Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2148: Backyard Baseball

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the earthquake in the Northeast, Juan Soto’s choice of walk-up song, J.J. Hardy building a ballpark in his Arizona backyard, the pluses and minuses of living in or near a ballpark, and how Shohei Ohtani relates to the Tower of Babel, then (1:04:21) answer listener emails about the […]

Vroom, vroom. Here's your primer. I'm Beef Boys, Baseball's End, Roger Angel, and Super Pretzels. Lillian's Asked a Deal, and Mike Trout Hypotheticals. Waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic eruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction. Hello and welcome to episode 2148 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, have you survived your morning's trauma? Are you stable? 4.8 on the Richter scale. I feel as if the ground has shifted beneath my feet because it literally has. But yes, we're staying strong. We're trying to make it through

this ordeal, this New York earthquake that everyone has been so concerned about. experience that might be universal as if you all invented the use of american cheese on you know eggs i understand that an earthquake in new york is disorienting this is not a typical experience for you guys you don't grow up under the constant threat of the big one right yes this was the big one by our standards but it was a pretty small one. Yeah. And so like, I get it. Like, if you don't, if you're not used to that sensation, having your building shake around you, very unnerving, you know, it's unnerving even when you have prior experience with it. And so I want to demonstrate compassion for that.

And you know, I've lived through a New York earthquake in my day, and people are not prepared for it. So I do get it, but I still feel like I'm being tested. You know, I feel like little traps are being laid for me. I feel like there is bait being put out. So I will simply say that I'm glad that you're fine and I hope that other people are fine. I know that, you know, some of the buildings in New York are quite old and the, you know, states around it. I do love if I can get my one shot in, if I'm allowed one shot. I do love that earthquake that really originated in New Jersey is being dubbed a New York quake,

you know? You guys are... anyway. We appropriate New Jersey sometimes and we disavow New Jersey sometimes. Yeah. Well, you know, like the Meadowlands. So, I'm glad you're doing well. I'm glad you're okay. And I hope that all of the very old buildings in that part of the country are doing all right. Yeah. I live in a century old building now. I just moved to a building that is celebrating its centennial this year. That's exciting. Still standing, fortunately.

Good. You know, and I hope that that is true for all of your neighbors in the greater tri-state area. And I would just remind people that what you are meant to do is get under a sturdy desk or table or stand in a doorway, you know, like in the brace yourself in the doorway and to not immediately run out into the street, which is what people wanted to do when I lived through a New York earthquake, because a lot of people who suffer serious injury or die in earthquakes, you know, some of it is building collapse, but a lot of it is being struck by falling debris. So, from someone who grew up in a part of the country where you do earthquake drills in school, I just want to share that piece of experience with everyone. Thank you for the advice. Yeah. Yeah.

We do it after, you know, you do like your fire drill, and then when we came back inside, we do the earthquake drill. And that was our, you know, that was how we did it, you know? Yeah. So, like people in the middle part of the country do like tornado drills, you know, they learn how to grapple with the potential disasters that may befall them. I feel like I have not really raised my voice at all and have been, you know, appropriate and not dismissive.

And yeah. It was a New York earthquake in the sense that Todd Frazier was a New York player when he played for the Yankees and the Mets, you know, also a New Jerseyite. And yeah, we will pick ourselves up off the floor where we probably didn't fall because it wasn't that big an earthquake and we will move on and we will rebuild. So thanks for the thoughts. Thanks for the thoughts and prayers, even if they were snarky thoughts from some.

I mean, you can't pin that on me. You couldn't pin it on me if you wanted to, you know, like you couldn't do it. I was not personally unnerved by the earthquake. I thought, oh, earthquake. And I went on with my day. And then many minutes later, I received multiple emergency alerts. Yeah, yeah. day. And then many minutes later, I received multiple emergency alerts. It's just not really an emergency probably in this case and also not particularly timely. So that's reassuring.

I did notice that the epicenter was Tewksbury, New Jersey, which made me think baseball earthquake because naturally I thought of Bob Tewksbury, which is, I don't know if everyone else made that comp, but baseball earthquake. I mean, look, it's the reverse. It's the flip side of New Yorkers making fun of people in westerly parts of the country when it snows and everyone freaks out or it rains and everyone freaks out. Yeah, because there's no part of the West where it rains, you know, like famously.

It's new and novel to your part of the country and you make a big deal of it and it's just that there are many New Yorkers so when many New Yorkers are making a big deal of things, then everyone else has to participate in that to some extent. Yeah, and like, you know, a high concentration of media members

so there's that piece of it. Again, I understand. You hear that siren? They're responding to the 4.8. They're responding to the earthquake, perhaps. I hope someone got under their desk. making fun of me for getting under the desk while he walked under several mounted tvs on his way out of the building and i was just like i don't want any harm to befall you and again you don't know because you don't grow up with this so like i can't fault you for it but also like if jim kramer fell on you right now or at least the broadcast version of him it's not that it would be entirely funny but it it would, provided you survived and did not suffer some sort of long-term physical consequence, be a little funny. Like,

because, you know, the hoods better make fun of me while I'm doing the thing you're supposed to do. Now, someone at my office did point out that, like, the context for building shaking in lower Manhattan is perhaps different for people from new york than it is for someone from the west and to that i have no funny rejoinders simply to say that the human experience is diverse often tragic and hopefully we come together in moments like this to support one another and if they're not serious maybe we get a little joke in but you know well i'm still desk deprived right now so if if the aftershock hits, I will have to hide under my daughter's vanity, which is where I'm still recording this podcast. That's fantastic. The Yankees were not playing when the earthquake struck, but they were taking batting practice.

Yeah. So there's video of Gleyber Torres taking BP. And he does not appear to notice that there's an earthquake. He does not appear to react to the earthquake. The camera shakes. Yeah. But that's it. Otherwise, he keeps taking BP, which is basically the magnitude that this earthquake was.

Sure. If you were taking BP at the time, you probably could just keep taking BP. But notable event, nonetheless. Notable. I hope that the way that this ends in the day is not for the New Yorker to start retweeting their piece on the big one in the West, which I want to say, like, to whoever on the social team was responsible for that piece getting retweeted at random intervals in 2020 when we were all already stressed. I don't want you to lose your job, but I hope you feel badly about that. Like that should, you know, yeah, I feel like I deserve restitution, right? Like I could send a therapy bill your way

and be justified in it. So really, this is about me. So after Gleyber Torres took batting practice during the earthquake, the Yankees played a game. They are still playing as we speak. I was like, did it end? Didn't it just start?

And we learned what Juan Soto's walk-up song would be. Now, this is relevant, A, because much like New Yorkers just discovered or rediscovered earthquakes, they also just discovered Juan Soto and are very vocal about the fact that he exists and plays baseball and is good now. And he seems to have taken a page out of the Bryce Harper playbook. Yes. Because Juan Soto has selected Empire State of Mind as his walk-up song, which is just a masterstroke. Yeah. And it makes me wonder, because they both share Scott Boris as an agent.

We've wondered about this before. Remember the Carlos Correa Dior store quote? Yes. When he said when his 2022 season was winding down, he had an analogy for what his free agency would be like. No one knew what his free agency would actually turn out to be like. But he said, when I go to the mall and I go to the Dior store, when I want something, I get it. I ask how much it costs and I buy it.

If you really want something, you just go get it. I'm the product here. If they want my product, they've just got to come get it. And I guess three teams did. And two of them decided, actually, we want to return this product. But that made us wonder at the time whether he was fed this line by Scott Boris because it sounded so Boris-esque. Yes.

And I believe I texted Scott Boris to ask and received no reply. But I was just doing my journalistic duty. Sure, yeah. And so we wondered at the time whether it was that he was getting lines from Boris or whether it was just that Boris had rubbed off on him. Right.

That he had been Boris' client. He'd seen how Scott Boris operates. So he tried to use a similar line, tried to beat Boris to the punch. Yeah. Or is it just that they are philosophically aligned? Maybe Carlos Correa chose Scott Boris as his agent because he liked the cut of his jib. To use a nautical analogy, he liked the way that he operated

and he operates in a similar way. So, is this the same sort of situation where maybe Bryce Harper, whom we have complimented, remarked upon his capacity for pandering to Phillies fans in perhaps a sincere and authentic way, but certainly a sort of over-the-top and highly effective way.

This is sort of in the same vein, and so it makes me wonder, did he get a tip from a fellow member of the Boris client roster? Did he get a tip from Boris? Hey, here's one way you could ingratiate yourself to your fan base, other than just hitting really well and throwing people out at the plate. Or is it that, hey, these are both great superstar future Hall of Fame players who came up

with the same team and have the same agent and have some of the same instincts, and so Juan Soto is just as much of a natural when it comes to pandering as Bryce Harper is. So I don't know how to read it. I always forget that they came up playing for the same team. You know how they used to both be nationals? I wouldn't be surprised if there was an active conversation. I want to be clear that like much like harper with his decisions around engaging with the fan base like i think that having a strategy for this sort of thing doesn't necessarily

render it inauthentic i would imagine particularly for soto where we know that there is some amount of expectation on the part of Yankees fans that he never be allowed to sort of leave the organization after this, right? That they get some sort of extension done with him, even though because Boris is his agent, that is highly unlikely to take place. Like, I can imagine there being some conversation either between Soto and Boris or just, you know, among the folks in Soto's orbit who are responsible for, you know, how he presents himself, which is going to go beyond just his representation on the agent side, right? To say, okay, we're not going to do an extension, right? We want you to hit free agency, but we want your year here to be good. You've been traded twice now. That's wild. Even if we aren't going to deliver

to the Yankees front office an extension, we can foster goodwill with the fan base by doing some stuff, right? And maybe that buys enough goodwill to sort of satiate everyone and to lessen the extension stuff and just kind of put you on a good footing with these folks. And I think that you can have that kind of a strategy in a conversation and have it be coming from a place of like, I wanna connect with people.

I wanna feel at home in my new place. I want, you know, these fans to feel that I am here to play for and advance, you know, a common goal between us. And, you know, can I ask a question though, Ben? Because you're a native New Yorker. Do you like that song? I actually do like that song. Okay.

Because it's sort of personally tied up with my history with the Yankees as an intern. Because that was sort of the unofficial theme song of that Yankees World Series run. Oh, I remember. Yeah. And I know. Could not escape that song in a New York sports bar. Right. If your life depended on you getting away from an earthquake, you know, like it was just.

Yes, it was omnipresent. Omnipresent, yeah. And the whole song sort of panders probably one could say. Oh, yeah. But I was young and I was experiencing that for the first time and I was a baseball operations intern and we were going to the World Series and it was exciting and I made friends with a bunch of the other interns and we were going out and celebrating and that song was playing. And so it does have some positive sentimental associations for me. I wasn't sure if it was in that category or if it had shifted for you in the same way that I'm going to admit something and people might be surprised by Macklemore. I, you know, that was a good fun time. And they'd play it after Seahawks touchdowns. It curdled.

Oh boy, it curdled in a profound way. And some of that was, you know, my feelings toward him as an artist kind of changing and curdling. They've kind of come back around lately. It's been a wild year. But there was a while where it was like, yes. And then it quickly moved into,

I never need to hear this song ever again. There are a lot of songs, some of which are meaningfully, appreciably, objectively better than Can't Hold Us, to be clear, that are just like, I just don't ever need to hear this song ever again. I i've i i only have so many hours with these ears in my life and i don't need any more of them to be filled up with this song right so i wasn't sure and i'm sure there's you know variation within the the fan base because it's a it's a diverse and vibrant community that has a lot of different kinds of people in it but yeah good for juan soto you know i think when you can put your finger on the pulse, it can be a really special thing, you know, for an athlete to get a fan base and for them to feel like

this is our guy, you know, this is one of our guys and when he's as talented as Juan Soto, like that can be the start of something very special. And even if Soto ends up wearing something other than pinstripes after this year, like you can still have those memories. So I think that it's, I think it's nice. It could be just a temporary empire state of mind. It doesn't necessarily say it will be a permanent one. Right. You know, and then like he will move on and in a couple of years, New York will be hit with another earthquake and he'll be like, we're doing this again.

And then I will feel a kinship with Juan Soto. So, you know, it's like it can be a gift that keeps giving. Yeah. Yeah. I was just in California. I'm in New York. I thought we were earthquake free here. You're telling me there are earthquakes here too? Apparently they can be much, feel much deeper because of the age of the, you feel them more broadly rather because of how the plates are stacked or how deep they go or I don't know. It's still weird that you guys take so many states to make a coastline, but apparently the earthquake thing like spreads far and wide. I don't know. Well, there's a big Dominican community here, of course, and he's Dominican.

And so, he's probably being embraced in that respect, too. Yeah. All right. Well, we've been talking about my neck of the woods. And now we have to talk about yours. Which one? The current one or the old one? The current one. Okay.

So, we might have earthquakes here on very rare occasions. They might not be super serious. Now on the West Coast, you might have to deal with more serious earthquakes. I don't know if that's an Arizona thing specifically. I don't think so. I don't know if that's an Arizona thing specifically. I don't think so. I don't think so, but I'm not sure. You do have droughts and you have high temperatures. And also, you have a lot of ballplayers living there who might be your next door neighbors and might try to build a ballpark in their backyard, which is adjacent to your backyard. Yeah. So, we've got to discuss a situation that is shaping up, I believe, not 20 miles from where you are currently recording this podcast.

Yeah. Basically, in your neighborhood, more or less. Yeah. I mean, not really, but. Not quite, no. But Chandler, Arizona, which is an outskirt of Phoenix. Yeah. And this story involves J.J. Hardy. Yes. Right, no, but Chandler, Arizona, which is an outskirt of Phoenix. And this story involves J.J. Hardy.

Yes. I did not expect to be thinking about J.J. Hardy this week. But I'm happy to because of the reason and the occasion. So I'm just going to play a clip here that will sum this up. This is some fine reporting that was done on this very important situation. And take it away, Jason Berry of Arizona Family 3 TV, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix. It's not something Pam Lange ever thought she'd have to worry about when she moved into this quiet East Valley community six years ago. I mean everybody has a right to enjoy their own yard but this is something that is beyond what is reasonable to

expect your neighbors to tolerate. The Chandler mom reached out to Arizona's family to tell us about what's going on behind her house. A neighbor, who happens to be former Major League shortstop J.J. Hardy, is building a field of dreams in his backyard, a miniature ballpark for his family and friends. Trucks coming in and out. Lang tells us she had no idea the baseball field was being built until construction started a couple months ago, and she noticed the giant 20-foot poles going up. Looking at a big fence and lights every night is not something she wants to be subjected to.

I did not sign up to live next to a baseball field. So Meg, this could have been you. Yeah. This could be you in this situation, and I have to know how you would handle it if it were you, because it could happen. There are ball players all over the place in Arizona. And so this is sort of an institutional hazard. There

might be a ball player who moves in next door and says that a putting green and a tennis court, that's not enough. I also need to relive my former glory by building a ballpark in my backyard such that it is very visible from your house and your backyard. And if you build it, they will complain to the local news. So how would you feel if J.J. Hardy or some other player decided to build a ballpark adjacent to your dwelling? I think that I would get pretty worked up. I generally agree with the sentiment that this neighbor started with, which is like the things you do in your yard aren't really my business, provided they're not hurting anyone, right?

If you want to have various sport courts on your property, okay, fine. If you want to put a pool back there, I don't know, given our drought condition that we want new pools, but whatever. You want to plant tomatoes, great. The ridiculousness of the height of this project is something that shifts it, right? And I live and like, I live in a neighborhood where we have an HOA, like a lot of people do, as I've learned by watching John Oliver, and like, you know, you have to like comply with various restrictions and you're at the mercy of, you know, how tyrannical your like HOA board feels. And I think in my neighborhood, we're pretty fortunate because we live under benevolent dictatorship. And people seem to get along

pretty well. But like, I get it. Like, it can feel like you're being infringed upon. But you also live in a society and this is a community and i think that the reasonable expectation that you not have a a giant i mean like i guess in fairness to jj hardy we don't know that he's gonna put like lights in so like that's i guess an important detail to pin down as this story develops but just the the presence of the netting suggests a seriousness to the project that makes the assumption that lights may be coming to be a reasonable one, which is wild because that's like a fundamentally unreasonable thing to do. Yeah.

Look, like people, you know, you move into a place and you're in an existing built environment a lot of the time. And that might mean stuff that you don't love about your neighborhood or stuff that you are fine with because it's just there. Like, what else are you going to do? Like, I live pretty close to a school. I can hear the bell, you know, when school is in session because we're close enough to hear the bell. And, you know, it's kind of nice actually to hear the bell and you know it's kind of nice actually to hear the coming and going and hear bustle in the neighborhood you know you live in the suburbs and it can be it can be quiet in a way that's eerie and like it can it's nice to

feel vibrancy and life in the neighborhood but not maybe like this like um you know i just don't know that it's like a reasonable thing to put in a private residence. It's different if you live adjacent to an existing ball field, because it's like, first of all, you're making a decision to move there and be proximate to that. And if it has lights, well, you know. But it's a little much. I think the part of this story that I actually find the most incredible is that, is JJ Hardy's understanding that he does not need permitting for this project because the way that they make it sound in the story is that they are this far along and we'll post the clip like you know artificial turf has been laid it is in process

the polls are in and he he has not seemingly applied for a permit with the county. And so what does he not know he needs to do that? Right. He's not bound by the HOA because he's on a county island. A county island. However, there does still have to be approval. And he, as of this report's filing, had not filed the requisite paperwork and had until later this month to do so. So he or someone in his family no commented in response to this report. But yeah, it's a pretty large-scale construction going on there.

Yeah. And credit to the local news. I mean, they had a drone on the scene so that you could get a drone's eye view of the way of the land. And he does not have a lot of land is the thing. You might hear like, oh, he's building a ballpark. You're thinking Kevin Costner and wide open spaces. No, he's in the middle of a suburb. Yeah, it looks like he's using most of his real estate here to build this ballpark.

Yeah, he sure does. I don't know if it's for lights. There are 20-foot poles, a dozen 20-foot poles, the story says. And the story says that it's the field's backstop. Yeah. Not that it's for lights. Now, it might be for lights. I guess you're happy that there would be a backstop so that J.J. Hardy is not constantly hitting balls into your yard.

You'll be Mr. Myrtle from the Sandlot and you'll have kids coming over all the time. I mean, I guess that's considerate. You know, if you're going to build a ballpark in your backyard, build a backstop so that at least you're not breaking anyone else's windows. Oh, sure. Yeah. On the other hand, that is maybe a bit of an eyesore, you know? I don't know what it's going to look like when it's finally constructed, but it's not just a field. Like, there's a larger edifice that you can see from your neighbor's area. Oh, yeah, you can.

So, you're okay with some limited amount of nimbyism as long as what is actually happening in the backyard, not your backyard, but someone else's backyard very close to yours, is a ballpark being built. Well, first of all, my assumption, looking at the way this is set up, is that those poles are for netting. I didn't think that lights are going on those, but I think that that's arguably more concerning for the homeowner because if there are lights,

no, maybe there aren't gonna be lights. And look, I think that it's inconsiderate to put to have to like erect this structure that you then have to look at from the neighbor's yards that like everyone around you has to to sort of grapple with but if it's just netting you know it's the kind of thing where you're gonna give side eye to jj hardy for the rest of your life living there, but you probably have to let go. Even if it isn't considerate, it doesn't strike me as something that necessarily merits intervention. But if there are lights, the lights are probably going to be in the outfield and facing these homes. And so there will be lights at night. But maybe he won't put lights up you know maybe he's like that's insane that's too much yeah build a full ballpark in my backyard but that no we have streetlights in our in our neighborhood there are very bright LEDs that have been put in the streetlights and it feels as if the backyard is a football field playing a night game

these days. I want it to be well lit for pedestrian safety. And I like the idea of them being LEDs because they'll last longer. They're more eco-friendly. But also I'm like, so there are a lot of like LED colors now. I don't need the like F-150 headlights up in the street lamps. Like this is a degree of lighting that is. So I'm just saying

that there's like a good there can be good give and take on these things and um it can be pleasant for everyone and i would be like you need a ballpark you like first of all you're retired like what are you doing you go to the go to the neighborhood go to the neighborhood park and like play play ball there with your friends and family like what is what is this? You know, I also think that of all the like rich people things that I have like judgment about that is perhaps unearned, but is strongly present. I think I'm morally opposed to sport courts on private residences. Like, what is this?

You're not like a, you're not an English Lord. You don't need us. What is that? You don't need to put a, put a hoop in your driveway like a normal Middle-class American. What is this bougie sport court business? That's ridiculous I mean it is I guess it to your point. It is nice to Prevent balls from going but it like if it's the backstop you're not preventing ball like how many balls are really? There's a foul balls you so many foul balls, balls you know like i just we're having a society i i also think here's here's what i think

part of this is a strategic error on jj hardy or his family's part we don't know who the decision maker around this stuff was but rather than as the neighbor going around and being like hey i'm a retired ball player this is still a really important part of my life my kids play i don't know if that's true but like my kids play ball i want to build this thing i know it's a little silly but i you know we're kind we're looking to put a little small ballpark in our backyard and i just want to assure you here are the parameters for it like do a little neighborhood diplomacy you don't need to just because you're on a county island doesn't mean you need to be on an island you know go to

your neighbors well tucson native jj hardy wearing out is welcome i hope that this is the biggest controversy in maricopa county this year but we will see you know i enjoy any sort of ball player like the John Ulruid dispute about trees in his backyard or whatever it was I'm very here for these domestic silly sort of neighbor disputes

involving former baseball players it's funny because it's like there are definitely places in the valley where he could go and build whatever he wants because it's so far out. It's like, you know, the suburbs aren't famous for density, but they're definitely denser, as you can see from these clips, like denser than some of the more far flung parts of Maricopa County. And so part of me also is like, hey, if you're choosing to live in a community of this scale, like you should have some reasonable, like, you know, expectations of what you can do in that space. I don't know. Like, it's funny too, because it's like, this shouldn't be our biggest problem.

Like we just need denser housing. Because if you have denser housing, see, this is why you should have dense housing, because then there's no room for a ballpark, you know? Then you just have to have a communal park where everyone can go. I don't know. What do I even think about this? With a 100-year-old apartment building like me, you don't have a backyard, no one can build a ballpark in there that you don't want. So, perfect solution. There you go.

While we're on the subject of baseball real estate, I wanted to send you an image here and ask you whether it appeals to you. Whether you think you would like to live in a ballpark or near a ballpark, would proximity to a ballpark, a view of a ballpark, perhaps even being situated within a ballpark, is that something that is attractive to you? Because I just sent you a tweet. Within a ballpark. Is that something that is attractive to you? Because I just sent you a tweet. This is a photo from a building, a new apartment building right by Target Field. Oh, okay.

So it's the North Loop Green. Sure. There's an 18th floor amenity deck, and you're looking down right into Target Field, basically. Yeah, look at that. From left field. So it's sort of like a Chicago rooftops thing, from left field. So it's sort of like a Chicago rooftops thing, but even closer. It seems like maybe an even better view.

So how much are you paying for that perk? Let's say you're looking for an apartment in the area and they tell you, hey, by the way, you can look down onto Target Field from the 18th floor amenity deck. Is that a selling point for you? Are you going to pay more if you're in Minneapolis and you're looking for a place to live? Are you going to look for that place specifically

because you can peer down at Twins games from time to time? Or is that just sort of a you know it's nice if if you happen to like to live there for other reasons i think that it's nice if you happen to want to live there for other reasons it's hard for me to separate my what would i pay answer from my own life experience which is that if i were living in minneapolis like i i don't think that I would want to live right by the ballpark because I already struggle to separate my personal time from my job. And if I lived right across the street, it would be devastating to any endeavors in that regard. But I really like it when ballparks are in the city and like part of a vibrant urban environment. Like I think that that's really great.

And I would hope that it would be somewhat affordable because it's nice to have like it be part of this like vibrant urban landscape where all kinds of different people can live and be and come together. And like I do have sort of Pollyanna-ish, idyllic feelings about that. I bet that they do charge up somewhat. Yeah. I saw the rents somewhere, and to me, as a New Yorker, now one way we actually are exceptional in New York is our rents. They are indeed too damn high.

Oh, too damn high. This seems quite reasonable to me with or without the perk of being able to look down upon target field like some sort of god. So I would happily pay the price to live there. I don't know if there's a premium or not, but to me it seemed like a discount. I don't know what percentage extra I would pay. I guess it's like, hey, I can't be blacked out if I can just go to my youth deck and look at the game with my own eyes. if I can just go to my youth deck and look at the game with my own eyes. But then again, if you're not blacked out, if you have access to the game,

how often are you really going to be watching from that vantage point? Like, it's kind of cool at first. Sure. And yeah, if you go with some friends, like if you had some friends over, I mean, it's an obstructed view. Like, you can't see. It's pretty far away, so you're not going to get a great experience. And there are parts of the field Like you can't see it. It's pretty far away. So you're not going to get a great experience. And there are parts of the field that you can't see perfectly.

So if you had people over and you're giving them the tour and you're like, check this out. We can look at Twins games. Isn't that cool? And yeah, it is cool. But if you really want to watch the Twins games, you're probably not really going to watch from that vantage point all that often because it's not going to give you the best perspective on the game. I have often wondered this because there are some apartment buildings that are close to, I guess it's Lumen Field now where the Seahawks play,

which is pretty proximate to what is now T-Mobile Park where the Mariners play. And, you know, I have wondered about like, what is your experience of traffic on game day? Does that get kind of annoying? Although you know what have wondered about like what is your experience of traffic on game day does that get kind of annoying although you you know you know what you're getting presumably when you move into a an apartment building that's approximate to a big venue like that so yeah i don't know that you would necessarily pay extra i can't imagine like you know if you were on in the twins front office like that might be very tempting.

Again, devastating to any separation between your private life and your personal life, but you're at the ballpark so much already. If you're working for a baseball team, you've probably already given that up. Right, exactly. So you might as well just have a short commute. Maybe you could set up a zip line directly into the ballpark or parachute in. line directly into the ballpark or parachute in. Well, the twins should negotiate some sort of a discount for front office employees who decide to live in the building as a job perk. The person who posted this in our Discord group, JD, said that one bedroom, one bathroom,

500 square feet starting at $1,700. Oh, yeah. You definitely live in New York,. You think that's reasonable. Yes, I know. So, I don't know. There's a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,000 square feet for 3,000. So, look, by Minneapolis standards,

I don't know, but it's a big, fancy building it looks like. Wow. Yeah. I bet by Minneapolis standards, that's quite high, though. Maybe. Yeah. Well, it's also high up and you can look down at the target field. So there's that, I guess, as a perk. I wonder what percentage of people in that building, will it be disproportionately Twins fans? Like, will there be a lot of people who live there who couldn't care less about the fact that you can see target field?

Also, if it's a game day, it's going to be loud, probably. there who couldn't care less about the fact that you can see Target Field. Also, if it's a game day, it's going to be loud probably. I mean, this is going to be worse than J.J. Hardy's private ballpark. This is a major league ballpark right next to you. So it's going to be loud. There are going to be crowds. So that is a – if you don't like baseball, you don't want to live there probably. Right. Yeah, this is what I'm saying.

Because at least, yeah, half the time during the season, place is going to be packed. Yeah. So, yeah, pluses and minuses. So, I wonder whether it will then disproportionately draw Twins fans who think that is kind of cool. sure there will be one, there will be at least one person who moves into that building and then really delights in complaining about like the experience of living there and their neighbors won't like them and they should make a Hulu series about that person, you know? Well, this reminds me, maybe you've seen the images of, there have been some ballparks that have been converted into dwellings. So, for example, in Indianapolis, the old Bush Stadium has been converted into Lofts, the Stadium Lofts, which opened, I think, in 2013, 2014. And there are apparently 282 apartments.

This used to be the home of the Indianapolis Indians baseball team. And it's apartments now, but they still have the field. Like, there's still a diamond and a field. But then there's a block of apartments. And, like, you can, I guess, live where the stands used to be. And there are pictures from the units, right, where, like, the view out your bedroom window is just the baseball diamond, you know, which is really distinctive. And I've seen in the same vein, sometimes people, I will include links to all these things we're talking about, but Osaka Stadium in Japan where the Nankai Hawks used to play. And it became a residential neighborhood.

The Nankai Hawks used to play and it became a residential neighborhood. And I don't think it was actually converted into a place where people live. I think it was just for show sort of. It was like display homes, but it's often shared as if like it was leased to construction companies and they just transformed it into this tiny little residential neighborhood with streets and lights and parking spaces inside the ballpark. I think it's just used as a showcase kind of thing. But it was really cool, right? Like it looks very cute and quaint and cozy kind of. Yes.

And you're in a ballpark. So I don't know whether that like it might be kind of cramped. And you're in a ballpark. So I don't know whether that, like it might be kind of cramped. I don't know. I don't know whether you get to use the field as like your personal space, you know? You should make it a park. Can you go, yeah.

Can you barbecue out there? Can you go play catch? That would be so cool. Like, is it a communal green or what? Or, you know, I guess you're limited if you're packing a bunch of hundreds of units into a sure a ballpark there's that could be a ton of space but that's okay yeah no it's it's cool it seems like the sort of thing that yeah like you might move in and be like okay i'm in a ballpark

this is kind of cool for a while and then maybe that would wear off and then there would be downsides to being in a ballpark but i definitely definitely like I'd love to Airbnb in a ballpark. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that anytime we can, I mean, I'm not an urban planner. I'm wildly outside my depth here. But like, I just think that anytime that we can be creative about repurposing that space so that it doesn't sit vacant or just, you know, like become a parking lot. Like, you know, I think that that's great when we can do that. And especially if it can be made into housing like that. I don't know. I just think that's really cool.

Like we should have we should have imagination about these kinds of things and you know as as much as i don't want our imagination to extend to like you know neighbors being able to erect sport courts that inconvenience their fellows like we should we should have imagination about this stuff because we have a lot of you know issues in urban spaces and if we can try to use them productively and and repurpose the already built environment such that we minimize waste. Like, I think that's great. So, I have a couple emails, but I also wanted to get your thoughts on this. You're familiar with the Tower of Babel and the parable concerning it. So, the book of Genesis story about how supposedly all of language got fractured into many different languages.

We all used to speak some common tongue and we were just too efficient and too productive and too successful. And so the Lord came down and doomed us all to speaking in different tongues so that we could not communicate as effectively. And really, if you read the story, the Lord is a dick in this story.

I was just gonna say, we're supposed to come away from this being like, let's follow that guy. I know. I mean, this is the Old Testament God. Right. Who was maybe more often kind of a dick, but particularly. Maybe more often. Okay.

Definitively more often. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say. But especially in this story where it's just so spiteful, so petty, the people are building themselves a tower. Now, maybe the Lord thought that this tower was an affront to the Lord because the top of the tower would be in the heavens. And the people want to build this city and the tower with the top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. So, the Lord sees that this is going on,

and he sees this pretty impressive tower. And he says, or they say, I don't know. Look, they are one people. I think it's very much a he in the Old Testament version of God. So, look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Now, reading that sentence, you might think the next sentence would be, isn't that great? Isn't it wonderful that these people I created have learned to work together and cooperate and they can do anything together?

That's great. That's what you would want a supportive Lord to say, I would think. anything together. That's great. That's what you would want a supportive Lord to say, I would think. But no, the next sentence, come, let us go down there and confuse their language there so that they will not understand what another speech. So, the Lord did that. And then they were scattered all over the face of the earth and they gave up on building the tower. And that's that. I think that the new Tower of Babel story for the modern age should be Shohei Otani being quoted or possibly misquoted in a case involving a home run that he hit and the Dodgers treatment of the fans that caught that home run ball and Shohei Otani's comment, which seemed to suggest that he had met and talked

with the fans, but also quite possibly did not suggest that. So Shohei Otani, after being controversy free for the first 29 years of his life, just embroiled in controversies. This one does not really rise to the level of the other one, but I saw some people seriously seizing on this to say that he's lying again. We can't trust what he said about the betting on baseball or sports

because now he is claiming to have met these fans when he actually didn't. And what this really comes down to, I think, is the difficulty of talking to each other. There really is a language barrier. We use that term all the time, but it is really a thing that was erected by Old Testament lords who decided to be a dick.

And now it actually does get in the way of us communicating and understanding each other. So what happened here? Now, it sounds like the Dodgers did not handle this well, or maybe from their perspective, they handled it exactly the way they wanted it to, which is that they didn't want to have to pay the people who caught Shohei Otani's first home run as a Dodger, which some people cited. Sam Blum wrote about this for The Athletic, and there were auctioneers and appraisers who said that this thing could go

for six figures. This could be a $100,000 ball, even though it's just a regular, regular season homer. It was his first one, presumably the first of many for the Dodgers. So, has some collectible value there. And it sounds like the Dodgers really pressured the people. It was a man and a woman together. They were partners, romantic partners. And Dodger's security seemingly, this is again according to the people involved, said that Dodger's security separated them. Yeah. I'm not sure how exactly, whether it was physically or just sort of dissuading them from being together. Yeah, I don't know. dissuading them from being together, but sort of separated them in order to maybe lowball the woman who caught the ball and put extra pressure on her.

And ultimately, they wanted her to give back the ball for just a couple of autographed caps. And she held out for a little bit more. She also got, what, a signed bat and ball, too, all autographed by Otani. But this thing's probably worth a lot more than that. And she said she's not necessarily unhappy with what she got, that she wasn't necessarily intending to drive a tough bargain here, that she wanted the ball to go back to Otani, that really what bothered her was just how it was handled by the Dodgers. And supposedly they threatened that they would not authenticate the ball if the people went home with it. And if it's not authenticated, then that saps its value significantly.

So they were really playing hardball, so to speak. playing hardball, so to speak. And they have since said that they have invited the people to some on-field event, right? So they're trying to save face or make amends here to some extent. They're asking them back to Dodger Stadium and the team says that it's reviewing

its ballpark processes for retrieving milestone balls. So they went a little hard here. Their tactics were a bit too tough. But Shohei Otani was asked about this and, well, it's not clear exactly what he said, but he said something to the effect of either I talk to them or we talk to them, right? To quote from the current version of Sam's article, I believe it has been stealth edited a few times since the publication, this particular passage, but I was able to talk to the fan and was able to get it back, Otani said through interpreter Will Ireton. That is what Will Ireton, the new, at least temporary, interpreter for Otani said.

That is not, that's not a question. Right, because that's on, this scrum is on camera. Yes, and in fact, I will play a little clip here for the benefit of any Japanese speakers in our audience who want to hear this and want to weigh in. So Ayrton translated it that way I was able to talk to the fan and was able to get it back Obviously it's a very special ball A lot of feelings toward it I'm very grateful that it's back

And then the fans said that we didn't talk to Otani, right? But if you look at the tweets about this and the tweets under the video, there are many, many Japanese speakers weighing in to say, actually, he did not say I talked to them. It was more like a we or it was unspecified. But then there are other people on the other side, Dylan Hernandez, who covers the Dodgers and speaks Japanese, defended the translation here. I personally have reached out to multiple Japanese speakers who gave me conflicting interpretations of what was said here. And my understanding is that that is because it can be kind of complicated in Japan with the pronoun use. Because you might not necessarily say I. There are words in Japanese that mean I, but you might sort

of omit that almost as if it's like a third person sort of thing. And so maybe like there's no pronoun at all and you sort of have to supply your own pronoun. I see. You know, like Japanese generally omits the subject. As the person listening have to supply your own? I see. Okay. Right. And so I think the import of what he is saying essentially here is that there was communication, right?

I don't know that he is necessarily claiming I personally met and talked with them. necessarily claiming I personally met and talked with them. But that is how it was interpreted. So, I don't blame anyone who took the interpretation at face value. And man, like this is not nearly as serious as your interpreter pretending to have talked to you and misrepresenting your communications and also possibly stealing from you if that's what happened. Side note, we have not heard from Ipe in a while. It's a little interesting. I don't imagine we will. I don't imagine that we will hear. I think the next time we quote unquote hear from Ipe, it will be in the context of a deposition.

Right. Which hasn't happened. Right. I don't know whether it's weird that that has not happened yet, that he has not been formally charged or that we're not aware of that and that we don't know exactly like Otani's camp declined to say which authorities they had talked to. I'm so used to people in most of these situations

just saying no comment, can't comment on an ongoing investigation. Like the weird thing was that they did comment as much as they did initially. So that makes me think maybe it's not so strange, but then I don't know. Is it odd that we haven't heard further developments by now? Who knows?

Anyway, stay tuned on that. But this is not nearly as serious. It's just really tough. And I don't know whether it's a commentary on the interpreter. People have said like, oh, he hasn't interpreted regularly since Kenta Maeda was around. Maybe he's a little rusty. He does a lot of other things for the Dodgers.

He's not purely an interpreter. He's been sort of pressed into service here because of what happened with Ipe. And so part of me is like, you should go get the best interpreter in the world. Like, I know nothing about Will Ayrton's interpreting capacities here. And maybe this is just a tough case where it's sort of open to debate exactly what was said. But if I'm Otani at this point, either I'm just speaking in Japanese and you can figure it out so that, I mean, that way you'd probably be misinterpreted anyway, like someone else is just going to go get that translated and then who knows. Or maybe expediting my study of English just because I can't trust anyone to, which is kind of a tough burden to place on him. Yeah.

Or I just say, get me the best interpreter in the world. Like, get me the interpreter who handles high-level political. Diplomatic. Yeah, like delicate negotiations where one misconstrued, misplaced stray word could sabotage the fate of nations. Yeah. Get me that person. Yeah, where's that person? Yeah, because his words, a lot of people are hanging on them these days.

He is very famous. Yes. on them these days. He is very famous. And if there were no controversy, if it was just him saying, yeah, I was just trying to put a good swing on it, or I felt good today or whatever, if it's not verbatim, if some nuance is lost, fine, probably no harm done. But at this point, every comment of his is being scrutinized to the point where I would not want to take any chances. I was talking about this, I don't want to call it an incident necessarily, but this occurrence. I mean, I think that what the Dodgers did definitely qualifies as an incident, but in terms of the potential misinterpretation or murky interpretation is maybe a better way to

describe it. I was talking about this with Craig Goldstein and I'm struck by, I was talking about this with Craig Goldstein, and I'm struck by, there seems to be a lot of appetite for an Otani heel turn in sort of the broader baseball discourse in a way that I find myself really surprised by. And I don't want to, you know, like, he's a human being, so like, he is capable of a heel turn, sure, you know, and I'm conscious of like how delicate it can be to you want to you definitely want to understand people the way that they mean to be understood. I don't want to infantilize this grown man. I don't want to attribute words to him that he didn't mean. It is a weird thing to have to kind of navigate around. weird thing to have to kind of navigate around but i'm just really surprised that people seem so motivated or keen to like assume the worst here and like i don't know what's going on with the gambling investigation right like we haven't heard anything new there

so i don't want to swing too far the other direction and just like assume that this this man is incapable of anything nefarious, because like that seems, again, it seems kind of infantilizing to me, some of the discourse around that, but it is tricky, you know, language is open to interpretation, right? It's open to interpretation even when we are speaking the same language right and are both fluent or native speakers of that language i doubt very much that he meant to say that he met with them when he hadn't because it's such an easy lie to to counter and so i'm skeptical of that like in order to believe that you have to think that he is like

kind of a sociopath or something like that's like a really bizarre it would be a really bizarre lie and bizarre enough that it makes me think that this is just a murkiness and a lack of clarity and that we could kind of probably leave it at that. But yeah, if I were him, and if I were the Dodgers, I would be like, okay, we got to find someone who, again, has been doing this full-time, is their full-time job. And I don't mean it as a knock on what they've had to kind of cobble together, given the circumstances. But yeah, it seems like everything is going to be scrutinized.

But yeah, it seems like everything is going to be scrutinized. And for whatever reason, there is a willingness to sort of assume the worst here. And so I think you want to guard against that because you don't necessarily want to takegers sort of find themselves in the circumstance they do is because there wasn't a robust existing dialogue between him, his camp, and the press. And so there is sort of a distrust there, but it's going to be scrutinized. And I think it makes the decisions on the part of the Dodgers around the home run retrieval even stranger to me. It's like, surely, you know that this guy who is like, you're in a field of very big stars, arguably your biggest and certainly under the most scrutiny, like, you didn't think that the people who interacted with your stadium personnel, if they had a bad experience, might tell someone about that? Like, come on, what are we doing here?

You know? I blame the Lord for all of this. Can I just say, your continued use of the Lord there made me giggle a lot because I kept thinking of Lord, like the singer. And then I was like, what does she have to do with any of this? Well, baseball singer, right? She's got baseball connection. Royals. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know that there's probably some virtue in having an interpreter who is well-versed in baseball, too, just because there's lots of lingo specific to baseball. So you go get the high-level diplomatic negotiator, and they may not know how to say that you were throwing a good splitter today or something. Yes, yeah. And they may not know how to say that you were throwing a good splitter today or something. Yeah, like I'm sensitive to the fact that this is probably a more challenging hire than we're necessarily giving it credit for. Especially if they're not just going to be your interpreter, but also are going to be your personal assistant in other ways. But maybe also separate those jobs. Yeah, I think those responsibilities are probably getting siphoned off from one another pretty dramatically. Hopefully, yes.

Okay. And probably part of the backlash, you said you're sort of surprised by how eager some are to pile on. I think, yes, I mean, there is some of that. There's probably also some people who are more quick to come to Otani's defense because they like Otani. But I think part of it is just the backlash to he's been the golden boy for so long. And some people are just sick of hearing about Shohei Otani and how wonderful and great and perfect he is. So I get it. But also probably partly that people were primed by his going to the Dodgers and signing the $700 million,

$700 million in non-adjusted dollar deal. There was already sort of, is he just a front runner? Is he just chasing a championship by going to the best team? Is this the easy way out? So some people had turned on him a bit just based on that and just based on being sick of the Dodgers being good and having the most money and spending it and getting the best players. So that probably created the conditions for this. Yes.

I wonder, like if he had re-signed with the Angels or maybe if he hadn't even been a free agent yet, let's say, and this had happened a year or two ago when he was still super famous, but he was still with the Angels and vastly underpaid, would there have been the same reaction? Probably some of the same reaction, but maybe not quite as much of it. Well, and I think that, you know, he's in the sort of unusual position of having been a guy who has said no to the majority of the league twice already you know and people remember that stuff they feel spurned yeah and i think you're right that there is you know maybe some amount of fatigue with him relative to other players just because of how famous and how good he's been

and to be clear like you're not obligated to like otani i you know people respond to baseball for all kinds of different reasons and you know maybe maybe you're just kind of sick of the guy but i i was surprised because what he does is so remarkable when he is sort of fully operational as a player and we spend i think a lot of collective time fidgeting over and feeling anxious about the relative prominence of baseball in the sporting landscape. And here's this guy who can really push through all of that stuff and who even, you know, I think a lot of casual sports fans know of, even if they, you know, can't give you a scouting report on him. So to see the turn kind of be so sudden and there seemingly being such appetite for it was just surprising to me. You know, I don't say that sort of issuing

a defense or a judgment one way or the other. I mean, I do think that it speaks to the challenges of covering, to your point, people who speak a language other than our own and sort of you are dependent on the interpretation of of the interpreter to sort of make your judgments and i i don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with you know taking those that interpretation at face value because like what else are you gonna do but i do think that you, maybe it's a good example of how when there is ambiguity and the content and meaning of those words does turn on sort of subtle changes that it's worth just circling back and trying to verify exactly what is meant to the extent that you can. But sometimes that's made hard by like these guys not being infinitely available, right? Or the team kind of closing ranks around one of their own. So, you know, it's a tricky thing. And I hope that maybe the takeaway is that we should all kind of grant grace in these situations to try to get at the real intent and meaning that the player was trying

to get across. But also, you know, having some sympathy for the challenges that that sort of media environment presents for media members. It's a tricky thing all the way around, you know? Yeah. Maybe there's some cynicism too. Like he has to have some skeletons in his closet. No one can possibly be so blemish free.

Maybe there's a sort of like a, not that he's projecting an image necessarily as like, I'm a great guy or anything. It's mostly you hear from other people. They're not even saying he's the greatest guy in the world or anything. It's just you don't hear anything negative or you didn't used to. Yeah. And so maybe there is some sort of, why is he so secretive? He didn't want us to know his dog's name.

What else is he hiding? Right? So there's probably a little bit of that going on as well. Yeah. I'm sort of, why is he so secretive? He didn't want us to know his dog's name. What else is he hiding, right? So, there's probably a little bit of that going on as well. Yeah, I guess, and I get that, but I also am like, I don't know. The conclusion that a person isn't perfect is so uninteresting because it's so obvious, the conclusion. Of course he's not perfect. He's a human being. You think, yeah. Of course he's not perfect. He's a human being. Like, by definition, there's

gonna be flaw there and it's about, you know, its particular contours and its magnitude. But like, yeah, he's a guy. He's a human guy. Like, yeah, he's gonna be, because like, you know, who among us, right? Even people who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how they can be like the best version of themselves are gonna goof on some level and again like we could find out at the end of all of this investigation that like he was the one who bet and he set up epay and also he spit on the hat that he gave to fans like sure like there's any number of permutations. Not even his signature. He had someone else sign it. Sure, pile that on there too. And I don't, I'm not trying to stake a claim to, you know, a particular understanding of this guy as a human being.

I don't know him, you know, but I just, I do find the, at points, glee, at other times, just like very willing acceptance of this counter narrative of him to be interesting you know i'm not saying it's even necessarily a bad thing but it is a surprising thing to me because i i thought we were all mostly on on one side of this and then it seems like there's a more fractious position around him that i was maybe appreciating which might just be a failure of my own understanding you know maybe it's not interesting at all. Maybe it's just, you know, me, Meg, not gauging this stuff right. That's totally possible. I don't know, man. But here we are talking about whether talk means meat. And it's like, I don't know.

Okay. I have a few emails here. This one, Michael says, I'm rewatching Moneyball. And I'm struck by the coincidence of the Mariners tying the all-time wins record in 2001 and the A's from the same division having a book and movie-worthy season one year later. My question is, which season do you think will be remembered longer, the 116-win Mariners or the Moneyball A's? I am going to try to have my cake and eat it too with my answer to this. I think that the actual season itself, probably the 116 win season. But in terms of the, and my answer might've been different if like the A's had won the World Series in the

Moneyball year, but they famously did not do that. But in terms of like the impact of the kind of understanding of team building and value, then the Moneyball team, because like we can't remember the Moneyball A's better than the 116-win Mariners because, for instance, they did in fact have good starting pitching that year, you know? Yeah, we misremember the Moneyball A's when it comes to who is actually on the team. Exactly. But yeah, when I think of Moneyball A's or when I say Moneyball A's, I'm not even necessarily speaking or thinking of the 2002 A's specifically. Same, yes.

I'm just thinking of that whole period from late 90s to maybe mid-2000s, right? That cast of characters and just the philosophy, the approach to baseball. So that will certainly be enduring. And that is better known now by a wide measure than the fact that the Mariners had a really record-setting season, too. The other thing that hurts the Mariners, of course, is that they did not win the World Series. Right. And so when people talk about the best teams of all time,

they don't come up the same way that they would if they had gone all the way and if that had been the first Mariners pennant and the first Mariners World Series. And that didn't happen. They just got knocked out, and they got knocked out by the Dynasty Yankees, too, or I guess the about-to-be-at-the-end-of-the-dynasty Yankees. And so I think in that sense, they're kind of discounted.

And then a lot of those players scattered to the winds, like the Tower of Babel builders, and went elsewhere in short order. builders and went elsewhere in short order. And so I think for those reasons, yeah, we talk about the Mariners whenever someone's on pace maybe to match or exceed them. And that will continue to be the case as long as they hold the record. Now, if that record gets exceeded, well, they'll still show up forever on leaderboards for the foreseeable, conceivable future when you're talking about most regular season wins. But especially, I think, as people prioritize the playoffs more and more and more, even since that Mariners team played,

I think probably that achievement has lost a little luster just because nowadays, even though it is even more subject to randomness than it was then when Billy Beatton said it was a crapshoot. Now it's just if you don't win in the playoffs, if you're not a World Series winner, then who are you? Why should I care? You know, people just have discounted the regular season sort of sadly in my mind. Yeah, I think that that's right.

But yeah, I mean, we don't, I mean, you and I remember the actual team itself, Yeah, I mean, we don't, I mean, you and I remember the actual team itself, but the degree to which the general public misunderstands that Moneyball team in terms of who was on it is like wild. And I can appreciate, I'm less bothered by it in the movie, because it's like, you know, there's a narrative, you're making a movie, you know, you want it to somewhat resemble real life, but you're making a movie and there's a narrative that you need to construct. But yeah, like the fact that people just like do not remember the rotation on that team at all. Like, you know, Ben, Ben? Miguel Tejada. He was pretty good. Eric Chavez. Remember him? Yeah. Yeah. Ben? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, anyway. And I guess the A's are like, there's the winning streak in the movie, which, but even that has been exceeded. So, I don't know how memorable that is either. So, yeah.

Book, movie, philosophy, concept. Absolutely. Absolutely. More famous, more enduring. Yes. But specific roster. Not so much. And, you know, it'll be interesting to see sort of how we interact with that over time as like, you know, they don't, they're no longer the Oakland A's for one. They're not in California at some point, theoretically, you know, assuming. And I think that when you talk about sort of the modern, like, exemplars of teams that are very smart, I don't know that we talk about Oakland like that anymore, right?

Like, we talk about them as perpetually under-resourced, the size of their staff relative to other staffs is quite small. And I'm not trying to knock the people who do work for the team, but it's just like they aren't at the front line of that anymore, right? Like the end of that movie told us why, right? You take teams that have actual financial resources, you show them a way to run a team like this, they're going to do that. And then all of a sudden, when we talk about the smartest teams in baseball, it's going

to be like the Dodgers. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see sort of how that stuff sort of changes over time and new generations, like just don't interact with that, that whole concept the same way anymore, right? Because they don't remember, they don't remember any of those guys' careers, you know, we're just like old now. And speaking of being old, we're not quite as old as Joey Votto. We got a question from Jacob, Patreon supporter, who sent a link to Joey Votto tweeted out back in mid-March a handwritten lengthy note reflecting on his previous comments about Canadian baseball. And this was written in cursive. And so Jacob wondered, how many MLB players do you think can and would currently express themselves longish form in cursive? What year do you imagine will be the first season this number would be zero?

So is this Joey Votto being a 40-year-old man and writing in cursive? Because cursive kind of has fallen out of favor. We're not quite as old as Joey Votto, but in the same range. If you were to write out a long kind of apology reflection on your previous comments about something, what would you write in or would you type it or would you print or some hybrid or what? I would probably type it. I don't have bad handwriting, but it's not like my penmanship isn't like incredible. Mostly I'm a terrible speller. like incredible. Mostly I'm a terrible speller. And so having the benefit of spellcheck would probably push me toward an electronic medium so that I don't, you know, embarrass myself because I'm just such a, I'm such a poor speller. But yeah, I don't know. Do they teach cursive in

school anymore? Well, so it's no longer part of the common core curriculum. Okay. It has been kind of phased out. I don't think it is not taught anywhere. Right. But it is, certainly it has fallen out of favor. I was looking up various links about this and surveys and such. And this was from 2013. And in 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by a publisher of cursive textbooks. Oh, wow.

I don't know if that biases the responses at all, but only 37% wrote in cursive, another 8% printed. The majority, 55%, wrote a hybrid, some elements resembling print writing, others resembling cursive. And that was handwriting teachers who were themselves shunning cursive. Got it. And I think that it is just, it has, it's not really taught, like Gen Z would not know cursive mostly or would not have been taught. Got it.

2010 was when cursive was omitted from the Common Core standards for K-12. And, of course, handwriting of any kind is a little less common, what with typing. Right. So, yeah, I'm guessing that it's still quite common among people Joey Votto's age. Yes. But your younger players who are coming up now,

probably not, for the most part, cursive writers. Yeah, but I had to do do like, you know, sheets. I had to do, I had to do cursive sheets, which was like a, it was supposed to, like, it's a speed thing, right? Because you don't pick up your pen, so you're supposed to be able to write faster. Yeah. I mean, you pick up your pen between words, obviously, but. Right.

My cursive is kind of calligraphy. It's very ornate. My wife makes fun of me for my cursive. I think she thinks it's not good handwriting. What occasions have you had to write in cursive where Jessie has been like, that's trash, Ben. She doesn't... I don't know that she would say it quite like that. No, probably she wouldn't put it like that.

But no, it is... It's very Baroque. It's very... I don't know. she would say it quite like that. No, probably she wouldn't put it like that. Probably not. But no, it's very Baroque. It's very, I don't know, it's very elaborate. And I think it's neat, but it is probably less legible than it could be if you're not familiar with my quirks as a cursive writer. So if I write, and rarely do I actually pick up a pen or pencil and write with it these days. And occasionally when I do, and I am called upon to write cursive or I decide to write cursive, I will briefly forget how to do, like, how do I do a capital I again? Oh, yeah. Okay. That's how you do it. I almost have to trace it out as if it's not totally muscle memory anymore.

I'm just- Yeah, it's probably not. No, I'm like drawing it as much as I'm writing. And so when I print, I do tend to just do like block lettering, like if I'm writing a check or something now, which I don't know, maybe that looks like what a little kid would do, but I feel like it's the neatest. It's just the most legible. And so if I'm not writing a personal correspondence or something, I'm just writing a check or signing something. Well, if I signed something, I still do cursive, but otherwise I'm just trying to make it as clear and simple as I can. And so, yeah, rarely do I write by hand anymore. And even more rarely do I use cursive. But I still can because I was taught to.

But if my daughter, for instance, will she be taught cursive? Probably not. Probably not, right? So, yeah, I don't know exactly where the cutoff is. But, like, if 2010 is when it's omitted from the Common Core and that was K K-12. And if you were still in school in 2010, like you're going to be an older big leaguer at this point. So, yeah, I mean, probably it is, I would guess the majority of players would not

or perhaps even could not do this. I don't know whether Joey Votto is like the last of the cursive ballplayers. Probably not. Probably there's someone younger out there. And also autographs, right? Sure. Because autographs are usually, would you call them cursive?

Usually they're just- Signatures. They're a squiggle. Right, yeah. Hardly even letters, really. They're just sort of a personal stamp. But in theory, they're kind of cursive. There are some players who still do cursive signatures. Well, and I suppose that we should allow for the fact that I don't know if the educational standards around this stuff are the same in Canada as they are in the U.S. And I don't know what they are abroad. Or, yeah, Latin America or wherever else if you're learning to

write English at all. So, you know, our slice of it is narrow to the domestic amateur up through pro population. But, yeah, I mean, like, I don't know that I would remember how much more cursive do I remember than calculus? Meg thinks.

I don't know. It might take a little while for the rust to get off both things. But yeah, I don't know. I probably handwrite things more often than you do because as we have discussed, I keep a paper planner. Right. Writing things down, I have found is useful for me for memory retention, like the actual physical act of writing it down rather than just putting it in a Google calendar. But yeah, my signature looks terrible. When do I write checks? I don't pay my rent via check. The neighborhood cat sitter prefers to be paid via check because she's in high school and she wanted to get experience casaching them, which I just found to be the most charming thing I've ever heard in my entire life, you know? Yeah. I wonder if she can even read your

cursive signature on the check. She's probably like, who signed this? I have no idea. But yeah, I do wonder. But as I said, I would opt for typing for spelling purposes, not legibility, although people might appreciate the increased legibility also. Okay. Well, I'm going to say he's not the last one. No. And I'm going to say the first season when no one will write in cursive. Man, there are so many, I mean, there are more than a thousand players, a good deal more than a thousand players. Yeah.

They come from all parts of the world and different backgrounds and different exposures to writing. So, who the heck knows? Yeah, their educational experiences are going to be pretty variable. Yeah, there might be some stragglers long after you'd think that everyone would have forgotten the fine art of cursive writing. But I don't know. I'll say 2042. Sure.

Okay. Yeah, sure. All right. Question from Grant, who says, I was watching the Rangers and Cubs opening day game. 42. Sure. Okay. Yeah, sure. Alright, question from Grant, who says, I was watching the Rangers and Cubs opening day game in which a Rangers season ticket holder of 49 years, Michael Carter, threw out the

first pitch to Pudge Rodriguez. The man was advanced in years and Pudge had to signal him to throw the ball no fewer than eight times before he finally threw the ball. This raises the question, if someone selected to throw a ceremonial first pitch, went up with the intention of delaying the game as long as possible, how long could they do it? How much would this change based on who is on the mound?

Why would they do that? I don't know. We've entertained the hypothetical of like like what if the first pitch counted? Yeah, yeah. What if it wasn't ceremonial or what if like you had a celebrity pitcher who you brought in to throw an actual pitch at some point? But this is just, no, we don't want any pitches to count. We don't want the umpire to say play ball. We're just stalling for some reason.

How much would this change based on who is on the mound? Season ticket holder, B-list celeb, former player, A-list celeb, Taylor Swift, former POTUS, Vin Scully, the late Vin Scully at a Dodgers game. Are there any strategies, stretching, faking injuries, et cetera, that could prolong the delay? Finally, what would be the process for removing said person from the field to get the game underway? So the maximum you're looking at is disrupting the broadcast window

because I think they get pretty persnickety about that. That's why you end up with random seeming first pitch times where you're like, why is this first pitch at like 112? That's so weird. And it's almost always like a broadcast thing. I think that if you're a season ticket holder, they're moving you through fast. They don't, that's probably not something they care as much about. Even a longstanding one, your rope is probably pretty short. And then they get the big hook out, you know, and they're like, eh. I think that your biggest time waster potential comes with a former player who's a Hall of Famer, you know. You're not Russian Randy Johnson out there, you know. He gets to take as long as he wants before a D-backs first pitch, right? But I think, you know your your

b-list celebrity is like why but you would you would wanna you i think you'd want to get it over with is the thing like your your incentives as the first pitch thrower if you're not a former player are very much aligned with getting out of there quick because what if you mess up like you don't want to overthink it you're gonna like go throw out of the plate you know so i think at most a couple of minutes at that point you probably have some nice young person in a headset who comes out there and it's like all right we gotta yeah you gotta move it along here friend right if it if it kept going yeah then you'd have the the dodgers security team going out there and physically removing you from the mound. You just, like, didn't have a meeting before the season started to be like, okay, here's what we're going to offer. Here's, like, the tone we're going to have. You know, I just, I don't, who knows? It could have been, like, a renegade, like, security person. But you just just, you gotta have that planned out in advance.

You know, we need some Shohei continuity planning. Yeah. You know, Shohei's gonna hit some homers at some point or you certainly hope so. What if this is the last one he ever hits? What if it's the- Then it would be very valuable, I would imagine. Yeah. What if it was the very last one?

What if there's now a curse or a jinx or something? When he gets banned from baseball for lying about having met with the fans. Yeah, I think if you are very famous and beloved, then you'd have a tough time getting the person off there. At some point, at some point, the fans

would turn on you too. Now it would take a long time. They want to watch a baseball game. Right. Now if you're Taylor Swift, now of course Taylor Swift being present at sporting events does piss off a certain sort of person, but most people... Makes a certain kind of person hear a noise that only dogs can hear.

Actually, that's not kind. Dogs are nice. Yeah. Right. But if it's someone who has a high approval rating, then it would take some time. But eventually it would be like has a high approval rating, then it would take some time. But eventually it would be like the pitcher in the olden days who would keep throwing over to first base and not throwing the real pitch.

You'd get booed. You would get booed. Yeah. So I don't know how many delays it would take for the crowd to turn on you if you're a beloved figure. But yeah, if you're a former president, what if you're an active president? What if you're the current president of the United States and for whatever reason, you're out there just refusing to throw the first pitch? What are they going to do? You're the president. Right. I love the idea that given our current environment, that there wouldn't just be lusty boos from the very beginning. Well, yeah, those are separate scenarios, to be clear.

The super popular person and the president's not necessarily one and the same, but they wield a lot of authority. And so if they refuse to vacate the mounds, well, what are you going to do, you know? So maybe if it's just like someone no one knows, because often it's a season ticket holder, it's someone who did something charitable. And it's still awkward because they announce you usually over the PA and they maybe put your name up on the big board out there. And so if you just went out there and refused to throw, are they going to just cart you out of there, just physically pick you up if you refuse to leave? That would be fantastic.

cart you out of there, just physically pick you up if you refuse to leave. That would be fantastic. At some point they would because you're not famous. But if you are famous and beloved, then I think you could stall for quite some time. Like what if you fake a Charlie horse or something? Oh, okay. Yeah, you fake an injury? Yeah, they're like bringing out the trainer and they're bringing out the cart or stretcher or something.

You're waving them off. No, no, I'm going to get up. I'm going to do it. You know, I'm going to gut my way through this first pitch. You could keep that going for quite a while, that act, I think. But, you know, I'm talking minutes. I'm talking five minutes max before everyone starts to realize this is really strange. five minutes max before everyone starts to realize this is really strange. And maybe there would be almost sort of like a surreal performance art aspect to this that people would appreciate.

It would be almost like the players like doing the staring contest before during the national anthem. Or maybe it would be sort of similar where at some point everyone would realize like the person was doing a bit. similar where at some point everyone would realize the person was doing a bit and then everyone would have their phones out documenting the bit and then maybe even rooting for the bit. Maybe at first you'd be like, let's get the show on the road here, but then you'd be like, no, this is

actually more interesting than the game. This is a social experiment now. Yeah. I've been thinking about the former president who throws out first pitches at Rangers games the most often and searching for a joke about refusing to vacate territory that doesn't belong to him. But I haven't been able to find a snappy version, you know? I don't have my type 10 yet. Yeah. Okay. I don't need emails about that. Sorry. Alex Patriot says, do you think there'd be value in a pitcher who can consistently throw from multiple different arm slots?

Yes. Would that even? Yeah. Yes. Next question. Sorry. Would that even be possible for a pitcher to develop such a skill at the professional level? Or do you think there would be too much injury risk with an experiment like this?

slider and a curve from over the top, three quarters, and sidearm to essentially make their arsenal six to nine pitches by being able to throw each pitch from each arm slot, changing the speed and movement from each arm slot. Oh, wow. What do you think? The most valuable pitcher in baseball. Yeah. I thought we had answered a hypothetical on these lines once. I couldn't find it, but if we did, apologies.

Yeah. But yeah, I think if you could do that, that'd be immensely valuable because it would make you so much more unpredictable and a certain sort of deceptive. Because I don't know what percentage of the familiarity effect in times through the order effect being able to anticipate someone's release point is and being able to lock your eyes in on that spot where the ball is going to be so you can track it from the get-go. I don't know how much that makes up of the familiarity effect versus, say, just knowing what your stuff looks like and knowing what your pitch type tendencies are, et cetera. But it's got to be a meaningful part of it, I would think. And this would be an uncomfortable plate appearance for hitters, I think. You know how I'm the one-man crusade against saying at bat for everything instead of plate appearance?

So when people say, that'd be an uncomfortable at bat, I'm going to say that'd be an uncomfortable plate appearance because you don't know whether it will be in a bat. You might get hit, you might get walked, and then it won't turn out to have been in a bat at all. We've talked about this before, but just so people notice, in contexts where people might normally say at bat, I always try to inject plate appearance into the conversation. It's not always preferable. It's not always applicable, but very often it is.

That's a side note. I'm just saying this would be very valuable if you could do it. I don't even know if it would be an injury risk so much as it would just be tough to have control. Repeatability is a watchword. I don't know how important it is, whether it's overstressed, but it is something that coaches talk about a lot,

that players talk about a lot. You want to repeat your delivery. It can be sort of deceptive, I guess, if you repeat your delivery really well and you throw different pitches. So your fastball delivery looks like your changeup delivery. Then that's good if they look more identical, I suppose. And so you wouldn't want to make this such that

one arm slot would map onto one pitch probably because that might actually backfire, right? Yes. So I think this is contingent on can you throw – Being able to throw multiple from the same slot but having different slots. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's pretty important. And that's tough because it's tougher to throw certain pitches from certain arm slots. But if you could do it without hurting yourself,

then I think it would be very valuable. Yes, I agree. I agree. It's also just a really cool thing, officially. Maybe in part because of the uniformity of deliveries these days, and we mostly don't even get wind-ups anymore. We get everyone going from the stretch. And just like as a kid, when David Cohen would drop down and throw the Laredo fastball blue by you,

like that was kind of cool. Or when Clayton Kershaw drops down sometimes, that was briefly an obsession of Jeff Sullivan's, as I recall. It's nice when that happens. All right, last question. This comes from Carter, who says, this was prompted by San Diego's 1-0 win over Team Korea in an exhibition in South Korea before the Padres-Dodgers series.

So the Padres won 1-0. And Carter, Patreon supporter, says, I thought about this some and considered the possibility that this could actually be a very difficult matchup for the Padres. some and considered the possibility that this could actually be a very difficult matchup for the Padres. Presumably, they have no history facing any of Korea's pitchers. Perhaps there are exceptions like from the WBC or Hasan Kim. And the team may not have bothered to provide advanced scouting information to the players for this exhibition game. It's more like an amateur team playing complete unknown but comparably strong opposition where they have to figure out what they're facing as the game unfolds. This made me consider the following hypothetical. On opening day, a new MLB team appears of entirely new players never seen before with 40-man replacements if needed

and is inserted into the schedule. This team is a true talent 500 team, equal in strength to existing MLB teams in terms of skill, but teams have no advanced scouting information on the team whatsoever to start the year. The new team, by the way, advanced scouting, not advanced scouting. I know that can be confusing because the advanced scouting can be advanced also, but advanced as in it's an advance of facing. I knew what you meant of facing. Yeah. Yeah. I knew what you meant, Ben. Yes.

I knew what you meant. The new team, however, does have advanced scouting information on all existing teams. Presumably other teams would start to build advanced scouting profiles on the new team as the season progressed. How much of an advantage would this new team possess over their competition and how long would it last? Please ignore scheduling imbalances from 31 teams, or consider two new teams instead. Okay, so this team appears out of nowhere. It's a true talent, 500 MLB team, but no one knows any of these players, so no one has a book on them, but they have the book on everyone else. So they have all the traits and the tendencies and the video and the data, but no one else has that on them. So this question is essentially how valuable are scouting reports and advanced scouting reports

specifically? I think you'd have an advantage for a while. I don't quite know how long, because you'd also be playing in big league ballparks. So you'd be generating data. So you'd be able to go off of that. But I, you know, I do think that advanced scouts pick up on stuff that is useful. We hear I feel like we hear about that every year, you know, during the World Series where it's like, you know, they send their advanced team and then and like I know people who that's what they do in October, you know, they end up going and advancing potential playoff opponents before they face them. So there's I don't know how many games though. I don't know how many games I would put on it. But I think it, you know, would have some kind of advantage if you knew about other people's tendencies, and they didn't know anything about yours. I mean, like at some point in the middle of a game, they're going to be like, yeah, here's what he's throwing. You know, like, you know that kind of quickly, but like being able to really dig in on it

probably takes some more data and information. And so, yeah, you'd have some kind of advantage for a little while, I would think. Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it might be substantial at first. And there is something that every fan base complains about how its team doesn't hit well against rookie pitchers. I wrote an article more than 10 years ago now for Baseball Prospectus headlined, Internet commenters complain about how their teams can't hit rookie pitchers. And I found a comment for every team or virtually every team complaining that their team doesn't

hit well against rookie pitchers. And I don't think there's really anything to that on the whole. I mean, there may be some familiarity effect, but it's not like every rookie pitcher is amazing, obviously. Well, and it's not like you don't have any information about them either. Well, yeah, now. Yeah, especially now you have more information than ever. You have video and data. You might have almost the same quality of information in some cases because you've got StatCast info on upper miners. You've got video. It's not quite the same, but you got a lot at your disposal. So I think there is maybe a myth or it's a bit blown out of proportion how much that matters. But I think it would really matter in this case where everyone is a complete enigma and a cipher and you know nothing.

Because you wouldn't even know what pitches they throw. You would have no idea where to pitch the hitters. you would have no idea where to pitch the hitters. Right. And there may be some players who don't really consult the scouting reports that much or at least don't apply them and they just say, I'm going to stick with my strengths and I'm going to do my thing as opposed to familiarizing myself with my opponent's weaknesses and targeting them. It's probably usually a bit of both, as it should be.

But you would really be completely in the dark here. And I think if this team is a true talent 500 team, and they know everything about everyone else, and no one knows anything about them, yeah, yeah, I mean, impressive that they managed to magic a major league team just out of thin air that's this competitive. Yeah. But I'm going to say this 81-win true talent team will instead be an 85-win team. Okay. I don't know. Sure. Something like that maybe.

Sure. Yeah. Be a real difference. And that's baking in the fact that teams will learn about them as the season goes on. Now, if you told me that somehow they have the men in black neuralyzer and they wipe away the memory of every other team as the season goes on, I might even go higher if it's not, if you get to gather data on them, then the effect would wear off fairly quickly because you'd have video. You'd at least know what the pitcher's stuff is like. It would take a while to determine where to pitch the hitters, let's say. But with StatCast stats, you get a pretty good small sample read on those things.

So I think the effect would wear off fairly quickly. So yeah, I'm going to go with with 85. Sure. Sounds reasonable. Sure. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. I really hope we will not have to talk next week about Spencer Strider, who after a four inning ineffective start in which he suffered some velocity loss, complained of elbow discomfort on Friday, and will have an MRI this weekend. If you want to know what I think about that, check out what I wrote or said this week,

or almost any week. Just rinse, repeat, pitcher injuries. They're the worst. I wish to unsubscribe from the UCL scourge. Here's hoping for a clean MRI, but how can one ever be confident about these things? I feel like this is the Old Testament God still screwing with us. We will give you these incredibly talented pitchers that you can't wait to watch, but they're throwing too hard. They're getting too many hitters out. They're too exciting to see. And so I will

give them one weak point, a ligament in their elbow that cannot stand up to the strain so that they will be brought low and scattered over the face of the earth. The UCL, basically a biblical plague at this point for baseball fans, the most maddening part of human anatomy. By the way, last time I was talking about how I used to think that mizeled or micelled was a word because I read the word misled, and in my head, it sounded like it would be mizeled or micelled. A number of listeners said that they had had the same experience. Well, there's a word for that sort of word, and it is, in fact, a mizel.

They're book words. They're words you know or you think you know, but you probably read them before you heard them said and their spelling is ambiguous or maybe misleading. And so you get misled. You get misled by misled. So you hear them differently than they're supposed to be said. And so linguists, language people, grammar nerds, they've dubbed them misles because that misunderstanding that I had and that some other listeners had is an incredibly common one. It's kind of the archetypal example. So that's cool. I'll drop a link on the

show page if you're interested in reading more about that. And if you're interested in supporting Effectively Wild on Patreon, well, there's a link for that too. You just got to go to patreon.com slash effectively wild, as have the following five listeners who have already signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount and help us keep the podcast going. Help us keep it ad free. Get themselves access to some perks. Yakov, Thomas Leslie, Cam Kane, Patrick Vance, and Jason Jamnick. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only.

Monthly bonus episodes. Playoff live streams. Disc on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and prioritized email answers. I could keep going, but instead, I will refer you once more to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site right there. You don't even have to go anywhere else. But if you're not, you can still contact us via email. Send your questions and comments to podcast at fancrafts.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.com slash group slash effectively wild.

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and we will be back to talk to you next week. Les avis pétantes et super, une fête Je pense que c'est effectivement cool Je pense que c'est effectivement wild Effectivement sauvage Effectivement sauvage