Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2101: Eating Crow

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether MLB should implement an NHL-esque holiday transaction freeze, then (5:53) answer listener emails about Bryce Harper, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, and tampering, abandoning the Angels, what to do after visiting every MLB and MiLB ballpark, when the last-place finishers of 2023 will be 90-win true-talent teams, “prep” […]

Effectively Wild I'm doing all right. I'm kind of enjoying our little lull in transactions the past few days. Not a league mandated lull like the NHL has and you wish MLB had, but a natural lull. I came to learn of this NHL transaction freeze via Emma Batchelori, who I believe learned about it from an NHL writer named Frank Suravalli. an NHL writer named Frank Soravalli. Soravalli? Frank, so sorry if I'm saying your name wrong. And it inspired me to think about how like hockey is a sport where like dudes can fight each other a little bit. They're allowed to fight a little bit.

They're not allowed to like really fight anymore. Less than they used to. Yeah, the brawling has come down to what I imagine they understand to be like a therapeutic level. But despite that, despite a sport that allows for fighting, what civility they show, you know, what respect of each other's time. I know that the knock on effects this has for their media members, probably not top of the list for them and in doing it but i think this is this is a nice this is so nice ben you know it's like everybody likes their their little jobs they're grateful for their little jobs i think we get to do very cool jobs

uh in in this space but it's nice to rest also and to not make your mom mad as i mentioned last episode and you know these some of these guys um they they seem to have a how do i want to put this neutrally like an indifference to the season um and the potential effects it has on um the people involved directly and also their loved ones and so i think it would be nice if we had a league mandated period of rest and we could build in exceptions as needed, although we would require fewer of them than the NHL does because we're not in season. Right. But like if you wanted to say like these days don't count against international

players posting timeline, for instance, like I could imagine needing to build some of that in because you don't count against international players posting timeline, for instance. Like I could imagine needing to build some of that in because you don't want Yamamoto to be, you know, to get short shrift or to feel rushed in his decision making because suddenly this transaction freeze counts against his posting days. Like we're, you know, we're accommodating sorts. But I think we should do this. And it's funny to me like they should just extend it to to january 2nd they could start it later for baseball they could say like friday starting friday you know tomorrow the 21st that's your that's your day no no more transactions after thursday and then extend it through january 1st and then get back to business on the 2nd.

How civilized. It's particularly impressive because it's not the offseason for the NHL. I mean, there's really no downside to doing this for MLB because we've got all the time in the world. So much time. You can make your moves in early January or mid-December instead. But in hockey, there is hockey going on. Hockey players are hockeying right now. And there might have to be moves. Apparently there are emergency exceptions so that you can make a move. And I was curious, what are the emergency exceptions? Apparently it's like

if someone gets hurt or someone gets sick or something, you can, if you can't field a full team, rink a full team. Rink a full team is absolutely, rink is not the verb, I think. I think it is probably. Is it ice a full team? No, but icing is a thing in hockey. Icing kickers you could do. Yeah. There are also icing rules.

Yeah, in hockey it's true. But whatever the verb is, if you can't do that, if you don't have enough players, then there are emergency conditions where you can get more players on there. So they have thought of that at least. But, yeah, they're setting an impressive example here. Even in the midst of a season, they're saying some things take precedence. And maybe that is very different from the fighting, but maybe it's sort of similar to the fighting because at least traditionally when there was a hockey fight, they really would just set some time aside to resolve their differences

and everyone else would just go about their business and be like, okay, I thought I was watching hockey. Now this is a boxing match. Now I'm watching fighting. Yeah, and they will just settle this and we'll let them do that for a while. And then eventually we'll get back to the hockey. But certain things take precedence. And apparently the holidays do for the NHL holidays and punching people, though less of the punching people now.

Yeah. I like this. I think we should acknowledge that we are sometimes inclined as human beings to inconvenience ourselves and others. are sometimes inclined as human beings to inconvenience ourselves and others. And it is good to have architecture in place to intervene on that instinct because you feel bad about it afterward. I mean, I doubt Preller has ever felt bad about it, like, candidly. And I don't really mean that as a knock on AJ necessarily. I mean, I do, but, like, in a less pointed way than it maybe sounds.

But, you know, it would be good to just say like, hey, hey, man, just take a day to rest or play pick up basketball or go get a big gulp or something. We all needed a bit of a breather after the Soto news and the Otani news and everything else, the many Otani news cycles. And it's not that there have been no new moves. I don't want to slight Martin Perez and Andrew McCutcheon and Tom Murphy and Eric Haas, but I don't have deep thoughts about any of them at the moment. And so I will not attempt to generate any. We have plenty of emails to answer and I have some stat blasts to do too. Stat blasts.

So we will get to that. We haven't had a whole lot of email time lately with all the news that we've had to discuss. I will tease or entreat people to send us submissions. I like to, at the end of a year, the very last episode or two, go over stories that we missed. And ideally, we try to find one story that we missed for each team so that everyone feels represented or at least equally neglected. So if there's something that we didn't talk about this season or this year, and I know that no one remembers every single thing we talked about on this podcast this year, including us, but if you don't recall us talking about something in particular for your team or someone else's team that you thought was interesting, maybe it was a

weird statistical season or it was some funny off the field occurrence or a quote or something wacky or whatever it was, a fun fact. It could be anything. But if we gave it short shrift on Effectively Wild, let us know and we'll compile some submissions and hopefully have one for each team or most teams, at least before the end of the year. Figured I'd mention that now because I know not, at least before the end of the year. Figured I'd mention that now because I know not everyone listens to the very end of the episode. But I have some emails and only some of them are Shohei Otani related.

In fact, very few of them. I steered away from Shohei, which is not normally my inclination. I steer into the skid when it comes to Shohei. But today I figured we'll give people a bit of a breather from Otani. But this question is not really about Otani, but it is prompted by Otani. So that's the best I can do. And I didn't send in this question. Other people sent it in. What can I do? We just answer the questions that we receive. Alex, Patreon supporter, says, the news about Shohei Otani's role in the ongoing Tyler Glasnow trade extension.

I guess it's no longer ongoing, but was when he sent this email. Got me thinking about past instances when players have been accused of tampering violations. Most notably, Bryce Harper following public comments about wanting Mike Trout as a teammate, though there are other examples. It then dawned on me that I have essentially zero understanding of what the terms tampering and recruiting even mean in MLB. Is it even correct to think of recruiting as being generally acceptable and tampering as being some unusual kind of recruitment that violates one or more MLB policies? Are there clearly delineated situations in which recruiting becomes tampering? Perhaps I'm also being misled by an underlying assumption that Otani, being the immaculate professional he is, could never violate a relatively inconsequential MLB policy, adherence to which is probably poorly incentivized to begin with, if such a policy even still exists within the new CBA.

Any light you'd be able to shed upon these nebulous concepts would be appreciated. So I don't think the CBA itself covers tampering, at least when I control F'd the CBA a second ago, nothing came up. However, there is a rule book, rules book, not the rule book, but the major league rules that you can find hosted on the Players Association site, the official professional baseball rules book. I know you're fond of this one. Oh, I am so fond of it. It's like the secret rule book, the insider rule book. It's the secret rule book. Yeah. Although I will admit to ignorance about what it says

with regard to tampering. So I'm excited to learn something about the, you know, double secret probation rulebook. Yeah. Yeah. Let me enlighten you. So this is rule 3K. These are the 2021 rules, but I'm guessing that this probably hasn't changed. Tampering to preserve discipline and competition and to prevent the enticement of players, coaches, managers, and umpires.

Yes. There shall be no negotiations or dealings respecting employment, either present or prospective, between any player, coach, or manager, and any major or minor league club other than the club with which the player is under contract, or acceptance of terms, or by which the player is reserved, or which has the player on its negotiation list. These rule books are always just so well written. It really just rolls off the tongue. Or between any umpire and any baseball employer other than the baseball employer with which the umpire is under contract or acceptance of terms unless the club or baseball employer with which the person is connected shall have in writing expressly authorized such negotiations or dealings prior to their commencement. I don't know if that enlightened anyone.

You probably need the plain English version of that. A lot of with witches in that paragraph. Yeah. But basically what it means is that you can't ask another player or tell another player to come play for your team while they're under contract with another team. Now, Tyler Glass now was in sort of a special situation here where I guess technically he was still a Ray, but he was in the process of being traded to the Dodgers. The Rays clearly wanted him to be a Dodger. And all they had to do was work out the extension.

And so Shohei sent him a video saying, hey, I want to hit some home runs for you and then we can pitch together in 2025. And, of course, Glasnow was pretty pumped to get a message from Shohei Otani. And it was like, yep, that recruiting pitch worked. It would work on me too. But that's a special situation. Because at that point, he was like in a liminal space where he was sort of a Ray, but he was about to be a Dodger. Like both teams wanted him to be a Dodger.

And so the Rays weren't going to be upset about Shohei Otani trying to recruit him and persuade him to be a Dodger. That is not always the case, though. So there have been times when players have run afoul of these rules. And the one that was mentioned in the question, 2019 in March, Bryce Harper was being pretty open about wanting Mike Trout to be on the Phillies. Yeah. And he said as much multiple times and in multiple ways. And he got in a little bit of trouble for it.

A little bit. Big trouble. Just slap on the wrist. He probably got a memo. Probably someone spoke to him. It's medium trouble. Yeah. So he said on a sports radio station,

if you don't think I'm going to call Mike Trout to come to Philly in 2020, you're crazy. And then also he said in a press conference, I think that he kind of obliquely referred to him. He said that his own deal, which he described as club friendly, left the Phillies room to add other players. And he said, I know there's another guy in about two years who comes off the books. We'll see what happens with him. And then he named him in another comment. He said, for me, I can be able to talk to Trout or whoever it is, big name free agent or whoever wants to come to Philly or is thinking about coming to Philly. I can say, hey, this is the place to be. This is where the fans are great. Ownership understands it. Our manager is awesome. Can't do that, Bryce. No. I also love that you're out here using a

liminal space. You're like a TikTok teen. They're really into liminal spaces out here on TikTok. Yeah. It's like a really funny bit of manners regulation to me because one could argue that everything that a team does to try to improve the on-field product particularly if it involves signing big free agents is a plea for others to come to the team right they are making a case for the desirability of that place as a place to play and it is only in the making it explicit that we get kind of shirty about it right it's like signing Bryce it's not tampering but it is inducement or an attempt to right like you do that because you want people to think your team is going to be really good and you probably know

that it makes it attractive to other free agents and I'm not saying that it's wrong. Like, I think that clubs need to be able to have some amount of stability. And, you know, there is something to the idea of them having like a period where they get to engage with their players one on one, I guess. But I also kind of think like, people should get to kind of decide where they work. And so the idea that this is like, meaningfully a problem for clubs is something I'm not necessarily super sympathetic to either. Does that seem unfair to you? Like, are you, what, what are, what do you think about the morality of tampering? Yeah. Maybe it's different if an executive is doing it than if a player is doing it, but even so, I don't know, I guess it would lead to some ruffled feathers and bad blood because it's kind of like, you

know, someone's flirting with your player while they're going steady with you. And so it could lead to a war of words. At that time, when Harper made his comments about Trout, Billy Epler, who was then the Angels GM, said that he was aware of the comments and, quote, we've been in touch with MLB and we have no further comment at this time. But so, like, here's the thing, though. Like, Trout is still under contract in this scenario, right? So it's like, what does the tampering, quote unquote, really do? Like, what difference does it make materially to the Angels? You know,

it's not like Trout's going to be like, oh, Bryce is right. I guess I'm going over there now. Like he had a contract in place. So I guess I'm always a little kind of flummoxed by like, what is the theory of the case here in terms of it being a problem? You know what I mean? theory of the case here in terms of it being a problem. You know what I mean? Maybe there's a fear that it would lead to something like the NBA's player empowerment era. I know the NBA has their mixed opinions on whether that's been good or bad. And the NBA has tampering rules too, but there is a lot of, hey, let's get together and we'll make a super team and players trying to engineer where they're gonna go which hey if they can do that and they have the leverage fine but also i guess

it gets taken to an extreme at times where players are just constantly you jump in ship or at least the perception is that they're forcing themselves out of any situation that isn't the best for them and just trying to arrange exactly what they want, you know, the way that most of us do with our employment where we are at least eligible to work wherever, which doesn't mean that anywhere will hire us, but at least we have the right to work wherever. But if you had something similar in baseball, maybe it would be good. Maybe it would be bad in some ways. I don't know if that were kind of the culture, if it were just constantly like, hey, come play with us. And I guess there's nothing to prevent players from texting each other about this or doing it behind the scenes in a non-public way, unless the other player is going to snitch and rat them out. Someone tampered. He texted me a tamper.

You got to do something. Then it would never really come to light. But players have been reprimanded and even fined. There was a situation in 2016 with David Ortiz. I think this was at the All-Star game. He was talking about how he wanted the Red Sox to trade for signed people. He mentioned Edwin Encarnacion specifically, who was going to be a free agent after that season. And I guess Poppy said that he would be a good replacement for him, for David Ortiz. And when he was asked about this.

All out of sorts about it. Yeah. Ortiz said tampering. I don't write no paycheck. I can say whatever I want. I'm not a GM or team owner or whatever. I mean, if I say tomorrow that I want to play with LeBron James, is that tampering too? Well, no, unless LeBron James is employed by a major league baseball team, in which case it probably would be. It's a different sport, which makes a material difference. But he is saying something sort of similar to what you're saying, I guess. Like what real impact does it have if a player says, hey, come play with me years down the road? Obviously, this pitch did not work on Mike Trout, who is not a Philly.

Didn't. Not at the moment. Yeah. No. I just think the whole thing is kind of goofy. work on Mike Trout, who is not a Philly. Didn't, not at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. No. I just think the whole thing is kind of goofy. I mean, like, and it's also, it feels like sometimes guys are allowed to flirt with the flirting pretty profoundly. Like, you know how we always just felt like we knew where David Stearns was going to go

work, you know? Like, we just felt like we had where David Stearns was going to go work, you know, like we just felt like we had a really good sense of that. And the reason we had a good sense of it was because of all of the like leaking that got done on background about the interest in David Stearns. And the reason they did the leaking on background is because they didn't want to run afoul of anti-tampering measures, but we still knew where he was probably going to go work. So like, is that a distinction with a material difference? I ask you, Ben. It's anti-labor.

I tell you what. Yeah. I guess most of professional sports is in some ways. Although, obviously, if you make it to the majors, you're doing decently salary-wise. Yeah, you're doing okay. I guess ostensibly maybe it's supposed to promote parity because you want players to stay with the teams that took them like you wouldn't want i mean you know if you had the yankees uh owner coming out and saying like come play for us we'll pay you more money or you know if it became a bidding war even when it

wasn't the offseason or when a player wasn't available and players just kind of had one foot out the door because they were like getting offers constantly kind of maybe there would be an excessive turnover or at least fans would see it that way so maybe that's the idea behind it at least but yeah i don't know that it actually has that huge an impact. Yeah, I don't. But I did learn something new today, which is about my favorite super secret rule book. So I feel like I'm grateful for the opportunity to contemplate the question. Wasn't there a there was a judge Machado. I think it was a few years ago.

It was 2018. Aaron Judge told many Machado that Machado would look good in pinstripes. Yeah. And that was too much. That was tampering potentially. Judge got a warning from NLB. He got a little warning. About that.

And I hope he said everybody looks good in pinstripes. They make you look taller. They make you look taller. Not that Aaron Judge needs to look taller. I know, but Manny Machado could stand too. You know, like he's not a small guy, but he's not as big as Judge. Maybe that's all he meant, you know?

And it's so funny because he ended up going to a team that does play in pinstripes, just not that one. You know, like if I were Aaron Judge, I'd be like, this describes like a bunch of different teams. There are so many, you know, like the Cubs wear pinstripes. And also at this point, the Padres, although I don't know if they had those uniforms back in their rack at the time. Just a general statement about what would be flattering to him. Like sartorial, sartorial, that's a hard word.

Sartorially. There you go. Yeah, like that. That definitely wasn't how you say it. No. I can spell it, sartorially. Yeah, I can't spell it. There we go.

Okay. I am not convinced that I can spell it. Yeah. This is rarely punished or policed, though, because, again, it would be so difficult to crack down on it, private conversations. So in that case, like like Judge was kind of kidding. It was a lighthearted comment. And so the league at the time said, we have been in contact with the Yankees.

They communicated to us that Mr. Judge's off the cuff comments were not appropriate and not authorized by the club. They will speak to him to make sure that this does not happen again. So it's very much. It's like so much more email than anyone needs to send on this question. Give him a good talking to sit Aaron down. Now, Aaron, just make him take a time out in the corner for a while because he tampered unintentionally tampered. Again, like I can appreciate why this is annoying to teams.

Like I think you want to be able to say we know what our team is going to be and we don't want people are already coming for our like talented front office folks but like you can just say no that's the other thing like they have so much discretion that I feel like they are already sufficiently empowered on this stuff and so I think that we should abolish the rules and also unionize front offices while we're at it holidays everybodyidays, everybody gets a present. Sure. I forgot about a maybe even more famous instance of Bryce Harper potential tampering, which was in 2012.

Do you remember when he tweeted at John Carlos Stanton? You can always play for the Nats. This was when Stanton was with the Marlins. We will take you anytime. Get some red, white and blue in your life. And then Stanton was with the Marlins. We will take you anytime. Get some red, white, and blue in your life. And then Stanton actually had a good comeback. He wrote back, dang, bro, if only my last name backwards wasn't not Nats, which was actually kind of clever. Yeah, it was quite clever, I think.

I wonder if he wants that back, though. Yeah. Well, I wonder if he wrote that or maybe he had a social media person suggest that to him. I don't want to denigrate his Twitter game. Why are we impugning his joking abilities? Well, at times we've impugned baseball players and how funny they are, or at least Dan Miller has. That's true. This is an instance of actually made me chuckle at the time.

Okay. So that's true. This is an instance of actually made me chuckle at the time. Yeah. Okay. Next question comes from Jacob, Patreon supporter. Also Otani inspired, but not directly Otani related. I'm an Angels fan and expect the team will be unwatchably bad for years without Otani. I will have reason. I will have little reason to watch even occasional games. Is my favorite player going to the Dodgers an acceptable reason to become a Dodgers fan?

I rooted for Japan against USA in the WPC, so this sort of happened before. I agree with you both that it's wrong to criticize Otani for, quote unquote, taking the easy way out, but it's hard to shake that feeling about myself. When is it respectable to jump ship as a fan? By the way, I checked the listener email database, always appreciated, Jacob, and found one question touching on this issue from Jason in episode 1053. Would you continue rooting for your doomed team? That was a thousand episodes ago with Jeff as co-host, so I think it is fair game. And we have bantered a bit more recently about whether you can or should switch allegiances. And this is sort of along the same

lines. I mean, the angels, I don't know if any team is truly doomed, but things certainly look gloomy, if not doomy for the angels even more so than they have. So if Jacob wants to defect and say, I'm a Dodgers fan now, or at least I'm watching the Dodgers and not watching the angels, should he? Should he feel any twinge of guilt about that? No, not even a twinge, not even a glimmer, not even a, you don't have to look backward, you know, move forward. I think that fandom is a lot of things. It can be fun. It can be frustrating.

It can be, you know, something that binds you to a community. It can be a source of commonality with your family. But I think most basically it is often arbitrary, right? Why am I a Seahawks fan? Because I grew up in Seattle, you know? Like my grandparents, great-grandparents on my mom's side, they were Broncos season ticket holders. And do I have an allegiance to the Broncos?

I sure do not, you know? I'm a Seahawks fan because I grew up there. I'm a Mariners fan because I grew up in Seattle. I enjoy watching the Arizona Coyotes, even though I voted against funding their stadium because I live in I live in Tempe and the place is like 10 minutes from my house, you know. And so it's all kind of an arbitrary bit of business. arbitrary bit of business. And I think that you will want a way for yourself if it meets the emotional requirements of fandom for you in other ways, right? Like is baseball something that you do come together with, with family or friends? Is, you know, sort of jumping to the Dodgers going to result in severing some of that connection?

Is that going to bother you? Are you able to just like sustain fandom for multiple teams? Does that feel natural to you? Like, I think that there are there are aspects to the decision that you should consider for what it means for you. But, you know, saying that you have to like one team over another because it's the one you've liked in the past doesn't resonate for me. You know, I think that that's a pretty fundamentally arbitrary thing more often than not. And so if you have a compelling reason to jump to another team and it's going to satisfy what sports fandom often does for us for you then yeah good have fun you're about to watch some really great baseball a lot of the time i think um i might require that you be as annoyed by joe kelly as craig goldstein is just to like balance the scales a little bit cosmically but i

think that if otani's your dude and watching him and rooting for his team to succeed brings you joy, then I say congratulations on being a Dodger fan, you know? Yeah, you don't have to be a Dodgers fan to continue to watch and root for Otani either. If that makes you uncomfortable, you can root for Shohei Otani. Yeah, just root for Otani. Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been watching a whole lot of Angels baseball because of Shohei Otani. Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been watching a whole lot of Angels baseball because of Shohei Otani primarily. And I'm not sorry that I will be watching a whole lot less Angels baseball in the future. So I'm a mercenary when it comes to my watching habits because I'm not really a fan of any particular team anymore.

So I go where the story is most interesting or the players are more interesting and compelling. And I know you can't just flip a switch and snap your fingers and feel that way. It was a years long, unintentional process for me that not every media member goes through, though a lot do. But the point is to have fun. So if it's making you miserable, then that seems counterproductive. Seems bad. There's enough else in the world that makes you miserable that you don't have to inflict more misery on yourself. Yeah. That said, and I've probably expressed some similar sentiments before, but some suffering, I think, can enhance the pleasure, right? Sure. suffering, I think, can enhance the pleasure, right? If you wait for the payoff and your team

wins, if you're just never having a hard time in your fandom and you're just hopping from good team to good team, well, then you're not experiencing the downs and the ups won't feel like ups. They'll just feel like a baseline because you won't have experienced the down. like ups. They'll just feel like a baseline because you won't have experienced the down. So I wouldn't recommend just any time your team is bad, you jump ship and you switch allegiances. But I think there are some cases where maybe the team has operated in such a way that it has kind of broken the contract with you to do its best or has just so mismanaged itself that you just have to cut ties. It's become a toxic relationship from your perspective and you just have to cut that out of your life. So yeah, I wouldn't say like the second the going gets tough, abandon that team

because living through the lean years really can make it much more rewarding when you get to the not so lean years. But if it's this kind of case, like don't deprive yourself of Shohei Otani because you just happened the cosmic coincidences conspired to make you an Angels fan, right? So whatever you have to do to continue to follow and enjoy his career and baseball at large, I think you should do without feeling bad about it yeah Tim patreon supporter says it took 21 years but I've now seen games at all but one of the affiliated minor league baseball and Major League Baseball parks 233 parks total from the Portland Seadogs to the Portland Beavers that is quite an accomplishment. I wonder if that's including, I guess that's including parks that no longer exist, decommissioned parks. He must have had to

make multiple return trips to some parks during this 21 year odyssey as parks were torn down and built up. It's like, oh, I already crossed that one off my list and now I got to go back again. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. So he says, usually in December, I'm planning the next season's trips, but now I don't know what to do. Should I start going to independent league stadiums, collegiate leagues, Mexico, Japan, or Korea? Or should I just find a new hobby? What would you do?

Wow. Well, I probably wouldn't find myself in this situation, although I admire and respect this accomplishment But I don't know. I guess it would be tough to kick the habit of collecting ballparks after doing it for 21 years. Yeah. I really like the idea if like the means are there of sort of expanding internationally. Yeah. Both because you get to check another ballpark off your list, but you also get the experience of going and seeing like, what is, you know, what's it like to take in a KBO game? What's an MPB game like? Like, you know, if you do winter league stuff, like go go to lead on games or something. I, you know, I, I know that people sort of level of comfort and ability to travel internationally can vary, but like if that's something that you're able and willing to

do and find exciting, like that seems really cool. And then I think, you know, the other sort of way that you could approach sort of, you know, you have a list of things to go do, um, that relates to the, to baseball would be to flip it into checking off events on the baseball calendar like have you ever been to an all-star game have you ever been to a world series game like have you um you know done done fall league like you know there are a bunch of other yeah i love that i you know those are all the same right caliber of experience all-star game world series game fall league um but fall league's great so everyone should should fall

league at some point but yeah i think that that would be another avenue to explore is like go do go do stuff um related to baseball that you haven't had a chance to do you know there's you could do some of the international games that, that MLB is hosting itself, right? Like you could go do games in Europe. You could go do games. I mean, they're going to host games in Japan. Like you could do all kinds of stuff. So I, I don't think that you have to give up the habit. I realized that once you, um, bake international travel into the equation that your habit may have just become like meaningfully more expensive. Yes.

So, you know, that might be prohibitive. But if it's not, like, I think that would be a cool way to take it. Yeah. There are only, I think, six or so surviving Negro Leagues ballparks or fields. So that might be something. Maybe you could go to the MLB game at Rickwood next year. Or, yeah, I like the international idea because there are only 10 KBO teams and 12 NPB teams. And, of course, those countries aren't as large.

So you could make the rounds much more quickly. And you get a completely different fan experience and rooting environment and you can potentially turn it into a trip and do some non-baseball sightseeing. So yeah, those would be my recommendations. Or you can just wait for new ballparks to be built or expansion to happen and then you'll have to make some return trips to be a completionist again. Yeah. I guess this won't be as hard to do in the future because there are fewer minor league teams, right? So there are fewer minor league ballparks if you're sticking with affiliated teams. So a future Tim who wants to do what Tim is doing would have fewer boxes to check, right?

Right. And you would be able to, you know, like assuming everything continues on the path it's on, in addition to expansion, like you get the new ballpark in Vegas. So you're going to have that soon. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Ish. Soon-ish.

Yeah. And, you know, I think we'd all be well served to imagine that despite recent pushback, that cities will get bilked out of public funding. So, you know, it's not a completely exhausted supply domestically. Yeah. But, you know. Must be hard to even remember anything about some of those ballparks after 233 and more than 20 years. I assume Tim must save some sort of memento, save a ticket stub from that game. Maybe he keeps score or keeps the game log handy or takes some photos.

It would be tough to actually retain memories of those individual ballparks because some ballparks blend together and some locations blend together. So I wonder if he actually has concrete differentiated memories of each of the 233. But, you know, it's about the journey, not the destination. I can't remember what we talked about on this podcast like two weeks ago. So I would be envious of discrete memories of each one. Yeah. He must keep great records even to know that he's done that.

I wonder how many miles he's traveled. Does he have a big map with red yarn going everywhere and the mileage? And yeah. All right. Michael, Patreon supporter, says, revisiting and slightly revising a listener email question originally posed by Matt Trueblood on episode 419. Wow. Rank the six teams that finished last in their division in 2023

in order of how soon you think they will field a 90-win true talent team. So those six teams that finished last in their respective divisions the red sox the royals the a's the gnats the cardinals the rockies so i looked back at the effectively wild wiki for episode 419 and my order at the time was cubs astros twins white socks marlins rockies sam said cubs astrosros, Marlins, Rockies, White Sox, Twins. I guess we were directionally right on most of those at least. So Red Sox, Royals, A's, Nats, Cardinals, Rockies. I don't know how you determine 90-win true talent team,

but let's say their base runs record or their Pythag record or whatever. Which of them will be a 90-win true talent team next? Yes. Is the question? In what order? In what order? Get back to that. Okay.

So here's how I would do it. Okay. True talent, right? Yeah. True talent. I'm saying this again because that makes a big difference. So I'm going to take the Red Sox first. Okay.

Again, true talent. Will they finish with 90 wins in a packed AL East? But I could see them being a 90 win true talent team. Oh, well, that's interesting. Do you consider? Do you think that's an unfair interpretation? I think you take into account quality of competition here. I would say so.

You can't take into account like luck or here. I would say so. You can't take into account luck or anything, but strength of schedule, I think. But can't you imagine them being like a 90-win Pythag team but having like 85 wins because they play in the East? I think my interpretation is fair. I mean, I guess their Pythag would also be worse because they're playing in the East though, right? Because they're still going to be playing tough teams.

Yeah, but there could be a little gap. There could be a little smidgen gap. There's definitely a difference between 90 wins of true talent in the immediate future that we know of, at least, then I think we have to factor in their current environment into our projections here. So I think if you're picking Red Sox, you have to pick Red Sox to be a 90-win base runs record or Pythag record team, even in the A at least, with stiff competition. I'm sighing greatly. I still am going to take them first.

Okay, yeah. And then I'm going to take the Cardinals, and then I'm going to take the Nationals, and then I'm going to take the Royals, and then I'm going to take the A's, and then I'm going to take the Rockies. That's my order. Wow, okay. Could the Rockies sink any lower that We're taking the A's over them. I just, it's so, they play on the surface of the moon.

You know, this is like the headwinds that they have. Oh, I didn't mean to actually clap. I did a little clap though. Yeah. Sorry. Wow. A little clap. I think that even when they have had a much better big league roster than they currently

have um and even when i've had greater confidence in their um minor league reinforcements being able to bolster the the team they still play on the moon ben they just play on the moon. Yes. Now, the A's are not going to be on the moon, but they are going to play in an environment that will have, I imagine, an impact on their club in some way, shape or form, at least in the future. Right. Right. Yeah. I think as currently constructed, I'd take the Rockies over the A's just because the A's have been actively trying to lose. The Rockies have been unintentionally losing. I guess what's our timeline for this?

Well, yeah, that's kind of the question, I guess. But the Rockies usually are not that bad. They were very bad this season. They lost 100 games for the first time. But usually they don't dip below presentable right they haven't been that terrible they haven't been that good either but i could see the rockies just kind of looking into it more so than i could see the a's doing it if the a's are operating like the a's have been recently but I suppose there's a chance that maybe they will make an effort to put a competitive

team on the field, a more competitive team on the field, because they may be moving and they may want to put their not worst foot forward as they introduce themselves to the natives of Las Vegas or the transplants in Las Vegas. There are people who grew up there, you know. Yeah, there are some. This is true. Yes. Or if they want to get a better ballpark deal or if Fisher wants to try to flip the team,

even though the other owners anticipated that he might do that and built in a steep tax there. So maybe they will stop trying to suck so much now that they have forced their way out of Oakland, whereas the Rockies are not trying to suck, but they have managed it nonetheless. And I don't know that they will suddenly change. So yeah, that's a tough one. Anyway, I guess for my pick, I'll probably go Cardinals first just because the Cardinals are always a 90 win team except for this year right otherwise they're they're

almost always hovering right around there and then I guess I'd go Red Sox next and then And then tough. I guess I'll go not Nats like John Carlos Stanton and take the Royals because, hey, they're trying. We'll see if it works. They are trying. And the Nats are going to be getting better too, one would hope. But I'll put them behind the Royals, though I think the Royals are still quite far from being good. They were arguably barely a 90-win true talent team when they won the World Series. But the Royals actually had a better base runs record than the Nationals did in 2023,

even though the Nationals won 15 more games. Sort of a toss-up. And then I'll say I'll give the Rockies this much. I'll say that they get there before the A's do. That's not much of a compliment, but it's something. No, we're being very rude, but what are you going to do? Yeah. All right.

Nick says, I've long been confused by the use of the term prep in prospecting circles, i.e. the top prep arm in his class. Is it referring exclusively to guys who attend a preparatory school? No. What would be the point of dividing the high school class in such a way? How many draft prospects even go to prep school? Or is it instead being used to refer to all high school prospects? But this would also be weird because I can think of no other instance in which prep refers to all high schoolers. My guess is publications don't like saying the words high school 500 times in an article. And so mix in a few preps.

But I was hoping a couple of baseball writers slash editors such as yourselves could shed some light on this. Yep. Yep. That's pretty much it. Because you know what? You just get so tired of saying high schooler over and over and over again. And so sometimes you call them a

prep you know and i don't you know i don't actively differentiate between it's not like i'm more likely to apply the prep label to someone i know is going to um what is calling itself a preparatory school or all schools like technically preparatory schools they might not call themselves that and i understand that there's like a private and special thing that like they're trying to do um when you're like preparatory academy but like all schools are preparation for something else otherwise it wouldn't be school you know it would be daycare that's a different project so i don't really differentiate mostly because like it's really hard to know what kind of some of these schools sound fake. They sound like made up schools and some of them are made up.

Like the primary purpose is to pool athletes so that they can get drafted. That does happen a lot. Like some of the academies in Florida, you're like, they're there to do sports. They're not there to learn stuff. But I don't really apply the label to one versus the other with any kind of consistency. It's just like, oh, God, I can't say high school again. Oh, my God. Yeah.

I asked Eric Long and Higgett about this, too, and he said the same thing. He also said verbally prep is so much easier to say than high school. So you save yourself time when you're speaking as well. True enough. It is true, though. I imagine this could be confusing to someone who's not read into this practice and yeah, we don't typically do this in other fields that we say preppy maybe, but that, that probably does sort of specifically

refer to preparatory school. Maybe there, I have a great great there are some great podcasts about this very question okay um ben and like the development of prep uh as a as a style um and uh yeah so like it's really something right yeah so there could be a prep school stereotype that might lead to someone saying preppy but that is not what we mean when we say prep player, prep prospect. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a, there's a really good episode of You're Wrong About with Avery Truffleman, who I think has also, she does like a podcast of her own about fashion and style trends and like where they come from and whatnot. So everyone should go listen to that.

And then I think there was also a Decoder episode about it. Very interesting. Go listen to that one. Avery Truffleman. She knows what she's talking about. I like her stuff. I'll link it on the show page. Two more.

Adrian, let's say there's a free agent who comes onto the market. Let's call him the Say Yay Kid, who is a 30-year-old quad A type of player with no distinguishing tool, except for the ability to deliver rousing dressing room pep talks that inspire teammates so powerfully that at their fullest potency, guarantee victory of the game they're playing no matter the score. His agent tells teams that at least one of these talks every year guarantees a win, but the say-yay kid can't know in advance of the pep talk which game that is. The catch, though, is that the potency of the pep talk's skill

is linked to his on-field performance. That is, his pep talks are only as effective as the respect the rest of the dressing room. What's this dressing room? Is this a hockey thing? I don't know. I don't know. This is not so much in use in baseball. The rest of the dressing room has for him as a player.

Is an MLB team signing him? And if so, which one and for how much? This is basically a question about how much we should value the pure social intangibles of players. So we have a Jason Hayward type here who could maybe deliver the perfect clutch, pep talk, rousing, inspirational Coach Taylor sort of speech, but doesn't know when it will be, doesn't know which game it will work, and also it doesn't work as well if he doesn't play as well which is something you hear that it's tough to be a team leader if you're not good yeah yeah it's

tough to like lead with words if you're not leading by example on the field in the sense of like being good at baseball can you exhort your teammates to be good if you yourself suck sort of right yeah and there are some exceptions to that that we might think of but in general i think there's like a baseline um contribution of performance that is necessary for people to kind of hear that in the way that it's meant to be delivered if that makes sense yeah i don't think that this would would merit a particularly robust contract because especially if the the sort of impact of the of the big speech is tied to that player's performance on the field like that implies like playing time thresholds that if you're really just like now

maybe you you're a team that needs like kind of a bench guy and so you're like we need a bench guy and like this guy kind of sounds like a bench guy and um so we'll you know give him some run every now and again when somebody gets hurt or like need but committing playing time to this kind of guy you can probably bring together that level of performance elsewhere with greater impact and fewer strings, I would think. Now, can this skill set transfer to a coach? Because if that's the case, then just have that guy be your pep guy, you know, like. Right. You just can have him be the pep dude and be like, it's time to bring in the pep.

Yeah. Yeah. It would be different if it were more predictable. Right. If it were, I give the pep talk and then we win. If it were an automatic victory and you could just save it for a must win game. Then you absolutely. Well, big ish, you know, reasonable.

Right. Yeah. You could carry that guy on a bench all year potentially if the rest of your team is good enough. that guy on a bench all year, potentially if the rest of your team is good enough, if you're the Dodgers, let's say they did just resign Jason Hayward, but they expect him to produce on the field as well,

I imagine. But if you were the Dodgers and you had a hellacious lineup, then you could carry the say yay kid knowing that, Hey, if we get to a playoff elimination game, we can break glass in case of emergency. And the say yay kid can come out and work his magic. Right.

And man, they not only have Hayward, they have Otani, who we learned in the WBC is quite a accomplished, inspirational speaker himself. I mean, we learned it again with glass now. Right. Yeah. Right. He's persuasive and inspirational, not only by example, but he can pump up his teammates when the case calls for it. Right. Yeah. He's persuasive and inspirational, not only by example, but he can pump up his teammates when the case calls for it. So they are really covered. Not only do they have talent, but they have the speaking, they have the orders on this team too. unpredictable if it were more directly tied if it were more okay this is the game we need to win do your thing and we will win then yeah but because there's so much unpredictability and

uncertainty and because it's tied to the player's performance i don't think you would sign him unless you would want him anyway it would be a nice bonus if he were a player you wanted to employ purely for performance reasons but it's probably not enough on its own i mean i guess it makes him a one win player sure that is that is technically true but you just don't know when that win will be and you don't know what the cumulative impact of the on i mean like we know that he has to be decently good for him to like activate this power but you like for how long how long does he have to be like decently good it's just like it feels like given you're gonna have to give playing time to this guy you know like you're gonna have

to give him playing time and that might on balance is that gonna be worth it i don't know i feel like i called it decoder it's decoder ring is the name of that podcast. Decoder ring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can't carry a pure motivational speaker who isn't adding anything else and is only giving you one win that may or may not come in a game when you don't even. I guess.

Now, what if he doesn't deliver a speech except for one time? Like, can you game this so that if at least one of these talks every year guarantees a win, then what if you save it? What if you only give one of these talks? Then does that mean you're guaranteed a win in that one game? If so, we found a loophole here. A loophole. And that would be essentially the same as getting a guaranteed win in a must-win game right you just you'd have to save it for that one time much to consider

can i interrupt our flow of uh emails for a second and and share a sad thought oh yeah have you been thinking about how clayton kershaw's been feeling lately i've been thinking about that a lot i found myself thinking about clayton kershaw and his mood lately. You think he's feeling a little left out? I think he might be feeling left out or I worry he is feeling left out. I, you know, I just, it made me realize that I hope they find a way to have him involved in this, uh, this new era of Dodger baseball, because I don't agree that the last 10 years has been a failure I think

that that is an overly like dramatic way of describing it um or that it it overstates the magnitude of what they have failed to accomplish and doesn't appreciate what they have accomplished quite enough and I get that's part of a sales pitch and whatnot but I imagine there's some truth to that expression of their view of the org. But like they've been phenomenally successful as an organization and he did win a World Series. But I just think that like this is a new this is a line of demarcation. And maybe it's cleaner for them to have it be like wholly separate in some ways from Kershaw. But I hope it isn't. I, you know, I was thinking about him yesterday, which is so weird because I don't know him, you know, we're not acquainted.

And yet I sat there and thought, I hope Kershaw's okay, you know, and I hope he gets to be involved if he wants to be, I don't know. Yeah. I'm sure it's up to him. I doubt they're going to say no. I don't know that they would pay him what he wants to be paid necessarily. It depends on his health, of course. But if he wants to come back, I don't think they're going to say no to Clayton Kershaw if he's willing to take some injury related discount. And also, you know, because they expect him to pitch a partial season anyway, and they still need some pitching.

And he just has meant so much to that franchise. But it must be a bit weird the way that his season ended. Of course, just getting completely shellacked and then having to have surgery. And then suddenly there's a new face of the franchise in town in Shoya Otani and also a new top of the rotation pitcher in Tarabasno. And it's like, I'm Clayton Kershaw though. Yeah. These have been my thoughts lately, Ben, you know, I've been, anyway.

I'm sure if he wants to be back, he can be back. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. All right. Last question before I do some stat blasting. Josh says, I'm not sure if either of you has been following the controversy surrounding the playoff selection process in college football. But as someone whose entire extended family, both parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, even a grandparent, all attended Florida State, I certainly have.

Based on the structure of sports as we know them, choosing a team for the postseason based on criteria other than wins on the field seems admittedly bizarre, but effectively, Wild has never shied away from bizarre. So here's the question. If MLB decided to implement a playoff committee similar to college football, what criteria would make for the best postseason fan experience? Biggest markets, biggest stars, most even matchups, most favorable run scoring environments. In other words, if the postseason were different, how different would it be? So a bit of background on college football, which I have recently acquired. I will act as if I know what I'm talking about here.

Let me explain it to you. Yeah, please tell me about. No, tell me, because I don't know if I could articulate it on the fly. It's such a arbitrary and strange thing, you know, let me enlighten you all about college football in the area of expertise of mine. So there is a college football playoff era that began not that long ago, as I understand it, it was like 2014. began not that long ago as i understand it it was like 2014 right and so there were like initially four teams in two semi-finals and they played in bowl games and then there was a national championship game everyone other than me knows this already so i'm i'm saying this as much for

my benefit as anyone else yes but there's a college football playoff selection committee with 13 members, I think. And it's people who've been coaches, players, college administrators, athletic directors. And also Condoleezza Rice for some reason. We don't understand. Huh. Journalists? Yeah. Okay.

I have to double check that, but I'm pretty sure Condoleezza Rice was on the... Condoleezza Rice. That was outside of my research, I believe. Football playoff committee. She served from 2013 to 2017. Sure. Why not? All right.

Well, the selection committee meets weekly and they make rankings and their rankings are based on how the members evaluate the team's performance on the field. So they take into account conference championships won and strength of schedule and head to head record and comparing results against common opponents to decide which teams are best, not just going purely by record, I guess, because there are such differences in schedule that you have to bring in these other factors, right? And so the committee members create a list of the 30 teams that they believe are the best in the country. And then three or more members list a team, it stays under consideration.

And then three or more members list a team. It stays under consideration. And then other teams can be added to the group of teams under consideration by a vote of three or more members. This is all quite foreign to me. There was a big hullabaloo about this lately because Florida State was left out and was undefeated. Correct. So they were 13-0, but not a playoff team. And people were upset about that, understandably, I guess, right? But what I didn't know, I mean, that applies to everything I just said, but what I didn't know specifically that was most interesting to me is that the reason seemingly that they were left out, or at least one of the prominent reasons is that their quarterback got hurt right and so they are not currently as good as they were when they were

13 and 0 for most of the season when they had their quarterback that is the argument that is being made yes that is odd yeah that's very odd to me and And the quarterback was like, I wish I had broken my leg sooner so that you would all know that the team is much more than me, which is a very selfless thing to say. Jordan Travis, who broke his leg in a home game against North Alabama. So people are upset about this and it does seem very imprecise, at least to me, although I guess there's some imprecision in the baseball playoff field too, but it's a little less subjective at least and, and a little less opaque, right? This is, this is odd though, the idea that you would deprive a team of its playoff appearance because it's missing a player who is good. And so it's not currently as good.

So, Ben, here's the thing about the college football playoff system that I think is probably the most obvious argument for not replicating what they're doing here, which is that they are changing this system. Like they are expanding the playoff field in coming years, in part because it is stupid as currently constituted. I mean, look, it kind of depends what you want out of your postseason, right? Like college football is weird and feral and populated by, you know, young men who are providing an incredibly lucrative service to their universities while not being adequately compensated for it, even in the era of NIL deals. They can move around much more than they were ever able to in the past. But it is like a wackadoo system. And I say that as someone who would just like everyone to acknowledge the obvious superiority of the University of Washington Huskies. They are not the best team in the playoff field,

but boy, are they in it. And I'm excited. Mighty are they who wear the purple and gold. I went to Bryn Mawr. I get to root for UW. It's fine, you guys. It's fine. I was admitted to the University of Washington twice,

both undergrad and grad school. I just didn't go. Anyway, I think that, that like here's the thing as much as we like to make fun of say the kansas city royals or the oakland athletics or even the colorado rockies part of what the college football playoff committee is trying to solve here is this problem of how radically different the quality of opponent can be for any of these schools right and teams will like lard up their schedules with easy opponents they will schedule out of conference matches not because they know that they can defeat you you know, Alabama, but because they want the TV revenue of playing Alabama, right?

And you have the SEC as sort of this powerhouse, and then you have the other Power Five conferences that are, like, pretending they're really good, and sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not. So I think that, like, a lot of the inducement to do things this way, baseball doesn't have to worry about, right? Like, first of all, it's a very long season, so we have a much better idea by the end of it of who is good and who is not and while again there are

big differences between say the very best teams in the league and the worst teams in terms of the quality of the roster the gap is much narrower than it is between the very best college football team and the worst college football team and so I think that you can feel confident that, you know, you're going to have a good idea of who's good by the end. And, of course, now they play a balanced schedule. So they all play each other, you know, to differing degrees in the course of a season, but they all play each other. So we don't need the business.

We don't need this business. And, you know, I think that it sucks for the Dodgers, say, that they went into the postseason with like one sort of healthy starter, and that was it. But the playoff field, which exists over an entire month's worth of play, potentially sorts these things out, you know. Can you imagine? Because this is one of the factors, unavailability of key players.

Right. And so the college football playoff committee chair, Boo Corrigan, said Florida State is a different team than they were through the first 11 weeks. An incredible season. But as you look at who they are as a team right now without Jordan Travis, without the offensive dynamic that he brings to it, they are a different team. Now, without Jordan Travis, without the offensive dynamic that he brings to it, they are a different team. Can you imagine if Rob Manford was like, yeah, well, without Clayton Kershaw healthy and without Walker Bueller, et cetera, et cetera. The Dodgers are a different team. So sorry, you won 100 games. But, yeah, you know, they just don't have the defensive dynamic that they bring to it.

So you're out. Yeah, that would not be an improvement. And, you know, you do get the phenomena of players. And I, you know, want to make clear, I think they are well within their rights to make this distinct this decision. But it's a little less common with the the teams that are going to the playoff. But these guys aren't pros yet. And so sometimes you have players who are like, I can't get hurt on a bowl game. I need to get drafted in a couple of months, you know? And so it's like, you take the quality of the team as it's currently constituted into account. And then sometimes guys sit out because they don't want to get hurt before they get

drafted and sign like their first big contract as an NFL player, which is perfectly reasonable, you know, so it's all very goofy. And I think that if you are able to like engage with the college football playoff the way that like I engage with the Mac conference during the season where it's like, we're gonna see some weird stuff in action tonight then it's really fun and light and silly but like it matters a lot to people and so i'm not trying you know like i think if you're a florida state fan you are well within your rights to feel pretty peeved that this was the decision that was made even if i as someone who is not a florida state fan like i'm kind of okay with the committee prioritizing like the watchability

of the thing in this particular instance but it's not fair like it's it's not fair it is actively unfair you know and they there's all kind of by all kinds of bias that gets introduced in this process and sometimes it's in service of like more watchable stuff but often it's in service of like the primacy of the sec because it just matters more here and it's like relax you guys like it's um and so i think having just the results on the field determine who's in and who's out is the safest avenue um in a pro context because you don't have to worry about either actual bias making its way into the selection process or the perception of bias which I think does undermine the sort of integrity of the whole endeavor and when again when it's college football and it is understood to be doofy and feral like that maybe maybe matters less to you. But like this is, you know, we want there to be some amount of seriousness to baseball.

We don't embrace feral in baseball. We are like anti-feral. And, you know, we could maybe deal with a little sprinkling of that and it would be fine. But, you know, you can't have people wondering, oh, they only got in because of the size of the media market. Like you can't have people worried about that, even if it doesn't end up being the thing that really determined what a hypothetical selection committee would do. So, yeah, these criteria are at least in theory, they're they're supposed to pertain to the strength of the team.

It's supposed to reward the best teams, not just the most entertaining, although I guess better teams, more entertaining, but it's not like they're taking into account style or something like this team is fun to play, or at least they're not saying that. Right. And so Josh is saying, what would the equivalent be for baseball? Like, you know, bigger stars or bigger markets or that would be payroll size, maybe because you want to reward that owner. Yeah. Yeah. But that would be... Payroll size maybe, because you want to reward that owner. Yeah, but that would be going pretty far afield from how you actually performed on the field, right? So even what they're trying to do here with Travis Jordan

is at least an attempt to factor in current team quality, which again, it seems like to not take into account what the team actually did for much of the season is questionable, but still this is all pertaining to current talent and performance. So if you were to do this in baseball, sticking with the same rubric there, then, well, there is not anywhere close to the same degree of difference when it comes to the quality of competition and everything, but there's some, obviously. So even though schedules are more balanced than they used to be, which I'm about to stat blast about, they're not completely balanced.

So you could take into account the schedule. You could take into account division, of course. We probably wouldn't even want divisions if we were doing a selection like this. We would just want the best teams. We wouldn't just say arbitrarily you get to go in even though you're not as good a team because you were in this division. So, yeah, you would probably disregard that and you would take into account the specifics of the schedule. And, yes, maybe you would take into account Pythag or Base Run's record, something like that. into account Pythag or Base Run's record, something like that.

And I guess if you wanted to do the equivalent of what this committee is currently doing, you would take Dan Cymborski's projected true talent of the roster as it is constructed at the end of the season, his postseason zips, essentially, and you would count that instead of what the team did in april or may right and you might even take into account if it's a better playoff team than it was a regular season team right if what you care about is how competitive it's going to be in the playoffs then right you would look to see does it get a bigger boost because they have a weak back of the rotation but a great top of the rotation or back of the bullpen or whatever it is. Right.

It's kind of weird that back of the rotation is bad, but back of the bullpen is good. I agree, Ben. I agree. Abolish me every time I'm dealing with it from a, we goofed that. We made it ambiguous. That's not good.

That just dawned on me. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about that. Let's talk about that for half an good. That just dawned on me. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about that. Let's talk about that for half an hour.

People will be really into it. I guess it makes sense because the bullpen is coming in at the back of the game. Right. And you're doing it from. A starter is starting a game. You're correlating. You're linking it to the innings they're pitching. I think that that's the way that it happened.

Right. Because they come in at the end. And like the guy at the back is your ninth inning guy. And so you end up being like, that's the best guy. But it's stupid. It's a stupid way to do it. We made a horrible mistake that we can't undo. I didn't mean to pedantically derail us there. Actually, I kind of did. But I'm just saying you could take into account that is a better playoff team today and disregard, take into account that is it a better playoff team today and disregard which we do when we're kind of handicapping playoff rounds but we don't do when it comes to qualifying for those playoff rounds so

i again i don't think we need to do this and i don't think we should do this but yeah if you were going to go full like well what's most entertaining then it wouldn't even necessarily be the best teams it might be yeah the reds get to go in because it's maybe Joey Votto's last season or it's L.E. De La Cruz and we want to watch him and they haven't been in the playoffs for a while. Living together. Then it would be, it would be purely vibes based and aesthetics based. And we would have to have a panel of people judging the vibes of the baseball teams in

addition to us to it. Yeah. I think we'd be good at it. Yeah. I do. I do. I think that we'd be good at it, but I also would be so afraid of what our inbox would look like.

Oh, yeah. You know? People would be mad no matter what we decided. Yeah. I mean, I guess as long as Condoleezza Rice isn't involved, we're probably coming out ahead. What was that? I don't know.

So weird. I think we're probably more qualified to do this for baseball than Condi was for football. But then, I don't know, maybe she's a college football expert. I know. I'm sure she knows more than I do. I'm not impugning her expertise about college football, candidly. I have no way to, I don't know, one way or the other. I just like, you know, there should be like a no war crimes requirement

for that kind of service stop blast they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or obs plus and then they'll tease out It's an interesting tidbit. Discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day still past. Okay. First of three comes from Dennis, Patreon supporter. I will answer these questions three, although one of the questions I will pose myself. Dennis says, Bobo Newsome, Hall of Very Good member, had a weird path through baseball. In an era of 16 AL and NL teams, he played for nine.

That's a greater percentage of possible teams than Edwin Jackson, who played for a record 14 teams. But what jumps out at me immediately is who played for a record 14 teams. But what jumps out at me immediately is the number of times he changed teams. Although he only played for nine teams, he switched teams 16 times. In other words, he had 17 different stops in the league. Even Edwin Jackson only switched teams 15 times. I've manually checked some of the other players toward the top of the list, for instance, Rich Hill, and couldn't find anyone who changed teams more than Bobo's 16. Is this a record? So Bobo has come up on the podcast before.

Not Popo. Bobo. On episode 1780, we did a stat blast inspired by Rich Hill because the Red Sox had reacquired him. They acquired him for the fourth time. I wondered whether that was a record. The Red Sox had reacquired him. They acquired him for the fourth time. I wondered whether that was a record. And Kenny Jacklin helped us out and confirmed that his seven free agent contracts with the Red Sox is a record. But we went over the players who had been acquired by a single team for the most times. And it was Scott Service, not the Mariners.

And it was Scott Service, not the Mariners, Scott Service, the other Scott Service spelled differently, who'd been acquired by the Cincinnati Reds on six separate occasions. And he was a hometown guy. He was from Cincinnati, much like Rich Hill is a New Englander. So that probably played a part there. But Bobo came up because he had five separate stints with the senators. So Ryan Nelson, frequent StatBlast consultant, find him on Twitter at rsnelson23. He looked up the team changes here. And indeed, as Dennis suspected, Bobo Newsom has the record with 17 just ahead of Edwin Jackson's 16, followed by Terry Mulholland, Rudy Sienes, Ron Vallone, Miguel Batista, Russell Branion, Octavio Dottel, Ricky Henderson, Kenny Lofton, Cameron Maben, Mike Morgan, Russ Springer, Matt Stairs,

Rick White, Jamie Wright, Miguel Cairo, Jesse Chavez, Tyler Clippard, Bartol Colon. I could keep reading names. Rich Hill is down at 12. But Bobo is at the top. And it really is. If we were able to era adjust this somehow it would be even more impressive because there were just barely more than half as many teams in his day as there are now and there was a reserve clause and there was less player turnover there was no free agency so the fact that he managed that many changes in that era is incredible but that was one of the many incredible things about Bobo if you haven't really read up on Bobo do yourself a favor he's one of the colorful characters of baseball he's called Bobo because he couldn't really remember anyone's name

so he'd just call everyone Bobo including himself who he would refer to as Bobo he would refer to as Bobo. He would refer to himself in the third person long before Ricky did that. And he really wore out his welcome in a lot of places and not so much with teammates. He was a popular teammate. He was a kind, friendly guy by all or most accounts. But managers, their patience wore thin with him sometimes. He had a big blow up with Leo DeRocher and Bucky Harris of the Senators was constantly

shipping him out and bringing him back again because he was a good pitcher. I mean, he was really good. He pitched in the majors for 20 years. He pitched professionally for 26 years and there are worse pitchers in the Hall of Fame than Bobo Newsome, but he was just

tough to tolerate, at least for authority figures. And so they would get rid of him, and then they'd feel like, hey, you know who we need? Bobo Newsome. We need to bring him back in here. So there's a biography about him from several years ago called Bobo Newsome, Baseball's Traveling Man, which is a very appropriate title. So yeah, Bobo, incredible movement in an era of less player movement. There is a wide receiver on the Seahawks whose name is Jake Bobo, and he's only played for one team. Okay. And supposedly, he boasted that he had more terms in Washington than President Roosevelt, which is true. Roosevelt only four terms and didn't even finish the fourth one. And Bobo had, I guess, five separate stints with the senator.

So I don't know if he actually said that or is just supposed to have said that. But good line one way or another. All right. Next question. Well, I guess this one kind of comes from me and I brought a prop and I have this physical object next to me, but I'm going to send you a picture, which I will link to on the show page so that everyone can see it. I'd like you to describe as best you can what you see in this image. I was cleaning out my closet this past weekend.

Did you make this as a young child? Ben, you have only ever been yourself, huh? It's true. You've just only ever been Ben. You've just been a Ben this whole time. Pretty much. true just you've just only ever been ben you've just been ben this whole time pretty much this is a clay clay i'm gonna say like it is it is technically a disc but i imagine It is meant to emulate a plaque. Yeah. And it is it is a plaque of the Yankees accomplishments up through the year. So am I right to think that you have indicated World Series wins at the top here is that right yeah i did a count the rings at the top rings um and then um you have uh created uh you have yankees and you have a a 3d yankees logo

interlocking in y there yeah yeah incredible craftsmanship on my part. Yeah, sticks out from the disc plaque. Embossed, yeah. And then you have an all-time lineup, which lists the very best Yankees. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. And then you have what I imagine are all of the retired numbers up until that point. There have been so many more added since you made this. I know. I need to update this.

It's shocking that they have any numbers left, honestly. Like we've said before, they're going to get to Wingdings soon. But yeah, the all-time lineup, which is Lou Gehrig, Willie Randolph. Hold on. We'll get to that. That's the subject of the stat blast. Oh, I'm so sorry. No, it's okay.

I didn't tell you to describe what you're seeing here. Yeah, I was just listening to instructions. It's reversible, though. I mean, not really. There's a back to it if you scroll down. There's more. Oh, my. Okay.

It's a pinstriped plaque on the back. Pinstriped. Tell Aaron Judge. Get Aaron Judge on this. Just like Manny Machado. Looks better with Pinstriped. Let Manny know. And this is the Yankees Hall of Famers. And boy, are there a bunch. And then at the bottom, am I right to think that this is Yankees MVPs? Yep. I got a little sidebar down there. And I'm not going to say any of those names in case there's

a stat blast about that, too. No, there isn't about that, but yeah, this is, this is a portable cheat sheet. Basically, this is like monument park you can carry more or less. And this was created in pottery class in grammar school. Now, I guess, given that I do have the 2000 World Championship there, which was the most recent at the time, that had probably just happened. So I would have been in eighth grade at the time. I would have been 13 years old. And this was before 14 year old me had his heart broken by Luis Gonzalez. Of course, I imagine this was before that happened. I was, I had started high school by that point. So this must have been one of my last acts in grammar school was to create this lasting relic, this monument to my now defunct fandom.

And, yeah, obviously I would have run out of real estate on this thing by now probably. Yeah. thing by now, probably because so many more Hall of Famers since then and retired numbers and one more championship, which is probably not as many as I would have guessed at the time. But I have to take issue with my all-time lineup. That's what I'm stat blasting about here. I would also take issue with the fact that I hyphenated Hall of Famers. Yeah. I wasn't going to say anything. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I was going to let that go. Yeah, I've learned something. I didn't know that, though. I want you to know. I was like, oh, yeah, you were young. Yeah, I wasn't working from the same style guide back then. But but in the past 20 plus years, I have refrained from

hyphenating in that specific situation. Right. Also, it seems like in an act of hubris and Yankees fan entitlement, I was claiming anyone with even the most tenuous connection to the Yankees as a Yankees Hall of Famer, not just guys who have a Yankees cap on their plaque. I have Paul Wehner here who played 10 games for the Yankees at the end of his career during World War II. Evidently, that counted as far as I was concerned. I used to decorate all sorts of things with Yankees insignia. I have all these paraphernalia.

I have ping pong paddles that are decorated with interlocking NYs. If anyone doubts that I was at one time an obnoxious Yankee fan, I have the physical objects to prove it, the memorabilia. Sorry, can I ask a clarifying question? So did you buy ping pong paddles and then affix the logos yourself? Oh, yes memorabilia. Sorry, can I ask a clarifying question? So did you buy ping pong paddles and then affix the logos yourself? Oh, yes, I did. It was handcrafted. Yes, you were crafting, you were doing crafts. Yeah, this was Etsy before Etsy. Wow. Okay. I should auction these things off, perhaps. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know if anyone would bid. But shout out to the late Mary Miner, who was a wonderful pottery teacher.

And I can't imagine that I really lived up to her expectations in that class. Probably this was not a project that she approved of or recommended, certainly. But, you know, she let us pursue our passions, which is why pottery class was great. That and just that oozy feeling when you put the clay on the pottery wheel. That was fun. Anyway, the all-time lineup. I think I got most of this right. Okay. And some of it would be different just because it's 2023 now and not 2000. But I have to take serious issue. I have to quibble with at least a couple of my picks here. I don't know what 13-year-old me was thinking.

If I went by war now, let's say, I didn't have war at my disposal back then, obviously. So, you know, we can give me a pass, perhaps. I got the obvious ones, right? Lou Gehrig, parentheses, Iron Horse is my all-time Yankees first baseman. Okay. Makes sense. Second base, I had Willie Randolph, which I think pretty astute pick.

That actually holds up. I stat-headed all the Yankees positional war leaders with some minimum amount of playing time. And Willie Randolph is atop that list, just ahead of Tony Lazeri and Robinson Cano, who I had not heard of at that point in my life. So like, who can hold that against you? You know?

Right. You were a child. Yeah, but even now, I think Willie Randolph is the right choice. Now, at shortstop, I had Phil, parentheses, Scooter, Rizzuto, lest anyone confuse that with some other Phil Rizzuto who is not nicknamed Scooter. And that was the appropriate pick at the time. He has since been supplanted by Derek Jeter, of course. But he's second on the list and would have been first in war at the time. He has since been supplanted by Derek Jeter, of course, but he's second on the list and would have been first

in war at the time. I guess lineup might be based on your bat, your offensive potential. Right. I don't know. If you're putting someone in the lineup, it's for their holistic contributions. Right. Yeah. Unless they're DHing. So, okay. And I had,

all right, I'm going to skip over third base for the moment. Catcher, Yogi Berra. All right. No issues there. He's only barely ahead of Bill Dickey, who also has his number eight retired, but he's ahead. Okay.

I'm going to skip over left field because that's another problem area here. Center field, Mickey Mantle. Fine. All right. Can't go wrong with the Mick. Apologies to Joe D and my man, Bernie Williams, but Mickey Mantle atop the world leaderboard. Right field, Babe Ruth, obviously head and shoulders above everyone else. Okay.

So the problem positions. Third base, I had inexplicably Frank, parentheses, the crow, I had inexplicably Frank, parentheses, the Crow, Corsetti. Yeah. Now, I knew my baseball history. At the time, I was fairly well-read, certainly when it came to the Yankees, and not every 13-year-old would have heard of Frank the Crow Corsetti. Right. But I don't know what I was thinking,

putting him as the all-time third baseman for the Yankees, given that he barely played third base, for one thing. So that's one problem. He played 1,516 career games at shortstop and 131 career games at third base. So baseball reference lists him as a shortstop and third baseman, but third base, clearly secondary, a distant second there. So I don't know exactly how I had him as a third baseman, but beyond that, I don't know why I would have had him as the third baseman, even if he were primarily a third baseman. Now today it would be A-Rod, who again was not yet a Yankee at that point, but I was just sleeping on Greg Nettles. Like, what was I thinking? Where was Greg Nettles on this all time?

I don't get it. Like, I mean, the Crow would have been maybe like fourth on the list if he had been a third baseman after Nettles and Red Rolf. But like, where was Nettles? How did Mary Minor, my late pottery teacher, not rebuke me here? I don't think she was a big Yankees fan, but I just, I don't know where I got this. I don't know where you got it either. I look,

first of all, you were child. So like, we don't have to, you know, but I was precocious. You were precocious, you know?

So there's that. And also, you know, it's funny when, if it was like guys, you had like really strong attachment to yourself. Yeah. Like.

Right. It's like it wasn't Scott Brocious or something. Right. Exactly. Like, yeah, I if I were I mean, this is more defensible for any number of reasons. But like, you know, I think we've talked before about how when I was young, I loved I loved Dan Wilson. And I love Dan Wilson in a way like Dan Wilson was a perfectly fine big leaguer, but I loved Dan Wilson in a way that was disproportionate to his contributions on the field.

And if I had been doing that, I would have been like, Dan Wilson! And, you know, it's the Mariners, so that's more defensible in a number of ways, like I said. But I had attachment to Dan, you know, as a young fan in a way that would have colored my execution of this exercise. But this isn't, those aren't your dudes, you know? So what's up, Ben? Do you have a memory of why you picked that? Was I so fond of Frankie the Crow Cressetti at the time? Was I going through a Frankie Cressetti phase? You know, at that age, 13, you know, you hide yourself away in your room and you say, mom, don't come in. And she opens the door and she finds you reading the Frankie Crescetti book.

And it's super embarrassing for both of you. Yeah. I was thinking maybe like, well, this was before I saw the sabermetric light, really. I mean, this was pre-Moneyball. I was 13 years old. You were 13. I wasn't really reading BP yet. So I was thinking maybe

it was like, you know, did he have a high batting average or something? And I was misled, but no, not really. He batted 245. I mean, Greg Nettles was and is underrated because he had a low batting average, 248. It was still higher than Frankie Crescetti's and Crescetti was playing in a pretty high average era. So yeah, I just, I don't know. I can't put myself in the mindset of the person who made this plaque. I don't recognize myself, the man who made this. Maybe you liked his name. The only thing I can think is that A, he was still alive when I made this plaque. He lived into his nineties and you know, I love a nonagenarian. And so at the time he was one of the last living links to the Ruth Gehrig era.

So that probably added a little luster. Also, the man was a winner. Seven World Series as a player, 17 if you count his coaching years. So many that apparently he started asking for engraved World Series shotguns instead of World Series rings. He won way more World Series than he had fingers. So true Yankee. And then lastly, he was a third base coach for like 30 years. So maybe that's why I identified him with third base. Maybe my 13 year old self said, well, why would he have coached third base if he hadn't played third base? That's the best I can come up with. But the other problem position is left field where I went with Bob Musil. Now, again, I guess showing my knowledge of not the top tier Pantheon Yankees here. Right.

But how I arrived at Bob Musil, who at least was mostly a left fielder, but played right field almost as much. He was just a corner guy kind of interchangeably. And again, this was pre-Brett Gardner, who is quite close to the top of the left field war list for the Yankees' second. But Roy White, I was sleeping on Roy White, who had almost double the war of Bob Musil with the Yankees. And then Charlie King Kong Keller, of course, was ahead of Bob Musil too. So I'm not really sure how I ended up with Bob Musil. But you did.

I did. And then the other pick or the source of some confusion here, I had a manager at the bottom. I had Joe McCarthy, which fine. Okay. But I had two pitchers, Lefty Gomez and Whitey Ford. Now, what confuses me is that I wrote LP and then dash hyphen Lefty Gomez, which I thought must have meant left-handed pitcher, lefty pitcher. But then Whitey Ford is next to RP, it looks like to me. And it's not Righty Ford. It's Whitey Ford, famously a lefty. So that makes me think that RP is relief pitcher. Like I was putting Whitey in the famously a lefty. Right. So that makes me think that RP is relief pitcher. Like I was putting Whitey in the bullpen or something, but then what is LP?

Right. It's long player record. Maybe you were just confused. Maybe you just thought that you had a lefty and a righty and you were just wrong. Either I thought Whitey was a righty, which would have been pretty inexcusable, or I wrote LP instead of SP for some reason. Anyway, I guess those weren't the worst picks, but again, I could have done better. Whitey Ford, of course, great pick and would have been at the top of the list at the time.

Do you know Mariano Rivera has the highest baseball reference war of any Yankees pitcher? Is that true? That's crazy. It's kind of amazing as a reliever, almost exclusively. Yeah, wild. Yeah, and Andy Pettit is third on the list. Of course, he wouldn't have been in 2000. Right, right.

But in addition to Whitey, I could have gone with Ron Guidry or Red Ruffing or Bob Shockey has the same war as Lefty Gomez. But look, it's not the worst to pick Lefty Gomez. He's a Hall of Famer. It's okay. But I'm just kind of confused about whether I picked him because he was a lefty or what I thought about Whitey and his handedness at the time. So I'm happy I found this. I am too.

I was mostly right. I look into the mind of pre-teen Ben. I mean, I guess you were 13. So young teen Ben is perhaps the best way to describe you. Yeah. No, I haven't really changed that much. I liked baseball and video games and I now get paid to talk about and care about those things, but I would probably be doing it for free, which I was doing at the time, apparently. So I had some misinformed opinions, perhaps, about Bob Musil and Frankie Corsetti. Good players, but just didn't deserve to be on Ben Lindbergh's all-time Yankees lineup in eighth grade. You know, like we like all kinds of things when we're 13 and then we grow out of them. You know, like we, we like all kinds of things when we're 13 and then we grow out of them, you know, that seems appropriate. So maybe at the time you were moved by some specific thing that we're failing to, uh, to understand. And now you would,

you would prioritize different things, but yeah. Okay. Well, if anyone has theories about what I might've been thinking at the time, please, please let me know. OK, last one. This comes from Eric, who says, I'm surprised that the new balanced schedule hasn't come up in your discussions of the uptick in attendance. Now, this email was sent in late July. So at the time we had been talking about the uptick in attendance. There's a reason why I'm just answering it now. But we had mentioned that attendance was up and we were speculating

about is it definitely the pitch clock? Is it some sort of post pandemic, post post pandemic boom? Is it something else? Will it last? Is it just the novelty value of the new rules, etc? So Eric says, I almost always buy tickets based on who the opposition is. It would make sense to me that, for example, replacing the relentless parade of Royals visits to Target Field, A's visits to T-Mobile, and Rockies visits to Chase with novel opposition would bring more people out to ballparks. Similarly, the novelty of seeing the Yankees in Colorado and Otani in Detroit ought to be a greater draw than seeing either as opposition so many times in the same divisional cities, though I know Ben would happily take Otani as local opposition every day of the week. And yes, small market slash basement dwelling teams do still play 81 games as visitors somewhere,

but it seems like their drag on attendance would be diluted under the new schedule. They might even bring long-suffering fans of those teams out to more interleague ballparks. For example, I lived in D.C. for many years and was only able to see my twins play at Nationals Park once every six years under the old schedule. That series will now be played in D.C. every other year. If this were the only series of interest to me, I'd be buying three times more tickets under the new schedule. And he proposed some possible ways that we could investigate this as a stat blast. And he said, I doubt this attendance variable can be untangled from the rule changes and the return of a more normal post-COVID, post-work stoppage season.

But seems like it would be a big factor. And hopefully folks who come out for the new opposition like the pace of play and come out for more games in the future. So Eric in Los Angeles is suggesting maybe we were sleeping on the real reason or one of the real reasons for the attendance boost all along. It's not just that people want to check out the pitch clock or like the pitch clock or like the predictability of game times now. It's actually that we're not seeing the same teams over and over and over again with the more balanced schedule

and maybe the novelty value is bringing people out to the park. So Ryan and I were both intrigued by this hypothesis, but we had to wait for the new Retro Sheet release to come out, which made it easier for Ryan to crunch the numbers on this. Retro Sheet has just done its big data dump of the 2023 season and also earlier seasons. Shout out to Retro Sheet for making so many stat blasts possible. So Ryan looked into this and he concludes, I don't think the theory holds up.

And I think I agree, or at least I think it matters on the margins maybe, but no more. So he sent all the data with a spreadsheet that I will attach. But here's his summary. From 2018 to 2022, not counting 2020, intra-league non-divisional games, so that is games within the same league but not within the same division, had an attendance boost of negative 1.2% versus divisional games. So divisional games, bigger draw than same league, non-divisional games. Interleague games had an attendance boost of 7.6% versus divisional games.

So interleague games, bigger draw. And so Ryan says, if we take those rates and apply them to the decrease in intra-league games and the increase in inter-league games, we would expect only a 1.2% boost to attendance, whereas we actually saw a 9.6% boost. So he's saying that if we took that historical pattern, people are more likely to go see inter-league games, and now there are more interleague games and you just applied that same pattern to the more balanced schedule in 2023, it would only produce a 1.2% attendance boost. And we saw one that was much bigger than that. And he says interleague games actually got relatively less popular.

So interleague games had only a 3.9% boost to per-game attendance compared to divisional games, down from the previously mentioned 7.6% over the previous four non-COVID seasons. Most of the 2022 to 2023 attendance boost actually came from divisional games, which gained 8.6% attendance per game, and non-divisional intra-league games, which were up 10.7% per game. So those boosts were bigger than the boost in interleague games, which was only 4.9%. So, he says, the attendance boost doesn't appear to have been caused by people being jazzed to see new teams. It seems to be people being jazzed for division rivalries. He also said, I did look to see if maybe attendance was just better toward the end of the year

when there are more divisional games and divisional races, but that wasn't really true either. Attendance peaked in July and June and August were all better than September, the only month with notably fewer interleague games and I guess kids being back in school. I guess overall, I think the interleague attendance boost is guess kids being back in school. I guess overall, I think the interleague attendance boost is probably just anecdotally overstated. Since interleague games started, the all-time average boost to attendance for interleague games over divisional games is just 6%. And he concluded that most casual ball game attenders probably don't really care who they're playing all that much. They just go when

they have the time and the funds. Now, my interpretation of this, so we went from unbalanced to more balanced and the split of intra-division games, intra-league, non-division games, and inter-league games, we went from 76 to 56 intra-division games. We went from 66 intra-league non-division games to 60, and we went from 20 inter-league games to 46. Right. Okay. So we more than doubled the inter-league games. The fact that the inter-league attendance boost relative to the intra-division attendance declined now that there are more interleague games and fewer intra-division ones. That seems consistent to me with the novelty theory, because maybe intra-division games

are more interesting when there are four series instead of six, right? And maybe interleague games are less interesting when there are more than twice as many of them, even though they're coming against a greater variety of teams. However, the non-divisional interleague games were up the most of anything, 10.6% relative to 2022, even though the quantity of those games didn't change much at all. They barely got any scarcer. changed much at all. They barely got any scarcer. And yet the attendance was way up, which makes me think that it probably wasn't really the rebalancing. And then given the historical attendance boost patterns for interleague games, the balancing, the rebalancing that happened just didn't cause a dramatic enough redistribution of games to produce a league wide boost of the size we saw, as Ryan said, the number of games that shifted from intra division and interleague to interleague,

just it wasn't big enough to produce that sort of bump. So I think there's some support for Eric's theory here in that people seemed amped to go to intra-division games more so than interleague games. And maybe that has to do with just supply and demand. But I don't think this explains all or even most. It might explain it most a little bit, I think, of the attendance boost. So we're still back to, yeah, maybe it actually was the pitch clock. Maybe people really like the predictability and novelty of that. Yeah, it could be.

It does. I mean, it matters to me as a viewer, or at least it did when I was watching one team all the time. Yeah. Then I wanted a more refreshing matchup. It was like, oh, we're playing them again? Didn't we just play them? We play them 19 times. That's too many times, right?

Right. So I guess this maybe has some implications for future realignments or schedule changes and the tolerance that people have for seeing the same matchups over and over again. But Ryan's right. I guess a pretty high percentage of people who are going to games are just kind of, you know, casual walk ups or looky loos or may not have planned it in advance or may not even know if it's a great matchup or not. They just feel like going to a ballgame that day. They're probably not planning ahead. Yeah, I guess. It's so funny to me. It's just very foreign to the way that I think about even for the Diamondbacks now that they are good. I always am like, not only what team is it, but who's pitching? But I appreciate that my priorities and experience are maybe not typical.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. All right. A reminder, if we miss some noteworthy story about your team this year, please let us know. Email your nominations to podcast at fangraphs.com. Also, one quick correction on our previous episode. Chris Hannell at one point referenced the Phillies using the most pitchers in 2023 with 44. That was actually the number of total players they used, not just pitchers.

He was looking at the wrong column. And in case you were wondering, because he tweeted this too, of the 40 predictions that Meg and I and Ben and Michael made, 11 actually came true. And if a listener had guessed no on all 40 predictions, they would have earned 355 points, which is a positive score, but far from the top of the leaderboard. So you can't just win that way. Finally, speaking of the Phillies, I was speaking to a Philly earlier today. I was talking to Philly's general manager and former major leaguer Sam Fold for a forthcoming story. And at the end of our conversation, as we were saying our goodbyes, he brought up Effectively Wild. And I'm just going to play you a snippet

of what he said with his permission. Keep doing the great work on the pod. I continue to enjoy you and Meg. So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well. Keep it going. Don't ever give that up. I hope Effectively Wild is a forever pod.

It certainly seems like it has been at this point but uh what episode are you on what are we at we're we're up to 2101 oh my gosh later today oh my gosh so uh you guys throw parties for milestones is it like any of your 2000 pit i don't know i mean i guess you acknowledge it on occasion on the yeah we we did some 10th anniversary stuff, but at this point we've had so many round numbers that we've got to act like we've been there before, I guess. Well, I think 3,000 is a unique number in baseball,

so you should at least celebrate that one. Okay. Get Wade Boggs and all the 3000 hit members to get on the pod. All right. Of course, after Sam said that I had to figure out how long it might take us to get to 3000, we'll be at 2105 by the end of this year. That leaves us 895 episodes away. We do three episodes week in and week out. So 52 weeks in a year, that's 156 episodes a year, week in and week out. So 52 weeks in a year, that's 156 episodes a year, 895 divided by 156. So at our current recording pace, we've got about five and three quarters years until I'm Mr. 3000.

So, oh, September, 2029. If I and our civilization last that long, better start booking those 3000 hit club members now. Never going to get Jeter after I snubbed him at shortstop on my all-time Yankees lineups. Who knows what will happen between now and then. Can't promise that this will be a forever pod, as Sam put it. Few things are forever. But if you'd like to make us and Sam Fold happy by helping keep the podcast going, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and pledging some monthly or yearly amount to help us keep making podcasts and help us stay ad-free and help yourself by getting access to some perks. The following five listeners have already done so. Stefan Tottle, Daniel Sinner, who's a saint as far as I'm concerned. He's a Patreon supporter. It's like

buying an indulgence. His sins are absolved. Rebecca Vaughn, Rebecca Fleming, and Michael Tatlock. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only. Monthly bonus episodes, including some year-end recommendations from me and Meg coming soon, shoutouts at the end of episodes, potential podcast appearances, discounts on merch and ad-free Fangrafts memberships, and so much more. Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site, and even if not, you can contact us via email, send your questions and comments, and your intro and outro themes to the aforementioned address, podcast at fan graphs dot com. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can join our Facebook group at Facebook dot com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Jordan Allen for her editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before Christmas and before the end of the week, so we will talk to you soon. Where do you go in a world of bad takes? For the good takes on baseball and life. For the good takes on baseball and life With a balance of analytics and humor Philosophical music

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