Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2293: Impossible Sliders and Extremely Slow Curves

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a baseball flub in medical procedural The Pitt, Lawrence Butler’s extension, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s lofty contract target, how the ball moves differently in the Cactus League, and the value of variety in pitch selection, followed by Stat Blasts (49:20) about the WAR values of letters in player names, […]

Should we use defensive runs saved? Or follow the OAA way? Who's gonna win? With their quips and opinions It's Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2293 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graaff's presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Van Graaff's Hello Meg. Hello. So we received a submission, or I received a submission of another example of baseball being mangled in media. So we have another case of baseball showing up in a movie or TV show, in this case, a TV show, and not quite being right.

Just sounding some alarm, raising some red flag that as always makes us say, you could have consulted us, we're right here. Have you watched The Pit? No. Okay, neither have I. This is so like decisive. I like Noah Wiley.

Noah Wiley's in it, right? This is a Noah Wiley show? He's in it and yeah. And it's like a play on words, the title, cause it's like they're talking about the ER, but also it's set in Pittsburgh. Am I understanding all that correctly? Wow, I know so much about that show.

I'm excited. It's a medical show. Each episode is an hour. That's kind of the gimmick. It's bringing the procedurals to streaming. It's on max. He is not playing his character from ER though, right? No, it is not his ER character, different doctor,

but kind of a spiritual successor, an homage, a callback of sorts, culturally speaking, I suppose. Anyway, I haven't had a chance to watch it yet either. I want to. It's been well received. Yeah, I'll get around to it, but I have now watched some scenes because I received a text from friend of the show, Zach Buchanan, formerly of the Athletic and many freelance outlets and currently of the Phoenix New Times. And he alerted me to a misuse of baseball here. So this is from the latest episode, episode 10 of season one. I'll just tell you what you need to know and then I'll share some clips with you that you

can listen to and that I will play on the pod. And we can do that in real time. So this is, and I didn't watch the entire episode, I just watched these baseball relevant scenes, but it's a high school kid who comes into the hospital in his baseball uniform with one of his eyes covered because he's been hit by a line drive. And so, yeah, so he's getting the eye checked out.

And then gradually over the course of the episode, we learn a little bit more about him and his dad who accompanies him to the hospital. So what I'm gonna do, I have three shortish clips from scenes that this kid appears in with his dad. And I'm actually going to share them with you in reverse chronological order, because the thing that Zach raised here

is in the first scene, but I think it helps to have additional context on this character that is provided in later scenes. So here's number one. So he has the surgery, stays overnight, he goes home tomorrow? It depends on how the surgery goes Number one. Huh? Sarah, your son is freaking out because he may never see out of his left eye again. Yeah, that's- No, no, forget baseball.

Just be his dad. I can't be that fucking awkward. Wow, very dramatic. Such a dramatic show. So the dad is extremely into baseball. He's pushing his kid to play at all times. This is the number one priority even above the kid's health and wellbeing.

All that matters here is baseball, okay? So that's important context. All right, here is scene number two, which actually precedes the scene that you just heard. You a junior? Yeah. You thinking about college? I have some due interest.

Where'd you go to college? Pitt for undergrad, now med school. You don't want to leave town? Look up at the ceiling for some numbing drops. It's not exactly an option to live anywhere but home when you go to college at 13. Oh. I had some drops of the fluorescence strip. I was thinking about California.

Maybe UCLA or USC. That's cool. Hey, maybe you can go straight to the majors, huh? College can wait. I don't know. I do. Hev's got a God-given gift. That's why we spent every weekend doing travel ball when he was young, pro camps, showcases. He's not throwing away his shot at the majors. All right. So you get the point. This dad is intense. He's a... God-hearing dad.

Yes, very much so. Sort of a stage dad, a sports dad. And the kid's clearly is talented. He's got the God given talent, according to the dad at least. The kid says that he's had D1 interest. So he seems to be a prep prospect of sorts. And he's been around baseball. He's been living the baseball life for years.

He's spent every weekend, the dad and the kid at travel ball, pro camps, showcases. So they should be quite well-versed in baseball and baseball lingo. So now we get to our third scene, which is actually the first scene, the introduction of this kid and his dad. And you can let me know whether anything

sounds slightly amiss. I'm so nervous because like, what if I listen to it and I'm like, that seems fine. And then I reveal myself to be an income poop. Okay, here we go. Let's find out if Meg's a dope. Who do we have the pleasure of meeting this afternoon? Everett Young, 16, took a line drive to the left eye.

Taki at 118. Four of morphine, four of Zofran. Excuse me. It was easily 100 miles per hour. Oof. Did you pass out? Uh, no ma'am. Baseball's a fun activity.

You any good? Any good. He's got a 95 mile an hour fastball, 12'6 slider, or.94 ERA. And he's a southpaw. What's that? That's a future Cy Young. I didn't know what that is either.

Okay, wait, what? So okay, he's, he's taken it. Let me make sure I'm understanding the scene. So this kid is a lefty prep pitcher who already throws 95. That's impressive. You know, to be a prep pitcher and already throw 95. And he took a come backer to the eye, right? Is what we're given to understand. Oh, wait, no. Okay, wait, I got to listen to that part again. Wait, wait.

Yeah. What pitch does he pair with that 95 mile per hour fastball? He's got a 95 mile an hour fastball, a 12.6 slider, a.94 ERA, and he's a southpaw. Wait, he has a 12.6 slider? 12.6 slider. I don't think that's how you would say that. He throws a 12 to 6 slider. No, no. That's not a thing.

That doesn't make any sense. I missed the slider part initially. Wait, why is- There's a lot to keep track of there, but- Okay, but so like, it's such a a weird errors like this are so weird to me. I can't, I almost like I'm not mad because it's like you have, you know, you've loaded in, I wonder if the actor made a mistake on the day. Like, is that how it's written in the script?

But why would they say, why, if you're an actor and you know enough about baseball to be doing like improvisational jazz with the script, you would know not to say a 12-6 slider. That is a curveball. Exactly. That's curveball movements you wouldn't want or you couldn't have a slider that had 12-6 movements. That's just not- That doesn't sound like a Cy Young one. It sounds like a home run is what it sounds like to me. That sounds like a hung slider. Yeah, I like the medical staff saying that's a fun activity.

Baseball's a fun activity, but I don't blame them for not picking up on the 12 to 6 slider issue, but these guys, they're hardcore. This is a top prospect. They're in travel ball. They're living and breathing baseball. You don't say 12 to 6 slider. On a Patreon bonus episode, I have discussed my issues with telling time on an analog clock, but even I know a slider is more of a lateral movement. It's more of a 8 to 10 for a righty or a 2 to 4 for a lefty. So the fact that everyone I saw who works in this hospital is

improbably good looking, not the least possible aspect of this episode. KS And so like, here's the, this is why it's so weird to me because again, this is clearly the rest of the monologue that is meant to establish the dad as an intense baseball jerk is like freighted with things that an intense baseball jerk dad would say about his prep player, Southpaw son who like can throw 95 already. You know, we could quibble with the like going straight to the majors. It's like, no, he's a prep arm. He's not going straight to the majors. Like that's not happening. But setting that aside, like, you know, that that's like the bloviations of an intense baseball jerk dad, you know, that can make sense within, in universe.

Or he could even be such an incredible prospect that he's like, I don't know, David Clyde or something. He is going to go directly to the majors because that worked out so well for David Clyde. But you could imagine, you know, he's throwing 95 as a prep player. Right. Might not take very long in the minors, might not need to hang around, you know, Altoona for very long. Sure. So like, you get, you get all of that, but that's a confounding little mistake. What Zach said to me is that it's somehow worse when they get so close and then screw

it up. Right. Like someone had to know that there was a 12 to 6 something that some breaking ball, some sort of pitch moves 12 to 6 and then they got that close. It was almost authentic and then they just didn't check which type of breaking ball breaks in that direction. I just think that weird Kershaw commercial where it's like, what is he supposed to be throwing in this? Did you like how I, a stickler for detail, decided to pick an actual pirate's affiliate? Oh yeah, clever. So this is just- Not the AAA affiliate, maybe knock me for that,

but like AA, you know, like maybe he's really good at starts. I am confounded, Ben. I'm confounded. I checked Twitter and Blue Sky to see if anyone else had picked up on this and found one person on Blue Sky who had sent a message about this. And I think it was perfect because the caption was, when the baseball dad in the pit describes his son's 12 to 6 slider, and then the image is of the scene in Inglourious Basterds. I don't know if you've seen that where the, yeah, the British spy who's undercover as a German, he holds up the three fingers for the three glasses, but he doesn't hold up the right three fingers

that a real German would hold up those particular, right. And so the actual German clocks that he's an imposter, that's exactly what this is. It's like this guy is a undercover pretending to be a baseball dad and he almost nailed it until he said 12 to six slider. So, so close. Nice attempt, people who write the pit

and whoever greenlit this line. I don't wanna dunk on you too much because I encourage people to reference baseball in popular media, but you just, you gotta run this by someone, you know? It's a lot of moving parts. It's hard to make TV, but yeah, you gotta have an authentic baseball person. Just give that a pass, like a sports, not sensitivity reader, but accuracy reader of some sort, just to, will this pass muster or will this end up unaffectively wild?

And the answer is the latter. Yeah, and then if you aren't careful, you end up going out speaking the Queens. That's about Inglorious Bastards. I haven't been able to revisit it. My tolerance for movie violence has really degraded with age, Good movie though. That'll be a problem, but yes.

Yeah. I can tell you one popular portrayal of baseball on screen that would not make such a mistake. And we will devote the latter part of this episode to discussing it. It's Ephus. There is a new baseball movie in town, literally in my town and no other towns currently,

but it will be coming to other towns, theaters, and eventually to video on demand and streaming, et cetera. It's a true blue baseball movie, not tongue in cheek, facetious. Yes, it's a baseball movie because there was a baseball reference the way that the pit is now a baseball show because they referenced a non-existent pitch movement.

Is it possible that his, his God given talent is that he has a 12 to six slider somehow? Like I feel like that would require further commentary. It just seems like an inexplicable goof to me. I mean, would that even be a good thing if your slider moved in a way that no one else's because you wouldn't want it to move 12, then it would just basically be a curve ball. I mean, It would just be a weird, it would just be a worse curve.

Like it would probably just be a not good curve ball. Why? Okay. So it's not even that he's, he's singular slider. It's not that it doesn't really make sense. I don't think so. I mean, we're going to, we're going to get someone written in Balan actually, it's this new, tried athletics. Yes. It's the, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, we're going to get someone written in, being like, actually, it's this new, tried athletics.

Yes, it's the kick slider. It's the death slider. Death slider. I think that's just a sweeper. Maybe they, maybe actually, Ben, what happened was they got all flummoxed because they're like, we listened to Effectively Wild. We've heard Meg complain about sweeper creep, which I do think is a real thing. And so what do we, what do we say?

We, we got to distinguish it from that. And then they got all turned around. Maybe they, maybe it's my fault. We've psyched them out. Yeah. But if us would never make such a mistake because it is made by someone who has played baseball and loved baseball, cares about baseball. And that is Carson Lund, who will be joining us for an interview.

And he's a multi-hyphenate. He did it almost all on this movie. He directed it, he co-wrote it and many other functions. It's a labor of love for him. And this is a small budget indie film. It is a tight 90 or so. And it's a slice of life, salt of the earth.

It's about a small town rec league beer league game. There is a shortage of balls, but not of beers in this league. They got plenty of beers to go around. They might be running out of baseballs, but they're playing one game because the field is closing. And so it's the swan song of this field and of this league and of these people who have come together to play in this league.

And it's a very, how would you describe it? Meandering, philosophical, lighthearted, but also serious. It's got a lot of humor to it, but also some profundity and some real thoughts about how we form bonds and how men relate to each other and the role that sports play in socialization. And just, it's got a lot of interesting stuff going on, but also a lot of baseball action and a lot of comedy, both slapstick and just clever lines and characters in every sense of the word. And it's not a

movie with a lot of big stars, at least in the cast, though the cast is excellent, but it does have some cameos that you might not expect. Bill Spaceman Lee shows up in this movie. Joe Castiglione shows up in this movie. Frederick Wiseman, the filmmaker and documentarian does a voiceover for this movie. So there's some interesting people who drop in, but it's mainly about a bunch of people you probably won't recognize, but you'll say,

huh, I would like to see this person in something else. So it's just a very good movie. And as we have discussed, baseball movies are few and far between these days. And so we got to support them when they come along. Yeah. And I just appreciated, you know, we have all this, I don't want to be totally down on long movies. like I enjoy a long movie, but it does feel like we are in an era of runtime bloat. And I think often driven by movies that are meant to be sort of like big studio releases, big action, fair franchises, MCUs, DC, whatever we're calling them. Or The Brutalist. Still haven't seen it.

And Oscar speeches about the Brutalist. Oh my God, I'm just saying, if you have time for that and a Bond montage, you could have done a real David Lynch tribute. That's all I'm saying, you know? That's what I have. Look, I don't wanna do any pot calling Kettle Black about runtimes, but I'll just say that, yes,

you're onto something when it comes to franchises. I get to say sometimes stuff is too long because I'm the one who sometimes says to you, you know, some of the episodes could be shorter. I'm just, you know, I'm throwing it out there. But anyway, so we have like this bloat and I think that we also like, sometimes I feel like movies are just so frenetic, you know, I like a well-paced, like, quick, dynamic, zippy movie, but sometimes it's, especially in the ones with bloat, you're just like, what is even happening in this guy? And so, to have a movie where, I wouldn't necessarily say meandering, but it's like it takes its time with stuff,

right? It doesn't feel like it needs to rush through, but it's still contained and 90 minutes and manageable. I just like, it was a really lovely, it was just really lovely, you know? It took care of my attention, I think is maybe the way I would put it. And I really enjoyed it. I had a nice time watching it. It was funny. It was moving. It was sad.

It was silly. Like it was, it was a good time, you know? It really was. It's ruminative. It's ruminative is such a nice way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. It's nostalgic, but not overly sentimental or saccharine.

It is set at some point in the past, so it is a little bit of a bygone world a few decades ago, and that plays into the themes of the movie. But yes, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It starts slowly, and then you kind of get into the rhythm of the thing. And it's very grounded and lived in, and these feel like real people in a small town,

but also then they kind of play around with the way that time moves in the movie. And it's just sort of this space that is set apart from everything else, this almost magical field, but not playing it up in a field of dreams kind of way. And people just flit in and out. And there are people who just happen by the game

and stop and watch for a while. Like there's, at some point you see a guy who just is shadow boxing out beyond the fence in center field. And the players kind of look around and they're like, what's that guy doing? And then he just goes on his way and you don't see him. He's not a character. He doesn't get any dialogue. He's just a transient person. He's just passing by watching the game for a second

and then moving along. And there's a lot of that. And the camera's kind of constantly moving around. It's hard to say like who the lead is or the protagonist. It's very much an ensemble piece or it's about the game and the park more so than any specific player, but it is a very nice and sweet movie in many ways. And so we will get into the genesis of it and the significance of some of it. And we won't spoil specifics really. It's a hard movie to spoil anyway. It's kind of a, it's a vibe. It's sort of a hangout movie more so than it is some meticulously plotted, you know, there's no Hollywood ending type thing going on here. The stakes of the

game don't matter so much, or at least the specifics of who's winning. So you're kind of peripherally aware of the play by play, but it kind of covers everything and everyone. So go check it out if you can. And I hope you'll stay and listen to our chat with Carson. And just a few things before we get to him first, the A's spent some more money. They extended Lawrence Butler. And I just want to salute Jeff Passon, who when he tweeted about this, he said, outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A's are in agreement on a seven year, 65 and a half million dollar contract extension

with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler 24 broke out as a rookie last year. And is seen as a foundational player for the A's moving forward. So we have taken some to task as has Brent Rooker for declaring Lawrence Butler a breakout candidate this year. No, he already broke out and that is why the A's said, hey, we should keep this guy around because he was a breakout player. He's good. He was one of the best hitters in baseball down the stretch last year. So good for him and good for the A's, which is not something that we've had

that many opportunities to say, at least when it comes to their ownership for spending some modicum of money for keeping some of their core intact and where those guys will play and when remains to be seen, but at least they will be on this athletics roster. And nice to see that his season, which was just a tale of two halves essentially, and there was a demotion in there. And then he came back and as we covered on our A's preview, he learned to keep his head still. That was the

key or maybe one of the keys and then he earned himself a fairly lucrative extension, so great. Now on the extension subject, there was some news about Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and what his counter to Toronto was when they were doing their negotiations for an extension, which now the self-imposed by Guerrero deadline has passed and he will be heading to free agency unless he has a change of heart or the Bujays blow him away at some point before he becomes a free agent. But there was back and forth about offers and there was news that he had turned down a $340 million offer from Toronto in December, I believe.

And then there was maybe further movement after that, but the sides did not meet in the middle. They were still some distance apart. And we got a little tidbit here from Vladoito who gave some details. And in an interview with some ESPN reporters, I will quote here, he said, so I guess some people had said that his expectations were comparable to the contract that Juan Soto got, and so he's trying to refute that and he says, it's much less than Soto.

We're talking about many fewer millions than Soto, more than a hundred million less. It was the same number of years as Soto's contract, but it didn't reach six hundred million. The last number we gave them as a counter offer didn't reach six hundred. Now, I guess any number below six hundred would not have reached six hundred, but the implication there, I guess, is that it was probably well above five hundred. It was just short of 600. So yes, a lot less than Juan Soto's, but more than basically every other contract

that a baseball player has signed if we take the real time value, the current value of Otanis. So that's a fair chunk of change. And he said, I know the business, I lowered the salary demands a bit, but I also lowered the number of years. I'm looking for 14. I would like 14, 15, even 20 if they give them to me,

but doing it the right way. And David Ortiz, who I think has a, a closer relationship with Vladimir Gros Jr. He, he had said, not long ago, he had tossed out that he thought Fl Flatito should get, I think, 585 million. And I think he said over 13 years. So I don't know whether that was just a wild-ass guess and he was pulling that number out of thin air and it happened to be maybe kind of close to what it was

or whether he had talked to Guerrero and that was the actual number, I don't know. But seems like it was probably around that range. So that's a lot of money, and he's entitled to seek whatever he wants, and for his sake, I hope he gets it. But if that's what it was, that it was quite close to 600 million,

then I can understand the Blue Jays saying, that's a little too rich for our blood. And they didn't share any specific numbers and they said how much they like him and that they were willing to go beyond whatever their model driven valuation was. And of course he likes it there and the Blue Jays like having him there

and he's popular and he spent his whole career there and he's got some good name recognition. So there's marquee value in all of that. But looking at the player that he has been and it's been kind of tough to pinpoint what player he is exactly because that has fluctuated from year to year. And that's just a lot given his resume to this point.

He's such an interesting case because I think in the years where Vlad is going good, I understand the, and I'm going to apply some caveats to this, but just bear with me. In the years where he is going good, where he has a season like he did in 2024, one like he did in 2021, in terms of like the potential impact of the offense, I appreciate why he would look to a player like Soto as a comp because, you know, last season, Vlad put up a 165 WRC plus he had 30 home runs, right? He's not a good base runner, but neither is Juan Soto. He's an impact bat, right? And a potentially

line of altering bat in the years where he's going good. That's going to be one of the caveats I apply here. But I think we can say a couple of things about him and the place where you would expect there to be a discount off of Soto. So one of the knocks on Soto, and we talked about this when he signed, was that the expectation is that Soto will eventually need to move to designated hitter. He is a not good defender, as is in an outfield corner. Vlad is a not particularly superlative defender, and it's not just the positional adjustment, although when you look at his war totals, obviously some of this is that he's playing primarily for space, but when you look at his outs above average or his fielding run value last

year, like he was in the red as a first baseman and just about average in limited exposure at third. He is a worse first baseman than Soto is a corner out fielder. I think that you can look at Vlad and wonder if, you know, given the differences between the two of them from a physicality perspective, if the downside of his career athletically might be worse than Soto's. Yeah, I don't want to be all Nico Harrison with Luca, but yeah, there have been conditioning concerns at various points in Vlad's career. And I want to be fair to him to say that like he has seemingly taken proactive steps to try to address some of those concerns, right?

So he's not insensitive to this as a potential gating factor for his value going forward. I think that Vlad seems aware of that. But I also think that like just in terms of to your point, the consistency of his track record, it's not the same as with Soto. Because when you look at Juan Soto, here are Juan Soto's WRC Plus numbers by season. And I am going to include 2020 here because, well, obviously that was only 47 games for him.

I do think that it is a consistent entry in his resume, even if it is the year where he had the most bonkers WRC Plus. But we can accept what it is as an outlier is the year where he had like the most bonkers WRC plus, but like we can accept what it is as an outlier and still appreciate where he lands. So like 2018, 146, 143, 202, 164, 146, 154, and then last year, 180. Here are Vlad's. And again, like the number of games played here varies a little bit, but 106, 110, 166, yeah, 132, 118, 165. Okay, so like, again, some really great seasons in their seasons that are comparable to some of Soto's best seasons when Guerrero's going good, but I will also note that like in the

last year when he had a 165 WRC+, he also had a 342 BABIP. Do we think that he's going to sustain that going forward, especially if he's a guy with athletic conditioning concerns? So I think that Vlad should make a lot of money. I think that he will very easily be one of the best free agents on the market when he hits the market. It is a phenomenal bat. When he was coming up, he had, I think know, I think that Eric put like a 70 future

if he on his hit, he had 80 raw power, he had 70 future game power, like he was described as having a messianic bat and there have been stretches where he has very much lived up to that billing, but it has not been all the time. And I think when you like combine all of those things together, he's, he's going to make less money than Juan Soto. And that's, that's okay. It's okay. You know, and from his perspective, he should just like, he should push for whatever he can push for. And I don't think that if Guerrero hits the free agent market, which is something that you will,

that doesn't preclude his ability to get something done with Toronto if he decides he wants to, but like it makes sense for him to test the market. I'm skeptical that he is going to match either in total raw dollars or from an AAV perspective, what Soto did, but like, you know, go try it. I think he'll end up feeling a little bit disappointed, but like, go try. But I don't think that like, we're in a weird era when it comes to assessing these

like mega contracts because like just as a philosophical principle, I want the balance of, you know, the share of revenue that players get relative to ownership to be to the players benefit. Because philosophically, that's how I think things should go between labor and capital. But I also am conscious of the fact that you reach a certain point, you surpass a certain value. And I don't know that we can really be moved to feel that bad if you make like a little less than what you're wanting. You know, like these are huge numbers.

These are astronomical numbers. And you know, Vladimir Grorod Jr. is a really good baseball player. He's an incredible hitter. I think that, you know, particularly if he is able to mount another season this year that looks like what he did last year, you know, he's gonna be in line for a tremendous payday. But, you know, I think that there are distinguishing factors between him and the guy who literally just signed the most lucrative deal in baseball. And I also think it's, in pro sports, full stop, and I also

think it's worth keeping in mind that like there's the player side of it and then there is like the idiosyncratic Steve Cohen of it all. Right. And so, you know, like we talked about, as soon as that guy put on a hat and a half and a quarter zip, I was like, well, I was going to be a Met. He's going to be a Met. That's what's going to happen. Cause that guy wants his childhood team to be his fun sandbox. He has decided this is what he's going to do. And so then the question becomes, does Guerrero inspire that same fervor from Cohen or from someone else? And the answer may well be yes. Like it could just happen because

he's really, really talented and he's still quite young, even though, you know, I think because of his question marks around the conditioning, like we perceive him to be, I think, older than he is because we're like worried, we're already potentially worried about the decline from a body perspective. But like, you know, Vlad was only 25 last year too. He's only 25, he's about to be 26. Happy early birthday to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. But like he's quite young himself. Yeah, he's five months younger than Soto approximately, which means that if he hits free agency this winter, he will be about seven months older than Soto was when he did.

So there's a little bit of an age difference there. And yeah, there's about a two war difference in their projections just for this coming season in roughly the same amount of playing time. So Soto is just such a superlative hitter that he hasn't had the lows that Vlad has had. His lows are relatively low, but they're not much lower than Vlad's highs. He's just that good. His baseline, his floor is so lofty when it comes to the offensive side of things and not so much elsewhere, but then Vlad certainly doesn't have him beat in those other respects either. And probably worth saying that a lot of Vlad's production in 2021, his best year, at least you take out the the BABIP stuff, he did a lot of damage in minor league parks that the Jays played in that year because of the pandemic. And I'm not saying he's purely a product of that or anything, but that is raising the numbers quite a bit. Yeah, that's one of the two seasons that we make much of

when we look at his ceiling. And a lot of that was in minor league parks. And then last year was excellent and was not minor league parks, but it was maybe a little luckier in some respects. So yeah, if he does it one more time, then absolutely he will be in line to cash in. And Dan Siborski, as you know,

because he works at the website that you run, he did a post projecting Vlad's contracts. This was last month. And he found that currently the Zips number that the system spit out was actually lower than the one that the Blue Jays had offered last year. And so Dan said, okay, what if he repeats his 2024 in 2025 and hits free agency coming off of two consecutive strong years? And that really helps, but it still gets him to maybe the vicinity of 500 for the entire remainder of his career.

Right. So even that, even in the scenario where he repeats what he did last year, we're still looking at at least the model would say, probably less than he was asking for. And Vlad, he's confident and he's betting on himself and he believes that he can replicate that season. And so he doesn't want to sell himself short. Sure. I get that. But obviously there's some uncertainty on the team side about whether he will do that. So maybe there's just a mismatch of confidence and security there in how good he's going to be. So

I get it. I get why there are some flaws and player with warts while being a fantastic player overall who most teams would absolutely want for the long haul, but that's a pretty pricey number there. So we'll see. Obviously how he does this season will largely determine whether he comes close to the number that he was looking at or whether he has to settle for significantly less. But yeah, he's not, he's not one Soto. He's great, but he's, he's not quite one Soto. All right. I will also just shout out some research that was done also at Fangrass by Michael Rosen. And there's a virtuous cycle here that's happening because Michael, he was, yeah, he was looking for a topic and then he heard our banter and he got a topic out of it. And now I am bringing up the research that he did in response to

our topic. It's just symbiotic relationship. We're just feeding off each other, a perpetual content machine here. Yeah. So we talked about Justin Verlander's comments about how pitch shapes and movements are different in Arizona than in Florida. And this is Justin Verlander's comments about how pitch shapes and movements are different in Arizona than in Florida And this is Justin Verlander's first exposure to the Cactus League He's been a career Grapefruit League guy and then I did a little semi stat blasting and I found that there is a significant difference in offense last year the year before Comparing Grapefruit League to Cactus League, and we were talking about some of the reasons for that.

And so Michael looked at the pitch data and found that there is a measurable difference in the movements of pitches in pitch shape. So I'll just quote from him here, pitches do move differently in the Cactus League. Over the last four spring trainings, so stretching back to spring of 2022, curve balls and knuckle curves have dropped

nearly an inch less in Cactus League ballparks compared to those thrown in Grapefruit League ballparks. On the flip side, four seam fastballs drop a half inch more in Cactus League games than Grapefruit League games. Not sure how it affects 12 to six sliders. We will have to consult the pit on that one. And- It's just a weird mistake to have made, but anyway, I'm just, I...

So he goes on to say, the main reason Florida air is denser than Arizona air, the Magnus force, which acts on a spinning baseball is proportional to the density of the air. When the air is less dense, the Magnus force is weaker. That means pitches with backspin like four seam fastballs drop more in Coors like conditions Pitches with topspin like curve balls drop less the Cactus League isn't quite like Coors But it's the closest thing that exists in professional baseball the air density in Cactus League ballparks in February is lower than all other non Coors parks and the primary reason for that as we Discussed is the difference in elevation, just thinner air because of that. And so the pitches move worse in the Cactus League and probably also the fly balls travel farther.

And that's how you get the offensive difference that I found. And this corroborates what Justin Verlander also observed and was told. So that's again, a real thing to keep in mind if you're a player going from one lead to the next, or if you're an analyst looking at the pitch data, gotta correct for that, gotta take that into account. But yeah, always nice when a player says something and then that prompts podcasters to say something and then that prompts a blogger to say something.

And then it circles back around to the podcaster. And then I guess the next step is for Justin Verlander to listen to our effectively wild discussion and to comment on the fact that Michael found that the pitch shapes are different and then we will all have weighed in in every possible way. I, you know, we had that conversation and then Michael posted about it on Blue Sky. And so I saw his post and I pinged him in our site Slack and I was like, if you think you're going to run off here for a post, like you could do a little post about this. And then he was like, I'll go look.

And then he was like, there is. Wow. Look at that. That is you doing your job as the managing editor of fangriffs.com. You're just a signing editor. Yeah, what a generous way to describe me being on blue sky during the day. I will say that I find, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this, although you have such a wide array of topics that you opine on professionally now that maybe you find yourself not wanting

for them this time of year. But I do think that this little bit, this little bit before we get into the real ramp up to opening day, right? Before I become a positional power rankings gremlin, before people have to make their predictions, before I, man, hopefully don't get norovirus again. That was rough. That was a rough way to spend the 24 hours before opening day last year. Boy, oh boy. But this is like the, I think people are really struggling to have ideas right now. And that is not to say that once they land on one that they're not good ideas. I think they are. Been a fun, productive, cool, varied week at fangrass.com in my opinion. But I've had a number of writers be like, so, hey,

what do you need me to write about though? Please give me something. Yeah. That's why it's handy when you have a team preview, season preview series that takes several weeks and then a baseball movie comes out clutch, clutch release by EFIS. Yeah, and I will also shout out another piece of that varied content at Fan Crafts, which was by Michael who wrote about Spencer Schwalbach who we talked about last time in our Braves preview and talked about how, no, he's not a breakout candidate.

He already broke out and Michael is actually higher on him maybe than the consensus and the consensus is already pretty good. And the reason why Michael's actually higher on him maybe than the consensus and the consensus is already pretty good. And the reason why Michael's so high on him is, well, one of them is because he varies his pitch types well. And he not only has a lot of good pitches, but he mixes them kind of evenly, like he uses them all a lot and pretty unpredictably. And this is something I've always appreciated. I appreciated this in Sandy Alcantara in his Cy Young year when I talked to him and wrote a feature on him. It was just, he used all of his pitch types just so evenly that it was

tough to predict. Now using them all the same rate doesn't necessarily mean that it's unpredictable, but if you use them all at the same rate and also don't fall into any predictable patterns, then how the heck are you gonna know what's coming next? And so I appreciate this at FanGraphs. You just said the varied content. It's nice to have variety at FanGraphs too. I think this is one of the highlights of Effectively Wild. You never know what you're gonna get.

We have variety too here. We're wild, but effective. And I think this is important for pitchers as well. There's actually in Ephesus, Bill Lee, the spaceman says, the key to the Ephesus is never throw three in a row because you're going to time it. And then it's going to go to the moon. Exactly.

And yes, there's game theory and there's mind games and maybe the hitter's thinking, well, he'll never throw three in a row. And then you surprise them by doing that. But at some point, the predictability of doubling up, tripling up, quadrupling up probably overcomes that, just adjusting to the stuff that you have seen. And there was some good research on this. I've been shouting out the folks at Oyster Analytics writing for Down on the Farm these days, Maxfield Lane and Owen Riley, and they just did a post this week titled,

How Variety and Repetition Impact Pitching and Hitting Performance. And they corroborated this same belief that mixing your pitches is good. Larger arsenals leads to less of a drop-off during the game. The times through the order effect is suppressed somewhat, which previous research has found.

But not just that, but emphasizing variety and pitch calling gets the most out of pitchers. And if you have multiple shapes of breaking stuff, that's good too, because you throw more breaking balls and they did this in a cool way where they even isolated it within a plate appearance. And they were able to say, if you throw a certain pitch type a number of times within a plate appearance, or it helps if you have multiple types of

breaking balls that move in different ways. And that helps keep hitters off of your breaking ball. Whereas if you have one, then they can just sort of sit on that. So, you know, helpful to have that 12 to 6 curve and the non 12 to 6 slider so that they can't necessarily sit on a single pitch profile or pitch shape. And they confirmed that, yeah, that helps mixing things up. Variety is good, all else being equal. And they were able to do a bunch of complicated things and statistical

gyrations to account for various confounding factors. And they were comparing pitchers to themselves. Cause of course you could have, you know, pitchers with different size arsenals and that could skew things, but they looked at pitchers comparing them to themselves and when they pursued variety more than other times and they found that it really is helpful to mix your pitches. Novelty is good and so I kind of wonder, I guess it's one of the frontiers of analytics, sabermetrics, pitch calling. And there have been some attempts to measure that, but usually less by looking at the actual pitch selection and more just by

backing out everything else we can quantify and then saying, well, the remainder of the value is probably pitch calling. But, but this is a little more precise. And I wonder whether teams have found or whether we will find in the public sphere at some point that players were getting a little too predictable because it's not that you want to throw every pitch the same number of times if you have good pitches then you want to throw them more but after accounting for that I think there really is value in just the hit or not knowing what's coming whether that's the movement of the pitch being unpredictable

or the selection of the pitch being unpredictable. So I'm all about mixing it up and not throwing the same pitch over and over again. I'm sure there are times when that makes sense and when it works, but all else being equal, I just really like keeping them guessing. And maybe that's one reason why you get a kick change and a split change and all these different changes

and different looks and a regular slider and a sweeper. It's not just that those pitches are effective in isolation, but also in tandem, there's a multiplicative effect where if you have a few different varieties, then people can sit on a single pitch a lot less effectively. I also just think that, I mean, like selfishly, and certainly this is adjusted for the effectiveness of the arsenal, right? If you throw a bunch of different things and some of them are like really bad, then the variety is less entertaining. But I do think that as a fan, as a viewer

of baseball, it's also just more fun to watch, you know, when a guy... Now, there are extremes in the other direction that are delightful. Like, when you're like, he's literally only throwing change-ups, just only ever the change-ups. What is, you know what I mean? Like, that can be fun when a guy is literally only doing the one thing. Because then you get into a game... Exactly. And then you get into a game of like, is this gonna keep working? fun when a guy is literally only doing the one thing. The comic canly. Exactly. And then you get into a game of like, is this going to keep working?

Is he going to get out of this? Is he going to be... But I think that it is one of those times where what tends to be effective for guys and what is fun to watch line up really nicely. And that's fun. Yeah. People have proposed at various times kind of out there kind of stat heady, but hey, what if we just randomized pitch calling and Sam and I kind of toyed with that idea with

the stoppers. We didn't do it. We figured the players would have hated it. I'm sure they would have. I think they would have hated it. Yes. But if you could do that, waiting for the effectiveness of the pitches and the attributes of the pitches, again, you wanna throw your better pitches more often,

but after you account for that, to randomize within that, I think that might help because pitchers and catchers, they're human and humans, even when we try to randomize things, we kind of put our thumbs on the scale and we end up with patterns because actual randomness is not like,

everything is evenly distributed, there are clumps and patterns and stuff. And so when humans try to do a pattern that they think is random, it's not, right, exactly. And so if you could algorithmically do that in some way that some pitcher was comfortable with, just kind of putting their hands, putting their trust in that system, then I think it might actually work. But yeah, you have to have conviction in your pitch call and you have to

be confident in what is being called. And that might be half the battle. So it could just undercut you if you have this optimized system, but the pitcher doesn't like it and feels like this is not the pitch I want to throw. Well, then it's probably not going to go great. It might not go great then. No. All right. Let me give you a rapid fire stat blast. Haven't had an opportunity to do any stat blasting while we're doing these previews. And then we will get to Carson. They'll take a data set sorted by sense and the theory minus or OBS plus And then they'll tease out some interest in data but discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways

Here's to day's to past is today still past? So here's the first one, this is sort of a silly one, and this was submitted by Patreon supporter Michael Eisen, who said, I know you've always wanted a list of the average career fan graphs were of each occurrence of every letter in every player's full name. I will explain what he means, but no, that was not something I wanted. Well, let's say it was not something I knew I wanted because once it was presented to me, I actually did want it. So this is essentially, he quantified the average war value of each letter in the alphabet based on the appearance of those letters in major leaguer's names. So it's kind of the average career war of every player who has the letter in question

anywhere in their name. So for instance, he put it, it's the average across occurrences of each letter. So Shohei Otani, the S, E, T, A, and N are counted once, the O and I twice, the H three times, and it just uses the name field from the fan graphs download, and then it just looks at all players who had those letters in their names and just comes up with an average war value

for those letters. And then he was able to use that to extrapolate to the player level. So he has it on the letter level, and then he pushed that out to the player level looking at the letters that are actually in their names. I'll share a spreadsheet. This is extremely esoteric, but I think kind of cool. The most productive letters in major league history, and this is not predictive in any way, but it is still interesting trivia. So most of the letters are just kind of clumped in the same range, which makes sense. Because again, there's nothing about the letter itself that is actually does anything. You have different occurrences of particular letters, right? But yeah,

other than that, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's not like a nominative determinism sort of situation probably where, Oh, this is a cool letter, so I'll be better at baseball because of that. So all of the... Some letters are cooler than others though, Ben. That is like science, I think. Well, it's maybe slightly subjective, but we have our personal opinions on that.

And so he also did this with diacritical marks too, so just the plain unadorned letters, and then also letters with accent marks and such to get sort of smaller samples. So when you get a smaller sample, then you get more variability. And so for instance, players with enyes in their name, the N with a tilde above it, the Spanish enye, they're only-

Ronald Acuna Jr., see? Yeah, there are evidently only 18 of them in the sample here. And so they have a very low average war, just a not nice 0.69. So I guess Acuna must be getting dragged down by less productive Enyae having players, but it's just such a small sample

that you can get the extremes. And then on the positive end of the spectrum, the best letter to have in your name historically has been an X. So X has an average Van Graaff's war value of 6.73. So that's much higher. And there are 210 X-havers in the sample. So the highest are X and Q and then V and then Y and then you get to B and D, but most of them are, they're all in the range of like four war to four and a half war, except for a few outliers on either end. The Vs and Qs and Xs and the Nye's and the accent over the A and I and U.

And then K is the first one with a bigger sample that's on the low end and then A. So I'll share the spreadsheet, but he also put together just the combined values for names, just the average war value, looking at all the letters in their names. And by that metric, the most productive name goes to Jimmy Fox, who did actually have

quite a career for himself. So- Yeah, I was gonna say, that lines up nice, doesn't it? It does. He's got the double X. And so I guess the excellence of Jimmy Fox, he is himself sort of skewing the productivity of X. So I don't know, maybe it'd be better to remove

the player themselves from the sample or something. But Jimmy Fox, he had 101, almost 102 war, and he has the highest quote unquote predicted war value based on the letters in his name. And it works out. And so a lot of Xs toward the top of that list. And then at the bottom, a lot of N.Yays, poor N.Yays, hate to pick on the poor N.Yay havers, but they kind of show up at the bottom. Although initially when Michael sent me this just for batters, the lowest on the list was a guy who I guess

was classified as a batter, but was actually a two-way player. And I was not familiar with his game or his name. And I am glad to be now Cocaina Garcia, Cocaina Garcia, who was a Cuban player who played in the Negro leagues in the 20s and 30s. Yeah, Cocainaína. His real name was Manuel, but a heck of a nickname that he has here. And according to his Wikipedia

page, he earned his unusual nickname as a result of batters who seemed drugged by his pitches and unable to concentrate or focus on the baseball. So, Cocaína Garcia. So like, Co Cocaina like cocaine? Yep. Wow. I mean, I guess that was maybe used at that point, I don't know, for medication reasons. I mean, you know, they had all sorts of stuff,

lot of men's cocaine, whatever. Right, exactly. You know, it was in your soft drinks. Yeah, you've run out of whiskey, your kids gums hurry, a little covina. I don't think of cocaine as like lulling batters to sleep or maybe the opposite. But yeah, he's down there, cocaine and Garcia, but I guess Darien Nunez is actually the lowest in terms of the predicted war value of their names, and he is a self-replacement level player to this point in his career. So again, it all checks out.

He was in the big leagues in 2021. I think he had a cup of coffee that year. I am delighted. I would say that it does not surprise me that there is a strong prevalence of X names because if I were going to name a letter that I think is cool, even with the brand damage it has recently suffered, I would put X high up on the list. Yeah, it's extreme. Yeah. So I just think it's like a cool, weird, versatile little thing. Why did we, why? It doesn't matter. I was going to say, why did, why does that letter exist?

You know, like objectively, weird letter. What a weird, cool little letter it is, X. Yeah. One of my best men, my groomsmen who gave the speech at my wedding is Xavier and everyone calls him X. It's just, it's a cool, cool name, cool nickname. It's a cool name. It's a cool letter. Xavier Nady, X Nady, you know, it's just kind of cool.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you have always wanted a list of the average career fan graphs, where of each occurrence of every letter in every player's full name, then got good news for you. I will share Michael's spreadsheet. Thank you for this valuable, important research from Michael. And I'd like to know the hypothetical name that would be the highest scoring. It's almost like a Scrapple scoring kind of thing. It's like, give me a real name who has not been a big leaguer, not just, you know, a bunch of X's in a row, like some Elon Musk offspring, but like an actual name that people might

have that could be a baseball player and would be the new high score here. I think that would be interesting to work out, but I leave that problem to others. Okay. And now a couple of quicker ones from frequent stat blast correspondent, Ryan Nelson, who has done his usual excellent and diligent work. In response this time to a couple of requests we got from listeners, one of which was posted on Reddit and it was a stat blast request. Not the best place to put your stat blast request,

but I did happen to see this one. Yeah, send it via email. Send it to podcast at fangraphs.com. Fangraphs.com, because I'm afraid of Reddit. I fear to know what is in there. It feels like it's just none of my business, you know? Like, good for all of you. I hope you find whatever you're looking for.

But that's not for me. Well. No, thank you. User MrShickadance posted on the Effectively Wild subreddit r slash effectively wild, stat blast request, best individual performance by a player who played only one season with a team So basically like guys who went one and done with each franchise and had the best season for that franchise of anyone who played Only a single season for that franchise. So Ryan has given me a list. I will share it

I'll quickly read it and there are some repeats which is kind of interesting here So for example, Diamondbacks pitcher Javier Vasquez, batter Gene Segura. So Javier Vasquez has a 3.5 FanGraphs War Season, Gene Segura had a 6.1 War Season, and those were their lone seasons for the Diamondbacks and they're the best in that category. All right, so I won't give you all the war values. You can look at the spreadsheet if you're curious, but Atlanta, Javier Vasquez again, a two-time guy. I was always a fan of Javier Vasquez. He was like a FIP, ERA differential guy, like good stuff, good sum peripherals, but then the ERA was never quite what you wanted.

And then there were health concerns and stuff, but he was good. He was one of the best pitchers in baseball for a while, and kind of unsung because he was an expo for most of that time, but had fine single seasons for Arizona-Atlanta. So Atlanta Javier Vazquez pitcher, Rogers Hornsby as a batter, Baltimore Kevin Brown,

who's going to show up again in a minute, and Reggie Jackson, Boston Eric Hansen, and Adrian Beltre. That's the famous pillow contract here for Beltre, which he parlayed into a long productive stint in Texas. Chicago, the Cubs, Dick Selma and Jim Doyle. White Sox, Marv Grissom and Billy Hoy. Cincinnati, Greg Swindell and Shinsu Chu.

Cleveland, Kevin Millwood and Matt Williams. Colorado, Colorado, Colorado. Colorado, Colorado, Colorado. Jeremy Burnett and Jason Marquis. Detroit, Red Donahue and Billy Lush. Houston, Randy Johnson. Remember the Randy Johnson Astros year or partial year? Yes, I do.

Clint Barmas. And then Royals, Bob Johnson and Jay Bell. Angels, Paul Bird and Jason Thompson. Dodgers, Tyler Anderson and Dick Allen. Miami, Mark Redman and Yvonne Rodriguez. Milwaukee, Cici Zabathia, of course, and Yasmine Grandal. Minnesota, John Smiley and Orlando Hudson.

The Mets, Mike Hampton and Marlon Byrd. The Yankees, John Lieber and Bobby Bonds. Oakland, Todd Stottlemyre and George Wood. Phillies, Mike Kruco and Roger Connor. Pittsburgh, Harry Salisbury and Hank Greenberg. Padres, Kevin Brown and Reggie Sanders. Seattle, Cliff Lee and Mike Hegan. Giants, Carlos Rodan and Rogers Hornsby again,

St. Louis Tony Mullane and Jason Hayward, Rays Corey Kluber and Jeff Kepinger, Texas John Thompson and Aurelio Rodriguez, Toronto Tom Candiati and Marcus Semyon and Washington slash Montreal maybe, Esteban, Laleiza and Alfonso Soriano. I think that was Luisa's second best year. I always remember that outlier 2003 season he had with the white socks where he picked up a 12 to six slider and finished second in Cy Young voting. Okay. Maybe it was a cutter, but still helps to have variety in pitch types.

So you got to look back fondly at those guys who came to your team for a single season and starred there. Probably often something of a surprise, though I guess the fact that they didn't replicate that performance for you is a little disappointing. Still they had that season in the Sun and then like George Cassanza they went out on a high note. So the greatest single seasons with a franchise ever are Roger's Hornsby with the Giants in 1927 10.4 war and Kevin Brown with the Padants in 1927, 10.4 war, and Kevin Brown with the Padres in 1998, 9.6 war. And the Padres were a World Series team, which provides an excellent segue to our third and

final stat blast. The request we got was, this one was on Twitter, I believe, again, if you want to get a stat blast answer, I guess I'm encouraging people to post in all sorts of places here by answering these, but email, email is best, but. Email is best. At iffythedopester on Twitter says, here's a stat I'd like to see. The total number of career games played for a franchise

by a World Series winning roster. So the 84 Tigers with stalwarts Tram, Lou, Jack, Gibby, Brookens, Chester, Larry, Peaches has to be ranked high in the free agent era. So World Series winning roster, who had played the most career games for that franchise through the season when they won the World Series. So up to and including that year, not after that point. And Ryan used only players who played in the World Series. So not just anyone who was on the roster that season at some point, and also, I guess, excluding anyone who was on a World Series roster,

but didn't actually play in the World Series. But looking at players who were actually on that victorious World Series roster and got into games, the number one total is actually, because Ryan gave me World Series roster and got into games. The number one total is actually, cause Ryan gave me World Series winners and losers, all the pennant winners. And the number one is a World Series loser. It's the 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers.

The boys of Summer Dodgers, they had 11,138 games played with the Dodgers by all the names you know, Pee Wee Reese and Carl Fiorillo and Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Duke Snyder and Roy Campanella and Jim Gilliam on and on and on. That's a lot of games. They kept that group together a lot and maybe that's why we know them and we associate them with that team and that time. But the number one total for a World Series winner is the 1971 Pirates, who were at 10,544 combined games played Roberto Clemente, Bill Maserowski, Willie Stargell, Gene Alley, Jose Pagan, Al Oliver, Manny Sanguian, et cetera.

And actually next on the list is the other 1971 World Series team, the Orioles, just below that. They were the losers in that series, 10,449 games played. So it's 63 Yankees after that, and then big red machine teams, 76 and 75 Reds, 81 Dodgers, 2005 Astros. I'm mixing up winners and losers here. The 55 victorious Dodgers, 83 Orioles, 62 Yankees,

a lot of continuity in those Yankees teams of that era, the Stengel Clubs. 1968 Tigers, 2009 Yankees, probably wouldn't have guessed that, 1980 Phillies, 2001 Yankees who lost that series. Anyway, the question was prompted by the 1984 Tigers, and they're down at 68th among all pennant winners with 7,016 combined games. And then if I filter for just the World Series champions, they were down at 30th. So up there, but not really toward the top. And then if you want to know who had the fewest career games played for that franchise at

the time when it won the World Series, it's the 1918 Red Sox. They had only 1789 games with that franchise combined from Everett Scott, Sam Agnew, Karl Mays, Babe Ruth, of course, the great Stuffy McInnis and then the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, who were pennant winner but World Series loser. They were down there at 1896 games. They were just one of the most fun teams. That turnaround that they made under Freeman when they were prioritizing defense and everything, and they'd snuck up on everyone except some of the projection systems.

That was a fun season. That was kind of a formative year for me in understanding team building. And yeah, I guess 1914 Boston Braves are up there, 1903 Boston again, 1959 Dodgers. And I will link to the full list here if you're interested. But thanks as always to Ryan for his research and to people for their prompts. I guess there are some era effects here, like World War I was 1918, the World Series was played in September that year, and more recent seasons, just more games in the season, so you could compile more cumulative

games played, but also more player movement these days, roster turnover. It's nice when your championship team is composed of a bunch of players who've been there for a while. It's probably a good sign if you've kept that core together, you must have had a stretch of success. Then again, probably also exciting when a bunch of fresh faces combine to win a World Series for you. Maybe it's more unexpected. I guess the moral of the story is, it's good to win a World Series, however one does it.

And if you do it with a fairly new collection of players, then you might have more good seasons ahead of you. Like the lowest total by a championship team post-World War II is the 1996 Yankees, 3818 games. And some members of that roster had a few more rings to win. Now we can take a quick break and you will hear a short clip from EFIS setting up our interview and then we will talk to Carson Lund. Oh, hey, I think Ed just threw an ephis. He threw a bad slow pitch.

Yeah, that's...isn't that what an ephis is? Maybe if Ed throws it. You can tell when it's an ephis. It stays in the air forever. You get bored watching it. I get bored. And the hitter does so, he tries to swing at it like normal. But it's already past him.

Where it waits until he's done swinging. The ethos makes him lose track of time. It's pretty mean that way. I like that. It's kind of like baseball. I'm looking around for something to happen. Poof, game's over. Well, we're joined now by Carson Lund, the director of ETHIS, and not only the director, but also the editor, co-writer, co-composer of the score, and damn near cinematographer

too until he realized he couldn't make the movie all by himself. Even Shohei Otani just DHs on the days he doesn't pitch. You got to learn to delegate. Welcome, Carson, and congrats on the North American theatrical release and the warm reception for the film, which we also quite enjoyed. Thank you very much. I first became aware of ETHIS back in 2021 when you were crowdfunding it on Kickstarter. That was a while ago. So it must've seemed from your perspective like the project was proceeding

at an ETHIS-esque pace at times. So take us through the backstory, going back to the beginning of your life. How did you come to love baseball? What's your backstory as a baseball lover? And how did this movie happen? Yeah, I grew up in New Hampshire in the suburbs, surrounded by parks and baseball fields and just fell in love with the game pretty early on. My dad was a huge, huge fan and encouraged me from a young age. And I got pretty good and I played

in traveling leagues and I was on all-star teams and all that stuff. It was a blast. It was an amazing way to spend one's childhood. But at some point I got a little sick of it. I got tired of the routine and the pressure and the kind of macho banter and all, really the culture around it. It's not that I started to lose interest in the game,

but it felt like that because I was kind of, I was getting interested in other things, and especially film. And it's definitely not that you weren't good enough to keep playing. You'd be in the big leagues now if. Well, you know, that, well, I don't know about that, but my dad was certainly interested in me pursuing that,

but I realized it required so much weight room time. I couldn't hack it. So it wasn't really for me. I left the game for a while, but I kind of fell back in love with it maybe a decade later when I moved to California and joined a rec league out there. Now I watch religiously like I did when I was a kid,

but I'm a Red Sox fan at heart. Yeah, and I joined this rec league out there. Now I watch religiously like I did when I was a kid, but I'm a Red Sox fan at heart. Yeah, and I joined this rec league where, you know, now it's all these guys that have realized that they're not getting to the big leagues, you know, and it's just, we're all there for the fun of it. We love the game, but we're not, there's not these outsized expectations around it. So I felt like that the camaraderie that we developed on that field and the friendships I made that kind of didn't extend beyond that field, you know, we see each other for four hours every Sunday and that's about it. I felt like that kind of relationship and the type of male bonding that exists in that

context had not been shown in a film or captured in a film in a way that I feel is honest and sincere. Yeah, and that's sort of the story of getting to the film. It was sort of like living inside me for a very long time, the seed of this idea until finally, like the pandemic really, I was missing this community and missing playing baseball. So the pandemic

really got it out of me. And I worked with two co-writers to dig into what it might look like to make a film that's structured around a single baseball game. Yeah, it was so I was struck as I was watching it, you know, it's not that the baseball in the movie doesn't matter. And you know, obviously, when you're portraying a rec league, the amount of good baseball one has to show on screen is going to be different than if you were doing a movie about a major league team. But the baseball was balanced by these moments between the players. And I was struggling to think of another film I'd seen like it that really focused on sort of how men interact with one another in a context like this, right,

where they're not going off to war, they're not engaged in like this, right? Where they're not going off to war, they're not engaged in business, they're doing guy stuff. They're guys being dudes and of different ages, different backgrounds seemingly. And I'm curious how you thought about foregrounding that versus the baseball and balancing what action we see versus the relationships that are clearly central to these guys' experience on the field that day. versus the baseball and balancing what action we see versus the relationships that are clearly central to these guys' experience on the field that day. It's all war, it's all combat Meg. Yes.

That's one of the characters, sis. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I take issue with that. It is war. No, I'm kidding. It's very insignificant what they're doing, at least on the surface. But it's very significant to them. That's what's important.

You know, when I first conceived the film, I was thinking of it as a movie about players who were once very, very good and now are just aging and they're frustrated because they can't recapture that sense of athletic prowess, you know? But casting that movie would have been very, very difficult. And so in the casting process, I came to the realization that this is a movie about many different skill levels, all converging on one field. And it's not really about the competition. It's about the camaraderie and the ritual of it all. Um,

so that was an important, important, uh, realization that I made, because, you know, the, the gameplay of this was probably the hardest part of shooting it. Because I played myself, I sort of functioned as the de facto coach. My dad stepped in when I was too busy directing. But we would actually do drills and I'd pitch them batting practice

and I'd just try to give them pointers to make them look like they'd played more recently. I made sure that everyone in the cast had played at some point and had some relationship to the game, but it was important for me to recognize that I don't need to get hung up on how someone fields a ground ball

or how someone hits an inside pitch to the opposite field or not, that sort of stuff. It just didn't matter. Because I think this is about the socialization, the way that the downtime of baseball creates all these opportunities for reflection and leisure. And so we thought of this, you know, as like it's one baseball game. We have to account for all the time that is spent in that game. And of course, it's nice that baseball is divided up into all these units of time. Innings, outs, strikes, balls.

And so we had to figure out, okay, we're not going to be on the field the whole game. How can we move around this field between gameplay, dugout action, dugout conversation, sideline action, and even just observation of the trees or the clouds, that sort of thing. Because for me, the field itself is the character. You know, and it's sort of very intuitive, the way we kind of tried to think about this, is just trying to find some balance,

this like zen equity between all the different elements. And it was very freeing as writers to think through that because if we were feeling like, okay, we've given too much attention to this particular thread or this character, we can kind of, there was always kind of like an escape hatch. Okay, like we can go check out this other team or we can go see the scorekeeper

or the old guy sitting on the bleachers who's all alone. Things like that. It was a very odd way to approach a narrative script, but it was very exciting for us to think about it as this kind of like different structure for a movie. You just touched on this, but we've interviewed various baseball coordinators over the years on other projects like the League of Their Own, the TV show or Pitch or even the Twilight movie. And this was one of the many jobs that you did on this movie was was basically to be that guy. And you didn't have the pressure here of trying to make actors who may or may not have any baseball playing experience if they're not Kevin Costner, look like not only professional athletes,

but major leaguers in many cases. And yet you also did have to make them look at least semi-familiar with the game. So it must have been walking a line between making it look like they'd never picked up a ball before and making it look like they were too good because you don't have to worry about the Bull Durham, does New Caloosh look like a real pitcher and Ron Shelton insists that Tim Robbins did and many other people insist that he didn't. No one's expecting

that much realism from your cast here. And yet you have to have that sort of lived in sense of these guys are good at being bad at baseball. Yeah, they understand it. Like they know how to anticipate the play and they know how to. Their gestures are correct. You know, that was really more important to me than, you know, they can hit the ball hard into the gap. There actually was a guy in the cast, Patrick Garragan, who plays like the

the younger college player, who there were times where I was like, is he is he actually too good that he makes the other guys look, like it's almost unconvincing that there would be this range. But I realized like, actually in a small town league, if it's a very small town and there's nowhere else to play, this is what does happen. And I've played with players that are certainly woeful

in their skills. so it just happens, you know? But you're there because you love it, and as long as there's enough skill to go around, the game can kind of progress in a way that isn't frustrating to witness. You talked about the field being a character, and it's not a fictional character as it happens. Maybe some aspects of it are fictionalized, but it's a real place. You didn't change the name of the field or the town. This is Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts, and it's a very historic field as I learned when I watched the movie and as I think you

learned after coming across this place as I understand it, fairly late in the process of location scouting. So tell us about how you found this gem of a field. And also if you could summarize a little bit of the history and the illustrious players who have shared this field with the Adler's paint team and some lesser stars, then please familiarize our listeners with this place. Adler's Paint Team and some lesser stars, then please familiarize our listeners with this place. And also, why did you decide to keep the name and not change any aspects of it,

and how much of that had to do with not having the budget to paint over a sign? Yeah, that's a little bit of a part of it. Yeah, we wrote this field as a New Hampshire field, actually. It was called North Common in reference to a field that I played at when I was young in Nashua, New Hampshire. And I liked the kind of vagueness of that, North Common. It could be any field, anywhere. We certainly wanted to encourage that feeling of this field could be anywhere in America.

Despite the autumn leaves, of course course that places you in New England. I wanted this to be a New Hampshire movie because it's where I'm from, but I scoured the whole region for fields that were right. That is to say they matched the layout that we had in mind when we were writing the script because it sort of necessitates all this action that happens. You need to have an idea of where the parking lot is, where the woods are, that sort of thing, what the dugouts look like. And so I looked at so many fields, and I mean, like Google scouting

and also driving all across New England to probably 50 or so fields. I kept running into the same issues, which was that a lot of the fields all across New England to probably 50 or so fields. I kept running into the same issues, which was that a lot of the fields that maybe looked a certain way from Google image results of photos that were taken maybe years ago, now it's just a bunch of aluminum bleachers, aluminum fences, chain link, a lot of kind of ugly stuff.

And a lot of kind of ugly stuff. And a lot of the fields were at like high schools and they just and then sometimes I would find a beautiful field that had a highway right near it. So it wasn't possible to get clean sound. It was very late in the process, as you mentioned, that I stumbled upon Soldiers Field, which at the time I knew nothing about. I walked onto that field on a whim because I happened to be in the area and I just sort of immediately felt that this is it. It has the old green painted fences,

wooden, that the paint is chipping off. There's an amazing press box, two-story press box, and I said this place has to have had some illustrious history, which I then, you know, I talked to people in town. There's a bar there called the Picket Fence, which on the main street, which is kind of like right a few blocks behind the field. You know, and there's pictures of the old glory days. So I just got very intrigued and I learned that in the 40s, there was a game there between the Red Sox and Yankees, an exhibition game to commemorate the town's 150th anniversary.

And so Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio played on that field, and you can find some images of it online. And that sort of made it all click. And I said, this is extraordinary. And I can't change the name now because I want it to be in conversation with that history. And when Bill Lee in the film comes in and pitches there, he's speaking as himself when he says, oh yeah, I used to play here. He has played there.

And he always tells me that anytime he's passing through the area, he stops there and lets his dog run around. So he has a living experience on that field that also was a nice touch. And I didn't want to change the name of the fields because I felt like these were all characters, all these characters are like soldiers against time. And then one character talks about how baseball is combat. So I was like, this actually is an appropriate name for the field. And it would have been expensive to change it.

So yeah. Yeah. That exhibition game between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1946 was just in mid-September. This was something that teams would just do middle of the regular season. Isn't that incredible? I can't imagine.

I can't imagine. And it's like the whole town is there. So there's probably a couple thousand people there lining the sidelines. And as you see in the film, it's not like, they have some bleachers, but it's not grandstands or anything like that. I think they had some different structures back then,

but I don't think it's changed radically. So I was really impressed to find that out. It's kind of a quiet, slightly depressed Massachusetts town now. It doesn't have that same glory, but the people in town are really, really sweet. Of course, I'm forever indebted to them for letting me do this. I went to the town council and asked to do this. And they were on board and basically gave me carte blanche to just take over the field for a month. I think they actually had to move their rec league games to the neighboring town. A plot point, a bone of much contention within the film itself, the idea of having to drive

to find a new rec league. Yes, I inflicted that upon the real life inhabitants of the region. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but in the early going of the movie, you reveal that the reason that this particular day is freighted with so much significance is that it will be the last game played on that field. And Small Town Suffers Civic Loss is a tale as old as time, but I really appreciated the twist that you put on it, which was not that this was being bulldozed to make way for a mini mall, but a middle school, a town resource so that people don't have to drive

their kids so far. And I'm curious what went into that decision, because I thought it was such a nice twist on what we typically see in movies like this, where you have some evil polluting corporation coming in to build a big plant and ruin the stream. But no, this was gonna be a middle school so that people didn't have to drive their kids

quite so far. Yeah. Now, I think if it were that, if it were the easy kind of gentrifying force, it would have let the players off the hook, I think. Their anger would feel a bit more justified, and I think the movie would, as a result, feel much more didactic. I wanted it to be something that was in theory at face value positive for society. And so what they're wrestling with is not so much a bogeyman that they can

point to, but just something much more existential and difficult to pin down. It's just that time passes and things change and you have to deal with that. And we have to say goodbye to things all the time for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with some evil force or corrupting force. And it's true that those are part of our lives too. And there have been many fields bulldozed to make way for mini-malls. I'm sure of it and I've experienced it in my own life. But I didn't want that to be the case here. And I think it definitely, for me, makes it funnier and more poignant that these guys

are complaining about something that is enriching the small community and even potentially their own children. But they're groveling about change, you know, and I think that's something we all do, and it's certainly a very New England trait to just complain and complain and, you know, deal with our own sorrow about things changing with, you know, competitive language and trash talk and getting mad at each other and getting mad at some enemy that is nebulous. And in the film, they point to one of the, this is not really a spoiler,

it's right there in the beginning of the movie, but they point to one of the players that was kind of like the founder of the River Dogs, this guy Graham, as like the culprit, But it's just that he works for the company that's developing the school. It's not even, he's just like a middle manager, you know? So they're always looking for a scapegoat, but I think that's life.

We're always looking for a scapegoat, but in fact, it's just that we have to deal with the time. You mentioned being the baseball coach. Did you also have to do quadruple quintuple duty as an accent coach, or did you cast locally to get the authentic accent work? I cast locally. There were some actors actually who were from New York

who were trying to put on the Massachusetts accent, and I was trying to push against that, because I'm not overly concerned with that.. I think you know there's some people realistically there would be some people who moved up from New York and that's okay you know in the fictional context I mean. So yeah I mostly cast from the Boston casting pool. We had a lot of resources and connections in Boston and it made sense to shoot the film around there. I actually had worked with several of these people before on films I made in the past

and I was excited to work with them again. Then also I cast some friends from home who had never been in a movie before who I just felt would be great for this. Then I also had a couple of friends from LA come in including my co-writer Nate Fisher who plays Merritt the Adler's paint pitcher who describes the EFIS. So it's a real motley crew and in theory many things could have gone wrong putting a bunch of men together on a field for a month and in a number of cabins in the woods together. But really what happened was it just sprouted this beautiful camaraderie and friendship

that has now defined the last few years since we made the film. So yeah, everything kind of went right, which is surprising. Well, the dialogue seemed authentic to me. I'm adding Mother McCree as an exclamation to my personal lexicon, I think people will probably be confused when I start saying that. I also have to question

the return on investment that Adler's Paint is getting from its sponsorship here, given the lack of attendance at these games. It just seems like not the greatest exposure for the company. Yeah, that's very true. I guess they just put money into the uniforms, which are of course a whole bunch of different uniforms from different generations. Yeah, no, it's actually based on Adler's hardware in Providence, Rhode Island, which is where Nate's from.

Okay. Yeah, I will admit that there were various points throughout watching it where the T on the end of paint sort of disappeared and it just looked like Adler's pain. I was like, that feels fitting for some of these guys. They might be feeling some pain. Yeah. That's great. On a slightly more serious note, this is something you talked about to Film-Maker Magazine last year.

This is a baseball movie and a genuine baseball movie, not the effectively wild definition of a baseball movie, which is semi tongue-in-cheek, but we are very liberal, very generous in our definition and classification. Anything that has any aspect of baseball, we will label a baseball movie. But this is a real one, but it's also a example of a different genre, which I don't know if it has a name exactly, but I guess I'd call it a last call movie. And sometimes it is literally about last call. It's about a bar, let's say, that's closing down. But there are a lot of movies that fit into this lineage, like Last Night at the Alamo, or

more recently, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, or Goodbye Dragon Inn, or A Prairie Home Companion, A Favourite of Mine, which was both a last call movie because it was about a last show, and also because it was Robert Altman's last movie. So this genre, what appealed to you about that? To what degree were some of these earlier examples direct inspirations? And what are the possibilities of this form? What do you get by setting a story in a place that's closing down? It's the last hurrah. Yeah, I've been calling them like sunset movies. You're right. I like Last Call too.

Sunset movies. That's good. You're right. I like Last Call too. And I would add Last Picture Show to that pantheon as well. I've always been drawn to these movies. I love them. I love every single one you just mentioned actually. And they were inspirations on the film.

In fact, Prairie Home Companion, there's a direct inspiration there with the Virginia Madsen character who kind of floats around the periphery of the auditorium and wearing all white. That was a wardrobe inspiration on Bill Lee and what he wears when he comes to the game. There's such a poignance to these films, you know, it's like, it's usually a celebration that's happening and everyone's excited about it, but they're also having to kind of cover up this underlying melancholy. You know, it's a beautiful mix of feelings for me.

And I love when comedy and tragedy intersect. And I think that's happening throughout EFIS in different ways. At first, the tragedy is more subtext, and then eventually it becomes, rises to the surface. You know? Yeah, and I like telling stories with large ensembles and I think when everyone is dealing with that same loss you have a lot of room to play and you have a lot of license to kind of move around the ensemble without feeling

like you're losing people because you kind of immediately are grounded by that that shared emotional experience that they're all having. Yeah, and also another direct inspiration was Goodbye Dragon Inn and the feeling I get watching the final few minutes of that movie. There's a shot with Lee Kang-Shang looking out at the street and it's pouring rain and it just holds there. There's so much feeling in that shot without anything really happening.

And there's a shot of Graham in this movie too towards the end that I think was very directly related to that. And I think that was sort of a North Star in making this film. Like, let's capture that very, very, very complex mix of attachment and dislocation and melancholy and gratitude all at once. Yeah. And yeah, that's kind of, that was what the film was all about for me. I guess sort of relatedly, I'm curious what your relationship to baseball movies as a genre, because obviously it's been explored thoroughly in cinema, often

with more exacting definitional standards than we apply at Effectively Wild, but an expansive genre nonetheless. What is your relationship to that genre and what are some of your favorites? I won't ask you to name the ones you find wanting that feels too much. Matthew 11 I just generally, I wish there were, I love it as a subject, obviously, and I wish there were more and better baseball movies. Because we didn't actively think about any baseball films when we were writing this. The strategy was to kind of operate from blank slate. Let's approach this with our own personal experience.

For me, it was like, let's really try to capture what it feels like to be out on that field every Sunday. You know, and not get sort of like corrupted by all these other baseball films that exist in public imagination. But of course, that's a fool's errand because we've all seen these films. They live fool's errand because we've all seen these films, they live in the public imagination, they're part of myth at this point. And I think like Field of Dreams and Boulderm, all those films kind of like seeped into this one at different points in ways that I couldn't even really control. And sometimes it wouldn't come from me, it would come from a cast member or a crew member. It would just, it would seep its way into the expression of the film.

But yeah, we didn't look at any when we were writing this. And I still haven't watched Field of Dreams or Sandlot like in the last 15 years. So, you know, I feel quite distant from most of them, but I do like Bull Durham quite a bit. I saw that more recently it's really not so much about baseball it's about yeah sex and human relationships I like Bingo Long and the traveling all-stars very beautiful

location movie actually just in terms of showing you all these kind of like working-class rundown towns throughout the American South I like big leaguer there's an old film called Big Leaguer by Robert Aldrich, which is very good. Everybody Wants Some is a good recent example. But again, it's really more of a, it's a film about baseball players, but I think we're only on the field like twice in that film.

Yeah, just at practice, they don't even play a real game. Exactly, exactly. It is funny how it's kind of a cliche thing that you say about every good baseball movie. It's not really about baseball. But of course, it's true. I mean, people are saying that about EFIS also. It has to have some deeper resonance to it,

as baseball itself does. That's one of the reasons why we love the sport. But yeah, it can't just be about baseball or then it's a documentary. There are many good baseball documentaries too, and I guess some of those aren't just about baseball either. The only thing that's just about baseball is baseball itself, I guess. But then again, is it really?

So I tried to make this film as much about baseball as I could, or really just to adopt the specific language and rhythm of it. That, I think, has not been done in a film in a way that feels satisfying to me. That's what I wanted to do, and I thought maybe I would alienate a lot of people who aren't baseball fans, but... I think the deeper you get into specificity, the more the film might become universal

against your best judgment judgment in a way. Like, this film is screened around the world and a lot of people have connected with it for the more human themes, I think, more of it. So, you know. I was gonna say, you premiered it at Cannes and got good reviews. I don't know how many minutes long the ovation was,

but how did the French feel about baseball movies? I don't know how many minutes long the ovation was, but how did the French feel about baseball movies? I don't know how long the ovation was either. I was kind of in a liminal state. It was kind of the best moment of my life. It was pretty amazing. Much like the players on Soldier's Field in your movie. Yeah. The French really took to it. I mean, it's hard to really make that assessment because in Cannes, there's so many people from all over the world going to the festivals. It's a really international audience. But then we actually opened in France in January where it screened in Paris for over a month actually. And I also learned about all these French baseball communities.

There was like Sandlot leagues in France, of all places, that rallied around the film and booked, you know, special events around the film, in the countryside in France. And that was certainly surprising, but even just the Parisian intellectuals, who don't know the game or know the rules even, I don't wanna say that's true of everyone out there,

but I've spoken to many people who feel that way and they enjoy the film, you know? I think it's just like watching a period costume drama. You don't know everything about the rituals of that world, but you're still intrigued by it because these are characters you can hopefully relate to. Yeah, and that famous quote, "'Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America

had better learn baseball, the rules and reality of the game, said by a Frenchman. So maybe they just wanted to understand America. I want to understand America these days. Me too, that's why I made the film. I wanted to ask you about the baseball movie's aspect of things, because as of yet,

you have yet to receive a negative review, as far as I could tell, or at least as far as Rotten Tomatoes classifies these things and we will not be snapping your streak here at Effectively Wild. And the AP reviewed your film with the headline, EFIS is the best baseball movie since Moneyball. And I thought, wow, that's a great compliment. And then I started counting how many baseball movies there have been since Moneyball. Yeah, yeah, I was sort of like,

oh, there are quite a lot, I was gonna say. I was like, that was kind of damning with faint praise, but I'll take it, I'll take it. Yeah, there've been a few bad ones, you know? You're better than Trouble with the Curve, that's good. No, I mean, there's, everybody wants some, there's The Phenom, I guess, but yeah. Oh, I do like The Phenom, actually.

Yeah, it's sort of. More than Moneyball, I would say. It's Slim Pickens other than documentaries. And I maintain that baseball is still overrepresented in media in TV on on screen because I think maybe it evokes something, it symbolizes something, it's, you know, sort of that perhaps outdated, but still resonates notion of the national pastime and this sort of pastoral connection to the game and to the origins of the country and a time of innocence and simplicity. But also I think maybe because

the people making movies in TV today in many cases are people your age who kind of came of age as baseball fans at a time when it was the heyday of baseball movies where there were so many baseball movies and they were quite popular. And so I guess whether that's conscious or subconscious, maybe there's a, well, you know, even if it's tough to get a big budget baseball movie sold these days because of concerns about people not coming out to see it or not traveling well overseas, despite your reception at Cannes, that maybe if you were sort of steeped in baseball movies when you were young in your formative years, then naturally you would gravitate towards making them.

So I don't know whether we'll get another wave, but we get a lot of baseball references and allusions and scenes in non-baseball movies, I think maybe more so even than the prominence of baseball currently would call for. Yeah, you make some very good points and I don't necessarily wanna understate the importance of the baseball movie canon in my own life. And I know I probably have already done that,

the understating that is. But I just haven't seen these films in a long time, but they were such a part of my childhood. And they're always referenced by my teammates. And it's just, it's a part of the language. It's hard to overlook those films at all. I just wanted to kind of, I felt like it was time for a new baseball film

that speaks to our current world and takes a different look at things. I mean, I know it's a period piece, but I wanted that there's an unresolved quality to the film, an ambiguity to it, and a certain... The ideas you just discussed about America in a state of innocence and baseball as this pure game that kind of cuts right to the heart of it, I think that's all in a state of innocence and baseball is this pure game that kind of cuts right to the heart of it. I think that's all in a state of crisis in the film. And it's all in question, you know,

as to the primacy of this sport on the culture. So yeah, I think it was about time for something new. I also just wonder, and you'd be able to speak to this as a filmmaker, if part of the appeal is that, you know, one of the things we like about baseball as a game when we're enjoying it as a filmmaker, if part of the appeal is that, you know, one of the things we like about baseball as a game when we're enjoying it as a spectator is that it breathes and it sort of has these natural beats that you talked about, these demarcations of time, but there are little gaps in between. And except for the catcher, you can see everybody's face. And I just wonder if as a filmmaker, that is a, not an easier canvas, but sort of a more pliable and receptive canvas on which to paint a story because you don't have to worry about all

of these quick cuts and guys slamming into each other the way you would in a football movie and everyone can be expressive in between moments of field action. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I don't know if I alluded to this earlier in the interview or not, but the idea of the game as something that can go on forever, in theory, you know, before the pitch clock was introduced. But yeah, you stretch and pull time in many different ways

and the pitcher is sort of like the master of that time stretching process. And as a result, there's all this anticipation that happens in those waiting periods, and sometimes distractedness too. If not much is happening in the game, that is, and there's not a lot of runs being scored, or let's say there's a massive deficit between one team and another, there will be a sense of ambient attention. Your attention floats around. I wanted the film's camera to adopt that kind of feeling that you might get as a spectator.

Some other thing starts to catch your attention. If you're at a baseball game, the guy selling popcorn or whatever, hot dogs rather. Now I'm mixing metaphors. I'm thinking about baseball and cinema. But yeah, I wanted that to be a part of the movie and for you in that process as a viewer to realize that all that downtime is actually very rich

with feeling and meaning and the mundane is actually quite rich. And I really just loved the process of shooting those scenes of people in the dugout looking past the camera and we had to simulate the cadence of a pitch and then the ball coming back from the catcher so that everyone is looking at the same thing. And there's something about that, about seeing people looking off-camera at something else that reminds me of... I think it's something that's so fascinating about watching two people in a car, too.

The world is going past them, but we're watching them, and they're not looking at each other, but they're relating through, and they're not looking at each other, but they're relating through this shared spectatorship. So that's a big part of the movie for me. Yeah. You mentioned the pitch clock. The game can still go on forever, just don't make outs. That's all. That's the only secret to extending it indefinitely. And you mentioned that this is a period piece, but one might ask which period exactly. It's sort of like when you watch severance and people are trying to puzzle out, when is this set?

Why is the technology? Why are the cars from all different eras? And of course, if you're moved to ask that question, it's probably a tip off that there's not meant to be an exact answer, that there's some intentional obfuscation there, but it is really interesting to watch this movie and try to figure it out because you've got different eras of music represented,

different makes and models of cars. There's a 1972 game on the boombox throughout this game. No one's on their phones, which is probably an important part of this and places it at a certain time, but were you intentionally trying to elide exactly when this was taking place and to have this sort of period piece but timeless aspect to it? Yes, absolutely. We wanted it to feel a bit nebulous. The 90s was the time when I was growing up and playing a lot of baseball, as well as

the early 2000s, but I remember that as a time spent in public parks and running around and playing late into the night, just like the players in this movie. So I really wanted to return to that scene, which for me was the 90s. So that was one reason. The other reason was eliminating the phones and trying to minimize the distractions for the players. Because I play in a league now where people can pull out their phone and check their social media or their fantasy

football scores or whatever. And it sometimes pulls you out of the game. And I wanted these characters to be stuck in the present and having to kind of relate to each other strictly through this game. The outside world is kind of just an abstraction in the film. But also there are guys that are like clinging to the past. So they have these cars from the,

muscle cars from the 60s and 70s and 80s and then you know naturally like they also had to have some some wardrobe pieces that were more contemporary because it's very hard to find cleats from 1992 you know so that mix on the screen I think produces this dreamlike ambiguity which is Interesting for me because these characters are locked between This past that's very comforting and also this very uncertain future So that that that for me is it's all intentional, you know Yeah, some of it some of it's just a happenstance like I said about the cleats, but but you know, the anachronisms just kind of happen but

But yeah, it's I just allow them to you know, and and it's also a function of a low budget as well Yeah, there's some nebulousness just in terms of the passage of time within the game too And and a lot is evoking that and the Sun setting, which I know complicated things for you as a filmmaker and trying to have continuity, but also the leaves are changing and the moon is waning. I guess I can't tell whether it's waning or waxing, but I think it's waning thematically. And the triangular manhole covers are being replaced

by the circular ones. And yet we kind of get stuck in a time bubble at a certain point. And there is kind of get stuck in a time bubble at a certain point. And there is sort of a field of dreams aspect to things without giving away the ending. There seems to be a temporal vortex of a sort that sort of strikes after the seventh inning stretch and suddenly you're wondering what time is it? How long have these guys been here? And I don't know whether you meant to provide a definitive answer to that or not, but I did notice that at one time you can hear the clock chiming, and then I was waiting to see, okay, how many times will it chime? Will that be a giveaway to what

hour it is here? And it strikes three times. And so I'm thinking, is it three in the morning now or am I meant to conclude that? Are they just refusing to go home? And you don't answer those questions definitively. It kind of becomes a purgatory, I think. Right. Yes, exactly. And I know you've got to go to another interview. We could talk all day. I just, the last thing I'd say, I guess, would be that I think the field, it creates this community among the men that wouldn't exist without it. And you make that pretty clear that

these guys aren't really friends. They're not seeing each other socially outside of the games. And someone proposes at one point, hey, we should get everyone together. We'll go get a drink over the winter. And the guy says, I'll think on it. And you know, he's not going to. And so it seems like that is sort of what you're saying here that if you remove a field, this place where people can meet, then maybe that leads to what everyone says about the epidemic of male loneliness or isolation or internet echo chambers and bowling alone and that whole idea. You pave over this field for a school, but even so, if you don't have this public space, then maybe we just retreat to our own corners,

and maybe that's where we are today. Unfortunately, I do see that as kind of the dark reality of especially suburban life, that there are fewer and fewer opportunities to get together, and the internet only makes us more insular most of the time. So yeah, I mean, I think also these are these are flawed characters for sure. They should be able to figure out how to get together. They should go to just play at Dustus even if the septic tank is close to the field. You know, it's but it's a it's a I think the movie is definitely making you aware of the effort that is required

to maintain friendships, especially large group friendships. And that effort is considerable. And if that field is gone, there's so many other things in life that are gonna pull our attention away from these things like leisure you know, leisure and friendship and joy that don't seem immediately necessary when you have to put food on the table. I do think they're gonna kind of drift away from each other. And I think it's on our culture and perhaps our politics to make sure that we have these

places that we can go and to create more time for people to be able to do these kinds of things. So I mean, I think there is a bit of a dark tone to the ending, but I think that's how I really feel about the reality of things in America right now. Well, it's a beautifully shot film. It looks like a perfect fall day,

though I know it wasn't in reality. It was a composite of many perfect fall days and many imperfect ones that you stitch together. But it looks beautiful and from the foliage to the ghostly breathing of the cold air that billows around everyone to the scorebook-styled interstitials that break up some sections of the film. And it's very funny. I love when there's a disputed play and they don't know how to score it, and they say, we'll call it a balk.

That's basically how we handle these things, or wearing their sunglasses with car lights and the well-lubricated River Dogs picture with a Craig Kimbrell-esque setup. I also felt personally attacked when one character you mentioned, Merritt, who's the one who explains the concept of the EFIS, he makes a statement about the catcher's framing. Oh, good pitch. It's a good pitch.

I was looking at the catcher, I don't like his framing. Which felt like it was personally targeted to me and Meg as catcher framing enthusiasts. He's sort of, he's the proto-analytics guy, I guess, on the rosters. He's watching the framing instead of the pitching. But it's just a great movie that I'd recommend that everyone see. And maybe you can leave us by telling everyone how they can see it, where it is in theaters and where it will be either in theaters or eventually somewhere you can watch it from home.

So at the moment it is being released in New York City. Today is March 7th and this is the official opening day. And it's a great time for it because spring training is in the air and yet the season hasn't started so I think people are craving baseball but you don't really need to watch the spring training games. Maybe you guys do. So it's New York this week. Next week, it expands to LA and Boston,

and then Chicago the week after that. And over that period, basically throughout March, it's expanding to many other smaller cities as well, and smaller towns all across the country. So keep an eye out for it. Ephesfilm.com is a great way to see where it's playing, or you can go to Music Box's website. There's also a page for it there.

Eventually, we will hope to get a streaming deal that's not on the table yet, but you know, and also a Blu-ray release is imminent at some point in the late spring, probably. Yes. But I encourage everyone to see it on a big screen, you know, I really do. If you can, I guess it's true to the spirit of the film that you see it with other people out in the world in a physical space somewhere. Not that I'm one to talk as a homebody, but still, that's the message of the movie. So thank you very much.

Congrats again. Glad you got to make it. And I hope it portends many more baseball movies to come. Carson Lund, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you. You know, the downside of making bad breakout picks my hobby horse is that many more bad breakout picks are brought to my attention now. Such as one that Jim Boden of The Athletic published on Friday, sent to me by

Patreon supporter, All the B's. Boden picks Lawrence Butler as a breakout candidate, but that's not the worst offense. Not even close. Here's a sentence. However, at 27, he's ready to have a breakout year. And I won't be surprised if he emerges as an MVP candidate by the All-Star break. This mystery player is the Orioles Adley Rutchman,

former number one overall draft pick, former number one overall prospect, producer of two past five war seasons in which he received MVP votes, rookie of the year runner-up, two-time All-Star in his first two full seasons, and according to my catcher ranking on MLB Network this winter,

the number one overall catcher in baseball. Why did I rank him that highly? Because I was betting on a bounce back from his relative down year last year. But a bounce back does not a breakout make. I'm tired folks. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. Just four more preview segments to go, two more preview pods.

We will get to those next week. Dodgers, Yankees, Rockies, White Sox. We should wrap up even in time for Cubs and Dodgers opening day. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. As have the following five listeners who have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Nicholas Morgan, Sterling Booth Curcio, Brian Knight, the aforementioned Michael Eisen, and Eddie Dudek, thanks to all of

you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts, memberships, and so much more, check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can find our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can find the effectively wild subreddit where Meg fears to tread at r slash effectively wild. And you can check the show notes and fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast

app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week. Effectivement Sauvage Effectivement Sauvage