Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 498: The Astros’ Draft Postmortem

Episode Date: July 23, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about banning the shift, then discuss the way the Astros’ draft deadline went down.

Well, it's lonesome in this old town. Everybody puts me down. I'm a face without a name. Just walking in the rain. Going back to Houston, Houston, Houston. Houston, Houston Good morning and welcome to episode 498 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. Brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller and that's Ben Lindberg who writes for Grantland. Ben, how are you? Great, how are you? Good. I'm sending you something that I just saw come over the wire two seconds before we started recording. This is the Arizona Republic, I think.

Yeah, it's always hard to tell. Yeah, it's azcentral.com. Newspapers are always rebranding their websites for some reason. When I was at Orange County Register, for a while our website was branded as MyOC, and for a while it was branded as OrangeCounty.com. So I'm always a little cautious. But yes, this is the Arizona Republic. It has a feature where readers can submit headlines for the Diamondbacks game. And I find this charming and wonderful,

and I just wanted you to see the headlines that are suggested. They are so earnest. They are not, like these are not, I mean, I guess maybe they've filtered out the ones that are any fun. But these are like people really trying to mimic copy editors as though copy editor is like this awesome thing that you dreamed of when you were a kid, but life got in the way and you could never become a copy editor.

But this is like the copy editor fantasy camp. And so they're really trying really hard. So like the winning headline today is long balls leave D-backs short. Which is such an earnest headline. Tigers pick off win as D-backs lose. The winner for July 20th. How sweep it is. How sweep it is how sweep it is i know exclamation point it's like every sweep you could do that and i'm sure people do gian gian gene whatever whatever your name is

you've got to think about what makes this headline unique this is a sweep unlike any other you have to find the thing that makes this sweep special unless this is the only sweep that has ever been sweet in which case it can work but i have a question this one is narrowly beat out another sweep sweet pun oh so sweet i wonder how they decided between those venom Venomous snakes sweep cubs. In which, fine, all true. But in this case, the thing that you chose to make your headline unique was by putting venomous snakes. And you can tell that all the color.

He's like, Diamondbacks sweep cubs. No, that's not it. This needs more. And so he came up with Venomous Snakes. It's the Diamondbacks' home newspaper. They're always Venomous Snakes. Every single headline could be Venomous Snakes. Everyone, 162 a year, could have Venomous Snakes in there.

Do you see how this works? Jolly Ulrich, do you get the headline game then getting heated one of these suggestions for today is para para gone yeah I saw that what is what is that it's a two-syllable word just like going yeah I don't know is that what that's supposed to be a take on so so so every game all right so ben name name a player name a player name a ball player goldschmidt all right so paul goldschmidt is the hero of the game my headline is going going paul all. Give me another one. Adam Eaton.

Eaton, Eaton, gone. Wow. It works so well for everyone. It does. In fact, as long as you don't have a six syllable name, I believe I can make it work. That's good, Eaton. Well, see, no, Ben, that actually makes sense. That would work. Because Eat eaten and eating sound alike.

You are too good for this. You are clearly a... I'm a professional. Yes, yes. It's clear that I'm a ringer here. All right. Not everyone can write brilliant headlines based on obscure rap lyrics like you. Do you want to banter about the thing, or do you want to save the banter and go on to the topic?

Because the topic's, I don't know, maybe the topic's going to be long, maybe it's not. I'll banter about it just because we got a bunch of questions about it and Facebook comments about it. All right, but Ben, I just want you to know this episode is going to go long, and around minute 40, I'm going to get grumpy. Okay. You can get grumpy. Okay, go ahead. Okay.

So there was an article, Sports Illustrated, by Tom Verducci, and the upshot of the article was that we should consider banning the shift, making the shift illegal in some way, drawing an imaginary line or an actual line on the field somewhere and saying that certain fielders can't go, can't cross this line, can't, you know, the shortstop can't uh you know the shortstop can't stand to the right of second base or or whatever whatever it is um but the the gist was that uh baseball's offense is down batting average is down this is bad for baseball it's boring baseball and so baseball needs to do something to counteract this and not the slow, gradual counteracting that might occur over a period of years. There is some suggestion in the article that teams will maybe encourage opposite field hitting or all fields hitting more than they have, but that that's something that might take years to show up because you have to ingrain that behavior early in players rather than after they get to the major leagues. And Soberducci says that we can't wait, or he doesn't really say that. He seriously

thinks that we should think about doing something about this, adding something to the books. doing something about this, adding something to the books. And I don't agree. We've, well, we've, we've talked about this. We talked about this a long time ago, uh, but not, not recently. So you are also against this, I would, I would imagine. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, uh, I guess I have, uh, I'm not ever really against anything or pro anything. I think that the less an idea makes sense, the more I kind of want to see it in a lot of ways. But yeah, I'm generally, I mean, so my two thoughts on this, one is that I think that people who want to outlaw the shift consider that the traditional way of doing things. They consider themselves the traditionalists. They're preserving the game as we know it.

They're the conservatives. And the shifters are the crazy radicals. But in fact, it's exactly the opposite. The thing that is consistent about baseball is that fielders have the right to go wherever they want and orchestrate their own defense. They have chosen a relatively conservative form of defense for 150 years, but there is no restriction on it. And it is always the case that the person who tries to engineer the game in any way or impose rules on the game where no rule existed is the true radical he is the one who is trying to dramatically change the

player's relationship to the game and once you start imposing restrictions there are always unintended consequences there would certainly i would say be some unintended consequence of this even if it were just in establishing a precedent for how we view defense, and that radical unintended consequence might not come for decades, but something unknown would come of it. And baseball has always generally, on matters of defense, allowed the seven men to roam where they are and trusted them to do the right thing, and they always have.

So in that sense, I don't think that this is necessarily as safe as people who promote it might think. The other thing is that if you're going to do it, if you're going to put restrictions on them, as you know, I often debate in my head the value of restrictions versus the value of allowing players to be as good as they can possibly be. And allowing defenders to play where they think they're most likely to catch the ball is pretty explicitly allowing them to be as good as they can possibly be. And putting restrictions on them is putting restrictions on them. And where we see restrictions, we often see much of the tension of the game that makes the game good. So if you're going to restrict them, that's an interesting idea. But restrict them.

No shading whatsoever. There's a circle on the field like you're in a play and you're not the director. And the director tells you where to stand. That's where you stand. So every player stands in the exact same position every play. And defenders aren't allowed to move. And then we can sort of see what the game would look like with that. Obviously, that's absurd. I only agree with new changes if they're slightly absurd. Otherwise, I let the game go where it wants to go.

Yeah, and it kind of discourages innovation in a way. If a strategy works so well that it risks being outlawed. I don't know how many other strategies there are that would work so well or would be so obvious in its effect or potentially dramatic in its effect. But I mean, I like the back and forth. I can see why the typical fan would rather see hits. That's understandable, but teams haven't, I don't think, gotten

close to exhausting all of their options to deal with the shift. I don't think it's like they've tried everything and clearly the shift has won and to save baseball something needs to be done. Teams haven't really adjusted all that much, as far as I can tell, which is their own fault.

So I've been writing about the bunting stuff, and of course there have been some hitters who have adapted their approach somewhat seemingly to counter the shift. And there are things that you can do if you want to get out from under the yoke of this thing. So do that. Yeah, when Michael Bowman came out as anti-shift a couple months ago, it was exactly the opposite. It was the ideas that it's just too easy to beat it. Right. And I still don't quite know. I love Michael and I still don't quite know what his concern is because if it's easy to beat it, then fielders

will stop doing it. But I trust him. I trust that he has very good reason for feeling the way he does. And it's the opposite. Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's the shift is we it's way, way, way, way too soon. Yeah, say that the shift is not crackable. It seems quite possible that in five years, there will be no shifts or the same amount of shifts as always. I hope that we get to see that evolution happen instead of a rule being implemented. I mean, it seems far-fetched. You know, it's something that you write, and it gets a lot of attention, and we're talking about it, and Verducci is great on the whole. And so it doesn't bother me that he raised the idea for discussion, but it's something that I definitely would not like to see. I think it's going to be interesting and fun to see how teams counter this thing without the commissioner intervening. While you were talking, I was on Twitter talking about these headlines, and somebody named Aaron just suggested the perfect headline without even hearing us.

This is what's amazing. He actually elevated our joke as though he were in the room with us, and he elevated it perfectly, and yet he has no idea what we have just said. His headline suggestion is, how sweep is it? Quite sweep. suggestion is how sweep is it quite sweep it's a good one you should submit that you're doing your squeak laugh almost. There it is. How squeak it is.

All right. Okay. No emails today. We're pushing back email. We probably should have said what we were planning to talk about at some point before this. But, yeah, we're doing emails tomorrow. Pushing back email Wednesday for a day. We're going to talk about the Astros and Brady Aiken. Nick Flares has written a real barn burner, a very comprehensive and insightful.

Insightful seems wrong because insightful, when you hear that somebody wrote something insightful, you think they're cutting open a vein and telling you how they feel or something like that. is not that this is will give you such an appreciation for the machinate the machinations machinate machinations machinations machinations say it machinations of the map of what happens when teams uh put together their draft plan and how basically you're thinking, in a lot of cases, not always, I guess, but in a lot of cases, you're thinking of your 21st round pick when you make your first round pick and you're thinking of your 14th round pick

when you make your 21st round pick. And the way that the CBA's slot guidelines have, or not guidelines, slot limits, have really turned the draft into a very complicated game. And so that's going to be up on the site in the morning. It's really good. Everybody should read it. We will do a very, very poor job of giving you a sense of everything that's in it, so don't just listen to us and think that you've heard it all. But I guess that if there's a central thesis to this, at least in regards to the Astros' role and decisions along the way, it's that the Astros are so smart that they came up with this perfect plan.

And the plan was going to get them an incredible pool of talent. They were going to maximize their leverage across the draft. They were going to sign players who were more valuable than they had to pay. They were going to sign players who were far more valuable than the round they were taken in. They were also going to get possibly, probably, maybe, arguably the best talent in the draft at number one. It was a perfect plan that they had clearly thought out. And it was so good, in fact, that they forgot to have a backup for what seems in retrospect to have been such an obvious concern,

which is that pitchers are all broken. And so once they put this plan in action and they got to see the MRI and they decided that Brady Aitken was too risky to spend $6.5 million on, but was not too risky to spend $5 million on, but too risky to spend $6.5 million on, But was, you know, not too risky to spend $5 million on, but too risky to spend $6.5 million on. They didn't have a backup plan for the first kind of cog in this sequence of events. And it was, in a way, it was their own brilliant plan that was their undoing. Would you say that's a fair thesis statement for this piece?

I suppose so. I would say that maybe if you want to put a more positive spin on it slightly. Oh, see, that to me sounds like the most positive spin you could put on it. Well, I was actually worried it was sounding too positive. Yeah, well, the last line of the article is, you would be hard-pressed to script a believable failure larger in scope and more sweeping in potential fallout than what we've seen with the 2014 draft efforts of the houston astra so that is it's a pretty ringing condemnation i don't know whether you can have a ringing condemnation ringing is usually a good thing so i think the only slight adjustment I might say or might make to what you said is that it's not so much that they failed to account for the fact that or the possibility that he might be broken, right? could agree on in the typical way, like he just had a torn UCL or something like Hoffman or Fetty or the other guys who had that issue, then this would not have led to the same disaster

scenario that ultimately transpired. It was this kind of edge case or in-between case where he wasn't clearly broken and he had been pitching on this arm perfectly effectively and he considered himself healthy and his agent Casey Close or advisor Casey Close considered him healthy. And there was no way to prove that he wasn't healthy, really, or that he was destined to break. He just, from what we know, had some sort of irregularity, just like a malformation. Something was not shaped the way that it is normally shaped. way that it is normally shaped. And it's hard to say, I suppose, that that is definitely going to lead to problems for him down the road. He evidently, I guess, believes that it is not, right? Because he passed up a pretty good payday. If he had seen the results of the MRI and been really scared off by them, you'd think he would have gone for the $5 million, maybe, even if

there were some hard feelings in the negotiation. But clearly, he's pretty confident in his ability to stay healthy, at least for another year, and reenter the draft and maybe make more money or as much money. And so it was this rare case. And as I was reading, I was kind of trying to think about how much I blame the Astros for not baking in a fallback plan for this, you know, not once in a lifetime case. I guess there have been similar cases, but a very rare case, more rare than just a pitcher being broken, which is fairly common and not all that surprising. an escape plan here so that they could emerge with something from this draft and spend the money on some other guy who would command a good deal of money, some other high school guy just outside the first 10 rounds that they could spend some money on, and they didn't do that, Nick contends,

because they likely thought that they had everything planned out before the draft. And in most cases, if you were to simulate this process 100 times somehow, it would probably work out for them 97 and a half times. So I don't know. I guess when there's this much at stake and you have all the time in the world to plan for how you want to approach this, I guess, given the stakes, it's something that you should consider. I'm still trying to decide how much blame to assign, at least to that portion of this process. Yeah, it's a really good point. There does seem to be, with a lot of health conditions,

there seems to just sort of almost be a consensus, a formula. This is how much your draft stock drops. This is how much less we'll give you. This is where you go now instead of where you would have gone. And it's not you know in total agreement i was asking around not long ago for a piece about uh jeff hoffman and i wanted to know how much uh it changed um uh you know how much how much how much value uh clubs or or uh talent evaluators would uh on Hoffman once they knew that he had the Tommy John surgery just before the draft. And the answers weren't all the same.

Some people said practically nothing. And some people said, well, nobody told me this, but according to Danny Knobler in a piece that he wrote about elbow health, something like 10 clubs, according to him. I don't really believe these 10 clubs are saying, really mean this, but apparently they're saying that they would never touch a Tommy John case in the draft at this point. But the consensus is basically like 50%. And Nick told us the same thing when we had him on before the draft and asked him about Hoffman. It was 50%. He said it would basically drop his dollar value about in half. And so, you know, we have enough experience

with most injuries or with most arm problems that it's pretty easy. And so when you're thinking about these things as essentially exercises in leverage and in using the leverage that you have against the other guy's leverage, which a big part of the first part of Nick's piece is about kind of thinking about what sorts of factors give clubs leverage, what sorts of factors give players leverage, and what situations are prone to create leverage on one side or the other and how that influences the negotiations. And so if this were an elbow thing, there would be kind of a more typical elbow thing like fraying.

Yeah, there'd be a shared vocabulary. There would be an agreement that it affects his dollar value by X, therefore it affects his leverage by X. But in this case case the astros are saying it affects it by x and maybe he's saying well it affects it by half of x or a quarter of x or one eighth of x and so then you're not really going to be able to find a common ground so it created a very weird situation so uh that's an interesting point ben and a good point. So the question then, one question that might be relevant is if another team had been in this situation and done exactly the kind of fallout of the Astros' strategy, more or less. Not just strategy, but the strategy as well as kind of some of the public relations that have gone on around them lately, where they are being painted as a particular type of organization. And so therefore, the actions they take are maybe easily caricaturized

as conforming to that narrative, to that idea of who they are. If, for instance, another Major League Baseball team, Twins, if the Twins had had the first overall pick and this exact same situation came up i don't think i would spend a lot of time thinking what does this say about the twins you know it would have just been like oh that's weird and maybe i would have thought ah those idiot twins sure are idiots but i wouldn't have had a pre-existing notion of what a twin does and how a twin behaves. But partly because of how much attention this rebuild has gotten, and partly the Astros themselves publicizing and partly people criticizing them, and partly all of us just talking about

them because it's unusual and interesting, and at times fun and at at times odd we have an idea of what an astro does and so when they drop their offer to aiken so they according to flair's account of this situation they offer him 6.5 million they get the bad mri or what they see as a bad mri they they withdraw that. They give him a formal offer that's just big enough to guarantee they get the compensation pick next year if they don't sign him. And they also give him an informal offer of $5 million. Simultaneously, they start negotiating with a 21st round pick who was also a difficult sign and who it wasn't really expected would sign they weren't even it doesn't seem like even really planning on signing uh him and that's uh mac marshall and um once it became clear though that this was well i guess in a way this is like that old saying

never waste a good crisis you know never let a good crisis go to waste, whatever that saying is. It's almost as though you can sort of see the wheels turning in their brains while they're doing this. And so the inference maybe is that because this was the Astros, a team that you know does everything very intentionally, a team that gets credit for being smart and having a plan, it makes it maybe slightly harder to operate in good faith if you're the Aikens. And maybe that's why it got so nasty so quickly. out that maybe the Astros gave the impression that their top priority, once they discovered whatever the irregularity was, was not making sure that Aiken was happy and Aiken ended up in Astro one way or another, but that the numbers worked out in such a way that it may have appeared, may have been, or may have just appeared that they were trying to cut his offer just the right amount that would allow them to sign Marshall

instead of making the priority Aiken, who was their top pick, the first overall pick, someone you should probably try to make feel pampered. Instead, maybe they were giving the impression, whether it was fair or not, whether it was their actual intention or not, that they were trying to profit from this circumstance, from the situation, that maybe it wasn't even an unwelcome development because they could exploit it or they found a way to make the most of it by using it to their own purposes. And maybe that wasn't what they were doing at all. Maybe they didn't do a good job of communicating what they were doing. circumstances, the lack of agreement over the severity of the injury and the fact that they were cutting the offer just the right amount that would enable them to do something else that would benefit them instead of just giving Aiken what he wanted or something closer to what he wanted,

maybe increased suspicion or gave Aiken and Close the impression that the Estras were negotiating in bad faith somehow here. So the last thing that I learned from this, I don't know, maybe everybody's heard this, maybe this is just a known thing, but Jacob Nix is the fifth round pick whose signing was sort of contingent on the Aiken signing. Because Aiken was going to sign below slot. They were going to use the extra, even in the original agreement, before the MRI. So he was going to sign below slot. They were going to use the savings to sign Nix, who was considered a difficult sign.

A first round talent who slipped to the fifth round. And once Aiken doesn't sign, the entire slot disappears. They don't have the money for Knicks. So Knicks now is also unable to be signed and perhaps unable to go to UCLA if he's ruled to have used an agent, which seems moderately likely. So Flairs notes that he was collateral damage and says that, quote, many talking heads have insisted that the only equitable outcome for Knicks is for Major League Baseball to force the Astros to honor the agreed-upon deal. And Flares doesn't say that that's the side that he's on or that he thinks it's likely. He's just noting that some people have said it.

And it seems very unlikely, according to Knicks, that this is going to happen. But if it does, the Astros, by not having that pool money from the Aiken pick, if they were forced to honor the deal with Knicks, they would then go over their slot allotment for the year, and they would lose, I think, their first two picks next year. And so it's unlikely, but it's actually conceivable that this situation that's so horrible for the Astros already, or seems at least to be so horrible. I think it's their, Nick says it's the loss of their next two first round picks.

So I don't know, so that would be their first pick in each of the next two drafts, I suppose? Yeah, okay, so say, sorry, their next two first round picks. It could actually be tremendously worse it i mean unlikely but just think of how bad it would be if if that ended up happening that would that would be a disaster yeah um yeah so that that probably won't happen but i guess just the mere possibility that that could happen that's something that could almost almost derail a rebuilding movement on its own i mean if you if you lost three first round picks in a row and you've not to mention appell who is presumably two because they're gonna have they're gonna they'll

get a compensation pick for next year true So they would essentially be losing, you know, de facto would be losing two. But, yeah, then having Appel in there and, yeah, it would be bad. Very bad. Very, very bad, Ben. But it probably won't happen. That part probably won't happen. Yeah. It is interesting that at the end of the day, clearly this is bad for them.

You know, they were lined up to have one of the great drafts, perhaps, of the era, or at least on draft day. Who knows whether any of these guys will turn into anything. And they end up with, you know, one of the weakest halls of the year. But they do get the number two overall pick next year. And it is interesting how, like, despite the fact that they didn't get anything done, the penalty for not getting anything done is it's a year deferred and they drop one pick in the draft. And that's kind of interesting because I wonder whether...

I mean, I guess that's fair. That's the intention is for it to be fair. You're not trying to harm teams. Like the point of this system is not to hurt teams or to make it harder for teams to rebuild or anything like that. So the whole point of compensation is that they want teams to keep their draft picks. But there is a way in which it's sort of... I don't know.

I don't know. I'm not saying that they should be penalized for it. It feels as though the way that we talk about the situation, it feels like they've already been penalized for it, and then a year later the penalty gets undone. But I don't know. I guess I don't have an opinion about that. It's odd. It's not as bad as it sounds in ways. It's worse than it sounds, and it's not as bad as it sounds.

It's not as bad as it sounds in ways. It's worse than it sounds, and it's not as bad as it sounds. Yeah. So is it possible that the greatest harm done to the Astros by this whole process will be the PR fallout? And not just PR fallout in terms of fans being upset, but in terms of future negotiations being affected, whether it's in the future drafts or even with professional players or with the Players Association and the Commissioner's Office, who it seems like have reason not And, and it's hard to say how, how upset he was with the Astros and, and legitimately, or whether he was just doing his best to, to put his client in the best light and put the Astros in the most negative light. But maybe, maybe he would be less likely to negotiate with them in the future.

And maybe this whole mess just sort of adds onto the pile of other Astros controversies, whether it's the lowballing of Springer Singleton with extension offers, the postponing of promoting them, and Evan's article about how they're regarded within the game with some skepticism and the ground control leak of trade talks that wasn't the best reflection of them. So all of that is kind of building into this i don't know it feels kind of like a critical mass of something right now but maybe maybe nothing bad there won't be any negative astro stories for a year now and and we'll all we'll all forget about it and let it go yeah i think that's why i that's why i asked the question about what it would be like if this had been the twins.

Because normally this sort of stuff, it just disappears after a while. You know, most stuff doesn't really stick. There's bad news cycles. They're followed by good news cycles. They don't really matter. But what seems to be interesting about the Astros is that we've gotten to a point where most of the things that you named in isolation are not particularly bad. And if they'd happened to another team, it wouldn't have been particularly notable.

It's just that it's gotten to this point where it feels like they've got an inescapable narrative around them that arguably is starting to affect their ability to maximize their opportunities in building a team. And that's when it starts to matter. And that's where you can start to sort of feel bad for them. A runaway narrative is awfully hard to counter. And they're probably getting hit harder than they should be on some of these things. But once it gets started, but once it gets started it can be hard to stop everything starts to look like another brick in that argument

and as long as it's not affecting the play on the field or the product on the field which is generally the case with PR that doesn't matter but it's starting to feel like it might be and the Aiken situation is probably the most compelling example or the most compelling example or the most compelling case that you can make that it started to affect the product on the

field. So I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if we're just overreacting to things, which we don't actually, I mean, a assessment of their, uh, you know, how it affects them is speculation. Um, but you know, yeah, it's, it, it, like I, like I said a couple of days ago, it's like, it's started to sort of feel like darker, a little darker. And if you, if you want to say that they brought it on themselves to some extent by, you know, trumpeting, trumpeting their process and trumpeting their, their status as, I don't know, iconoclasts or, or people who are not bound by tradition and, and giving lots of quotes and interviews and stories about how they're so innovative and they're, you know, trying things that other teams have not tried before.

And, I mean, they have broadcasted that quite loudly, right? I mean, other teams are likely doing the same things that the Astros have been in the news about for the organization of their baseball operations department or hiring people from outside the traditional baseball background, that sort of thing. There are other teams trying experimental things and going against baseball tradition

and not talking to the press about it. And it always seemed to me like the Astros' strategy in trying to position themselves as the team that was willing to do these things was that that was all they had going for them at the time, that they wanted the narrative not to be that we are incompetent losers, which maybe it would have been if they had just stayed quiet and lost 110 games every year. And so they did their best to put a positive spin on the losing by saying, we have a plan and we're trying new things. And ultimately the talent will be there. And then we have the rays and they never spoke to anyone and and no one could

name anyone who was in their front office but they had lost the same number of games maybe it would have been a negative story in a completely different way maybe by maybe by drawing the attention to their process they distracted people to some extent from the losing and the hopeless depression of being as bad as they've been over the past few years. I don't know. It's hard to say which would be worse. It's not as if they escaped notice for losing a lot either. So it'll be interesting if they win, if their talent comes along as they expect it to, then I would expect that this is not the defining story of the Astros ultimately.

But at this moment in time, it seems like a tough thing to overcome. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, what do you do to turn the narrative around? And the simple answer is you win. I mean, that's almost literally the only thing you can do. I mean, look, we're in a little bit of a closed loop around here, so I don't want to impose my experience with that of everyone around the world. But I mean, you might say that other than winning the next best thing would be getting a full-throated endorsement on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And yet, as I'm sure you saw in your timeline, that just became fodder.

That became something that a lot of people used to elevate their criticism of it. So it becomes hard to escape unless you're winning. So winning is the next step. the next step. Anyway, everyone should go read Nick's article because it's very thorough and we only talked about aspects of it.

And there's more for you to learn from that piece. So go check that out. And if you did not send a listener email in time for what you thought would be the listener email show, then you have another day in which you can do that. So send us some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

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