much better than the Angels because they're, you know, quote unquote, willing to spend money or whatever. The Astros are good because they got a great farm system and they can make a trade to get Garrett Cole. And then when Garrett Cole is ready to make a ton of money, they can just say, oh, okay, see you later. Because look who we have. We have Frambois Valdez, Christian Javier, you know, all these otheramer valdez christian javier you know all these other guys that they just developed and you know when carlos correa is ready to go make a ton of money they say oh that's okay we have jeremy pena and he's pretty good too so that's what the

angels don't have they just don't have guys that just come up from their farm system and become productive and that has been a huge problem it. It's poor drafting or poor development or something has gone wrong at that level of it. And it's made it really hard for them to win. Yeah. Fangraph's just updated its pre-draft farm system rankings and the Angels are down at 28th. So with- That sounds like they're going up. Things are looking up. Yeah. So with Otani under contract for one more year together, could it click? Or is there some possibility that they don't have one more year together and that Otani could even be traded

before that season is complete? Well, he's not going to be traded. I can pretty much guarantee that. I think that they're going to try to sign him this winter. And if they can't sign him, I think they're still just going to keep him for 2023 because they want to be as good as they can be in 2023. I don't think there's any Otani trade you can make that continues your, that makes you better in the short term. The only Otani trade you make is going to get you a bunch of prospects and then maybe you're better in the long term, but then that's taking more years out of Mike Trout's prime to wait for that. So I don't see the Angels doing that. I think that they would rather just keep Otani all the way through the end of 2023 and just keep trying to sign him. And if you eventually can't sign him, then you just say,

well, you know, we tried and good luck to you. And, you know, we sold a lot of tickets in the meantime. Right. As for if they can win, you can win without doing that, I mean, sure they can. You just kind of need a lot of things to go right for you. I look at the Giants of last year who they certainly didn't go out and get like the biggest marquee free agents, but they just nailed everything that they got. Every player they got turned out to be good, and things all went right. Older players that you thought were washed up to be good. And things all went right. You know, older players that you thought

were washed up were suddenly good. And so the Angels are going to need something like that to happen for them in the short term. And then long term, they're just going to need to draft a whole lot better so they can start to build up a core that is actually going to be successful in a repeatable way. As we've seen the Giants, what they did last year is not necessarily so repeatable and what the Astros are doing is repeatable. So basically they need to hope to be the Giants every once in a while while they're trying to become the Astros. Yeah. Otani, I think is the one player you might consider untradeable, even if you knew with a hundred percent certainty that you could not extend them and that he was not going to resign and that you

were just going to lose him. Even so, the entertainment value of having a season of Otani in his prime doing this almost unprecedented, probably completely unprecedented thing, which who knows how long he'll be able to continue doing that and who knows if anyone else will ever do it. That's the kind of thing where, you know know what you just take the short for you i think and just say we have to give our fans the experience of watching this as long as possible even if it kind of costs us in the long run i mean it's not like you can guarantee oh if we trade him we're going to get like these four great 23 year old players and we're going to be good so we can make the sacrifice no you're going to trade him and you're going to get like five 19-year-old players

that may be good or may not be good. And in the meantime, you don't have Otani to watch. So I think the Angels would just assume take the safer route and just keep Otani and try to draft as well as they can and hope that they can pluck the Logan Webbs out of the world and be good. And, you know, so far that hasn't worked. But, you know, at any year, it could start clicking.

Last question. Just looking forward, I get greedy when I watch him because he is so skilled and because you see him do these things that no one else can do. And I fantasize about him putting together his absolute top of the range performance on both sides of the ball at the same time, which you will see him do for even a month at a time sometimes. And, you know, you will inevitably have slumps and rough patches, but he has improved as a pitcher. And we saw what he could do with the bat last season. Not that he's been any slouch this season too, but you put together the pitching that he's had this year with the offense that he had

last year, then it's an even higher level. And he's such a hard worker and he's always been so driven and always looking for something else that he can improve going back to when he was a kid. So what, if anything, do you think he is still working on or wants to accomplish or could accomplish that we haven't seen yet? You know, I often say that to me, the most impressive thing in a way is just the durability that he's shown over the past year and a half and the amount of playing time that he has gotten while shouldering this heavier load than anyone has in decades in a way that no one ever has, really. So just staying healthy and continuing to do what he's doing, I would be quite happy

with that. But it's hard not to feel like there's more in there because of just how good he is and how hard he works. Yeah. I mean, definitely the durability is the number one thing that I think allowed the incredible season to happen. Because like, if you look at 2018, he really did it for two months. Like he was just as good for the first two months of 2018 as he was in 2021. But the reason 2021 was the historic season is because he managed to do it over six months. So that is sort of the huge Holy grail for him to keep doing. As for what he can do better, I think that offensively he still gets into these little ruts where he'll try to pull the ball too much or hit the ball on the ground a little too much

and expand his strike zone a little bit, which I think also tends to happen when the team is losing. He presses. He wants to hit six homers every game, and I think it would help if he had a better player around him. No one left in that lineup. If he had a better team around him, it would help, I think, his performance even better because he wouldn't feel like he's got to do that. That's why this year there was so much excitement about like,

last year he had this great season with no Trout and no Rendon in the lineup. And we started to think, oh, wow, if you can put Otani with Trout and Rendon both at their normal levels behind him, and he's really not going to have to swing in anything out of the zone because he's going to be totally happy to just walk and let those guys hit. Wow. Imagine what he could do. But obviously we didn't have Rendon and Trout has had some slumps and it just hasn't happened. So if we could see him really do that for like a whole season, just be disciplined and keep with his approach, then that would be, you know, next level for sure. All right. Well, it would be pretty impressive if there was a next level considering how high this level is.

And also, I just think obviously he has physical gifts that no one else has, but it is also a makeup question too, right? And he just seems to have this temperament and this confidence in himself and this drive that has allowed him to make the most of those physical gifts as well. And you can see that even going back to his career in Japan or as an amateur and constantly trying to improve himself. So we all look forward to the next act and possibly the sequel, or at least a afterward to the paperback edition next year, right, where you can cover, let's say, the second greatest baseball season ever played. Or perhaps you will, in retrospect and retroactively demote the greatest season to the second greatest, and this will be the greatest. Either way, I'm happy. You can find the book. It is called Showtime, The Inside Story of Shohei Otani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played.

You can find Jeff on Twitter at JeffFletcherOCR and you can find his website at JeffFletcherWrites.com. Thank you, Jeff. All right. Thanks, Ben. All right. Sometimes it seems as if Otani is too talented to be true. He must have hacked the sport somehow. As far as we know, he hasn't. He's just that good. However, a lot of baseball players have cheated. So let's discuss a book about them. I'll be right back with Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt to talk about Intentional Bach,

baseball's thin line between innovation and cheating. I'll take it off you, yeah I'll take it off you, yeah I'll take it off you, yeah Joined now by Mark Harmore and Daniel Levitt, two prolific researchers and writers as individuals who from time to time come together as a tandem to produce great baseball books. Their previous tandem works, In Pursuit of Penance, Baseball Operations from Dead Ball

to Moneyball, and Paths to Glory, How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way, are well-researched and definitive treatments of the topic of team building. And now they have brought that same level of rigor to the topic of cheating, which is pretty inextricably tied to the topic of team building and just playing baseball in general. So the new book is called Intentional Bach, Baseball's Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating.

And it's a history of every way in which baseball players, executives, groundskeepers, et cetera, have exploited loopholes and broken the rules, or, as Bill Veck would say, tested their elasticity. So, Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ben. And Daniel, welcome to you as well.

Thank you. Glad to be here. So one thing that I have wrestled with and that you wrestle with in the book as well is the differing perception of different types of cheating and also how that evolves over time. So you have cheaters who are celebrated and revered, your Vex and your Rickies and even your Gaylord Perrys, etc. And then you have cheaters who are condemned harshly. So what did you ultimately decide about what determines how we perceive the degree of ethical breach that goes on with various types of cheating and how that evolves over time? Mark, if you want to start?

Well, yes, thank you. There's probably two main issues at play. One is I think that as time has moved on, I think we're, we collectively take the game much more seriously. This is not maybe a clear path for everyone, but I think the notion of the correct team winning and losing and the correct out being made on the, on the bases and how calls are made. I think that collectively, I think that the precision of the outcomes is much more important. So I think people notice that. So I think we're being maybe a little bit more of moralists sort of generally than we used to be. I think that's going on. I also think that because we have such precise ways of watching ballplayers compared to what we used to do, that I think that what Gaylord Perry was doing on the field, for example, was, I think one could make the case that he was trying to deceive people with what he was doing. It was kind of a big routine that he went through to, as a, is he or isn't he, or where has he put this stuff? And I think now that there's 20 cameras on him, I think that that is a little

bit harder. So I think there's the perception is that the cheaters are not goofing around on the field anymore, but they're actually back in the office with spreadsheets. And it's much more of a sort of mad scientist kind of thing than it used to be. So I think that's part of it. So the difference between the goofy stories of science dealing from 50 years ago and what the Astros did with like the entire, you know, computer system in the ops department being involved. I think it's easier for people to think like you're ruining our game. So it's complicated, but I think it's partly both of those things. Yeah. And Daniel, do you think that our recollections or perceptions of the offenses change over time so that when the affront is fresh, as it is in the Astros case, the offense is so recent and people who consider themselves the aggrieved parties, it's still very fresh in their minds. Do you think decades down the road, people will think of that the way they think of, well, let's say the Giants' sign-stealing scheme, where there's a little less condemnation and a

little more, oh, isn't this quaint and a product of its times? Or will this always be of the evil astros and the moods won't soften at all? Well, you know, one of the interesting things about the sign-stealing in particular, this isn't going to necessarily answer your question, but it does in moods won't soften at all. Well, you know, one of the interesting things about the sign stealing in particular, this isn't going to necessarily answer your question, but it does in a way, and that sign stealing was never against the rules by artificial means. There was this consensual ethic, which we talk a lot about in the book, that you weren't supposed to sign steal using artificial means. And, you you know you reported to lead presidents or the commissioner who would generally not do anything but there was actually no rule against

it until relatively recently and so I mean one of the differences with the Astros is that they were actually violating a rule that had been promulgated more recently and that during the 20th century there was no rule against what the giants were doing. Now, again, people considered it cheating. But so I think that there was a slightly different level there relative to the boys will be boys. And we talk about that a little bit in the book about how that, you know, where the rules are versus what people feel is where we get into problems when those two things are very different. When there's a cost-benefit analysis that says, you know, I should cheat because I can't be caught. Like, look at steroids in the 90s.

I mean, one of the big issues with that was that there was no way to detect it. A, because there was no testing, the cost-benefit analysis of taking steroids, if you're a player, was not the same as it would have been in 2018, when clearly if you were caught, I mean, when there was testing, and so there were the penalties. So I think a lot of it has to do with how people perceive it, is sort of this line of how do people perceive that cheat at that time, and because the rules and the lines change, I think that that has something to do with it, too. But I think, too, I mean, you know, I think there's something more about the society today, I think probably looks at cheating a little bit differently than we would have in

1955 for all sorts of social reasons beyond beyond sort of the nuance around the rules as well. And you don't do a lot of moralizing in the book, which is not to say that you don't do any editorializing, but there's no, this is worse than that, ethically speaking, necessarily. I mean, you might try to figure out why players or people in the game perceive certain things to be bigger breaches than others, but you're not so much weighing in on that question. And I wonder whether that is because it is tough to get up on your high horse and condemn people when you take the long view here and you dig into the history and you know that there was no point at which people were not constantly cheating when this was not rampant, which is not to say that no one ever had morals. I don't mean that necessarily, but that this has always been a more or less accepted part of the game.

And so when the latest cheating scandal comes along, if you know about the countless cheating scandals that preceded it, perhaps it's harder with that historical perspective to think that this is the worst thing that's ever happened. Well, right. I mean, it goes all the way back to, right, the origins of the game when teams were trying to bring in ringers. You know, there was rules that you had to stay, the players back in the earliest days, the 1860s, during baseball, before you even had leagues, when everybody was an amateur. You had people trying to slip money under the table to try and bring in ringers.

You had teams getting players who would, when technically you were supposed to not jump to another team for 30 days, people jumping before 30 days. Back when you were supposed to be pitching sort of underarm, people would try and throw their arm, you know, would try and throw overhand and get away with it. So yeah, it's been around since the beginning. So it is hard to moralize, right? I mean, it's sort of like competitive people.

And as Mark has pointed out so well, I mean, these are the most competitive people you will ever meet playing professional sports. And if there's an opportunity to win, they're going to try and win. And sometimes that involves going over a line. And it's just tough for us to moralize about it. I mean, clearly it's wrong and the players themselves have drawn a line. But again, there's very much nuances and different types of cheating as to what exactly is the rule and what is somebody doing in violation of that. Yeah. And one point you make in the book, which I hadn't really considered, is that the very presence of the umpire almost tacitly gives players permission to get away with whatever they can get away with. Whereas if there were no umpire almost tacitly gives players permission to get away with whatever they can get away with. Whereas if there were no umpire, it's almost like if it were just honor system, there would maybe be more dishonor associated with violating it. Whereas if you have the umpire there, it's like, well, if you can get away with it, if the umpire doesn't catch you, then I guess it's fair game because you do have some arbiter on the field who is there to prevent that kind of activity.

So I was thinking of that in terms of catcher framing, which is something that Meg and I talk a lot about on this show. And sometimes we will have people write in and say this is cheating. They're deceiving the umpire and there's no rule against it. And of course, it goes back to the beginning of baseball. But that is maybe a very clear example, right, Mark, where it's if you can pull the wool over the umpire's eyes, then more power to you. A conversation that I have had a lot in the last couple of years with people that I know that aren't necessarily into baseball to the extent that the three of us are, we would talk about their years playing Little League baseball or maybe

their years coaching Little League baseball or just teaching their kids how to play. And I would talk about the idea of cheating. And of course, the first thing that would always get into their head was, well, yeah, you don't want your kids to cheat. Nobody does that. I mean, that's like something that only happens. It's only like bad people. That's kind of what you, I think most people think about their own lives. But then when I started to ask them about like, well, what would you do if your kid like trapped a ball on the outfield and then held it up and said, well, I caught that and ran off the field. And he said, well, you got to do that. I mean, that's like, that's the way you play baseball. I said, well, you got to do that. I mean, that's like, that's the way you play baseball. And I said, well, okay, then, you know, that's sort of our point. And if you play in the sandlot, like I certainly did, and I expect that you guys did, you absolutely learned to do that. If you,

if you, if you missed a base, sometimes accidentally, sometimes maybe not accidentally, got away with it. And then once the umpire is there without question, I think even a little league coach or certainly my high school coach would say, play on. You play on and wait for that whistle or in basketball or you wait for the umpire to stop the play. You certainly don't volunteer that you've violated the rules. That just doesn't happen. And some of the topics, the types of cheating that you devote a chapter to have been or could be the subject of entire books, right? So you go pretty deep on science dealing, but there have been books or at least a book about science dealing. We've had Paul Dixon on the show to talk about that. Things go very deep, and I think you do a good job of going as deep as you can in the space allotted and giving people a really great survey of all of the notable scandals that have surfaced at some point over baseball history.

Although, of course, there are probably just as many that we never heard of, if not more. Was there a certain type that you were most intrigued by? that you were most intrigued by? Maybe each of you had a different type of cheating that was sort of your specialty, whether it is the fascination with how it's done or just the audacity of it or the mechanics of it. Dan, do you have a specialty when it comes to cheating? Well, let me give you two stories if I can.

Just one, I mean, the sign stealing was fascinating to me when I found out, when I realized that there were no actual rules against it and just you know our book is on innovation you know how innovation relates to cheating and you know modern prison binoculars first came out in 1894 and by 1899 Morgan Murphy of the Philadelphia Phillies had a pair of binoculars and he was out center field, out in the center field clubhouse back in the day. This was 1899, and looking in and stealing signs. And the next year, they had an electronic buzzer system that went from out there to the third base coach. So, I mean, to me, that was fascinating just how quickly you had the binoculars,

and then you went to the buzzer system, and then you went to this chaos and controversy because there was no rule against it. The NL tried to put a rule against it, and it didn't happen. The other thing that sort of fascinated me was more on the drug side. And, you know, the first drug scandal in baseball, it wasn't really a scandal, but the first news around it was Hal Neuhauser in 1951. It came out that he was getting all these Novocaine shots in his arm in 1945 when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. And he was the MVP. And there was when it came out in 1951 that he was getting these shots.

There was, you know, headlines like, you know, Tigers doped way to World Series championship. And it quickly died off. And of course, Novocaine or now cortisone is regularly used and not viewed as an issue. And it sort of led to this whole restorative versus enhancement types of drugs. What brings you back and to where you should be and what enhances it? And of course, there's no bright line there. But those are two things that I just found really interesting that I really didn't know before we started our research. And Mark, are there any specific areas of interest or expertise for you in the cheating realm? So the area that I've really been interested in for a long time, even since I was a kid, is doctoring the baseball.

I was really a big fan of Gaylord Perry when he was in the American League when I was a kid is Doctrine the Baseball. I was really a big fan of Gaylord Perry when he was in the American League when I was a kid. I love that whole story. I love the deception. I love the managers coming out to the mound and making him take off his belt and his hat and his shirt. And I just thought the whole thing was really kind of cool. And I thought Perry himself was funny. And I just thought the whole thing was really kind of cool. And I thought Harry himself was funny. So I was kind of interested in that kind of story. And then obviously in recent years with the spider attack and the substances that people have used recently, I became even more interested in the story. became even more interested in the story.

So I like the fact that we got to tell this 120-year story and how the focus has really changed from making the ball have less grip, which is what Perry was interested in, and to having the ball have more grip, which is what Garrett Cole and his fellow, excuse the expression, cheaters have been doing recently. And the fact that it is technology that allowed them to figure out what the ball is actually doing. When Perry was doing what he was doing or Whitey Ford, they didn't actually have up to the minute evidence of how the ball was moving or what the spin rate was of the ball. They just knew that the batter wasn't able to hit it.

And today, you can go up to Seattle in a lab and experiment with mostly legal things like a new grip, a new finger placement, a new rotation of the wrist to see what the ball does instantaneously, and then taking a step further and saying what would happen if I put some pine tar in my fingernail or whatever. So that story is really, I think, really cool because I think it involves not just sportsmen trying to figure out how to game it, but then I think in recent years, it has like a little bit of a mad scientist angle to it as well, which I think is kind of fun. I think it's probably the biggest story because of the fact that it's not really ever gone away, even though it's evolved quite a bit. I kind of love that story. And something that's really interesting to me is just that you can't tell the story of

baseball without talking about cheating, but it's not even just an incidental story that is proceeding in parallel with the rest of baseball history. It is often driving baseball history. And you look at the rule book and so much of what's in there is there either in response to someone exploiting something that was not explicitly prohibited, right, or breaking some sort of rule and then having to have that rule clarified or something like pitchers pitching overhand, right? That is pretty much a product of cheating, right? Because gradually the arms got higher and higher and higher and the wrists bent more and more and more and more and more spin was imparted to the ball. And all of that was against the rules, but people keep pushing the envelope and eventually the envelope changes and okay, anything goes and you can throw overhand now. But we got there by cheating in a very real way, right?

Yeah, I mean, one interesting story about just about the going overhand is that at one point your arm was supposed to be below your waist. And so players would hike their pants up as far as they possibly could so they could keep their arm up just a little bit higher. And what you're talking about there, it's interesting because it highlights that sometimes you crack down on the rules if you're baseball or in society, and sometimes you change the rules to match the behavior. lot of that depends on what the behavior is and what is the consensual ethic around that behavior. I think everybody was throwing higher and higher with their arm and people said, hey, this isn't hurting the game. Why have the umpire try and enforce this, you know, 10 times a game?

Let's just change the rule. Of course, in other times, you know, and around other things such as, for example, you know, sign stealing or drugs, people, you know, that other things such as for example you know science dealing or or drugs people you know that generally it's hey this is not something we want it affects how human limits are perceived right I mean the whole point of athletic competition is that what are the sort of the limits of human excellence and how do you compete at that level and clearly you know artificial means are a little different there than the non-artificial means. But you're right.

Your point is exactly right, that sometimes you change the rules and sometimes you have to enforce the rules. And the nuance of when you do which, I think, is one of the things we talk about a little bit in the book. One thing you note in the book is that there's often a different perception of off the field cheating or rule stretching and on the field cheating or rule stretching. And often it's the case that the off the field kind is arguably more impactful. You could make a case that Branch Rickey is the worst cheater of all, right? Because not only was he an architect of the farm system, but then he exacerbated that. He pushed

it farther than it was supposed to be pushed and had players and teams under his control that should not have been, and that hurt players' careers and gave him an advantage. And that kind of thing, maybe that is forgotten or swept under the rug a little bit because of his other accomplishments. But just in general, it seems like we make a bigger deal out of things that happen on the field, even though there are things that are happening off the field that are maybe a little less visible but might actually have a greater effect on the outcome of games and seasons. Yeah, what's interesting about that is that, and I haven't really thought this through in terms of the idea of trying to rank cheaters or to give them a scale

of one to 10 or something, because I don't know. I wouldn't expect any two people would ever agree, but I wonder whether Ricky's offenses... Well, I guess I don't wonder. I believe that Ricky's offenses would be a lot worse today. When John Capabella was essentially kicked out of baseball for life for a scandal that had to do with how he was paying foreign players. That was about four or five years ago. And what Rickey was doing was, I mean, they were different things, but it was similar. He was breaking rules that everyone knew were rules,

and he was doing it in a way that affected the careers and lives of hundreds of people. But back then, it wasn't a slap on the wrist. They lost a bunch of players, but he himself was not penalized, whereas in the more recent cases, they actually went after the people. And I would just piggyback on that with one comment. What's interesting there, too, is that the public outrage around steroids or sign stealing seems to be much greater than it was around Capalella, even though he was suspended for life. And so clearly baseball itself understood the significance of the actions,

but it never seemed to get in the sort of the public eye in the same way. And where is the line generally drawn between deception and cheating and allowable sort of deception and a type of deception that gets people up in arms because there are all kinds of deception. I mean, throwing a curveball is a kind of deception. Framing is a kind of deception. Trying to hide the ball before you throw it is a type of deception. But there are also types of deception that perhaps go too far. Or I think you note in the book, maybe there's kind of a golden rule of thumb almost that if a player wouldn't want it done to them, then they wouldn't do it or they might feel some hesitation about doing it. You also write that we still have appeal plays, right, where the team has to point out that something happened or didn't happen.

The umpire won't just go out and volunteer it, which is sort of maybe a remnant of an earlier era. So how do you guys think about deception versus cheating and where that blurry line tends to get drawn? Well, I would say it's definitely true that the players generally believe that things that are happening on the playing field, they're happening within the view of the umpires, which are the judges of the game, that that is while they might probably want the umpire to make the call if it's the other team that's doing it. I don't think that players generally believe that that is cheating or unethical or that the player should be punished beyond the out being called or something. Whereas things that are happening away from the field, I think Keith Hernandez in his book actually said that he thought that what pitchers do on the mound to him

wasn't as bad as corking a bat because the bat, you're doing that at home and you're coming with a piece of equipment that no one can tell is doctored unless it breaks. Whereas the pitcher is, you know, he's doing it right in front of people and if they don't catch it, well, that is, you know, he's doing it right in front of people. And if they don't catch it, well, that is, I think Hernandez was saying, like, yes, if people figure it out, they should punish him, punish the violation. But it's not, it doesn't, it's not a moral failing that he thought that trying to get away with stuff was actually okay. So I think that's part of it. In some ways, it goes to the title of the book, right? Intentional balk. So, right, baseball ruled with the balk, which is trying to deceive the runner. You're trying to trick the runner

that you're throwing to the plate when you're really going to try and get the runner on the base. And, you know, a deception in most sports of that type is legal, right? Think of a play-action pass, right? You're pretending you're going to run and then you throw it. So it's sort of interesting in baseball, what sort of led to the title, which is this type of deception, which is the pitcher in full view of everybody with the ball is not allowed to, you know, sort of fake home in order to get the runner. I think it makes sense. You know, I think we want to encourage the running game. I think that baseball has historically had a pretty good balance there. But it's just interesting to me that baseball in that instant has actually banned sort of a

deception that is in full view of everybody. Right. Even if no one understands the rule exactly, we should have a book about box if that doesn't exist already. I think that would help everyone who's trying to understand that. But it is interesting because I think in cricket, there is a rule about fielder willfully to attempt by word or action to distract, deceive, or obstruct either batsman after the striker has received the ball. And I guess there's something like that in baseball, too, with, for instance, the Eddie Stanky rule, right, where you can't jump up and down in the batter's line of view before the pitch is thrown. And that's a rule because he did that. And everyone realized, oh, we need a rule against this. But certain types of deception are banned and others are not. And there's not always a perfectly clear consistency there. the end. It's the means to an end. But of course, there's still deception involved there. So it's all very slippery and hard to get your hands around. down statements that various figures, John McGraw, Bill Veck, Rogers Hornsby, etc., made about cheating. And fortunately for you, it seems like players and personnel in earlier eras were maybe more open about what they were doing than contemporary players are. Maybe they'll open up

later after they retire. Who knows? But maybe not. But if I had a doctrine about cheating, if we had a Lindbergh doctrine, it would be, and I've written about this before, that I have come to the conclusion that I think cheating is overrated in general, which is not to say that it's not a fascinating subject or worthy of a book. But it's often tough to tell what the effects are. And you know it when people have tried to quantify things or done various research, but often it's very hard to tell. And part of me thinks, well, this has been a part of the game from the beginning. These players know what they're doing. Why would they constantly be trying to cheat if it were not helping them?

And yet there are a number of instances where, based on what information we do have, it doesn't seem like there was that huge an effect, whether it's Astro's sign stealing or whether it's the sticky stuff crackdown, which maybe seemingly has reduced strikeout rates by a percentage point, perhaps. It's something, it's not nothing. But is that as big an effect as everyone thought it was? Or even with various chemical aids, it can be tough to tell, well, how much did PEDs help this person or that person? So what conclusion have you come to, if any, about how advantageous many of these types of on-field cheating actually are? Are players devoting too much time and effort to these things that may not pay off in the ways that they think? I guess corking your bat, that's another one, right? Or loading up your bat with metal on the end of it. Both of those things, it's a trade-off, right? You make the bat heavier in the barrel and you can't swing it as fast, or you make it lighter in the barrel and now it doesn't make as much of an impact on the ball and the ball doesn't go as far. So is it even worth it?

Well, yeah, I think it's right. Absolutely. I think it's case by case. I mean, we have to go through the whole book, but the bat is sort of the perfect example because we actually have, I mean, scientists have actually attempted to understand that. And there were people, even in the 1920s, there were batters that were saying like, it doesn't help because you are losing mass in the bat and the mass is why you can hit the balls further. I think a lot of hitters have always understood this, but as far as we know, it's not really stopped anybody from thinking it's helping them, but whether or not it is, I don't know.

from thinking it's helping them, but whether or not it is, I don't know. I mean, steroids is one of those things that I think people believe sort of logically is helping certain batters. But of course, the pitchers are often probably using steroids too. I think steroids would be one that would be impossible to unpack on an individual level because you'd have to have somebody that was willing to actually experiment with you. I just don't really think we're ever going to get to the bottom of that.

I think it's pretty obvious to me that the game on a macro level changed quite a bit for a number of years, especially for old players, you know, and that it resettled, you know, about 10 years ago. But yeah, I do believe that there is cheating going on that is not helping, but I don't believe that's going to stop people from trying anyway. Well, I would say at the roster level, it's different, right? I mean, clearly the Braves ended up with a bunch of good young prospects that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, which is why they were released. Even in that case, I think very few of those prospects actually

panned out or turned into anything. But I agree. Yes, in theory, that would be a bigger offense and a bigger advantage. Or Chris Correa hacking into the Astros database, getting a look at everything that they have going on in trade talks and what they want to offer the players. I think that's where the advantage lies. I also think, just going back to the spider tack, I think that the sticky stuff, it's gotten to a point with the high-speed video and being able to sort of measure your pitches so exactly and how you're twisting your wrist and your overall motion. I think that the sticky stuff does make a real difference.

It's hard to say, but again, I mean, you're talking at the level of the game is so high that even if you're just tweaking it at the margins, you are in fact probably gaining a fairly significant advantage. So last question then, and I should say also that there can be psychological advantages to some of these things that can be even harder to quantify, you know, some sort of placebo effect where you think you're getting an advantage and maybe you aren't actually, but the confidence that you gain from having that perceived advantage then helps you in some way. Or it's hard to quantify because, well, maybe everyone is cheating in some way. And so if you're cheating, it's maybe not giving you an advantage, but it's placing you at less of a disadvantage. So it's a complicated subject.

But last question, do you think we're at a low ebb for on-field cheating? And I say this just a few years after we found out about what the Astros and other teams were doing. And it would not shock me if some other revelation comes along, right? And we just went through the whole sticky stuff scandal and cracked down too. But relative to some of the eras that you're talking about in this book, it reminds me a little bit of when I interviewed Bill James once about his book, The Man from the Train, about a serial killer. And I was asking, well, is it harder to be a serial killer these days?

Because you hopefully, at least in theory, have people who are more vigilant and are sharing information and have greater technology at their disposal to track people down. That doesn't always work in practice, but there are more tools available, at least. And I guess you could say the same about cracking down on cheating in baseball or in sports. And you have drug tests and you have high definition cameras and you can track spin rates and so on and so forth. So are we going to get another book about baseball cheating in decades to come and it will have just as many revelations about this era as you have in your book about earlier eras or has at least the on field kind of cheating, do you think,

died down slightly in a relative sense? I would say, in my opinion, it probably has slowed down at the moment. And maybe I think there needs to be a perceived opportunity. And maybe there isn't a perceived opportunity at the moment. So the question is, will there be a perceived opportunity later? I think with the kinds of things that we currently, I think sign-stealing, for example, I think would be a pretty difficult thing to convince your team to do at the moment because the punishments are pretty bad, not just in terms of what it does to the team, but also what it does to the players' reputations, which I think that does matter to them. I think what Jose Altuve is going through, which, and there's a lot of questions about how much he really participated in this situation,

but he's booed. He's still booed, and it's been five years since the events. And I was up in Seattle a few weeks ago for an Astros game, and he was booed the whole time. So I don't think players really want to go through that. And then there's probably – it's difficult. There's a lot of questions in terms of how much it helps, et cetera. And I think the same thing happened with steroids to some extent.

I'm not saying that it's not happening. It would have to be something that you'd have to convince yourself that it was undetectable because, I mean, the punishments are pretty rough compared to the punishments that Mark McGuire had, which was essentially nothing. the punishments that Mark McGuire had, which was essentially nothing. So I think that it's going to be harder with the things that we now know about. And then the question is whether there are things that we don't know about, like a new chemical or a new modification to your body even, and whether that will then become outlawed, which would then result in cheating. I would just echo that, that the on-field stuff, I completely agree with Mark and sort of the premise of your question,

that it's going to be a lot harder. I mean, but, you know, everybody's competitive and there's new innovation. So, you know, with all these devices that teams are using and players are using to measure their swing and their pitches, the Rapsodo and all of these sort of new physiological measurements that are being made to players, is our team's going to try and, you know, take advantage of unique knowledge of what they have around this, even sometimes, you know, and how is this supposed to be shared? I mean, all the rules around this is still a little bit nebulous, exactly what you can do.

And you're not allowed to share that information from team to team. It's not like the medical information. So are there ways to take advantage of that? And what exactly is cheating among that? And then, of course, the whole high-tech thing. If we have, like, electronic ball-and-strike counters, I'm going to try and figure out a way that you can, you know, interfere with that either with the code itself or by, you know, doing something from your dugout that somehow affects how it reads, right? I mean,

who knows what's coming in all of this stuff. And if there's new opportunities, people try and figure out ways to get an advantage. Yep. You have a PitchCom device and then someone cracks the PitchCom device, which they say can't be done, but we will see. So yeah. And as you observe in the book, often there's a correlation between people or organizations that are innovating and are trying to do new things that are permissible and legal. And then that impulse is taken too far. And then those people cross the line. And maybe that's John McGraw. Maybe it's Branch Rickey. Maybe it's the Houston Astros, right? Who innovated in some legal ways that have been imitated and then also innovated in ways that were swiftly cracked down upon, although perhaps not swiftly or harshly enough.

So there is a connection there. And the more competitive the game and the sport gets and the less low-hanging fruit is out there for you to gain an advantage in an easy and legal way, then perhaps the more you are pressed to do something that does cross that line. So we will see if there will be more material for you to do a follow-up someday. But for now, you can go get the book. It is called Intentional Bawk, Baseball's Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating. It is by Daniel Levitt and Mark Armour, whom I've been talking to today. You can find Mark on Twitter at MarkArmour04.

That is A-R-M-O-U-R-0-4. And his website is Markarmor.net. There is a hyphen in there. And also Dan is on Twitter at D levs one and his website is Daniel hyphen levitt.com. And you can find more information about the book at intentional Bach book.com. Thanks guys. Always glad when you team up to work on something, and I look forward to future collaborations.

Our pleasure. Thank you, Ben. This was enjoyable. I appreciate it. All right. Three books down, one to go. Everyone still with me? Excellent.

Let's take one more inter-book break, and I'll be right back with Paul Oyer to talk about An Economist Goes to the Game, How to Throw Away $580 Million, and other surprising insights from the economics of sports. I'm snowing in my head I'm waiting on my friends And I sign from the gods To come out and play Now that our economy Is going to the dark Paul Oyer is a professor of economics and the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He's a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor Economics. We could keep listing his titles all day. But perhaps the most relevant right now is published author, and his latest book is An Economist Goes to the Game, How to Throw Away $580 Million, and other surprising insights from the economics of sports. Paul, welcome.

Ah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Longtime listener, as they say. Yeah, I did not list that as your top credential, but you are, in fact, a longtime Effectively Wild listener, and you proved it in this book. I will cite a brief passage here, quoting from your book. On one of my favorite baseball podcasts, Effectively Wild, the hosts regularly discuss the degree to which Trout could be handicapped and remain a major league quality player. They had long spirited discussions, for example, about how good Trout would be if he had to run the bases backward, how valuable he would be if he were allowed to only swing one time each time he came to bat. And I'm not making this up. He were allowed to only swing one time each time he came to bat. And I'm not making this up.

Whether he could fake his death midway through his career, assume a new persona, and be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame twice. In short, Mike Trout was and is an outstanding baseball player. That is all true. That all checks out. And I appreciate the flattery. And I would not guarantee that anyone who writes about the podcast in their book can come on the podcast, but it doesn't hurt. Well, I didn't do it for that reason, but I'm glad it did work. And I got to tell you, the faking the debt thing, that was really good stuff. So if Bill James is commonly regarded as the father or one of the fathers of sabermetrics, then I guess Simon Rottenberg might be regarded as the father of sports economics.

And you write a bit in your book about his 1956 paper, The Baseball Player's Labor Market, which appeared in the Journal of Political Economy. Can you explain a little bit about who he was or what his thesis was there or what impact it had? Yeah. So there was for many years now, or I don't know, there's always been this belief that the big market teams will take over and that we have to somehow, I don't know, make baseball or other sports equal in some way. So revenue sharing and other things are a way of getting around that. And Simon Rottenberg came very much from the traditional Chicago school of markets will all sort themselves out and everything will be fine. And so his basic point was just let the market work it out. And in fact, not all the great players will end up on the Yankees and the Dodgers in equilibrium will end up having real competition. This was his big,

big thought and insight. And he made some predictions basically about what would happen once free agency. So this was all pre-free agency, of course. And people were like, oh, we can't have free agents or everybody will end up on the Yankees. And he made a few predictions. And I'm going to be honest, I can't off the top of my head tell you exactly what they were right now. But, you know, basically he said the world will not end and there will still be competition once there's free agency. And some of his specific predictions turned out, panned out and have really held true in the in the world of free agency. I mean, I'm a I'm a Mets fan by, you know, because I have I'm from New York originally and I'm an A's fan.

And, you know, I've been more successful as an A's fan in the last 10 or 20 years. Hopefully not. Definitely not this year. years. Hopefully not, definitely not this year, but I've been, I've had more good years as an A's fan, despite the fact that they, you know, refused to sign. They have one of the lowest payrolls in the league. So a little, I think a little bit of now, maybe some of that is more, he didn't realize that there would be these bargains and so forth that analytics allowed Billy Beane and the like to find. But in general, a lot of his predictions turned out to be exactly right. So this is not solely a baseball book. There's a lot of baseball in it, but you write about a

wide range of sports. Did you find baseball to be the richest soil for your economic insights? Or in a sense, has that ground been picked over to an extent just because baseball has been analyzed through an economic and statistical lens to a greater extent than probably any other sport or most fields of human endeavor for that matter? Yeah, I mean, definitely analytics and economics started with baseball. But I think that the trend away from that is just a reflection of baseball's place in society. So my guess is Simon Rottenberg and probably the next big father of labor economics who started with baseball was a guy named Gerald Scully. And they both really focused on baseball, I'm guessing, because that's what the sports pages were about in 1970. And if you turn on Sports Center now, there's baseball, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. The place of baseball has fallen a little bit. So I do think that other sports have picked up partially because they're

just more popular, partially because the statistics in baseball are so easy, were so easy to analyze early on, whereas it's taken a lot longer to figure out how to analyze soccer and hockey and other sports using statistics, which is, you know, let's not, I don't want to confuse people by the idea of analytics is closely related to the economic study of baseball, but they're by no means synonymous. So there's economics of sports, and then there's analytics of sports. And those two things enhance one another, but in other sports. And you observe something that Meg and I have mentioned on the show, which is that, well, player salaries are justified when you consider the financial value that they produce. But perhaps we could look at it from a societal good perspective and say, well, is there some other way that we could organize our culture such that other occupations would be valued as highly. And

you write about that in the book. You say, even economists are human, so I can't help but sympathize with that view. A baseball player who excels at their craft does not do nearly as much to serve others as a farmer, a nurse, or a school teacher, but those other workers also do not create as much financial value as Mike Trout does. So what would have to happen from an economic perspective to reorder society such that those salaries would come more closely into line? tax rates. But other than short of that, I mean, the simple answer is communism, I guess, right? But we know that that has even more negative ramifications than free markets that seem unfair. I mean, there's a real unfairness seeming to this, but baseball players, maybe I didn't give them enough credit in what you quoted because they don't save lives and they don't educate our children. So they don't create

what an economist would call a positive externality. But what they do is they do create a lot of utility for sports fans. So people really enjoy it. And that's why they get- Distract us on the slog to rigor mortis. That's something. Exactly. I mean, so that's the economic value is right there. I mean, they're really, they really make us very happy. And then what makes them make so much money is, don't forget, economics is not the study of money. It's the study of scarce resources. And their skills are so unique, right? I mean, we know, you know, when you were a kid, you probably knew a bunch of kids who you thought were the greatest baseball players and

athletes ever. And those people never went anywhere in their careers, right? And whereas these guys playing in the major leagues, they're just super human and their skills are so scarce and so hard to come by. One thing you note in that chapter as you're comparing the salaries across sports and specifically guaranteed contracts, which are very different in MLB and the NFL. And if I had to quibble with one thing in that chapter, you note that there are maybe multiple reasons why it's the case that there's less guaranteed money in the NFL. And you note that maybe just the beating that those players take physically, just going out there game after game, week after week, means that there's more importance on the incentive of having to, right, the respective unions and players associations, which in MLB and baseball has been much stronger historically post-Marvin Miller. And

the NFL Players Association was sort of broken by the owners in 87 with replacement players and then players crossing the picket line. And so the MLBPA may not be quite what it was at its peak, The MLBPA may not be quite what it was at its peak, but it is still seemingly stronger than other unions and other sports. And so I wonder how you can take something like that into account when you're comparing sports and baseball's unique economic structure. So I think that's a great question. There's no question that baseball's union, as you said, has historically been very strong and remains that way. But I think that the underlying question of how much is guaranteed versus is one question, and then the other is how much money do the players get? And I think the strength of the union speaks to how much the players get, but I don't see anything specific in the union's negotiation that says

the contracts will be long and guaranteed. That's just a outcome of the negotiations and the competition among owners to land players, right? So I don't think the union, I could be wrong. I haven't read the collective bargaining agreement in detail. I suspect you may have the recent collective bargaining agreement. Not the new one. I don't think it's out yet. Can't wait. Hot off the presses.

We'll be picking it up here. I don't, to my knowledge, there isn't much in there that would say players' contracts will be long and guaranteed. That's an outcome of the players want long and guaranteed contracts. And then the, you know, the 10 teams that are willing to spend a lot of money start bidding against each other and they trade off money versus length and guaranteedness of these contracts to make them attractive to players. And the same thing happens in football, right? But the difference is the owners are willing to compete by guaranteeing money in baseball. And the hypothesis

that you particularly mentioned, which I think is part of the story, but not the whole thing, is they're willing to do that because they know that several years from now, a baseball player will still want to play baseball and we won't you know, we won't have to force them out there. You know, in the book, I quote a lineman who talks about in football, why did he keep playing? And it's like, I just had to, if I didn't, I didn't get the paycheck. So I think that's that, that the unions are really important, but I would focus the effect of the union more on how much money are the players getting rather than what is the guaranteed versus non-guaranteed form of payment. Yeah. And, you know, we've started to see perhaps a shift toward shorter, higher a higher single season salary ceiling and go year to year, let's say. And I hate to invoke Trevor Bauer these days

for any reason, but his deal with the Dodgers was perhaps sort of a precedent setter in that respect. Since then, we've seen players like Max Scherzer, who, you know, at an advanced age, maybe he was not in the market for a very long-term deal. But even someone like Carlos Correa, right, who's taking a shorter-term, higher average annual value contract with the twins that included opt-outs that could return him to free agency even sooner. So do you think that that's something that more players should pursue than have pursued in the past? Or what are the tradeoffs to consider there? So remember, I'm an economist, so I would never say what a player should do. We only try to explain it after the fact. But why would Max Scherzer have taken a shorter term? Well, as you said, he's at a late stage in his career, so even Steve Cohen wasn't going to give

him a 10-year contract. But you might expect to see a guy like him or somebody else who's renegotiating in their early 30s be willing to take a shorter term contract if they've already earned $100 million in their career. So something, you know, if I'm signing a contract at age 26, boy, you know, if I sat down and did some math as an economist and just kind of guessed people's risk aversion, I would very quickly come to the conclusion that no matter how confident you are, betting on yourself to the point of giving up a long-term contract, it's hard to reconcile. When you're offered $100 million guaranteed versus $10 million this year and roll the dice the following year, the incentives to go for that long-term contract are really strong. And I would be hard-pressed to ever tell a player they should not do that. So the thing that might lead to more of it is if there are some players

who make a lot of money and then it's time to re-up and they already have tens of millions of dollars in the bank, then you can see them feeling insulated from the risk and at that point putting more on the line. And of course, this comes up often early in players' careers when they're weighing long-term extension offers before they have banked a lot of money. And then it's even harder to turn down when someone's dangling what seems to you like a very large deal, even if you could get a significantly larger one if you stayed healthy and if your performance was maintained, et cetera. So that's a difficult consideration.

And you just have to trust that the agents or whoever is in their orbit is advising them on what they could expect otherwise. But really, that's, you know, whether you sign that deal before you make the majors or after you've just broken in or after you've already become arbitration eligible or super two eligible, it makes a huge difference, of course, because you have different incentives to make sure that you have some amount of money that can support yourself and your family for the rest of your life, whatever happens. Yeah. And as you've discussed on the show in the past, in a couple of, at least a couple of

episodes and probably more, there are now organizations in the private market trying to make it even less risky for younger players before they can cash in, right? So you have these organizations like Pando and I can't remember the name of the other company where they got sued. Big League Advance was the one. Yeah. Yeah. And so they're taking the logic of let's take away some of the risk and let's allow you to at least be sure you can make a good living for the rest of your life if you have expectations that you can make a lot of money. They're trying to take some of that risk off the table when people are young. And I think the economic value of sharing risk among young players is tremendous. So that makes a lot of sense as long as, and that's the point that we started from, as long as it doesn't screw up the incentives to perform.

Right. Or as long as there's not some predatory aspects to it where you're taking advantage of players in a way that it really doesn't work out for them, or maybe they're not informed enough about the issues to know what they're signing up for, et cetera. So yeah, no, they need it. They need a high quality. The one piece of advice I will give is have a high quality agent helping you out, especially when you're young. I mean, right. Obviously the predatory side of things that when there's so much money at stake and people kind of naive, the opportunity for predatory things is really rife. And you will definitely want to stop that.

You also devote a chapter to stadium deals and public funding of ballparks. And we've devoted plenty of episodes to that too. And I think probably a lot of our audience knows that typically those things don't seem to work out when you look at the numbers or at least the non-twisted numbers that are marshaled to support someone's case about this being a boon to a local populace. But what I wonder is why this keeps happening, right? Because people have been writing and talking about this and decrying these deals and bemoaning them for years at this point, and yet there doesn't seem to be any end to them. So is it that there is some value,

some incentive that we're not taking into account is just the value of making sure that you keep your team there so great that we can't quantify it? Or is it that the wool is repeatedly being pulled over people's eyes? Yeah, I think I lean more towards the second category. But I will say that the trends are good here. I mean, the wool is being pulled over people's eyes less than it used to be. So you're not seeing quite as many stadium deals. I mean, I'm an A's fan. I really want them to build a new stadium, but I'm kind of happy that Oakland and the local area is not knuckling under and doing it for them. So, and there are more areas that are doing that. But I think the, when you do see public money being used, it is a matter of

the wool being pulled over their eyes, as you said. And I think it really comes down to something that's a fundamental idea in economics, political economy. And that is, you have a small set of people for whom something means a lot. And they can often push through an agenda if there's a wide set of people who don't want something, but it's not like the most critical thing they're thinking about all the time, right? So most people don't want us to spend public money on stadiums, but they're not taking the time to go out and fight and go to City Hall and fight about it. They might go and vote against it. They do. Almost every vote for public financing of stadiums in the last 25 years has lost.

So people do go vote against it, but they don't go and fight against it. And if you're a politician who really loves your local team and values being there to throw out the first pitch, you can figure out ways to build a coalition to get around majority opinion. majority opinion. Is there any economist's code of conduct or a Hippocratic oath for economists? Because sometimes with these stadium deals, right, there's always some study, some literature that is drummed up in support of the public funding proposal that says this will create X number of jobs and this will be worth this many millions or billions to the local community. And sometimes there are economists who may or may not know better who are putting those reports together or who are involved as consultants. So is there any kind of conduct, and we do censure one another in our various orbits. But often the people who will come out in favor of this or write reports along those lines are not economists necessarily highly regarded by the American Economic Association or economists at universities or things like that. So unlike doctor, you can call yourself an economist. And so there's not the equivalent of the Bar Association or something like that.

And you're absolutely right. I mean, when, and you'll see this, this goes beyond this context. There, you know, often there will be lawsuits and there'll be expert witnesses brought in, you know, for some, you know, antitrust cases or something like that. And there'll be economists on both sides of that. And there isn't always a good censure for those people because that's the realm in which they operate is different from the realm in which the broader group of academic economists operate. You also devote a chapter to gambling and sports betting. sports betting. And it's something I think about a lot in regard to baseball with just what seems to be the potential for micro betting, right? And for placing wagers on the outcome of a particular

plate appearance or the outcome of a particular pitch even. And you talk a little bit about some of the scandals that have gone on in other sports and just like low stakes match fixing in a way, you know, and there's seemingly some potential for that to happen if not at the major league level, although I don't think that's out of the question, but certainly you look at the minor league level where the players are not being that well compensated. And if there were a market where some player in double A can throw a pitch inside the strike zone instead of outside the strike zone and get some payout because of that. I mean, how could you ever detect that?

How could you police that? How could you prevent that? So what do you see as the potential cost? Of course, that's separate from the cost to the public and the fact that people have problems with gambling and that can be devastating. have problems with gambling and that can be devastating. But I also wonder about the competitive integrity question, which was always just the line in the sand where MLP would not cross as long as these things were illegal. And then as soon as it became legal, it's, oh, we can do this and still maintain competitive integrity and rake in tons of money. So do you have concerns about them maintaining that integrity at every level as this becomes

an even bigger business? Yeah, so I think the distinction you made between the potential for corruption in the majors and the minors is really important here. So the good news is, even if you don't think that baseball players making $20 million a year is a good thing, you know, in the ways we were talking about earlier, if you think that has other problems, it does help with the gambling in the sense that by paying baseball major leaguers so much, they have so much to lose by being caught in a gambling scandal that I think that's a second, really a second order risk. So legalized gambling, as you hinted at,

I don't worry that much about the majors. So what about in the minors? As you said, the difference between eating and not eating is a reality for minor league players. And so I think what I would say there is, boy, if you bet on a minor league game, like caveat emptor, as they say, the stakes, I just can't understand. I will be surprised if serious liquid markets take place in betting in minor league games. Who knows? Anything can happen. But I think that the biggest impediment to people cheating is that because the opportunities to cheat and the rewards to it for a minor league player would be so high i just don't think it would make sense for those betting markets to to even take place i mean in

the book i don't talk about baseball and the betting thing but the example i use is there was a match a tennis match where the guy ranked 600th in the world was caught cheating. And like the bet that was the greatest, I mean, like the bet was that he would win the first set of a match. It wasn't even that the guy would win the match. Somebody ranked 600th in the world and you could bet on whether he would win the first set of a match between him and the guy ranked 1200th in the world. And anybody who participates in those betting markets, in a betting market that thin and that rife for corruption kind of has it coming, you might say. So I think avoiding, one thing that I sure hope is, is markets are,

if betting markets take off, and I have real reservations about whether they should or not, but if they do, I certainly hope they're focused more on big, you know, the NFL and Major League Baseball and other places where it's just wouldn't be rational for people to cheat and throw matches. the world is susceptible to this, then what might that mean for a minor leaguer? Of course, I guess people would be less up in arms about, say, swinging the outcome of a plate appearance or a pitch at the minor league level where wins and losses are generally considered less important. But even so, you wonder whether that would be some kind of gateway. You start dabbling in that, then do you continue to dabble once you become a big leaguer? It just seems like a bit of a dangerous road, a slippery slope. So I wonder just how difficult that would be to completely prevent. But that's probably not even the main concern. I mean, I know that in other countries that adopted legalized gambling earlier, they are already putting

regulations in place to, say, restrict celebrity spokespeople and athletes endorsing gambling services and such, whereas we're just starting to see that happen here. And it seems like the cost elsewhere has been kind of devastating. And I don't know whether we're learning from that and skipping that step or whether we're just going to go through those same growing pains and perhaps not even take the same corrective steps? Oh, we're going to definitely go through the same growing pains, whether we take the steps or not. And yeah, I mean, but the thing about betting is it's really fun and good for most people, but it's really devastating for a small group of people. And so that's just the kind of societal trade-off. We really have to think carefully about how far we want to go

down that road. But as far as celebrity spokespeople go and so forth, I think at the very least, regulation around betting as it grows and should be very much truth in advertising and full disclosure of odds and things like that. So, you know, making it very sexy and alluring through celebrities and by showing people winning all the time in advertisements, that can be problematic for people who are susceptible to become problem gamblers because it just paints an unrealistic picture. I mean, you should bet. A lot of people can and should go ahead and bet because they can do so and it makes it more fun and they recognize they'll probably lose, but they're having a better time. Economists would be all for that. Unfortunately, there's this big externality on a group of irrational people that we have to be really careful about.

So last question. There's been a lot of agonizing over the competitive landscape in MLB. And I think some of that sometimes gets a bit overblown. But it is true that these days it seems like teams can make money without necessarily fielding a competitive roster, right? Just because there's so much money coming in from other revenue sources that their bottom line is not tied as directly to ticket sales as it once was. There's kind of a built-in revenue source or several revenue sources before the season even starts. And so that has enabled some owners and some teams to take advantage of that system and essentially pocket whatever revenue sharing money they're getting or downsize or cut payroll and not push forward when,

in theory, they could probably afford to spend more on their rosters. And so as a combination Mets A's fan, I guess you've experienced the extremes of that lately, right? You've experienced the extremes of that lately, right? Where Steve Cohen, okay, he is even wealthier than the other ultra wealthy MLB owners. John Fisher is not going to be out on the street anytime soon. His net worth is measured in the billions as well. And while it's impressive that the A's front office has managed to field competitive rosters for the most part over the last 25 years or so, despite the constraints that have been imposed by ownership. It's frustrating, right?

It's very frustrating, I'm sure, as an A's fan to see them tear down what was a competitive and compelling roster last year just because they would not spend more when seemingly you would think they could afford to spend more if they wanted to, Fisher that is. So what, if anything, do you think could be done or should be done to incentivize teams like that that have a history of keeping their payrolls smaller than maybe they could to increase them or to penalize teams for not doing so. And just in general, what motivates someone who is very rich, right, and buys a baseball team and then does not devote money that they have to making that baseball team better, you know, when they have as much as they do already and it would seem like they could just take a little bit out of the massive bank account to put a more competitive team on the field. And instead, they treat it as if it is any other business, right, where they want to turn a profit every year. Yeah. And so great questions. And I think that the answer on the last part of your question of why would they buy the team and only try to make a profit? I don't understand

that at all. Like, there's so many other things to invest in. If you're not buying the baseball team to try to win and have, or a football team or whatever, to try to win and have fun, just, you know, go buy a tech company. So I don't, I just don't get it. Why would they buy these teams and try to maximize profit? There's only 30 of them. There's, you know, so many people who buy them and then do irrational, crazy things like Steve Cohen is doing overspending for the sake of my enjoyment. Go ahead and do that. Use them as a hobby. Steve Ballmer, Steve Cohen, they're interesting people. They're not necessarily the most admirable people in every possible way, but at least they're just kind of making the game fun for everybody else. So credit to the way they spend their money. But the answer to what can be

done about the A's, the current A's, and in fairness, the A's until a year or two ago, they were cheap, but they were really trying hard to get the most bang for their buck. were cheap, but they were really trying hard to get the most bang for their buck. But as far as this giving up now and just trying to make money, I don't get it. But there are two groups that can discipline these owners, right? And you're seeing it right now with the A's. Fans can discipline them. I don't go to A's games anymore. I used to go to games. I don't. And if you look, if you look in the stands at an A's game now, I was watching a game the other night and you know, like you could see the people right behind home plate. And you know, when the pitch is coming, it looks like the game is crowded.

And then they showed the stands and you realize that like 80% of the people at the game were sitting right behind home plate in that shot because the A's games are just empty. So the fans are disciplining them and that's good. Now, it's not enough because as you said, they get all this revenue sharing. So the other group that's going to have to keep the Pirates and the A's from continuing to free ride on the others is the league itself. continuing to free ride on the others is the league itself. So the league is the commissioner and the other owners have to figure out what is the government structure to keep things going. And there's minimum, you know,

you've discussed all the things they've on the show so many times that they can try minimum payrolls and other things. Of course, the problem with enforcing some of those things is it's easy. It's not easy, but it's not necessarily that difficult for sports franchises to put a little bit of opaqueness around their revenues and how much money they're making. And so if everything were a completely open book, it would be easy for the leagues to impose rules on teams. Because of the opacity there, it's not easy for that to happen. But basically, we need the fans and the

league offices to be strong and to basically remind the 30 team owners, hey, you're in a collective agreement to make this interesting for people. Step it up. Well, I can recommend one open book, which is An Economist Goes to the Game. How's that segue to the outro there? That was awesome. Thank you. I will link to the site where you can find a lot of information about it. And you can also find Paul on Twitter at Paul Oyer, O-Y-E-R.

Paul, it was a pleasure. And thanks again for the shout out. Thank you so much, Ben. I really enjoyed it and I love the podcast. All right, everyone, let's take one more break and I'll be back to tie a bow on this book extravaganza with today's past and last. So much present inside of my, present inside of my, present inside of my soul. So much past inside of my, present inside of my, present inside of my, present inside of my soul. Okay, time to wrap up with our past blast, although I have one item to relay before we do. Richard Hershberger, who provides our past blasts, historian, researcher, author of Strike For the Evolution of Baseball. He writes in in response to our discussion of the Royals anti-vaxxer problem on our preceding episode to note that the need for teams to get vaccinated is nothing new.

episode to note that the need for teams to get vaccinated is nothing new. He sends me a clip from Sporting Life on February 5th, 1910. Headline, must vaccinate. No chances to be taken by Boston of trouble in the South. Dateline, Boston, Massachusetts, January 31st. Manager Donovan of the Boston Red Sox sent out a circular letter to the players he intends taking South for training at Hot Springs. Extracts from the letter follow. Quote, as you no doubt remember, the New York American League club experienced serious difficulty last year in the south, which gave them a very bad setback. I refer to the case of smallpox, which Hal Chase contracted, which might have been contracted by any of the other players unless proper precaution was taken. I would advise and also request that you have a competent

physician vaccinate you at once. Be sure to obtain a certificate from the physician and mail same to I don't know what percentage of the team complied. I know that the Red Sox finished fourth, and according to a cursory newspapers.com search, I don't see any signs of a smallpox outbreak on the roster that season. So I don't know if any 1910 Red Sox players were doing their own research and making personal decisions. Smallpox was pretty scary. I hope they all got the jab. But now let's rewind a few decades. This is episode 1876. So today's past blast from Richard comes from 1876. Richard Richard notes we are now in the National League era Yes, this is a momentous year Not only the U.S. Centennial, but the inaugural season of the National League

However, Richard writes, that doesn't mean we are out of the quaint teams era So Hartford versus the Mutuals, October 17th, 1876 As reported in the New York Clipper of October 28th One of the best plays of the match was that by Ferguson, the third baseman in the eighth inning, when Booth led off with a ball to Remsen, who failed to hold it. Then Matthews came to the bat and prepared himself for a fair foul hit. Seeing this, Ferguson took up a position on foul ground toward home base, and on Matthews' hit, made a pretty double play.

But for this playing of points, in other words, using one's judgment as to the play of the batsman, Matthews would have made a two-base fair foul hit, and with one man on the base and none out, would no doubt have secured the first run. It is this style of thing which distinguishes a shrewd and skillful player from a mere field machine, the latter always being found ready to catch or field a ball only where he happens to be placed, and seldom or ever going out of his rut to field a ball or to judge the play of the batsman. So, Richard explains, we saw the fair foul hit in episode 1874, a bunt that landed in fair territory and veered off across the foul line. Ferguson anticipates that Matthews will hit one and positions himself not merely close in, but in foul territory where he correctly

predicts the ball will go. Why didn't Matthews try instead to hit a sharp fair ball down the line? This is the 1876 version of asking why batters don't bat against the shift. It isn't that easy. Also, Matthews is the pitcher. Even in 1876, pitchers weren't hired for their bat skills. He batted 183 that year. Ferguson's position would be illegal today. In the modern rules, only the catcher is allowed to begin the play in foul territory, and he is constrained within the catcher's box. Discussions opposing banning the shift often begin with the claim that players can and always have been able to be positioned anywhere. They, other than the pitcher and catcher, have a wide leeway in where they are positioned.

But this is not absolute. The modern rule was adopted in 1910, just as the Red Sox were getting vaccinated for smallpox. I don't know why. I looked at several discussions of the rules changes. This one is barely mentioned, clearly regarded as a tiny change, not meriting discussion. If I had to guess as to the reason,

I would note that relief pitching had reached the point where they were starting to have bullpens down the lines. Perhaps this was a matter of keeping the fielders and the pitchers apart. This isn't a great explanation, but I don't have anything better. Nor do I, Richard. Thank you, as always. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. Last call for listener tributes and testimonials for next week's anniversary episodes. If you're interested, send us a voice clip, 30 seconds or shorter. Just introduce yourself and say whatever's in your heart about your experience with an affinity for the podcast. Happy to have our listeners' voices

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We will be back to talk to you soon. And you still expect to love a bus after showing all you got I see it in your eyes, a reddit in the bus, a girl wants love without the luck I'll see it in your eyes A red-headed fox Who won't stop Without the luck That's all