Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1940: Shipping Out of Boston

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their AI chatbot counterparts, then discuss the ramifications of the Padres signing Xander Bogaerts (12:58), the significance of the Red Sox losing Bogaerts and the trend toward very long-term contracts (51:26), and a report about multiple models of the baseball being used during the 2022 season (1:19:59), plus […]

I don't have pills or the thrills to survive So say I've never lived, but I know I'm alive You always say that I'm living in my head But I will cry for you long after you're dead Get simulated, I really get me down now. Get simulated, I really get me down now. Hello and welcome to episode 1940 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. Hey, Meg. Hello. Hey, Meg. What do you think about the state of baseball today? I think it's in a really interesting place right now. There's been a lot of debate about the role of analytics and how it's changing the way the game is played. Yeah, that's definitely a hot topic. I think the use of data and advanced metrics has had a big impact on the game, both good and bad.

Definitely. On the one hand, it's allowed teams to make more informed decisions and optimize their strategies. But on the other hand, some people worry that it's taking the human element out of the game. That's a valid concern. I think it's important to strike a balance and not let the numbers completely dictate how the game is played. Agreed. At the end of the day, baseball is still a game. It should be fun to watch and play. Absolutely. I think as long as we remember that, the game will continue to thrive and evolve in exciting ways. I hope we haven't completely confused everyone.

Actually, I guess I hope we have. That was kind of the point of this exercise. The scary thing would be if no one noticed anything was amiss. The scary thing would be if no one noticed anything was amiss. What we were doing here is reading a script that we alluded to on the last episode that was generated by the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and was given a prompt by effectively wild listener Ben Miller, who typed in a conversation about baseball between Ben Lindbergh and Meg Raleigh. And the performance that we just put on was what the chatbot spat out. So did anyone notice that that was not our normal intro banter? Because if not, then we are no better than AI. I think that that one is generic enough that people were probably like, what are they doing? Yeah. I hope no one's like, oh, this suddenly got a lot more boring

after they finished reading the script. The script was great. Stick to the script. We actually, we do have a couple more here that actually are pretty good in kind of a frightening way. I don't like it. I find myself disturbed. I feel unsettled.

Yeah, because when we alluded to this last time, we were talking about the anxiety about the machines putting us out of jobs. And having seen this first script, I was not very concerned. Yeah, I wasn't worried. I think we can do better than that. Yeah. But there are some subsequent ones that some of our listeners have run here specifically related to Mike Trout hypotheticals. So these are either going to put us out of business or put our listeners out of business, or perhaps just make our jobs a lot easier if we can just read the scripts. You'll

never know now whether this is authentic Ben and Meg or whether you're getting an AI chatbot that we are just reading. But this one, this was created by our listener Triumph in the Effectively Wild Discord group. And this was actually not using ChatGPT, but OpenAI, another AI model. And the prompt this time was write an episode of Effectively Wild where Ben and Meg banter about the latest wacky Mike Trout hypothetical sent in via listener email. And for some reason, it spat out a script. Yeah. Like an actual script as if this were something you would see in a movie script. So it begins with interior Ben's house day, which is accurate so far.

I guess it's still sort of daytime where I am. But then it says Ben and Meg are sitting in Ben's living room, both holding coffee mugs. First mistake. Yeah, I would never do. Yeah, you're not a coffee guy. Yeah. And when do we ever record in my living room or in the same place? Period.

Not often enough, Ben. not often enough ben not often enough well you're welcome you're invited if you want to make the trip and hold a coffee mug in my living room but all right so so that's the the preface yeah and uh you can kick it off oh once you find it sorry i closed a tab i didn't mean to close okay so what should we talk about today on effectively wild benny Once you find it. Sorry, I closed a tab I didn't mean to close. Okay. So what should we talk about today on Effectively Wild, Benny? Already ready. I'm not going to call you Benny. I'm sorry.

It doesn't feel right. Hmm. I had a bunch of listener email come in over the past few days. And we got another really wacky Mike Trout hypothetical. Oh, wow. What is it this time? Well, it goes like this. What if Mike Trout and a giant squid were locked in a battle to the death inside a swimming

pool? Who would win? That's hilarious. Of course Trout would win. Have you ever seen a squid try to swim laps? Sorry, I laughed there. That was not in my script. Your laugh was specified.

I have gone off script, but it does say in parentheses, smiling, so I'm going to smile as I say this. No, never. We're talking about the fastest man in baseball versus a giant sea creature. Right.

It's like a relationship between a cheetah and a bear. No contest. Plus, Trout is ready for anything. He's a five-tool player, so he can handle the defensive struggles under the surface. Exactly. The tentacle strikes won't scare him. He'll be able to power his way through

it with his superior speed and agility. And you know, if he hits it out of the pool, he'll be able to run back in and get the victory. True. I guess there really isn't any other outcome. Well, I don't know. Our delivery probably leaves a little to, I mean, I don't know whether OpenAI would be pleased with our performance here. Maybe we're not doing justice to the material. Yeah, it might be able to sense the sarcasm inherent in the AI here. All right, well, maybe we can try to read this one straight. We can, you know, not try to color our pronunciations here with any subtext. This is us having a real conversation here. I'm embodying Meg. Yes, I will try to be Ben. And this is from- Not Benny? Not Benny?

No, this one I think I've just been, fortunately. So this is from listener Sir Parsifal and also from the AI. So Meg, the latest listener email we received is a doozy. It's a hypothetical about Mike Trout. Oh boy, I can't wait to hear this one. What's the hypothetical? Well, the listener asks, what if Mike Trout could time travel? Time travel? That's a new one.

What would happen? Well, the listener suggests that Trout would use his time traveling powers to go back in time and win every MVP award from 2012 to 2020. That would definitely be impressive. Trout already has three MVP awards, but if he could win seven more, he'd be the undisputed MVP king. And that's not all. The listener also suggests that Trout would use his time traveling powers to go forward in time and win MVP awards in the future. So in this hypothetical, Trout would be winning MVP awards for the next century? Exactly.

The listener suggests that Trout would be the first player in history to win 100 MVP awards. That's definitely wacky, but I have to say, if anyone could pull it off, it would be Mike Trout. Agreed. And just to make things even more wacky, the listener suggests that Trout would use his time traveling powers to go back in time and play for every team in Major League Baseball. So in this hypothetical, Trout would be the starting center fielder for the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Dodgers all at the same time? Exactly. And he would be dominating for every team. The listener suggests that Trout would lead every team to a World Series victory. That'd be insane.

But again, if anyone could do it, it would be Mike Trout. I think we can all agree that this is a wacky hypothetical. But it's fun to imagine what could happen if Mike Trout had time-traveling powers. Definitely. And it just goes to show that with Mike Trout, anything is possible. And seen. I feel like I got into a better rhythm toward the end there.

Well, look, the pressure is on the listeners at this point, I think, really. Because I don't know if the AI is coming for us or is coming for the people who replenish our mailbag. The people who send us Mike Trout hypotheticals, you are on notice now that this is the

bar and you've got to clear this or we will just default to uh answering chat gpt and open ai questions i guess if we have a slow episode who knows we might get desperate you know all the free agents have signed this week so we've still got a few months to go until opening day nice to know we could always just fall back on an ai chat bot if we get really desperate. If only we had thought of this and it had been available during the lockout, we really had to resort to it at that time. There's no way that we haven't gotten a time travel question before, though. Yeah, you'd think.

And the weird thing about this is that in this exchange, it's like we didn't even think of anything. Usually, it's like, what would happen if if this happened and then we have to right but in this case it's apparently the listener just ran through the entire hypothetical themselves in the email and we were just like well the listener said this that would be wacky yeah that would be crazy i don't really like is he in this scenario he's playing for for every team at the same time right like i do resent like some of the the like implications here like i think i would come up with slightly different questions than those you know if he's he's the starting center fielder for

the yankees the red sox and the dodgers all at the same time would they not notice is this like a hunter renfro situation except they're i still have to write that piece yeah especially now yeah their teammates but yeah i how would he dominate for every team at the same time i could see if he dominated for every team in different seasons and he's time traveling backward and forward but in the same season you'd think that people would notice that unless he's like playing for one team in that season and dominating and then he travels back again and erases the first timeline. Yeah.

It's kind of confusing to me. It's confusing, you know. But I guess that's the mark of a good time travel scenario is that it's kind of confusing. Anyway, hopefully this was a fun diversion and not too disturbing for us. I mean, look, if anything happens and the podcast ceases someday, then apparently you can just AI generate Effectively Wild forever. You don't even need us. It can just be CGI Ben and Meg. It can be like bringing back Grand Moff Tarkin, Peter Cushing, Beyond the Grave.

That was disturbing, though. It was. They've gotten better since Rogue One, and I'm sure that the chatbots will continue to get better, and that is a scary prospect. Yeah, because it ends with us having to hang out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, and plus the next step, I guess, would be to have AI-generated voice samples, too. I mean, we've got thousands of episodes out there, so they've got hours and hours of audio. They could just run us through the re-speecher process that they're just check out of the process. We can just kick back and roll around

in our Patreon money and we can just have the AI produce the podcast. And I don't know if the AI can edit and release the podcast as well, choose the music. Certainly it can just be like a end to end system and we don't even have to let anyone know that it's not us anymore. enough to let anyone know that it's not us anymore i um i was thinking the other day about how like we're in danger of deep fake stuff ben yeah you know at least from a voice perspective because the sample is just so huge at this point yeah you know there's there's um there's a lot of us out in the world i don't know maybe that Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it could backfire. Yeah. Could.

All right. Well, that was an experiment. Yeah, there you go. So we should talk a little bit about baseball. This is us, our original thoughts. This is real Ben and Meg. We're going to now have to prove that it's us. We'll have to supply some anecdote from our childhood that the AI would not know. Yeah, or take pictures of ourselves with that day's us. We'll have to supply some anecdote from our childhood that the AI would not know.

Yeah, or take pictures of ourselves with that day's paper. I mean, that could be fake too. Oh, man. I don't know. Nothing's authentic anymore. Modernity. It's not great in some respects.

It might not be great in some respects. It's great for the San Diego Padres. Oh, good transition, Ben. Yeah, that was about as good a transition as I think chatPT could manage. I think they could probably handle that. But we got to talk about the Padres because we talked a little bit about the Padres yesterday. And there's so much more Padres to discuss.

So much more Padres. About half an hour after we posted the last episode, the Padres just broke the internet, broke the baseball newswire again by signing Xander Bogarts. So just as everyone was handing home from the winter meetings, AJ Prowler was like, nope, not done. Everyone come back. So this is just huge and surprising. Less surprising, I guess, in the sense that it seems like the Padres were willing to offer almost anyone $300 million or so.

They didn't call me. No, me neither. Rude. Yeah. Short stops and reigning MVPs. Oh, sure. You have to be a good baseball player. I get it. Yeah, that is one of their conditions. Although you don't necessarily have to play a position where they don't already have four or five qualified players. So there's that. So 11 years, 11 years and $280 million for Xander Bogarts blowing away, I think, every prediction and estimate at every source. So

this seems to have sort of stunned the Red Sox, although they can't be that stunned that they lost him, given that it seems like their offers maxed out at 160 and six. top that offer. But no one was going to top 280 over 11 years. This is like getting normalized, like the longer than 10-year contract already, which, I mean, that made your mind boggle when Bryce Harper had it. And now we've had Trey Turner, and now we have Xander Bogarts. And who knows what will happen next? It's a trend that we should talk about. But with Bogarts specifically, boy, I mean, the Padres really do like debatably have four to five shortstops now who could play there every day. And arguably Bogarts could be maybe the worst of them defensively or you could make that case. I don't know exactly what Cronenworth and Machado would do over a full season. But Fernando Tatis, he breaks some bones and he gets popped for PDs. And by the time he gets back, he finds that he's been replaced not once but twice in his position.

Yeah, it is an interesting, like they certainly are going to have to do some rearranging. I mean, I think that they are, the plan has emerged in a kind of clear way and makes some amount of sense, right? Where you have Bogarts at short, you have Hassan Kim at second base now. Cronenworth will play first base and Tatis will go to the outfield and I imagine that there will be some rotation stuff that happens there and you know some spelling of each other at various spots and it is good to have that versatility but yeah it's it's like we joked or at least I specifically really joked about the Phillies building their entire team out of DHs. Right.

And the Padres seem to have gone in the direction that we might say that the Tampa Bay Rays have pioneered, where it's like, what if you built the entire team out of middle infielders, though? Yeah. Like, what if you just were like— Which is preferable. I would rather have a shortstop at every position than a DH at every position. Yeah. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah. So it obviously, it's going to make you considerably better if you sign Xander Bogarts because he's an excellent player.

I guess you could say that it's not the most efficient. And by efficient, I'm not even talking about what he's going to make per year or anything. I'm just saying if you have a certain number of dollars to spend and the Padres, for all we know, have unlimited dollars, it's not clear that there is an end to the dollars that the Padres have to spend. But if you decided that you were going to spend $200 million, then you could make the case that there might be better ways to spend it. If you were to give that money to Carlos Rodan and Brandon Nimmo, let's say, right? Or, you know, like maybe they need a starter and a center fielder who can hit really well, more so than they need, you know, the fifth redundant shortstop. Because obviously, like they're better than they were without Bogarts, but it does sort of sap the value a bit of the players that they will be moving

around, at least some of them, right? Because a big part of Ha Sung Kim's value comes from the fact that he showed himself to be a very capable shortstop. And he might be an even better second baseman. Yeah. But still, it seems like probably you're getting the most value out of him at shortstop. And then you could say the same about Cronenworth, who might be a very good first baseman, but is quite capable of playing a competent second base as well. And obviously the offensive standards are lower in the middle infield than they are at first. So, you know, he's like he could be a star second baseman. He could be a star second baseman. I don't know if he's as big a star first baseman, although I don't know that there's a better first baseman sitting out there right now. I guess it's amusing that the Red Sox ended up with the Padres old first baseman. in a number of ways, but it is a strange allocation of your position playing talent, I suppose. And, you know, look, I guess they decided that they wanted to move Tatis,

and I think it makes some sense to move Tatis. And you could either play him in left or you could play him in right because maybe he has a stronger arm than Juan Soto, and you play Soto in left. But were they still Juan Soto? Yeah. They don't have a good fifth starter, but they do have Juan Soto in left and then Grisham. Who are these? Oh, Juan Soto. Yeah. They don't have a good fifth starter, but they do have Juan Soto.

They've got so many superstars now. They just spent almost $300 million on Xander Bogarts, and he's, what, their fourth best player maybe, depending on if Tatis comes back at full strength. Like Tatis, Machado, Soto, then you probably get to Bogarts. So one of the most lucrative contracts signed this winter and ever for that matter. And he's probably like, yeah, their fourth or so best player, which is kind of ridiculous, just the top tier talent on this roster. So yeah, it's a little strange in that sense. And obviously he's not

the only shortstop they were interested in because they wanted Trey Turner too. So Judge maybe might have made more sense just from like an alignment of the talent that they already have on hand or some other starter. And I guess it's possible that they could still trade from their shortstop strength and depth now, right? And try to go get pitching that way if they wanted to. But it's like they decided we have this money to spend and there's some superstars we can spend it on and we're just not going to be too precious about whether we already have players at those positions or not. So I think that aspect of things raises some eyebrows. And I guess it just generally raises eyebrows among other

teams who are like how are they spending this much or like we don't want to spend this much stop spending so much padres you're making us look bad yeah but other than that i mean this is just pure uncut aj preller and the padres like just doing what they do just i mean they have not allowed themselves to be limited by the fact that they may already have several players at a certain position. This is not new for them that they have like just oops all infielders over there. It's like too many cooks, too many shortstops or maybe just enough. Who knows? We'll see.

But I guess they could have a really fantastic defense if they have a shortstop everywhere. There is some penalty associated with switching positions, but after you get over the hump and you figure out the different angles and you get some reps at those positions, it's certainly possible that all these guys could be elite at their new positions once they get some experience under their belts. And that would be just as good as getting pitching, I i guess if you're gobbling up every ball yeah it's certainly a way to secure outs and if you're confident that the guys who are doing doing that securing that's such a kind of alluded way of saying that who are securing those outs there you go that's more of a sentence are also providing meaningful run upgrades on the

other side of it like it's a way to win baseball games, certainly. I think that we tend to like really big punishing pitching. And it's not like the Padres don't have any of that. It's just that they don't have a ton of depth. I don't mean to insult Adrian Morihan. That's not my project here. But in terms of their depth beyond those guys, it's a little light. here but in terms of their depth beyond those guys it's a little light but you know prevent runs score runs win games i'm breaking ground here ben but i think there might be something to that

sounds like a winning formula so has been at times yeah we should just like do an episode where we just rank the times that the padres shocked everyone everyone during E.J. Prowler's tenure. There are like several distinct periods. There was the one where he just immediately after he took over, tried to create a contender out of thin air, essentially. And that led to a spree of transactions. He's like spree GM, like a spree killer. He's just a spree executive. And he will just kind of go on these trade and signing benders and just be concentrating more activity within a day or a few days or winter meetings than anyone else will. offered and ownership offered that like you would think it would take some deliberation like hey do

we want to offer this many millions of dollars to to this person and it's like oh they turned us down how about this guy who's who's left yeah you know there's probably more deliberation that went into it than that like they probably did do some analysis and some research and decide okay which players on this market are worthy of this kind of contract? And so it wasn't just like, oh, this person spurned us. Who's left standing? Okay, how about you? Do you want this pile of cash we have here? I mean, these are all excellent players.

So in that sense, you can't go wrong with any of them. They're all superstars. They all project to be great. And Bogarts, I think, projects to be very good for a very long time. Zimborski had the numbers again from Zips, and it really wasn't that far removed from the numbers that we actually got here. Now, that's because I guess he was specifying 11 years, right? And therefore, what is the appropriate amount to offer over 11 years? No one would have thought that 11 years would be the term that we would

have arrived at here. So that's the surprising part more so than the average annual value. It sounds like the Red Sox were willing to do as well or better on the AAV front as they should be if they're only talking about six years instead of 11. But it's the fact that the Padres were willing to have it that high and add on several more years, or at least a few more than people thought he was going to get. Yeah. You messaged me. You messaged me at 10.23 p.m. my time last night.

I was getting ready to go to bed, Ben, because I'm still getting over this flu. And we published like 13 things at Fangraphs yesterday. And I rest for the weary. Yeah, we had we potted. It was a full day. You know, I did a good I did a good day's work. I didn't edit all of those things by myself, to be clear. I don't want to take any shine away from John.

But like, you know, it was a busy day. We were busy. We were that Wallace and Gromit gif where he's laying track right in front of the train. And I look at my phone and I was like little padres could mean anything that's the that's the the energy that they bring to baseball right now is that it's like little padres choose your own adventure for that phrase and i gotta tell you though having said that having said it could be anything them signing xander bogarts was not among the like top 10 things i was like maybe they signed rodan maybe they signed maybe they

traded fernando tatis jr maybe they i was like i was running through my list like what could it be what could it be maybe they fired preller i didn't think that was likely but i was like i don't know like what what weird thing could have happened maybe he failed to get one of these guys and so ownership said enough of you aj be gone which again didn't seem likely but i was like oh maybe it didn't then i opened it i was like xander bogarts then i was like 11 years 11 and my voice said you know how does the ai account for that increase in register you know yeah it Yeah, right. It had laughing and it had smiling, but it needs to make the Meg makes the sound that only dogs can hear. If it ingests enough Meg audio,

then it probably would predict that you would do that at a certain point. I'm so nervous about the future. Here's how Bob Nightingale broke the news, or at least, so he didn't break the news, but he accurately tweeted about the news first. So he said the hashtag Padres strike once again. Xander Bogart signs 11-year, $208 million contract.

Okay, so far so good. One minute later, he tweets in a tweet that is still up. The Padres are now the first team in MLB history to have three players making at least $300 million, comma, all infielders. So this is one minute after he tweeted that they had signed him for $280 million. Yeah, I was going to say, Zander Bogarts isn't making $300 million is the thing, though. No, he's not. And Bob Nightingale knew that because he had tweeted it. He just tweeted it.

Not more than one minute earlier. And then he tweeted that they were the first team in MLB history to have three players making at least $300 million, comma, all infielders, which is, I think, wrong in multiple ways. Yeah. Because it's wrong. Well, it's actually wrong, I guess, in, well, I'm trying to think, is it wrong in two ways or three ways? So it's definitely- Let's count them.

It's wrong in the sense that they do not have three players who have $300 million contracts. They have but the two, just Tatis and Machado. So this was misrepresenting the contract that Bob Nightingale himself had tweeted moments earlier. But beyond that, they are not the first team. Even if Xander Bogarts had gotten a $300 million contract, they would not have been the first team in MLB history to have three players making at least $300 million because the Yankees had earned that distinction earlier in the day. Right. When they added to Garrett Cole and John Carlos then they added Aaron Judge's new contract.

Yeah. Now, I guess you could say that he was intending to mean that it's three players making at least 300 million dollars specifying that the three players are all infielders. But if you parse exactly what he said there, grammatically speaking, that is not really what he said. So I guess maybe merely two ways wrong, but it's still up there. No correction, no retraction, no deletion. That's Bob for you. You know, Heyman will delete the arson judge, but Nightingale would not necessarily delete arson judge if he were to have would not necessarily delete arson judge if

he were to have tweeted that. Anyway, so that was how some people probably found out about the news. But I'm glad that I could break this for you and give you a suspenseful moment and rouse you from your rest. It's like when CJ says that's a full lid at the end of her press conferences on the West Wing. That means she's done talking. She's done taking questions.

Business is over. But you had to reopen the lid and presumably assign this piece to someone. Well, I'll say a few things. First of all, watch a different show, Ben. I'm not saying I watched it recently. No, I'm just giving you the business, Benny. I know. Benny. Has know. Benny.

Has anyone ever called you Benny in your entire life? Like jokingly, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, Benny. Benny makes me think of the important film, The Mummy from 1995. Oh, yeah.

His buddy, Benny. Yeah. Now I watch The Mummy. It's not that old. It can't be that old. It's important. Oh, yeah. You know, his buddy, Bunny. Yeah. Now I watch The Mummy. It's not that old. It can't be that old. It's important. It's important for sure, but it's not. 95.

No. Isn't it from 95? No. All right. We're going to take a brief break. I don't think I'm that old. 99. I'm sorry.

Excuse me. That makes me feel a little bit better. 1999's The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser who we are not like reviving. We never abandoned him. Anyway. So that's not the point of this story though. Benny is in The Mummy. Well there's a character

named Benny. He meets a bad end. He kind of deserves it though. So what was I going to say Ben? I don't know. What I was going to say. welcome to our podcast is um that the ai never loses its train of thought no but now it knows about me being obsessed with the mummy and that's true that's dangerous it probably knows when the mummy came out too it's got its back straight yeah yeah what movies came out in 1995 you know which movies that i really like came out in 1995? You know, which movies that I really like came out in 1995?

Can we name them? Anyway, what I was going to say was I did have the concern that something that I had not pre-assigned would have come out about the Padres because, again, real multitude of options when you're talking about the San Diego Padres in terms of what the phrase, whoa, Padres could be. But, you know, Xander Bogarts being one of the more notable free agents on the market had already been pre-assigned to one Dan Zimborski.

I did think, hmm, it's late. Dan's probably asleep. But then I thought, hmm, Dan keeps odd hours. And sure enough, you know, I didn't see this because I went to bed. I was like, Dan has this hill file in the morning and I made sure everyone in the Slack knew that. An hour and a half later, Dan was like,

Bogarts will be in the cube when you wake up. Then at 2 a.m. my time and Dan lives in a later time zone than me, sure enough, Dan was like, it's ready. I was like, that Dan, he sure is something. So anyway, that is a little peek behind the curtain at both my understanding of when 1999's The Mummy came out and also our editorial process. It is helpful sometimes to have someone who is extremely nocturnal on your writing staff.

I've been that person myself at times. So depends on when news breaks. But anyway, yeah. So if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And you don't get Turner, you don't get Judge. Well, you get yourself Sandra Bogarts. And that's a pretty nice consolation prize there. And I actually asked Dan, where are the Padres relative to the Dodgers in the division now?

Because we talked about this before Thanksgiving when Dan ran his preliminary projections for 2023. And we noted that there was a fairly small gap between the Dodgers and the Padres. It was like four games at the time. And we remarked, I think, that this maybe was the smallest gap in some time. And in fact, since then, I mean, the Dodgers have lost some targets, right? Like Justin Verlander and Trey Turner is officially departed and they have not really added anyone since then. Clayton Kershaw was finalized, but had already been reported. And now they're just adding Jason Hayward on minor league deals, right? So they have not matched. They have not held serve.

And now that the Padres have Bogarts in the fold, they are actually ahead of the Dodgers just by a bit, just by like six-tenths of a win, rounds to one win, though the Padres actually have the projected edge in the NLS now, which obviously could and perhaps likely will change between now and opening day, depending on what the Dodgers response is, if any, and depending on how much more money the Padres and AJ Preller have to spend. But just that, I think, is significant because it feels like the Padres have been chasing the Dodgers for years now and constantly looking up at them. And we've been saying, oh, this should be a great race. And then not so much. The Dodgers just smoke everyone. But right now, according to who is currently under contract and projected to play, the Padres are at worst neck and neck in true talent if you believe the projections.

So, I mean, that doesn't mean anything. You know, the projected division title flag in December does not fly forever. But even so, that's something. I don't think it flies at all. Do you think that he was rounding up to $300 million and that's how he got? You know what my mom has taken to saying ben but i'm rounding to 40 oh no you can't say that thank you i look allow me to say nothing wrong with being 40 certainly nothing wrong with being any age right that's that's not where we're that's not the project but also it's

not like change it's not like rounding up to the next dollar to like donate to charity when you check out somewhere like you can't charge me for whole years of my life in advance that's not how age works mom yeah anyway she's already heard this rant but she's like well you're rounding to 40 and i was like i am doing no such thing i am sitting squarely in 36 thank you very much you want someone to say that about her i don't know what she runs up to these days but you know when she wants that same treatment yeah see this is the thing one of the advantages to having a baby when you're a quite young person as my mom did, is that she will always be too young, quote unquote, to have a daughter my age.

And I just keep getting older. So square that circle, you know? Yeah. My pal Zach Kram from The Ringer, he speculated that maybe Bob had this tweet holstered in advance in preparation for another signing, like when he thought that the Padres were going to get. Carlos Graff? Yeah. for another signing, like when he thought that the Padres were going to get... Oh, like Carlos Graff? Yeah, or Judge or Turner or whomever, so that maybe he just had it in the drafts and decided

to send it out there even though it was not actually accurate and then not retracted or corrected or anything. Anyway, that's one theory. The lack of deleting, I'm like, it's not like it's the Library of Congress. Like, you can just... So here's a question that this signing inspired in me that I wanted to ask you about. So you're Carlos Correa. Yeah.

You're sitting at home. I'm about to be very, very rich. Yeah, congratulations. You're sitting at home on a Wednesday night. And in an American city that is not differentiated from any other, as we have learned from your quotes, and contemplating Scott Boris's puns about you. And you see this news come across the transom, right? And what do you think? If you are Carlos Correa and you are engaging with this news for the purposes of trying to recalibrate your expectations of your own market. Do you adjust your number up? Does it remain the same? It seems unlikely to adjust down even though

another team is off the board because it's probably not one that you were really counting on in terms of signing you because again, the entire Padres team seems to be made out of short stops. like again the entire Padres team seems to be made out of short stops but like what does it what does it do for your expectations of of your own contract because on the one hand again you probably didn't expect to be signed by the Padres because they have a surplus of short stops as it is and you probably maybe already had the expectation that you would be the highest paid amongst the short stops so your your your market has probably crept up maybe relative to where it was anyway just because of the deal that Trey Turner got. But also, you know, one of the teams that likes to wild,

namely the San Diego Padres, is off the board now. And so maybe even though you didn't expect to be signed by them, maybe part of you was like, well, you know, there's AJ. You know, that AJ, he gets up to stuff. So if you were Carlos Correa, how would you feel on this Thursday at 3.20 p.m. my time? I don't know where. I don't know if he's like home in Puerto Rico.

I don't know where he is now. I don't mean in a creepy way. Wherever he is. Wherever he is, at whatever time it is, what are you thinking? I'd feel pretty good. I mean, look, things seem to be going pretty well just in general in life for Carlos Correa. He's got a nice, young, growing family. He's very accomplished in his field. He is well compensated already and is about to be extraordinarily more so. So he's got a lot going for him. And I think having seen this news, I would think cha-ching even more so than I was thinking already. Like the Dior store is not enough anymore. Whatever the next step up from the Dior store is, this is going to have to

be it because yeah, the Padres are off the boardior store is, this is going to have to be it because, yeah, the Padres are off the board now, but I didn't even know that they were on the board or at least on this board. So it would be one thing if, say, the Giants had signed the Sander Bogarts or the Twins or any of the teams that are viewed as the leading contenders for Cars Cray or most in need of his services, then you could say, well, the market is maybe upward because I am an even more desirable player perhaps than Xander Bogarts, but one of my suitors has now been removed from the courting process. But in this case, you can't even really say that. It's like the people who are interested in Kars Correa, most of them are still interested other than i guess the phillies who who landed trey turner already so yeah i would be

feeling great i mean you know that the number is going to start with a three maybe you knew that already well because you've seen bob's twitter well yeah but but now you gotta be thinking i don't like are you setting your sights on Judge? Probably not quite, but split the difference between Bogarts and Judge, right? I mean, that seems like it should be about where Carlos Correa should be. And the Giants now having had the Padres upgrade and having missed out on Judge and having all the money that is available to them why would they not be breaking the bank for him although i know that they've been linked to various other players as well so just generally like everyone has to adjust their estimates and expectations upward just based on what we've seen in this market so far but especially for for mid-tier starting pitchers and short stops yeah do you think that the giants maybe are playing like four what is our what is our agreed upon like number of dimensions to indicate beyond three like

do we have an agreed upon like meme format for that by like i guess 4d chess 4d chess people are still they're still just playing 4D chess. Do you think that there's- Prowler's playing, I don't know how many Ds Prowler is playing here. Many extra dimensions. A lot of jokes. I know. I can't make them.

Are we not doing phrasing anymore? Not professional. I knew I was walking right into that. Yeah. I just have a lot of material that's got to, you know, stay. We are both BBWA members, despite the many things that we have said on this podcast. Hey, I think that I bring a certain something to the association, you know, a spark, a joie de vivre that people appreciate generally. So, no, what I was going to say is, do you you this is like very galaxy brained of me i am playing

some kind of chess that extends into additional dimensions but like do you think that maybe i was talking about this with someone before we started recording that like and and they they broached the possibility that like maybe the giants kind of just were happy to drive up the price on Judge. Could be. Even if they were, like they wouldn't have minded signing him, to be clear. But maybe they were like, you know, sure, we'll either sign you or we'll put a team that has a big budget to sign you

at a contention for other guys who we like. Do you think that could be a thing they're not uh direct competitors no yankees in the way that some teams are but yeah sure i mean if uh if the yankees had not gotten judged then they would have had to pivot to signing some other players and perhaps the giants could have had their eye on them. So yeah, you never know. So they should certainly be looking at Correa. And if not Correa, Grant Brisby speculated, he predicted the other day that it would be Hanager. This was after Hanager signed, but Brandon Nimmo and Senga, maybe. I mean, they have a lot of options. But yeah, if you're Carlos Correa, you got to be

feeling pretty darn good at this point about your market. Much more so than last winter, which did not go Carlos Correa's way. I mean, relatively speaking. Yeah, that wasn't his fault, though. No. What if they end up signing? We have other shows to talk about, but like, what if they end up signing Carlos Correa and Rodon? Yeah.

Is the Rodon-Correa contract combined? Is that just judge? Are they just getting to judge numbers if they've already indicated a willingness to spend? It's going to have to be more than judge. Probably, yeah. At least total. I mean, yeah.

Given the other pitcher contracts we've seen, like cause Rodon, he's going to be raising his sights too. So yeah. And in fairness to Cause Renan, he's going to be raising his sights too. So yeah. And in fairness to the Padres, I mean, not that we're slamming them here. We're, if anything, congratulating them, but also somewhat puzzling over why this particular splurge. But they may be thinking beyond this season, right? Because Manny Machado has an opt-out after next season. Because Manny Machado has an opt-out after next season. And beyond that, Juan Soto is only under team control for two more seasons. He would be a free agent after 2024.

So even though they have all of these other superstars, they may not have them in perpetuity. They may not have them for most of the time that they now have Xander Bogarts and Fernando Tatis. So it is possible that they will have a vacancy in the infield next season as soon as 2024, right? As soon as 2025, they might have another superstar hole if Soto were to go elsewhere, if he's not inclined to sign an extension now any more than he was previously. So there's that, right? I mean, for now, they're just ridiculously stacked when it comes to shortstops and position players, but it also does give them some depth

and some ability to fill in should they lose one of these guys in the coming winters. Yeah, they have a big landmark decision after 2023 with respect to Machado, which even if he decides to opt out, which I don't know, if you're Manny Machado looking around at this market, you might be like, I could probably go get some more money, and that would be a reasonable thing to conclude from this market.

It doesn't preclude him from coming back because as we've seen, Preller's just like, everybody gets a big contract, and isn't that nice? Yeah. And just looking at the contracts as a whole ben clemens has reviewed his own free agent predictions which were low across the board as as were everyone's still higher than the crowdsource but yeah so he tweeted that his top 50 just looking at every single contract signed by players in the top 50 so far a total miss of 377 million on the low side. But the crowdsourced from FanCraft's readers, those estimates have been low by 508 million. And a lot of this is coming

not from the average annual value, which is maybe slightly above expectations, but mostly from the terms. There have been more years tacked onto everything. So I think Ben told me 19 of his top 50 have signed already. And I think of MLB Trade Rumors top 50, 22 of them have signed. And Zach Cram ran this analysis in his winners and losers piece for The Ringer.

But collectively, he noted they have earned 14% more guaranteed money than MLB Trade Rumors predicted. Of those 22, 17 had received more money than expected versus just four receiving less. And then Clayton Kershaw got exactly what he was predicted to make. And then 10 of the 22 have signed deals that were worth eight figures more than were predicted, but he noted that the average of the 22, they got 22.8 million per year versus an expectation of 22.7 million. But almost every elite free agent, he writes, to sign this far, along with many mid-tier options, has gained an extra year or two or three or four beyond the

predicted length. And that doesn't even account for players like Masataka Yoshida, who weren't even ranked on the top 50. So more than 2 billion already out there and half or so of the top 50 to go or a little more, although I guess many of the very tippy top free agents are already off the market at this point. So this is exciting stuff for the Padres. I saw that listener Scott Brady noted that Tatis, I hadn't considered this, but he is basically doing a speed run of Alex Rodriguez's entire career arc in a year or so. He's going from like 96 A-Rod to 2013 A-Rod in that he goes from the golden boy and then signs a massive contract, in his case, an extension. And he's got it all and the sky's the limit. And then PD stuff, right? And that sullies his

reputation so much. And now positional change is cemented, right? So he's moving off shortstop for a somewhat different reason, but not entirely. Anyway, he's going through the full A-Rod here. But he has many years ahead of him. So I hope we are years away from him being on Sunday Night Baseball and raving about bunts. But he has a lot of time ahead of him to change the narrative back to, for Nidotati, he's amazing and delightful and we love him and he's a future Hall of Famer, etc. So I hope that that does happen. But it's been an eventful year or two for him in both good ways and bad.

Anyway, really exciting stuff for the Padres. Just to paraphrase The Rock, the hierarchy of power in the NL West is about to change, I think, maybe more convincingly than it did in the DC universe with Black Adam, which seems like it might lose money at the box office, if anything. I don't know whether the Padres are making money or losing money at this point, but they're definitely putting a compelling and competing product out there. And fans are responding to it. They drew, I think, almost 3 million fans this past season. I think they were maybe fifth in attendance. And they're just sort of spitting in the eye of Manfred's comments this week about how there's this great disparity

in market size and you can't compete if you're in one of the smaller markets. And here we have the Padres in one of the smaller media markets in the country for a baseball team, although they do have it more to themselves when it comes to sports franchises than many teams in bigger media markets do. But still, here they are just blowing the Red Sox, the big bad Red Sox, out of the water. And you can't even say that the Padres needed him more than the Red Sox or that it made more sense for one of these teams to break the bank like you would have thought it would be the Red Sox, not the Padres, right? So we should just talk a little bit about the Red Sox side of this,

although I do have an AI chatbot version of the Xander Bogart's discussion here. Oh, no. Do I have to do another table read? Yeah, it's a short one, though. I'll paste it in here. Okay. Oh, gosh. Hold on.

I got to expand my window. This is from Triumph again, and I think this is an OpenAI one. And the prompt was, write an episode of Effectively Wild where the host, Ben, and Meg banter about Xander Bogart signing with the Padres. So let's see whether the chatbot did better or worse than we did. So I lead off here. All right, so Meg, did you hear the news about Xander Bogarts signing with the Padres? What are your thoughts? Well, I think it's a smart move.

Bogarts is one of the game's premier shortstops, and adding him to the Padres lineup is sure to make them an even more dangerous team. I agree. It adds to their already solid lineup of Tatis Jr., Machado, and Profar. And now with... That was a snub for Juan Soto there, but anyway.

And now with Bogarts... So Cherson Profar doesn't work for the Padres anymore. There's that too. And now with Bogarts, the Padres are fully stocked and ready for a World Series run. Absolutely.

I also think it's a great move for Bogarts. He's still in his prime and going to a team with this much talent can only mean good things for his career. Ouch. Ouch. Just dancing on the grave of Red Sox fans there. Definitely. I think they're likely to be the team to beat this season, so it'll be interesting to see how Bogarts integrates himself into the team. It'll be fun to watch. I'm excited to see what the Padres can do now that they have Bogarts. I'm excited to see what the Padres can do now that they have Bogarts. That's a wrap.

I think we did a little bit better. I mean, it was much more economical. If we did the AI model, we would have Sam's ideal length for the podcast. I think we would wrap up really quickly. But I'm not sure. It's a little bit bland, I think. I mean, other than the profile thing, no lies detected. I guess it's accurate.

Basically, what we said boiled down to, well, Xander Bogarts is a good player and the Padres are better with him now. So, you know, sort of the same take-home message there, but a little less entertaining, I think. Yeah, and no one would know about my love for 1999's The Mummy. So, you know. Yes. All right. So, you know. Yes. All right. So the Red Sox. This is not a new feeling for Red Sox fans, but a dismaying one.

That's for sure. And I don't know whether it hurts worse or less having gone through this with Mookie Betts and whether you'd think, well, surely this could not happen again or whether you were bracing for it because it had happened already. But for the Red Sox to draw the line where they did and not have it come down to, oh, he just wanted to leave. He wanted to play in the San Diego climate. No, it was just the money from all appearances and comments. Bogarts wanted to stay. If there had been any kind of competitive offer it sounds like he would have he's had an incredible career he's already one of the most accomplished shortstops in in Red Sox franchise history he's a team leader he's extremely talented he seems like he will age

well he got his shortstop defense together this past season, at least based on what we can tell from his work in a single season of defensive stats. So he's sort of like the anti-Tatis. Tatis is spectacular, but error prone, and Bogarts is unspectacular, but dependable. He can kind of hold his own there and makes you think he might not have to move as soon as you might have previously thought he'd have to move. So really, like nothing not to like. A little less power, perhaps, than he had in the past. And that may be because of the ball, but he adjusted and he was just as valuable offensively as ever and a good fit for the park. I mean, just no problems with Xander Brogaerts in Boston. He wanted to stay. The fans wanted him to stay. The Red Sox wanted

him to stay, but not enough not enough yeah not nearly enough to spend close to what it would take for that to happen yeah i think that well i want to say this i think that there is a to your point like there is a timeline there is a version of reality in which the red sox make xander bogarts a very compelling offer to stay. They make him an offer that is commensurate with what he brings to the table as a player. There's an offer that they could have made to him that would be commensurate with his value to them

as a franchise in much the same way that, as I said on our last episode, I think Aaron Judge has unique value to the Yankees because he's one of their guys right and he could still end up a padre because it's 280 million dollars for 11 years and like that's a lot you know and i think that preller seems to like operate in this world of funny money in a way that i don't think is bad but that i imagine makes countering him in negotiations challenging, even when you are putting your very best and most sort of resource intensive foot forward.

But that's not what they did here, right? I think that it's fine for us to say that that offer isn't good. Yeah. It's not a good offer right and it doesn't feel like it's i don't remember if we got specific details of their back and forth prior to the season i i i think i'm right in remembering that they made an extension offer to bogarts that he rejected and then they went into the year with this like opt-out decision looming is that right it's not a big one though it was like 90 million so four years I think and so like this is an increase on that but I think when you understand Bogart's value like it did

not seem like a it didn't seem like a particularly serious offer I find myself really confused by what the Red Sox think they're doing, right? Me too. I think we were pretty resounding in our displeasure with the bets trade. We didn't like it. I think that we thought that there is a version of that team that can still be really good and competitive. We haven't super seen that this year. Obviously, the 2021 team did make the postseason.

This one didn't. Right? Yes, I think that is correct. I had a moment where I was like, wait. It's hard to keep the year straight, but yes, that is correct. Did I misremember how the postseason went? Oh, God. Anyway, like, I just wanted to avoid it.

One day we were like, it's amazing that the Yankees gave Aaron Judge the day off and it turned out that they just didn't know how to play a game that day. And then we got like 20 emails about it. And I want to say, you were all right. And we were wrong. And it has filled me with doubt every single day since then that everything I'm going to say on the podcast is wrong. But I think I'm in the clear on this particular one.

You know, they were not one of the AL East teams that made it. Anyway, so I don't quite get what they're up to. I mean, I get like the cynical answer to that question. And I think there's some truth to the cynical answer. It's not like they've done nothing despite the jokes i was making about them you know not really getting into the full swing of things like they did commit significant payroll to yoshida they obviously signed kenley jansen they brought in chris martin they have yeah no time to enjoy those moves it's like oh we got yoshida let's

celebrate oh hours later yeah right and so it's like you know I think that despite us saying that the the Padres are now a team entirely made of shortstops like you might look at Xander Bogarts and be like this guy is likely to move off the position soon and then it's like he doesn't have the arm for third so like where does he end up but you know he is such a great hitter like the the bat is pretty sterling and i think gives him you know even if you look at the zips projection and and take a more skeptical view of his defense long term or look at his defensive metrics this year which were really good you know and say that is a single season sort of aberration like he is likely to be a good player for a long time, even as he starts to move off of shortstop

whenever that ends up happening. And so it's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Do you want to win a World Series? Do you want to compete in the postseason? It's not that they're not spending. The places that they're spending are weird, right? You would imagine a guy coming from Tampa would not want to invest a lot in the bullpen, and then they're spending money on the bullpen,

and they're bringing in Jansen, and that seemed like a kind of rich deal. So I just, I don't get it. I don't get it. And I think that if you are asking your fan base to stomach moves that feel so bad, it should be easier to get it. You know? Yeah, right. Like, make it make sense. So I don't get it. And I don't like it. And I would like to.

And I don't. So I don't know, man. Like, it's weird. And I would like to, and I don't. So I don't know, man. Like, it's weird. And I don't know where the buck stops and the fault lies, but you've got to assume it's ownership, right? I don't know. The account in the Boston Globe by Julian McWilliams, who was on the scene when Chaim Blum found out about this.

And let us all send up a prayer to whatever entity you believe in, that in one of your like most upsetting professional moments that there isn't literally a media member right there like good gravy like on your flight pack from the yeah just uh any comment on this uh devastating news for your franchise yeah so it sounds like he was really just shocked and stunned by this. I mean, he couldn't have thought really that Bogarts would accept that offer. So it's not that stunning that he didn't really. Maybe he was stunned that that was all he was allowed to offer. I don't know. been one departure after another, right? Like he takes over this team where Mookie's still there and Bogart's and Benintendi and all the Bs are gone now. And I know that obviously like Dombrowski left that franchise with a championship and also with some players on fairly lucrative contracts who were no longer as productive as they had been before they signed them. So there were some challenges there, but traded just these franchise cornerstones and

hasn't necessarily gotten franchise cornerstones back. It's too soon to say, but no one who has established themselves as one immediately. And then you have Raphael Devers, right? Who now everyone's wondering, is he going to be the next to go? Right. Or will they actually spend the money that they did not spend on these other guys, on Devers? And would he even want to stay now? Now that his former teammates, the guys he came up with and looked up to, are gone. Can he have confidence that this is a franchise where he would want to stay, even if they would pony up for him? Right. And obviously, like, the Red Sox, they're not the A's or anything like they've spent a good deal of money over the last several years.

Like they've generally been among the highest spending. And, yeah, they just handed out the biggest contract ever for an NPB position player. And they're spending. But right now, I think in projected payroll, they're down at 12th and they are under the luxury tax thresholds right now. They have been over it in the past. And so you just wonder because like they're part of this Fenway sports group that owns multiple teams and the Penguins and Liverpool and they're maybe putting Liverpool up for sale. And it's just it's not clear like they have no less net worth than the Padres do. Like, you know, John Henry is no less rich than Peter Seidler and maybe more. So it's just it's confusing. It's like they're acting like you would have expected the Padres to act or like they hire the Rays executive. Or like they hire the Rays executive and it's like the Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman and then they were like, hey, keep doing the stuff you were doing there.

But also you get to go get all these superstars. Yeah. And it's like the Red Sox were like, no, we'll go get the Rays executive and then kind of make him still behave as if he's with the Rays in some way. I mean, it's not that they're spending as little as the Rays are, obviously, but in the sense that the Rays will trade great franchise players in many cases. There's a mentality there. Yeah, that's kind of what the Red Sox have been doing when it seems like they should be in the class of team that is willing to match anyone's offer for that kind of player. And they just haven't. And, you know, they have Trevor Story, right?

And no one's confident that he can play shortstop anymore because of his arm. And prior to that, he was a capable shortstop before he moved to second. So it's not like they don't have any options, but just you hate to see someone like that leave a team like that when he wants to stay and everyone seemingly wants him to stay.

It's like, why are you acting as if your hands are tied here so i don't get it yeah and i i look like you know i think that our our philosophy on this stuff tends to be like i talk a lot about how teams should spend i don't mean that they should just spend on any player and that every contract makes good sense right like you can you can give big deals to players who aren't very good, right? One of those guys plays for the Boston Red Sox now, right? Sure, yeah. So there is recent precedent for that. And I think that when you look at a team like,

say, the Dodgers, they are a team that manages their payroll in a really active way is mindful of the luxury tax will at times dip below the tax in order to reset penalties to then make a big splash later. And to my mind, that's the right approach to this stuff. To say you have to spend doesn't mean that you're always spending in every single year that you're not mindful of those things, that you're not constrained by budget at some point. But I think you need to understand when to push your chips in, either because you're in the midst of a competitive window that you should take advantage of so you can win a World Series, or because you have really important talent that is either coming loose in free agency like Bogarts is is or is approaching free agency and is worthy of extension you know red sox have already had already extended bogarts once right like there's

there was clearly value seen there and so you can be strategic and thoughtful about this stuff but like you should be strategic and thoughtful with the purpose of extending your competitive window, of taking advantage of competitive windows when they exist, of retaining really talented players who don't just grow on trees. Those guys are hard to find. It turns out there aren't a lot of Mookie Bettses in the world in much the same way that there aren't a lot of Xander Bogartses in the world. And if we look back at what the Dodgers did, like, I wish that the, you know, part of what they had done when they dipped below the luxury tax and

then decided to blow through it, like hadn't been signing Trevor Bauer, right? There are other ways that contracts can be bad apart from just the money involved. But, you know, I think managing it dynamically with the mind of not just like, how can we be hyper-efficient, but how can we be hyper-competitive is where you want teams to go. And a team like the Red Sox should look at their resources and say, we have margin to go over a little bit, maybe not 280 million for 11 years, but not in every individual year, to be clear. I'm not doing the tweet. I'm just saying. But to say these are expenditures that are worth it for us in terms of where we want to be competitively. And to be in a position like Boston is with the resources at their disposal and not look at that as an opportunity within a hyper-competitive division, but as a burden that needs to be pared down

is really disappointing, you know, because they have the money and you can spend big money in smart ways. And I imagine that they're capable of that. They have a lot of smart people working for the team, including their general manager. So to see them punt on it is just disappointing. And it's like, I'm sympathetic to the shock,

like because $280 million over 11 years is shocking. But I also kind of want to be like, I'm like, what do you think they brought you in here to do? Like, you're the guy that does this. So like you had to know that $160 million was not going to get it done, particularly in this was going on in his head. But yeah, this is a tough thing, like for him to step into that job. And obviously he wasn't like day one on the job. I want to trade Mookie Betts, you know, like that was clearly just a mandate that was delivered to him, right?

And it was his job to do the best that he could, but he had to be the one to wear that to some degree. And so I doubt that he took this job thinking like i'll be the guy who just dismantles this incredibly successful world series team the best in franchise history and trades away all these beloved players he knew he was gonna be doing it probably yeah he must have had some idea about some of it at least yeah i don't imagine that he went through the interview process they hired him and then day one they were like hey by the way we forgot to mention something yeah you know like you want to talk to a potential gm candidate about their their philosophy around this stuff and their

willingness to do things like that i don't i don't imagine he went in without you know his eyes wide open to the to the fact that he was going to be trading mookie bets oh yeah that definitely but everything that's happened after, I don't know. Anyway, at some point during that exchange, I think you said that Bogarts don't grow on trees, something to that effect. Yeah. And I hate to break this to you, but the AI also said that. No! In this exchange that Sir Parsifal plugged in a prompt where we banter about what it would take for the Red Sox

to re-sign Bogarts and AI Ben actually not AI Meg said and it's not like they can just replace him easily short stops like Bogarts don't grow on trees why are we why aren't we more worried about this you know

I don't want to overreact instantly outlaw this maybe before it gets out of hand i don't want to be one of those people who's like doing the 2020 equivalent of being like the novel's gonna ruin the world i've already made that version of me sound like jimmy stewart a little bit but yeah like we should be a little more concerned about this i don't know man it seems like we're underreacting a little bit. Anyway, AI Ben sounds pretty confident that the Red Sox are going to bounce back from this. He said, it's never easy to lose a player like Bogarts, but the Red Sox are a resilient team. I'm sure they'll find a way to move on and continue to be successful.

Real flesh and blood, Ben, is not quite as sanguine about the Red Sox prospects, at least in the short term. But it's as Scott Boris said, right, the Red Sox without X or so-so. I've gotten, I can't remember if I said this yesterday, I've gotten to the point in my recovery from the flu where I am able to focus more on my active disappointment that I couldn't go to San Diego. And a lot of that has to do with seeing people who I haven't seen in a while and feeling sad that I didn't get to catch up with my friends and also just thinking still about that Branzino every day. But I was really looking forward to giving you a live report, Ben, from the scene of Boris's...

Yeah, we've done that before. But I could have really been there. You know, I had a plan and the best laid plans of mice and men. I bet the AI says that sometimes too. Yeah, probably. The good or bad news is that the AI seems to struggle coming up with Scott Boris-isms.

So it's not great really at nailing the puns. So puns are like our, yeah. That's the last refuge of humanity. Yeah. That's the way forward. Yeah. Okay. That makes me feel a little bit better about it.

Right. It's Zion in the Matrix is puns for us, basically. Oh, now we're back to orgies. Yeah. I guess so. All right. Well, the last thing I'll say about this is just that, yeah, the 11 years is wild. And this seems to be a trend. Like they're just teams that are just tacking on tons of years here. And we've seen this in other sports. It has happened in the NHL. It happens in the NFL, like salary cap sports. I guess they call them void years in the NFL or voidable, where you can just kind of tack on years and get around things. And in the NHL, they did the same thing until eventually they took it too far. And it was the New Jersey Devils, I believe, who kind of spoiled the party by having a contract that they offered to I 17-year, $102 million deal. But I think the terms were it was likely rejected by the commissioner, by the league, because the All-Star was slated to earn only $550,000 in each of the last five seasons of the contract.

the contract. So the contract would have run through when he was 44 and he was supposed to earn 98 and a half million in the first 11 years and then 550,000 in each of the last five years when he obviously would not be playing. And this was just to spread out the money and just reduce the average baseline. And this was rejected as just taking it too far, right? Like other teams had gotten away with lesser versions of this, but this was just so obvious that they struck it down. And it's kind of happening in MLB right now, not nearly to the same extent. Like Dan was joking on the episode the other day that he would just, you know, try like a 30 or 40 year contract and just see what happens. And I was saying, well, I don't think that would work. I think probably Rob would step in at that point. And we're not at that point with what's happening here, especially because they're not front-loading it like that. I mean, even though Bogart's got the 11-year deal, he's still going to be making a lot at the end of it. Right. trends that you would think would be a competing trend is that teams are not spending as much on old players and have become more cognizant of the aging curve. And so Jason Stark has a piece at The Athletic where he talked to some executives about like, what is happening here? How is all of this money going to old players? And some executives are throwing up their hands. Here's

one quote. It's insanity, grumbled an executive of one analytically inclined team. It's irrational people. Was it the Red Sox? Yeah, I don't know. It's irrational people operating in an illogical market. Yeah. Which, look, I mean, you know, if you're going by dollars per war and you're one of the teams that essentially is grading yourself on that kind of curve, then I see why you would think that. And there are some teams that don't play in this end of the pool and are probably feeling a little miffed and left out and wishing that they could twist their ownership's arm into being Peter Seidler and handing out

contracts like this. And they're probably thinking there's just like a run on shortstops right now, and it's a run on starting pitchers and everyone, it's just like the dust will settle and they'll think, what did we do? 11 years? How many years? So yeah, maybe there is a little bit of that happening here. But also if you're going to get one of these guys at the top of the market, it seems like this is what you've got to do at this point. And even though there are some executives who are kind of casting aspersions on this, one says, you know, an executive of a middle market team, we're not operating in a vacuum. So when you're sitting on the sidelines and watching deals go down, you have this fear that you're going to miss out on all the premium players. And that's a hard feeling to cope with. And so they're suggesting that this is causing everyone else to jump in and bid up.

But then another exec, I think the same one, says, we talk about this all the time. Are we hunting good deals or are we hunting good players? Right. The whole idea is to hunt good players. There's a cost to that. And we don't always get to control that cost. Right. So that seems to be what's happening now.

But really, it's just like Jason's speculating in this piece. But really, it's just like Jason's speculating in this piece. Well, maybe it's performance departments and conditioning and what we knew about nutrition and all of these things that are helping us keep older players productive longer. And so they're actually betting on these guys still being good at the end of these deals. But I don't really think that is what's happening here. I think, if anything. Or at least not primarily. Yeah. Of course, you hope that that will be the case, right? And

you'll do whatever you can to ensure that it is the case. But I don't think anyone who's signing these deals is thinking, yeah, this guy's still going to be a star when he's 40, right? And there's one other executive who is quoted here. This is all anonymous, of course, but Stark put that question and that hypothesis to them. Like, is everyone just confident that they can keep these players productive longer? And they said, it's a great question, but I'm not aware of any research that's changed with respect to what players project to be in their late 30s. We are more aware of nutrition. We are more aware of recovery. We are more aware of so many things that we can do to help players age more slowly

or more gracefully. But 38 is still 38 and 40 is still 40. And I don't think we've found a way for skills not to decline. We can slow the decline, but I don't think we've found a way to stop the decline. And if anything, it seems like in recent years, the aging curves have been harsher on position players, you know, maybe because players are getting such good instruction early on that they come up and are productive at early ages. And then it's tough for older guys to hang on. Or some people speculate maybe it's velocity and it's hard to keep up with the

ever escalating velocity. So I think it's just trying to find a way to get around the competitive balance tax threshold, basically. And it's funny, I was talking to Ben Clemens about who would step in to stop this, if anyone. And I don't think it's gotten to the point where it needs to be stopped. Like if Rob Manfred stepped in and said, 11 years, this is, we must reject and nullify this contract. Like, I don't think there are any grounds for doing that. He's still going to be making lots of money at the end of that deal. But in general, it would be for the commissioner's office to step in and do that. And that's what happened in the NHL. But as Ben said, and I was saying to Ben, it's funny in a way because it's like the owners are

looking for a way around a provision of the CBA that they themselves insisted on. It was their top priority in bargaining. We can't lift the CBT we can't give any ground here and they you know succeeded to some extent the players didn't get everything they wanted there and so now that there is a cbt that like teams are like oh well but we don't want to incur these penalties here so hey what's going on here yeah so it's uh like they're the ones who impose the CBT and now, you know, players would prefer for the thresholds to be raised. But I guess it's not for the owners as a whole to have the cbt have some teeth so that you know the league as a whole can keep costs down each individual actor is then incentivized to find a way around that right despite cooperating on

suppressing costs kind of being in the best interest of the owners as a whole, you're still going to get just each individual. If you have Steve Cohen, who's like, well, I got a lot of money and I want to spend it, or Peter Seidler or whoever, then they're going to break ranks when it comes to actually signing people. And that's when you need the commissioner to step in, or at least the owners might want the commissioner to step in and sort of enforce the austerity rules, which might benefit them in the aggregate, but not in certain specific cases. So it's kind of an interesting case study, I suppose. Economists would have a field day with this. Well, and especially if we had better clarity. I mean, I know we got some of it in the course of the lockout and the CBA stuff, but it's like, you know, I think there are a lot of places where ownership is universally aligned across the 30 teams, but we know for a fact that there are different

constituencies within the ownership group, right? And that there are teams that have been much more keen to impose limits as a way of maybe preserving their own competitive position within the industry and other teams that, you know, and not just the Mets that have been interested in having slightly higher or even much higher limits so that they can sort of throw their weight around in a place where they view themselves rightly as having a competitive advantage relative to their peers. So it would be a really fascinating, you know, if we could get real transparency into all of those sort of machinations, it would be really, really interesting.

And I wonder if there are owners who are, you know, looking around at the landscape now and going, oh, right, you guys were willing to go higher on those CBT thresholds or whatever it is, you know? Yeah. And I would imagine that part of the dread, especially for teams that are committed to being cost constrained, isn't even so much like, oh, we're missing out on Carlos Correa, right? It's the knock-on effects further down the market where we are seeing sort of the Taiwan

walkers of the world get four years and $72 million. And it's like, oh, I thought we were going to be able to be sort of in the market for some of these mid-tier guys. But, you know, the entire market is shifting upward. And now we're seeing ourselves playing in a very different pool where it's like we have to get really excited about Kyle Gibson. Great. Yeah. All right. Can I give you the Cliff Notes version of my thoughts on the ball stuff? Sure. It was big news. It would have been bigger news in any other week, I think you the Cliff Notes version of my thoughts on the ball stuff? Sure. It was big news. It would have been bigger news in any other week, I think, the fact that the insider report

from Bradford William Davis and Dr. Meredith Wills dropped this week amid the madness of the winter meetings that may have stolen some of the spotlight from it. But it still got a good share of the spotlight because it's a pretty sensational report here. And just some general observations. So for anyone who didn't read it, it's all free. It's available for anyone to read. It's not paywalled. We will link to it on the show page.

And we have had both Meredith and Bradford on the show multiple times in the past. We had them on together a year ago to talk about their previous article, which was about the ball and the fact that multiple models of the baseball were in use in 2021, which was very valuable research that they did because they brought to light something that MLB had not publicly acknowledged and arguably had not even privately acknowledged, right? The fact that two different versions of the baseball were in use in the 2021 season, a deader ball and a more juiced ball. And it was their reporting that got MLB to admit this and acknowledge it publicly. And we claimed that it

had informed teams or the Players Association, but they were all like, huh? When did that happen? So no one seemed to know about this. And Rob Manfred claimed that it was because of supply chain issues and production delays and COVID and everything, which had stymied their plans to switch over to a new model of the ball. And so they had been forced to use leftover balls. And that sounds reasonable, although it seemed to kind of contradict some of Meredith's research that suggested that multiple models of the ball were manufactured in 2021, that it wasn't just leftover. So their story still wasn't in perfect accord with what Meredith's story was. But anyway, the upshot was that that was something of a scandal, that there were multiple balls being

used and they were supposedly randomly distributed. And so you just never knew. And so the perception that some fans and players had that one day the ball would be carrying and the next day it would not seemed to have some basis in fact that they had not come out and announced this. And it took meticulous research and writing and reporting by those two to bring that to light.

And so this is sort of the sequel to that piece. And as with any sequel, it gets even bigger, right? So instead of two balls, now it's three balls this time. So this time they have collected even— I'm trying so hard not to laugh about balls. I know. Thank you. I'm really setting you up here. Yeah, you really are. It's unavoidable when we talk about balls, which we do a lot these days in many ways.

But this report, so this was based on a little more than 200 balls. Here we go again. That were sourced in various ways from some sources, perhaps with teams. They're not disclosing, of course, exactly who sent them the balls, but they got some maybe straight from the source and some they purchased and some they got from fans who caught balls, et cetera. So they got just a little over 200. And according to their analysis, and Meredith, of course, unwinds the balls and disassembles them. And you can go back and listen to when we had them on if you want to hear about that whole process. That was episode 1781, the last time we talked to them.

And then she weighs the cores. And so this time she has determined that there are, in fact, three models of ball that were in play during the 2022 season. That there was the juiced ball still that was left over from 2021 and then the deader ball that was announced and put into production for 2022. And then also she has identified, she says, a third group of balls, a Goldilocks group, as they have called it, that's somewhere in the middle, not dead, not juiced, but supposedly perhaps a happy medium. And so there's a lot here that if this report is accurate, I mean, if everything in here, if you took the worst possible interpretation for MLB of everything

here, it should be a huge story and a huge scandal and heads should roll and Rob Manfred should resign, right? Because it's not just that, that three balls, the suggestion is, were in use during the 2022 season, but it's MLB strenuously denying that that's the case, right? And having Rawlings strenuously deny it as well. And then there are also suggestions in here that MLB, who was planning to send some baseballs to Meredith and then was instructed not to. And Bradford reviewed the text from the MLBPA person who supposedly was texting Slater and saying that the league executive had said, don't send balls to Wills. We don't want a third party reviewing these things. And if anyone does give them balls, say a team employee, a clubhouse attendant, someone who's not unionized, they could be fired for that. So there's that. And then finally, the other sensational part of this is that the Goldilocks balls, right?

The only times that they detected that the Goldilocks balls were in play were essentially special times and Yankees regular season games. So jewel events like the All-Star Game, the Home Run Derby, the postseason, and I should say that about half of the balls that they sourced were from the postseason and the World Series. And then there were some commemorative balls like the 50th anniversary of the Rangers, right? And they had sort of special surfaces. like the 50th anniversary of the Rangers, right?

And they had sort of special surfaces. But the only ones that were not at those special events and didn't have the commemorative surfaces were at Yankees regular season games, which I talked to Bradford and most of them were from Yankee Stadium games. Some were from a Reds game, I believe, when the Yankees were the visiting team. And some of these were in-game.

Some of them were batting practice balls. But when the Yankees were the visiting team. And some of these were in-game, some of them were batting practice balls. But when the Yankees were taking BP, of course, there's no way to know that Judge hit any of these balls or that no one else was hitting them or that he was the only one hitting them. So that is obviously something that people perked up about because Aaron Judge was having his historic home run race in the second half of the season when these supposed Goldilocks balls were showing up in Yankees games. And so everyone connected the dots and thought conspiracy and the league was juicing the ball for Aaron Judge, right? So if any of those things are true or multiple of those things are true or all of those things are true, then that should basically blow up the league office and everyone should step down and resign in disgrace if that came out. So that's the question, I guess, is whether this is all being open or transparent or truthful about any of these things, which is what opens it up to reports like this. But the actual specifics, you know, about there being three balls and I should say that of the just over 200 that they had in their sample, only six were of the old, more juiced variety.

And if that had been the sum of what they found, then you could say, oh, well, it could have been a mistake. Maybe someone had a leftover box lying around and they put them into play by mistake. Or if it's only six, who knows? Maybe it's like outliers within the normal range or something, and that wouldn't be such a huge deal. So the Goldilocks thing, the suggestion that there's a third ball that this was a change in manufacturing and that they sort of, you know, decided maybe that, oh, this one's too juiced and that one's, oh, we went too far with the deadening and now we've got to come up with a compromise here. That and the Aaron Judge link, like all of this, you know, people have read it and taken evidently perhaps allegedly threatening to fire people who give balls to Meredith.

But also, like, it's just it's hard to source these things and it's time consuming and costly to do these analyses. So the sample size is always going to be a concern. Yeah. But also, it's really hard to get a bigger sample. and MLB makes it pretty impossible to get a bigger sample. Yes. So then I guess the question becomes, well, do you throw your hands up and say, well, we can't come to an answer here and we just can't really draw any conclusions? Or do you try to draw conclusions from what you have on hand, even if it's not as big a sample as you would want it to be? Right. I feel like this report raises a lot of questions that are certainly worthy of additional exploration.

And I find it frustrating that a lot of the avenues for that additional exploration seem to be preemptively closed by the league's own sort of resistance. So there's that piece of it. And I think that there are a couple of things that are just obviously on their face not great here, like threatening players or other league employees, team employees for assisting in that research seems bad and also likely to inspire people to think sort of conspiratorially about why they might be resisting that research. And I think that we've talked a lot about how the way that the league generally in the commissioner in particular have talked about the changing nature of the ball and how that interacts with the offensive environment in baseball leaves a lot to be desired in terms of its transparency, even in instances like the ones that we've seen recently,

where teams were notified in advance about how the specifications of the ball were going to change and what the league thought that was going to mean in terms of how it performed. That was communicated to the teams and then leaked to the public, right? That wasn't a direct communication to fans about like, you know, here's what we want. Here's what we want baseball to look like in terms of how offense and pitching sort of balance against one another. And here's how we are looking at the ball to do that. And I think that if, if the commissioner were to come forward and say, look, the ball has been variable in its composition and performance in a way that is both expected for a handmade product and also frustrating in terms of us wanting to have

a consistent offensive environment throughout the league in a way that we're not happy about. And we purchased Rawlings in the hope that we could change that. It hasn't happened to the degree or with the sort of speed and regularity that we hoped. It's an ongoing project for us. We understand how that's frustrating. Here's what we want it to look like. Here's what we're trying to do to make that happen. I think that would go a

long way to assuaging people's concerns. I don't know that, like when I read this, I did not come away thinking that there was a smoking gun with what I think we are meant to assume is the most sort of salacious accusation, which is that there was some sort of thumb being put on the scale, specifically in Aaron Judge's favor this year. And I guess, to be fair, I don't know that they're making that accusation in the article. Obviously, everyone who's read it has come to that conclusion. Sure. They're saying that, hey, we only found these Goldilocks balls in Yankees games, right? Or at least, you know, the only like regular season games that weren't some sort of special event where we found them. That was Yankees games. And just so happens that Aaron Judge was having a historic home run race. And so, you know, they didn't outright allege, I suppose, in print that MLB was cooking the books for Aaron Judge. But they waved at it.

Yeah, sure. Right. That's the conclusion that, you know, it's hinted. It's implied. It's suggested. It's, you know, come to your own conclusions. But this is suspicious. Right. This is a conclusion that one could reach. And I think that, you know, I appreciate that there's like, it must be very frustrating because and I find myself frustrated that like, it would be really nice to know this stuff with greater transparency. And it really stinks that the league is sort of limiting and stymieing that research. And it's not an unusual posture for Major League Baseball to take in terms of some of the questions that we would like answers to that we can't get the data we need to answer, right?

So it's not like I read this and I'm like, there's nothing here. I mean, I will say it's like 200 baseballs isn't a lot of baseballs. You know, there are games where they use 150 balls. So like individual games. And so I think that what this suggests to me is that we will not get sort of satisfactory

answers, certainly not be able to forecast with the precision we would want to how the offensive environment is going to be influenced by the ball until we get a lot more information from Major League Baseball. And it doesn't seem like that information is forthcoming. And it certainly doesn't, you know, do them any favors if they're threatening people who are trying to aid that research. In terms of Judge specifically, my understanding from the research that came out when the ball was the juiciest,

when it was the juiciest ball, was that the hitters who were aided the most significantly by the juiced ball in terms of their home run totals tended not to be hitters like Judge, right? That it tended to be sort of the no power, sort of mid power guys, right? Who were making leaps from two home runs to 10 or from 10 to 20 or from 20 to 30. It wasn't guys like Judge who were leading stat cast leaderboards. And when you look at the 2022 stat cast leaderboards and you are looking at barrels per plate appearance percentage, it's Aaron Judge.

He's number one. And then you have Alvarez, and then you have Trout, and then you have Schwarber, and then you have Stanton, and then you have Otani, right? Guys like this, it's not that there weren't any home runs that they hit in a juicy ball year that were aided by the juicy ball. It's just that they weren't the biggest beneficiaries of it. It's like Aaron Judge, he hit some wall scrapers. He hit some wall scrapers at Yankee Stadium last year, but he's also capable of planting a baseball like 20 rows deep in a ballpark that has a lot more

pitcher friendly dimensions than Yankee Stadium does. So I think, you know, balancing all of that stuff together is tricky, because I don't want to grant baseball, Major League Baseball, the benefit of the doubt in an area where they have proven themselves to be, you know, unwilling to be transparent is the generous way of describing the way that they have postured around this stuff in the last couple of years. And we certainly have seen instances in Major League Baseball at the team level,

at the individual level over the last couple of years where guys will cheat and they will cheat sometimes for a while before Major League Baseball does anything. And I'm not saying that this piece even hints at Judge having anything to do with this. That's not what I'm saying. But we've seen that there are bad actors in baseball, right? That exists, and we're not new to that concept. And I need to see more, I think, than this to feel confident that what happened here wasn't simply a combination of some incompetence

on the part of someone somewhere putting a batch of balls in play that maybe they shouldn't have and the continuing effects of supply chain issues and that interacting with Rob Manfred's unwillingness to give a normal freaking answer on any of this stuff like i find that nexus of of things more likely to me than like someone including rob manfred sitting there saying like well send the special balls to yankee stadium so that aaron judge can hit a bunch of home runs like that doesn't seem as likely to me and you're right to say that that is not like a specific allegation that is alleged here but like we are i think meant to come away wondering if that is not like a specific allegation that is alleged here. But like we are, I think, meant to come away wondering if that is something that's in play. And I think it's fine for us to wonder that.

I don't think that this proves that that's what happened. Right. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely would need to see more. And as they acknowledge in the piece, I think they didn't get balls from every park, right? Right. There were 22 of them, I think.

And this was nine so-called Goldilocks balls, I think, that they found in Yankees regular season. It's just it's not a lot. So even if the ones that they found were in Yankees games, they don't know that they weren't in other games. Right. And, you know, like someone asked Bradford on Twitter, what about Pujols? Right. And he said, well, we didn't have any balls from Bush, so we don't know. Right. And so it's really hard to say. And yeah, you're right. Even if someone like Judge wouldn't be the biggest beneficiary of a more juiced ball, at some point he's going to have a fence scraper that just goes over. So, you know, if it's 62 versus 61, then that's still right. Meaningful difference in this particular year, right? Yes, of course. Right.

And it would sort of stink if something like this did come out because one of the nice things about the judge story made it so impressive was that he didn't really have anything going for him. As far as we knew, it wasn't the PD era. It wasn't the juiciest ball. He didn't have advantages that some other home run record setters set in terms of the offensive context or even the ballpark and other things like that. Apart from the natural advantage of being chiseled out of granite seemingly. Yeah, right. Other than being a literal giant. So it would sort of stick to find out, if we did find out that MLB was trying to put its thumb on the scale here, then that would be disappointing. And I'm not saying that I would want that story

buried or something because it would stink. Like I would obviously want that story to come out if it were the case. But yeah, I'm far from being convinced that that's the case. But I'm not even fully convinced by the Goldilocks ball hypothesis, frankly, because it's 31 balls that they had with weights that they've identified as Goldilocks balls. And really, the differences in weight are very small, because we're not even talking about dead versus juiced. We're talking about dead versus somewhere in the middle. And if you look at the graphics in the piece, there's a lot of overlap between the dead balls and the Goldilocks balls. Right. And so how do you know for absolutely certain that it's not just normal variation with a hand-stitched ball?

We're talking about a gram of difference on average between what they labeled dead balls and what they labeled Goldilocks balls. And a difference in weight, by the way, is not necessarily enough to tell whether the ball would carry better or worse. Other factors affect that much more, like the circumference, like the coefficient of restitution, like maybe the seam height and how that affects drag. And they found that the circumference of the different groups was the same. So they're sort of inferring that probably the core, the coefficient of restitution was different with the Goldilocks balls in a way that would cause it to be hit harder. But we don't know that for sure. And it wouldn't be a big difference if it were true.

It would be nice if there wasn't so much natural variation. But there is with the current process, you know, which is something that they could maybe do something about or find some sort of alternative because all of these balls were well within normal ranges. It's just that the normal ranges allow for fairly large legal fluctuations. So just given the samples there, I was a little skeptical just based on what was presented in the article. Now, I've talked to both Bradford and Meredith just because I had some questions and wanted to clarify some things. There were some things that weren't entirely clear to me as presented initially. And

they've both been totally gracious and willing to answer and eager to answer any questions and feedback and everything. Yeah. No, which is great, which, you know, you would like to get that kind of openness from MLB, right? Yeah. You don't really. And so they've both responded and, you know, satisfied some concerns. And Meredith is, you know, satisfied some concerns. And Meredith is, you know, very adamant and convinced because, of course, like she's looking not just at the weights, but at the batch code. So she can tell when the balls were produced. And so she can tell, like, if a certain batch that had a lower or higher weight all came from the same time, then maybe that's more suspicious, right, than if it were just a giant pool and you couldn't differentiate when they came from. So I don't have the access to all the data that they don't have. I'm not disputing or refuting anything. I don't have the information to be able

to do that. I'm just saying that based on the fairly small fluctuations here and the samples involved, I was not fully persuaded reading the piece that there were definitely three balls like regularly in play. And so, you know, definitely not convinced about the judge thing either, but also like not being Pollyannish about MLB and its capacity to do things. So I'm glad that people are trying to do the research the best that they can. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in here. There's some stuff that I'm still kind of in the need to see more camp, definitely, when it comes to conclusions.

And, you know, they may release more data or satisfy other things that I was thinking were kind of dubious, perhaps. But Meredith is more expert than me in many aspects of this stuff. And obviously her work was borne out last year. And presumably she's using the same care and the same methods here. So it certainly carries some weight if she is confident in this and stakes her reputation on this. And Bradford and his reporting effort that goes into producing these things. And I'm glad someone is trying to keep tabs on all this, even if we can't do it perfectly. And the ideal solution would be for MLB to just open up everything and make it completely transparent. And look, they do send balls out to a couple of partner facilities and the people who run those facilities and do those tests, one of whom I've talked to in the past and think is generally good, they speak and are quoted in the piece and say,

you know, nothing to see here and we didn't detect any problems. But even though I think at least, you know, they have their credentials and their qualifications, you just like as long as there's any kind of association with the league, you can just never be completely certain. Right. And I do understand why MLB might also be hesitant about just a third party person acquiring balls via various means and various storage techniques and coming to conclusions based on smaller samples, etc. I get that.

But the alternative to that then is to just release all the data, just like share everything. Yeah. It's like you guys have the power to change this if you want to. Right. You've created the situation where we're trying to subsist on scraps here and perhaps the research might be imperfect in some ways, but there's no way to do it perfectly and openly because you're not releasing this information and there's no feasible way to acquire this stuff, especially if you're threatening people who are going to send it to. So that's sort of a situation of their own making to a certain extent. Until they finally definitively open up the books because they have been either incompetent or deceitful or whatever, some combination of those things over the past several years, you know, initially maintaining that it had nothing to do with the ball and then finally, finally conceding that it did, but then not being transparent even when they did change the ball. And even when they did change the ball, it's just there's such a pattern here. And there are a number of players quoted in the piece expressing their doubts and their reservations and their skepticism.

And so the fact that the players, including prominent players like Max Scherzer, is quoted in here and saying, like, this is, you know, this is sketchy. Right. And so when the players themselves are saying that, you would think that you would want it. Like, if there's nothing to hide, like like just come out, satisfy everyone's doubt. Like we understand it's a hand-stitched product. There's going to be some variation. If you can't come up with something synthetic, fine. If you can't come up with open AI to make your balls be the same, okay, fine. But like then you got to really open up the books just to satisfy everyone or there will continue to be conspiracy theories because there is some ground for skepticism so again like there's a lot of explosive stuff in

here potentially that if true if proven beyond all doubt it would just be like hand in your resignation because this is a disgrace i'm not there there yet with all of that stuff, but it certainly bears further study, one would hope. It's really tough to do that study. It would be nice if MLB would make it easier. You'd think that MLB would want to clear its own name when it comes to the core piece of equipment. They don't want fans wondering after every ball is hit, was that a juiced one? Was that a dead one? Was that somewhere in the middle?

Particularly at a time when they're asking people to put money on stuff right like yeah you know it's not the reason that i want them to care about this stuff right i want them to care for competitive integrity i think that it's the right thing to do in terms of the players it's the right thing to do for teams in terms of thinking about roster construction. Like we have to be able to trust that the game is proceeding in a way that is fair and balanced and thoughtful, right? That's important for us enjoying baseball. You would think though for MLB that it would also be important for people wanting to bet on baseball because if you can't predict this stuff and like, you know, we've probably

talked too much about how unpredictable a lot of the stuff that motivates betting is but like you're asking people to put money on these on particular over unders you're asking folks to put money on world series odds you're asking people to put all kinds of money on all kinds of stuff that's affected by what kind of ball we have and how consistent it is from game to game and if you can't assure that, why would anyone do it? You know, so you would think that they have a ton of incentive, both sort of economic and reputational to iron this stuff out and to be able to sort of answer more honestly about it,

more transparently about it. And the fact that they can't or don't want to is wild. It would also, I'm sorry, it would also be so funny, Ben, it would be so funny if baseball was like, we're going to put our little thumb on the scale so that Aaron Judge hits a bunch of home runs and then at the end of that, Aaron Judge is like, great, $360 million, please?

Yeah, there's that too. Which is another reason I'm a little skeptical. Yeah, right. Wasn't it Pete Alonzo who had the theory that like yes would de-juice the ball to cost free agents money right which and then re-juice it yes and then re-juice it when pitchers were up to make but yeah which was far too elaborate for me and uh and we took our issues with that yeah beyond mlb's ability to control things that finally but uh yeah if if Alonzo was onto something, then I think it may have backfired at least in Aaron Judge's case. But again, I don't think that that was

actually why he hit that many homers. Anyway, lots of stuff to discuss there and maybe we will return to it. And I'm continuing to talk to other researchers and Bradford and Meredith about this. So perhaps we will follow up. But again, just, you know, if you're not happy with the way the study was performed, make it easier to do a better study and have multiple people do it and different methods converging would be great. It's just at every step, it's been public researchers really who have been poking and prodding and spurring MLB to finally, finally, okay, let's get a commission together and study this, or let's put something about drag on baseball savant now using a method

that public researchers like Rob Arthur had already been using just because it was what we had, and so MLB has constantly been dragging its feet, denying, dissembling, and then after a while when it becomes impossible to pretend that nothing is happening, then they will finally acknowledge some limited amount of that information. And so they just really haven't earned any credibility when it comes to this. So that's kind of what it boils down to. That's why people are so eager to just swallow everything in the article and just every hint and suggestion, it's like, oh, this is gospel because MLB has kind of poisoned the well

when it comes to this topic. It's just people are so used to things seeming shady or being shady that that creates the conditions where anyone is willing to believe anything at this point. Yeah, for sure. All right. Gosh, it's been a busy week.

It's been a very newsworthy week. I'm so tired, Ben. Benny, I'm. All right. Gosh, it's been a busy week. It's been a very newsworthy week. I'm so tired, Ben. Benny, I'm exhausted. Yeah. Meg is already a nickname, so what can I even go to from there? I don't know. Anyway, I wish they could spread all these signings out a bit, although it was a lot of fun when all the madness was going down.

Yeah. All right. Well, even more moves broke after we finished recording, because of course they did. The Mets re-signed center fielder Brandon Nimmo, who was predicted by both Ben Clemens and MLB trade rumors to get a five-year $110 million deal. Naturally, therefore, he got an eight-year $162 million deal. So yet another deal that will extend into someone's late 30s. Again, it's not the AAV

that exceeded the estimate. It's the years. The Mets also signed David Robertson to a one-year $10 million deal. And that, I think, establishes that, yeah, Steve Cohen is not going to be restrained by the Steve Cohen tax. The Mets are now up to a projected payroll of $322 million. a projected payroll of $322 million. That is a luxury tax projection of $335 million. They're about $70 million beyond the Yankees at number two. So yet another deal that will extend into someone's late 30s. Nimmo is probably the best outfielder on the market other than Judge,

which made him the best remaining. So both big spending New York teams kept their big free agent outfielders. That NL East race, it's going to get interesting. All right, I will leave you as always with the past blast provided by Jacob Pemranki, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. This past blast comes not only from Jacob, but from 1940, because this is episode 1940. You get how this works by now. 1940, pining for old signs. Jacob writes, complaints about advertisements at baseball games usually take the form of there's just too many of

them, either between innings or while you're at the ballpark. In 1940, sports writer Tom Meaney had a different complaint. Baseball ads just weren't creative enough anymore. He handed out some cheeky advice to advertisers in this column that was reprinted in the Sporting News on September 5th. Quote, in an ivory shower, fans are somewhat shocked on arriving at Ebbets Field to see boldly and blatantly plastered on the centerfield fence this legend. The Dodgers use Lifebuoy, of course a different brand of soap. In these uncertain times, this is upsetting. Advertisers on park fences also lack the imagination of their predecessors of the pre-repeal generations. In the old days, two billboards were standard in all ballparks, Bull Durham Tobacco and Tanglefoot Insect Repellent.

The tobacco ad, which said hit this sign and get $50, stayed until the advent of the lively ball when the Bull quit in disgust. The flypaper ad picked out the league's leading outfielder, such as in 1920, Zach Wheat Brooklyn caught 321 flies. In 1920, Tanglefoot Grand Rapids caught 67 million flies. The current ads are tame stuff. The whiskey and beer companies are going light on the athletes. What about a good rousing whiskey endorsement, such as, this scotch cost me $400 in fines in 1940 and it was worth it, signed Joe so-and-so outfielder. Or how about hit the sign and the drinks are on us from Seagram's Rye. That would certainly pep up the fences and the ballplayers, no doubt. Jacob concludes the pre-repeal generation refers to the years when Prohibition was in effect,

which had just come off the books seven years earlier in 1933. So the beer and whiskey ads at ballparks were still a relatively new phenomenon, or at least new to that particular generation, which shows how these things have always gone in cycles. Some fans today pined for the days when Fenway Park's Green Monster was clean and green, conveniently forgetting that for most of Ted Williams' career, the wall in Boston was covered all over with ads for soap, razor blades, and alcohol. And now in 2022, I guess we're just pining for anything other than sports betting ads.

Just a little variety, that's all we ask. We didn't have time for a stat blast this week, but Jacob also informed me that the new Sabre Research Journal that came out this month includes a study by Douglas Jordan on over 30 lineups in baseball, which was prompted by a stat blast on Effectively Wild episode 1659 last February. So it builds on data provided by former stat blast consultant Adam Ott, who now works for the Guardians. So I'll link to that on the show page. For anyone who was wondering, I did hear back from Heather Bonikowski, lexicographer for dictionary.com, who responded to my message thanking her for updating the dictionary definition of ghost runner and also recommending some changes to the etymology of automatic runner. She noted, you're going to make me shy if you keep reading our correspondence to your audience, but in the interest of sharing my own great passion,

lexicography, let me say that antedating is important in ongoing research in the life of a dictionary. Importantly, the citation must use the word itself. I may have found a 1985 published citation for Automatic Runner in an article about collegiate softball. I'm forwarding your email and this other article to our etymologist and to the lexicographer in charge of these entries. If they are able to confirm my citation shows the same meaning in context or further antedate this term, we will make sure the most accurate date is reflected in the automatic runner etymology in a future update. Once again, much appreciated. If only I could email Rob Manfred and have him change the zombie runner rule as easily.

And I also wanted to let everyone know that there will be an Effectively Wild Secret Santa starting soon. This is always organized by listener Zach Wenkos, and he is going to do it again. So if you check the Facebook group, there should be a notice in the next day or so. And we will announce the details and provide links on the first episode next week. I'm also going to link to the official Phillies Twitter account's announcement that they had signed Trey Turner because it says, ring the bell, and then there is a picture of Trey Turner, a giant Trey Turner, standing astride the infield in Philadelphia and towering over everyone and everything. So someone tweeted at us about this looking like our hypothetical about the 75-foot tall player. I think this giant kaiju-like Trey Turner would tower over our 75 foot tall

player. This is terrifying. He will trample everyone in the ballpark and everyone on the field. If you squint, you can sort of see tiny little figures on the field, actual players who were there instead of this honey-eye-blew-up-the-kid-style Trey Turner. Martin Brody said you're going to need a bigger boat. The Phillies are going to need a bigger ballpark. But as the disclaimer always says, not actual size. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free, and get themselves access to some perks. James Turco, Chris Wicke, Carol O, Robert Milholland,

and Bennett Akin. Thanks to all of you. Our Patreon perks include access to the wonderful Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, as well as monthly bonus episodes and playoff live streams and discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships and more. You can contact me and Meg via email at podcastfangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

And you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week which will probably be a little less eventful keep in your distance but never too far away for our love to be grown Close enough, but not so close We start burning out

Life in the Goldilocks zone Hello and welcome to episode 1940 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Hey, Meg, what do you think about the state of baseball today? I find it chaotic. You're off script. You're off script. You're off script.

This is our chat. Oh, sorry. Oh, God. I already goofed it up. Oh, Ben. Line. We need a line reader whispering from the sides. Sorry, I totally...

Wait, can we take it again? I want to act like I actually know the bit that we agreed to in advance okay sorry dylan all right i gotta start over