Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2269: Baseball Jobs (Bullpen Catcher and Baseball Ops Analyst)

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about salary arbitration, Kyle Tucker, and the unique case of Mike Edwards, then (15:55) kick off a series of interviews about unsung baseball jobs by talking to Rockies bullpen catcher and major league operations assistant (and now, minor league hitting coach) Aaron Muñoz, followed (1:06:09) by former Marlins coordinator […]

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Hello and welcome to episode 2269 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Meg Rowley of FanGraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. So it's arbitration season, which is not among the more exciting news cycles, I would say. No.

But every now and then I get like a minor heart attack because I see Jeff Passon tweet about some major player who signed a contract and I'm like, what, oh, oh, oh. Right. It was just, yeah, they signed a deal to avoid arbitration. That's not exciting at all. That's expected. I mean, okay, now we know they're not going to ARB. They're not going to go to a hearing, but I'm always thinking, oh, was there a huge extension or wait, free agent signing or

someone changed teams or something? No, it's not that. I'm sure a lot of people who get those notifications are probably confused by it and probably also a lot of people who get those notifications are probably confused by it. And probably also a lot of people who are just confused by the arbitration process in general, which is understandable, probably see those alerts and think, Tarek Scoob will sign a $10 million contract for one year. He just won a CyUK Award. That doesn't seem like enough. Yeah. Right. I'm sure that happens all the time. I saw that reaction to Brent Rooker's extension. Congrats to Brent because he- Didn't break it on EWD though.

No, I know he didn't bring it on, but I guess we won't hold that against him. Maybe it was out of his hands, you know? Maybe it was leaked from elsewhere and he was just on the verge of telling us and got scooped or something, who knows? Could be true. Rosenthal's, he's good at his job,

but that extension was for three Arbyers. And so people were looking at that and comparing to like Pete Alonso, who is currently a free agent and it's just, it's different. It's how economics work in baseball is what they've collectively park and it's a strange system, but it's, I guess the best that they've come up with so far. But there was one funny thing, friend of the show, Alex Spear, he tweeted that per a source, the Red Sox, this was in Jaren Duran's arbitration, that they had exchanged figures, the Red Sox and Jaren Duran, and that the Red Sox had filed at 4 million and Jaren Duran filed at 3.5 million. And because he's an excellent reporter, he quickly realized that he had got that reversed

and he, quote, skeeted it or whatever we're saying and said, make that Duran at 4 million, Sox at 3.5 million, would have been a pretty strange negotiation otherwise, which is true. If the team had submitted a higher figure than the player, that would be opposite Ville. That would be bizarro arbitration. It would be very funny. Yeah. And someone in our Patreon discord group was saying, I wonder if that's

ever happened or could that happen? And another patron in the discord group Wandering Winder, I guess had a vague recollection that it had happened at some point and dug up that it did. And it was mentioned in an MLB.com article a few years ago that in 1980, a second baseman named Mike Edwards

actually asked for less money than the then Oakland A's offered. So Mike Edwards asked for 50,000 and the A's offered 58,000. Because the way it works, each side names their figure and then maybe there's a compromise or maybe there's not a compromise and they go to a hearing. But in this isolated case, Mike Edwards asked for less than the team offered. And there was just one sentence in this article, so I was trying to look up a little contemporary reporting about what happened here. And apparently I was reading an account. So Mike Edwards, second baseman for the A's, he submitted for 50,000, the A said 58, and the parties agreed on 56 with 2,000 in potential

bonuses. So they sort of met more or less in the middle there, I guess, or they kind of compromised, and that was the first time on record that that had happened. And it's the only time on record, to my knowledge, that the team has ever offered more than the player. And it's the only time on record to my knowledge that the team has ever offered more than the player. And it's amusing. I don't know what I would think if I were Mike Edwards and would I be mad at my agent? Would I be happy with my team? And Mike Edwards was not a particularly accomplished player and he was coming off a season with the A's in 1980, where he played 46 games, 63 play appearances with a 40 OPS plus. And as it turned out, he never played in the big leagues again. And he didn't appear to play professionally at all in

1981. And then he played internationally for a few years after that, but he ended his big league career with a 64 OPS plus in four seasons and a negative 1.7 baseball reference war. He was kind of a marginal utility type. So I wonder if you're, are you upset at your representative for undershooting? It's like, well, clearly we asked too little here. I guess he more or less got what the team offered anyway and it was above his expectations, right? So I guess you're happy in that sense, but then you're thinking, did I sell myself short here?

Right. I don't know what I would think if I were, I mean, I think I would instinctually be like, what's going on with my agent that they think so little of me. Maybe the team was like, we got to buck him up, you know, we got to make him feel good about himself. But yeah, I think I would have something to say to my rep. Did I see Ben that the Cubs and Kyle Tucker are going to a hearing? Yes, that has been probably the most controversial result because they were what, two and a half million apart. And yeah, it seems like small beans in the grand scheme of things,

especially if this is a player you just acquired and you want to be your star and maybe you want to try to extend or resign at some point. And yeah, it seems like not worth it. It's, I'm sure there are other teams that would do the same but it is just another data point and Cubs kind of cheapen out relative to their market and attendance and financial wherewithal.

Look, I don't think, I don't think that it is a uniquely Cubs issue. As we've discussed, like so much of the approach to this is routinized. The teams just all kind of take the same approach. They're often dealing with figures that are remarkably similar to one another. I know that it has raised eyebrows amongst the players and the reps and the union and there's been, you know, like a word that sounds like a collusion, but we wouldn't say that. You know, and so I don't know that this is something that is unique to Chicago by any means, but I also think that it might strike some people as odd when you have, well, first of all, you've

offered a very clear signal to both Kyle Tucker and the market about how much you value Kyle Tucker. Cause you know, you just went and traded for him. So that seems a little bit odd. It's also, I don't know, man, like he put up four wins in like 78 games last year. So maybe you don't, don't be cheaping out on, we've been talking about how he could, you know, he seems like a anyway, I don't know. They're just, I think particularly when you have a guy who you've traded for, you again have expressed to him, his reps, the world, here's how we value Kyle Tucker. He is worth one Esauk Parades, one Hayden Wozniewski and one Cam Smith plus whatever value he brings to our club and it might be a

guy who you want to sign. You just, I don't know, eat it. I think you should eat it. You know, I think a lot of teams should eat it a lot of the time, but particularly in this circumstance, so it would have been advisable. That's just my perspective, me, Meg. And I know there's a lot of file and trial that goes on these days and you submit your figures and that's it. It's like your final offer, but there is the opportunity to continue to negotiate and reach some sort of settlement here or, or an extension or, or who knows what, right? We just talked the other day about whether this actually has lingering effects, whether there's bad blood that affects whether you can actually sign someone.

And in many cases it doesn't matter and you give them a good offer and they'll sign with you or they're just not even with you anymore, like Corbin Burns with the Brewers who was upset about how they handled his hearing and then they ended up trading him anyway. Right? Yeah. Thank you to our listeners for, because I had like a tickling in my brain that there was someone I was trying to locate that was more recent than Dillon Patansas, and it was indeed Corbin Burns. So thank you for quieting the

internal voices for at least a moment. Appreciate it very much. The difference here is that Burns was years away from free agency, whereas Tucker is months away, so there's less time for any bitterness to blow over. So maybe not the best first impression. Plus the Cubs have plenty to spend. In theory, their payroll's down. They traded Bellinger. We will see if there are any ramifications or maybe we'll never know.

One other thing I learned about Mike Edwards is that he was a twin with Marshall Edwards, who was also a big leaguer. And there was a third Edwards brother, Dave Edwards, and they were all playing in the big leagues at the same time. They all overlapped for a little while there, late seventies or early eighties, I guess. Or I guess Marshall maybe showed up in 81 when Mike was done. So maybe there's, you know, it's like one twin disappears, the other appears, who knows? But yeah, they're all still among the living. They're all in their 70s now, just the Edwards trio.

That'd be a fun cold call, except I'd have to conference cold call all of the Edwardses to get them all on the line. Yeah, it's interesting because the three of them, they all made the majors and they all had very short and fairly undistinguished careers. By big league standards, you make the big leagues, that's distinguished in itself. But they combined the three of them for, I think negative 1.8 baseball reference. So it's like an incredible athletic family, three big league brothers and yet none of them really had more than a marginal major league career. Kind of an interesting dynamic there. But it's not the situation where you have one brother who's great and one who barely makes the majors, because that happens sometimes too. They were

all sort of similarly successful. So maybe that's nice. You don't have to have any sibling envy. We all made it and we all similarly struggled. It's a bonding experience for the brothers, the two of them were twins. And then there was an, well, not unrelated, but- Not triplets, yeah. Not triplets. And then the twins were present at the same time. So it wasn't like a prestige situation. Well, no, it may have been. I mean, it probably wasn't.

They were actually separate people, but Mike Edwards- Well, so were the guys in the prestige. That's kind of the whole, sorry to spoil the prestige. There are two of them. That's how they do the trick. CB He exited the stage just as Marshall Edwards appeared on the Major League stage. LS Okay, gotcha. CB But the sun never set on the Edwards family there for several years. There was always an

Edwards, if not multiple Edwardses. Actually, you would think that, I'm almost surprised that that never happened any other time. To be clear, we're not still talking about the prestige. No, the player filing lower than the team, because back then the numbers weren't that different. Now, it probably wouldn't happen because you're separated by millions of dollars, but here we're talking about a separate, well, no, but in this case, we're talking about 8,000 bucks. It wouldn't take that much to be, and inflation, 8,000 bucks was a little more than it is now, but still, it's in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money. So I don't know if they like, if there were feelers like, well, what are you offering?

Here's what we're offering. So that I'm almost surprised that those streams didn't get crossed more than that one time. Cause you know, like if you have no idea what the other team is offering and I guess you're all preparing based on the same kind of comps and you're working on the same stats and everything. But even so, I'm sort of surprised that was a singular event. Yeah. And again, you might have a team that's like, we got to buck up our dude.

We got to buck him up. They don't do that. Hey, those guys who tried to wrestle the ball out of Mookie's hands, they're banned indefinitely from everywhere. That's good. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a just outcome to a goofy situation.

I'm satisfied. I think so too. All right, what we are doing today is a jobs in baseball episode, baseball jobs. So the original plan was to do this as a series and do it over the holidays and we would bank interviews and best laid plans. It's hard to pre-record. It's hard to arrange things over the holidays. It's hard to find people who do baseball jobs who are willing and able to talk about them publicly.

And we've got a couple of good ones today. So people submitted and requested all sorts of interesting jobs and we're working on them, working on finding the right people. So it's not going to be just a continuous series. It'll be a, whenever we line up some guests and have an open episode. Eventually we will have had a series and I don't know if it'll be all this off season or if it'll carry into the season too, but no particular time pressure. But we've got a couple of good guests to lead off today.

I love bullpen catchers. I had a bullpen catcher on the Ringer MLB show, RIP back in the day. And I'm sad that we've never had one on Effectively Wild and we are changing that today with Aaron Munoz of the Rockies, who's been doing that job for the better part of a decade. He was the one who was providing on the ground in-person anecdotes about the Carlos Estevez home run prediction some time back when I was doing my inordinate amount of digging on the specifics of the Carlos Estevez home run predictions when he was warming up in Colorado years ago or when he was on the Rockies at least and

Aaron Munoz was on the scene. He was the guy warming him up. So he was telling me what he recalled and I was sharing that on the show. And today he's here to talk to us about being a bullpen catcher and bullpen etiquette and lots of other interesting stuff. And then we will be joined by former fan graphs writer, Bradley Woodrum, who for the past several years

has been working as a baseball operations executive in the Miami Marlins front office. So bullpen catcher, baseball ops analyst, those are the two that we are starting with today. So without even a break, we will roll right into our first conversation with Aaron. All right, well, we are joined now by Aaron Munoz of the Rockies,

who for the past nine years has had the honor and privilege of being the bullpen catcher for the Colorado nine years has had the honor and privilege of being the bullpen catcher for the Colorado Rockies. Although just recently he has given up that cushy job and he has taken a new one as a minor league hitting coach for the Rockies at the complex level in Arizona so we can talk about that transition. But Aaron, I regularly hear that being a bullpen catcher is the best job in baseball. So what possessed you to give up the best job? There's nowhere to go but

down from bullpen catcher. You know, I run into a lot of people that think the same way that you do. It's definitely a great job. Don't get me wrong. And it's got a lot of perks. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the best job. I didn't aspire to be a bullpen catcher. I was completely naive to the role when I first found out about it. I get a lot of former college players and high school players always ask me how they can be bullpen catchers. And I never have a right answer to that. I was a former catcher myself. I was drafted as a catcher. I played four years with Toronto and then

spring training with the Rockies as a catcher. That kind of just kind of pushed me into that direction. When I first started the job, it was more of a transition job because I started doing it after I retired in 2015. They asked me, hey, we don't have any available playing time for you, but we do have a kind of coaching transition job for you if you're interested. And at that point in time, I was 26. And in the baseball world, 26 in the minor leagues is old, believe it or not. And so I kind of saw the writing on the wall and decided, hey, you know what, maybe coaching

is the right direction for me. And I took the job and I went straight to AAA after that spring training in 2015 as a bullpen catcher, knowing that it was a transition into the coaching world. After that year, I got interviewed to be, funny enough, a minor league hitting coach and I got the job. That off season in 2015, I thought I was going to be a hitting coach in the minor leagues. This was 10 years ago. Coming up to February, the bullpen job in the big leagues at the time

had just opened up. And the pitching coach in AAA at our level kind of threw my name in the hat, not knowing that at the time. And then I get a phone call all of a sudden saying, hey, would you like to interview for the bullpen job in the big leagues? And at that point, I had nothing to lose. I really had a hitting job, so I was like, if I don't get it, I'm still gonna be a hitting coach. So I got flown out to Denver and interviewed with our GM at the time and kind of hit it off and hit the ground running after that.

So I kind of stalled my actual coaching career to pursue this bullpen job. And nine years later, here I am back at square one. So funny how that works. So I'm sure that there's some amount of variation, team to team, level to level, but walk our listeners through a day in the life of a big league bullpen catcher. You get to the ballpark and then what?

People talk about routines, right? And whether you're a player, coach, or bullpen catcher, routines everything, right? So being new to it at the time and understanding that, I've already had a routine as a player, so finding a routine that fit for me as a bullpen catcher was something that I had to make an adjustment for. But the day-to-day stuff is very, very similar.

So you get there early enough, whether you decide to work out, you have your little gym routine, you know you get there early enough whether you decide to work out you have your little gym routine Before the players get there You always want to be out of the way, right? You never want to take up Space for the players to kind of get their work in so I get there early enough So if it's a 640 game, you know you get there at 12 12 30 get a nice workout And then once one one o''clock, 1 30 hits, kind of meetings start.

You're kind of involved in some of those meetings, whether it be the daily prep or the scouting meetings and all that stuff, you kind of just apply on the wall there. But then after that, the work kind of starts, right? Our job as a bullpen catcher is to make sure the pitchers are ready to go. So you kind of have to understand pitchers routines, right? And then be ready for that.

So whether it's throwing with certain guys, catching bullpens, this is all pregame stuff. The biggest thing is making sure that they have what they need throughout the day, right? Whether it's baseballs, where the bullpen's set up according to what the players need, right? Whether it's bands, weighted balls now, all that fun stuff. So you kind of get that taken care of to where the players can just show up and get their stuff done and make it easier for them

so they don't have to worry about that stuff. Three o'clock hits and pitchers are stretching, ready to go, so you're kind of there, hits and pitchers are stretching, ready to go. So you're kind of there, available to throw, play catch, get the arm going. It's definitely very physically demanding being in the gym and prepping your body the right way because we do end up throwing quite a bit. Batting practice starts. Whether they need you to throw batting practice, you're available to do that.

And then once game time hits, you have your starter's routine. You do all that stuff, you get them through that. You have your catcher's routine too sometimes where you're a part of helping that and getting the catcher ready for the game. And then once the game starts, which is my favorite part of the day, the first four innings of the game, because you're sitting there talking to the guys in the bullpen and kind of, you know, my role was to make sure these guys are as comfortable as possible. Because you know they're stressed and you know they're getting ready to play, but the first four innings, you know, hopefully the starter's out there doing his job,

it's kind of stress-free for those guys and you want to keep it that way, you want to keep it loose. Part of the first four innings of a ball game is make sure these guys are relaxed enough and prepared enough to go out there and compete whenever their name's called. Looking at a 2018 Denver Post story headline from working with hitters to being a sounding board for coaches, Rocky Zaron Munoz, more than just a bullpen catcher. The number of things he does on a daily basis to help us win is huge, Colorado manager Bud Black said. And I guess you were officially more than justible pen catcher. That sounds derogatory to say justible pen catcher, but you were also a coach officially, right? I don't know exactly when that happened, but you were a major league operations

assistant. Is that just kind of a catch all term for Jack of all trades, just helping out in any number of ways or were there set duties associated with that too? Yeah, you know, it's funny that the title has changed over the years, right? And I didn't know the title had changed, honestly, you know, until somebody mentioned something, you know, when it came to payroll stuff and they're like, hey, you know, this is your title, right? Did you know that?

I was like, I had no idea. The jobs and then what it took on the day-to-day kind of evolved over time, right? I was fortunate to have managers that kind of saw me a little bit more than just a bullpen catcher, right? They helped me create more value in that area, right? You've seen it evolve now. Bullpen catchers from when I started, right? There was only one when I started in 2016.

I was the only guy, bolt pin catcher that is. And the fifth inning, the backup catcher would come down in case we had a double barrel pitchers on the mound to warm up during the game. But that was in 16. So I was the only one. And then 17, you know, we got another guy because we wanted the catcher to be in the dugout and kind of be involved in that way.

So, to where as now that I've talked to other bullpen catchers, they've kind of established more of a bigger role, right? Whether it's the analytics, the game prep, the scouting stuff, all that other stuff that kind of you wouldn't necessarily think the bullpen catchers involved, but it's grown. It's grown drastically just because we are another uniformed personnel on the field, right? So teams has gotten smart to where, hey, man, this guy's on the field and part of the team.

Let's kind of utilize that role and expand that job, whatever the case may be. And in my case, it sometimes was I was lucky enough to be able to speak Spanish. So I was translating for some guys in certain interviews and kind of being the middle guy when it came to translating for, you know, coach to player or player to coach.

And it just evolved actually. And that's a credit to the managers too, right? You know, Buddy was extremely helpful in allowing me to take on a little more at times and giving me that freedom. And I was extremely grateful for it. HOFFMAN And why is it that people so often say that bullpen catcher is just such a great job? Is it because you just get to hang out in the bullpen a lot and sort of shoot the s*** with the guys for the first

few innings and we hear so much about what a great environment that can be and the pranks and the conversations that happen there. Is it that no fans are yelling at you? Is that part of it? Oh, fans definitely do yell at you, right? There's a reason why. Okay. I guess you're getting heckled no matter what if you're in the bullpen there, but you're not sending someone home who gets thrown out or you're not directly blamable easily, I guess, for something that goes wrong on the field. Yeah, no doubt. I think part of the reason people say that too is because there's not a lot of stress

involved in our job. I don't have to worry about playing and performing anymore. Looking back as a player, you're just the anxiety levels through the roof and the stress of trying to go out there and perform. That gets eliminated. So it's definitely a job where you can sit back and you have the best seats in the house in my opinion, every day watching a baseball game and you have the best seats in the house, in my opinion, every day watching a baseball game, and you get to experience the perks of the game without the

stress. And I think that's what people are referring to when they say that. And you're definitely a part of the guy's lives, right? You get to know these guys over the years, especially in the bullpen, the amount of conversations we have. You become a psychologist, you become a bartender, you become a friend, you become, you know, all these things that you would never have guessed just by being around these guys, right? And getting to know these guys and what makes them tick and what makes them, you know, go out there and compete. And that's the beauty of it, right? There's that behind the scenes stuff that I think people would absolutely enjoy and

love. And that's one of the reasons I love doing my job is because I was a fly on the wall with the best seats of the house and getting to know the behind the scenes of what it takes to be part of a baseball game. And at the major league level is something that I definitely cherish. We hear so much about the catcher-pitcher relationship, talking about the catcher who's actually on the field in the game, but that applies to your job too, I would imagine. I'm sure that a lot of those pitchers, they're probably just as nervous, if not more nervous before they go into the game than they are when they actually get out there.

So you must have to sort of settle them down and get them ready. And just that whole kind of being a pitcher, whisperer, confidant, friends, whatever they need in that moment. That's pretty important, even if you're not actually in the box score. Yeah, no doubt. And that's, uh, that's the beauty of what, uh, you know, what we do as, as bullpen catchers, you know, We are around these guys quite a bit, and you develop these relationships and the trust that goes along with that.

Even the work that they do, you see them day in and day out, so you know what they're doing right sometimes, you know what they're doing wrong, and they confide in you at times. You do become the middle guy, and you have to navigate that accordingly, right, depending on who your pitching coach is. You do have to kind of relay those messages, right? Because the pitching coaches have enough on their plate and sometimes they can't be around the pitchers much to work with, but if we can kind of navigate

that relationship and kind of be the middle guy and relay those messages, right? Whether it's a pitcher working on certain pitches and they've said something throughout a bullpen session and they confided in you, you kind of relay that message and it develops kind of more of a group effort at that point. And then, you know, you kind of hit the ground running

after that. You know, I imagine that as you interact with players, they have differing relationships with analytics sort of broadly, depending on, you know, whether they came up through a college program that had a heavy focus on that or whether they've had to adjust their game at the big league level to be more competitive to stick around. And I'm curious, you know, you're in this unique position where you're having to coach guys, you're having to sort of understand what makes them tick. And I'm curious how you've navigated a relationship with analytics in the game and sort of what

your approach has been, picture to picture, to try to see, you know, how you can best assist them, how you can kind of speak the language that's going to have the greatest impact for their development and sort of continued success. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. You know, the game has changed quite a bit, right? Even since I've started in 2016, these numbers were new, right? All these analytic numbers and all this stuff, and you kind of gradually saw the change, right?

And the players now that are using this religiously at times, right? And it could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing. As a coach, I think, especially at that level, you have to understand what works best for each pitcher and each individual, whether they heavily use the analytics part of it to make those adjustments. You have to identify those guys. When you're talking to those guys, especially during a game or even pregame, you got to

understand what works best for them and how to communicate those numbers to them, right? Because sometimes it doesn't correlate, right? So a guy can be in the bullpen and they're looking at their outing from the previous night and they're looking at the numbers, how the ball is spinning and how it was moving, especially at altitude, right? And it's always a factor. They always look at those numbers and they're kind of reviewing their previous game,

and you're sitting there looking at it with those guys, and they're just focused so much on these numbers, and sometimes you have to remind them, hey, sometimes the command is a little bit better than the numbers that you're looking for, right? And so how to navigate that has been a topic of conversation past couple of years, right? So learning to adjust, I think understanding the individual that you're talking to is huge, right? And some guys rely more, some guys rely less and finding the balance, I think, is this key. How much do the warmup routines differ when a guy gets a call?

Okay, you might have to come in here. He gets up, he's stretching, he's soft tossing, whatever it is. How standard is that? How much does each pitcher kind of have his own idiosyncratic routine? Just how intense, how long it takes him to get loosened up, what pitches he wants to throw at, what intensity before he enters the game? Yeah. And I think it starts to, even before they get on the mound, right?

So the game's going to dictate, right? And especially at the big league level, some of these guys understand their roles, right? And so they kind of get ready according to the situation, right? So whether it's the setup guy, the closer, you know, those are kind of the easier roles, right? The middle guys, you know, the long relievers, you know, their routine starts prior to even getting on the mound, right? Because there are certain situations where they have to get hot really quick, right? So they kind of have established a foundation already with their pregame stuff,

whether it's weighted balls against the wall, whether it's their armband stuff, right? So once they get on the mound, I think their routine kind of stays the same, right? There, at least, you know, the more veteran guys understand how many pitches it takes for them to get ready. And believe it or not, not a lot of guys let it loose until maybe they throw the last two pitches and they're 100%.

Which is funny because as a bullpen catcher, you understand these routines. Even set up. When you're getting a certain guy on the mound, you know that you have to set up down and away because that's where they like to start. Understanding that as a bullpen catcher, it makes the pitcher kind of ease up a little bit and relax because they don't have to necessarily tell me, hey, I want you to set up over here. Those conversations happen way before they even get on the mound. Like, hey, how do you want the glove?

Where do you want the glove? Where do you want me to set up? What's funny throughout the course of the season, it just automatically happens. You know that this guy's on the mound. I'm going to set up a certain way to make them feel a little bit more comfortable before they go in the game. And it varies from guy to guy, right? Some guys like to throw 10 pitches. Some guys like to throw 20. And at Coors Field, believe it or not, guys have adjusted that they don't need to spend 20 to 25 pitches getting loose because they're trying to save

their energy for the game. So you get a lot of young guys that learn that really quick, and you kind of have to remind them, hey, man, you're at altitude right now, so your effort level has got to stay within this range. And that way you can save your energy for when you go out there and compete. Yeah, I was going to ask you if there's anything, you don't have to give away state secrets here or anything like that, but specific to preparing in cores that is different than what you guys might do when you're on the road at a place that doesn't ask you to play on the moon.

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's not a set plan, right? road at a place that doesn't ask you to play on the moon. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, there's not a set plan, right? It's individually, right? It's individually based. I think the Rockies do a great job of understanding that the recovery aspect of every workload is really important, especially in Denver. And getting these kids to understand that, you know, in Denver we got to make adjustments.

And that adjustment depends on what you want to do and what you want to get out of it. So it's definitely a factor, but you know, we have the advantage of understanding that, you know, for 80 plus games in Denver. So again, it's a routine, right? So your routine is different in Denver than it is on the road. And some of the players understand that. Some guys learn the hard way and they make adjustments. But it's definitely a factor and we use it to our advantage because we understand it.

We love watching guys run in from the bullpen from the opposing team, right? And some of the pitchers laugh because, oh, he's running too hard right now. And he might be gassed when he gets on the mound. So, you know, we have those conversations, right? Oh, this guy, this guy's not going to last this whole inning because he's, you know, he's running too hard to come into this game. Right. So learning those little things, right. Is fun to me. And those guys make adjustments and it's a credit to those guys pitching in Denver. Yeah. We hear so much about the course field hangover effect and how that affects the hitters.

And I know there's been a lot of efforts and Charlie Blackman and others have led efforts to try to change the preparation and the routine so that maybe you are getting a look at how pitches are moving before a game, when you're moving from Denver elsewhere and back again. I wonder also how that affects things from a pitching perspective. People often look at the Rockies home road splits and they're always large. They've been a little smaller lately, but still big. But from a pitcher's perspective, if your stuff isn't moving the way that it just was at sea level, is that demoralizing?

Are you changing your pitch mix significantly, home versus away? And then does that screw up your thought process? If your first game of a homestand after you've been on the road and someone's warming up in the pen, are they demoralized if they're not getting the same break that they were just getting? Do you have to kind of course adjust mentally before you get into the game? Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, mentally, I think that's the biggest factor, right? And as a bullpen catcher and catching these guys, there's a constant reminder like, hey man, because these guys obviously they see the movement, right? And that's not as big as it is on the road. So as a catcher, you kind of constantly have to remind them, hey man, that's a good pitch,

right? Like it didn't break as much as you thought, but it's, you know, the location's more important at that point, right? Yeah. It's just physics. It's not your fault. Yeah, it's not your fault, right? So getting them to understand that, and that's a big obstacle in itself, right? Because the guys are so used to, you know, their swing and miss pitch being, you know, breaking so much and they don't get that in itself, right? Because the guys are so used to, their swing and miss pitch being breaking so much and they don't get that in Denver, right? So what can I do to help them understand that,

hey, sometimes it's not about the movement, it's about the location. And sometimes you have to kind of put your blinders on and understand that, especially the cores. So something I always wonder about and not just me is how predictive stuff in the bullpen is of stuff in the game, because how many times have you heard someone said,

they pitched no hitter or something, and they were just like, yeah, I knew warming up. I just, I had my A stuff that day. But then other times you hear completely the opposite. Like I thought I had nothing that day, right? So times you hear completely the opposite. Like I thought I had nothing that day. Right. So if we could correlate and maybe teams actually do because they have tracking stuff set up in the bullpen and maybe they could actually verify this, but we can't do that publicly. Do you think there's a connection? And if so, how does that affect just like pitcher usage or preparation?

Yeah. You know, it's funny when a guy warms up in the bullpen and they're just all over the place. I mean, spiking balls in the grass, in the dirt, you're just like, oh my God, this is going to be a long day, right? And then they go out there and completely have a shutdown game. It's like, what just happened, right? You know, go out there and completely have a shut down game. It's like, what just happened? Right? Yeah. Hope it wasn't me. Yeah. I think about Hermann Marquez, one game,

it goes out pregame routine. He's throwing his pregame warmups and he's just all over the place. And I look at our pitching coach, I'm like, he might not get out of the first. And I look at our pitching coach, I'm like, he might not get out of the first. Not with this stuff, right? And he goes out there and throws eight scoreless innings and we're just like, what in the... As a bullpen catcher, I almost want to see that over the overconfidence that happens when you feel so good pregame or before you go into the game, and he goes out there and gives it up, right? You're just like, what happened?

Was it overconfidence? You just felt too good? I almost wanna see the opposite, right? Because what ends up happening, I think, in most cases, pitchers that struggle pregame or before they go into the game, they don't overthink it, right? They're like, well, I guess I don't have it. I'm just going to go out there and compete, right? And then they oversimplify it and then they get better results because of it, right?

And I find it baffling that I've seen that more than anything else. Tanner Iskra Yeah. I wonder how that affects your mindset. Maybe if you suck in the pen, you're like, I got that out of my system or- Chris Yeah. There's something to be said about that, right? And believe it or not, that happens a lot more than you think, right? And as a catcher, you know, I hate to say this, but, you know, you don't want to go, man, that was terrible, right? Because you don't want to even demoralize the kid for going out there. You just kind of want to at least give them some confidence, right? So yeah, there's been many cases where, you know, a guy, a bullpen guy goes into the game

and I go to the pitching coach and I'm like, you might, you might want to call down and get somebody else warmed up here. Cause I don't know if it's gonna, it's gonna get out of the, if he's gonna get out of this inning. Let me ask you about dry humping. Settle down everyone. This is when our lever gets up, warms up, doesn't get to come into the game. And this is something that a lot of teams, they try to avoid and some teams

track this. It's not really tracked publicly. Again, this is data I'd be interested in having. Someone gets up and gets all hot and then sits down again and maybe you're warming up multiple times in a game before you come in or you never get to come into a game. How closely are teams monitoring that and what's the understanding of what the stress level is of that as opposed to actually getting into a game? Like if a guy's up and down a few times in the pen doesn't get into that game, is he down the next day? Like is someone ever unavailable because they were warming up too much, even if they never actually got to pitch meaningful pitches? Yeah, no doubt. It's definitely not publicly right, but we definitely in-house or pitching

coaches do a great job of understanding that and relaying that message to the manager sometimes. Obviously, you're trying to avoid a dry hump the manager sometimes. Obviously, you're trying to avoid a dry hump. That's not necessarily what you're trying to do, but the situation does change. Again, it's a credit to the bullpen guys that understand situations. Whether it's two outs and, hey, you got the next hitter, the pitcher understands if he's done it for a while now. Younger guys kind of learned it along the way and they kind of learned by trial and error. But the veteran guys are really good at understanding like,

hey, I need five more pitches to get hot and I have the next hitter. So they kind of read the situation and understand that, right? But the pitching coach tracks the number of pitches thrown, right? So if a guy gets dry humped multiple times in a game, he's throwing 20, 15 pitches, now he's at 35 pitches

and didn't get in the game, they track that. And so sometimes you see, man, this guy hasn't pitched in a couple of days. Well, it's because sometimes he's been dry humped multiple times and he has thrown a lot of pitches whether he's been in the game or not. So they definitely monitor that. It's definitely not foolproof, right?

And bullpen guys understand that's part of the game, right? And so it's tough when a guy three days in a row gets dry humped three times, and then he's got to be down the next day, and he hasn't pitched in four days. That happens a lot too, right? And especially in Denver, where you have to keep track of the workload, right? Because, you know, you definitely want to make sure that the guy's healthy and can pitch throughout the whole year. People are going to have a field day with this answer. I know our listeners, but hey,

that's just, that's what it's called. What can I tell you? How have things changed your relationship with other players coming in doing this for almost a decade, you're in your mid twenties, basically, when you started doing it just out of playing professionally yourself to now, you know, almost 10 years beyond that and you're further removed from being a player and you're older than most of the players, probably at that point, not all. So how does that change the relationship? If you're a young bullpen catcher and you're catching a veteran pitcher, are you nervous?

You just said there's a little less pressure in that role, but are you nervous about that? And does that just change your relationship to the team? Being a friend as opposed to being a mentor, that type of thing. Yeah, you know, that's changed too since I started right in 2016. I'm kind of like a fly on the wall. I'm I'm listening more than I'm speaking and, you know, learning that part of it. And sometimes players do come to you, right. And you have to establish those relationships and they kind of grow over time. You kind of learn the ins and outs from experience.

Experience is the best teacher, especially in that role. And so you understand your role a little bit better. My seventh year, eighth year, ninth year were better than my first couple of years. You talk to these guys. At the beginning, I was 26, 27 years old, and sometimes you get like a 30, 32-year-old veteran. And I think age isn't really a factor at that point. It's just more of how can you relate to these guys?

How can you talk to these guys, earning their respect and trust first and foremost, and then establish those relationships. So it's definitely unique, you know, because I view it as I'm the middle guy, right? Sometimes players kind of confide in you a little bit more than they do coaches, right? So actual coach or pitching coaches or managers, right? And so you're kind of the middle guy, right? So you have to learn to filter conversations out

and understand what's important to relay a message to the pitching coach, right? Because at the end of the day, you want what's best for the player and you want what's best for the team and the pitching coach, right? And what he's asking of you. And sometimes it's the other way around.

Sometimes the pitching coach goes, hey man, if you see so and so do this, maybe remind him to do this, and then you kind of communicate that in a certain way and you establish that. But it's ever-changing. You kind of go and roll with the punches and it takes time, right? Players up there in the big leagues are so stressed out all the time and it's hard to gain their trust at times, right? So you kind of have to wait it out sometimes, you know, and patience is key.

And you know, you kind of, you kind of go with it, you know, and sometimes they ask, ask you questions and you know, you better have the answer for it, right? You don't have to name any names, but will pitchers sometimes complain about their in-game catchers to the bullpen catchers? Will they be complaining about pitch selection or, I wish you could come out there, I wish you could be catching me, I like throwing to you, I just don't like throwing to this guy. I guess in the pitch com era, you could call your own pitches if you want, but is there ever a commiseration there where you can be the catcher that's less is at stake

when you're warming them up and then they go into the game and things go wrong and then they can kind of complain to you later? Well, human nature, right? Even athletes, right? They need an excuse, right? Sometimes it's more so about blaming me, right? Hey, blame me for not warming you up right, right? And then it's my fault.

My target should have been better or something, right? And so again, that's one of those filtered things, right? Sometimes these players need to vent, whether it's about their previous outing or how they warmed up that day or whatever. I think it's more important for them to have that vent session for somebody, right? And sometimes it is the bullpen catcher, right? And we're kind of, again, we're the bartender, right? We're just there to hear, right? Let them vent, let them air it out because if they bottle it up, it's not going to be a good thing for them. So you take it with the greatest all, right?

Players can complain, right? That's a given, right? No matter what level you're at. I was a player, I complained too, right? I was like, man, this coach isn't flipping right, man. I'm trying to get my work done. And it's like, all right. So to answer your question, there are times where there is a lot of complaining,

but it's never malice, it's never like they're the reason. It's just, they just need to vent and they need to let it out. And sometimes again, we're the only ones around. And you know, on the flip side too, we can tell them if we have that relationship, we can go, hey man, quit making excuses, go out there and compete and do your job, right?

Sometimes they need to hear that and sometimes they just need you to listen and not say a word. Well, Ben mentioned PitchCom and so maybe this is an opportunity for me to ask a question I keep wondering about. What percentage of PitchCom malfunctions do you think are genuine issues with the PitchCom and what percentage of them are strategy on the part of either the pitcher or the catcher to buy some time? You don't have to name names, but I am curious.

No, there's definitely, you know, without a doubt, there's definitely malfunctions there, right? And it's, you know, to what extent is it a ploy to kind of catch your breath or use it, especially in Denver, use it as, as kind of an extra time of catch your breath or use it, especially in Denver, use it as kind of an extra time to catch your breath. I don't know the percentage. I want to say it's low. I mean, I would say a veteran is probably more likely to have that happen that understands

the situation and understands how to go about that. But I think it's a little bit more rare for a young guy to do it because they're not even thinking about that to be honest. They're out there trying to survive at times and so I wouldn't say we necessarily do it. I'm sure it's been done. I wouldn't rule it out but I haven't heard in a lot of occasions that happening. Who catches more pitches over the course of a season? The starting catcher or the bullpen

catcher? Bullpen catcher without a doubt. I know there might be a difference. I'm a little biased though. In game intensity versus bullpen intensity, but still. You sometimes got to think too, we're catching relievers and starters, right? Sometimes even before the game, right? After their stretch and routine goes, sometimes they want to get off the mound, right?

Sometimes it's four or five guys getting off the mound throwing 10, 15 pitches apiece, right? I'm a little biased and I'm going to go say the bullpen catcher wears a lot of that, but it differs from team to team, I guess. What is the state of your knees? Yeah, or your hands. Again, going back to me not having any stress, I don't have to throw down the second anymore.

Fewer foul tips. Yeah. So I'm on a knee sometimes throughout the whole bullpen session, and my knees are perfectly fine. Whereas when I played, I was always a catcher stance and getting my legs underneath me. But as a catcher, a bullpen catcher,

you're trying to be as comfortable as possible back there, and saving your legs as much as possible. Knees are no issue for me. Do you have hand soreness? Do you need to ice after you catch several pitchers at once? Well, my glove hand is permanently swollen. I wish I could show you on Vim, but my glove hand is, compared to my right hand, is I think permanently swollen just from catching so much.

Now that you're changing jobs, I wonder whether that will change, whether it will finally subside. Yeah, I'll keep track of it. I hope so, right? Just track your glove size over time, see if as a hidden coach, maybe it's a little bit different. Yeah. It's like when NFL kickers have one leg that's like noticeably larger than the other, more muscular. Yeah. Tell us about the best bullpen prank. Is it overrated? Is it overblown that there's just incredible, profound or extremely silly and stupid conversations constantly happening in bullpens? Does it depend

on the mix of the guys on that particular team in that particular year or is it as great a vibe as it is often portrayed? Oh, it's everything and then some, right? as it is often portrayed? Oh, it's everything and then some, right? There's countless stories, ones that you can talk about, ones that you hope they never come out, right? But there's obviously pranks to you, right? My favorite ones are,

say a guy goes into the bathroom, right? And then our offense just goes off and he's been in the bathroom. And so the guy's kind of, hey, you're staying in the bathroom until this inning's over because they think that him being in the bathroom is the reason why our offense is clicking and scoring runs. So there's been times where guys have been in the bathroom for three, four innings, stuck in there, you know? So stuff like that, I think is funny

and not a lot of people get to experience that. And you know, you kind of laugh about it. And again, there's endless amount of stories that I wish I could tell that are probably going to the grave with me. So we'll just leave it at that. Hosted by Dr. David J. Zyrowski

Well, you mentioned the bathroom thing and I've wondered, baseball players have a reputation for being a generally pretty superstitious group. I wonder if there are, again, without naming any names, any particularly wild superstitions that you've observed over your tenure that you could share? Yeah, man, every guy has something. And nothing surprises me anymore, right? Whether it's I'm having a banana in the third inning, whether I'm drinking two Red Bulls this game, whether it's I have to go to the bathroom in the fifth inning, you know, stuff

like that, that little quirks that guys have that, you know, are fun and, you know, you kind of over time kind of make fun of them about it and you know it's going to happen. So as a bullpen catcher, you're ready for it, right? Whether it's you got to have pre-workout and these guys need it and you got to make sure it's available. Again, all these outside factors that one can control to make their life easier, you kind of learn that throughout the season and kind of roll with it, right? And some guys need it, some guys don't. Those are just the little ones I can think of off the top of my head here. Now that we're a few years past the sticky stuff, foreign substance crackdown, again,

you don't have to give away any specifics here, but could you tell us a little bit maybe in general terms about what you observed back then compared to what you observe now in terms of preparation for entering a game when you knew that you weren't going to get your hand patted down tenderly by an umpire? Yeah, no doubt. And that's changed too, right? We hear stories from other teams, right? When players get traded or players sign here and they're like, hey, these guys did this.

It wasn't on our radar, to be honest with you, right? Because pitching in Denver, the ball's slick as it is, right? Even before the humidor, right? Even with the humidor now, the ball's slick, right? Because pitching in Denver, the ball is slick as it is, right? Even before the humidor, right? And even with the humidor now, the ball is slick, right? And so whether it's rosin or sunscreen or whatever the case may be, right? That's changed over time too, right? And guys have been creative on how they use the rosin to kind of especially, you know, we rub baseballs, right, with mud. Some pitchers don't want a lot of mud on the pitch, especially when they're doing their pregame stuff. So you kind of learn that part of it. They want more of a white ball just so they can feel the grip. And that changes too, right, over time. So guys develop it.

And some guys don't even, you know, worry about it, right? There's certain players where they can just grab the ball and let it rip and have success and others. Again, I think it's more of a mental thing at times. Going back to what you talked about, Meg, about the analytics and numbers, right? Some guys think that they need more rosin to get more spin. It's like, that's not the case sometimes, right? And so it becomes kind of a mental struggle there with convincing these guys, hey, you know, your pitch is fine. You don't need to add more.

You don't need to do more. You have great stuff. Let's use it. Let's build off that. And that's changed too, right? And so when you're catching a guy, you kind of have to remind them. There's a constant reminder of, hey man, the ball's coming out pretty good. It may not feel that way, but it's coming out pretty good. I've caught you for a while now, and it's coming out just as hard as it was earlier. So convincing those guys has been an issue. But as far as the sticky stuff goes, it's kind of hit or miss with guys. Nowadays, it's become more of like a, I wouldn't say common thing, but no one really talks about it anymore, I guess. Hasn't been an issue or hasn't been even discussed as far as what I do. So I got in touch with you initially to pester you completely out of the blue about that Carlos

Estevez prediction story, and you were kind enough to respond to several emails about that. Our stance on this generally is that whenever we hear a story about a player predicting a home or whatever it is, we just don't make much of it because our understanding at this point is basically that someone on the team is predicting a home run at all times basically. And you're in the bullpen and like there's not that much to do and people are just chatting. Is that more or less accurate that basically people are just to pass the time, just to have a little fun, are just kind of constantly predicting the outcome of things and then we only hear about it when it actually comes true, whatever percentage

of times they actually call it, then maybe they brag about it or it gets to a reporter and it gets out to us. But how often is that actually happening? Oh, a hundred percent. Look, the bullpen, you're on an island sometimes, right? Especially when guys know they're not playing that game or they're down that day, right? It becomes kind of a guessing game at that point, right? Guys tend to, oh no, I feel like a home run here. It happens and we're just like,

I don't know if you see videos sometimes of the bullpen just going crazy, because that's what happened. So there's a lot of that for sure. And again, we're on an island. So all we can do is watch the game and almost be a glorified fan. right? And that happens too, right? You go out there and you guess, this guy's going to growl until don't play and we're all pumped and it happens. And you're just like, I told you, I told you. It's like, yeah, you've been saying that for the past week. Exactly. So yeah, I definitely agree with you. It happens a lot more than you think. And believe it or not, sometimes they're definitely right and we get fired up.

And there was a game this year, Stallings was catching that game. And I don't know, for whatever reason, in my head, I was like, hey man, I feel like you're going to hit a homer today. I just feel it. And sure enough, middle of the game, he hits a homer and he's rounding first and he's pointing at the bullpen like, you know, I had something to do with it. But, you know, I think at the time I just,

I felt like I wanted to give him some confidence and it turns out, you know, he hit a homer and, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've told a player that and it never happened. So. Right, exactly. Yeah. We only hear about the successes.

Exactly. The last thing I wanted to ask you is about bullpen etiquette during a brawl or when the bench is clear and then the bullpen is belatedly clear, and then it seems like no one really knows what to do. And like, do you square off with the opposing bullpen? Do you run in all the way to the infield? Do you feel sort of silly trotting in there after it's probably already over at that point?

Tell me about the proper procedure for how you handle that situation. Yeah, yeah. All right, number one rule though is don't be the last one out of the bullpen, right? That's the number one rule because you will not hear the end of it. Because once we get back of the bullpen, right? That's the number one rule because you will not hear the end of it. Because once we get back to the bullpen and they're like, who was the

last one out? And they just wear that person out, right? Because you definitely don't want to be the last one out. I've been in a couple. The one that I shouldn't have been in, looking back now, it was against the Padres. I ended up somehow being in the middle of Nolan Aernado, Mark McGuire, Cargo was there, and I'm just looking, I'm 5'9", right? I'm not that big. I'm not a big guy, right? Let alone on a Major League Baseball field with these two just big guys in front of me, what am I doing here? If someone starts swinging, I'm done, right? Like, what am I going to do here? So that was

a little nerve wracking. Definitely, I shouldn't, I definitely shouldn't have been a part of that. But again, when you see it happen and you run out, you're just sprinting. And my whole role at that point is just to make sure no one, you know, you're trying to make sure everyone gets separated. And that's, I think that's what I was trying to do, but I definitely shouldn't have been in that one for sure. Yeah, that's, that's the first time I think my first one was in Pittsburgh. It was a night game. And I just remember, you know, at that point, I've never been on the field, right? I'm always in the bullpen, but being on the field

is a completely different experience. I'm sitting there, I'm standing on second base and DJ LaMejue, and he's not a small guy. But underneath the lights and whatever the case may be, I felt like I was on a movie set going, what am I doing on the field? I'm looking up at DJ like, I shouldn't even be here. What am I doing? So yeah, those moments. But yeah. Jared Ranere That's when you get the

freeze frame and the record scratch and the, you're probably wondering how I ended up here. Chris Smith Yes, that's exactly what it feels like. Yeah, yeah. And I've had plenty of those. So you clearly have a lot of affection for the role that you've had, but now you're transitioning into a new one. And so I want to know what the future holds for you as a minor league hitting coach and sort of what motivated the switch. You know, I don't know what the lifespan is as a bullpen catcher.

When I first got the job, they said, hey, you could be doing this for a couple of years and not like it. You could do it for the next 15 years of your career. You just don't know. I spent nine years doing it and I loved every second of it. Just because the reason I caught for a long time was because when you caught a good game, the credit went to the pitcher, right? It rarely goes to the catcher. That's what I loved about it, right? You get no credit.

I didn't want the credit. I don't need the credit. Bope and catcher is no different, right? You do a lot of things and sometimes you get overlooked, but the beauty of it is you're behind the scenes. You're seeing how everything's done, and you wish everyone could experience that behind the scenes preparation,

because it's one of a kind. And you do it day in and day out. After last year, I get a call from Buddy, and he said, hey, we're thinking about reassigning you to the Meyer Leagues and to start your actual coaching career. And I was super pumped. I was fortunate enough to have these conversations with him and even our bench coach, Mike Redmond. He was always constantly asking me what I want to do for the rest of my life and what

does baseball look like for you and always kind of putting these thoughts in my head. And I told him, hey, eventually I want to manage and I want to go down to the Meyer leagues and start that process, whatever that looks like. So I was fortunate enough to get that conversation and get that opportunity because as you know, in baseball, you're not promised next year, right? And so the Rockies have been great to me and they've extended this opportunity towards me and I was extremely grateful. I get to work with these young guys now and get to see what the first year looks like,

you know, and I've had nine years of what the result looks like on the opposite end. So I feel like I have a lot to provide and perspective to give to these younger kids. And I'm excited for that. It's definitely going to be a challenge and I'm ready for it and we'll see what happens. Well, we wish you luck in that new role. I guess you'll be farther from the bright lights for now, but we hope you'll work your way back up to them in a new capacity. So, no doubt. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, we love catchers here at Effectively Wild. Bullpen catchers included. They don't get enough

love. Oh, they sure don't. I appreciate you guys showing them love. I do my best too every time to get to know a bullpen catcher whenever we go on the road or something. Yeah. What's the bullpen catcher fraternity like? Yeah. I wish it was bigger. There's a couple of guys out there that I talked to and remain in contact with. But that's the thing is the reason I did it is because they don't understand, those guys understand what we do, right? And so to have that kind of fraternity of guys that understand what you do and how common issues we have that we can relate to

and kind of laugh about is pretty cool. Well, we laughed a lot talking to you today. So thank you very much, Aaron. This was great. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. I appreciate it. All right, we'll take a quick break now and we'll be back with Bradley Woodrum,

formerly of FanGraphs and formerly of the Marlins I appreciate it. All right, we'll take a quick break now, and we'll be back with Bradley Woodrum, formerly of FanGraphs and formerly of the Marlins, to talk about being a Baseball Ops Analyst. To other girls I'm just a fan who wants Nothing less than effectively wild Oh wild, oh wild Nothing less than effectively wild Well, from 2011 through 2018, Bradley Woodrum was just like me and Mick, out here on the internet in the public sphere associated with fan graphs. And now he's more or less back out in the same boat. He's a civilian again. But in the intervening almost seven years,

he was on the inside. He was seeing how things really work in a baseball front office as the coordinator of baseball information services for the Miami Marlins. And he's here to lift the little, little, pull back the veil, raise the curtain, whatever phrase we wanna use here

on how being a baseball ops analyst works. Hello, Bradley, welcome back to the internet. I mean, I guess you were on the internet, but we were less aware of you for a while there. Back from the shadows, thank you very much. Yeah, it doesn't seem that many people who go on the inside from the outside come back out again, or at least not for long. It doesn't seem like a lot of people, once they get that

call and they join a front office, it seems like they're often either there for life or maybe they moved to a different industry or something, but not a whole lot come back to baseball writing unless it's as sort of a stop gap while they're looking for another position. There are a few exceptions to that, but is it the case in your case and in most people's cases that you found that once you get bitten by that bug or once you feel like you feel what it's like

to be privy to the inside info that it's hard to give that up again? Yeah, I think that and also there's a lot of burnout that happens. I think a lot of folks myself, I worked 60 hours a week up to 100 for all seven years I was there. I never had a vacation day. I was eating, drinking, sleeping baseball. And the truth is though that I think the reason I'm still present in the online space is that I would put in my 60 hours of work and then I'd play MLB the online space is that like I would put in my 60 hours of work and then I'd play MLB the show afterwards.

And my wife would be like, what, aren't you done with? It's like, no, I can't, I can't help it. The itch is still big and I gotta keep going for it. So I think that's the big thing for myself is that I just, I love baseball. I love sports in general. And baseball particularly just seems to be that space, that intersection of statistics

and sport that is so enjoyable to me that I can't stop being involved with it. Wow. Yeah, that's intense. You really love the game if you're doing it in your downtime too. When you say that you didn't have a vacation day, was that just a personal preference? Was that policy? Was that some sort of unspoken pressure not to take time off? I mean, can you literally not take a day

or did you just not wanna take a day? It's hard to say. I think if I had put my foot down, I will say that the organization was always accommodating in terms of I have two young kids. And so I was often called to do parental duties with that. And there was always flexibility with when I needed to be not working or when I am working.

But the reality was, is that a lot of the products that I produced and worked on were available and required on game day. And so I had to do work on game days just about every single day. And I also had to travel a lot. And with all of that combined, it's just, it was difficult to ever really

let projects lay alone for a long time. And so I think maybe, again, my personality type, I'm not a perfectionist, but I'm definitely a grinder. And so I think that always resulted in me putting in a lot of hours. I'm sure the supervisors would have been fine with me saying I gotta travel to Tahiti or whatever. But like the reality is also I was taken,

I took a 50% pay cut to work in baseball. So I wasn't racking up Tahiti money. So I don't know if I had that option available to me anyway. Yeah, I was gonna say to people not come back to baseball writing because the pay is not good enough, but it's not as if working for a baseball firm is exactly a get rich quick scheme. Yeah.

I, I'm curious. So, you know, you, you find this job with the Maryland's, you accept the job. I'm sure you had a vision in your mind of what that job would actually entail. And then you, you did it. And I'm sure that it was different. That's true of every profession, right? That you sort of have this maybe not idealized, but

particular understanding of what your professional life is going to look like. And then you do it for a while and you're like, oh, this is appreciably different than I thought it would be. What were some of the biggest differences between what you thought the job was going to be on day one and what it ended up being like your last day? I thought going into being hired by the Morales because the last article I had written in the public space was a machine learning algorithm to anticipate Tommy John surgeries. And so I thought, oh yeah, I'll probably be hired

to do some econometrics forecasting analyst type stuff. And I did do some of that, but really, I think you always have to be adaptive to the skillsets you have in any organization. I think we identified fairly early that I taught good in public. And so I was ultimately the analyst put in front of players and coaches

in a way that there only is one or two in any analytics department that really has that privilege of being in the clubhouse. And so I ended up shifting a lot more of my work towards that coordinating of information, essentially being the person who explains an analytics model to a non-analytics person. And I really loved doing that.

I loved it so much, I learned how to speak Spanish and I started, like, I even gave some Spanish language analytics presentations and stuff like that. And it's just, it was a space that was absolutely enjoyable, but it was also, it had to be at the expense of me doing some of the hard research type stuff that I really loved doing, the stuff that I was doing in my free time too. So I would say that it ended up splitting my duties

a little bit as I got into the organization. And so I was expecting to be a data scientist type person and I ended up being much more of a communicator for the organization or for the analytics department specifically. I guess you failed to fully figure out the preventing Tommy John surgery problem though. But it wasn't just you.

Yeah, no, I think what I really discovered was that like medical stuff is really, really difficult. Like initially the first run of my model said, R.A. Dickey had a really low odds of having Tommy John surgery and they were much lower than I realized at first because he doesn't have an ulnar collateral ligament. So yeah, I think that's a, it's a really tough task. And it was one of the things I thought the organization was going to be excited about. They were excited about the skills though, that I

had immediately. They were like, we, if we were able to predict Tommy John surgery really effectively, what are we going to do? Tell our minor leaguers like, be careful. You're about to have Tommy John surgery. Like that it doesn't, it's not as actionable as it may be. It may be in the outer sphere when we're just thinking about free agency and trade acquisitions, but internally there's not a lot you can do in terms of if your guys have those risks. That is the conundrum the whole sport finds itself in, I guess. Is there any consideration of just telling people not to throw max effort so much or

is that sort of a non-starter when you're actually in a front office and you are trying to win games? No, absolutely. I think that was always like we could recommend things to players to the detriment of their career and you can say it all day long, but the truth is, is the organization isn't the only voice in any of these players ears. They're working with trainers, they're working with their off-season buddies or organizations. And so we could try to put the thumb on the scale and encourage greater safety or anything like that.

But at the end of the day, if we do that and you comply and you start throwing softer and one of your teammates doesn't and they're still throwing 98, then you better believe you're gonna have a little bit of concern that, hey, this guy throw a 98 and I've toned it down to 96 or whatever, that is gonna undermine your ability to move up

in the mind league system. It's gonna undermine your ability to attract a team and free agency because they see that as a tool, something we can work and mold with. And so I think the very nature of the problem is, I don't know, it's driven by the market. And so I don't know what solution there is that is both player oriented,

but also reasonable in terms of developing performance. I don't know what the answer is. I do know that I watch like major league wiffle ball and they actually have a speed limit. You can't exceed a certain velocity. And I doubt that's coming for major league baseball, but that would be theoretically a way to encourage offense and safety in a way that would be neutrally applied

across the league. But I don't know, I think that's a really tough scenario and it's such a big picture problem. There's not like one person tasked to that notion. I think maybe an AGM or a GM level, you're thinking about that. But for my job, I was mostly focused on like any one individual player.

And who am I to say that this one guy is throwing too hard? It's hard for me to know. That's not my field of expertise, but I could tell him how and where his performances were good or needing improvement. And if I told him that, hey, you're not missing enough bats with your fastball, there's not really a whole lot of things you can do other than, okay, maybe in the off season, I'll try to find some more velocity or uncork some new movement with my pitch.

So it's a really tough conundrum for both the organization and the players that are involved. I think we have this perception on the public side that there's a fair amount of copycatting that goes on within baseball. And you know, you have organizations at different points sort of on the, the analytic spectrum, although everyone's pretty compressed relative to one another compared to, you know, 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And I'm sure that there's variation organization to organization and maybe even

within orgs as you look at different parts of the front office. But I'm curious if you can kind of ballpark, like how much of the work that the front office was doing was reactive to what you were seeing across the industry with other teams versus stuff that, you know, you guys were culling through data, you're looking at your various feeds and being like, oh, that's interesting, we should try to,

I'm trying to get a sense of like, what is in response to trends that you're looking at your various feeds and being like, oh, that's interesting. We should try to, I'm trying to get a sense of like, what is in response to trends that you're already seeing versus trying to get ahead of where the industry is as it's currently constituted. I think you're absolutely onto something. I think there's obviously a lot of copycat in the league because there's a lot of turnover in the league. We went through quite a few hitting coaches

during my time there and each one of them had their own designs that they preferred for the advanced packet. And that was in charge of developing out our sort of analytics advanced packet that would be delivered to players and coaches before games. And the packets that were requested from the hitting coaches, and these hitting coaches came from various different organizations previously, but they were pretty similar to each other. And you could see that they, you know, that maybe there are some just truisms

of what an advanced packet for hitters should look like. But the reality is, is that I think when one organization, let's say the Dodgers start hitting really well, well, everybody tries to ask, what are they doing? We start hiring away their assistant coaches and we ask, okay, so what was the process you had previously with them? I remember one year the Giants made the playoffs and our entire organization, the analytics, the off season, we spent just thinking like, how did they do that?

They do that in a really creative way. They had excessive use of platooning that would seem to work out really well. Maybe there's a way we can lean into that. But then when they aren't successful for the following seasons, then you have to like pump the brakes. You, you turn your attention to this new organization thinking about where the trajectory of the league is going. That's a really tough guessing game, but it's also something that you've got to participate.

Otherwise you end up in a scenario where you think, oh, we've got it figured out. And then you're 10 years down the road and like, wait, we haven't made the playoffs in 10 years because we thought we had it figured out, but the industry moved past us. So I think that copycatting is sort of the inhale and exhale of the league as teams are successful.

They start to hemorrhage assistant coaches as those coaches get hired for promotional positions in other organizations. And I think similarly, you see that even in analytics departments now, where if a team is successful and they're believed to have a really good analytics department, they hire away a senior analyst for a manager role and you end up sharing information that way, even if, you know, sometimes I've seen coaches

sharing like screenshots on their phone from documents that they want recreated internally, but at the same time in an analytics department, a lot of this stuff it's encased away in the brain of the person you just hired. And so they have the ability to recreate most anything that they did in the previous organization. So that degree of copycat does occur,

but that's also why I think the regular churn in analytics departments where folks are entering the industry and departing the industry results in new ideas because folks coming from different industries, maybe different sports, they've seen this sport in a new way, in a new light, and I think that can be actually somewhat healthy for the industry, but it's certainly at the price of people's careers and burnout for sure. I was going to read just the job description that you have on your LinkedIn for this position,

but then I clicked show more. There was a lot more, so show less. But here's one little item you have here, performed ad hoc research in Tableau, R, SQL, and Excel. Projects included studying the impact of moving the outfield walls, assessing the transition of hitters from East Asian leagues into MLB and examining the attrition rate of MLB pitchers given changes to league rules. Nothing about studying the impact of moving the home run

structure at Marowen's Park, unfortunately. But how much of the job is that kind of cool research project where it's just like, this is interesting, you know, like this could be a fan graphs article, this could be a stat blast on effectively wild. People probably think that's gonna be a lot of the job, just kind of going down these rabbit holes, but I wonder how much of it actually ends up being that as opposed to procedural stuff and reading resumes

and making sure that your routine reports are working and that kind of not drudgery, it's still baseball, it's still kind of cool, but it's not quite following your fancy wherever it leads. Yeah, I think that's an exceptional experience that I had where I was both in club houses and I was interfacing with some of our most unique research, whether I was leading it or a meaningful participant in some of the research that has a lot to do also with sort of the size of your analytics department. If you're in a department that is, and we were like six to eight people strong most

of my career there, then everybody has to wear a lot of hats. You can't just be the guy who travels to the minor league affiliates. You also have to participate in some research because there's just too much work to be done. We had a bigger task list of things that we simply had to say no to than we had one of ongoing projects simply because there were coaches asking for stuff. There were executives asking for research. And in general, we didn't have enough people to go around. And so in an organization like, I don't know,

the Diamondbacks, the Rays, the Yankees, some of these organizations with larger analytics departments, you might find yourself, the typical analysts might find themselves working on basically one project, the entire career that they're there, whether it be like our base running model and maybe our receiving model. I am in charge of those two things.

Those are my babies and I'm going to work on them all day long. But for myself, I ended up having to do quite a few different projects, quite a few different ad hoc projects like that, as well as major projects that did take up half my day, but were sprinkled in with a lot of unique things. And so that is one of those tough things,

is that if you're in a larger analytics organization, it's because that organization cares more about analytics, because they're gonna lean on your products more heavily. But it also means that you yourself are not gonna be as meaningful a contributor of any analytics project, you're gonna be a cog in a larger machine. Whereas if you're in a smaller department, like I was in, then you might get to do all of it.

And you might also be able to put a thumb on the scale for certain things in a meaningful way. But it also means that like your department as a whole is just a voice in the room and you may not be able to affect maybe as broader changes as you might like. And that was something I think we definitely experienced. There were times where it's like analytically,

we were directed this one direction, but the other departments, they deserve and need to have a voice in the room. You don't want an echo chamber, but that is sort of that sort of tough exchange that occurs between larger and smaller analytics departments is how much does your product get valued? How easily is it to dismiss concerns from your department? And how meaningful it feels like your work is to the rest of the organization?

Well, even if the department wasn't one of the biggest ones, it certainly got a lot larger during your time there. And granted, I guess most departments probably grew all over the league, but this was pretty extreme. Your LinkedIn also mentions that you built out the analytics department, the Marlins did, from a two-person operation to a fully staffed team of 15 plus highly qualified analysts.

So when you got there, I imagine there must have been a lot of catch up having to happen, right? That tiny department may be a bit behind and then by the time you leave, there's maybe a modernization that's happened. You have Peter Bendix come in from the Rays, you've staffed up. Tell us a little bit about that transition and what the difference was in terms of technology, resources, et cetera.

Yeah, so when I first got to the Marlins, Mr. Jeter had just taken over the organization and the directive was we want to be more like the Yankees in a lot of different ways. And one of those was the Yankees did have a fairly, and they do have a fairly robust analytics department. And in that though, they still wanted to strike a balance where analytics was a voice in the room,

but it wasn't a dominating force in any sort of conversation. And so we did not maybe get the degree of funding, certainly that other analytics departments get. And with that, we had to, again, like we had to wear a lot of hats, we had to be really effective, efficient, we had to do a lot of automation. I'm very proud of saying that when we did hire folks from other organizations, whether it be the Rays or the Twins or some of these organizations with very effective analytics departments, we often heard from players or from coaches that we were keeping pace with the league, but we did so maybe at the expense of Bradley's vacation days and the 100 hour work weeks and such.

But at the same time, we definitely prided ourselves in putting in a lot of effort, getting the essentials effective and high quality. But at the same time, they were always gonna be spaces we couldn't fill out. And so when Peter came in, one of the first things that they put me in charge of is we wanna hire analysts to fill out all of our minor league affiliates,

which is something I had been begging for basically since day one is because I would visit these minor league affiliates and I would, I would talk to these players and coaches and coaches who were constantly having these aha moments, misunderstanding our metrics or understanding a player in a new light. And that was really impactful.

And I could tell of my short little visits to organizations throughout our minor league system, like it was really easy to make a big impact with just a few words here and there, casual conversations that coaches maybe had questions that didn't rise to the level of writing an email, but they didn't realize how big of a question it was. And so putting analysts in every level was really essential. And when we finally did do that, I think we saw pretty immediate returns, players and coaches having greater understanding of our metrics, having greater performances on the field, too. And it was really exciting to see us graduate a couple of guys from our minor league system, possibly in part of those changes that we made, but also some of our prospects, some young guys having really decent turnarounds throughout their season this last year. So anyway, I was very excited to be involved in that process.

really decent turnarounds throughout their season this last year. So anyway, I was very excited to be involved in that process. But again, it comes with the byproduct of I was a generalist and my organization was sizing up to acquire a lot more specialists. And so that ended up coming at the expense of my own work there. But I really do think that they're what they're doing by fleshing out a larger analytics department, they're going to find a lot of success in that space, but they need to they need to staff it with folks who are specialists, who are really good at maybe one specific space. They are AI specialists, or they are biomechanics specialists.

And I think there's a lot of value in that, absolutely. It's a different approach, for sure. One of the, I don't think I'm speaking out of school, that like one of the things that you did would be to like email me and say, hey, Meg, we have a job posting that we want to put on fan graphs. And I go, okay. And I put it up. And you obviously were involved in that process. You talk about building out the department.

I think that one of the issues that continues to vex the industry is how to make the baseball workforce look more like the people who play baseball and also make the baseball workforce look more like the people who play baseball and also the people who enjoy baseball so that we aren't overrepresented in certain demographics and underrepresented in others. And I'm curious, you know, as you went through the process of hiring, was there evidence of sort of the effort to shift some of those profiles and have a larger applicant pool? Like, this is perhaps a really depressing question I'm realizing, but you know, as you would go through rounds, did you see different kinds of folks that were interested in working in the sport, making their way into the

applicant pool? Yeah, I think that's a very meaningful, important question. It's something that always bothered me while I was there. I was the guy in the room hammering a fist on the table saying, why is our department so looking much like me having a similar background to myself? I think there's an enormous value in having diversity not only of education and experience but demographic diversity really is meaningful

in terms of if you're trying to communicate with somebody having somebody who can maybe natively speak Spanish or people who sometimes respond better to a woman who might be giving this presentation than a man. That's really valuable, not only in terms of productivity, but I think it's also just like the right thing to do in a lot of situations. And so I will say one of the biggest changes

that happened in my time with the organization was the hiring of Kim Aang as our general manager. We saw the applicant pool of women more than go 10 times what we previously had. And there were so many years where we would have three or four women apply to an opening. And two of those were people that I had encouraged specifically to apply.

And so it was just really frustrating. I think part of it is that there is a online culture of baseball fanatics that is predominantly white male. And that is the space that we, unfortunately we advertise a lot of our positions in that space because we know there are people who are interested in baseball, who are passionate about who will work 60 hours a week

with a skillset that requires a lot more money than they're gonna receive. But I think at the same time too, we have done a poor job of, I don't know, like advertising to different colleges or different spaces where diversity is possible. The Miami Marlins are based in an extremely diverse city. And yet we continue to hire folks

who were very much like myself in terms of a waspy white gentleman. And I think that there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with hiring folks who have the right skill set, but at the same time, it lacks the effectiveness, the maximum potential that comes from a hiring process. So that was something I was always the most obnoxious guy in the room about white knighting in

and fighting for diversity. But I will say the Marlins were always leaning really heavily into MLB's diversity pipeline program, which resulted in some of our absolute best hires when I was there at the organization. And I do think that that program has been very good, but it's also bailing water out of a boat that is taking on much faster.

We would have to hire exclusively from that program for the following decade in order to just balance out the gender in our organization or in our department specifically. And it was a small department. So that was always very frustrating for me because I could see so much untapped potential in terms of our hiring practices. But I also recognize that we are drawing from a strictly STEM background space that is also

disproportionately demographically male. And so I think there was always a frustration on my end that we weren't hiring more Spanish speakers because that is not something that should be at all affected by the STEM side of things, but also just the fact that because we are hiring STEM, we could not seem to break through and hire greater diversity in the organization. I think it's something that organizations are trying

to find more and more now. I think Rachel, who was one of my supervisors in my final season with the club, she has said before, Rachel Balkovec, who's in charge of the player development side of things, she said before that organizations are now, they're looking for women who can fill these roles. As in the past, they would be willing to accept a very highly overqualified woman, but now they are seeking out females to fill in these roles. And I think that's fantastic.

I have said many times before that like, I would not have an interest in baseball if it were not for my mother. My dad's an artist, like bless his heart. I played catch with him like twice. And the second throw that was over the fence, like it's just, it's not in his blood and that's fine. But my mom is the reason I love baseball.

And I think it's insane to me that we cannot seem to have a workforce in the front office that matches the audience that's at our games or the ethnic diversity that we see on our fields. It seems truly fundamentally flawed to me, but I do think there's also another part of this where minor leaguers throughout baseball who are Spanish speakers, native Spanish speakers,

they're not getting the same level of analytics education that the native English speakers are getting. That was something I tried really hard to improve upon in my final season with the club and actually multiple seasons with the club. It's just the idea that like we give these presentations and so many of them have to get translated for the players, but we'll do an English presentation separate from the Spanish presentation because that way we can have translation. But those Spanish translated sessions take twice as long because you have to say everything twice.

And that inability to communicate cleanly and effectively with Spanish speaking players, I think is resulting in fewer Spanish speaking players finding themselves elevated into analytics positions later on in their careers because they don't understand that space in a way that their English speaking colleagues do. And so anyway, that's, you could get me talking for a very long time about that specific subject.

So I think that's a very potent question. Well, while we're on that sort of broad subject, I don't know how frank you can be or care to be publicly about this, but what if anything can you say about the end of Kim Eng's time with the Marlins or about what people inside the organization thought about how that happened? Yeah, I'll say that I was extremely disappointed and bummed when Kim left, but I was not alone in that.

I think just about everybody on both ends was very bummed that that is how everything turned out. I think the organization did have genuine hopes that she would return. But also, I don't think anybody can fault her for saying, no, I don't accept a demotion essentially. So I think I was over the moon so excited when the Marlins first hired Kim. I wrote about her as far back as, gosh, 2012 as a potential front office executive for FanGraphs. I wrote that many years back and she was very much more a hero of mine than Derek was even when I got a chance to meet Derek.

So it's one of those things like it was very exciting to have her in the organization. I felt like she had a really methodical, thoughtful process behind everything that she did. And she always took time to hear voices from differing perspectives. I will say that obviously she, her experience in baseball is not an analytics background. She came up through the White Sox and the Yankees, through their play development side of things, through a side of the organization

that is more broadly focused. And so there were times where it was tough to, from the analytics side of things, maybe get our say or to potentially like, you know, slam a fist side of things, maybe get our say or to potentially, you know, slam a fist on the table, so to speak. But at the same time though, I really did appreciate her leadership, her thoughtfulness. And I think that if she were still in charge

of another organization, that organization would find success with her at the helm. I think it was an absolute point of frustration for myself when she did not return. We see now kind of why ultimately there was a friction there at the organization for a long time. One of the second largest owners of the club is very analytic savvy guy, David Ott is a guy

I worked with a couple of times on some of my projects. And I think he had been pushing, and I don't know, this is me hypothesizing here, but I think he had been pushing and some of the owners had been pushing for a more Tampa Bay Rays approach to things, a larger analytics department that did have a lot more say on even smaller transactions. And so I think that effort, that push to go

towards this different process was gonna result in significant turnover, both at the coaching level, but even in the front office level. And that was something I think Kim was aware of and wasn't particularly fond of. She had said a couple of times when I was with the organization that she was more inclined towards having a smaller front office,

having fewer voices in the room. And I mean, one of the first things Peter did was hired several other assistant general managers. I think there are times where too, like we saw the last trade deadline, like having a bunch of AGMs means you have more people to work the phones. Logistically speaking, you can conduct more trades

if there are more folks actually able to receive and send texts about certain players and do due diligence on things. So that is a space where I definitely was frustrated and bummed at how it all turned out. But I also see the perspective kind of from both directions there. But I really do think that Kim is an

excellent executive and she deserves a spot in a front office running a team, frankly, somewhere. Well, putting that aside for a second, when Peter Bendix comes in, speaking of a more raise-oriented approach to things, I guess at that point, you're probably not having a whole lot of concerns about receptiveness to analytics, but he's hired November of 2023. And obviously there's been a ton of turnover since then. This is a house cleaning, if there ever was one, really pretty extreme, even by the standards of a new person comes in and there's always turnover, but there's just been an enormous amount of turnover from the dugout on up really. And so you were let go in September, you were far from alone, right? So I wonder whether at that time a new voice, whether that's exciting, whether that's scary, it's a new opportunity, but also you maybe have to prove yourself or this person might

have their own people earmarked for certain positions and they don't know you and you don't know them, at least as well as you know whoever was there before. So tell us a little bit about that getting to know you process when a new boss comes in. And then I guess whatever you wanna say about the exodus that has happened of late. I'll say that, yeah, when Peter was hired

it was extremely exciting for myself and other fellow nerds in the nerd department, but because he's a guy who spoke our language, who came from our background and blogger. Yeah, right. So that's a space that like he and I were able to communicate very well. And I really enjoyed my time interacting with him directly. And I honestly think that he is leading the organization in the net positive direction. It was one of those things too, where immediately having somebody like Gabe Kapler brought in as an assistant general manager,

Gabe spoke our language and was a former player and Gabe is just an exceptional person. And so I think like he brought in very clearly competent, exceptional, wonderful people, Gabe and Rachel and folks who like really could do a great job. And it did come at the cost of my boss, Gabe and Rachel, and folks who really could do a great job. And it did come at the cost of my boss, Dan Greenlee, who was also really great at his job

and some of the architect of some of the best transactions the Marlins had during my time there. And it was one of those frustrating things to see both quality departing and arriving. But I guess that's partly how the cycle of a baseball team works, even on the player side of things. You'll lose quality and you've got to replace it. And so I think organizationally,

the direction they went by kind of making a cleaner cut with basically most of the former staff, definitely was personally very hurtful. I didn't love getting let go, especially since at my time with the club, I never had gotten any negative reports on my work. I had been what I consider to be an exceptional quality worker, but at the same time, I also recognize too, I was performing a job, a super utility role that the organization didn't

see maybe in the future. And so in that regard, I guess I get that. And I think that that degree of frustration of the uncertainty of why was I let go or what did I do wrong? I think that's a thing that hangs over a lot of folks who don't get their contracts renewed. And frankly, my seven years in the club, I think is probably already like an 80th percentile outcome

for a lot of folks who work in front offices. And so I'm very happy with my time in baseball. I loved what I did. And if I end up working for another team, it's gonna be more of the same fun, I'm sure. But at the same time too, I also recognize that one of the things that I loved about working in baseball was the content, the style of work that I got to work on.

And that is a space that I can find that I was doing similar type work, and it sounds crazy, but I was doing similar work, working in utilities for the government. So like, I don't know if that speaks more about my personality type or anything, but I do think that there's something you said for, you've got to be the kind of person

who likes the kind of work you're doing, otherwise you can't stick around for seven years. So that said, I do think that the organization, they made some cuts in places they probably didn't need to. I definitely don't follow some of the decisions that were made, but I guess the macro picture is still one of leaning on analytics, leaning on doing as much in the player development space early on for guys

and having a lot of resources available to them in a way that we didn't have. I think that's going to be really beneficial to a lot of those players who are in that organization. So I do think that the future is actually quite bright for Miami. So two questions everyone always wonders about. One, what's the public-private gap? Just how big a difference in knowledge, information, insight is there currently and how do you think that has changed and is changing? And then secondly, what do you think is the gap among teams? Just what's the difference? Is it

smaller than it used to be? Which way is that trending too? Yeah, I would say that Cold War question of where are we versus the other teams is the more daunting, impossible question for me to answer. I will say that the insights that I got from players or executives or coaches who moved across organizations was that things are pretty dang close between clubs. But maybe that's the perspective a Marlin's employee would have. I would say that there were multiple instances where an executive would come in

and they would pitch something that they thought was kind of like a game changing idea to us. And we were like, oh yeah, we built that a few years back. It didn't get buy-in and it didn't work. So it'd be like a kind of a cold water moment where it's like, oh yeah, there are some things that we actually we're on the cutting edge of maybe our timing

was wrong on it or our execution was bad. But at the same time, I think the gap between clubs is fairly narrow because of the turnover. But however, that means that the gap between the public space and the clubs is a bit wider. I think there's probably about a two year lag in terms of what is being talked about in the public space versus what?

Clubs are ingesting considering and working on internally and and two years honestly doesn't seem that like that much I feel like there were things that when I first got to the club that you know, we were talking about Oh, yeah We got to think about like high spin fastballs and the way we think about fastballs needs to change and that was pretty quickly Caught on by guys like, you know Sarah's out there in the public space thinking thinking about how pitches move and really digging into spin rates and stuff like that. That conversation altered and blew up significantly very quickly. But there's other things that are obviously within organizations that are doing it right, that are

going to be still a few years away for the rest of us to catch on what has happened. In part, because sometimes organizations are trying things and they don't work out, and so we don't really notice that they try it. That one's a harder one to detect for sure. So I think, yeah, there's still a gap in that space. The gap between the teams is a lot harder to know for sure though.

When I left my internship with the Yankees in 2011, they had at the time, what was a pretty advanced system. I'm sure it still is, but I no longer know. But there was a withdrawal there because I had access to all this cool stuff. And then it was taken away and I wanted to be able to look at those leaderboards or look at that video. And of course, there's a lot of excellent stuff that is public now. But I wonder if there's something, if you want to specify what it is, please feel free, but I wonder if just going from private to public, again,

you feel the absence of certain reports or video angles or information or whatever it is beyond obviously just being able to look at scouting reports, for instance, but stats, information, resources that just aren't available or aren't widely available in public. Yeah, I'll say that what FanGraphs has built over the last several years and what Statcast is fleshing out, or Baseball Savant is fleshing out, is really impressive. And that does honestly meet a lot of what was available internally.

And everything else that was available internally that we don't have in the public space is stuff I built, so I'm just rebuilding it for myself. So that is one of the, I guess, the perks of having been involved in so many of those types of projects. And I just, I've been, I built my own SQL database and I'm just slowly rebuilding all the stuff that I had privately with the club

because I think there are some tools, some handy things that are available, but for the most part, the public space analytically is missing, I think, the synergy of all those pieces. And there was a one-stop shop on the player pages in our internal website that had scouting reports, our offensive and pitching and defensive metrics, and all of it was really integrated

and very handily constructed. And also like some sort of like, it's hard to say like how to describe it, but a automated scouting report that was compiling tools, that kind of stuff is all within reason of combining what we have out there in the public space already. So for me, I think the public space has a lot of the things it's how they put them together

and how we analyze the players is big gap, but also minor league data. There's just so much more minor league data within a club that really does change the way you perceive players or transactions. Give me it, give me it. Give me it. Yeah, no, that is something I miss a ton.

What if you gave it to me though? I don't have to give, I'm so sorry. Give me it, I wanna touch them all. You said you could rebuild everything. Rebuild it from memory. Yeah, I wanna touch them all, let me do it. Yeah, I was actually gonna ask about that, just like the intellectual property or what you can and can't share or bring with you, because you're not under an NDA.

You told us before we started recording, there's maybe some professional propriety and limits the amount of dirt you want to dish. You might want to work in baseball again, that sort of thing. But you're not legally restricted from saying something. But is that the norm? Has that changed how protective are teams of their secrets? Given that, as you said, there is a lot of turnover and yet, uh, teams probably don't want people to take everything they know or have worked

on to their next employer. Well, I think obviously every person is gonna behave differently. I'm a guy who had a security clearance with the government. I'm a very rules following kind of guy. So the moment they let me go, I closed my laptop, didn't reopen it, sent it away immediately to the Marlin. So for me, there was no way I was gonna bring

anything I built with the club with me. I've had coaches who showed me pictures of stuff that they had with other clubs and that was fingernails on the chalkboard. I mean, not something I would ever do. But the problem is, is that I built so much of it that it's in my head. And so I know what I want and I know how to rebuild it.

And a lot of the tools like Tableau and Statcast data is available out there. So it's not hard for me to rebuild a lot of things I was using previously. But I think the truth is, is that the Marlins right now are looking to, they're burning it down and building it fresh. And so because of that,

I don't think they were terribly scared about me taking the intellectual property that was locked away in my head. The truth is that any other things I built for the Marlins is property of the Marlins. So I would never destroy that trust because that's what I take home with me at the end of the night is my reputation.

So there are probably other clubs out there who are doing way more sophisticated things that I would not be able to rebuild on my own. But the stuff I was working on and using, I found those daily driver tools for myself when I was with the Marlins, is all stuff that is, it's out there. And the question is, is how do we perceive it?

How do we use it? And so maybe that's a call of action to young folks wanting to get into baseball is that there are the pieces of the puzzle in the blogosphere right now. It's out there on FanGraphs, it's on StackCast. You can get some of the stuff that will make you look like a competitive candidate,

will show that you understand this industry in a meaningful way. And you don't have to wait or pay for anything really. I'm doing this all for free. So I think there's a lot of really great tools that are out there. And honestly, the FanGraph graphs has helped close up that gap. I said two years, but honestly, what's on fan graphs now is very comparable to what

we had on our internal websites. You can find that with what's on baseball savant. And there's really not a lot of pieces that aren't covered. But again, it's just about how do we perceive all those when put together? What advice would you offer to folks who are trying to break into the industry for the first time, young or old or anywhere in between? What sort of skills do you view as sort of the baseline? And what can folks do to sort of distinguish themselves as candidates as they apply for

team jobs? Yeah, I would say first and foremost, don't like try to emulate my career or career path or expect to get to what I did. I was very much a knuckle baller. Like I was doing something really unique and it's not a thing you're gonna teach everybody to work on fastballs and sliders first and then work your way towards knuckle ball

if those don't work out. But I will say that one of the biggest game changers when I was doing interviews or reading through resumes was people having demonstrated some of their capabilities to work. And that might be starting a blog where only you and your mom are reading it. That's fine. As long as you're showing, Hey, I know how to code in Python. I know how to analyze baseball, getting your GitHub in order, putting some good code out there, doing research, posting on LinkedIn or blue sky or whatever it is. I think just finding a way to show

that you know, the skills that you say you have is gonna help separate candidates out from each other. We had so many candidates with decent baseball work experience or decent education, but there's just so many of them. We're getting hundreds of applicants a day. And usually after day three, we know we have enough applicants to find at least one

quality associate or intern or entry level employee. And so, we didn't even consider resumes oftentimes if it had been a week after the job posting. And that should be depressing because it kind of is, but the reality is, is that like, there's so many people who want to work in baseball. You've got to understand the competition is fierce. To separate yourself out,

having some work experience is fantastic. Having a blog or some means of showing your abilities is extremely valuable. It was one of the things that I found I would skim resumes, but I would study githubs. It was so much more useful to know somebody could code, how well they coded, somebody could analyze baseball, they could make a Tableau dashboard or an R Shiny dashboard. That's so valuable to an organization to know that I don't have to train somebody in this, that I think there's no reason not to start doing that stuff. That's all free. It just takes time to build those things out. But also I think don't undersell working outside of

baseball for a little bit. I worked as a financial analyst and an economist before being hired by a major league team. And that experience was really essential for me to have success in my organization. And so I think there's a stigma that if I'm not working in like tickets in a front office, then I'm not following my dream. The reality is, is that working in selling tickets is so there's so little overlap in job skill sets that actually line up with what an analytics organization or an analytics department is looking for. And so you would be better off working data for a company that sells bath mats

than you would be to sell tickets for a minor league team or something like that. So that was one of the tough paradigms. I don't think people recognized when they were applying to jobs, they would have these skills, maybe in education, but they didn't use them in their workspace. And that work you did for the minor league club

isn't as meaningful as it should be simply because there is no overlap in skillsets. So I know that's a wild and crazy rant there, but I think in general, the key point of advice is start doing whatever you're interested in doing. A, because you'll be able to build up a resume, a portfolio of demonstration that you can do this thing that you're purportedly doing,

but also B, you'll find out if you like doing it. I think there's a lot of folks who get into coding and like, oh, wow, this is the most boring, terrible thing I've ever done. I don't want to do this thing that you're purportedly doing, but also B, you'll find out if you like doing it. I think there's a lot of folks who get into coding and like, Oh, wow, this is the most boring, terrible thing I've ever done. I don't want to do this again. So, you know, head off that problem by making sure you know, you like what you want to do. And I know on your YouTube channel, you have a almost 40 minute video that elaborates on this very topic about how to get into baseball. So you go into greater detail there and we will link to that on the show page. Because sometimes it might come up in an interview or on an application, people might ask,

what's the next big competitive advantage or what's the great area of research? And of course, a lot of it just comes down to implementation more so than these big pie in the sky ideas. But if there are big pie in the sky ideas that you think are being under discussed in the public sphere based on your time in the game, is it just the obvious? Injury prevention is very important, obviously. Are there other aspects of the game on the field, around the field that you think will be the next frontier or is the current frontier that we are not focused on enough here. Well, I think that one of the things that's certainly getting like zippered up right now

is the, you know, the MVP machine value of having a really robust player development system where you've got a lot of analysts, a lot of support staff around your prospects. There's just so much money wrapped up in terms of like surplus value. You've got a lot of analysts, a lot of support staff around your prospects. There's just so much money wrapped up in terms of like surplus value. There's so much surplus value wrapped up in the minor league system that organizations would be foolish to think they can make it work

without actually having an analyst at every level, without having video managers in addition to analysts. And I think that space is starting to get closed up a little bit. I think Marlins were some of the, one of the later holdouts in terms of staffing up that side, but other organizations are starting to move that direction. I do think that this is an oscillation.

It's a very fascinating thing to see what's happening. I don't know, potentially in San Francisco or in different organizations now, the Cardinals moving in a different direction. I think each organization is trying to, they're swinging back and forth a little bit, trying to find out what is that right balance between developing and supplying analytics

and letting players just kind of work through the feel of the game. Cause there's so much that goes into the psychology of being a effective baseball player that is so hard to capture in statistics or to effectively change with good analytics data. So I don't know, that one's hard for me to say exactly where the future is going in all of this space.

I do think that the general system right now is geared towards seeing player development flesh out a lot more, but where it goes from there, it's hard to say. I think sometimes we also overestimate the correction that's occurring. I remember there was a big period where it seemed like outfield defense was this big needle mover.

And granted, we've seen over the last several years, outfield defense is improving. The best outfields now are significantly better than the worst and the worst are better than the worst used to be. And so that gap is narrowing there too. But at the same time, some of these bigger revolutions, they tend to be, there tends to be a reaction

in terms of rules that follow. Like one of the biggest revolutions in my lifetime was the better understanding of pitch framing and shifting. Those two things are getting slowly and steadily eaten up by rules. And so I do think that there's always going to be overcorrections in terms of how we overly perceive the value of a certain change. But at the same time too's always going to be overcorrections in terms of how we overly

perceive the value of a certain change. But at the same time, too, you have to be adaptive. As the rules change, so does the game. And so it's really, it's unknown what the next steps I think would look like. Certainly, I don't know, I should say. It's not unknown. Somebody might know. Somebody might have a great idea out there.

I would love to hear it. But I think in general, yeah, just the player development pipeline seems to be that space where there's clearly uncaptured territory for a couple of teams. And, and once that's sewn up, I don't know what, what's next. Last thing in the couple of minutes we have here, one thing just occurred to me to ask when I was with the Sonoma Stompers working on what became the only rules it has to work. Sam and I were very invested in the players we personally signed,

which was partly an ego thing. We wanted to not screw up. We wanted the players we signed to be good and feel like we were smart, but also we were really rooting for them. They'd uprooted their lives and they'd come out here and trusted us and taken this leap. And we didn't want that to be a waste. And the greatest thing about the whole experience was that a couple of guys got signed and got to pitch in Pro Ball at the, briefly, but they got to live that dream for a while and that was really cool. When you're working for a team and for a front office, do you ever have that sense of like, that's my guy?

Like he's on the roster because I pushed for him, or is it all just such a group effort and so much collaboration that you can never trace it to any one person? I mean, even if it's like a minor move, like a rule five pick or something, you know, that you just went to the mat for, is there ever a time where you feel personally invested in someone's success because you staked your reputation

on it, evaluation wise, maybe, or yeah, you just feel personally responsible more so than the norm for bringing it about that that guy is playing for your team. I would say yes to both. Both I grew attached to players in part because like I got to know some of these players and like they're genuinely great people all throughout baseball. I made the joke before I worked in baseball that I was rooting for over half the league

by the time the team hired me. And it's only gotten worse since then. Now I've got friends who work in front offices and other clubs now, so I'm rooting for baseball as a whole. I'll need to get a Rob Lowe hat that reflects that, I think. But the truth is though that guys, you know, like guys like Griffin Coneye, I was writing articles within our organization trying to, I say articles, but I was writing like research, but comparable to like a fan grass article

essentially for our executive leadership, for our coaches to better understand his performance and to understand, Hey, maybe there's a chance this guy actually is like a major leaguer. And so every home run he hit, I was jogging the bases with him. And I know I fully recognize like, I'm probably not the biggest baseball influence in Griffin, Coneye's life. Uh, odds are his major league dad, Mr. Marlin, it has a lot more influence on his career.

And, and, but that said, I know that I played a role, however small in his career, and I also know the person he's a good dude, and so he's easy to root for. And he's not alone. Now there's so many players out there. I am just like, you guys just drafted Sixto in the minor league free agent. I can't tell you how hard I'm rooting for Sixto. It's just one of those things.

Sixto Sanchez is another guy who I saw a lot at the Jupiter facility, cause he was rehabbing all the time. And just like, I care about these people's careers cause they're not just, they're not players, they're people. They're people that I know and people I care about. And so, yeah, it's definitely hard when you see success and failure

sometimes come simultaneously when Zach Galin is facing jazz chism, like, you know, both those players had a meaningful role in your career with a club and you care about their careers. And so it's definitely a tough situation to end up where you will find yourself rooting for just about everybody. But I still, it helps me enjoy the game more to know that like, I helped

move a needle, even however small for so many of our players that I just, I care about all of them. I care about when they become coaches too. I'm rooting for them in that space too. Yeah. I can understand that. It's funny how once a writer, always a writer, teams will hire bloggers and basically make them blog just for a much smaller audience. It's funny how once a writer, always a writer, teams will hire bloggers and basically

make them blog just for a much smaller audience. I'm sure Carson Sestulli is writing poems for the Blue Jays. Yes. And in turn, I was writing memos about obscure rules and sending them around to coaches. That skillset, people make fun of writers and English majors, but whatever you do, this was pre-AI, hopefully post-LLMs, that will continue to be the case. We still have them beat for now. Hopefully we will continue to.

Their editor didn't make fun. Their editor appreciated it. She thought it was great. She was giving it so much time and attention and told them what smart boys and girls they were. I'm just saying. I know of some teams that have had internal podcasts hosted by former public podcasters. I know of some teams too. had internal podcasts hosted by former public podcast.

That's fantastic. These things exist. Anyway, apropos of nothing, I actually, I had a fake scouting report designed that included astrology signs and stuff like that. And I asked our coaches to please leave as many of those as possible at the Tampa Bay Rays Clubhouse in the hope that Jeff Sullivan would happen upon it. The word is that it didn't make it back to him, but I'm still very proud of that work too

and I can recreate it if I need to. Well, this was a rare window into a area that there's a lot of, not a lot of transparency about typically. So glad we got you back out here, at least for a little while, though, best of luck with whatever your efforts are next. And people can read you in the baseball prospectus annual for now. So you returned to public writing at least for a bit. Thank you very much Bradley. Always good to

see a fan graphs guy and a sabermetric internet blogger make good and get the call and nice to have the chance to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me. All right. that was fun. Thank you to Aaron and Bradley. We have had some front office folks on before, some perhaps present, certainly some future, and some past. I would refer people to an episode we did with Louis Paulus,

former Philly's front office exec, episode 1859, from 2022, where we talked to Louis about how being in a front office was his dream job. And then eventually it turned out not to be. The burnout didn't go so great for him. He decided to change careers. So that might make a good compliment to this conversation with Bradley. Couple quick follow-ups on episode 2266.

We answered a question about an owner playing in games for their own team, got a message from Patreon supporter Eli who said, I'm surprised that Ben as an elder millennial New Yorker didn't bring up this 90s era New York State lottery ad in the discussion of owners as players. And now that Eli has reminded me, I'm surprised too. Let's give it a little listen. Is the team where you want it to be at this point in the season? I think we're getting there.

Our pitching staff is starting to settle in. Bats have been hard lately. What about Baginski? What about him? Well, he's only batted 0-27 for the entire season. It loses a little without the video of Bajinski swinging and missing and fumbling the ball, but you get the point. And yes, I must have heard that ad dozens, hundreds of times. Came back to me immediately when Eli mentioned it.

That probably is what would happen. If it could happen, which as we noted a few episodes ago, it probably could not. Also two episodes ago, episode 2267, we answered a question about why MLB's potential reduction in TV revenue is worth worrying about for the average fan. One thing I meant to mention is a point that Joshian has made in his newsletter, which is that the upside of a version of the sport with less built-in revenue before the games begin is, potentially, improvements in competition. Because suddenly spending money, signing players, winning games will matter.

If there's less cash you can count on before the season even starts, if selling tickets makes up a higher proportion of your revenue than it has recently, then you gotta get fans excited. You gotta splash some cash so that fans will reciprocate. And it's true, that could be good. You might have fewer teams nutting, just sitting on their hands, not spending much of the money that they are receiving in revenue sharing and via broadcast deals, etc. I think there have always been and will always be teams that are trying less hard than others and that are succeeding less than others. There will always be winners and losers, it's a zero sum game, there are only so many wins

to go around, there are only so many wins above replacement to be bought on the market, but you might get fewer perennially hopeless situations if you have to make more of a proactive case for people to pay attention to your team. Though there were certainly sad sack franchises for decades at a time in earlier eras of baseball history. Finally Meg was musing last time about how she likes the name Cal or the nickname Cal. She was kind of inquiring slash joking about what Cal stands for. Could it stand for Calbert, for instance? And then it came up that there's a character on the Netflix show, a man on the inside named Calbert. We were joking about how it sounds like kind of a classic Mike Schor made up

name. However, listener Matt Trueblood pointed out that there was an NBA player named Calbert Cheney played in the nineties and two thousands. And in fact, he was briefly a Boston Celtic. Mike Schor is of course a big Boston fan, so I wouldn't be surprised if the fictional Calbert were named after the real Calbert. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount

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And you can check the show notes at Fangrass 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. Thanks to you for listening today and this week. If you're in the LA area, like many of my colleagues, we hope you're staying safe, and we will be back to talk to you next week. With man and bike In back rally Analytically called

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