Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1878: The 10th Anniversary Draft

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley continue their celebration of the 10th anniversary of Effectively Wild by bringing on former cohost Jeff Sullivan and Most Frequent Guest (for now) Grant Brisbee to banter about Jeff’s job with the Rays and draft their favorite baseball stories from the past 10 years (plus a Past Blast from 1878). […]

All I wanna do Is pretend for a night That the end's out of sight For old friends I will leave on a lie Old friends On a new guitar And there's so much whiskey at the bar Hello and welcome to episode 1878 of Effectively Wild,

a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm swell. That's great. We have other guests. Well, you're not a guest, you're a co-host, but we have some guests. Our anniversary fun continues with, you know, some longtime pals and one former co-host. Indeed. Yeah. Sadly, Sam Miller was unavailable for our old home week here. But fortunately, we've got a couple other pals. We've got one Jeff Sullivan. Hello, Jeff. Hello. And one Grant Brisby. Hello, Grant.

Hello. How is everybody? We're doing well. What was that? I don't know. Is that how you are? How is everybody? So this is the second of our anniversary-themed episodes. And fortunately, Grant and Jeff have nothing going on.

You can get Grant and Jeff on your podcast, no problem. No, that's not true. They're both busy, too. Grant covers the Giants for The Athletic. Jeff is a baseball development analyst for The Rays. So presumably he has a lot of baseball analysis and or development to do, which he is taking a break from to talk to us now because he is a former co-host of Effectively Wild. And Grant is now our most frequent guest in Effectively Wild history with this very

appearance because there was a three-way tie, we learned, between Grant, Eric Lagenhagen, and Russell Carlton. And with this appearance, Grant's 19th lifetime appearance on Effectively Wild, he now takes the lead. Grant, how does it feel? It's always been my dream to crush Eric and Russell. And now I've realized that dream. And, you know, in their face, basically. Well, here's the problem. Eric is going to be on the next episode.

So your reign as most frequent Effective Wild guests will last for about a day. What about most downloads by guest? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm sure the grand episodes get big numbers. You've always been kind of in spirit, the fifth beetle of Effectively Wild,'ve always been kind of in spirit, the fifth Beatle of Effectively Wild, the Billy Preston of the podcast,

where we've thought, oh, he'd be a great full-time band member. And then Paul McCartney said, eh, maybe not. So that hasn't quite happened, but it would be great. We always love when Grant is here. And you guys are always bickering

and just being really rude to each other. And then I show up and everyone starts to get along and everyone's a lot more creative. Yeah, that's really right. Yeah. Great on the keys to just really superlative. Jeff, how is your health? Because most of the people I know who are employed by the Tampa Bay Rays seem to be on the injured list these days, not to bring up a literally sore subject. I'm fine. And I owe that mostly to not doing anything. I did have a thought that if I was more involved in the on-fit.

You had sent me a message some time ago. Being like a reader asked if the Rays making so many outs on the bases was some form of competitive advantage. And I realized that if I was around a little more, I might try to compel Randy Rosarani as Player's Weekend nickname to be Vroom Vroom Guy. I think that that would be the most appropriate manifestation of the podcast. He's already living it. We might as well call him that.

I would buy that jersey. Players being injured seems like not a competitive advantage either. Some might say it's even a competitive disadvantage. What do you think like when your team is the team that is having injury issues in a given season? Because it's always some team, right? And sometimes it's multiple teams. But when it is your team, I'm sure it's quite frustrating. But is there ever a point where you're like, something is happening here that we have to look into to try to prevent? Or do you just curse the heavens and think this is not our year health-wise?

What do I think when the whole team is hurt? I think bad things. I think that it's miserable to live through. But I mean, we're a team that cycles through pitchers. We have every pitcher throw as hard as they can and throw 80% breaking balls. Whenever you select people based on talent and affordability, and a lot of times the players who are more affordable are the players who are not the most durable. So, I mean, there's every reason in the world to think that we would end up selecting for people who get hurt. But also, I don't know, Harold Ramirez just broke his thumb because Jordan Lyles hit him with a 91-mile-per-hour fastball in the thumb. Can't do much about that.

You can do a little more about pitchers who, well, I guess you can do a little more about pitchers who get hurt, but you can expect. I mean, you know, the Dodgers are beat up, right? So at least we're not the only one. Also, it helps you feel a little smug to be like, yeah, top wildcard team and everybody starts. That's kind of, it's not fun.

It's not fun, to be absolutely clear. It's not fun. But at least it does, at the minimum, it provides an excuse. Glad we could clarify that. Here's the thing. When I'm covering a Giants team that's hurt and there's guys all over the injured list, I think, wow, this is weird or this is a story angle. This is something different. This is something unfortunate. When it's happening to Jeff, it's possible that he caused it. and unfortunate. When it's happening to Jeff, it's possible that he caused it. There's no way that I would cause the Giants injury problem, but Jeff might be responsible, wholly responsible for everything that's going on except for the hit by pitch. I cannot recommend highly enough not being a senior executive because at the end of the day, I was talking to my wife about this yesterday,

nothing really. I don't know why I get paid. I just sit here and I tell stuff to some people and then they do whatever the hell they want. And then the day is over and I have dinner. Nothing matters if I'm not around. We can still do stuff. At least when it's the Giants getting hurt, you can think, well, everyone is 37. So why wouldn't they be hurt? Yeah. Fair enough.

There it's a trend, whereas otherwise you might think, well, this is a fluke and we are unlucky. Or some teams, if it persists across multiple seasons, then it's like, do we need to revamp our training routines? Yeah. Or are we the Mets? Or do we need to get a new training staff or something like that? You start to think it might not just be fluke and coincidence and unfortunate, but it might actually mean something. So I don't know if one season or two seasons is enough for it to mean something. Meg has a hard out here in a bit, and I'm also not going to tell this story now.

But when Meg leaves and we're done recording, then I'll tell you, which is that it's been, I think, three and a half years or so now since you callously abandoned both Fangraphs and Effectively Wild. So is that enough time for you to have seen essentially the meta of MLB change, like the current competitive strategy, like the things that the Rays were talking about? like the current competitive strategy, like the things that the Rays were talking about. Let's say you don't have to give away what these things were, although you're welcome to if you want to. But the things that a team might be thinking, OK, here's what we should do now. Here's something that other teams aren't doing that we could do. This could be an advantage for us. Like in three and a half years, has that turned over several times already to the point where the things that you were thinking about in that vein back in early 2019 seem archaic now, or is it not that fast? Some of it, of course. And part of that comes from, well, whatever weird little competitive

advantages the Rays had, well, not only does Andrew Friedman run the Dodgers, but in just the time that I've been at the Rays, Hein Blum went to run the Red Sox and James Click went to run the Astros. And we just lost Ani Colomby, a tremendous analyst, to go be an executive with the Phillies. Do people not like working with you? Is that the issue? Aww. I am so far away that I don't think anyone thinks that they do work with me.

I just exist on the Internet, and that's fine. Then I show up in the office, and then like next week I'll go to the office, and then I'll just kind of float around the first day in there looking for a desk because i don't have a desk just kind of like spend the first day being like where can i settle uh and then people are like oh hey it's jeff and then after about 20 minutes nobody cares anymore it's great but like i was just looking at something this morning i'm not going to say what it is but like the phillies are now doing something this year that they didn't do last year and it's something that was very closely involved in

and was kind of the idea man for. So not a surprise to see that go somewhere else. This is not a surprise to see ideas spread through the industry. You're not going to find what it is. There's no public. You're not going to find it. The Orioles are doing something this year that they didn't do before. That is in the public, I'm still not going to say,

but it's something that we've done a lot. Is that catchers setting up in the same place on every pitch? It's straightforward, right? But they're doing it now, which they didn't do before. Before, yeah. They're throwing more strikes. What a f***ing surprise. So there's a good amount of that.

Last winter, a few of us were really excited, being like, oh, I think we figured out a way to add more break to these pitchers' breaking balls. We've got to keep that one under wraps. And then you read a whole entire article by Lindsay Adler being like, yeah, the Yankees had this two years ago, and now they're teaching it to everybody. I just noticed that every single pitcher on the Yankees

has this pitch because it's not a mystery. Just do what Corey Kluber does, right? Pitchers copying pitches is not. The point, the answer is yes. All right. Well, this is injuries bad, throwing strikes good. Just a taste of the type of analysis that the Rays are getting in baseball development

from Jeff Sullivan that we are being deprived of these days. Hold on, hold on. I'm writing that down. I'm writing that down. Now everyone can spend a while trying to figure out what the Phillies are doing. So we do have an actual topic or purpose here today, sort of. And in keeping with the anniversary theme,

we thought we would do a little low stakes draft as we often have done with Jeff and Grant, where there's no competitive aspect to it, really, and we're just here to have fun, which is that we thought that we would draft our favorite baseball stories to talk about or write about or cover or just interact with in some ways over the past decade, just since this podcast began, basically. And it doesn't have to be something that we personally covered, although I guess in many cases it would be

if we were fascinated by it. Could be silly stuff, could be serious stuff, could be surprising stuff. We'll find out what we each pick. So Meg, do you want to go first? Because you do have a hard out. I don't want to go first. You don't want to go first.

I don't want to go first. I will share this with our listeners as I shared with you guys before we started. I have done no prep for this draft because I have been working like a crazy person that just you guys haven't been. And I was listening to Rob Manfred and Tony Clark talk. And then I scooted back to the hotel. I am told that I am going to be delivered a cookie soon. So that's very exciting. But no, I don't know.

I'm drafting baseball. Draft done. So you're not drafting Rob Manfred becoming commissioner of baseball? That's not on your list? I just think that I would be less aggrieved if it were me. If I were the commissioner, I'd be like, what if we tried being a happy guy? What if we tried to do the happy guy commissioner dance? You just give it a shot. Try something new. Anyway, someone else draft. Yeah, that'll be for our what do we want in the next 10 years of baseball draft. So I don't know, one of our guests, you want to go? Jeff, I don't know whether you've thought about baseball in this way for years or remember anything that you used to write about before you were an analyst in

baseball development. I have two ideas to go number one. I feel like someone's going to steal this one. Okay, so first I'm going to draft Mike Trout. Okay. I think Mike Trout is great, and he's been a lot of fun for 10 years. And I don't think that I wrote about anything more often. I don't think that there's been anything more fun to think about. I don't think there's been anyone more consistent.

Even when he changes, he's the same. I think even this year, you know, he's been hurt a lot, which is very discouraging. Although it would have been maybe more discouraging when I was on the outside trying to write about him. I care about it less now because, you know, competitive juices. But he's great. And every single year, you know, what's the old rule of thumb? Stats don't count until Mike Trout has the highest war in baseball. Holds true.

Still extremely accurate. Mike Trout, number one. He's great. Yep. I guess that's not a shocker. Mike Trout being number one on the things we like about baseball. Draft uneffectively wild. Probably the most discussed player in our history.

Obviously the most frequent subject of weird hypotheticals. And certainly I've written a ton about him and all of us have probably covered him a lot in some ways. And yes, the changing nature of Mike Trout and the way that he is always good, but he gets there in different ways. And that's always been fun to write about. I don't know how many Fangraphs blogs you did

about Mike Trout and high fastballs, but probably a lot if we could Google that. So yeah, that has been a constant source of enjoyment and would have been on my board as well. I will say that one of the changes in perspective that I have going back to writing about the Giants full time is how little I think about Mike Trout. And it's not like I'm not trying to be snarky or anything. It's almost like a baseball truism that I'm so focused on my team. It's just, it's almost like a baseball truism that I'm so focused on my team. It's almost like the perspective of being a normal baseball fan where it's hard to think

about Mike Trout. It's not like LeBron James. It's such a different sport. It's such a regional sport. I just, I feel like I'm listening to Jeff talk. It's like, oh, holy heck, I need to go back and watch more Mike Trout. He's right. That dude's good. But it's the same for us. We don't, we play the Angels a few times a year and you think like, well, we're going to give up a few home runs to Mike Trout. But like, we're not going to trade for Mike Trout. We're not probably going to see Mike Trout in the playoffs.

We don't talk about it. I've had maybe like four conversations about Mike Trout since I got hired and he's been amazing. But you know, I just, my relationship with him is very similar to yours been amazing. But, you know, my relationship with him is very similar to yours, Grant. Grant, I have bad news, which is that he's hurt right now. Right now.

That's what I'm telling you. Right now? Right now, yeah. His ribs are inflamed or maybe stuff around his ribs. Something's wrong with his ribs. They're not great. That does not bode well for the Angels. Oh, Grant, I got some news for you about

the Angels. Holy shnikes! Yeah, it's not... Oh. We're breaking news left and right here. The Rays probably not trading for Mike Trout. We're going to get aggregated. This is going to be headlines on MLB Trade Rumors. Jeff is going to get in trouble.

Oh, boy. I don't like to break. Like, can I just, I'm going to make this one a definite. We're not trading for Mike Trout. You can put that on the board. The Tampa Bay Rays are not trading for Mike Trout. This year. Okay, this year. This year, the Tampa Bay Rays are not trading for Mike Trout.

Wow, what a scoop. You had it here first. Oh, extra, extra. Source literally and endless for the Tempe race. Okay. Grant, this is going to be tough for you because the team that you cover hasn't really done anything noteworthy in the last decade that I can recall. So, I don't know. Do you have anything? I, well, you know what? I'm going to throw a little curveball baseball term at you and I'm going to draft

baseball history. Writing about baseball history. It's taken me a decade plus to realize that that is what I like doing. And I love reading about the things I would have been writing if they happened today, but I get to rediscover them. Because frankly, they make too much baseball these days. It's too hard to keep up with it. And it's almost like music where they keep making music, and I keep falling behind. And there's like David Bowie albums that I don't know. Like I have to go back. I love David Bowie, but I'm not intimately familiar with Lodger. So they're making new albums that aren't David Bowie, but there's David Bowie albums that I don't know. And that's how it is with baseball.

So I like writing about things that happened. They should stop making baseball so we could go back and dig through archives and get all musty smelling and stuff like that. I like writing about nerding out on history of baseball. Yeah. I thought you were going to say they should stop making new David Bowie albums. And I was going to be like,

Grant, I have further bad news. Oh God. No. What is it, his ribs? Oh, no. We shouldn't laugh at this. All of us are so sad.

Yeah, you just want to live in Kirk Reader's shed, basically, and never come out. Yes! That's exactly right. It is just, I wrote about, when I was looking at what I've written over the past decade, Kirk Reader's shed is a great example of, like like that's so important to me and my baseball writing career. The 1997 Giants, the early, the late candlestick era Giants. And I like digging into that stuff. I wrote about the history of Candlestick Park, the McGuire Sosa race, the Baltimore Orioles losing 21 games to start the season.

games, to start the season. I love that stuff because I get to go through and read about what the sporting news was publishing in 1988 in April. And I love that stuff. I don't know why, but that's what I want to become. I want to be John Thorne. So it would have been better if the lockout had continued is what you're saying. Yes, and COVID. More pandemics and lockouts. That's what Grant says. Man, the pull quotes from this episode are going to be something. Yes, out of context, effectively wild. Twitter account is going to go wild with this one. Dude, working during the lockout was awesome.

We should have a lockout every year for like a month, just around the holidays. Everyone was in favor of it. We are the sowing, reaping tweet right now, though, because there's no days off. There's just games and games and doubleheaders and more games and like 14 games in a row. Sucks.

Yeah, guys getting injured. No one was getting injured when no one was playing. That was great. Well, except for Fernando Tatis Jr. True. Is he hurt? Now that one seems relevant to the team that you cover.

I'm teasing. I'm teasing. All right. I guess I should go with the extremely obvious pick that everyone knew I would make, which is Shohei Otani. Yeah. Shohei Otani. I mean, continuing our theme here, we're drafting two angels in the first two picks, Yeah. that it is probably broken baseball for me and ruined every other baseball story. Like, in some sense, it is my favorite baseball story of the last decade. And in another sense,

it is sort of like the last one that I will ever care about as deeply as I care about that one, or at least that's what I'm worried about. Because I don't know that I will ever be as excited by a player or as invested in a player as I have been in Shohei Otani. And I don't know that I will ever be as excited by a player or as invested in a player as I have been in Shohei Otani. And I don't know if I can ever be as impressed by a player as I am by Shohei Otani. Like, how am I supposed to get hyped for anyone else who is just good at one thing when there's a guy who's one of the best at two things? Like, I am just eternally unimpressed by everyone now. It's like, do they do both? Do they do both as well as Shohei Otani? No. Well, why should I care about them as much as I care

about this other guy? So all of my hopes have been riding on him and he has delivered. And I would guess that like, Jeff, you said you don't talk a lot about Mike Trout a lot or think about Mike Trout that much as a team employee, but I'm going to guess that Shohei Otani comes up in front offices regardless, even if it's just like marveling at the fact that he exists or talking about whether anyone else like him could exist. And I guess the Rays have had some experiments with two-way players too, so maybe it's been relevant there too, but like, who would not want to talk and think about Shohei Otani? So yeah, we've had a handful of two-way players, and I would say that they have gone exactly as well. Well, they both still have two hands.

It's also just been a fun story to follow. Like, in our clip show the other day, we had the first time Otani was mentioned on an episode, which was episode 350, when he was just starting out in Japan. That was 2013. And so ever since then, he's been on my radar and just gradually getting bigger and bigger as a blip on that radar. And it was like you could follow him to the point where it was like, oh, there's this guy who's trying to be a two-way player. Well, surely he will pick one of those things and specialize and be good at it.

And then he never did that. And then he turned into the best player in MPB. And then it was like, well, will he come over here and can he continue to do this? And almost immediately he did. But then he got hurt. It was like, well, will we ever see that again? And then suddenly, gloriously, we saw it again and are still seeing it. I have written a little less about baseball, like less of my writing has been about baseball lately. And there are probably a lot of reasons for that. But I feel like maybe one very real reason for that is that like after Shohei Otani, I was like, all right, well, that was all I needed to see. Great sport. Enjoyed it. This was wonderful. Don't see how I can be topped by anything else.

As opposed to Star Wars, where apparently you can't see enough. There's always more to see. Well, I may reach my limits there too, but maybe the Mandalorian is the Shohei Otani of Star Wars. I don't know. But anyway, Shohei Otani is special and perfect and wonderful, and I will always treasure the time that we have had with him. There's a Mr. Show sketch where they blow up the moon and they interview an astronaut and they say, well, what do you think about them blowing up the moon? And he goes, I've been to the moon. Right.

Ate an egg on it, did a push-up on it. What else is there to do with it? Exactly. That's Ben with baseball. Yeah. Yep. I still like doing this podcast, but we talk a lot about Shohei Otani on this podcast. Yeah, we do. That's not a coincidence. All right. He but we talk a lot about Shohei Otani on this podcast. Yeah, we do.

That's not a coincidence. All right. He gets caught stealing a lot, though. Have you noticed this? That's the thing. Yeah. There's one flaw. Not a great percentage base dealer.

So as long as that's the case, I guess I still have something to watch for. I know a team you can get caught stealing bases on. Are you declaring that the Rays will not trade for Shohei shohei otani too or you're not going to go there i'm not going to go there so there's a chance you're saying there's a chance um okay i have been given enough time to think of my pick and i am going to pick pitch framing because i i you know i love pitch framing I think that pitch framing, I have the unique distinction, I talked about this in the intro to our clip episode of having spent most of Effectively Wild's tenure as a listener, and then, you know, only later as a guest and then an eventual co-host.

And, you know, in the course of Effectively Wild, in the course of the last 10 years, I feel like pitch framing was a thing where I really, I wanted to dig in much more to understand it because that's cool. And I can see it. And I feel like I have a good handle on what is good and what is bad and want to understand it better. And it like changed the way that I thought about catching. It changed the way that I thought about how players accrue value and how quickly they can do that when given a lot of chances to do a thing like receive a baseball.

So I'm picking pitch framing also because it like, you know, I think it has allowed us as nerds to still keep a foot in the world of like, you know, humans doing human things and us having an appetite for that as opposed to always embracing technology. So pitch framing is good. You know, Jeff, it really, you know, human things and us having an appetite for that as opposed to always embracing technology so pitch framing it's good you know jeff it really you know sucks that the zanino is hurt because

now your pitch framing i imagine is less good so meg has drafted something that's dead in two years ben is done with baseball grant is only interested in the baseball that's already happened i was already cheering for the lockout. What are we doing here? Yeah, I considered taking pitch framing too. I guess we found out about it more than 10 years ago. But within those 10 years, I have been like doing weekly breakdowns of framing. So I think it counts regardless. And yes, in the way that Shohei Otani has like ruined all subsequent players for me, I think maybe catcher framing has ruined all subsequent baseball discoveries for me of like edges that we didn't know about or things that we didn't realize were as valuable as they are. such a revelation, obviously not to everyone in the game. People knew about this, but the fact that it could be quantified and that it was apparently worth so much and that Jose Molina was so great at it and Ryan Domet was so bad at it and that not only did we have the numbers, but we could see it and watch it and understand it and break it down. And it was very tangible

and the technique was cool and everything else that's come along since like there's still a lot of things we found out about and a lot of things that we still don't know and things that probably Jeff knows right now that we don't know and maybe the Phillies know them now too but I don't know that any subsequent like whenever we hear about I don't know I guess like the sweeper or whatever we're calling it is a decent example of that or seam shifted wake or whatever new pitching innovation or discovery or there's this bat data and swing data that's out there. It's all incredibly cool, but I don't know that any of it quite compares to the joy that I experienced and just the shock of finding out how much pitch framing was worth. So I think nothing can quite compare to that in my mind either. was worth so i think nothing can quite compare to that in my mind either i wanted to break the silence but i did i did have thoughts because it buster posey was so good

buster posey was so good at it and i'm just i'm like processing my relationship with pitch framing right now. And I don't think because I'm unlike you guys where I'm too stupid to realize this stuff on the cutting edge. I'm more I read something that you guys write and then go, oh. And so that's how pitch framing was for me. And by the time I really started to get into it, everyone sort of moved on a little little bit or or i guess more it's more than all catchers were really good at it and then by the time i really start to appreciate there's going to be robot umpires right yeah you finally get into it and everyone's like that was so 2013 grant come on catch up i do appreciate your uh breaking that silence in that very natural, organic way. I had a thought that I have ADHD.

I had lost it. By the way, I meant to ask, has your dog pooped in the room where you are currently recording? Because if it has, speak up. Don't wait for the end of the episode this time because you've been known to just suffer and smell in silence until the recording is over. That was a one-off – well, no. It actually happened again on Bags and Brisbane. But the puppy is now a one-year-old and so still young, still a jerk, less likely to leave a hoagie-sized boot behind me. Great.

All right. Jeff, you have another one? Yeah. Okay. So I know this is obvious since I already took Droughton, you already took Otani, but I'm going to choose the third Angels point from the last 10 years, Phil Gosselin. I think everyone left and right, everyone in the neighborhood has been talking about Phil Gosselin.

Just a tremendous utility player of the era. Man of the people. He's back. They just got him back. I know. You can't quit him. They can't. I can't.

So what I'm actually going to pick is the Astros cheating because I think it was great. And it happened right around the time where I couldn't talk about it or write about it. But it was endlessly fascinating. First of all, just for the blunt aspect of it of just hitting a damn trash can. And that was their whole system is they would just hit a thing that people people get here on the field and they would just bash it in the hall and then you would watch the clips where you can hear it in the background you're like i don't know people like millions of people watched astros games during the course of the year no one was like what is that what is that sound that the microphones are picking up i watched the astros i pay attention to details almost as much as anyone

on this podcast like no one no one in the effectively wild facebook group is like i don't know there's like a weird banging noise in the background of all of these astros it's like there's like they're taking out the trash but all of the time you know like there's just like the concession stands are just overflowing anyway but so so the answer she didn't that that's fine. But also I think what is most fascinating to me about it is like when you take the dates of like the rough time period of when they were doing it. And you listen to the clips and you're like, all right, it seems pretty straightforward. Like fastball, non-fastball, it's coming. And they have a system. Presumably it worked almost foolproof because a lot of players were participating in it and i'm not trying to like bother astros fans with this or anything because i think what's

what's most notable about it is if you look at the splits i there's like almost no evidence it made them any better which is like endlessly fascinating for its broader implications about what it means to be a hitter or a pitcher or pitch tipping or whether it's actually helpful at all to know what's coming and so like i'm not drafting this in a snarky way but i like even now years later i keep going back to it being like that is i don't think that there's been enough focus inside or outside of the industry on what it means that the asterisk had this i'm not going to say elaborate system a really stupid system that still nobody caught up. But we're asking baseball players to do it.

It was about as advanced as baseball players are going to do it. And they're just hitting the trash can, telling their own guys what's coming, and they were as good as they have been. That is pretty incredible. And as part of this, I'm also sub-drafting the Nationals beating the Astros in the World Series. I will say that when I'm also sub-drafting the Nationals beating the Astros in the World Series. I will say that when I'm watching baseball and I can see when a runner on second is trying to do his best to indicate something.

And I've noticed a few times where you see the runner on second doing something. And you're thinking he's telling that batter telling that batter okay it's going to be uh breaking stuff down and away or breaking stuff away and you see the the pitcher hang a slider and the hitter waved through that slider that was right in the hit me zone because they're prepped for down and away and it makes me wonder to your point how often does that happen how what kind of advantage is that so i i want to read your article on it. Can you write one? I mean, I basically just said it. It didn't help.

Yeah. I think it's too bad that there, you know, a lot about that whole stretch was regrettable, but it is too bad that it is so fraught for so many people. I don't mean to say that fans of other teams shouldn't feel irritated by it or whatever, but it is objectively funny to your point that that was the mechanism, right? That this is a front office that uses machine learning unironically in sentences, and they were trying to do stuff with banging on a trash can. That is objectively funny. That is funny. But we can't be amused by it because we're all, you know, Twitter paid it by the whole thing.

So it's really too bad. I think that your further sub-draft should be fans of teams like the Yankees booing Astros players because it's like, you feel real confident that you're not going to get got there? I wouldn't, maybe.

They were hitting a thing in the hall it's like if their bench coach was really good at burping and they're like all right he's gonna burp once for a fastball and twice for breaking balls and he just is like burping the entire season that's that's the most advanced mechanism they came up with and nobody caught it and it didn't help and they were great it's the whole thing is unbelievable i'm disappointed. It's like three amigos when Steve Martin's up on the wall. I was like, hey, look up there. Look up there. Like if someone's in the dugout doing bird calls.

Everyone at home was waiting and hoping that you would say banging scheme, Meg. And I don't think you did. Banging scheme. Disappointed everyone. There you go. Banging scheme. But it's a good pick. I think also I would also, if we were drafting individual plays plays that Howie Kendrick home run would be somewhere for me because that was awesome and also extremely improbable and wonderful. And that Astro's cheating scandal and the subsequent analysis of its impact not being that great or even imperceptible, even though you can't really convince anyone of that fact for the most part, it does seem to be the case.

And so that really changed my thinking about cheating in general and just how advantageous and beneficial it actually is. Somewhat similarly, I guess, to how having Mike Trout and Shohei Otani and still being a bad baseball team has maybe been a great illustration of how even having great players, great individuals on your team is not enough, which is a bummer for Angels fans and for people who want to see those players in the postseason, but is a pretty useful case, I guess, to point to and say baseball is not like those other sports you can have great players and still be bad yep all right grant i will say before i i do my my draft pick i misread what we what we were actually drafting for a little bit like when you sent that that direct message i thought i was going to be looking through it and and picking out the articles that i have written over the past decade plus. And I was going to bring up what I wrote about the Astros in 2017 and how proud I was to go to Houston in the ALDS and write. I was really proud of what I wrote. And I thought it was just like a really interesting way of tackling the Astros and the clubhouse culture. And I was so proud of it. And it's ruined. It is ruined. It's maybe my favorite thing I've ever written and it's ruined and everyone hates it now.

I was going to say, Jeff, I probably linked several times to that post you wrote about how the Astros were projected to have a far lower strikeout rate that season because of the personnel changes they have made. Because everyone cited the fact that they had this big historic drop in strikeout rate after the fact as evidence that sign stealing worked. But then you had that post before the fact, where it was like, no, they're actually not going to strike out anymore because the entire lineup changed, not knowing anything, obviously, about the banging scheme. So that at least has aged pretty well, I guess, even though I don't know that anyone paid

any attention to it really, except me in the aftermath. I remember when I wrote that article being like, oh, this is kind of cool. And it got like basically zero traffic. So I think that everything that you sent it years after the fact was a wreck. I should ask for a raise in hindsight for that. Yeah, it would have gotten way better traffic if you had said that they'd have a lower strike rate because they were cheating. That would have done big numbers. Yeah.

Missed opportunity. All right. What else you got, Grant? All right. I am going to draft. I'm going to draft Unwritten Rules because that is – One of your beats. That's my brand, Unwritten Rules.

I don't do it nearly as much at The Athletic because it's a very broad subject. It's more of a general baseball thing, and I have not been on that beat in a while. But I love – it's because baseball is silly, and I think that everyone on this podcast agrees that baseball is delightfully silly. No one taught me more about the silliness of baseball than Jeff Sullivan. So Jeff, you taught me to really appreciate silly baseball in a way that I hadn't before. And for that, I thank you.

But unwritten rules are like the manifestation of that where you have grown men in pajamas who really care about things like big leads and trying to hit a home run on 3-0 pitches and stealing when you're up by 10. And I thought it would get old after writing about it for so long, and it just never did. There was always some new unwritten rule that would squeak in there. And I just love it because it's the purest distillation of silly baseball. Do you have a favorite unwritten rules controversy of

the past decade? Oh boy, I was not prepared for that one. I think I do enjoy a good stealing with a big lead because where is the line? Do you care if the team that's down big if they have like the 1995 indians lineup can they steal or can you steal against them because they have manny ramirez and jim tomey and you're just going to keep running up the score because they might come back is there no line should there be a line at five runs six runs is i i don't know so i love the idea of stealing when you're up big and the other team going, hey, that's against the pale, friend. And I love that. So how do you feel about the team that you cover trying to do away with such things?

Yeah. And there was a nice little dovetail for my brand. And I agree with it because it's silly. And if you are up 10 and you steal a base throw the other team should throw them out i think that's if if you have a no hitter and you uh or the other team has a no hitter going and you bunt against that no hitter the other team should try and throw the runner out before he reaches first base i think there are very simple answers to these unwritten rules and that is uh do the baseball things that prevent you from being offended the bunting one has got to be the best right like when you're throwing a no hitter you're not allowed

to in what inning does it start like is it the seventh on or it's not a leadoff hitter bunt right it's it's an attempt it's a baseball play i don't even know it's not you're not showing off it's the opposite of showing off you're're actually diminishing yourself as a batter. It's why the sluggers wouldn't butt against the shift because they just want to hit their home runs. They don't want to look like little puny weaklings. But then you put up. Well, we don't. Look, we're running out of time.

I'm going to take one. I hope I'm not stepping on Grant's toes here because this was related to one of his greatest tweets. But I'm going to take the Jose Quintana trade being broken by Wet Butt 23 and Katy Perry's booty hole. Being emblematic of the larger genre of people breaking baseball news that you would not think of as baseball news breakers. So this is maybe the most famous example, right, of Reddit users WetBot23 and Katy Perry's booty hole breaking the Jose Quintana trade, which led to Grant's tweet. Source, Jose Quintana to Cubs for four players. Katy Perry's booty hole had it first via Web 23. That was in 2017. That actually came, I think, a few years after the peak of teenagers breaking baseball news. Remember when that was like all the rage?

I mean, maybe that still happens a little bit, but it seems like things have gone back a bit to like Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal pretty much break the major news. But for a while there, there was that period where like Chris Cotillo, 16 or 17 years old or whatever he was, was breaking news. Right. And Robert Murray was breaking news and probably other people that I'm not thinking of. And it just flummoxed me, like, how are they doing this? Like, how do they, I've never tried to be a newsbreaker, but just like the idea that basically someone who is just starting out and is in school would be able to break major baseball news. I think I wrote about this for Grantland at the time because it was happening so often. And I don't know if this has stopped. Devin Fink, who later wrote for Fangraphs, he broke something at the A's signing Billy Butler. He was like 13 at the time.

And when we interviewed him to be a contributor, he's like, yeah, I broke that news one time. And I was like, how old were you? He's like, yeah, I was like 13. I was like, I am a column of salt and dust. He's at Fansided, but he was a Brewers beat writer for The Athletic for a while. But like they just kind of came out of nowhere and it became clear that you could glean these tidbits of information just by like constantly messaging agents or players or whatever. And you could somehow get these little morsels of information before the people who had been plugged in for decades and had like hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. So that was so wild to me. And I guess, you know, you have like Shams in the NBA, right? Who is just like, you know, at the be a baseball writer. You don't need to have a resume. You can literally be a teenager and be in school and somehow beat Rosenthal and Passon and Heyman and Morosi and all of these people to baseball news. That was crazy. It's a little like when Ralph Nader got like 12% of the vote that one time.

And then you're just like, well, I mean, that's cool. A little pop up, but we're just going to regress back to the standard two party disaster system that we typically have. Yes. I am prohibited from commenting on that because of the New York Times purchase of the athletics. Confirm nor deny. Two points to this draft pick because first, the wet butt 23 in Katy Perry's booty hole is funny to me because right now I just sent out a call for questions for my mailbag. I'm doing a mailbag article for The Athletic and Mr. Sugar Penis is in my mentions right now. Right now. He's like feeding me questions and it's a little bit that he's got going on right now.

So that is funny. But also I can reveal now that I am responsible for one scoop in my life. I was the source for a scoop to Niners Nation. I had the scoop that Alex Smith was going to re-sign with the 49ers when it looked like he was gone. There was no way he was going to re-sign. I had the scoop. I fed it to David and I said, you read about this. I have it on good authority. So I can reveal that now. Big news. Wow. Wow. Big news breaker over here. I know his brother. Does the existence of Wet Butt 23 suggest that there are 22 other wet butts?

Absolutely. You ever been to the South? I guess that's a good lead into my, my next draft pick because I, I'm going to pick baseball players pooping themselves a little bit. Yes. And look, there's the comedy of it, right?

Like I, that's probably still my most trafficked piece at fan graphs when Archie Bradley, like admitted to pooping himself a little bit. And then I was like, I have to investigate when that happened. But I also think that it is useful to me when I am watching a game and I wonder, for instance, like, why is a particular reliever who is available but isn't coming in? Like, why isn't the manager using that guy? That makes much more sense from a matchup perspective. Like, why isn't the manager using that guy? That makes much more sense from a matchup perspective.

And I think it's just useful for all of us to remember that, like, we never know everything that's going on with these guys, right? Like, sometimes their family is in distress or, like, they had a, you know, they have a sick kid or they pooped themselves a little bit. And then they have to, like, go be a baseball player and worry about the poop showing that they just pooped themselves a little bit. And people blogging about it and trying to figure out when it was. I mean, he can't be mad about that because he was like, I'm going to volunteer this information to the world. If I had pooped myself a little bit at work, I wouldn't tell anybody about that. I'd be like, you know, that's a Meg only thought. I don't need to share that with the world. There probably wouldn't be like broadcast footage of it either.

Well, no, unless there's something weird going on in my house that I don't know about. So I, you know, there's the funny and we're here to make our jokes and get our jokes off. But also I just think it's useful to remember that, you know, we don't always know what's going on with these guys and we can have some, you know, we can like grant them grace and empathy when they do poorly. Cause sometimes it's cause they suck. Like to be clear, sometimes they're not as good at baseball as they need to be or once were, but sometimes it's cause they poop themselves a little bit. Although I think funnily enough, Archie Bradley threw a clean inning. So if I recall, no runs were scored, even though there had been runs previously.

If I recall, no runs were scored, even though there had been runs previously. With this draft pick, do you also get included Adam Lind farting? Oh, I wrote about that too. Yeah, I did. Yeah, sub pick. I did write about that. I think we determined that it was probably Chuck. Probably.

I think it was probably Chuck. Although I will say that every time I watch a mariners game that robbie ray starts i'm like your your pants are effectively spanks and i wonder what that's doing to your gut health i worry about robbie ray's gut there are other health things i worry about with robbie ray but he's picking those so you know it's the kind of pants you can get bit through uh i just watched the tweet now and he definitely farted smoke yeah I mean like it definitely looks like he

not looks like I did an investigation Grant I know I'm in the article and I'm sorry but he is no he no I'm just teasing spanks yeah I guess it's sort of lightning round at this point But no, I'm just teasing. Spanx.

Jeff, you got anything? Yeah, I guess it's sort of lightning right at this point, but I guess you gave us 10 years. So I'm going back 10 years, and I'm choosing that time that John Carlos Tan faced Jamie Moyer and broke the scoreboard. I think that baseball is generally a pretty unpredictable sport. It seems like it should be a lot more predictable. We all are in the business of pretending

like it's more predictable than it is. But I think that that was probably the perfect distillation of exactly what's supposed to... Like, there's not a whole lot of like, yeah, that's what was supposed to happen. But you have this monstrous, like the Raldus Chapman of hitting, right? And this is back before there was Aaron Judge

and before there was everybody else hitting the ball 118 miles per hour. It was just Giancarlo Stanton. right spacing jamie moyer full count gotta throw him a fastball fastball and he didn't just hit a home run he hit a home run that broke the scoreboard he broke the ball he hit the ball so hard that the scoreboard broke the part of the scoreboard that worked was done working after john carlos stanton swung and hit the ball that the jamie moyer threw and it just felt in that instant it just felt like it was baseball nirvana it was everything was perfectly clear and you thought that's that is exactly the thing that my soul was telling me was about to have the crowd was getting into it was like a longer at bat right full count i think the bases were loaded even

like it was there's a grand slam it was a big home run the people were getting into it just anticipating that you're getting up for two strikes. The pitch is going to strike him. Granted, these are the home fans who were getting up just being like, I wonder what he's going to do to the shittiest fastball we've ever seen. And he hit it as hard as anyone has ever hit a ball. And he broke the electronic scoreboard that was like 450 feet away. Like if he had hit that in Houston,

it would have knocked the train off the damn tracks. Like put it on the ground. Unbelievable clip. It's the best. It's the best. I loved the Rajai Davis home run in the World Series. Like that was a great home run, but that was a piece of s*** home run.

Giancarlo Stanton, unbelievable home run. My favorite home run ever hit. That's a good one. That reminded me, when I was going to do a story on jacarla stanton and i went to watch him take batting practice at oracle park and when he was taking batting practice he hit a ball so far and went over the bleachers in left field and landed in this little kind of wiffle ball park that they have it's a model oracle park that they have behind the left

field bleachers and it would have hurt children if they had had a game, a little wiffle ball game going on like they do during the actual games. And it just made me realize they put that wiffle ball park there because that is not where baseballs are supposed to go. Nobody's supposed to hit baseballs there. It is unrealistic. And he would have really hurt a child. It is unrealistic, and he would have really hurt a child. Yeah. Yeah. There are some bad at balls in baseball history that I kind of wish we had stat cast for.

Maybe it's better not to so that we can just come up with whatever wild number we want to attach to these things. And we can say that this homer went 570 feet or whatever it is, and we can just extrapolate from the footage. But there are some that I kind of wish we had the numbers because it doesn't look like they disappoint. All right. I have a few more, but Meg, I don't want to make you late for the All-Star Game. Before we lose you, do you have any others that you want to mention, get off your chest here? I want to draft all of the Beef Boys. They are not new.

They are not new to baseball in the last 10 years. I mean, I guess the beef boys of prior eras look like Babe Ruth and now they look like Giancarlo Stanton. So in that respect, they are quite different. But I want to draft all all the good beef boys, because I just enjoy saying beef boys. And also I really enjoy knowing just how hard they're hitting that's not out of the ball. So I will take all of those beef boys. I would like to draft. Let's see. What else do I want to draft? Can I just interject real quick? Give me the beef boys and free my soul.

I want to get lost in the rock and roll and drift away okay go on playing me out let's do uh i guess like i will do an earnest i will do an earnest one which is that i would like to draft the continued uh diversification of baseball on the front office side. And then in conjunction with that, like in the last couple of years, I think a very sincere try to course correct the trends that are making the game harder for, you know, particularly Black Americans to play baseball. So like us trying to take seriously the idea that a lot of different people can contribute something to the game and make that felt lot of different people can contribute something to the game and make that felt in in front offices and on the field i think is a thing that is pretty

cool because it's pretty rocking to see women wear a uniform so there's that that's sincere i needed to do one that wasn't pooping i'm glad you took a sincere serious one because i have one along those lines to end on and i was nervous about drafting it after I drafted Wet Butt 23 and Katy Perry's seal so as to suggest that it was less important but thank you for breaking the seal on the sincere ones yeah I want to stress again that like I did very little prep so if I were actually ordering this like as a prep list it would have come differently before archie bradley yeah definitely definitely before i mean but but pooping before the beef boys you know which is a fun sentence to say that's a fun um let's see are there any other things that i i wanted i want to draft the phenomena of trying to come up with new names for slight variations on pitches um because i just find it delightful that

we are like you know we got sweepers and what do the yankees call it swirlies that's wrong yeah where we swirlies is something the beef boys do i really enjoy that as a as a phenomenon and intersection of you know of writing and player dev and like us trying to make a new something that is old so that that was on my list that i just came up with and i don't know i'm currently something that is old. That was on my list that I just came up with. I don't know. I'm

currently enjoying Julio Rodriguez being a mariner, but that feels like recency bias affecting my draft. That seems pretty good. Since you said Ernest a lot, did you know that if you try to pull up any of the old Ernest movies, like Ernest goes to Japan or Ernest

goes to the correctional facility like they they're not free they actually charge you 3.99 if you want to watch any of them you think of all movies do you know that movies they would be free one time i did like a joke on twitter where i tried to rank all the earnest movies and i just went to imdb and i went one two three four and people got straight mad at me they found it and they got mad at me for ranking Ernest Goes to Jail too low. Ranking can be dangerous regardless of the subject. Yeah. Generate strong opinions.

Yeah. Well, Meg, we will let you go be a professional baseball writer and cover baseball, and then when you get home, we will have you back on the podcast which you co-host to talk about did i just get demoted or something to talk about everything that you have seen at all-star week we we've got to catch up on a non-anniversary themed news episode in which we will be joined by Eric so that he can displace Grant from his sole leaderboard position. We have to knock Grant off his pedestal.

He's getting too big for his britches and he's going to let Wet Butt break more news. Grant has never been too big for any britches. Gosh dang it, Jeff. A short joke. Son of a... All right. So we have lost Meg.

Jeff and Grant are still here. So we can wrap up with anything else that was on our list here. Jeff, do you have any other favorite baseball topics from the past 10 years? Yeah, if we were going to do a lightning round. The next one on my list was John Lester not throwing pickoff throws. That was my next pick too. Yeah, I mean, that one was just the psychology of people trying to steal bases against John Lester. Yeah.

It was absolutely one of my favorite genres. Me too. Whether it was a game, a month, three years, I don't have any sense of how long it went on or if he ever started throwing pickoff throws again. I remember when MLB tweeted out that John Lester threw a pickoff throw, it got like 8,000 retweets or whatever because it was such a big story. But that was incredible. That was absolutely incredible. I love that story. I miss it so much. That was the best. That went on for some period of years because for a while he was trying to fix the pickoff attempt and he had the like bounce one and then he was trying to do a different one and it never really worked that well but i love that story because if i'm remembering right didn't it come to light initially like in a fan graphs comment or something like wasn't there a post about that wild card game and someone noticed that he had not thrown any pickoff attempts in a really

long time. And that became a talking point. It was like, it was pointed out by someone in the public sphere, I think just before that game began. So we knew about it, like possibly before the teams did, or at least it hadn't really been mentioned it was wet butt 22 not 23 it was 22 right i'm gonna have to look up and say at the end of the episode how that first came to light but we all kind of discovered that fact and then we were marveling at it and wondering what it meant and then in that wild card game it it seemed to come into play and people were stealing off him and then it was like well is this game-breaking career ending kind of flaw? Or does it not actually matter at all?

Like either of those were totally in play. Like I remember doing a story at Grantland, I guess, where I went to all the companies that simulate baseball games. And I was like, can you simulate this? Like someone never throwing a pickoff attempt. And they couldn't really because like it hadn't happened. It's like, how do you know what the impact of this is? And the estimates range from like not a big deal at all to a pretty big deal. And actually he's like not going to be good now. Either of those seem to be on the table. And then the greatest surprise of all of it,

which I remember you writing about, Jeff, was just that like players would not or could not bring themselves to take advantage of it that much because it was like either they couldn't internalize the idea that this guy actually couldn't throw to first. And so they just stood there and watched him because he was like a lefty pitcher and they were just so conditioned to like go back to the bag that they just couldn't shake that habit. Or maybe they had some sympathy or felt sorry for him or something. It was never totally clear.

But ultimately, it was like kind of a nothing burger. It was like low stakes yips. So it was like we could all obsess over it but not have to feel bad about it really, right? Or like feel like we were picking on him pointing this out because it wasn't adversely affecting him that much it was just this one weird thing that like i didn't know it was possible not to be able to do while being able to do all the other things that he could do like throw pitches so yes i think back on that as just an amazing story on multiple levels it's just like the the

astros thing where you think like okay this is like a funny story on its own but you think about the implications of it and you're like well this does kind of change the way that i look at baseball this kind of changes the way i think about like pitching and running the bases john lester for his entire career so fangraphs his little metric right for like stolen base value for pitcher fielding whatever let's assume that it's accurate. John Lester's entire career, four runs below average. So, you know, stolen bases were bad for him. And, you know, it took a turn for the worse around the time that that became news. Like he was, he was minus eight runs over three years between 2014 and 2016. After that, he still threw like another, I don't know, 500 innings, minus one run,

stolen bases. Like John Lester was fine. He allowed 44 stolen bases in 2015. That's a lot of stolen bases. But also 11 dudes got caught. And that was the worst year that he had. Noah Syndergaard, active pitcher. First career. Minus 21 runs.

Stolen base runs. Nobody talks about it. He's terrible at it. But nobody talks about it. Adam. Okay. I don't know what the number is. But I'm going to pull up Adam Modavino here because I know

he's really bad at it too. So he's a release pitcher, of course. Adam Modavino for his career, minus 16 runs, stolen bases. Most of that in like the last five or six years, which is phenomenally insane. They're just slow to the plate. John Lester could not throw a ball to first base. Could not. Had the thing. Like you wouldn't

believe, like you genuinely wouldn't believe. We saw it and we can't believe it now that he can't put the ball there, but he was throwing strikes left and right to home plate. It doesn't, no part of it makes sense. And the runner still couldn't go. It was unbelievable. Yeah, it was incredible. And I guess he had the advantage of A, not allowing a lot of base runners to begin with. B, I guess he had David Ross catching for him at that time and he would do a lot of back picks. So he got some help there. And C, maybe he was pretty quick to the plate. So that helped a little.

But still, like people just could have taken longer leads and they just didn't for the most part. And it just baffled me. And then it taught me something. So yes, thank you to John Lester for your one weird yip in an incredible career. We got to stay on this just for one second so I could pull something up because I remember this. I want to quiz both of you and maybe this is more of a Grant thing that he would remember because, you know, Padres. But you remember Chris Young before he like ran a baseball team when he was a pitcher, right? Tall drink of water, that one.

So in 2007, Chris Young was a pitcher for the Padres. He started 30 games. He was really quite good. He had a 3.12 ERA, which corrected for Petco at that time, was equivalent to like an ERA of 5.5. So he allowed his run. But Chris Young that year allowed 44 stolen bases and that was out of 44 stolen base attempts wow nobody got caught and the year before that he allowed 41 stolen bases and four people got caught and then you're like why was he allowed with so many stolen bases and

then you look at him and you're like it takes him four seconds for his body to unfurl like of course yeah he's like hands the ball to the catcher basically when he pitches but the entire thing is like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon it's just every single pitch anyway i loved that ass like the padres back then i forget who their catches were is josh bard or whoever were the other half dozen josh bards of the era back then but like none of them could throw but i'm not sure any of the pitchers give them a chance they were just allowing like 300 stolen bases a year that's an exaggeration but as i think about it i'm not sure that it is didn't i draft the word unfurl in one of these effectively wild and you just used it in context

that's outstanding such a great word unfurl chris young unfurls to the plate. Yep. Strike. Josh Bard, 2007, allowed 121 stolen paces. 10 were caught. Wow. Wow. You know what it was? It wasn't a Fangraphs comment. It was John Rogoli, who is maybe best known for his tracking of Tommy John surgeries. He tweeted, I think it was the morning of the day of the 2014 AL wildcard

game. He tweeted, if I'm the Royals, the first batter to reach first base is taking a huge lead. John Lester has not attempted a pickoff in 2014, not once. And I think everyone was like, wait, what? I don't think anyone had noticed that. I would kill to know if that was in the Royals advanced scouting report for that game. I've got to think it was. I've got to think that they knew about that. But as far as I recall, it had not really circulated publicly at that point until it just showed up on Twitter. Let's pretend. So I know there's a story that the Royals had it advanced scouting.

There's a lot of talk written about the Royals advanced scouting. Who knows? But let's pretend that the Royals didn't have that before. You're in your pregame meetings, right? You got the one game wildcard playoff later that day. You do all your pregame meeting time to the coaches. You have your strategy. And then meetings wrapping up five minutes ago.

And someone's like, hey, guys, you seen this tweet? And you're like, dude, the game starts in two hours. We don't have time to, like, confirm this on video. Do you act on it? Just based on the tweet. Just based on the tweet. Just based on the tweet. It's got 70 retweets. This baby gets to 100.

We got to act on it. 71, 72. Okay. It's all Gerard Dyson and his burner accounts. Okay. It's all Gerard Dyson in his burner accounts. I will say that with, with Lester and the yips, I empathize because I have the yips.

I coach softball and I can do just about everything, but throw a ball underhanded. I have such yips when I'm doing a batting practice and I'm throwing wiffle balls. I keep hitting nine-year-olds in the batting hall with wiffle balls. I can do ladder golf. I can do horseshoes. I can bowl.

I can do underhanded motions. But when it comes to throwing a ball underhanded, I have serious Lester-like yips, and I cannot shake them. No matter how hard I practice, I keep hitting nine-year-olds in the head with wiffle balls. Just have to throw that out there. I'm just going to break the set. I think we lost Ben. That was wildly awkward. I don't know.

Have you done any of that weird Navy SEAL training to shake the yips? Gone to one of those camps? I should. I would like to. This latest round, my daughter's playing in a summer league. And so it's all these girls who don't know me. And I'm not the coach this time. And the coach is like, hey, can you help out?

And I go out to throw batting practice. And they just think I'm the biggest weirdo and the biggest goofball because I cannot throw a strike underhand. It's so embarrassing. It's just like you got a first day in there. You got to take down the biggest guy in the joint. and you're showing up. These girls don't know. You're just like, hit you in the head, hit you in the head. You respect me as a professional coach. It's my plate. It's my plate. So where do you think Ben's mic cord fell out to? Well, that's what I'm wondering because it seems like it should be a pretty simple remedy.

fell out too. Well, that's what I'm wondering. I guess it seems like it should be a pretty simple remedy. I'm back. My mic cord is reattached now. I had so many questions. I was there laughing just out of frame, laughing too. If you think the first silence was awkward, oh boy, this silence was a doozy. What I wanted to ask was whether the yips only applies when you're like lobbing the ball underhanded or can you throw it fast underhanded or is it both you know if i do a full softball pitch wind up i can generally get it i'm not throwing strikes just because i'm not good at softball pitching in general sure that's separate from yips just being bad at something yeah but i can generally like get it where i think i'm trying to get it to. So it is mostly lobbying. Right. Well, that's what they say about the yips, right? If you have time to think about it, if it's a routine automatic action, then you don't get the yips. But if you have time to

throw over to first and think about throwing over to first or not throwing over to first, if you're John Lester, then that's where those issues crop up. And it's only throwing underhand wiffle balls to nine-year-old girls. I wonder if maybe we all have the yips and we just haven't discovered where yet because that's a pretty niche yip. Yeah, exactly. You just have to try enough things to figure out what your yip is. You have a reduce of integration. It's not just wiffle balls. It's also actual softballs. So just any sort of round spherical object in general. Okay. Any other favorite baseball stories on your list, Grant? I love this story so much because it tickles the part of my brain where I think about random giants from the past.

And that's just how I'm built. I'm just likely to be on a bus somewhere and go, Mike Benjamin. You know, like that is just how my brain works. And so for Travis Ishikawa to be a draft pick, and he was a draft pick that was very unlike the giants where they gave him a lot of money in those days for especially for a giant's draft pick to stay away from oregon state they actually did the thing that other rich teams do which was buy a kid out of his college commitment they never did that and so they did it here i got to follow him as a prospect got to follow him as maybe this is the solution at first base oh i guess not and

then he drifted away bye-bye that's the last time we'll think about him and in 10 years i'm going to be able to go travis ishikawa and it's going to be like a self-sustaining punch line and then he came back and why did he come back to play left field which he didn't do and even if he had why was that your option you had a long time to think about this jared parker was a decent outfielder defensively and he could hit a ball out of the ballpark why not just play him there were a hundred different ways for travis ishikawa to never happen and it just the dominoes just went clink and now it's one of the greatest home runs in Major League history. And I don't think that's hyperbolic. So try to see Chicago.

That's my guy. Yeah, it's a good one. I know that we have a bias toward taking weird off-the-wall ones or more obscure hipster picks here. But if I were just taking basic baseball things that happened over the past 10 years, I mean, like, I don't think any of us is about to draft like Cubs winning the World Series or something, but like, that'd probably be like at the top of a lot of people's boards. But if not that, I'd probably take maybe those mid-decade Royals who were just a ton of fun and surpassed everyone's expectations. Like probably the most fun I've had just watching a baseball team that I was not rooting for, but just marveling at the way that they did it and wondering if they could keep doing it.

And really not even pandering to whatever portion of your Giants audience you have brought to this podcast. But last year's Giants were incredibly fun. And that division race was also incredibly fun. That might be recency bias that I didn't bring that up, like reverse recency bias. And that division race was also incredibly fun. That was just – That might be recency bias. I didn't bring that up, like reverse recency bias. But that's as much fun as I've ever had covering a team. Just every day was something fun, something new.

There's so many angles, so much to write about. So I do – that was just – that was a blast. What happened at the end of it? Yeah, I did break my arm in and when when i broke my elbow and then but the thing i'm not sure if i tweeted this out maybe i did maybe i didn't but when they called the wilmer flores and when said that wilmer flores swung i pushed away from the press box desk with my broken elbow and hurt it again. Like it hurt. So Wilmer Flores is out and I'm going, ah!

So I can break that as well. Wet butt 23 actually broke that at the time. So the last ones on my board here, I'll take Rich Hill, just Rich Hill in general, but specifically Rich Hill's resurgence in 2015, which was what really got me fascinated in player development and the changes in player development that made me want to write about that. someone revitalizing their career and your Justin Turner's and your JD Martinez's. Rich Hills was the most wondrous of all, just for him to kind of come out of the minors, out of indie ball in 2015 at the end of the season at 35 years old and be like the best pitcher in baseball for four starts and then have that actually be real and have it be because there was an epiphany about his curveball and Trackman discovered how important it was. And Brian Bannister came along and was like, throw this

pitch more. And that whole saga and that whole story and just the general idea that anyone can be better than we thought they were, even if they've been around for a really long time and they've been bouncing between the minors and the majors and they're 35 and they're Rich Hill, and they've been bouncing between the minors and the majors, and they're 35 and they're Rich Hill, you can be amazing all of a sudden. So that, I think, just opened my eyes maybe to the possibilities of what you can achieve with a new pitch or a new pitch mix or all of the other witchcraft that the Rays do or the Dodgers do or the Giants do or any Yankees, all of these teams that have managed to, quote unquote, fix players or improve players. For me, the fascination with that stuff started with Rich Hill end of 2015. Yeah, that's like the real demarcation line where you had before that

sabermetrics and baseball analysis was, well, this guy did this for five years, so we can extrapolate that trend and this is what we think a six year is going to be. And that was the first time that I remember a baseball team going, that thing that that player did for two weeks, yeah, I believe in that. We're going to commit resources to that. And that was such a mind blower. And that's just, that's how baseball works now. It's just Drew Pomerantz, his ERA is in the fives, but we're going to give up a prospect for him because we think he's going to be good. And then you're right. He's great. He's great in relief for the Brewers.

So, yeah. Yeah. I don't know what my job is, but it's not to like make our projection system that we have internally. But I like to think like and along these same lines, I don't know if it was Rich Hill or J.D. Martinez or really like the swing change guys. But just the entire era of these guys that persists to this day of course and they all get written about but it it has created for me the spark of just like relentless optimism around every single player yeah that plays professional baseball to the extent that it's becoming like kind of a problem because i know like i have i struggle

to like rank between players. Cause I, our projection system will say like, Oh, this guy's this and this guy's this. And I like to think, Oh, but this guy could be this,

but this guy could be double this. All he has to do is this one thing. And then this guy just has to back up and then he could do that thing. Keon Broxton. It's not too late. Yeah. We have Keon Broxton. His name is Brett Phillips and he plays center field.

Yeah. Yeah. It's still still it continues it's a lot of fun because being being on the team side i'm like having a foot in i guess our player development to just being like i don't know what if we tried this it's just so much more fun than being like well this guy's 3x and this guy's 2x so why wouldn't you take 3x of course you take 3 3x, which I think that had its place. And you still need to be grounded because most adjustments don't stick and make profound changes. But the fact that people can get four times as good in one off season or even just manipulating a grip in the middle of the year, that's crazy. And any projection system is not going to be able to see that. So it's a lot of fun. Yeah. I guess people still talk about ceilings, the concept of ceilings, right? But there's more of an understanding that you can shatter the

ceiling in pretty unpredictable ways. So, and yeah, as you're saying, like it's probably misplaced optimism in a lot of cases because not everyone can do that. Like Rich Hill still had that incredible curveball. Maybe he didn't throw it enough. Maybe people didn't realize how good it was, but he could still throw it and he could still spin it that way. And not everyone can learn to do that. So if you don't have one of those like elite capabilities, then maybe that's not enough. But more often than not, it seems like there's some way to teach someone something where you can at least like dream about it. So I can tell you where this comes. So, you know,

everything is conducted on Slack. I'm not sure I actually work with any people. It's just software, but we have a Slack channel where our software executives, like we have a waivers channel, right? We're like everyone who ends up on waivers, we're like, okay, here's the player. Should we like claim him or not? What do we think about this player like pretty low stakes and yet williams astadio passed through waivers somehow where were you that day i was around but you see it you see every player on waivers and it's the hardest almost every single time someone's on waivers i first thought is we should claim it you gotta put him in the roster you gotta claim it and it's every so often there's a guy you're just like we shouldn't claim him but like a lot of the time you're just like we could do something

we can do something with this guy or like last year's giants uh because they were befuddling everyone including like including the giants but certainly like our numbers they the giants way overachieved right but to an extent where you're like, the Giants have figured something out. And every single time the Giants like claimed a hitter or traded for a hitter, some like John Nagowski or just some anyone, I would talk, there was a coworker of mine and we would exchange DMs being like, what do they see?

They can do something with this guy. And last year they did. Everyone that stepped up had like a 115 LPS plus. It was bananas. I don't know how much of that is true, but you just see it. And just like when people are like, oh, the Rays got a pitcher, the Dodgers got a pitcher. Like, no, it was the Giants and it was hidden. It was like, they're going to claim everyone and they're going to make them something.

Yep. So it's like, we can rebuild him. We can do something. Yeah. All right. What else? Did I have anything else on my board? I guess the ball, not so much now the ball. I feel like the ball has kind of become tedious just because we've been talking about the ball's changes for so long. But I did enjoy the early ball discourse, like late 2015. I think I remember you blogging about it, Jeff, and maybe like early 2016, I was writing about it with Rob

Arthur, like back when no one was convinced that it was the ball that had caused that sudden home run rate spike. And people were speculating about all these different causes. And Rob Manfred was suggesting all of these things that made zero sense about like, oh, the batting orders are different now or whatever his idea was. And none of those seemed sufficient to explain what was happening. And so for a little while there, it was like you could be a sleuth and you could be like, oh, well, it can't be this and it can't be that. And process of elimination,

it's got to be the ball. And then after a while, we figured out that it definitely was the ball indeed. And then there were studies and people started acknowledging that it was the ball. And then the ball just kept changing wildly and unpredictably by the year, by the month. And that got a little less fun and more frustrating. And why can't they just figure this out already? But for a while there, it was kind of fun to feel like it was this baseball mystery and knew what was going on. And so we were just trying to get to the bottom of it. Related to that, I liked last year the sticky stuff crackdown, which was like the huge news.

And then, I don't know, a month later, it's like, eh. Yeah. Okay. So everyone's the same. Yep. For the most part. Yeah. How much ball investigation goes on in front offices, would you say? Oh, plenty. I mean, we have our people who do it, but the analysis is a little more, it's like hard-coded at this point,

to be like, well, what's the drag now? Press the button and then you have it in 15 seconds. Every so often you'll have a guy, he'll be like, well, spins down or whatever. And then you're just like, well, stuff looks the same, so who cares? So ultimately, who cares? Yeah.

Back in our day, we had to calculate things manually and figure it out every year. Now it's just a subroutine that runs every day. There's no wonder, no mystery, no joy in it anymore. But yeah, the ball for a while there. And did I have anything else? I thought about maybe taking the Drake LaRoche saga. Grant, you know, I had to write so many little articles about that.

I actually googled my own stories and I wrote something and whatever year that was, that was the least essential stories of that year. And number one was Drake LaRoche. I was just like, oh yeah, I remember that. I feel like we're going to wake up in like eight years and, oh, Drake LaRoche is like a state rep

somewhere. He's just like in local Congress. Well, he'll probably just be like the number one pick one of these years. I don't know how old Drake LaRoche is, but it seems like every draft pick is someone's son at this point. But yeah, that story, obviously it's meaningless. But with time, I think it is only added to the luster of how nonsensical it was. And Chris Sale continuing to be kind of weird and do things that other players wouldn't do from time to time. like five-year retrospectives on the Drake LaRoche saga, but just the idea that like of all the clubhouse controversies one could be caused by whether one guy's kid was allowed in there or not or how that news was broken. I mean, I guess the Chris Sale like jersey cutting thing kind of goes hand in hand with that story. The throwback Chris Sale jersey cutting up the jersey story, that's up there in the Pantheon with me too kind of connected in my mind

back in whatever year it was I guess it was 2019 when I interviewed with the Phillies before I took a job with the race and I remember as part of that interview I went down in some room you're just in the bowels of the ballpark for any of these interviews and I think this would have been like early January so no season had taken place

for quite a while certainly certainly not in Philadelphia. But we were down in the room and it was just like a regular room, like adjacent to the clubhouse. And on the floor of the, it was a large room. And on the floor in one corner, there was a bat. And on the other side of the room, there was a hole where a TV used to be. And it wasn't, yeah, Chris Sale isn't the only one. Well, that reminds me of A.J. Hinch breaking the monitors as the best part of the Astro Signs doing scandal and still the most inexplicable part of that whole story to me. All right.

I just saw that either while we were recording or shortly before the raise claimed Angel Perdomo from the Brewers. So now I'm squinting at that news and thinking, what did they see? What did you see? I told you to do that before you started recording. is, I guess, kind of similar to Grant's greater appreciation for baseball history, is just the greater appreciation of the Negro Leagues in the past few years. And there have been a lot of things that both on this podcast and in baseball media in general and sports media and the world, I guess, that we have all become more conscious of and placed more of an emphasis on. But the Negro Leagues was one where, like a lot of people, I grew up reading about baseball history and just didn't read a lot

about Negro Leagues history. And so I knew the Satchel Pages and the Josh Gibsons, but not much more beyond that. And so the fact that in the span of a couple of years here, we've gone from that, where people didn't learn about these things regularly for the most part, or you only knew the biggest names, but not some of the other great players who don't get mentioned as much. And now we have those stats on baseball reference and elsewhere, and they've finally belatedly been officially recognized. And the fact that the podcast played some small part in that effort because there was a podcast emailer who wrote in to be like, why does MLB not classify the

Negro Leagues as major leagues again? And then I asked about that and that led to a whole chain of events where people had already been bringing that up, but it kind of came to the fore at that time and I was able to do some writing and reporting on it, which I was happy to play some small part in that effort. So that was kind of cool. So there's still so much I don't know and feel like I'm just barely starting to catch up with all of those great players and teams that I just didn't learn about as I was coming of age as a baseball fan. learn about as I was coming of age as a baseball fan. But I'm hoping that that renewed emphasis will mean that the next generation of fans that's coming up actually will know those names more so than they used to and just get to recognize how good those players were. So that's my serious pick. It has improved the baseball reference homepage where they have the 12 headshots at the top left.

Yeah. You get to look and go oh who's that who's oh dave magan and oh well now you have negro leagues players and it's well i'm gonna click on it and learn something and it wasn't always like that where you would just click and like you're not i know enough about dave magan that i'm not gonna learn that much from clicking on his headshot but uh let's see who is today is Willie Cornelius. No idea. So I get to click and learn a little bit and it's fantastic. Yeah. All right. And I guess I'll also take just like young players being better than they ever were before, which is something that I think I've written about from time to time over the years. This is like almost too obvious or earnest.

This is like on one of our drafting things we like about baseball episodes when Jeff took like the green of the grass or something. No, you took like optimism in spring training and Sam made fun of you and was like, are you going it's hard to top like trout and harper coming up in machado 10 years ago but then to get like the tatis and acunas and julio and soto and vlad jr and just like all this great generation of young players who were like better than young players have ever been before and have been so much fun to watch like it does feel like just you know regardless of baseball's popularity in general or its place in the culture, like the players are getting better and more entertaining than ever, even if the game they are playing is not always,

thanks Jeff and the Rays for breaking baseball, making baseball unwatchable. I think it's great. It's to the point where Marco Luciano is 20 years old and he is in high A and he's doing well enough in high A. But I'm like, is there something wrong with him? Oh, gosh. He's not in double A yet. He's certainly not in triple A.

He's not in the majors. What in the world? Yeah. What's taking so long? All right. Well, that's all I got, I guess. So unless anyone else has any stragglers here, we can let Jeff get back to just salivating over players of the past 10 years have been Aaron Judge and Mike Trout. And two of the other best have been Mookie Betts and Jose Altuve. I think that's great. That's a great one.

And I know you said that we should only cover 10 years, but I'm going to cover 12. And this might be the last opportunity to get to draft this. But just on that off chance, I'll take the Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2009. I think that's a pretty good one. Not just from the perspective of a Raisin Boy, but from the perspective of a red-blooded American baseball fan. I think that's exactly what we want. The Red Sox winning the World Series ruined their thing. The Cubs winning the World Series ruined their thing.

The Dodgers winning the World Series, which I know people have a thing about, but trust me, it counted. That kind of ruined their thing. So the Yankees haven't won for a while. I think that's super. That is pretty funny. That is pretty funny. I will say as an unbiased observer, it's still pretty funny. All right.

Well, we always love having you back, Jeff. We miss you. We hope that the trade deadline and everything else goes well and that your players are healthier from now till the rest of the season. Mm-hmm. You can find Jeff on Twitter, I guess. He still tweets occasionally.

You don't have to. You still tweet more often than your typical front office employee, which is not at all. Or you just retweet job listings or something. Occasionally, you will still have an amusing tweet. So that's something. I can't even repost something and be like, come work with me for the raise because I'm in Oregon. You go work with somebody else. Your value of a replacement front office member tweeter is pretty high.

And Grant still does actual tweets and a lot of them are still pretty funny actually. And he writes about the Giants at The Athletic. He also podcasts about the Giants and other things with fellow Effectively Wild favorite Andy McCullough, Mark Rigg. You can find them on The Roundtable, which is part of the athletic baseball show. So you can still get your grant content. So that at least is still out there, but we're always happy to have you on. And we're glad that you could join us during this week. And now you can bask in being the most frequent Effectively Podcast for at least a few hours until Langenhagen joins you at the top of the list. I'm going to draft a couple tamales for my belly.

Okay. For lunch. I hope nobody's drafting behind you in an hour and a half. No, but thank you for having me on, and I will come back and crush you. All right. Another topic that we have learned to pay more attention to in the past decade, minor league pay and minor league living conditions, much to Rob Manfred's dismay. But that's a topic for previous and future podcasts. Right now, I have to leave you with today's past blast. So this is episode 1878. And therefore, today's past blast comes from 1878 and also from Richard

Hershberger, historian, saber researcher, author of Strike Four, The Evolution of Baseball, who writes, I'm using a different format here. I've been quoting a contemporary text while providing context. This one doesn't lend itself to that. So it's a discussion in a couple of box scores. And Richard's topic is the Heinines triple play. May 8th, 1878, Boston at Providence. Don't laugh, he says, in eight years in the National League, Providence won the pennant twice. So on that May 8th tilt in the eighth inning, Boston had two men

on base with no outs, Jack Manning on third and Ezra Sutton at second. Jack Burdock was batting. He hit a soft line drive, what would later be called a Texas leaguer, over the shortstop's head. The runners took off. Paul Hines, playing shallow center field, made a shoestring catch for the first out. He followed his momentum and ran to third base. By this time, Manning and Sutton were both at home. Hines tagged third base, putting Manning out, and threw the ball to Charlie Sweezy, the second baseman who tagged second. Was this baseball's first unassisted triple play? It clearly was a triple play, but the question is whether Hines tagging third base put out both Manning, the runner from third, and Sutton, the runner from second, or was it Sweezy's tag of second base that put out Sutton?

Under the modern rules, this clearly would not be unassisted. Rule 5.09c reads, Any runner shall be called out on appeal when, after a fly ball is caught, he fails to retouch his original base before he or his original base is tagged. Third was not Sutton's original base, so tagging it would not put him out. But the rules of 1878 were not so precise. They could be interpreted either way. I have attached the box score, Richard writes, and I will also link to it on the show page, from the next day's Providence Journal and Boston Post.

The Journal credits Hines with four outs and one assist, and Sweezy with one out. The Post credits Hines with five outs and zero assists, and Sweezy with zero outs. The question, was this unassisted under the rules of 1878, is unanswerable. What interests me as a historian is not so much the question of rules interpretation, but how the story almost immediately began morphing. Humans are storytellers. The first unassisted triple play makes for a good story, but an abstruse question of rules interpretation does not. When a decade later the story was relitigated, Sutton, the runner from second, remembered it as he was between second and third when Hines tagged third, which would clearly give Sweezy at second the final out. Even disregarding the baseball plausibility of Sutton lingering between the bases for so long

on a slow developing play, the contemporary accounts all either place him at home or don't go into this level of detail. Both sides of the debate eagerly abandoned the questions of rules interpretation and recast the question as Sutton's location. This is how the question usually is formulated to this day. And so, Richard concludes, contemporary accounts often are unreliable, while later recollections are even worse. Was that the game ball used to put out Merkel? Did Ruth call his shot? Heck if I know, I am waiting to review the video. Until then, I tend to favor

the version that isn't as good a story. A wise stance by Richard, and I also tend to favor the account that is closest to when the event actually occurred, although that is not foolproof either. As Galadriel said, some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. But baseball hasn't passed out of all knowledge. Not yet, at least. All right, thanks to everyone who wrote in in response to the first anniversary episode. Glad people seemed to enjoy that. This is the second of what we hope will be three, so stay tuned for one more anniversary celebration later this week. But before then, Meg and I will speak to Eric Longenhagen about this week's events. The draft, the futures game, the derby, the all-star game,

the Soto trade rumors. Keep an eye and an ear out for that in the next day or so. But as mentioned, we are aiming to give you a bonus episode this week. Because hey, you only turn 10 once. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up, pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Get themselves access to some perks and help us stay ad free. Brendan Pulsford, Scott Kramer, William123, Brian Hamilton, and Sarah Cumley. Thanks to all of you.

Our Patreon supporters get access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, monthly bonus episodes, discounts on t-shirts, including our brand new 10th anniversary t-shirt linked on the show page, featuring many of the player characters who have starred in some of our email episodes, plus playoff live streams and more. You can contact me and Meg via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or by messaging us through the Patreon site if you are a supporter. You can find our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Old friend. Pitching pennies in the park. Playing croquet till it's dark. Old friend.

Mmm. Old friend. Old friend. Oh, friends Swapping lives and lives and lives Pitching popcorn to the doves Oh, friends Oh, friends