Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 374: Baseball’s State of the Union: The BP Rebuttal

Episode Date: January 29, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss Tom Verducci’s suggested ways to make baseball better.

You can make it better, maybe so much better All the time, just a good boy Looking hard to see my way A little time, a little trouble You better day Good morning and welcome to episode 374 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How are you? Good. Here. I'm here. Good. That's all I ask of you.

So our discussion the other day about players who took hometown discounts, you put me on the spot and asked me for some and I failed. Yeah, you did. In our Facebook

group, Brady Childs reminded me of the Cliff Lee deal with the Phillies, which sort of qualifies. I don't know. It was generally agreed that he left money on the table. Yeah, definitely left guaranteed money. But I would say he got a higher average annual value out of it. He did, yes. I think Halliday, on the other hand.

The Halliday one was... Yeah, that one was hard to understand. Yeah, so I don't know. He got five years instead of the seven he could have gotten from the Yankees or six with a player option or something like that. But you're right. The AAV was lower. So I don't know if it qualifies, but it comes close.

Yeah, sure. And then the other news today was that we lost Uni to Japan. Uniesky Betancourt signed with the Oryx Buffaloes, which makes me sad. All right, so let's start a pool. What day will he break the all-time home run record? Yeah, I was considering asking you what you thought his slash line would be in Japan. Because he, I don't know, he kind of feels like a player who would be good there. Like I have this vague idea in my mind

of the type of player who does well there, and I don't know whether it's backed up by anything. It probably is just Vladimir Balentine, basically. But he, I don't know, I'm sorry to see him go because he was kind of a fun I mean who's the player punchline now yeah I

there is no one I'm fairly confident that nobody has played as much at as low a level as he has for so long according to baseball reference and I have to go to baseball reference and uh i have to go to baseball reference because i think the others uh find an outlier positive season here

and there but according to baseball reference he has been below replacement level every year since 2007 every year every year every single year and in that time he has gotten 590 played appearances 508 588 584 228 and 409 last year primarily at first base and uh so there is nobody who is currently crushing teams the way that at least the uh advanced metrics suggest strongly that he is. I mean, Jeff Francoeur is the closest thing I think we have to a comparable player in the public image. But Francoeur is not going to be getting 500 plate appearances anytime soon. I don't even know where Francoeur is right now. He signed with the Indians, right?

Minor league deal, I think. Yes. So I don't know who the I mean you know there's yeah I don't know who would be the next guy who could conceivably put up six consecutive negative war seasons in full time play

it's not easy to do I wonder how many times that is that's happened I don't know. I was looking forward to watching how he would play this season because you know if he had stayed,

it feels almost inevitable that he would have played somehow or other. Some improbable situation would have come up just like it did last year where a team has you know Corey Hart get get hurt and and then Alex Gonzalez is there starting first baseman on opening day and then Uni is there and you just stick him at first for much of the season uh even though that

is killing you um so I was looking forward to seeing how it would happen this year but now it won't so uh unioski betancourt uh in let's see uh since 1980 uh only one player has had more negative war seasons with 200 played appearances at least in each season than uni which is pretty impressive because he's now leaving us at at age 31 i mean he had like that's this is the prime sub replacement yeah part of your career i mean he's he's giving up basically it would be like if he if willie mays had gone to japan for ages 27 to 29 like he's leaving like really right in his sweet spot he's young enough that teams will keep giving him contracts and arguably paying him and and old enough that he's going to get worse um and yet he uh he he's he's second since 1980 um and uh in his defense desi reliford uh is tied with him

and also left it at age uh 31 and todd benzinger is tied with him and left at age 31 uh the other guys who are tied with him brent main and john mabry and um uh wes helms all took longer to do it but um uh there's one player with more do you you're never going to get it and i hate hearing you think gary gary disarcinia good guess let me let me see how uh uh disarcinia does uh does not appear to have ever had a let's say disarcing and did not reach three i guess it seems likely or at least he certainly didn't reach four uh so no the answer is it's a recent guy and it's actually a guy that you think is pretty good like in your head you you've remembered this guy as being pretty good um but it's jose guillen okay, okay. With eight, by the way. You need six.

Yeah. Jose Guillen at eight. Yeah, I don't know if I would say that I think of him as being pretty good. I do. The wind has swept away a lot of the bad seasons, and in my mind I remember him having some good years. Like with the Reds, he had that really good year with the Reds, didn't he? Yes, yeah.

He had like a 30-homer year. Billy Bean acquired him. Although 30-homer year 10 years ago was not what it is now. He did slug 569 that year, though. Yeah. And yeah, he was good with the Angels. Had some good years. So, yeah, he was good with the Angels. Mm-hmm. Had some good years.

So I remember him being somewhat good. Well, now you won't. The main reason I remember Jose Guillen is that the Giants had him. The Giants acquired him and Cody Ross almost simultaneously and made the decision that Guillen was their guy and played Guillen throughout the the pennant race all the way until the end of the season and then um so I guess they it seemed as though they maybe had some notice that he was about to get suspended for HGH and so they left him off the postseason roster and went with their second choice Cody Ross on the

postseason roster and Cody Ross like won all three MVP awards in that postseason or something like that and was this ultimate postseason hero so it was his timeliness and getting suspended that saved Bruce Bochy from himself and is the reason that we now think that Bruce Bochy is a great manager and Brian Sabian is a pretty good GM, even though they did not want to actually play Cody Ross. All right. Well, farewell, Uni. We wish you well, and we hope to see you back in the States someday.

Okay, so for my topic, I was at a loss, as we both usually are for most of the day at this point in the year when we're trying to come up with a topic. But then a listener named Jesse posted a link to Tom Verducci's Baseball State of the Union in the Facebook group and suggested that we talk about it. And I was only too happy to take him up on that suggestion. that we talk about it. And I was only too happy to take him up on that suggestion. So Tom Ferducci posted a very long article, Baseball State of the Union,

Some Ways to Improve the Game at Sports Illustrated. It is a two-page article. It starts out by talking about how great things are in baseball financially, and then it talks about how they're not so great in terms of interest level relative to other sports or relative to to what the interest level used to be and uh there's there's kind of a a questionable paragraph i think where he he says uh what has hurt baseball's younger viewership may be more about how culture changed. Many of the qualities associated with baseball are less valued in today's society than they were in 1986.

Qualities such as teamwork, humility, patience, pensiveness, perseverance, and strategizing. The qualities that have gained in cultural value are not associated with baseball, such as self-promotion, entrepreneurship, violence, action, noise, and gambling. So kind of a grumpy old man paragraph there. But most of the articles is good stuff and pretty thought-provoking. Most of the articles is good stuff and pretty thought-provoking. And the second page is just suggestions for how to make baseball better. And some of them sort of resemble listener emails that we get and discuss. So I thought I would run down the list and we can talk about them and see if you like them. We can talk about them and see if you like them. So the first one really makes me think that he must have misplaced our email address and put this into a column instead because this is a classic Effectively Wild listener email show idea.

He calls it the bonus batter, and apparently he proposed it last year also. it the bonus batter and apparently he proposed it last year also uh each manager each game gets to pick one at bat when he can send any batter to the plate including somebody already in the lineup to bat for someone else without having to lose the player who gives up the at bat the idea is to get the stars of the game to the plate in the biggest moments and if the manager picks the right spot a situation where he can't be walked it also adds tension and strategy to the game then he says uh sounds crazy people thought the same thing in 1973 about the idea of designating one player to do nothing but hit which is uh i don't know that this is crazier this is crazier than that was then

but uh what do you think of the bonus batter idea uh you know i always thought that that the carpool lane um should everybody should have one day of the month that you get to ride in the carpool lane without having a carpool and i just feel like like the carpool lane, it's too binary. There are some days when people really need that lane. You've got to get your kids or something. There's a societal need for people to be able to use the lane just once, not regularly.

Obviously, you don't want to clutter it up, but you should get one day when it's more important to you than anybody else to have that lane. That's kind of what this is, I guess. And I guess I don't have much more to say than a random tangential idea I had once about the Carpool Lane. I think that this comes back to what we talked about once, which is that you have to decide what you want in baseball.

Do you want to see as much of the best hitters and the best pitchers facing each other as much as possible? Is that the platonic ideal of the best hitters and the best pitchers facing each other as much as possible? Is that the platonic ideal of the game? Or do you want to see a sort of competition that is more interesting because of the limitations you put on it and forces inferior players in? I don't have a... I don't have a, I don't know. I like the idea of having a bomb that you get to throw at some point in the game,

like some super bomb that you get to throw that you get to hold in reserve. I don't like this one particularly. Nothing about the first paragraph that he wrote captivated me. Well, a lot of his central theme seems to be that baseball is kind of boring, or at least that all the kids who are into violence and gambling and tweets find baseball boring. And so these are sort of ways to make it more interesting or more compelling to a modern audience. And there is a kind of an interesting point in the article made by an

anonymous NL executive who, who suggests that baseball is sort of propped up by the fact that, that live programming is so valuable today, that because there is just so much baseball live programming, that has made the sport financially successful, but at the same time turned lots of people off. And that the sport has kind of been saved through no action of its own, but just the circumstances that live TV in the DVR era is super valuable and super, you know, financially rewarding. And so a lot of Verducci's suggestions seem to be to make baseball more exciting to an audience that needs more of an adrenaline rush, I suppose, or to make it more marketable. And this probably would make it more marketable.

Do you think so? I think so. To get the stars of the game to the plate in the biggest moment yes but on the other hand um like a lot of times the stars of the game are at the plate in the biggest moments and it would be less interesting if you knew that the star at the plate at the biggest moment gets to come up two batters later you know like there's something about the the relative scarcity of this showdown that makes it um you know interesting i i really i don't know i just don't know that i feel particularly in the 2430 regular season games where they just sort of flow like a creek through your life and none none really ever achieves that particular emotional climax that,

you know, like an NFC championship ever does. I just don't really feel like, like there's this massive Americans who are going to like notice that, um, you know, Freddie Freeman is batting against Sergio Romo. Let's run to the TV.

You know, like it just doesn't really feel like it's the sort of thing that shifts any particular paradigms. Yeah, he points out that the wildcard games have had very good ratings, that they've had better ratings than any of the non-elimination games in the championship series round or something. elimination games in like the championship series round or something, that people seem to be responding to this sudden death nature of it. And this, I don't know, he's trying to tap into that desire to see more on the line or maybe there'd be, I don't know. He says it adds strategy to the game

I don't know whether it does really because it would almost be like an automatic move right the bonus batter I mean if you're allowed to do that you would just use your best batter for that matchup

I don't know how much of a wrinkle it really adds to it. There would be another move, but it would be kind of an obligatory move. His next suggestion is... I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. I think I probably agree with that, but I'm sure there are things that we're not thinking of.

Like, for instance, let's say your best hitter is Barry Bonds in 2003. You want to get him up, but you also want to get him up with runners on base, and your best chance of having a runner on base is to have Barry Bonds on base. So you might split up your order slightly differently. Ideally, you would have this guy bat for the eighth or ninth batter and but ideally you'd also have him bat with the bases loaded and the bases are less likely to be loaded for the eighth or ninth batter than they are for the third or fourth batter and so maybe you maybe you stagger your lineup more you know i mean like i i don't i don't

doubt that there are seven or eight possible articles about the optimal strategy of this rule. So I'm not willing to cast it aside for simplicity necessarily. It just doesn't necessarily appeal to me. Like why one, for instance? It just feels sort of arbitrary. Why one? Why not all of them? Why not just any anytime you want, you can know, you'd have, like, who would Dusty Baker have sent up

as his bonus batter last year with runners on? It probably would have been, you know, Brandon Phillips every time. It would not. Oh, come on. We could argue about that. Come on, get over yourself. He's a run producer.

It would not have been Brandon Phillips. He's not an idiot. He drives and runs. Yeah. Anyway, Brandon Phillips is a switch hitter, and so even if he did send up Brandon Phillips, we could just say, oh, it was a platoon advantage. Yeah.

Next suggestion is the summer game. He says, it makes no sense that because baseball has the sports calendar mostly to itself in midsummer, around when the All-Star break is, that the schedule goes dark for a couple days after the All-Star game, that it needs to capitalize on this having a monopoly on the sports schedule by having some sort of event programming. So he says it should schedule one game for the Thursday after the All-Star game, bill it as the summer game, and play it at an iconic American venue, such as the foothills near Mount Rushmore, the mall in Washington, D.C.,

the Field of Dreams field in Iowa, Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, the Rose Bowl, Michigan Stadium, et cetera. In some cases, you may need to build a temporary field and compromise on attendance and dimensions, but you're talking about one regular season game out of 2,430 that is visually stunning, brings Major League Baseball to a place it never has been before, appeals to the event appetite of demanding sports viewers,

and underscores baseball a unique place in Americana. This, I mean, clearly this doesn't go far enough. It should be, like, it should be, you know, like, on a mountain. Like, if he wants to get in the email show, he needs to introduce uneven playing fields, you know? Like, it should be, you know, like... On an aircraft carrier. Like, they play basketball on an aircraft carrier. On an aircraft carrier thank you man so that's settled yeah we're on board with this

if you put it on an aircraft carrier yeah uh practically speaking players would probably hate this um i don't know i mean it is only one game game. I mean, these guys are pretty used to the slog. I think that... If you give... I mean, you could give the team a day off later in the week. Probably that would make up for it mostly. They'd have to cut their vacations short. But, eh, I mean, it's not going to move the needle much either way, probably.

But it's not a bad suggestion. I'd watch that game, but I'd watch almost any game that's the only game going. You could play it in Tampa Bay, and I'd watch it. Bracket-style home run derby. I like that one. By the way, I like that one more than I like the bonus batter. So if we're keeping score, that's my pick. I'm voting for it so far.

All right. Bracket style home run derby. The current format is tedious and uninspired. You will get no argument from us on that. Do away with rounds of hitting. Select the 16 most high-profile sluggers and let them go at it bracket style. Can you say office pool? How about Harper going to head-to-head against Mike Trout? Winner advances. Loser is knocked out. I would want to watch that. That's true.

I would want, well, no, I wouldn't actually. But I mean, if I were going to want to watch a home run derby, I would want to watch that more than something else. We've talked about the home run derby. I think that the 16 most high profile sluggers kills my interest um because i don't particularly want to watch 16 more or less equal type hitters going up against each other so i think if he came up with a you know 16 guys that i got to choose and they were brackets brackets are more interesting than than the

rounds as currently is yeah i i don't know it's not that compelling to me even if it's a bracket because you're not competing against each other really i mean you're right it's it's like golf or something you're playing against the course and you're playing sort of with someone else but you're not directly competing against that person. If Mike Trout had to pitch to Bryce Harper or something and they each had to pitch to each other, maybe I'd watch that. But as it is, I mean, you're competing against yourself and the batting practice pitcher in the stadium

and you just happen to be matched up with someone else who is in your bracket, but there's no actual head-to-head competition i suppose that that that is somewhat true none it doesn't totally ruin the idea for me but it's somewhat true i um uh it would be good if they alternated swings. Yeah. Well, it would also give Chris Berman a whole lot more time to talk in between people walking to and from the plate. If they had a righty and a lefty, and they each stand on one side of the plate, and they take alternate swings.

Yeah. All right. That's what I'm talking about. There is no fix for baseball that involves the home run derby i'll just say that um best of five lcs uh so basically he's saying that the shorter a series is the more urgent and exciting it is the more people are into it the higher ratings it gets uh a best of five lcs which is the way it used to be, pumps more urgency into the postseason

and lifts the profile of the World Series, which becomes the only best of seven round instead of just another round. So this is, I don't know, we've talked before about how we balance having the best team win versus having something exciting. But, well, also, even if you're having, even if each game is individually more exciting, you're getting fewer games.

And so is it 140% more exciting to balance out? I mean, where does the math come in? I mean, each game in a seven-game series is quite exciting, and each game in a five-game series might be slightly more exciting, but it has to be proportionally more exciting to make up for the loss of actual games. I mean, you could make the case that a 13-game series might be less exciting each game,

but there'd be twice as many games. So there is a sweet spot somewhere, but it sounds like this, you know, like just saying, oh, five is better than seven is a little bit too easy. Yeah. I'd rather have seven anyway. I like seven.

Seven's good. Yeah, we like seven. The 2-3-2 is beautiful. The 2-3-2 is unimpeachable. Right. I mean, these suggestions are mostly to attract people who are not already watching baseball. We are hooked as it is, so the more baseball, the better for us

and for most of the people listening to this. But I don't know. It's hard to imagine that anyone would really get into baseball because there are two fewer games in an LCS. I mean, if it were all one game, then I think it would. I think there actually are a lot of people who would watch if each series was one game, like a lot of people. Yeah, I agree.

But then what do you got? Then you've got college football. Yeah. And then we couldn't pay the players. Well, yeah, this would never happen because of money. Okay, the next idea is one that we've discussed. I think we might have done most of a show on it, the Scott Boras suggestion for a neutral site world series.

No, no. Boris says I'm big on the world series being a planned event. The problem with world series ratings right now is that they are regional and that may be the case, but I don't see how the neutral site fixes that at all. Because it's not it's not that people all around the world are not tuning into the world series in a neutral site like can you imagine somebody in like la turns it on he's like oh it's the st louis arch i'm not watching this

one team has home field advantage this is unfair i don't want to watch anymore uh yeah so i don't look at that downtown that's not my downtown plus also even if that were the case it would still only be in one downtown right well yeah i guess so unless unless you have multiple neutral sites for one series so i don't i don't know how it fixes anything. If you put it in a warm weather place every year, I don't know. Even that, I mean, the World Series sells out as it is. So it's not like you need to attract fans. I guess you could have all sorts of World Series week events and make it into some sort of baseball festival.

And maybe that would attract people. But I can't imagine that the ratings would be any different, really. I mean, it's hard to... Who would watch it because it's in a neutral site instead of the city that one of those teams plays in? You'd just upset the fans of that team without attracting any others. I don't get it. Yeah. I don't know.

All right. We're vetoing that one. The next one, fund college baseball. Baseball literally has billions of dollars set aside and for what, said one club executive. What they should and can do tomorrow is to fund scholarships for college programs. Verducci makes the point that baseball programs

are allowed only 11.7 full scholarships, or scholarships at all. Full scholarships are very rare. And of course, basketball and football pay the full cost of college for a lot of elite players, which provides some incentive for, for athletes to choose those sports over baseball. Of course that is presumably because those sports are very profitable for the schools, whereas baseball is not.

So that theoretically then is where major league baseball steps in. Are you buying it? No. When I turn on a game, and it's the Astros and the Indians in September, and I have a hard time getting into it, I don't think, oh, if only they fixed NCAA baseball. No. Well, it definitely wouldn't attract anyone else unless the idea is building for the future, I suppose,

and the idea that you would attract better talent to the sport. Yeah. I actually don't think that better talent matters. I'm fairly certain that the talent relative to itself is you know gonna stay fairly consistent and that most people aren't capable of telling the difference between you know the talent as is and the talent times you know 1.002 and so i don't think it's that significant that six players have chosen to take a football scholarship instead of a baseball scholarship the other thing is that baseball is the only sport of the three at which you can get you know your three hundred thousand dollars or your three million

dollars out of high school and so they already have an advantage. In a sense, college baseball sort of competes with what I think clubs would all prefer, which is that they get guys out of high school so they can start teaching them change-ups. Yeah, I'd rather have baseball spend its billions of dollars set aside on funding college baseball than on doing nothing with that, I guess, because I might conceivably get something out of the college baseball being funded, whereas I get nothing out of owners profiting. But I don't expect them to give up their profits for this, and I don't know that it would help all that much.

And then the remaining suggestions are all pretty much things that we've talked about and are all targeted toward shortening the length of games. Install a pitch clock, which we talked about. You were not a fan of the pitch clock. Do you remember why I wasn't a fan? It's because of anxiety wasn't it i feel like i liked the anxiety aspect of it i think that the reason i didn't like it is because the players don't want it and i feel like it's the player's game uh-huh yeah well Well, I mean, his idea is just basically to enforce what the rulebook already says.

Yeah. I think it would probably just be better to take it out of the rulebook. I mean, you could enforce it. You could enforce it, and that's something that has been said for 100 years. And the fact that it doesn't just suggests to me that us out here, we just don't appreciate it. The players don't want it. There's a reason they don't want it.

There's a reason that they don't push for this, that the umpires don't push it. I mean, the game generally moderates itself fairly well. And I feel like this is something that is not a new concept. It's like literally many decades that this idea just gets kicked around casually. And it's just not something that anybody in the game actually wants. So I also don't really feel like the length of the game is a – I mean you could cut 10 minutes out of it and I don't think it would do much.

So I feel like the length of the game – I mean the product itself is a long-form product. And some people don't want that, and it limits its market. How is it going to survive in the Twitter era? Yeah, no, I mean, how is it going to survive with record revenues? But the revenues, it's being propped up by TV advertising. Are they going to? Yeah, okay. No one actually likes the sport, you understand. Yeah. by TV advertising. It's just, yeah, it's okay. No one actually likes the sport.

You understand. Yeah. Uh, limit timeouts. Baseball is the only sport where teams get an unlimited number of timeouts. If the manager and pitching coach are limited in their trips to the mound, so should the catcher. I'm fine with that.

That's a good idea. Yeah, that's, that's absolutely true. The catcher. Yeah'm fine with that. That's a good idea. Yeah, that's absolutely true. The catcher. Yeah. I mean, there are times where there are several catcher trips out there for really no other reason than that. They just don't know what signs they're using or they just can't seem to get on the same page, can't seem to communicate. That seems like something that they should probably work out on their own time so we don't have to watch them figure out what their signs are yeah that'd be nice i agree and uh limit pitching changes um and i'm sure we've talked about this

at some point uh he suggests that a pitcher has to obtain an out before he could be removed, or you gave a manager an allowance of only one mid-inning change per inning. I prefer the former. I like the one-out rule because it puts pressure on you to actually get an out. You could imagine a guy who simply cannot get that out, and it would get giddier and giddier. It would be like the guy who can't throw a strike, and you would sort of be very aware that the manager is on the front step, dying to pull him, and the pitcher himself is out there

just going nowhere in his life. And we would all love it. Those would be great scenes. So you'd get tight close-ups. I like almost anything that leads to tight close-ups i like i like almost anything that leads to tight close-ups of sweaty ball players so uh yeah i'd be all all in favor that one's my that's my favorite idea and the last one is uh one that he suggests and then immediately undercuts uh he he says start every batter with a one and one countone count. And then he says, this is too radical for my tastes.

So this, I mean, this is basically the same as just making, giving a batter two strikes and, I mean, making a strikeout two strikes and a walk three balls. You could just do that. But he says this is a common tactic for amateur coaches in scrimmages to improve the pace of play, to get more repetitions for hitters, pitchers, and fielders, and it does work toward creating a faster game. You seem not to believe that the length of the game is a problem,

so I assume that you are against this. Well, if you were, I mean, I could, the length of the game is potentially an issue. I just don't think that things that cut eight minutes from the game are particularly significant i think if you wanted to change the product to make it an hour and a half entertainment event that's that's actually would be fine with me i mean if you did it in a way that didn't make me hate baseball that would be fine with me it's just that changing it from three hours to two hours and 50 minutes does nothing in my mind. But this would be a dramatic change.

So this would be a dramatic change. It would absolutely be a dramatic change. And although you might argue that what actually ends up happening is that it increases dramatically the three true outcomes incentives for each side. the three true outcomes incentives for each side and that you have batters that are much closer to drawing a walk and pitchers that are much closer to striking batters out. And so it could actually end up slowing down the game because instead of having... It would just completely eliminate the even pretense

of pitching to contact. And you would just have a game in which you don't even need defenders. Yeah, and he mentions that problem on the first page about the decreasing contact rate. Oh yeah, Verducci hates the decreasing contact rate. He does. That's his pet project is getting everybody to put the bat on the ball.

Not going so well. No. is getting everybody to put the bat on the ball, which is fine. Not going so well. No. He should try arguing that people should strike out more and see what happens. All right, so that was Tom Raducci's State of the Union. Some good suggestions in there. Yes.

And the whole article is definitely worth reading, especially for the first page. The whole article is definitely worth reading, especially for the first page. I will link to it in the Facebook group and on the blog post at BP. This is not on topic, but I spent the day reading old Sports Illustrated articles by chance. And it seems like half of them, if you search anything on Sports Illustrated, half of the old articles are Tom Verucci and he is so good yeah like when he when he writes feature articles he is so good at his job and i just think that everybody should just appreciate like like what a just absolute genius he is at what he does uh just a pretty face when he digs into a profile, there's nobody better.

Super good. Yep. Okay. That's the show. Send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.