Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1931: Big Batters Don’t Cry

Episode Date: November 19, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about redefining the MVP award, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s unearthed baseball blogs, Billy Beane’s new role with the A’s, and the Braves’ spinoff from Liberty Media, plus a Past Blast from 1931. Then (30:27) they bring on listener and top-tier Patreon supporter Peter Bonney to discuss his baseball background […]

I'll take you down with me But I went in the rain And I'll answer me I said hey, life or death I said hey, death or life Hello and welcome to episode 1931 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. How are you? I'm doing well.

Berger, The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. How are you? I'm doing well. Good. So we have a Patreon supporter joining us later in the episode, a Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter. Peter Bonney will be on and we'll talk a little bit about his baseball background and then get into some emails. Since we last recorded, we've had MVP awards come out. So all the awards are done. They were all pretty predictable, all pretty uncontroversial. And we saw, as expected, that Aaron Judge won easily in the AL. Paul Goldschmidt won easily in the NL, a little less easily, but still pretty easily. My only observation here, and I don't know that this actually matters, but it bothers me, I think, still that pitchers are eligible for the MVP, but not recognized as as valuable as they are. You know what I mean?

Because like pitchers have their own dedicated award. They have the Cy Young and it's basically the best pitcher award. You know, we don't call it the most valuable pitcher award. And therefore, it seems like no one really cares if the Cy Young Award winner was on a bad team or not. We don't have to talk about whether they were valuable enough to win. It's just were they good at pitching. So that's maybe a point in favor of renaming the MVP to just say it's the best player award or whatever. But beyond that, you can still win the MVP as a pitcher.

You're eligible. You're eligible, but I guess because pitchers have their own dedicated award, pitchers these days at least are really at a disadvantage when it comes to winning the MVP award. And so our respective Cy Young Award winners this year, Justin Verlander and Sandy Alcantara probably should finish above Pete Alonso, I would think. And Justin Verlander maybe should finish above, I don't know, Xander Bogarts or something, or at least you can make a good case. The best pitcher in the league probably is going to be better than the 10th best player overall in the league, even these days when pitchers tend to pitch fewer innings. So I think Verlander got a couple of fifth place votes. That was the highest he ranked. Alcantara got a couple of fifth place votes. That was the highest he ranked. Alcantara got a couple of fourth place votes, but ultimately they were distant 10th.

And I don't know what I want to do about this, but I feel like I want to clarify something. Like either like this is the position player award, pitchers, you have your own award and therefore like don't crash the results for the the mvp ballot or like if they are legitimately eligible for this thing then they should probably do even better like we should remind everyone hey like even though pitchers have have this other award like don't hold that against them here like they should be higher on this ballot too so i don't know something about like the the imprecision of it bothers me, I guess, like the cognitive dissonance of like best pitcher is only 10th best player. Something about that bugs me. It's a me problem, I think. But there's like a lack of clarity, I think, about like, are these guys eligible? Like, should they win this thing? Should they not? Because they have a dedicated award for themselves. Yeah, it does seem as if we have it a little wrong.

I think the best thing to do would be to use this observation as an opportunity to rename the MVP, to make it explicitly about position players and to remove the value piece of it, which we still can't. We just can't get it right then. We can't sort it out. We're confused by it as fans and as a voting body. So I think that we should use your irritation to address some of my irritations, and then we will

both get what we want and we'll have greater clarity. And it seems fine to me that we would have an award that is understood to be just for the position players and an award that is understood to be just for the pitchers and then like if we really want there to be an award that is meant to identify the most important single individual player in all of baseball we could come up with a new award and we could call it something totally bizarre that no one understands right you know so we have that option available to us also if we really choose to to utilize it but yeah we need some kind of reconfiguration here i think yeah and i guess you could say well hitters have silver

sluggers already but but that's just hitting specifically doesn't take defense or base running or other aspects of position playing into account. So yeah, I would like just for the symmetry of it, I'd like there to be a pitcher award and a non-pitcher award. And then maybe there can be an overarching award for the best of either. And a Sandy Alcantara or a Justin Verlander wouldn't be at a disadvantage in that one. It would be like a level playing field and everyone would understand that they're equally eligible and deserving of that award because we've gotten away from MVPs being pitchers. And maybe that's because they're just less often deserving of being the MVP than they

used to be. But it's not just that. I think it's also just that people are reluctant to vote for them for that award because they have their own thing. There's definitely category confusion there. And I think that the way that we tend to treat the rookie of the year is instructive because that's about how long you've been in the league and pitchers and hitters receive votes right we maybe expected the nlmvp to be closer but like we thought that was going to be potentially like a

tied race between strider and harris uh and obviously didn't end up being that way, but people were not reluctant to cast a ballot for a pitcher. And so I think having a little bit more precision there would probably be useful to everyone, including the players who might end up getting awards or not, as the case may be. So have you been reading the SBF baseball blogs? No. I have.

So everyone is consumed by Sam Bankman-Frieda, a person who like I knew nothing about beyond like maybe having heard the name until very recently. And now you have like really detailed thoughts on effective altruism. Yeah. very recently and now you have like really detailed thoughts on effective altruism yeah so i know much more about this person than i did like 10 days ago let's put it that way and even as someone who like doesn't understand finance and doesn't understand crypto etc like i can't get enough of reading about the fall of ftx and just the cult of sbf and everything and there's like there's kind of like a schadenfreude aspect to it.

Just like this person who everyone held up as this like golden boy and an exception to all the NFT crypto nonsense and was actually someone who was going to do good things with the money. And then it turns out was doing extremely irresponsible things. extremely irresponsible things and I guess still to be determined just like where on the like scammer slash Ponzi scheme slash incompetence spectrum he actually was. Why not both? Yeah, could be both. But also a baseball blogger, it has come to light. So yeah, I was reading, I've read many accounts of what went down or at least what we know of what went down, one of which, one of the most comprehensive of which is at a website called milkyeggs.com. And that is where I first learned of Sam Bankman Freed's blog. And this writer of milkyeggs.com, who's kind of like trying to understand like, what was he doing? How did he

get in so much trouble? Like, was it that he was like taking too many stimulants and that clouded his thinking? Like, was it that he was trying to do bad things or just fell into doing bad things? And so one little passage here, one can also argue that there are clear signs of SBF's deficits in the realm of overall competence and cognitive ability. For example, his personal blog, Measuring Shadows, is incredibly dull. It is a compendium of overly long posts about effective altruism, moral philosophy, and baseball statistics. So I take offense as a writer of overly long posts about baseball statistics. I don't think these are that bad, actually. In fact, I think a lot of loss could have been averted if back in 2012, when he started blogging about

baseball, he'd instead say he started a baseball podcast. That's what I did in 2012. This is like if we had let Trump buy the bills, maybe the entire course of history is different. Yeah, exactly. Like SBF could have just like been a Fangraphs writer or something, and it would have been fine. I mean, it would not have been fine. Well, he wouldn't have become a billionaire, but he also wouldn't have lost all of the billions that people invested with his company. And, of course, this affects MLB, right, because MLB has a sponsorship with FTX, or did. Does not anymore. Umpires will not be repping FTX next

year. And Shohei Otani is like a defendant in a lawsuit along with all of the other people who endorsed FTX, which seems pretty spurious to me. I don't think that they will actually be legally liable for being spokespeople for that brand as far as I can tell, especially Otani, because he was definitely not trying to defraud people. He believed in this, I think, which is not great. But I think he took his payment in coins and crypto and everything. Oh, did he really? Oh, Troy. Yeah. So it was misguided, but pure, I guess. So he believed in the product for whatever reason. Anyway, SBF in 2012. So he started this blog called Measuring Shadows.

And his very first post on this blog is about baseball. And actually, most of the posts on this blog are about baseball or at least a plurality of the posts are about them. Like they have the tags for the subject matter of the posts and 16 of them are baseball and many of them are like super saber brain like he was building simulators. He was like trying to build his own war model. He was like linking to Fangraphs posts and stuff. Oh no. SBF confirmed Fangraph's reader, at least at the time. So 2012, that's when Effectively Wild started. You know, like if he had just gone down that road instead of the road that he went down, you know, he would not be so notorious. There's one of his posts that's like, I want to be remembered. Like I hope everyone hopes that they will be remembered.

I think he will be remembered now longer than he would have been perhaps as a baseball blogger. But it's interesting because like a lot of the things he was writing really would not have looked out of place like in the sabermetric blogosphere in 2012. Like he was basically in line with the thinking. And in fact, like his big hobby horse seems to have been that he wanted to do away with pitching roles and he wanted like pitchers always to be pinch hit for. This was pre-DH, of course, and he wanted like, you know, everyone would like instead of having a set role, like each pitcher would pitch like two innings or three innings or whatever. And you wouldn't have closers and you wouldn't have starters. You would just have this blend, this melange of pitchers. And, you know, he was writing about how that would help you because you could pinch hit more often and you wouldn't have to have pitchers hitting and you wouldn't have pitchers facing hitters multiple times in the

same game and having the times to the order penalty. So this was his big cause. And he said, you know, it would be worth several wins to a team. And he wrote multiple posts about that, actually. But the thing is that I think Dave Cameron beat him to it because SBF was writing these posts like August of 2012 was his first time that he proposed this. And Fangraphs.com, June 21st, 2012, Dave Cameron, a more radical pitching staff proposal. Exactly the same thing where he was saying, like, you should just split up the innings, you know. So, hey, I mean, Dave Cameron, now high-ranking Seattle Mariners executive. So SBF could have gone down that way instead.

Could have just been a baseball blogger all this time. Yeah, although it's funny that, like, like do some googling dude doesn't didn't he come out saying like i don't believe in books yes wasn't that one of his things he's like i don't believe in books so he wouldn't have he wouldn't have had a place at fangrass for long because i'm here to tell you something ben we believe in books and people i think should should read them you know i think there's value in there and i would probably give him the feedback i would give any aspiring uh baseball writer or really any aspiring writer at all which is that if you're going to dive in on a subject you should see what else has been previously written and then cite your sources but you know like clean honest

attribution it seems like it might have been something he struggled with. So, yeah, all his tweets are up still. So people are unearthing the tweets. And there was one where he was like criticizing FiveThirtyEight and criticizing like sports punditry and how bad sports punditry was and sports journalism. And, you know, how like FiveThirtyE38's analysis had been watered down and had gotten too pundit like and then he he tweeted i guess this is another thing to file on the ever-growing list of things i hope never happened to ftx man i bet he had i bet he has just horrifying labor takes i bet his labor takes are hat garbage.

Yeah, but he was still stuck on this idea of just the like no roles pitching staff as recently as a year ago. Wow. Last November, I think it was, he had a whole long thread, like 20 something tweets. He's a Giants fan. Okay. fan okay and so he had a whole thread about how like he used to want to be a gm but now he doesn't because uh he thinks like gms have been commoditized now and and basically like every team's doing the same thing and it's not like moneyball which was so insightful which now is also ironic because michael lewis is writing a book yeah geez anyway a lot of it is like in retrospect. But even last November, he was like still on this idea of just like taking away roles from the pitchers. Although like that has like happened to a great extent relative to 2012, at least like

with openers and with starters going less deep into games and, you know, not really defined closers to the extent that there used to be. But this seemed to be his like real one bankable idea that he was stuck on in 2012 and still stuck on in late 2021 and thought even then that it would be several wins worth of value to some teams. So just saying. But, you know, it's interesting that like going back and reading his post or even Dave's post from 2012 or I'm sure my post from 2012, like no one was really thinking about like baseball from an effective altruism standpoint.

Like, would this be good for the game if we did this? in one of these posts, like, well, pitchers would hate it, obviously, but it would be very valuable to teams. And this is, you know, we've all matured, I think, maybe as a community. I mean, we weren't perhaps anticipating, A, that like these things would happen, you know, it was all very much in the realm of like abstract, like here's a wonky idea, right? Here's one weird trick you could use, but no one was thinking like teams will actually pay attention to this. They might do this. They might hire Dave Cameron and others to, like, implement the ideas that they first blogged about. And so back then it was all about, like, well, maybe what is good for teams is not necessarily good for the sport or for spectators. And we don't actually want pitchers to have no defined roles

whatsoever and just come in and out constantly. That is actually not as fun to watch. So we've evolved, I guess, is one word for it. Yeah, I think that there's been an evolution of thought. And I think that there is a greater sensitivity now to like how fun the puzzle box is to watch in addition to how fun it is to like put together. Right. And I think that we've all like thankfully evolved on or become less naive to or more sensitive to however you want to put it, like the labor implications of all of these strategies and wanting to be more mindful of that piece of it in addition to like how it actually feels

to sit and watch a baseball game. And so I think that that's all to baseball and certainly public baseball analysis's benefit. And it surprises me not a bit that this guy would be like, what if I could make it worse to engage with? You know, because like that's how he's approaching a lot of the world. And he doesn't like books. Like imagine being proud of not liking books and like saying that. I'm not saying everyone has to be a big reader.

Like that's fine. But like books, I don't know about books. And it's like, OK. Yeah, I'm fine with the like specific authors. I mean, like he has a whole post about how you know we prioritize the past too much and at some point like we just decided who the the great artists were and how improbable it is that like the great artists in one medium would have been alive several hundred years ago when there were so many fewer literate people and all these things and

like they just get ingrained in the curriculum and maybe we're not recognizing great current artists. And I think maybe there's something to that idea. Like he he's anti Shakespeare specifically. And look, I one of my hottest takes Shakespeare, maybe a bit overrated or like doesn't bring me personally that much pleasure as a reader but that's just a personal taste i'm not coming out with a blanket condemnation of of books or authors very pro those things in general just you know the specific so what you want everyone's takeaway from this segment to be is that you do not under any circumstances gotta hand it to him no okay no absolutely not anyway i will link to the the combined baseball writing oeuvre of sam bank for anyone who has fallen down the ftx rabbit hole as i have not at all surprising that like he would have wanted to be a gm like someone who went into this field and talks the way he talks and does the things he does because there's just so much overlap between like finance bros and baseball GMs, right? Like some have been both, you know, or talk the same or think the same.

There's just a lot of overlap there, obviously. And that's, you know, one effect of Moneyball. So anyway, not surprising that he would be that. I enjoy when someone who becomes famous for one thing turns out to be a baseball fan. When James Holzhauer was on his big Jeopardy run and we all found out he was a Sabre guy and he was on the podcast, that was cool. This is more infamy than fame. So not as cool, but also not surprising that people would unearth the baseball tweets of Sam Bankman Freed. end of the era there. He has handed over the reins to David Forst, his longtime second in command, and he's now just an advisor, more of an ownership level executive for the A's, so still in association with the team, but not really running the baseball ops day to day. So he goes back to 97, the longest tenured GM. So now his pal Brian Cashman will be the longest. So that was notable. And also in baseball slash finance news, I'm kind of interested in this like Braves Liberty Media spinoff. I don't know if you saw this, but Atlanta, the baseballves specifically or like, you know, there will be a tracking stock for the Braves, which should be interesting, I think. I don't – Travis Sotchick wrote about this and said maybe we'll get more transparency into the books than we have already.

Like Atlanta is like the one window we have into like ownership and books and finances right because of liberty media or at least one of them but but this is i think the first time since like 2002 that a north american major sports franchise was like publicly traded in this way so travis was saying that we might get even more transparency or or insight and that there's like actually an MLB rule that you're not allowed to do this anymore, but that Atlanta just like got a dispensation to keep doing it because they were already doing it before the rule. And so this is just this kind of weird arrangement where like, I don't know whether the stock price will like go up or down, like when the Braves sign a player or, you know, if they like sign someone to an extension, does that mean the stock price will like go up or down like when the Braves sign a player or you know if they like

sign someone to an extension does that mean the stock goes up because they committed to to winning or does that mean the stock goes down because they spend more money now like I don't even know which way the indicators will work but I am kind of kind of interested in seeing a baseball team stock move up and down like independent of other entities in the liberty media conglomeration yeah i mean i will say that like it's further proof it kind of puts the light of the idea that this stuff isn't good business because you tend to not issue do a stock issue if it's bad business that's one of the first things i think they tell you in business school i haven't been to the business school but in my finance experience tends to be how it goes yeah so yeah it is it is interesting and i think that

like in conjunction with that announcement sort of came them saying that they plan to run like a top five payroll because to use their words they can afford it so that's good yeah it's a good data point to have out there you know especially when it's one of the few that we have that's good. It's a good data point to have out there, you know, especially when it's one of the few that we have that's actually supported by real financial data as opposed to the rest of them where they get to say it's been terrible for us. And we're like, is that true? We think it's not. Yeah. By the way, Manfred spoke about FTX and about the uniform sponsorship deal just getting tanked by FTX tanking. And he said, the FTX development was a little jarring.

We have been really careful moving forward in this space. We've been really religious about staying away from coins themselves as opposed to more company-based sponsorships. We think that was prudent, particularly given the way things unfolded. We will proceed with caution in the future. particularly given the way things unfolded, we will proceed with caution in the future. I mean, if you really were proceeding with caution, you probably would not even proceed in this space at all. I get what he's saying. People did think that FTX was somewhat reliable relative to these other companies and everything, but it turns out that it was just a house of cards and a mirage, at least at the end. And if they weren't investing, like, you know, MLB is not accepting sponsorships from specific coins,

but FTX, like at the end, at least was like mostly an edifice constructed on like coins that they came up with basically. So that were basically worthless except in theory. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise or shock me in any way that like MLB mostly cares about the check clearing more so than like whether this is an ethical business or whether we want our name sullied or tarnished. And, you know, MLB is not alone, like tons of leagues and teams accepted sponsorships from FTX and other kind of dodgy crypto type NFT-ish businesses. dodgy crypto type NFT-ish businesses. So, you know, like I don't know that it actually like sullies the brand that much if MLB is sponsored by whatever, because I don't know that anyone cares all that much or thinks it's really a reflection on the brand. But like they'll take your money, you know, like if the check clears in the short term

and, you know, some people have been left in the lurch that had longer term deals. But if they get their money, then they will put your name on their thing. That is basically the main criterion that they are looking at. Yeah, I think, I don't know, like, I get that the check clearing is the main thing. I mean, I do wish that there were a little bit of thought given to like, there are a lot of things that MLB advertises on its air or has as like, you know, banner ads within the stadium or whatever that people could raise various objections to, right? I'm sure there are people who are uncomfortable with like the proliferation of the gambling sponsorships.

There might be people who think that like there's just too much alcohol shilled on MLB broadcast, right? And so I get that there's probably not going to be consensus around all of this stuff all of the time but like you know maybe a good rule is like are we actually actively shilling what might be a ponzi scheme and i don't know that it's fair of me to like assume that whoever is like vetting ads for or like advertiser relationships which i imagine is the the level at which this gets vetted, right? It's not like they're sitting there with final cut over commercials, probably.

And so maybe I'm asking for something that isn't totally reasonable, but it doesn't look great when you're like, well, this might just have all been a big fraud. And we showed it to our viewers, and some of them probably lost some money as a result of that. You know, it's investing and you're always supposed to talk to an investment advisor and assess the suitability of it for you personally.

But, you know, I think a lot of people had the feeling that like, oh, I got to get in on this because like, you know, Tom Brady's telling me I'm going to miss out or Otani. Shohei. Yeah, Shohei. All right. Well, I had some stat blast out. Or Otani. Shohei. Yeah. Shohei. All right. Well, I had some stat blasts, but I will save them for next week.

They will keep. And we can end, I guess, with a pass blast before we bring on our guest. This is episode 1931. And so this pass blast comes from 1931 and from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabre's director of editorial content and chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. And he writes, 1931, nocturnal baseball. The first minor league game played under the lights took place in 1930 in Kansas, although some Negro League's teams and independent teams had been experimenting with night baseball before then. By 1931, with attendance dropping everywhere due to the Great Depression, more owners decided to do whatever it took to bring fans to the ballpark. But not everyone thought the fad would last, as one serious enterprise. Twelve months ago, only two ball lots in the nation were illuminated.

Now the arcs blaze in more than 60 pastures. Independence, Kansas gave birth to the idea of finding a substitute for the sun. Des Moines next turned on the switch. Now in every coast park, the owls and bats and baseballers hobnob together. Half the Texas loop is lighted. Same thing is true in Dixie. You can hardly conclude that the night baseball idea has bogged down. Oh boy. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. And Jacob concludes,

from the very beginning. And today, it does feel like it was kind of an inevitable path. It does. I guess I understand some skepticism at the time. I mean, I guess I would have been skeptical that the lights were good enough, which they probably weren't really. They probably weren't. Yeah, initially. So there's that. And I guess, I mean, at that point, you had other forms of entertainment that were in the evening hours. So it wouldn't have been maybe such a huge leap to think that people might come to see a sporting event. But but if day games was all you had ever known. Right.

And I can see why you you might be a little skeptical about this whole night baseball idea, at least before you saw it in action with proper lights that were well lit enough to play the game. So yeah, it seems inevitable, but I think more so than some of the skepticism about new ideas that we've encountered during this past blast series, I can kind of sympathize with raising an eyebrow about playing baseball at night of all times. Okay. And now imagine trying to explain FTX to the person who wrote that. Yeah. It's hard enough to explain to anyone now.

Do you want to say some more business words before we go? I don't think I know anymore. I think I exhausted all of them. Guess we got to go to our guests then. All right, we will be right back with Patreon supporter and listener Peter Bonney, who will, along with us, answer many of your emails. No, no, no, he's not licked yet He said he's not licked yet All right, we are back now, and we are joined by our Patreon supporter extraordinaire, Peter Bonney, who has been a Patreon supporter at the highest level, the Mike Trout tier. Mike Trout, I think, finished eighth, was it, in AL MVP voting?

But you're our number one MVP today. Peter, welcome to the podcast. That is quite an introduction. I'm glad to be placed ahead of Mike Trout. Yeah, it won't happen often, but just in this specific context. So we have actually met, you and I, in real life, IRL, and you actually have a bit of a baseball writing, baseball analysis background. We met several years ago at a Sabre seminar in Boston. And I believe that I may have emailed you a couple subsequent Sabre seminars or at least one when I was not able to make it and you were presenting. And I think you sent me slides of your presentation. Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. You did something on umpire analysis with machine learning, I think, and you did something maybe on

Fenway Park and park factors. I was just looking at my old emails. I'm hopefully not making that up, but you have also been a Patreon supporter and effectively wild listener. So how did that come about? Was that before or after we met? I forget whether you listened to this podcast at that point. No. So that, I mean, it actually was when I discovered Effectively Wild. It was at Saber Seminar. It was the- Oh, we recorded one probably. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You did the live broadcast or the live recording, I should say. I don't know if it was a live broadcast. And I hadn't heard of Effectively Wild. Well, I think I had heard of Effectively Wild. I'd seen the name around.

Come on. Exactly. Fair enough. But I'd never listened. I thought, wow, this is actually- You had no choice but to listen. Well, I had no choice but to listen. I was captive unless I wanted to very rudely leave.

But no, I stayed. Then I thought to myself, well, I have a four-hour drive back to New York, so let me go and download some episodes. Yeah, I listened to Effectively Wild for most of the ride back. New York. So let me go and download some episodes. And so, yeah, I listened to Effectively Wild for most of the ride back. All right. Great. And I guess history was made. You were hooked forever and here you are. And you wrote for the Heartball Times a few times back around then in 2015. So what's your background in baseball? And I guess in baseball analysis specifically, how did you come to be someone who would be attending Saber Seminar in the first place?

Well, I can start there. I was bored at work. Common origin story for all kinds of podcast listeners and workers in baseball. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I was sort of at the tail end of my career in finance and looking for new things to kind of keep myself occupied. And I had maybe a couple of years before that sort of discovered the world of sabermetrics. I'd always been interested in baseball. I played youth baseball growing up. I guess a common thing you hear from listeners on this podcast or other people involved is I played Stratomatic baseball as a kid. It was the old school one with the cards. And yeah, so, you know, was always kind of into that,

you know, sort of statistical view of baseball, but I was never serious about it, never really spent any further time on it. You know, I wasn't participating in any of the early baseball message boards back in the day on the internet. And by the way, just to set some context, I think I'm, you know, probably about 10 years older than both of you. So I guess I could have been around for whatever was happening on AOL or- Yeah, Rexport Baseball or something. Yeah, exactly. But I just, I wasn't. Oh, and the other thing I should probably mention, don't hold it against me. I grew up in New England, so I kind of got Red Sox fandom in the blood. Yeah. And then just kind of engaged with baseball as a fan for a long time until I got invited

to play in a fantasy sports league, a fantasy baseball league. And when I was sort of poking around like, okay, well, how do I actually draft a team? I discovered Fangraphs. And that's when I discovered, yeah, seriously, I discovered basically this entire world of sabermetrics that I didn't really know about. I was aware of Moneyball and all of that, but I had no idea how things had advanced beyond just like, OBP is good from the year 2000 to the year 2010 when all of a sudden there's all this pitch tracking data and war exists. I was really blown away.

tracking data and war exists, I was really blown away. So I kind of just started diving in in my free time. And then eventually when I got more free time, I dove in more and started kind of scraping pitch data and kind of having some fun with it. And did you ever have team aspirations with your writing? Not seriously. First of all, because I was already in my mid-30s at that point, so I was not going to realistically sign up for an entry-level job working 80 hours a week, moving somewhere else in the country. That just wasn't going to happen. I did actually apply to a job with the Chicago Cubs, it was embarrassingly bad. It was actually kind of one of my submission. It was actually kind of one of the things that really kind of motivated me to warn more than, you know, warn what I had been missing out on.

Because like, yeah, it was a bad job application. If it's not too painful to talk about. No, no, not at all. What made it so bad? Yeah, because, yeah, actually, this might be interesting for your listeners if you've never applied to a job in baseball as an analyst. So what they did was they asked – they basically posed a question. And it was a good question. I wish I'd looked this up again before I came on.

It was something like basically can I provide any insight about fastball value? It was very open-ended and in a nice way. It wasn't like a mean thing. They sort of said like, you know, just whatever, use whatever data sources you have, come up with whatever kind of insight you can glean. It can be from just like, you know, looking at like fan graphs data. It can be, you know, from like looking at like your own database, whatever it is. They didn't really care. I think they just wanted an insight. And so that was like my first instance. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to, you know, use baseball on a stick. I'm going to download game day data and I'm going to dive into it. And I did all that. And I came up with nothing.

It was just like, you know, I sort of had said, oh, yeah, I'll turn that around in like four days. And they said, that's fine. And after four days, I had like bupkis. It was bad. I sent in some like terrible like correlation analysis. It was just like worthless, just worthless garbage data. Oh, well, you did not hear back, I assume. I got a nice email back saying they were not moving on. Needless to say, I did not get the job.

Yeah. Could have been running the place by now. Yeah. And you could have been like Sam Bankman Freed and started FTX, but I guess you started a different company, right? You founded a different company. I guess maybe that got in the way of your baseball aspirations, if you had any. Hopefully one with a little less fraud involved. Yes. Well, yeah. So I mean, yes, it's called PBX. It is... No, I'm just kidding. No, I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Vendorful. And we are a SaaS company that sells primarily to large companies, and we help them basically manage their suppliers. So our

main customers are procurement and supply chain professionals, finance professionals who have challenges related to assessing supplier performance, supplier cost, understanding the correlation between those two things, and are looking to save money, save time, and get more value out of those relationships. Cool. Well, you might be a good person to answer this first question that I had on tap here because we're going to do some emails here, some that have been hanging around in our mailbag for a bit. We haven't done a whole lot of emails lately.

We had postseason, we had drafts, all kinds of other things getting in the way. This question, has supply chain in the email? I don't know how supply chain related it actually is, but this is from Anna, who's a fellow Patreon supporter and wrote, I don't really understand baseball supply chain economics. If owners did invest more in players, would that really result in better teams across the league or would it just increase how much some players earn? If owners like Bob Nutting invested more, would they be able to keep up with owners in larger markets? Are there above-replacement players not playing because owners won't pay for them? It seems to me that there is a limit to the

number of elite players available, and I can't figure out how owners of middle-market teams attempting to invest more in the best players would actually move the needle when large market teams have so many more resources available to them. So I don't know if that is exactly relevant to your industry, but the question is basically like, you know, if we're advocating for owners who do not spend a lot to spend more, would that actually lead to like the baseball being better quality across the league? How would that actually raise the amount that other owners have to spend? Would it just mean that players make more, but everything else is essentially the same? Both of you know more about business than I do. So I don't know if anything comes to mind. I do have thoughts on this, but I don't... Meg,

if you have anything you want to share, by all means. No, please. You first. So that's funny. I don't think this really ties into what I do professionally now. I'm not sure I would think of that as a supply chain issue. I thought the question was actually going to be about like the supply chain of baseballs and bats and things like that when you started down that road, which would also be interesting to find out about. Yeah. Maybe it's supply side. Maybe it's more of that. That's a thing. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Well, so one of the few articles I wrote was actually about player aging. And by the way, I'm very briefly going to give my hottest baseball

take, which is that the steroid era is completely mislabeled. It's really the expansion era. Yeah. I mean, I think it's the earlier juiced ball era more than anything, probably. That could be too. That could be too. But I agree. It is other factors other than PDs, at least on a league-wide level. So I'm with you on that one. Yeah. So I was actually rereading that recently because I wanted to prepare to give my hottest hot take. And one of the things I had mentioned in the article was like, if I played in like over 30 basketball leagues, say, and then one year LeBron James joined, right?

That would make my performance look worse in a couple of ways. One is that I would have to play against LeBron James, so I would play worse. And then the other is that he would raise the average performance of everybody else, and so relative to average, I would look worse. And I think that this kind of ties into the question because I do believe that there has been an influx of talent in baseball over the last, call it, 20 years. Well, there's been both an influx of talent from more international players and, you know, possibly from people sort of directing their kids away from football, sort of youth football, and people gravitating more towards baseball and basketball. Not so sure about that, but possibility. And that would take a while to sort of play out. The other factor is, of course, there hasn't been any expansion in a very long

time. So you've got probably a higher talent level and no more slots to take that talent. So I suspect the average true talent of a baseball player, if you could kind of measure it in some non-relative way, is higher today than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And putting more money into the pool over time, I think, would only increase the attractiveness of baseball relative to other options. Small effect, but got to be there, probably. And so, yeah, I think it would raise the quality of play, but for everybody. Right. Yeah. Just by being more attractive as a career. Right. And more just seductive to an athlete who might do something else or just people in general. Yeah. It's a bigger windfall. component of spending that I think is the most obvious one and certainly the one that is of greatest concern to folks who are trying to see a better balance in, say, revenue distribution

between ownership and labor. But that's not the only way that teams can spend on their teams from a baseball perspective. And I think that one of the places we see teams that maybe don't have top line payrolls but are consistently good is, you know, distributing their money and getting big bang for the buck is like, you know, Cleveland deciding to put Kinetrax in their big league ballpark, even though that costs money and doing it earlier because that data is valuable to them being able to improve their own players and better assess, you know, other players out there or like, you know, the raise spending money on scouts, even though they don't spend big payroll dollars because they can have, you know, a couple of scouts making, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80 K a year and really finding great players for them who aren't expensive and being able to invest in their club that way, which I don't say those teams shouldn't just also spend some money on their payroll. But I think that when you look at a team like, say, the A's, part of how they are falling behind is that they are budget constrained from a payroll perspective. But I think there's also a widening gap between some of the other ancillary stuff you do around player

acquisition and development where, you know, you do have to spend some money on infrastructure and personnel and stuff away from the actual players themselves. And so I guess there are a lot of ways to fall behind monetarily. It's not just in player salary, even though that's the most obvious and sort of biggest ticket one. There is a limited pool of players who are like impact potentially, you know, playoff odds altering guys. But, you know, I don't think that we would end up with just mediocrity if suddenly, say, the Pirates were like, oh, we can spend money? What?

Because you can get a couple of guys that will help to elevate a young cost-controlled core and sort of put you over the finish line. So I don't think anyone's expectation is that every team is going to compete every year. The problem we get into with the competitive landscape is when we have teams that are perpetually not trying to compete, and the most obvious manifestation of that is payroll. So, you know, it's fine if, like, I'm going to say a thing,

and I don't say it to, like, pick on anyone or to get emails, but, like, if the Yankees were just not good for a little while, that wouldn't, it'd be okay. Like, we'd all survive that, right? as long as other teams are good you know we just it's fine for there to be cycles around this stuff it's when we have a perpetual underachieving group that i think we get into a place where you really start to worry about competitive balance and the interest that those teams can generate for their fan bases, et cetera. Yeah. And you could even open up new baseball markets if you were willing to spend more.

You could have scouts in more parts of the world or open up academies or try to cultivate interest in baseball in markets where not many people have played. Get yourself a competitive advantage there and expand the possible player pool. And yeah, I think one of the factors that was sometimes cited as a possible explanation for why the AL was so much better than the NL for a period of years was that the Yankees and the Red Sox were in the AL and they were the two big spending titans at the time. And so the thought was, well, they're spending a ton and then their competitors in the AL also have to spend more to try to keep up with them.

And if the NL didn't have a big juggernaut like that back then that was kind of dragging up everyone's expenditures and lifting all boats from a salary perspective, then maybe that was why that league fell behind. So on a league-wide or sport-wide level, I guess the same thing would be true, where if you had the Pirates spending more or the teams that perpetually don't spend more, then that pushes their rivals in the division to spend a little more. And yeah, there's only so much war out there in theory. You could maybe expand, as we're saying, the number of players long-term who are available, but in any given year, there's really only so many wins to go around and it's sort of a zero-sum thing. So you are just talking about just driving up the price per war more so than,

you know, not every team can be good at all times. So there is a limit to that. It's true. But yeah, you would see fewer perpetual losers or perpetual not investors, really, where even now you look at the Pirates and they've got a great farm system and hopefully that sets them up for better things to come. But then will they spend and will they supplement the prospects? Or will it just be like the last time the Pirates were good for not all that long, where they had some competitive advantages and some market inefficiencies and also some good homegrown players, but then they couldn't really keep it going and they never had a huge payroll relative to the league. mid-career to change to an entry-level job in baseball, or we're going to try to match salaries

for folks on the dev side of things so that we peel off a couple people who would otherwise go into tech, and we're not just using love of baseball as a way to do that. We're going to pay our analysts more so that we can appeal you know, appeal to people who, you know, maybe have to take out student loans to go to college, right? So that we have a broader workforce and applicant pool, like teams should spend money on players, because they play baseball and generate the game. And they should spend money lots of places, I think we should just come up with a little shopping list for them and make them spend some money. I'm in favor of that. Yeah, I mean, it is always kind of shocked me, you know, sort of seeing having both worked in

tech and in finance, just how many smart, talented people there are out there who are earning a lot of money and coaxing those people and getting access to that talent pool, I would think could really help baseball teams. Maybe they just have as much talent in the front office as they can handle. I don't know. But yeah, it has always baffled me that they don't seem to want to draw from the same talent pool. Yeah. Here's a question from Brendan. This is an old one from back in July. Headline, the ultimate player to be named later. Relatively new listener, so sorry if someone else thought of this already i don't think so but i had an epiphany listening to you talk about potential

one soto trades what if there was a player to be named later trade but there was no expiration date and the list was any player ever in the organization to put it another way what if you traded one soto for a future golden ticket to take any one player of your choice from the franchise at any time other than Juan Soto? I call this rumple stilt skinning, because once you make the deal, you'd be left waiting for the creature that is the Washington Nationals to steal something you love one day. It would have limitations. You'd have to take them before the trade deadline and no trade clauses still apply. If you're the Nationals, how long would you wait? Would you hold out for a potential generational star to pop up in a decade?

If you're the other team, would you start giving out no trade clauses like candy? So I don't know whether you'd have to restrict this to a player at the minor league level, like still in the system, a prospect. But one way or another, like what timescale do you think would be best here? How long would it make sense to wait? Because my thought was that you could just wait and wait and wait for that team to have a real generational player, like another Juan Soto who comes along. Not that there are many Juan Sotos, but you know, the Nets had Steven Trasberg and they had Bryce Harper and they had Juan Soto who comes along. Not that there are many Juan Sotos, but the Nets

had Steven Trasberg and they had Bryce Harper and they had Juan Soto. So the next guy like that potentially who comes along. But if you are currently running this team, then you don't want to wait until you lose your job or you lose. Yeah, that's the big problem here. Exactly. Yeah. There's like a moral hazard here where you want to be able to take advantage of this golden ticket and not just leave it for the next person who's running the team after you, your successor. So there would be a pressure to use it quickly, like use it or lose it to the next person who comes along. Oh, man. No team would ever do this. Right. Yeah. Right.

That was my thought. Never. No. I don't think either side would do it because to your point, Ben, if you're the GM trading Juan Soto, you'd have to feel confident that you are going to at least be able to get somewhere close to Juan Soto. And you'd want to be pretty sure that you were going to get somewhere close to Juan Soto because maybe you have a guy who comes up and has an incredible debut. And you're like, ah, it's Juan Soto.

And then you're like, no, it's not. Because there aren't very many of them. And so you probably are looking at a guy who's already an established big leaguer. And then at that point, don't you just hold on to the Juan Soto you have? Yeah. I think the problem is that the time scale, if we think about this kind of like time value of money, time value of war or whatever, unless there's somebody you can get immediately, even three, five years down the road, if you're not getting back a Mike Trout level talent

for that Juan Soto trade, then yeah, I mean, for sure, like the front office has been complete, has all been fired. And rightly so, because you've now lost like three or five years of, you know, extremely high level of performance for the possibility that maybe you might get a Mike Trout in the future. Right. And they did fairly well if they were going to give away Juan Soto. It's not like they got fleeced. I mean, maybe you automatically get fleeced if you're the team that is trading Juan Soto. But the package better than that for some unspecified player at some unspecified time. I don't know that you could be confident that you could beat the package that you were receiving there unless it's like you get to even if they're at the major league level and they're a superstar, then you can swoop in and get them.

So it's not even prospects like proven performer. swoop in and get them so it's not even prospects like proven performer but yes i i think the questioner is right that if you had this rumple stiltskin situation hanging over your head then you probably would be very eager to sign every player who came along to an extension that included a no trade clause right because you would want to take them off the board so yeah i mean i don't want to be a downer this is actually like a super fun idea but i think the only way it would work is if you could you could do something like where you it's like you had a pool of teams right and you sort of agreed with them that like one of them would maybe get one soto in the future for you know some unidentified player and so i don't know i'm thinking of this on the fly but like yeah think as constructed, there's just no way

anyone would ever agree to it, because if there was that level of talent of player that you felt good about getting, you would just try to trade for them in exchange for one soda. Why did Rumpelstiltskin want a baby? What is Rumpelstiltskin going to do with a baby? It's, you know, reasons.

You know, like, what's up with that? I don't remember Rumpelstiltskin's motivations. I don't know if the story ever really got into his motivations, but I mean, that might be an interesting novel for somebody to write. Yeah. All right. Question from Nate, who describes himself as a dislocated Cincinnati Reds fan living in Dusseldorf, Germany. And Nate says, I was just watching the MLB Network High Heat show.

This was back in the summer also. And the scroll across the bottom with its random assortment of facts caught my eye, as it is wont to do. One note popped up saying that Stephen Kwan has a.354 batting average in his last 22 games. And it got me thinking about something I thought might interest you or you might know more about. I often see these sorts of arbitrary numbers and cutoffs and wonder how they are determined. Why that average, and why 22 games? Who makes the decision that this is more impressive than a 340 average in 23 games,

or a 360 average in 21 games? I often see random numbers like this about hot or cold streaks and write it off as a product of just the arbitrary nature of baseball statistic cutoffs, but wonder if there is a bit of science to determining these sorts of things. So we've probably all at one point or another had some arbitrary endpoints and had to come up with some sort of fun fact about so-and-so being cold or hot. And I guess often you just try to frame it in the most impressive way. So if you're being open about it and not disingenuous, like you might just try to pick some round number or something or starting with a given date or the beginning of a month or something, something that appeals to our brains in that way. Or you might just try to maximize the funness of the fact or try to maximize how impressive it sounds

or how unimpressive it sounds. And so you just cut it off like whatever the day after the guy had a four for five and you start with the O for four that started the protracted slump. And that way you can make it look even worse. Or on the other side, you do away with the 0 for 4 and you draft that out of the sample and you start on the day that he was 4 for 5. So I guess that's what it is. And often there's some decision about do I want to start here or do I want to start there?

I mean, I try to avoid cherry picking it or like gerrymandering it in a very obvious way so that it's totally transparent that I'm just crafting it in the most impressive way possible. Or I will be open about the fact that that is what I'm doing. I will just transparently say I'm crafting this stat in such a way that it makes this player sound as impressive or as unimpressive as possible. But that's it. Basically, someone has to look at the game logs and decide where to set the cutoff, right? I guess that's as simple as it is. Didn't you have a guest on, I want to say within the last year or so, who does this job for TV broadcasts, who's kind of like a stats consultant. Yeah, we've talked to people like that. Yeah. And yeah, you just have to, you know,

like you're trying to make the point for the broadcaster or you're trying to catch the person's eye on the bottom line as they're watching. And 354 sounds pretty good. Maybe 340 doesn't sound as good. Yeah, my guess is it's much more art than science, probably just like, oh, that looks like a nice round number or a nice big number.

If I recall, and this was over a year ago, so who knows what I even said, but I remember when I was talking with Sarah Langs about this for an episode she did while you were on maternity leave. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of, yeah. You know, she wanted it to like be meaningful. Like it, you know, there are definitely fun facts where they're sort of acknowledged to be silly, right? Or you're looking at, you have so many qualifiers on it that you know that it doesn't really say anything. But I think that like the good ones, when they're doing that stretch, like there is something you can really discern about the player and the player's quality that stands up to some amount of scrutiny.

And I think that that tends to be when we go, oh, yeah, that's a good fun factor. And when it doesn't, we're like, that doesn't say anything at all. It says no things. So I think that trying to have it actually really inform, even if it's a small thing, really inform our understanding of the player in a way that's meaningful, potentially beyond, you know, some tiny sample of games I think makes for good ones. Yeah, my bar for the bottom line for the ticker for the scroll is pretty low. Like, I'm barely paying attention to that at all. And if I just want to signal that so and so has been

hot or cold lately, then there's only so many ways you can do that. But I wouldn't even bother like tweeting that if I were still someone who really tweeted, you know, like it would have to be more fun than just this guy's played well lately. But yeah, you want it to be something significant. But if you're just trying to portray that someone has been good lately, then you just sort of set the cutoff at the place that makes them look best. I guess that's about it. All right.

Here's a question from Tim in Newmarket, Canada. Apparently, one can alter the voice and even the language spoken by the Pitchcom sign transmitter. So the question is, who would provide the voice that would generate the most optimal performance for a pitcher? His preferred catcher, his pitching coach, a significant other, a famous voice actor. If we had his voice actually recorded calling the pitches in English and Spanish. I think he's bilingual to some extent. And he also recorded just little exhortations basically where someone would make a pitch and he recorded himself saying like, fuck yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah. Really? Yeah. To like psych up his pitchers and like other pitchers on the staff said, this gets me hyped, you know, like Tristan McKenzie or Emmanuel Classe. Like they were like, I want to hear the fuck yeah. Like I want to feel good about myself. And it varied.

So like he doesn't do the fuck yeah for shane bieber so much who's maybe more restrained and so he kind of had to know like when to trigger that button and when to provide the positive reinforcement or should you have some sort of negative reinforcement like you have to know your personality of your pitcher and what works best but apparently yeah you can kind of customize it i think there's like a one second limit maybe on any individual clip but he made it so that he could use his voice and he could only use like one button instead of two buttons i don't know how that worked exactly but like to indicate the pitch type and the location he wanted to streamline it and make it even faster so yeah you can kind of customize it so in theory you could get get Jon Hamm or whoever to do your pitch comp voice.

So I guess the question is, who would be the most motivational pitch comp voice? I don't know. As an aside, you're like, how does a guy with a 42 WRC plus possibly get rostered on a big league team? And this is how it happens happens now we know yes now we know yep yep wow i have so many questions so i mean some basic ones like how many i've never thought about this but how many buttons are there on the pitchcom system there are not a lot of buttons i've seen it it's like a quadrant kind of thing i think to like set the location and then there's like pitch type buttons that correspond to it so i don't even know how he worked it so that it's just one button press to indicate type and location but apparently he

did and and now i'm wondering like is it like really hackable can you do things like like combinations like or if you know you press these two buttons yeah exactly like can you have like you know 50 different messages that get triggered by different input combinations? I don't know. That would be pretty cool. I don't know. Yeah. He had help from like the Guardian's IT department, according to Travis's article. I assume like I would hope it's not that hackable because the whole point of the thing is that it's not hackable.

This has been part of the concern, right? Yeah. Right. This must have been the most fun IT project they worked on all season. Oh, yeah. Probably. Oh, yeah. Like. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm locked out of my computer.

Like, what's the Wi-Fi password? Can you record me saying fuck yeah so that our pitchers could hear that? Yeah, probably a more fun project. But I don't know. Like, you could have – if you had, like, Tom Hanks or someone who's, like – didn't he – Tom Hanks did, like, the Guardians team name change announcement, right? Tom Hanks did like the Guardians team name change announcement, right? So you could have Tom Hanks like – and he could be the inspirational Tom Hanks or he could be like calming Tom Hanks who's like centering you on the mound. Because Hedges' whole idea was that like mound visits are limited now.

Like maybe this can take the place of a mound visit in a sense. Like I can psych someone up. I can be motivational without actually having to go out there. So I don't know. You could have some famous voice coach or motivational speaker who's doing this or The Rock or something. I don't know. See, this is why Austin Hedges is a professional athlete and I am not. Because the first thing thought about was like if I was in his position what voices could I record in what combination what messages could I record to try and make the pitcher crack up in the middle of the game yeah right well and that could be itself a good motivational tactic like you know it's a high stress moment and you say something silly and

maybe it deflates the pressure a little bit so yeah oh gosh i don't i mean it seems like everyone's ideal voice is probably gonna be different right you know they're gonna be i would be surprised if people want their significant others voice yeah that doesn't seem as likely to me Not that they don't like their significant others, but just, you know, that's a weird crossing of the streams. It's a weird context, yeah. Yeah. But I don't know.

Like, it would be good if you could have a variety of them because I'm sure that people, you know, we all respond to, we haven't gotten many of these emails lately, but as anyone who hosts a podcast knows, people respond to different voices differently, and sometimes the feedback is not good. So you might have all kinds of folks that you find

inspirational or grating. Yep. Yeah. I mean, you could get like the Bane voice or something, like some James Earl Jones voice. I don't know. Hold on. Did I miss this in the question? Helen Mirren. Oh, that'd be good. That'd be good.

Yeah, right. I guess you wouldn't want scary, intimidating villain, probably. That's probably the opposite of what you would want. I don't know. Maybe. Did I mishear this in the question that it comes preset with different voice options, like a GPS system? It comes with different language options, but I think they're default voices. Got it. And I don't know if they're even human voices or we're kind of computerized voices by default but if you can just swap in anyone

yeah tony robbins i don't know oh boy some kind of just like someone who's supposed to pump you up i don't know jack lelaine yeah maybe just your catcher is actually the best way to do it i don't know. Jack LaLanne. Yeah. Maybe just your catcher is actually the best way to do it. I don't know if it's not very imaginative. Dame Judi Dench. Idris Elba. I want Idris Elba as my pitch count voice. That'd be good. Yeah.

That'd be a good one. Yeah. Give us some, get a lot of Brits percolating to the top for me. All right. Well, we welcome suggestions. But yeah, probably like for any one person, it would be some trusted mentor type. Yeah. It might be your pitching coach. It it would be some trusted mentor type. Yeah. It might be your pitching coach.

It might be your catcher. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Makes sense. Yeah. Or who's the president from Independence Day? Whitmore?

Is that his name? Yeah. Can we get him to do it? Maybe Bill Pullman? Bill Pullman. Not Bill Paxton. Not Bill Paxton. Rest in peace.

Yes. All right. Not Bill Paxton. Rest in peace. Yes. All right. Here's a similar question from Tyler about overcoming velocity and movement with psychological warfare. I, like many, am concerned about the growing dominance of pitching in baseball as bullpens increasingly become the domicile of no-name 24-year-olds who throw 100 miles per hour with sink.

Batters simply cannot keep up. Many proposals have been made to address this, most of which involve altering rules or the field, limiting rostered pitchers, moving back the mound, perhaps turning the mound into a syncing platform. But I would like to propose a strategic solution that requires no rule changes, a change that leverages every pitcher's inherent humanity and capacity for empathy.

What if batters cried after striking out? Would pitchers try less hard because they feel bad? Granted, I acknowledge that this would not work against every pitcher. Namely, the mean pitchers would likely try even harder. But if advanced scouting of opposing pitchers included an evaluation of their emotional sensitivity and tendency for sympathy, perhaps this could be leveraged for some small psychological advantage. There's also the trouble of baseball players generally not wanting to appear weak in front of others, let alone millions watching on television. But I believe it would only take one team to prove its advantage before the entire league was sniffling after every whiff. I think this has it completely backwards. I think that the writer of this question, whose name I'm sadly

forgetting, is perhaps not adequately in the head of the hyper-competitive person and what motivates them. I think they would very, very happily make their opponent cry at every opportunity. Yes, I think I agree. I was listening to an episode of The Gist the other day, and Mike Peska was talking to someone who was researching like how to decrease political polarization and was like running a competition ascendant, you know, basically being like, you don't need to worry about the other side because say like, you've got a majority in this house or whatever, like things are going great for your side. Right. And they thought that that would make that side less likely to like be up in arms against the other side. Right. Cause it's like, you won't feel threatened by them because you'll feel like your side is sitting pretty.

And it had the opposite effect. In fact, it emboldened the side. It increased polarization because it's like, well, we don't even need to appease them or make nice. We're on the warpath here. We're doing great. So we can just totally dunk on them. So I think that's sort of what you're saying here, that if the batter showed weakness or it's construed in this macho environment to be weakness, then yeah, you might feel even less intimidated by them.

I mean, we're an awful species, so that's the bottom line. Yeah, basically. Yeah, I don't know that we should assume that people, that baseball players respond to like human feeling within the context of work anyway, in the same way that like the average person might, right? Like I imagine that I would not feel inclined to throw a baseball at another person if they, like, flipped their bat. That doesn't seem likely to me, but there certainly are baseball

players who want to do that. So I think you have to take the particular psychology of baseball players into account when you're trying to solve this riddle. Plus, you know, people fatigue in the face of strong feelings if they're exposed to them over and over. Plus, you know, people fatigue in the face of strong feelings if they're exposed to them over and over. So if, like, yet another guy goes up there and starts crying, you're like, you know, I worry that we would sort of exhaust our human empathy pretty quickly and be like, all right, we get it, you're crying because you're sad that you started crying.

We get it. You know, again, not because that's good, but because that seems kind of human. Yeah, right. And I always I kind of appreciate it when a pitcher hits a batter with a pitch and doesn't do the like macho kind of thing. It's like I will not acknowledge that I just injured you, you know, like when they express some concern. It's like, hey, I just hurt you. You know, I didn't mean to hurt you.

I mean, it depends on how severe the injury is. Like if it's just a brushback pitch or something, fine, that hits someone. But if they're like seriously hurt and it wasn't intentional, then sometimes pitchers will make some sign of like, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that. Other times, though, they won't, you know, because they want to preserve the illusion, at least, that they're unfeeling and they will strike you down if you rise up against them.

And so I like it when they do actually apologize and be like, I didn't mean to do that. And it's the same on the other side, really, because when hitters get hit by a pitch, often they don't want to show that they feel pain. Right. So like they will just, you know, pretend not to be heard or they'll just like jog to first. And, you know, they really want to like rub it and be like, ouchie, but they won't. So there's a lot of posturing when it comes to that stuff.

Yeah. I want to say I forget whether Nick Madrigal said that he used to cry when he struck out as a kid. I know he said it really, really frustrated him when he struck out. And so it wasn't so much that he was showing weakness to try to lull the pitcher into not trying as hard. It was just that he was really, really frustrated. And Stephen Kwan, same thing. He said earlier this year, I remember when I was younger, every time I struck out, I would want to cry. So I think I just told myself, I don't like to cry, so I just won't strike out. I could imagine that potentially pumping up the picture too. It's like, right, or not be taunted is like you got to stand up to the bully or like the bully wants you to look like they got to you. And so the best thing you can do is not show that that hurt you or something. Yeah, they are a terrible species. I agree. I think you just also solved the problem of rising strikeouts. We just have to make every Little Leaguer cry whenever they strike out and then they'll be like Nick Magical when they grow up. That's what we need, more pressure in youth sports.

Absolutely. It's what's been missing up until now. More parents yelling from the sidelines, please. More angry coaches. That's what we need. This is not just about having fun out there. It's about winning, even in t-ball, even in coach pitch. All right.

Here's a question from Alex. How many MLB games are recorded? I'm wondering how many MLB games have video recording somewhere out there. Games from the past several years are archived on YouTube or MLB TV, but most games from history might only have been recorded on home VCR or tapes at a TV station. If their goal was to collect a complete archive of all MLB games since baseball was first broadcast, how close would a team of hardworking historians and archivists get? Has a project like this ever been attempted? So I don't know. I don't know the answer to this one. I'd love to know the answer to this one. I know that MLB has a vault as a film room, right? And some of that is accessible.

Some of it is digitized and we can look it up, but a lot of it is not. And they're definitely sitting on a goldmine of old recordings that are just not accessible to us. And sometimes they will put clips or even full games online and other people will upload things. But it's just a drop in the bucket. I mean, it's a tiny bit. You know, you get back beyond the last few years

and it might as well have been like before games were broadcast because there's just no way for us to find it, which is very frustrating at times. So I would love to know if they would ever open up the Chocolate Factory and let us see exactly how much tape they have because I'd imagine that they have a ton of it they're probably missing a bunch that yeah you know maybe just like some vhs hoarder somewhere has like taped a game that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world at this point or

maybe it's like in the tv station archives but has never been digitized or who knows, they threw it out or it will never be found. It's like old silent movies that have been lost forever but then somehow a reel is found in someone's attic someday and it's like, oh, it's not actually lost. So probably a lot of that going on with baseball. But I would guess that MLB has access to a very sizable percentage that we do not have access to. I just – I don't really know what that percentage would be. I have absolutely nothing to add to this. Yeah. Way outside any bounds of or area of knowledge for me.

Yeah. It's like when Albert Pujols hit 700, right? And MLB put out that video that was like Pujols hitting every single home run he ever hit. And like it took years apparently or it took a really long time to put that together. And it was like Pujols just as he was swinging or before he was swinging with all of his homers. And that's going back to what, 2002 or whenever he first made it to the major. So that's out there somewhere. Like if you're MLB, you can access that, but we cannot, at least not consistently. You know, you can find old radio broadcasts in some archive.org archives or on YouTube and you can find old TV broadcasts too, but it's really a small percentage

of all of the broadcast games that are accessible to the public. I would guess that it's to the public i would guess that it's it's probably like i would guess it's a minority of games that even mlb has access to in any accessible archive but like probably i don't know if i'd say most like i guess most are probably somewhere in the world if you were to scour the globe and every attic and every TV station archive and MLB's treasure trove and every possible source. I would guess most, at least since we have easy recording technology and it's not just like kinescopes or whatever, when people at home

could tape these things off the TV in a practical way, then I would imagine that the percentage would jump up quite a bit. Yeah. They should open it up for everyone. Sort of like, remember for a while, Disney was like, we have the Disney vault. I'm putting stuff back in the vault. And then they were like, we want a streaming service. So everyone gets access to the vault for $7 a month.

Yes, you got to pay for the vault. That would be cool. I would probably pay for that if I could look up any game that they had digitized. Although that's interesting, the fact that you said it took them so long to put together the Pujols highlight video. I think I saw that it did, yeah. Then, yeah, that would suggest that either a lot of it's not digitized already or it is digitized, but it's not indexed. Indexed, yeah. Right, yes. Yeah.

So maybe they just can't productize it. Yeah, it might not be Yeah. Oh, dear. So maybe they just can't productize it. Yeah. It might not be worth the investment, but. This is another place where baseball could spend money. Yeah, true. We're adding it to their shopping list. I want to make clear that good players are still at the top of the list. I'm not saying skimp on the good players, spend money elsewhere. I'm saying spend money everywhere.

And also pay players. Yeah, everywhere. You know, it's like, what's his name with the strategy in Westeros? Fight them everywhere. I don't remember. Ben, help me out here. Who was the bad guy who ended up dying? You know, and he was like, fight them everywhere. You're going to have to narrow it down.

Little finger? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I remember stuff. I did sneeze at one point. I was muted. It was really nice. We appreciate it. I feel better now. All right.

Question from Chris. I've enjoyed the episodes discussing playoff structure and batting around listener ideas for improvement. I'm a bit of a regular season purist and was quite opposed to playoff expansion coming into this year. That said, Manfred is going to Manfred, and at this point it seems like there's no turning back. Thus accepting the inevitable, here is a simple proposal to reward teams for regular season success. Create a formal award for the regular season winners of both leagues and award it to the team with the best record

in each league. The structure here would be similar to MLS, where the regular season champion is awarded the Supporter's Shield, but there is still a postseason where the winner is awarded the MLS Cup. This structure gives fans the best of both worlds, there is real incentive to win the regular season, and fans and teams alike genuinely value winning the Shield. But you still get all the same chaos and excitement of the playoffs. all the same chaos and excitement of the playoffs. In the baseball context here, a couple of things that would have to happen to make this work. MLB would really have to push to make teams and fans feel like winning the baseball version of the shield is something worth caring about.

This could entail ads. The race for the shield is on at the start of the season, or the Dodgers have won the NL shield by the trophy NFT. Now it might also entail ceremonies for the teams that win, banners at the top of a player's baseball reference page for the number of shields a player has won right next to World Series titles, and even just

naming the award in a particular way. For instance, MLB could call their version of the shield the NL and AL pennants, and then have the playoffs decide only the World Series winner. And number two, the schedules would also have to become more balanced. Next year, MLB is already moving in this direction. So while teams in weaker divisions would still have a leg up, it would be a good year to introduce this concept.

Other than that, I cannot really think of any downsides here. Am I missing something? Why isn't this the perfect solution to all the playoff discourse and handwritten? I love it. I mean, I think it might take a while to make fans actually care about it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think that the regular season matters and I think it is, uh, it would be nice to, for people to recognize outstanding regular season performance. Yep. I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think it would be a good thing to do. I do think it would take a while. And you're swimming upstream a little bit when your solution to how do we make people care about this is like ads. But also, that is a way we make people care about stuff.

So even if we don't like it, can I just say, can I say an advertising related thing? Sure. I've complained a lot on this show about all the gambling ads. But this past week, I was watching football. It was like the first Sunday after the election. And there was not a single campaign ad. And I was like,

welcome to my home, DraftKings. Pull up a chair. We have missed you. It is, it's disorienting. I mean, you know, Ben and I both live in New York. So I imagine. Yeah, you don't have to worry about it quite as much. It is disorienting. I mean, you know, Ben and I both live in New York, so I imagine. Yeah, you don't have to worry about it quite as much.

It is disorienting when you watch television in like my parents live in Florida. So, yeah, it's been a while since I visited them. But when I go to visit them and watch television, it is a weird experience. I bet. Yeah, this is a good proposal. I think Dane Perry perhaps has proposed this as well. And yeah, I mean, it may have existed at some point. For all I know, it does exist. And we just don't even pay any attention to it.

Ever know? And then I just cover the person awards. Yeah, right. And you'd have to make it mean more than a hunk of metal. So you would have to really run at cross purposes with MLB just pumping up the postseason as the be all end all because they get a lot of revenue there. They want as many teams as possible in the playoffs. And so I don't know that they would be motivated to do this because if they made the regular season seem super significant, I don't know.

Maybe it would cheapen the postseason in some people's minds. But I would love if we could celebrate both. I also think there should be just a postseason MVP, just an individual player, right? Because we have the individual round MVPs now, but I think it would be nice if there were a postseason. The whole shebang. Exactly, right. And I think

this would be great. You'd just have to change the mindset and change the messaging to the point where it would actually become something coveted. like we could just start handing out the shield but without a history of handing it out and without a real campaign to make people value it and appreciate it then i don't know that it would change anything like you'd have to change mindsets and that might take more than just handing out the hunk of metal yeah

but like um you know maybe like the bbwa could do a thing like maybe you need an outside group because people just love all of our award picks all the time there's never any controversy it tends to go great but yeah i think having a body outside of the league bestow something might maybe be a an avenue to explore because then you're right the league is probably going to be reticent to do this even though there are other there are precedents in other sports leagues because they don't want to work at cross purposes with october but maybe we could just say too bad you know here's our award yep yeah i'm all for it okay here's a question from josh patreon supporter who says i really enjoyed your conversation

on episode 1923 with Ethan Singer about Pat Hoberg's perfect game. And I have a follow-up question. Going into the World Series, seven umpires are selected for the series roster. If the series goes to seven games, all seven umpires will have a turn behind home plate, but only four are guaranteed to work a game behind the plate. Let's say that through some combination of metrics, call accuracy, adjusted call accuracy, consistency, favor, et cetera, you were able to rank the seven umpires from who you expect to call the best game to who you expect to call the worst game.

My question is, going into the series, how would you order the home plate umpiring assignments game by game? Would you assign umpire one, the best umpire, to game 1, wanting to give the impression that the best umpires in the world are going to be calling the World Series? Would you assign Umpire 1 to game 3, knowing that if the series is tied 1-1 after two games, game 3 is incredibly pivotal? Or would you assign Umpire 1 to the even more pivotal game 5 or game 7, even though that means there's a chance that the best umpire doesn't end up calling a game behind home plate at all? Or would you order the seven possible games by how much they historically determine the outcome of the series and just assign the best umpire to the most impactful game,

the second best to the second most impactful game, etc., etc.? And one more wrinkle, you can now change which umpire is assigned to a game after the preceding game ends but can still use each umpire only once so your choices for game one and game two would be static since the series will always be one nothing following game one but do you initially have umpire one assigned to say game five or game seven then bump umpire one up to game three if the series is tied after the first two games so when do you want your best and worst umpires? Ideally, if you can set the order. That's a tough one. Yeah.

What if instead we said just promote better umpires? We reject the false dichotomy we are being presented with. I do not grant the premise of the question. That's what I learned to say in philosophy classes. Undergrad served me well. I think you want to... How long of a series are we grappling with here? Best of seven.

I think... How many bad umpires are we assuming? Hopefully zero. They're not bad. Yeah, it's just some are bad just less good rankable less good i think you want well let's assume you put your worst of the good options right we'll be generous in game three no two in game two put it in game two yeah two you're not doing that much damage there.

It's not the first impression, and it's not going to be a pivotal game. Right. You're not putting anybody in a position where you have a bad or less good. Let's just say one of them is bad. One of them might be bad. Yeah, you're the poison pill umpire. Where do you put like poison pill umpire yeah put the poison pill you don't want to i think you don't want to put them in game three because you know even with good officiating you've had one team say win games one and two and then they could be a potential beneficiary of bad

umpiring in game three and then you're in a position where you're setting up the dreaded sweep and Ben has to cry. And, you know, you don't want that. And you don't want them in decisive games because then we all might cry for non-sweep related reasons. So I think let's assume that I'm changing the parameters of the questions lately. There's one bad umpire. The rest of them are just like on a spectrum of fair to good, right? But there's one stinker. Put the stinker in game two early, and then you're probably fine the rest of the way.

And implement a challenge system, and then none of this matters. Yeah. There you go. Way to bring it back to the pitch. Yeah. I would have hated to save Hoberg for game seven. Right, because what if you don't get to see him? Yeah.

That's right. You don't get the perfect game at all. They didn't play a seventh game. So yeah, I think I might put the best ump in the first game, maybe? Just like you have the most people watching or I don't know. I guess you have the most people watching in like a decisive game seven or something, but you don't know that you're going to get that. So I might go for the first impression or guess you could wait for like a game five or something where you've got a good chance of playing that and also a good chance of it being really important.

So you might just go by the historic odds. might just go by the historic odds. But yeah, ideally, you just wouldn't have such a big drop off from your best to your second best and your sixth best to your seventh best that it would actually be all that noticeable where this would be a really important decision. You're really going to kill my evening because now I'm going to spend time tonight looking up whether there is a probability brain teaser that maps exactly onto this problem. I bet there is. I bet this has been solved. All right. And Mick, Patreon supporter, says, God knows I don't want to start a Hall of Fame debate, but all the talk of Dusty being a lock now that he's won a ring as manager had me thinking,

why does the Hall classify people as solely players, managers, media members, etc.? Why can't a guy like Keith Hernandez go in for his perhaps not quite Hall of Fame caliber playing career and also his contributions in the booth or say a Dusty Baker or Joe Torre before they won a World Series as a manager just for their combined playing and managing careers? If the story of baseball is to be told there, isn't it the case that we should be recognizing baseball lifers who excel that more than one classification, but not enough to make it solely on one. Yes. Yeah. I don't have a great objection to that. I guess that's like, it's kind of like the Buck O'Neill case,

I guess. Like he, he finally got in as, as an executive, I think, but it was kind of just like, we want Buck O'Neill to be in the Hall of Fame. So let's just, however we're going to do it, it's like almost a lifetime achievement

award. It's like he was a player, but perhaps not quite a Hall of Fame caliber player. And he was a manager in the Negro Leagues. And then he was a scout and coach and like all these things are are impressive and you know like beyond that of course he was just like the voice of baseball for years toward the end of his life and so you just kind of add all those pieces up and and it yields a hall of fame pie sort of for him it was it almost it just felt like you know let's let's not be sticklers here let's just put buck o'neill in because buck o'neill should be in the Hall of Fame. Right. So I wouldn't be averse to doing that kind of thing more often.

But how do you, from a logistical perspective, Ben, how does that work, though? Because I don't disagree. I think that, like, philosophically, there are people who contribute to the game in multiple facets. people who contribute to the game in multiple facets and when you combine those contributions and sort of look at their baseball life they are induction worthy for their contributions to baseball sort of broadly understood yeah but also i have to run an editorial calendar ben so like how many bites of the apple how do we do that basically how do we ensure that we are evaluating holistically someone who has contributed in multiple facets without being in perpetual Hall of Fame season and bogging down the committees? That would be great for Jay Jaffe, new round content. Right.

Yeah, that would be nice. But Jay likes to write about other stuff too. I mean, his Hall of Fame coverage is, I think, the best out there. And, you know, he has thoughts about baseball beyond the Hall of Fame. Yes. So that part of it, I think, is probably not insurmountable practical barrier, but a practical barrier, especially because I think one thing we've learned in the last couple of years is that we really want to honor these guys while they're still alive to enjoy it. You know, so there have been so many instances in the last couple of years is that we really want to honor these guys while they're still alive to enjoy it. There have been so many instances in the last couple of years

where a guy has been up and then has passed and isn't going to be able to enjoy induction or in Dick Allen's case just hasn't even been inducted yet. So I want to make sure we're lauding people while they're still alive to enjoy it rather than just always having to write like sad obituaries. Right. Yeah.

Tricky. Yeah. I mean, personally, I'm not, I don't get very fussed over the Hall of Fame. So, yeah, I see no reason to just not change at all. Just let people into the Hall of Fame for whatever reason. It's, you know. The Matt Kemp, let them all in. Yeah.

Yeah. But, yeah, it'd be tougher because there's no statistical, there's no jaws for like, if you're a multidisciplinary inductee, you know, it's like, oh, you were half a Hall of Fame career as a player and half a Hall of Fame career as a manager or something like, just weigh it all together. How about this? How about this? Let them all in and then let the Hall of Famers decide how to rank them.

Who gets to stay or should they just rank every single player? Yeah. You sort of have like your top of the pyramid, sort of like, well, yeah, you got your Vin Scullies and your Buck O'Neils or whatever. And then as you get further and further down, you know, I don't want to pick on, you know, maybe Grady Little, something like that. Yeah, right.

You just do like that. I said I don't want to pick on anybody and then I named him. So that's terrible. I do that all the time. You could just do like a Elo rating, like runoff type thing, like Tango's done that, I think,

where it's just like you get people to vote on, is this guy better than that guy? is this guy better than that guy? Is this guy better than that guy? And hundreds and hundreds of combinations and ultimately you end up with something. But yeah, in general, I think it makes some sense. And there aren't that many. I don't know how many Hall of Famers you would add to the ranks if it's just like, oh, his playing career. would add right to the ranks if it's just like oh his playing career because like you know what if someone's like almost a hall of fame manager and then he he was like a 10 war player or something

it's like oh well if we add 10 war to like being a pretty good manager then now he's a hall of famer i don't know that that would quite work and if you're like most of a hall of famer in each thing does that mean that you're fully qualified yeah because because don't you have to have been hall of fame at one thing i guess the premise of the question is no you do not it just it does it's all cumulative but there needs to be like a similar impact it can't just be like oh you know i was like a 20 or like what was dusty like a 30 war guy or something like that? He was a good player, not a Hall of Fame player. Not a Hall of Fame player. But Dusty's kind of in that category of he's just such a character and he's been present for so much baseball history.

He knows everyone and he's integral to the fabric of the game and everything. He's part of the story. I think that's the real thing. It's like, can you tell the story? If I left this person out, would the story lose something? Right. Yeah.

37.9 war based on our version of War at Fangraphs. Yeah. And then you get into the whole, like, do we take fame? Literally debate. Right. Which I don't love that debate.

And let's have a debate about value too. Right. And the whole story, like you can tell the story in the museum without actually inducting someone. So there's that, too. So it gets a little complicated. Yeah.

All right. Last question. This is from Mitch, who says, you've been joking, I think, about the lengths of each series and whether teams had to win games consecutively, which got me thinking, what if we totally scrapped the structure of the World Series and made it so that you did have to win games consecutively? Oh, my God. My idea, the series would be of an undetermined length and just go until a team won three straight games no matter how long it took. How do you think this would impact your enjoyment of the series?

Would it affect your opinion of how deserving the champion is? What strategies do you think teams might change to account for this twist? Some things I like about this setup. You could have the team switch cities whenever a team wins and starts a new streak at one. That way every team would get wins two and three at home in front of great crowds.

You'd never have the awkwardness of a team clinching on the road in a miserable stadium. You wouldn't be able to win a series in which you're mostly outplayed except for the same starting pitcher dominating games 1-5 or 1-4-7 or whatever. It might be a better test of the better team to have to use more of the roster to pull out three straight. A best-of-nine or longer series could get boring if it's lopsided as it drags out,

but this would have high stakes for every game, even if it takes 12 to finish. You could potentially have a bunch of clinching games for both teams, which could make for several great TV events. Obviously, it's a travel and scheduling nightmare, and it would be harder to avoid NFL primetime games like the current setup mostly does. But other than that, what am I missing? Who says no? I'm just imagining, and granted, this is not the concern for most people who are engaging with the postseason, but I'm just remembering the slow descent into madness I witness on Instagram every year as my friends who are national baseball writers are on the road for a month. And then to not know when you get to go home and just be sitting there being like, let me go home. I miss my home. My home is nice and it's not here.

So that seems, and I bet players would feel the same way. Imagine poor Bryce Harper is just like, I don't know, maybe I'm getting surgery on my elbow in January. Who knows when it's going to happen. And imagine you got the Red Sox or Yankees in the World Series

and it's stretching on to mid-November, and it's in the 20s at night. Right. Right. Free agency can't start until the World Series concludes, so the off-season just happens sometime. I mean, actually, as you're saying all this, the chaos might be kind of awesome, but I think it would only be awesome to a distinct subset of fans. Yeah. I don't think we really want series to be that much longer than they are, even if you have the uncertainty of not knowing when it might end, which would be tough logistically, but would maintain some suspense. Even so, I don't know.

If it kept going and going and going, eventually it would reach a level of absurdity where it would swing back around to being fun again I guess but everyone would be exhausted by that point like it could be in the depths of winter who knows so yeah at some point the twins will

go back to the postseason and advance and then like yeah what are you going to do then? Oh, God, yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. So it's twins. Yeah.

I don't know how it would affect strategy much either because, like, what would you do to try to increase your odds of winning three consecutive games, like, at the't know that you would do anything all that differently because you're already sort of stacking your starters so that the best ones go together generally. And you use the better ones early in the series so that they could come back later in the series. So I don't know that it would affect your starting assignment so much. I guess you could just like go for broke and do like bullpen games and just, you know, wear out your relievers and hope that you could win three consecutively and that it wouldn't come back to bite you. So that's something, but I mean, I guess,

you know, if, if you could make it a little less onerous and make it a win by two, you have to win by two. Yeah. Right. But even that, I mean,

well, I guess I'd have to go and look at the numbers. How many world series have even, you know, gone to a game seven because that's otherwise you you are winning by at least two um i don't know interesting i yeah you would have for sure you would say oh it's not going to be that bad and you would for sure have that one series that just kind of alternates winners until you've gone 13 games and everyone's

sick of it yep yeah and then i'm sitting here, I have to run a top 50, man. Like, I just have to do it at some point. And these poor guys, they don't have as much time to do free agency, right? We've shown how exhausting it is when we don't know when things are supposed to happen in the baseball calendar. Why would we go back?

Yep. All right. Well, this was fun. Thank you very much, Peter. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. I have we go back? Yep. All right. Well, this was fun. Thank you very much, Peter. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. I have to ask one burning question. This is the actual reason I came on Effectively Wild. I need to know the answer to this. Okay. Yeah. The Stat Blast song. Okay. The lyrics are published. They're even on a t-shirt and various Effectively Wild merch. However, there is a secondary vocal track in the Stat Blast song, right?

It like kicks off with what, I think it's a voice at least. It sounds like, you know, something like it's or it's just, what are those words? Oh, huh. Let me listen here. I don't, let's see.

They'll take a data set sorted by something like A, R,RA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in a way that's... I think it's the stat blast. I think. I think that's it. Oh, interesting. That would make sense.

So basically the background vocal is saying it's the stat blast. Yeah, I will confirm with my wife who wrote and performed the stat blast song after we finished recording here. And I will note in the outro if that is in fact the case, but that's what it sounds like to me. That seems so obvious that I'm now embarrassed I asked. Boy, you wasted your money. You probably could have just asked. Yeah, we would have just told you. That's true.

That's true. Yeah. All right. Well, now I'll just go hide in shame. We're glad that you were a Mike Trout-level Patreon supporter. We do appreciate the support. Yes. And anyone can be like Peter and get to ask us a question like that that we would probably answer for free,

but also talk to us and enter emails. So this was fun. And Peter, you are on Twitter, right? As long as Twitter is around. I am on Twitter, but I'm not very active. I think I did tweet like three times today, but that was probably the first time I've tweeted in months. But you can find me on Twitter, PeterKBonnie. Easier to find me on LinkedIn. If that doesn't flag me as being old, I don't know what does. But yeah. And you can also find my company at vendorful.com. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you. All right. I did confirm, by the way, that the words at the beginning of the Stat Blast song

are indeed, it's the Stat Blast. How how fitting and while we did not get to our planned stat blasts today that we'll have to wait for next week i'll give you a little taste here this is a fun bit of trivia so harrison bader formerly of the cardinals currently of the yankees tweeted i definitely tied a record somewhere for playing with the most mvps in a single season judgy and goldie congrats teammates like you make me grateful and humble beyond words. And listener Lewis tweeted at me and frequent stat blast consultant Ryan Nelson at rsnelson23, I smell a stat blast. And so did Ryan, who found that Bader is of course correct.

He has tied a record and he joins an exclusive group of seven previous players who played with two MVPs in the same season. So Joe Smith in 2016 played with both NL MVP Chris Bryan and AL MVP Mike Trout. Tony Fossus in 1998 played with both NL MVP Sammy Sosa and AL MVP Juan Gonzalez. Brian Robby in 1997, he was teammates with NL MVP Larry Walker and AL MVP Ken Griffey Jr. Neil Allen in 1985, he was teammates with NL MVP Willie McGee and AL MVP Don Mattingly. And in 1969, Cesar Gutierrez and Don McMahon played with both NL MVP Willie McCovey and AL MVP Harmon Killebrew. Gutierrez and McMahon were traded for each other, allowing both of them to play with both MVPs. And then finally in 1953, Carmen Morrow played with NL

MVP Roy Campanella and AL MVP Al Rosen. So now you know. Harrison Bader, welcome to the club. And I guess Jordan Montgomery, welcome to the club as well because he was traded for Harrison Bader, so they both played for the Cardinals and Yankees. We'll have some transaction talk and trades and non-tenders to talk about

early next week. Man, Cody Bellinger, what a weird career. At the moment, no longer a Los Angeles Dodger, although they could resign him for less than the 18 million or so that he was projected to make in arbitration. From MVP to non-tender. Didn't see that coming. If the Dodgers don't bring him back, then he becomes a classic quote-unquote change of scenery candidate. The only issue there, as we've discussed before, is that the Dodgers are the team you think of for rehabilitating hitters. So we'll see if someone else gets to take a crack, potentially another NL West team. And because life comes at you fast, we could use your support on

Patreon. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. It's not just Peter Bonney, but also Marcus Cleaver, Daniel Powell, Nate Georgie, Adam Davey, and Davin Laurel. Thanks to all of you, just a couple supporters away from getting to 900 members of the Effectively Wild Patreon Discord group, which all of our Patreon supporters are entitled to join. You also get access to monthly bonus episodes. Meg and I will have another one of those coming up in the not-too-distant future.

Plus, you get discounts on merch, you get ad-free Fangrafts membership deals, you get playoff livestreams, and more. You can also message us through the Patreon site if you are a supporter, which helps bring it to our attention. But if you're not a Patreon supporter, you can still contact us via email at

podcastatfangrafts.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. As long as Twitter lasts, you can follow us there at EWPod. And one way or another, you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Have a good time. Let's go get checked into his motel room. Finish that bottle by mid-afternoon.

Hey!