Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2267: The Breakout Breakdown

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley rant about the practice of picking “breakout” players who have already broken out, react (22:20) to the Orioles’ Charlie Morton signing and discuss (38:24) Morton as one of the pitchers who best embodies his era, and answer listener emails (52:14) about whether the existence of the minor leagues suggests that […]

With Ben Lindberg and Meg Raleigh Come for the ball and the banter's free Baseball is a simulation It's all just one big conversation Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2267 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fan Crafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fan Crafts.

Hello Meg. Hello. I didn't think I could like multi-time Effectively Wild guest Brent Rooker any more than I already do, but he tweeted just this past weekend, he quote tweeted an MLB network tweet, which highlighted Lawrence Butler's breakout, I would say breakout 2024. And it provides his stats in the last 73 games of the 2024 season, 302 average, 597 slugging percentage, 20 homers, 40 extra base hits, 943 OPS. And the tweet by MLB network says, 24 year old slugger, Lawrence Butler,

is a breakout candidate to watch in 2025. Eyes emoji. Eyes emoji. Brent Rooker of the now Sacramento Ace and occasionally of the Effectively Wild Podcast, when he deigns to join us, he quote tweeted and said, Sacramento Ace and occasionally of the Effectively Wild podcast, when he deigns to join us, he quote tweeted and said, guys, if we're not counting what he did in 2024 as a breakout,

then I'm not really sure what qualifies. Could not agree more because I don't know if this is my pet peeve, but it's up there. I have a number of peeves. I have a multitude of peeves. There's a whole hierarchy of peeves. There's major peeves, a number of peeves. I have a multitude of peeves. There's a whole hierarchy of peeves. There's major peeves, there's lesser peeves. This is among the more major of my peeves. You're just doing peeve. You're not doing pet peeve. You're not doing major pet peeve. Does pet make it small?

Pet makes it big. Pet makes it like, this is my major peeve. This is, I think, right? Do you think that pet is duplicative with major? Isn't pet peeve meant to indicate a minor peeve sort of by definition? It's a minor peeve, but it bugs you more maybe. Like if you said something was a pet peeve, I would think that bugs you more than just a peeve. Now, people don't typically say that's a peeve. Often, they use pet in conjunction with peeve. But to me, I think that signifies that this is something that really gets your goat. And- LS. So many animals involved in this whole thing. Surprising. CB. The goat is a pet in this scenario.

LS. They are small relative to other, you know, hoofed, hoofed, are they hoofed? Are they ungulates? I'm taking this so far afield. It's kind of like a goat that got away. But anyway, so you are peeve to some degree. Classification of goats is probably somebody's peeve or pet peeve. But yeah, this bugs me when people just call something a breakout or they have a breakout candidate. I'm sure I've talked about this before at some point, but the situation has not improved as far as I can tell. We have to stop using the term breakout as liberally

or as we do, or set the bar as low as we do for what constitutes a breakout, you cannot claim breakout. Lawrence Butler, by any definition, any reasonable definition, he broke out. He had his breakout already. Brent Rooker is right. And Brent Rooker, he's just standing up for his teammate. I'm sure it's the modern day bash brothers, Rooker and Butler, but hopefully he would agree that this is consistent. Like if someone had predicted that Brent Rooker was a breakout candidate a year ago, let's say, I probably would have objected to that too, because he was an

all star in 2023, that was his breakout in my mind. You can't be a breakout candidate in the year following your first All-Star appearance. I don't think you can. Now can you break out multiple times? People could quibble. Brent Rooker, maybe he had two consecutive breakouts. He clearly raised his game to an even higher level after what I would call his breakout, but I just wouldn't term that a breakout in my mind.

This is, you know, he improved certainly. He reached a new level. He leveled up. He has new gear. He established himself as one of the game's young stars, you know, like. I would maybe quibble with young too, but. Wow.

Okay, see like. Butler, yes. Here I am tastefully forgetting his birthday both times. We've talked to or about him lately. You're just insisting upon welcoming him into the you're squarely in your 30s club, but okay. Yeah. But I just have this problem every year and we're heading into breakout season when people provide their breakout picks for the upcoming year. And I just, I beg of people to please, please put a little thought into things

and do not predict that someone will break out based on the fact that they already broke out. Now, I'm sure if you said that Lawrence Butler is a breakout candidate, what you're really saying, I guess, is that, okay, what he did for roughly half a season, he will do it for a whole season. That's probably what you're saying. Okay, if you want to say that he'll be better,

he'll sustain his breakout, it will prove repeatable, however you want to term that, fine, but you cannot call that a breakout. He was one of the best hitters in baseball for like the last few months of the season. Come on. That's not even the most egregious one. And I have a whole G chat thread with RJ Anderson

cause we constantly commiserate over this, the writer for CBS sports. And I believe that RJ is the only true breakout pick maker. He is the only person who abides by my, and our mutual definition of what constitutes a breakout. He's going for obscure players, players who have not already been good or performed at an elite level, frankly, for an extended stretch.

And this is all somewhat subjective and squishy. I get that. There's no hard and fast definition, but RJ, when he makes his annual breakout picks, I haven't heard of a lot of them. That should be the standard. They should be obscure. They should be obscure. They should be guys who've been scuffling around for a while. They should be guys who've been stuck in the minors.

They should be like non-roster invitees. They should be just generic veterans who you think are somehow really going to unlock something and reach a level of stardom that they've never even snipped before. It should not be what it so often is, which is like last year's top prospect, basically. Sometimes even the current years. Come on. I mean, by some definition, I guess you could call it a breakout if they haven't done it in the big leagues before, but who is that helping to predict that like a number one pick is going to be good? Okay, great. Or it's someone, you can't even call them a post-hype sleeper, like someone who, you

know, if you had said that Jirxen Profar was going to break out in 2024, let's say, as a guy who is a top prospect and then he was around, he was hanging around for years and he was an okay player at times, but he'd never reached stardom. And you could say he broke out in 2024. Fine. But most people, they don't wait until the guy has been around for several seasons. Like mlb.com, I don't want to single out any names here.

I'm not after anyone specific, but mlb.com just published a group post, each team's breakout player for 2025. RJ sent this to me, of course. And some of them are just, you got to be kidding me. So the Orioles breakout pick is Jackson Holliday. Come on. Shut the front door. What?

Jackson Holliday? Come on. He was the number one pick in base, number one, I mean, yeah, number one pick and number one prospect. I get that he did not have a good rookie season, but come on, this is not a breakout candidate if he sucks for six more seasons and you're saying, okay, finally it's going to click and it's going to all come together. Okay, fine. Not now. Not now. The Rays breakout candidate is Junior Kamenero. What?

Who was also the number one prospect in baseball last year. Just because he's going to be an everyday player now. He wasn't even bad. He hit fine. He was like an above average player. Okay, maybe you're saying he's going to be a star now or something, but that does not constitute a breakout. The Red Sox breakout pick, brace yourself for this. It's Garrett Crochet. What the, wait a minute. Garrett Crochet is the breakout player. So many times people are sheepish about this. When they do this, they know they're being bad. They know this is not what anyone wants from them. And so the blurb for Garrett Crochet, I'm not naming names, you can find this if you want.

There's a, it starts with this sentence. There's a temptation to say Crochet already had his breakout season last year. A temptation. He did. Succumb to the temptation. That is exactly what happened. He was an all-star.

Okay, he was a white tracks all-star, but he was really good. He was an all-star. Okay, he was an all-star, but he was really good. He was like a top trade target at the deadline and over the off season. He was one of the best pitchers in baseball on a great basis. He was the best pitcher in baseball for the first few months of the season. And the blurb says, but there is more in the tank. Okay. I mean, maybe. Okay, but yeah, that's not that. Okay. That's not, he might, he might pitch more innings. Right. I guess conceivably, he could be even better. Don't rule out crochet elevating his game the way Tarek Scoobel did for

the Tigers last season. Sure. I won't rule it out, but that's not a breakout. He broke out. He already broke out. The Yankees breakout pick on this list is Austin Wells. Austin Wells just finished third in rookies here voting and arguably could have been higher. This is a guy who earned the starting job and was batting cleanup in the playoffs, which had more to do with the Yankees lineup than anything else, but he was a good player already. You cannot give me Austin Wells as a breakout candidate.

Please. I could go on and I will. Here's another one. I will. The A's pick was Lawrence Butler. I guess that's maybe where the tweet was sourced from potentially. Okay. Brace yourself for this one.

Mariners breakout pick. Do you want to guess? It can't be Julio. It's a Leo. Okay, brace yourself for this one. Mariners breakout pick. Do you wanna guess? It can't be Julio. It's a Leo. No, it's not! Julio Rodriguez. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was the rookie of the year.

He was an all-star. He had one of the more- He was like a popular MVP pick last year. Granted, he did not have an MVP caliber season. If you wanna say, like, comeback player, like, he did not have an MVP caliber season. If you want to say comeback player, he's a great player already. Wait, sorry, just to address that, you can't make him the comeback player of the year. You can't do it. No, I wouldn't do that either for you. That would be wild. But that's closer. I'd come closer to saying come back than breakout because he has already

broken out so he could come back from slumping, from having a down season, relatively speaking. And again, the self-conscious first sentence, though it might sound like a stretch to call a former AL Rookie of the Year award-winner, a two-time All-Star, and the face of the Mariners franchise, a breakout candidate, it sure does, it sure does. He has a hundred million dollar contract. What are we talking about?

So I'm gonna let you continue to be exasperated, but I just want to, you know, I just want to say, um, because people might be like, Hey, you're picking on your fellow writers. I'm going to pick on somebody else. This is an editor's failure. If I solicited amongst our staff, give me your breakout picks for the season and somebody turned in Julio, I'd be like, no, you need to pick someone else. It cannot be a guy who was literally the picks for the season. And somebody turned in Julio. I'd be like, no, you need to pick someone else. It cannot be a guy who was literally the rookie of the year. And so I'm sorry if it is a person we know, I'm sorry if it is a person I don't know,

I'm sure you were busy, you know, we're all coming back from the holidays. We're trying to, we're trying to get through this first full week of work for a lot of us. I get it. I have sympathy, but also have standards. Because what is the point of the exercise if the people you're naming are Garrett Crochet and literally Julio Rodriguez? Did the other Julio Rodriguez get traded to the Mariners and that's who you mean? No, no, no. The Rangers breakout pick is Wyatt Langford again, falls into the top prospect. Mets breakout pick, Francisco Alvarez.

You could make Wyatt Langford or Julio rather than come, you could say here are bounce back candidates, right? Cause like why Langford's up and down, Julio did that thing where he like wasn't hitting for the first half of the season and the first rolls were fine. But anyway, it was like, this wasn't the Julio they needed, right? And so if you want to do bounce back, fine, fine.

But you cannot, no, no, you cannot, no. The Nationals pick is James Wood. But you cannot, no, no, you cannot, no. The Nationals pick is James Wood. No. Their top prospect, like it even, it mentions that the Zips projection for Wood is that he'll like be the best hitter on the Nationals with a 127 OPS plus.

Like if you're just saying that the Zips projection, which is like the baseline outlook for him, will be better than he was, well, yeah, because he'll have a full season and he won't be a rookie. But like, no, I reject. The Pirates breakout pick is Jared Jones. Jared Jones, he broke out already. I get that like then he kind of ran out of steam.

And so, okay, maybe he won't run out of steam and maybe his curve ball will come along and he'll be even more elite than he was. But no. Okay. Oh my goodness. Oh no, I kept scrolling. The Diamondbacks breakout pick is Corbin Carroll.

I'm going to... These are just the best players on the team in many cases. Apologies to Ketel Marte, but this is another rookie of the year. He won rookie of the year. He also literally has a hundred million dollar contract. And he was bad at the start of last season and then he was great again. Oh my God. No. And he was bad at the start of last season and then he was great again. Like, no. If you want to, if like, was the prompt different where they asked like, who might be a little

bit better than they were or something? But no, because the blurbs acknowledged that the prompt was breakout and the blurb for Corbin Carroll starts with, it's a bit of a stretch to call Carol a breakout player. Then don't. Then don't. Then don't. Don't. You don't. No one's forcing you to.

I'm so upset. I didn't expect to be. Also goats are ungulates. I know everyone is really worried about that. Okay. They're ungulates. I can clarify that. Yeah.

Goats. I don't know if they're ruminators. Probably. Based on how they eat, they're probably ruminators. Those are different ones about hooves and the others about digestion. CB 1. The Reds breakout pick is Matt McLean. LS I thought you were going to say Hunter Green. CB 1. Ellie Nella Cruz. No, it's not McLean who missed 2024. So again, if you want to say come back or bounce back or something, okay. LS But he was an established big leaker.

CB 1. He was like a four-win player in 89 games as a rookie and finished fifth in rookie of the year voting. Some of what I'm about to say is undermined by the pics that you just read, which I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of my natural life. But I think what people often mean when they say break out is that this is a person who has broken through and quite often they'd mean to their notice, right? Quite often they're like, I bet a lot of people weren't watching the A's last year, so maybe they don't have an appreciation for how good Lawrence Butler's season was,

but then just say that. Under the radar or something. Yeah, if you wanted to say that. Exactly. Here are guys who you might not have noticed either because they're playing for teams that weren't contenders or because there are a lot of other stars who they're competing with for playing time or appreciation or whatever, whatever. But that would be a more accurate way of describing the whole project. But you can't, no, no, you got a piece of hardware from the league, you can't have a rookie of the year

be a break, what does that, it is rendered completely meaningless. I can't stand it. And I'm not even picking on anyone in particular because I'm picking on everyone. This is an industry-wide problem. This is endemic to this exercise of breakout picks. And that's why I've singled out RJ as the only good breakout picker.

I was moved to tweet about it. I gave him his flowers. I guess this was early last year. I never tweet anymore. I retweet. I did a fully original tweet where I just, I praised RJ for being the only good breakout candidate picker.

And by the way, I'm not saying that anyone should be good at picking breakouts because that's a really hard thing to do. I'm not saying like, how dare you not pick the breakout candidates. Correct guy. No one, yeah. I'm not expecting anyone to be good at this.

I'm just saying you got to give it a go. You got to at least pick someone who fits the definition of a breakout. And I'd rather not pick breakouts at all because I don't think I'm particularly good at that. If any of us had a great track record at doing this, we'd probably be working for a team or something. What would be more valuable? Does any of us actually have a demonstrated track record of being able to consistently identify breakouts before they break out? Probably not. I've had a few successes in the past when I've been forced to do that. But what value are you even adding? The idea here is I'll tell you something you don't know. I'll tell you about this player you might be sleeping on. Maybe it's a fantasy draft season and I'm giving you some, some hidden gems here, some,

some gold that's like, you know, you're panning for gold and here's what you're coming up with. If I'm just telling you someone who's already a star, a big name player, who's going to go in an early round, then I'm not providing any value whatsoever. Even if they do get better, it's not like they're going to fall to you. It's just going to be, oh yeah, my sneaky pick. I'm drafting Corbin Carroll. No one knows about him. What is the point of this exercise? And I'm a guy who makes chalky predictions and I don't really believe in making predictions just for the sake of standing out or getting attention or saying something controversial.

And you could say, well, what's the point if I'm asked to predict the playoff teams or something and I just kind of go down the line and pick like the consensus favorites, what is even the point of that? And we've had that conversation with Ben Clemens who has a slightly different philosophy. Like you should pick where you differ from the consensus. And I think that's reasonable enough if you want to add a little value that you're not getting from a projection system or something and you want to go against the grain a little. And it's more like a, I like this team better than the consensus, even if you're not literally saying that you think they're more

likely to make the playoffs or win the World series than the team that is favored to, maybe you're adding some wrinkles to this. But if you're just saying that an established star is a breakout candidate, then you're not even adding any value if someone wants value. So I recognize that this is hard to do well, and RJ spends a ton of time coming up with his candidates and they're super obscure and most of them don't hit, but he does decently well, like a third of them I think when he's gone back and seen like they fit some definition of, yeah, he broke out,

I would say. So he does a decent job of digging up some of these gems. You're just not going to get that if you pick a star or a top prospect. We all know about that. If you want to say improvement, like this player could improve, I think there's even more left in here. You could reach a new level. Fine. If you want to publish a list like that, then I'm not going to complain about that. But if you promise me breakouts, you got to give me breakout candidates and nobody does. And look, I, I having gone after a nameless editor as part of this, I will say we, we get a little squishy with it sometimes. Like I think Dan acknowledges that there are times where his list involves guys who haven't yet reached like the level of performance that say he or Zips expects of them, but that they are known quantities, right? Like he has had Hunter Green on lists like that for a while, but like he's not putting Julio on there,

you know? No, yeah. Right? Like he's not doing that because that's unhinged. I'm not saying you have to have been a bad player, but if you're predicting that, let's say an average player or a slightly above average player is a breakout candidate, then he better be a star. Like it better be a big leap from whatever that player's established baseline is. So if you're saying that a guy who is an all-star is a breakout candidate, then he better be

the MVP. And even then, I don't know that I would call him a breakout candidate, then he better be the MVP. And even then, I don't know that I would call him a breakout candidate so much as, you know, career year or he put it all together. We had that kind of career year breakout conversation on an episode not too long ago, I think. But yeah, this just, it's perpetually something that bothers me.

I've probably ranted about it before, but it's not improving and my rants will continue until the breakout picks improve. All right. Thanks to Brent Rooker for backing me up. And we should remember, goats are ungulates. The only notable transaction that has transpired since the last time we recorded is that the Orioles signed a starting pitcher. Hey, good for them. I don't want to pile on the Orioles because the last time we piled on the Orioles, we said, hey, go sign a starting pitcher. And then they did.

And so I want to congratulate them for doing that thing. Now they didn't break the bank for this starting pitcher. They didn't sign a pitcher trade for a pitcher at the top of the market. They acquired Charlie Morton on a one-year deal. It's a $15 million deal for a 41-year-old pitcher who remains productive. And I quite enjoy Charlie Morton's pitching and his whole career, which I'll get into at a slightly greater length in a second. But as for how this reflects on the Orioles, it's progress in isolation. It's a good addition, I think. I guess it doesn't really change the kind of core complaint about the Orioles, which is just like, go really splash some money around. Just go get someone at the top of the market, which

it's basically too late to do already. So unless they somehow sign Sasaki or manage to pry away an ace from someone else on the trade market, they've more or less missed the boat on the opportunities to really land a number one. Those opportunities were out there, at least in theory, though you never know. It takes two to tango. Corbin Burns seemed to want to be a Diamondback, so maybe that's not Baltimore's fault.

But they have played this conservatively. I guess we can say maybe conservatively is even the wrong word. I don't know. It's risky, if anything, to be as not free spending as they've been. Inert. And so, yeah, they've ended up with a rotation that is probably worse than last year or projects to be worse than last year's ended up being, which was I think a top 10 starting rotation by FanGraphsWAR as we noted recently. And it's kind of like

middling. They got Sugano, there's some questions about how well his stuff will translate at his age to MLB. And that was just short-term, fairly lowish dollar deal. And then they got Morton and Burns left and the holdovers. You know, I guess you've got Grayson Rodriguez, who at least theoretically has top of the rotation potential. He's maybe your best bet to give you that kind of performance if he stays healthy and breaks out. Can we call it a breakout if Grayson Rodriguez is a top of the rotation pitcher this year

or has it not been long enough since he was a top prospect? I don't know. The injury part of it clouds that for me with him because it's like, he wasn't available for a lot of it. I don't know. Other than that, you know, Zach Efflin, he's a good pitcher. Sure. But, you know, it's just kind of when the playoffs roll around based on what we know now, is that a rotation that is going to intimidate you? And I'm not going to say that they can't win a World Series with this rotation. Of course they could.

You could win a World Series with almost any rotation, as the Dodgers just proved. But in the Dodgers case, they had like eight other pitchers get hurt, and that's what they were left with. And it was just barely good enough given all of their other talent and depth. If you're going into the season with a rotation that the top three or so project to be about as good as the much diminished Dodgers rotation did last year, then it's not the greatest starting point given potential attrition. Obviously, you can make mid-season additions potentially too, but yeah,

it's not super exciting. LSF I think a couple of things. First of all, we should keep being snarky because the last time we were, they went and signed a pitcher. So maybe they'll keep going. Like maybe we're the, you know, providing the chutzpah, the prod, the, you know, real incentive. Elias is just like, please stop talking about my team in such a rude way. And so I'll sign a guy and look, Mike, we're not going to stop until you go get a different guy. I think that Morton is fine. I think that it is fine, but I think that this is a team that you want Charlie Morton to be the guy you sign who you're not counting on for innings.

CB Yeah. So it's like the 13th pitcher in the Dodgers rotation kind of deal. Maybe three or four of them will be healthy at the same time. We'll just keep stacking Paxton's and Kershaw's and whoever else. LS That's not to say that Morton is like certain to get hurt or that young pitchers canaws and whoever else. That's not to say that Morton is like certain to get hurt or that young pitchers can't get hurt themselves. He has been quite durable.

He threw 163 innings in 2023. He threw 165 innings last year. He threw 182 the year before that, but he's gonna be in his age 41 season. He is literally 41 just in terms of his human age when you're not worried about seasons. Does it improve their depth? Absolutely. Does it improve their rotation overall?

Yes. I don't know if it appreciably moves my understanding of the ceiling of that rotation and I don't know that it does a ton to change the floor either. So like, is that a weird thing to say having said that it made it better? Yeah, but it's like you want more because you have Gunnar Henderson, you have Jackson Holliday famously breakout candidate, you have this young cost control position player corps and as we've talked about, sometimes when you're in this like, you know, analytics beep-bop-boop

mood, you can miss the fact that sometimes under committing from a payroll perspective actually results in you under utilizing that cost control core, right? The point isn't to be cheap, it's to be flexible to use money that you might otherwise have to spend on paying Gunnar Henderson market rate to go get the guys to supplement Gunnar Henderson so that you can win, forget a World Series, a playoff series, right? Like that's where we need to be with this team. Now you're right, could they go out and win a World Series with this rotation as it's currently constituted?

Sure. But we know that for one thing, it probably won't be as it's currently constituted come October because pitchers get hurt sort of famously. And also why play on hard mode? Like go get some more guys. Now to their credit, they have all these young prospects. They have all these young, maybe not technically prospects anymore, but young position players. If the avenue they want to go is to consolidate some of that and go trade for an ACE, okay, but you got to do that. And you know, or the team you're trading with knows that you can't get what

you need in the free agent market. So maybe you end up paying a little bit of a premium. Now, if they signed Sasaki, do I think that they're a better team? Yeah. Is their ceiling appreciably higher? Yes, it is. Is their floor appreciably higher? That is also true. They still need more pitching. They just need more pitching. And some of that pitching doesn't have to be high-end frontline starter pitching. They need depth too. There are a lot of ways that they can improve this rotation, but they don't have like, I don't dislike Grayson. So it sounds like I'm going to, I'm like giving them the business, but like, I'm sorry. I don't think that Zach Efflin and Grayson Rodriguez are like the real, you need Corbin Burns and maybe not

exactly Corbin Burns. Unfortunately, he's a diamond back, at least for the Orioles purposes, but you need a guy of that caliber. And right now, they have a fine rotation and it can't really sustain any injuries at all. So there's that. The other thing I will say is that I've never felt like I had more in common with a baseball player in my entire life than Corbin Burns being like, I want to be Diamondback, so I don't have to move. He also had $200 million, so that probably helped. But it's like, yeah, dude, I get that. You don't even have to move during spring training.

You just get to be at home. Year round. Year round, get to be at home. I was on the road for like half of December, Ben. And I never wanna leave my house ever again. So anyway, all that to say, I think the Orioles should do more. I think that they are a good team. I think the fact that the only team that has really done a lot is the Yankees from a free

agency perspective makes it seem like the gap between these teams is narrower, that their position in the division is secure. But like the Red Sox did get better, the Yankees did get better. Did the Orioles get better from a pure projection perspective? I don't know if I think that they did. I don't know that there's that much. CB They were kind of replacing players who departed. They signed Tauro Anil, he's replacing Anthony Santander, right? And their rotation right now according to fan graphs, depth charts 25th in projected starting pitcher war. If you look at individual starting pitcher projections according to the depth charts, which is powered

by steamer, you have to go down to 45th before you reach an Oriole starter, Sac Eflin, at 2.6 war. So again, they could have a breakout. Someone could be better than that. before you reach an Oriole starter, Sac break through what was said to be their ceiling. So I'm not necessarily limiting anyone, but just based on our best guesses, basically, it's hard to see that unless maybe it comes from Grayson. But yeah, it's really because of where they are, it's a testament to their drafting and development and scouting that they have all this room to spend because their payroll now for 2025 is like smack dab in the middle, middle of the pack. But their 2026 commitments are almost non-existent. I think O'Neill is the only player they have signed under contract for that season.

They are tied with the raise for the least amount of money committed in 2026. It's $17 million. So if you're going to assign some of your homegrown guys and extend them, great. I know a few of them are Boris clients, maybe that's a tall order. If you know it's a tall order, okay, then you have even more money to splash around in free agency. You got to do one or the other. So we've kind of been a broken record about Baltimore and look, they went and got Corbin Burns once. If they go and get someone else like that again, then great. I will say you did it.

You did what we were suggesting that you should do. And you know where this ends, right? For me, like just sort of cosmically, this ends with Logan Gilbert as a fricking Baltimore Royal or something, right? Like Michael Isis is going to be like, I don't know, Meg told me to go get a frontline starter and I called up Jerry who's been like clawing his eyes out waiting to make a move and he was like, yeah, sure, whatever, give me the breakout candidate of the year Jackson Holliday and you got a deal. I don't say that knowing anything. I want people to know that I'm kidding. I'm making a funny joke. I'm going,

ha ha, what a joke that is. But somewhere the monkey's paws starting to curl and I'll have no one to blame but myself. And we are unstinting, unsparing in criticism of other teams too that sit on their hands. In some cases, even more than the Orioles have and maybe have even less to start with than the Orioles do. We've talked about the twins, we've talked about the Mariners, lots of teams that could and should spend more or get better because they have a base of talent and all they have to do is just get more depth or add some complimentary players and then they'd really be set up and they just don't do it, won't, can't, whatever it is, they will not. And we have certainly taken them to task for that too. So it's not just Orioles' axe to grind here, it's other teams too. It's just that we expect more

of certain teams based on where they are in the competitive cycle and how much room they have to spend. And there are some teams that there are other factors that, I don't know if they mitigate, but they at least explain why they're not doing more with the twins. Maybe it's the fact that, well, they're up for sale right now and who knows how that's affecting things or the Nationals in the past when they were kind of being dangled or, well, I guess in some cases there's broadcast situations stuff going on. You could include the Mariners in that to some extent and even well, the twins too.

And also I guess the Padres, cause as we learned on Monday, there's all sorts of drama going on until now behind the scenes with the Padres ownership situation. The widow of Peter Seidler, Sheila Seidler, has sued the brothers of Peter Seidler for control of the team and has put out a statement to fans and has said that Seidler intended for her to be the control person of the team. So there's now a battle for control of the Padres. This is messy now that it's become public, but sometimes something like this is going on and

maybe you say, oh, well, this could be why AJ Pellor hasn't done anything this off season, which is out of character for him. But you never know when your hands are tied by some situation like this. I guess it's not unlike the Chargers ownership situation when there was a dispute among the siblings there. So San Diego fans may be kind of used to hearing about this sort of thing. I know that's Los Angeles now, but yeah. So sometimes this stuff ties your hands a bit. And if that's the explanation for why the Padres haven't done that much, to be clear, they don't have to do as much as some of their teams do. Yeah, I was going to say they're a pretty complete team.

That's a pretty good team. And they've made more than their share of moves over the past several seasons. So if Preller wanted to take a breather, take an off season off, I think he'd be entitled to that. It just doesn't seem like his thing. So now I'm imagining him literally chained to a pipe in a basement somewhere, like he's just unable to make transactions because of this ownership dispute. So we'll see how all that plays out and how long it lingers and whether that does restrict what the Padres can or will do. But if there's not something

like that, and you could say that maybe the Orioles were even in that boat under the Angelus administration, and hopefully they're not so much anymore. Anytime I reach for regime, I think, no, Meg would want me to say administration and you can hear me course correct right in the middle of my sentence. LS. Such an optimistic distinction to draw on January 6th. Anyway that's where we stand on the Orioles and other teams that have been even more inactive. Yeah, I do think it's useful to note just for its explanatory power, if nothing else, that there are often dynamics at play with these decisions that we don't fully comprehend, which isn't to excuse the lack of action on the part of

a franchise writ large, but perhaps to more accurately lay the blame for it at the feet of ownership or ownership that's in dispute rather than front office personnel. Because I don't know, it it's literally AJ Proler. So I think I feel comfortable saying that he wants to be doing something, but you're right. Like this stuff operating in the background often cast out on, you know, certainly your ability to sign new players. You might kind of receive word that you should just lay low for a little bit, but sometimes

there's no good reason. So that's true too. All of that said, I really like Charlie Morton. I don't even mean just purely as a pitcher in 2025. I just mean his whole career arc fascinates me. I think you could kind of tell the story of this whole era of the past couple of decades in baseball through the career of Charlie Morton. I hope he writes a memoir or someone writes a biography of him someday. I think I reached out to his agents a few years ago about doing a piece on him. I don't think I heard back, but maybe

I should check again because he just fascinates me the multiple evolutions that he has gone through in his career. And I remember that, gosh, I guess almost four years ago on Rob Nyer's, sadly, now defunct podcast, Sabrecast, he had Brandon McCarthy on former teammate of Charlie Morton and they were talking about Morton's multiple evolutions. And McCarthy was talking about the necessity for pitchers in particular to evolve over the course of their careers. And how he thinks that'll be happening more and more. Maybe I can play a clip from that pod. Guys who come in now, if we're going to look at guys having 15, 20 year careers now, you're going to see two to three iterations of them in their career.

I think it's just going to be what has to happen. As stuff declines a little bit, you have to find a new way to pitch. As hitters change their tendencies, as they adjust to your tendencies, you're going to have to find new ways to achieve the same results. I think we saw more of that in the last 10, 12 years. And so like the perfect pocket of micro, like you kind of have to adjust with it. And if you want to stay alive, you better move. Otherwise, they're just going to knock you right out of the game. And I think we'll see a lot of that going it. And if you want to stay alive, you better move. Otherwise, they're just going to knock you right out of the game. And I think we'll see a lot of that going forward. And I think one of the most desirable traits for me in a pitcher is adjustability.

Can you change? If you're only stuck to the things you're doing, you can certainly have success. But I think your window for success might be a little bit shorter than someone who you show them a new grip. And they can kind of make that work into something to where they have a bag of tricks and you go in and the scouting report is different than it was last year and you go, okay, well I have a

new way to pitch to you too so I can figure this out. I think that has always happened. Players have always had to adjust and there are lots of Frank Tanana type cases of a pitcher who came up as a flamethrower and they've lost some stuff. Maybe they had an arm injury or something and they reinvent came up as a flame thrower and they've lost some stuff. Maybe they had an arm injury or something and they reinvented themselves as a soft tosser or a knuckleballer or whatever it is. I think it's just that these days there are more tools available to you so you can undergo those evolutions in a more concerted fashion, data-driven fashion, just evaluating

yourself more objectively and saying what isn't working, what could I do that maybe would work and you can reinvent yourself. And Morton has done that multiple times. And it really is fascinating that he's sustained his career this long. He's 41 years old. He's been flirting with retirement for a few years, several years at this point. He's almost been in the kind of Kershaw, do I want to come back camp for a few years, several years at this point. He's almost been in the kind of Kershaw, do I want to come back camp for a while? Although he's done it with more than one team now,

I guess it's sort of a surprise that he was lured away from Atlanta because it seemed like there were only so many teams he was interested in playing for and didn't want to be too far from home like us and like Corbin Burns. But there was the young Charlie Morton and then remember he remade himself in the image of Roy Halliday? A lot of pitchers emulated Roy Halliday in some respects, but he just completely physically reinvented himself as Roy Halliday, like modeled his delivery on Roy Halliday to the point where you saw him pitch and he just showed up and it was like, oh, that looks like Roy Halliday now.

And he made that work for a while and then he's kind of gone away from that because he was a ground baller when he came up. Like he was a sinker baller, got a lot of grounders, pitched a contact. And then he went more toward the the high fastball evolution that everyone was doing and sort of shelved the sinker even to this day, doesn't really throw many sinkers anymore. And the curve ball became a great weapon for him. And that was like a, you know, Astro is sort of data find, oh, this high spin curve and there's more in this guy, breakout candidate probably at that point who actually broke out. And he became more of a power pitcher, like missing bats and not so much a ground ball guy, just nasty stuff and

lots of strikeouts. And now he's almost turning a little bit back into what he was, like more of a finesse guy and fewer strikeouts. And he's like just changed his pitch mix. It just, it really kind of mirrors what was in vogue over the past 15 plus years. At this point, you could kind of trace the evolution of pitching and player development through Charlie Morton's career. He's like the avatar of all these trends, I think. And he's made it work. These multiple incarnations of Morton and he's put together really solid career. There's a pretty wide baseball reference, fan graphs, war disparity, because I guess he's been a little bit of whatever the opposite of a FIP beater is. He's underperformed his FIP a little bit. So his fan crafts were as more robust than his baseball

reference for and maybe over 15 seasons or however many it is and 2000 plus innings, we could say that this is who he was. But still to last that long and to be as good as he was in a multi-time all-star and 17 seasons in the VIGS and to still be commanding 15 million bucks as a 41-year-old, it's just really impressive that he, I don't know, like I kind of like that his agent just didn't get back to you. There are plenty of guys who do work to remake themselves and are adaptable and are open to sort of tweaks and whatnot and talk about it and aren't annoying, but there's also like a thread of, I made changes guys. And I'm sometimes like, okay, well, thank you for that.

It's true. Yeah, I'm sure he's talked about it or people have asked him about it, but he's not among the more valuable pitchers. And yeah, he's never been really the poster boy, at least like the self-appointed poster boy of that kind of like Brandon of, like Brandon McCarthy, love Brandon McCarthy. Like he was a cover model on ESPN, the magazine, right? And it

was all about how he had remade himself and FIP and all that. And Brian Bannister was kind of the original like, you know, nerd favorite. I love Brian Bannister too. I may be thinking about one loud guy, you know, now that I'm examining. But there are a lot of players who have, yeah, they, they talk about, you know, even Zach Greinke, who was kind of like an acolyte of Bannister, even though, you know, he was way more talented than Bannister, but he was also like, yeah, I'm pitching to FIP and, you know, especially back in that era when not every pitcher talked like that constantly.

Now they all do. So it's, it's hard to even notable if, if someone's talking about advanced stats, but a decade or more ago, it was like, oh, this guy gets it or like, you know, he's evaluating baseball the way that we nerds out there are evaluating baseball. Right. And so that was cool. And that led to a lot of sort of sapermetric leaning coverage, understandably, I think. But yeah, Charlie Morton has never really been the face of that sort of thing.

Yeah, he hasn't. He just seems like a guy who kind of goes about his business more often than not and wrestles with whether or not he wants to keep doing it sort of every couple of years and so far has come to the conclusion that yeah, I'll at least take $15 million to give it one more ride. And I don't know, I just find him to be fascinating. I like it when players talk to people, to be clear. It would be weird if I, a media member and the head or even chief of fan grass was like, hey, don't talk to people. But it's, you know, sometimes there's a lot of bluster. Anti-bluster,

I think. Pro-ungulate anti-bluster. Yeah. And he's been around for so long. He was drafted in 2002. He has to stay in baseball forever because he's older than me and I appreciate that so much. I love that for him and for me also. Yeah. He debuted in 2008 and I guess Clayton Kershaw debuted in 2008, right? But Morton was much older and then it took him a while to really get established. And so he was drafted before Justin Verlander was drafted. He was drafted before Max Scherzer was drafted. He's the Iron Man of this generation. Obviously, he's nowhere near being the best pitcher of this era, but he is the pitcher of this era, but he is the picture of this era, like in some ways in my mind, because Quentin Kershaw was just amazing from the second he showed up in the majors.

And, you know, he underwent a evolution as we read in Andy McCullough's excellent book and, you know, he changed his delivery and everything, but it was before he was known to us. And so he was more or less a finished product and he is adapted too in, in ways that I think are admirable and somewhat surprising. And as he's lost his stuff, he's compensated by what we would have called pitching backwards in the past and going with more off speed stuff. And he's made that work longer than I thought he would at a high level. The interesting thing about Morton is that he hasn't even really lost that much stuff.

Right. Like I'm sure he has, if you were to break it down by movement and get more granular about it, but just in terms of raw velocity, he throws like harder now than he did when he first came up, you know, like he's never been the hardest thrower, but he's still sort of like sitting mid nineties, even now. So yeah, it's not even purely that he's lost his stuff and has compensated for that. There's some of that going on, but he has actually managed to hold onto it fairly well. And you know, like he's, he's made 30 starts, 30 starts, 31 starts, 33

starts, 2020 was 2020, 33 starts, 2019, 30 starts, 2018. Like in every actual full season, he has made 30 or more starts since 2018 at an advanced stage. So yeah, I don't know. I just really liked Charlie Morton. He feels like one of those guys who, when he finally does retire, he'll kind of be forgotten mostly. Like, you know, just, I don't know what people will remember specifically about him if you weren't kind of around watching his career.

It's not like he has a ton of black ink or anything. He did lead the majors in winning percentage one year with the Astros, but at a point where no one cared that much about winning percentage anymore. And he led the league and hit by pitch a few times and stingy with homers a couple of times and led the majors in starts in 2021. But yeah, just not the highest profile pitcher, but more than a remember some guys. Somewhere in between like Hall of Very Good and Guy You Remember is Charlie Morton. LS. Yeah. Yeah. And I've just said he needs to pitch forever. But I appreciate the moment

we all have when guys like that retire because I do think that people take a second and look at their careers and go, oh, like he was way more productive than I assumed. Or he, you know, I knew he was old, but he really did pitch a lot longer and for more good teams than I realized or whatever. You know, it's just, I'm glad we're doing this now. Cause sometimes I worry that we don't give these guys the recognition they're due during their careers. And, you know, while they're still around to enjoy it, I guess is a good option also, but you know, like, you had a good picture. And we just spent time saying some mean stuff about the Orioles, but that's not about Charlie Morton.

We love you, Charlie. You're good. You're good. You just can't be the best at naming to the rotation. That's all. And you know what? I bet Charlie Morton would go, yeah. He seems self-effacing and self-aware. All right. Well, we were planning to do Minor League for Agent draft today, but we're pushing

that to next time. So stay tuned. That is coming soon. Yes. You have a few more days to prep and so do we. Have you prepped it all yet? Nope. I haven't either. So, so when I asked you, I, it's my fault, everyone. It's my fault. We won't get into the reasons why, but yesterday I was like, Hey guys, can, can we do a Thursday

instead? I like can't, cause we were supposed to do it tomorrow and then stuff come up in the afternoon and I can't remember. And my reasons that I told you Ben were real, but also did part of you go, Oh, thank God I don't have to spend part of the day tomorrow prepping? Yeah, but it's just kicking the can down the road a couple of days. Putting it off, yeah. It's not like I'm doing weeks of groundwork for Minorly Free Agent

draft as seriously as I take it. It's usually a day before, day of sort of exercise for me. But yes, you did give me mentally more time before I had to actually dig into the numbers. So you can all prep along with us for the Minor League for Agent Draft and test your acumen against ours. I have a few leftover emails that we didn't get to last time, so maybe we can catch up on those. This one we must have talked about at some point. Couldn't find an email specifically about it, nor could the listener. But James L asked, I was thinking about how MLB is the only pro sport, at least that I'm aware of, that has the expectation of years of further development in the

minor leagues before making the majors. In the NFL and NBA, players go directly from college to the pros. And some even went directly from high school to the NBA. They're minor leagues for the NHL, but from what I can tell, it's still common for players to go right from the draft to the pros. Ditto for the G-League and the NBA, that's me adding to that. Does this imply that MLB is more difficult than those other sports? As most players need years of further development to reach the skill level required for the majors. If not, what are the other factors impacting this? I was surprised to see that when we were doing

our baseball exceptionalism series a couple of years ago, when we were just listing all the ways in which baseball is unique or unusual among major sports, that this was not on there. I don't know whether we considered it and rejected it because it's not quite unique, but it does stand out in that respect, certainly, that there's really an expectation that even if you're a star, you're going to have to put the time in. So to what would you attribute that? Is that evidence if someone were to say, oh, it's the hardest sports, you know,

the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat, that old cliche. I do think that's true. I don't know whether that's true. I don't know whether it's true. I think it's true. It feels true, doesn't it? It is very hard, but I think all the sports are hard. But does this give you ammunition in that case? Like, hey, you have to, you have to do some, some apprenticeship really to make the majors, even if you're a top prospect. I guess a question I have in relation to this is, you know, on average, how much time do young NBA or NHL players spend in their respective leagues, developmental teams, leagues, because the G league does exist, right? NHL players do have like farm teams.

So like the, you know, it's not like all of those guys go directly to the biggest, the highest level. I was going to say the biggest show. What does that mean, Ben? The biggest show? Why would big be the adjective you would apply to it at all? I mean, you call it the big leagues. Yeah.

And the show. So you just kind of combine them. The biggest show. You almost made a wrestler name out of that. Biggest show. It's on a big 70 inch screen. What is it? Yeah.

But there's the AHL, the American Hockey League, which is, it's the minor leagues of hockey more or less. Yeah. But yeah, like if you're the tippy top prospect, unless you're really young and maybe you need some seasoning, obviously it's quite common for your top draft prospects and your top draft picks to just go directly, do not pass go, right? Just go from school to the pros and not just the pros, but the highest level of the pros and often thrive there. So you can bypass that in a way that there are baseball players who have and who have successfully less so in this era, even though guys are debuting younger and maybe with a little less minor league playing time, it's still quite rare.

It's still notable when the angels are just like, congrats, you're a major leaguer. We just picked you in the draft, come on down or come on up. But that's obviously the exception. LS I have a couple of possible explanations. Some of it is, and I think the distinction that we can draw within the baseball player population between high school draftees and college guys is perhaps instructive where, and I know that basketball is like kind of weird because you, you know, you can be one and done in basketball in a way that you can't with other, with the other major men's sports, but you could argue that the NFL has the minor leagues and it's

division one football, right? That they have just outsourced that development for the most part to those leagues and that they're content to have the cost of developing players born by colleges and the colleges are happy to pay for the privilege because they make a bunch of money doing it, right? So that's one argument. And I think that when you look at the relative time to debut for college draftees versus domestic high schoolers, it tends to be shorter because they're older, they're more advanced, they've played against more consistent high level competition.

If you're a hitter, you've seen velocity that is comparable to the bigs, at least somewhat and certainly more than you would even in a showcase setting for a high school player. So there's that piece of it. Part of it is that, and here I don't want to overstate my expertise about what the signing rules are in some of the other sports, but I don't know that there is an equivalent to our international amateur system in baseball, in hockey, or certainly in basketball or football. So part of it is if you're signing a 16-year-old, that kid's probably, and I use the word kid for a reason, that kid's probably going to need more time to not only face good competition, but just to physically and psychologically, mentally mature as a human being, let alone

as a baseball player. So you're gonna spend more time in the minors that way. I do think it's really hard. I mean, I don't want to discount the level of skill or physical acuity or strength that you need to be an NFL player or an NBA player or a pro hockey player. But I think the combination of physical toll and hand-eye coordination in baseball is really exacting and you probably benefit from doing it for a while repetitively and then against better and better competition. Some of it's probably just tradition, you know? There is precedent for the minors as a developmental tool and as a means of, you know, controlling your talent in baseball in a way that isn't as developed in the other sports. So I think it's probably a bunch of those things. Do those explanations

strike you as reasonable? Yes. I definitely think the college as de facto minors makes sense for other sports, even more so than baseball. It's true for baseball, sort of, to an extent too. Sort of, and more and more, right? More and more, yes. Collegiate programs, getting more and more adept at development. I guess maybe there's just a greater leap in terms of endurance going from a high school or college schedule to a major league schedule in baseball. There's just a grind.

Obviously, basketball and football, for goodness sake sake and hockey are grueling even in a way that baseball isn't just as more contact and more physical sports, but just not quite as many games. And maybe there's something to the idea of going from a short college schedule, you can't just jump directly into a lot of college players. If they do play late into the season in which they get drafted, they're kind of gassed by the end of that season. They're just not used to that.

So you have to really build up your endurance. I think that's probably part of it. I don't know if some of it is about like the depth of the roster, or like you just, you need more players. It's like in basketball, there just aren't as many players on the team or on the floor, certainly at any given time as there are players on the field or on a baseball roster. So. But you would think then that the level of play from any individual player would by

default have to be higher through those, right? Cause you can't hide a guy. Not that, you know, big league teams are really hiding anybody, but you know what I mean. I do think there's something to the idea of baseball, not necessarily being harder, but requiring more reps, maybe. I don't know if that's synonymous with difficulty because, yeah, I'm not saying that like pitch recognition, for instance, seems like a skill that you just need to see a lot of pitches. And maybe there are deliberate practice techniques you can use to shorten that process now where you're getting immediate

feedback and you're not dependent on playing hundreds of games in the minors and getting little bits of imperfect feedback here and there just based on what an umpire says in a ball when their zones are all over the place and you're just gradually learning what a strike looks like. Now you could step in the cage and you could get instant feedback. Was that in the strike zone? Was it not? So you could maybe shorten that process, but historically, I think you have needed just to see a lot of pitches to just condition that discipline and recognize just the movement and pick up the potential break and be able to extrapolate from the initial pitch trajectory out of the hand, where's this thing going to end up? out of the hand, where's this thing going to end up? That's really tough. And maybe that, again, is it harder than, I don't know, like being on a football field with a bunch of giants who are

trying to cream you and like, you know, being just someone who is stronger and faster than everyone on a baseball field often or many of them. I don't know if it's harder exactly, but it does seem to require a different type of preparation. I think the pure reflexes or athleticism or whatever it is in other sports, maybe even the bar is higher than it is in baseball. But there is something to the idea of just needing to see a lot of pitches in particular that I think requires some seasoning and some practice more so than other sports where again, like I try not to be exceptionalist in like the sport that I like the most is the hardest and the most refined or something like that.

You know, the others are just pure reflexes or athleticism or something. I'm not saying that. I just think that specific skill just requires some honing that historically has taken time. I also think there can be variability year to year and position to position. Like it has sort of become de rigueur that quarterbacks in the NFL are going to be, you know, if you're a first round quarterback, we have seen a lot of guys in the last couple of seasons who are just the starter on day one as, you know, the face of the franchise. And some of those guys have struggled. And some of them have been great right away, but it wasn't always the case that even a

first rounder, a guy who a team might have really high expectation of and expect to be a franchise player was necessarily gonna start. Like it used to be very common for a young guy to sit behind an established veteran for a season or two and kind of learn how to do quarterbacking. And I think, you know, in the NFL, like you definitely see guys who will come back like year two and you can tell that their conditioning has changed. So part

of it is physically adapting to getting creamed, right? And being in a position where you're stronger and you're better able to sort of handle the wear and tear of a really violent sport over the course of a long season. But particularly for quarterback where, you know, that is just such a mentally taxing position, right? It is so hard to do the mental work of quarterbacking. I think that we have seen times in the past where guys have really benefited from having a year or two to kind of come up to speed. And some of that is, you know, maybe you have an established veteran who's making big money and you want to kind of play out their contract before you really bring the young guy in. I think that there are times where teams maybe

should have gone to their young starters sooner. You can argue that there are times where it might have benefited a guy to like have a year to work behind someone for a little bit and kind of figure it out just to adapt to the speed of the game at the pro level if nothing else. But these things kind of ebb and flow in other sports. So I don't want us to overstate the case just because things have remained relatively consistent from a developmental timeline perspective in baseball. I think that there's a little bit more give there than we're maybe giving other sports credit for. I don't know about hockey at all. So I don't know. You could tell me that they skate onto the ice the next day. You could tell me that they skate onto the ice the next day. You could tell me that they're in whatever the, what's the equivalent called for hockey?

There's the AHL, there's the CHL, the Canadian Hockey League, which is like junior leagues. Wherever the Russians go. Intermediate steps there, certainly. I think another thing might be just the way that the sports evolved. Like if, if you were starting from scratch today, you were saying this might be, be a historical artifact to some extent. This is the way it's been done. And baseball, because it came along before these other sports and was professionalized before these other sports, it sort of started at the pro level, whereas some of these others really developed in college, right?

Like college football has like a longer, richer tradition than professional football even, and so that was just the progression. Whereas in baseball, it sort of went the other way. It started with pro players. I mean, you know, they were amateurs at first, obviously, but, and then there became a college baseball tradition. So, Well, and there were pro players and then there was a minor leagues, right? Like, you

know, it's not like the institution of the minors famously was not like there from day one for baseball either. We just been playing the sport for long enough that it's like feels like old hat at this point, but that wasn't always true, you know? Yeah, and also I think it might have to do with the difficulty of evaluating baseball players, not even just about the development, but about actually separating the wheat from the chaff,

like being able to tell who the good players are because there's so much randomness in baseball, especially for hitters. Again, this is something that's changing, could change. You could potentially evaluate someone just based on their tools on the mound or in the cage now, given all the data and tracking tech that we have now. And you could kind of just bypass that whole, you know, the old, oh, the hitters will tell me what's not working. That idea, right?

Like you just need to go out there and you get knocked around. Oh, I guess I'll do something different. Whereas now you're often proactively saying, here's how I can change. And I know in advance that it will work if I can actually consistently do this. So before you might've needed hundreds, thousands of it bats just for someone to scout you accurately. Or just to tell, I mean, we know how much randomness and variability there is in babbip, pitcher babbip, even writer babbip, like all these things, it takes a lot of time for these stats to stabilize, especially at that level and the growth that players are going through.

So it just, you needed a large sample to be able to tell at least statistically. And, you know, again, people were going by the eye test, obviously, but you needed a longer track record to show actually I'm good here, that this isn't just pure randomness. So maybe that's part of it too. Yeah. And while we say that, we don't mean to overstate the degree of precision there is with the model approach, right? Because you do need to put eyes on a guy, in my opinion. Yeah, and get them into games too. Right, and get them into games. But we do have a lot more sort of tangible information that tells us something that seems to be sort of well correlated to actual results than you did when, you know, certainly when

the minors were devised. But I think you're right. I think, I do think you got to stand in there. I've been thinking a lot about how I know that I, well, I guess I don't know, but I feel it is safe to assume that I would struggle to put, to even make contact with like a big league fastball, like a big league fastball thrown at least at the major league average. There's like the physical act of that, the hand-eye coordination. But I also have been thinking about how big a weenie I am and like how afraid I would be to see big league velocity really coming at me. I'm pretty pain averse is the thing I've

learned about myself in the last year. It's like a little ouchy. I don't like ouchy. I don't care for ouchy. That's an adaptive property that's evolutionarily pretty valuable. LS Yeah. I do feel bad for the people who can't feel any pain. They get injured all the time. CB Well, yeah, that's... No, it sounds good at first and then you think, oh, that is actually very bad.

But it is something that is probably correlated to your talent because if you're able to pick up pitches and get out of the way of them, maybe you're a little less afraid of them. Yeah. So there's like the hitting piece of that, that is the obvious direct corollary. But then I think you don't know how you're going to react to, like let's say you're a catcher, congratulations, and you're a prospect. Wow. How exciting for you, Ben. You as an organization, drafting a guy, signing a guy, don't know how a prospect is going to react to a season as a catcher, like getting the s*** kicked out of him back there, you know, for a full year.

Like, you just don't know. Like there comes a point sometimes where these guys are like trying to get away from the ball. So I do think that you need reps, and it's not just to develop skill, but for you as a player and for the organization that employs you to like get a sense of how you are over a full season of playing, because it's really hard

and it's such a long season. I mean, like we joke about, we have joked on this show about like, it feels like they play, I mean, the hockey playoffs go on forever. The NBA playoffs go on forever. It feels like their playoffs are as long as their season, but let me tell you, baseball season is so long. It's so long. But let me tell you, baseball season is so long. It's so long. Oh yeah. So there's stuff that you need to know about a player and how they can adapt to the just reality of that being their actual job.

And I don't think you can do it until they do it a couple of times. Yeah. I forgot about the ECHL, which is a tier below the AHL. It's like- You could be making them up and I wouldn't know. I'd be like, oh yeah, that one. It's like double A for hockey more or less. The Maple league, sure. I think probably this comes back to bite baseball in some ways.

If there is a potential multi-sport star, someone who has the talent to play in both, baseball is helped sometimes because you last longer, potentially. You can have a longer career. Like Ricky Henderson's mom didn't want him to play football, thought he could last a long time in baseball, which turned out to be true. But also you dissuade some players from playing baseball because they don't want to take years to make the majors and more years after that to start making real money and you're riding the buses and you know, you're in these rundown facilities, especially historically where teams aren't spending on minor leaguers.

That has driven some players away from baseball. I wonder if part of it also is that baseball players last longer or at least can last longer so they can kind of take their time. I'm not saying that they don't want to get there as soon as they can, but the aging curve these days, I don't know, but historically speaking, it's a little more forgiving. Whereas in football, unless you're a quarterback, maybe you're typically not going to last that long or a kicker or something, right? Like the, the aging curve is pretty harsh because it's just so physical. And in basketball, unless you're LeBron, you're usually not going to

hang around until you're 40. It's like extraordinary that he's playing at all at 40, let alone that he's still one of the best players in the league, whereas we're like, yeah, Charlie Morton, he's pitching at 41, like that's cool, but it's not like awe-inspiring that he's still one of the best players in the league. Whereas we're like, yeah, Charlie Morton, he's pitching at 41. Like that's cool, but it's not like awe inspiring that he's doing that. So because it's a little less physical and less grueling aerobically, maybe there's a little less time pressure. Cause it's just a, Hey, you, you can last, you don't have to start the clock as soon because maybe the hourglass

won't be empty quite as quickly. And teams think of that too. It's no salary cap and baseball and it's advantageous obviously now to have players when they're cheap and cost controlled and young, but also there's been service time manipulation in the past because you want to hang on to those players as long as possible. So there are all sorts of considerations and this might change. And soccer, I guess, is another case where there are a bunch of rungs that you climb as you advance and academies and various equivalents to the minor leagues, they start them young in

soccer. So maybe that's not really so different. And we're looking at this from a US-centric traditionally perspective. But I guess it's kind of a nice thing because there's just such a great tradition about the minor leagues in baseball that we don't want to lose. And if we move more towards an academy style system, which seems to be like what Jeff Luna and others were advocating, then we lose something. You take the minor league levels away, you shorten the draft, there are fewer towns across the country with pro baseball and affiliated baseball. It's a nice thing to do on a summer night wherever you are. So that has helped really insert baseball into the fabric of the country or keep it there and make it for a time, the true national

pastime. The fact that it was not such limited supply that you could go see pretty high level organized baseball almost wherever you were. So whether that was just kind of a quirk or a necessity, it's been maybe to the benefit of baseball in a lot of ways. And if we're losing that, there could be cost to that too. Yeah. I think that that is very well put. Yeah, I think that that is very well put. Yeah, I guess it's good that, oh, a more charming guy wasn't the one advocating for you. Saved us some heartache. And you know, there's a tradition, like, you know, the Thunderbirds play in the greater Seattle area. Like you go to minor league hockey, I don't know, minor league hockey game. I still want to call them matches. I know that's wrong,

but you know, long before we had the Kraken, I feel like I should know more about hockey than I do, but I don't. It's a mystery to me to this day. I like it. I enjoy watching it. I enjoy going. Could I tell you very much about it? Nah, couldn't do it. Couldn't do it even a little bit. Mm-mm. Yeah. To you, the neutral zone is from Star Trek. It is from Star Trek. Not from hockey. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Could be either. It could be both. Doesn't have to be. I'm revealing myself to be a particular kind of nerd, I guess. My goodness. I guess for Bauman, it would be both Star Trek and cycling.

There's a neutral zone in cycling too, which I was not even aware of. I guess technically there's a neutral zone in football. There's a lot of neutral zones out there. Yeah. Yeah. But I'd say hockey and Star Trek, probably the most prominent neutral zones in my mind at least. Well, while we're talking about systemic sweeping changes, Michael, Patreon supporter says, let's say after the now inevitable

collapse of the RSN based system in baseball, say after that collapses, or at least as reduced, that baseball fails to develop a similarly lucrative replacement and revenue collapses so that in 10 years, the enterprise as a whole is taking in 50% of its current revenue. That might be even more drastic than I'd expect, but okay. Let's say that's the downside. Let's say that's the worst case scenario. This possibility, yeah, I never want to say something's the worst case.

It could always be worse, but this possibility is discussed by nearly everyone as a disaster. And indeed it would be for players and owners and other people who make their livings in the game. But would baseball actually be all that different to fans? It seems unlikely that many players would stop choosing to play the game if the minimum MLB salary were $350,000 a year and high-end contracts were $25 million a year instead of $50 million a year. Maybe some international players would stay overseas if the contracts were 25 million a year instead of 50 million a year. Maybe some international players would stay overseas if the contracts were smaller, and maybe this would tilt the balance for some

multi-sport athletes, as we were just talking about. Maybe there'd be a bit less technology in player dev, but overall it seems to me that the impact on the game on the field would likely be minimal. Do you agree? And if so, why exactly are we also worried about the fate of MLB revenue? I don't know that I agree. I probably agree in the short term just because I think that these things take a while to kind of unspool. But I do think the perceived upper bound of salary potential influences decisions for players, at least at the amateur level. Now, you could argue that that's kind of silly because like most of them aren't going to

be professional baseball players anyway. But I do think that that piece of it matters. I think that if what you're describing were to take place, certainly it would probably correspond with the cultural footprint of the sport shrinking further, which might have a bigger impact even than any particular salary shift would impact things. So I think that it would matter. I think it would take some time for it to matter because you would have some amount of path dependency for athletes who are already either in affiliated ball or playing upper level amateur ball and aspire to a big league career.

And there is probably some trade off to be had or, you know, equilibrium point when you think about how well off many pro baseball players, at least domestic pro baseball players are to begin with, right? Like this is part of what is influencing the demographic skew within the game. So I don't know if you come from a fancy family, maybe you don't care that your league minimum has been halved, but I think that it would, I think the league minimum and sort of lower level salaries being hit hard would actually have a bigger impact on the sport than the upper upper bound would because you just have a lot of guys who are making the league minimum. And if that value proposition changes dramatically, I don't know if everyone's going to be as into it. So I think it would be bad. Also,

part of the reason that we worry about the health of the sport is that it does constitute our livelihood. So like, there is a certain amount of bias there, but I think that it's the direction of that bias is fine given that it, you know, what we are angling for is a healthy affiliated pro sport league in the U.S. It does make me wonder, you know, if there were that kind of setback for It does make me wonder if there were that kind of setback for major league baseball, if depending of course on what sort of the legal landscape looks like in terms of the antitrust stuff, if we might see competitor leagues kind of spring up. Because if you have some amount of attrition from major league baseball, and by that I mean like the business entity that is major league baseball, do you have, you know, startup leagues trying to like push in to say, hey, like we're the cool CFL

of pro baseball, pro men's ball in the United States. I don't know, but I think it would not be good and I would prefer not happen. I think Michael's onto something in the sense that I think Michael's onto something in the sense that I'm not personally invested in players making $40 million a year instead of $20 million a year. We have generally a pretty pro-labor bent on this podcast, but for me, that's just about, well, players should get their fair share. They do a lot to create the revenue and so they should get a proportionate amount of that revenue. And if there were less revenue overall, if the pie were smaller, then I wouldn't particularly

be bothered by the pieces of that pie also being smaller. We've even talked about the idea of like on a societal level, our priorities are maybe way out of whack and maybe it would be better in some ways if we didn't venerate entertainment to such an extent that we fund it the way that we do at the expense of other things that are vital and very valuable from a societal perspective and just don't create the same amount of revenue or it's tough to quantify the ways that they do. And so a teacher doesn't make as much money as a professional baseball player who's really good, that kind of thing. So if this led to some sort of recalibration somehow

where the top baseball players were a little less fabulously wealthy than they currently are. I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over that as long as they're still getting their fair shares. If their fair share is just smaller than it is now, that's fine. That wouldn't bother me. But I don't know that this would lead to a recalibration. It's probably just like, you know, if people are not spending on the cable bundle, it's not because they're like philanthropists or they're given to support good causes or something, they're probably just wasting their time on some other form of entertainment instead of baseball. I don't know that it would change anything in a really positive way on a societal level,

but it is true that if you just lopped off half of baseball revenue and the shares of that remains the same and we're collectively bargained, then that wouldn't bother me if the numbers were just smaller for both the owners and the players. But as you're saying, there would probably be some knock-on effects of that, that you might get less of the potential player pool deciding to be baseball players or, I don't know, there'd just be a little less cache just in general associated with baseball and it would be seen as even more diminished than it is. And the baseball is dying refrain would be louder than ever. And that might drive people away from not only playing the sport, but also following the sport, listening to our podcast, supporting us on Patreon. Yeah, there is an element of self-interest here. But it is kind of collectively,

I think the fact that baseball players get paid so much, I don't know, it leads to headlines. Sometimes there's a backlash to those headlines, but also it suggests that, I think the fact that baseball players get paid so much, I don't know, it leads to headlines. Sometimes there's a backlash to those headlines, but also it suggests that, oh, people must care about this thing. It's generating a lot of revenue, you know, which is not what we're in it for necessarily, but we are in it for the perception of other people care about this. That's one reason why you should care about it is that it will have some cultural currency. I think the fact that there's a lot of money in the game does indirectly reinforce that

perception. People are always like, well, why should you care what the ratings are or how your movie does at the box office? Yeah, we shouldn't care about that the way that a network executive would care about that. But I think there are some reasons for Josh Mo or us to care about that, that you want movies to do well at the box office if you want those movies to keep getting made, or you want baseball to do well on TV if you want it to continue to be televised. There are some

incentives here. And also I think maybe the biggest reason why this is all a little scary is that you're not going to just get from point A to point B with no disruption. There's going to be a big disruption in the interim and maybe that's necessary and it's just a crucible you got to go through, but it's going to be bad in the interim. You're going to have work stoppages. You're going to probably lose a season. Like, you know, you're not going to just lop off half of players' salaries and they're just going to say, okay, fine.

I guess that's fair because owners are losing revenue too. And owners are not going to say, oh, we're losing revenue. And I guess we'll just swallow that. We're billionaires anyway. We can afford to lose, you know, we can'll just swallow that. We're billionaires anyway. We can afford to lose. We can take a haircut here. That's not the stance that they ever take. Maybe that's how they got to be billionaires, unless it was by just inheriting all of their money, which is how they got to be billionaires in a lot of cases. But you're going to go through a lot of upheaval and turmoil,

which is not going to be good for baseball fans in the short term, if your interest is, I want them to continue to play the sport and for it to be on and for me to be able to go to games, there's just going to be so much growing pain in between those points that, uh, that alone, I think is enough reason to be wary of what's coming next. Yeah, I want the best athletes in the world to want to play baseball, selfishly, because it's my favorite sport. So I want them to feel like that's a good use of their athletic talent to play baseball. We see this with guys who come to the league from the international amateur side

where you never know how a guy's going to do with a sport until he plays it. And so some of this is just your comping like physique and physicality to other players in other sports. But sometimes you'll see guys who like, you know, grow up in the Dominican Republic and you're like, you would probably just play football if you lived here. Like if you had grown up in the US, you might just play football because you have the build to do it. And we've seen you be an elite level athlete.

So we make this assumption that that would translate to another sport. And so I'm always grateful that those guys play baseball instead. Now, if they decided they wanted to play football, I'd want them to do that because I think that, you know, their self-determination is more important

than my personal enjoyment, but I want the best guys to want to play this sport. And I think that we've talked a lot of times about how like we, we are so lucky to, with all the problems that Major League Baseball, you know, business entity has, and with, you know, all of the uncertainty that the next couple of years might bring around broadcast stuff and the next CBA negotiation and the aesthetic quibbles that we have with the game, the ways that we wish it would be a little bit different. It just feels indisputable that we are watching the very best guys to ever do this, do this on a, at least on average.

And that's not to say that there aren't guys who lived in earlier eras who wouldn't be able to play today. That's not the argument I'm making, but like we are just seeing such incredible athletes play and they have such amazing tools at their disposal and increasing willingness to make use of those tools. And so I don't want to sacrifice any of that. Like it's selfish, but that's where I'm at.

And I don't have, don't make me learn that's where I'm at. And you know, I don't have to, don't make me learn more about hockey unless I want to, you know? There's an element of FOMO where you don't want to feel like you're missing out on the best athletes, but if you were and you didn't know it, it might not bother you that much. If you're watching the highest level of your sport, if there's no better brand of baseball somewhere else, then maybe it wouldn't even be apparent to you that it could be better, that there could be an even higher caliber of competition. Like if all you had ever seen was AAA baseball, you might just think, well, that's the best

that baseball could be. But because there's a higher level league out there, you know, it can be better. And if there were players routinely opting to play other sports instead of baseball so that you're aware that you're missing out on potential stars, then that might bother you. But it's, it's like a Plato in the cave kind of situation. It's like, if you don't even suspect that there's higher caliber baseball out there, maybe it wouldn't even suspect that there's higher caliber baseball out there,

maybe it wouldn't even weigh on you. And baseball players used to be worse at playing baseball and that didn't necessarily make the sport less compelling. When we started watching baseball, it's 30 years ago and clearly we got the baseball bug. We thought that was rad. And I wouldn't say that the players then were as good as the players now. And that doesn't always correlate to the entertainment value.

And there's other stuff, you know, all the other trends and saber metrics and analytics and all the ways that the sport has evolved in ways that maybe aren't always fan friendly. But even if the sport had stayed the same and player usage had somehow stayed the same, but the players just got bigger and faster and stronger and through harder than ever. I don't know. We thought baseball was pretty awesome when we started watching it and people who were a lot older than we are thought baseball was awesome when they started watching it, right? And the athletes just weren't as good and the potential player population wasn't nearly as large as it is now

and we didn't know any better, right? So I don't know, maybe it matters less than you think unless you're aware of loss. Like if we were conscious that players were getting worse than they used to be, then we would really feel like we were losing something that the sport was sinking, but you're not always conscious of the ways in which it's improving. Yeah, that's fair. And you know, there's an argument to be made that many of the best athletes are choosing other sports, right? They are going to, you know, play football or soccer or basketball or I don't know about hockey. I feel like I'm down on hockey. I don't mean that, but it's just a smaller sport relative to the other major pro sports in the U.S. It's

good, but it's smaller. They make less money. So, you know, there's an argument to be made that like this is already happening and I like baseball as it is just fine, but I want to keep it this way. I do feel like there's been this sense of not progress, but a progression in terms of the average quality of a big leaker today versus when we were little kids. Although I grew up watching Griffey, so I don't know what you're talking about because that guy was fucking great. So there's that, but it does feel like

as I have been conscious of the sport over the course of my lifetime, there have been not huge like X over the course of my lifetime, there have been not huge like X-Men level evolutionary leaps forward, but there's just been a constant progression. And I would probably view there being a bigger leap from say baseball when I was in high school to after college into my grad school years than there was because there was like this dark period where I just wasn't watching the sport as actively because I was busy being in college and then being in finance and then I got to grad school.

But still, a march, right? And I want to maintain that sense of some sort of momentum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be that, you know, the athletes keep getting better and better or the strategy is always perfectly optimized, but just that we are engaged in interesting questions, that we are learning new things about it, and that those things are sort of manifesting themselves on the field. So that's what I want. It's funny, a second ago when you were reaching for ways in which hockey is less prominent,

at least in the US, you said, you know, makes less money, right? Less revenue. I mean, that is kind of a shorthand that we often default to. Maybe, you know, capitalistic society, unconsciously or not, even if you're dissatisfied with the way the system works, we kind of, well, we equate worth with revenue to some extent. Like there must be demand for this thing, it must be popular because it makes lots of money. And there's some truth to that, I guess in baseball, there's also just a whole lot of supply. There's so many games, right? But that is one way that we measure merit or not exactly merit, but at least like interest and worth is just people are willing to part

with lots of money to consume baseball. So therefore it must be worthwhile, right? Even if we're not saying that explicitly, it's something that you almost default to feeling. Yeah. Well, we only took two questions on this episode. I had more, but these were deep ones. These were wide ranging, profound questions.

So we can wrap up there. Congrats to aforementioned good guy Brent Rooker, who signed a five year, $60 million contract extension to stay with the A's with a vesting option for a sixth season that could raise the value to 90 million. That buys out three arbitration years and a couple free agent years. He didn't make good on his podcast promise to notify us about any extension signing. Ken Rosenthal broke the news, but I'm still happy for him. He cashed in on his breakout and that'll buy a lot of breakfasts.

There are other teams, by the way, that we could have mentioned when we were recounting the clubs that don't do enough. The Guardians, they've come in for plenty of criticism here. It's not that they don't do things, it's that a lot of the things that they do are motivated by money, but they keep winning, which does earn you a partial pass. Then there are the Blue Jays, who haven't really succeeded in signing anyone significant, but not for lack of trying, and I really do believe that they're trying. This is not just a we tried for show, it seems like they're having trouble persuading players to sign, and not just this winter. Anyway, a few teams did things after

we recorded. The Rangers signed the reliever Chris Martin. The Royals signed Michael Lorenzen, or re-signed him I suppose. So much for the scheme discussed on this podcast. For him to sign with a non-contender, get a bunch of plate appearances, to qualify as a two-way player, and then get flipped to a contender at the deadline who could use him without it counting against their pitcher limit. The Royals clearly planned to contend. I guess it's not out of the question that he could hit, but unlikely. So maybe that was just posturing. Maybe the right situation didn't materialize. We didn't think the two-way eligibility would be worth that much anyway. Kansas City signed him to a one-year $7 million deal. Somewhat more significantly, we had a trade. The Dodgers dealt Gavin Lux to the Reds of all teams, perhaps not the team most in need of infield help, but it sounds like they're going to use

him as a utility player, assuming he doesn't get flipped again. Mookie Betts reportedly will still plan to play shortstop for the Dodgers, though this does clear up the logjam a little. Speaking of which, the Korean player they signed last week, which we reacted to in real time on the podcast as we were recording and read the news, I definitely butchered his name. I was exchanging some direct messages with the Korean journalist Jiho Yoo, who is a guest on Effectively Wild episode 2104, and I said, hey, how do you pronounce his name? And he sent me a voice memo, which he said I could play on the podcast so that you can

all hear how a native speaker pronounces this player's name. And he sent me a voice memo which he said I could play on the podcast so that you can all hear how a native speaker pronounces this player's name. I got the Kim part right, but the rest? Well, let's listen. Hyesung. Hyesung. So yeah, the anglicization, the romanization, it's HYE, so it looks like it could be Hyesung, Kim. It's not. It's Hyesung. Ji Jiho Yoo says it's a weird romanization rule in Korea that throws off English speaking people. And I'm one of them. So glad we got that straightened out. Also, two late breaking stories we missed from 2024. One, I discovered how great Jose Ramirez was at hitting with two strikes. He was great at hitting overall, obviously, but he wasn't really

any worse with two strikes. Overall, he batted 279, 335, 537, that's an 872 OPS. With two strikes, he batted 282, 321, 552, that's an 873 OPS. Baseball reference has his TOPS+, his 99, that's in 352 plate appearances that went to two strikes. If I set the minimum at 250 plate appearances with two strikes, that is the 4th best TOPS+, going back to 1988. Trailing only Harold Reynolds in 1991, Isaiah Kiner-Falefa in 2022, and Luis Polonia in 1991. Okay, not exactly Murderers Row there. The fact that that's the company he keeps there makes it even more impressive. Those guys hit a total of 5 home runs

with two strikes in those seasons. Ramirez hit 22, so he wasn't some slapheader who was choking up to try to make contact. He was still driving the ball. Going by SOPS Plus, that's relative to the league-wide batting line with two strikes, Ramirez's 241 was tied for the fifth highest ever behind Victor Martinez in 2014, Mookie Betts in 2018, Ricky Henderson in 1990, and Todd Helton in 2000, tied with Mike Napoli in 2011. So Jose Ramirez, great hitter, fantastic hitter with two strikes in 2024. Though career 65, TOPS+, with two strikes, which is better than the league-wide figure of 44 this past season. Also, Nick Raitin with a Rockies submission, I know I'm

obviously late to get into the discussion from episode 2263, but apparently I'm the only actual Rockies fan that listens to the show. Slight exaggeration. Nick notes that Aaron Shunk's dad would sketch every game his son played in from his seat. I don't think that's quite true, not every game that his son played in, but he is a talented artist. You can see his stuff on Instagram and Twitter. Eric Shunk did sketch at least a couple of games that his son, Aaron Schunk, played for the Rockies this past season, and it looks like he's done it throughout his career.

Pretty nice memento of your son's big league debut. A sketch of what the park looked like at the time. I like that last name, Schunk. Aaron Schunk didn't hit great as a rookie, but I'm glad to know about him and his dad. Thanks, Nick. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcasts 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. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. And you can check the show page at fancrafts or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode a little later this week.

Talk to you then! I've been Lindberg and Meg, Riding, I wanna hear a mouth show, Hey, old Tony, Or a white trout with three arms.