Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1003: Happiness, the Human Condition, and Cracker Jack

Episode Date: January 6, 2017

Ben and Slate’s Mike Pesca banter about incentive clauses, happiness, analogies, injuries, and the Mets, then discuss sabermetric thinking about non-baseball subjects, optimism, podcasting, and preparation.

Hello and welcome to episode 1003 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. My incoming co-host Jeff Sullivan is on vacation. So I've been asking other people I like to fill in for him, and I'm very excited about today's guest host. I think the two most cited podcasts in the history of Effectively Wild are Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, and Slate's daily, I don't know what to call it, current affairs podcast, The Gist. And the link between those two shows, aside from Slate, is Mike Peska, who co-hosts Hang Up and Listen and hosts The Gist, as well as contributing to NPR and serving as my sidekick today. So, Mike, I know that you are pretty sure that you have the happiness gene. And I've never heard you not say I'm well when someone asks you how you are. So I won't waste time asking you, but welcome. And I am very happy to have you on. I am. I'm happy to be

on. I was for a second, my heart was in my throat when I thought you were going to mention Welcome to Night Vale as one of the favorite podcasts of the show. And I just missed that episode. So I'm glad you like my episodes. I do have to say, I've been going through this thing, this virus inflected thing, where every joint in my body feels like it was at least a grade two sprain. And I say grade two, because I don't remember if grade one or three is the worst one. Yeah, that's right. So it's this weird virus thing. So I am well, but I have that. But do you ever think, I mean, this is flu season. Like every time a baseball player or an athlete plays through a flu

or plays through a normal non-sports related injury, and we just don't give it any credence, that is what makes them superheroes. Like playing through the flu and playing through just intestinal problems is the most amazing thing that professional athletes do. Yeah. I did an article on that once for Baseball Perspectives about just instances of athletes doing something heroic. And then after the game, you find out that they threw up four times in the dugout while they were doing those things. Now, I have a theory that maybe we don't hear about that unless they have a good game, right? So if they go for four with four strikeouts, then you don't hear afterwards that they were sick because no one wants to use sickness as an excuse. But if you had a good game, then it makes you look even more superhuman.

And the fact that they can ever do that does set them apart, I think. Doing a podcast slightly under the weather is a little less demanding. Yeah, but I went three for four against lefties. But that is weird, too, that, you know, you don't want to use sickness as an excuse. Why? Because everyone listening, they've all been sick. It would be a great excuse. I always think that, yeah. Why'd you take that last strike looking? You know, I did throw up four times. Do they think that the Braves faithful would rise up and say, no good, sir? Yeah. Every sports executive says that if they have an injury plague season, they always say, I never want to use injuries as an

excuse, which is a way to sort of use it as an excuse without actually using it as an excuse. But it's a good excuse a lot of the time. It's a great, I think it's the word excuse. Like what does excuse mean? An explanation that mitigates the terrible circumstance. It's literally a good excuse. I don't, yeah, we do have this as fans, this disconnect between the actual physical pain of an athlete and some idea of like gutting it out or being the gladiator. And, you know, as much as we want to say, well, they're getting paid for that much. We are worse when it comes to the college athletes. So it's not about that. It's just that sports fans become terrible.

Right. All right. Well, I'm pretty sure I have the happiness gene, too. But I guess if you don't have the happiness gene, you wouldn't be happy to hear someone else discussing it. It's anandamide for your listeners, if they want to know what it is. Right. Anandamide. And do you have, can we go through the checklist? Sure. Are you rarely anxious?

Never anxious. Almost never anxious. Okay. Do you tend to overeat or do you have a propensity, if unchecked, to overeat? I wouldn't say so. I probably don't have that part, no. Do you not enjoy the effects of marijuana? I would say that. Yeah. I've never really been drawn to any sort of drug, which I

guess could be because I am just naturally in a in a good frame of mind and don't feel any need to alter my mood. So, yeah. So sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's marijuana specifically because the anandamide is this like can they found it by looking at the receptors for cannabis. So it's, you know, I don't hate it or get paranoid. I've almost never smoked it just because I'm like, oh, this is this kind of stinks. I just I got to get to my overeating. I got some overeating to get to. So I've heard every episode of The Gist, except the ones from this Wednesday and Thursday. I catch up on the weekend sometimes. So I'm going to gush about the show a little bit later, but I do have a bit of banter first. And as you know, this part of the calendar is a dead zone for baseball news. There's nothing going on. And really the only interesting news today is something John Heyman reported,

which is that Edwin Encarnacion, who just signed with the Cleveland Indians, has an incentive clause in his contract where he can get something like up to an extra million dollars per year, depending on the Indians' attendance, which is, I guess, a good bet for him just because the Indians have had very lousy attendance the last few years or several years. And I think they were third worst in baseball last year and coming off the World Series, you figure maybe they'd get some sort of bump and he would benefit from that. But if he doesn't want to leave it to chance and he wants to ensure that the Indians have higher attendance next year and for every year he's with them, what can he do? Do you have any suggestions for what Edwin Encarnacion can do to bring Cleveland fans to the ballpark,

apart from, you know, sitting, hitting 70 home runs or something? Let's assume that he can't make himself better at baseball. Is there anything he can do to juice the attendance stats by himself? Is it a million dollars? Yes, which to Edwin Encarnacion is not a whole lot of money. But that's true. But just to be I mean, well, first of all, what I do is maybe contract this out. So I would sell this right to someone else and figure that they could do whatever, that'll be their incentive. So I'd X prize it, first of all.

I'd definitely X prize it. Then if I bought it, I would pay something like $500,000 and I would maybe have a bobblehead night that you only have to give it to the first or a random 5,000. Once the word bobblehead night that you only have to give it to the first or a random 5,000. Once the word bobblehead is on a ticket, I think attendance goes up.

I don't know. They have some multiple, but it's the best giveaway in baseball. And bobbleheads aren't that expensive to produce or mass produce. You can even make bobbleheads of specific fans. So I would target the nights, those midweek nights

where you're not going to get a big boost anyway, and just have Encarnacion. And you don't disclose that it was actually subcontracted out, but the Encarnacion specific sponsored bobblehead night. increase attendance to trigger this clause, but that could work. I like that idea. All right. So if you have a hallmark as a speaker, I think it might be your extreme willingness to break into song sometimes despite the unwillingness of your audience. But if it's not that, I think it's your use of analogies. And you clearly love analogies. You take your time crafting them and you don't just slip them into your normal speech. You sort of announce that the analogy is coming, and you clear the floor, and you say, I have an analogy, and then you lay out all the parameters, and you try to make it the best possible analogy you can. Do you think that baseball is the best source of analogies,

or has it been a fruitful source for you? To the point where I think that there are some analogies in our language that we don't even know are from baseball. For instance, his back was against the wall. Is that a baseball analogy or not? What do you think the etymology of that would be from baseball? Well, other than baseball, like running out of options, I mean, it seems like the other times your back is against the wall is what, an or the you know, you take a turn down an alley. But people literally who are out of options and have nowhere else to go and their back is against the wall probably happens more in baseball than all other aspects of life. I mean, literally, when that's it, there's nowhere else to go. How often is your back against the wall?

I mean, chase scenes happen a lot in movies, but not in real lives. And in real life, it's not a wall, but the things that the LAPD puts down on the highway to make the guy's tire explode that usually stops him. So I'll tell you, though, I worked for NPR for a long time. And the reason, well, I like analogies because I like analogies. And I also think that analogies are actually how we think. We have a thought. We have another thought.

Our synaptic connection is what intelligence is. But I mean, they were so useful with NPR because I knew that a big part of the audience wasn't into sports. And I knew that some part of the audience who was listening to me for the sports context wanted to be flattered if I brought up anything related to the arts or another walk of life. So using analogies was so rewarded in NPR, I kind of got, I would say, a big fix out of it. But with the gist, I try to avoid sports analogies, but they often are the first thing that comes to mind. There is a large portion of people that do not get the sports analogies, and you're actually making things more opaque for them when you analogize situations to sports. Right. Baseball, of course, has the longest history,

and it sort of has more, I guess, penetration into the lexicon. And Brian Curtis did an article for Grantland once about how politics is all baseball metaphors, and it just constantly creeps into the language. And a lot of people who aren't baseball fans are at least familiar with the rules or the history enough to understand if you do use it as a framing device. So it comes in handy sometimes. Do you have an analogy generation strategy? Does it just come to you or can you kind of purposefully build an analogy? I have a Wonka-esque Oompa Loompas working in the basement. I guess it comes to me. I kind of sometimes, I do sit down on occasion. It comes to me more often than it doesn't, but sometimes I will want to think of an analogy and try. I guess most people in most walks of

life, they don't have that need, right? Some guys selling insurance, it's the analogy that's going to drive things home, but probably people have the need more often than not. So when during the election, when it was the primary and all the Bernie supporters were talking about all the states they want, and it was driving me crazy because states don't count and delegates don't count. I really wanted to get the analogy right. And the analogy to baseball is pretty perfect. You know, I outscored him in a number of innings. It doesn't matter. Innings don't count. That drove it home to a lot of people. Yeah. All right. And a Mets question, since you are a Mets fan, I'm looking at the

fan graphs, depth charts, projections for 2017. And so the Mets right now have the 10th best projected record, but the sixth best projected record in the National League. So if all of these projections played out perfectly, they would finish one game out of the wildcard slot. And I don't know what to make of the Mets. I think entering this winter, they were sort of the team with the biggest error bars or the most variance. It could go either way. Really, that's still the case and will continue to be the case as long as they are dependent on young pitching. And if you click through and you look at the depth charts, the pitching staff section, it's like a forest of crosses. It's like one of those terrible turns on a highway or something where a bunch of people died and you put crosses up. It looks like that. When you think of them, do you think of them as a potential great team, which they could be, or a potential disaster, which they could be? Or do you think of them as probably something in the middle, just an 84 win, maybe wildcard team, which is what the projections say? Well, it's all riding on the acumen of Terry Collins. Yeah. And then the weird thing about

those bars, which has the iconography of the Swiss flag is because of Fang Collins. Yeah, and then the weird thing about those bars, which have the iconography of the Swiss flag, is because of Fangraph's branding, they're all green crosses, which should mean their health is pretty good, but that's just how they use the crosses. And the crosses, here are the starting pitching. Matt's shoulder day-to-day, Harvey's

shoulder day-to-day, Gesselman's shoulder day-to-day, Wheeler, breaking the trend, elbow day-to-day. Well, if they're day-to-day, Gesselman shoulder day-to-day, Wheeler breaking the trend elbow day-to-day. Well, if they're day-to-day now and it's January, that should be good. I think they'll be very good because, first of all, Syndergaard and DeGrom don't have a green cross next to them. But I've just listed four of whatever the 20 best pitchers potentially all right not guess i'm in but i've just listed three of the potential best 15 pitchers in the national league i mean

when you have that starting pitching it's amazing they've shown an ability to get something out of their pen and i think their offense is you know travis darnot was hurt so much of last year will he be this year duda was out so much of last year they Will he be this year? Duda was out so much of last year. They had a lot of guys who were out last year and you don't project them Walker by the end. So given all that, even if their injuries, they had terrible injury luck last year. If it more than evens out, I think there'll be a pretty good team. Everyone makes the playoffs too, which is nice. Even Cindergarten de grom had green crosses at points during the season there's no one who has not had a green cross at some point that was their green cross to bear yeah

except familia who should have for overuse right why did they why did they keep him i don't know it would it would be nice though if we got to see one year where everything clicks just because the the super rotation is always such a enticing prospect, and it never really pans out. Whenever you start a season with four or five aces or something, inevitably a couple of them get hurt, and one of them is not as good as he's been before, and it ends up being a decent rotation, but nothing special, nothing historic. And there's clearly potential here for historic, but based on what we've seen so far and how everyone in this rotation has had Tommy

John surgery just about, it's not something that you can count on, which made it smart. I think that Alderson stockpiled pitchers a couple of years ago when everyone was saying he should trade them for outfielders or bats, and he ended up really needing every arm the last couple of years, but it could completely go either way. I have no way to forecast whether they will hit the high end or the low end of their projections. Yeah, they made with that MASH unit, they did make the playoffs last year. Granted, a one-game playoff against Madison Bumgarner is essentially like not making the playoffs, but I think they overperformed. I think getting Cespedes back is a great

signing I think what the Braves are doing though they're like the ex-Mets team I'm considering it is weird logically the team that every Mets fan should like second most are the Braves with R.A. Dickey and Bartolo Colon right you know the two most popular Mets pitchers of the last five or six years and the most highly lauded one in terms of Cy Young's and one in terms of gifts. By the way, my love of both those guys, the Dickie love is, as far as fandom goes, totally rational because he has interests like I do. And I've interviewed him and he's a lovely guy and a thoughtful guy, and his memoir is absolutely one of the best sports memoirs. I think it might be the best sports memoir of an active player that I've ever read. I've read better sports memoirs, but they're usually looking back

on a long and storied career, and Dickie's was in the middle of a good but weird career, and it was just so well written, whereas the cologne love is entirely irrational and stuff that, as you guys have talked about the show, kind of because I like the jolly fat guy and that's almost demeaning. No, that clearly is demeaning to Bartolo Cologne. And like him being a bad hitter is just this accident of a bizarre rule that like, what if what if Peyton Manning were the worst field goal kicker? We wouldn't know it because he's never had to kick a field goal. So both those guys on the Braves are pretty interesting. Yeah.

All right. Well, unless you have other pressing baseball matters on your mind on January 6th, then we did get some Cracker Jack meditations out of the way before we officially started the show. So I'll stick those on the other end of the episode as a slate plus sort of segment, I guess. For free. You don't have to subscribe for 40 bucks or whatever it is these days. I will transition to the gist and to covering sports versus covering news and current events. And I'll still try to tie it tenuously to baseball. But I had Carson Sestouli on the last episode, and he was saying

that what attracted him to baseball stats and sabermetrics wasn't only the subject matter, but also the mindset or the way of looking at the world, which, if you go by the Bill James definition, is a search for some sort of objective knowledge. And I think of the gist as sort of a sabermetric show. And I don't mean that you do much math, although you have done math on occasion when figuring out which states have the fewest people per electoral vote or maybe fact-checking Donald Trump's tweets. But you don't rely, when you can avoid it, on opinion or supposition. You try to consult the literature, the research. You have a recurring segment called is that bullshit? And I mean, just the example you were citing early on about the Bernie Sanders

support just a few minutes ago is kind of an example of that. And I think for me, baseball and sabermetrics formed my way of thinking so that I now look at other subjects that way. But how did you come to look at the world in that way? I do naturally. And that's the answer for you, too, right? It's not like you believed in myths, and then someone turned you on to statistics, right? You have a mindset. Carson has that mindset. You might not know, pre Bill James, people who craved empirical knowledge might not have known it. But it has to be there in you. And the first place that I loved, I always loved politics and I always loved sports.

And I think I probably got into the Bill Jamesian part of sports late. In fact, baseball was my third favorite sport for much of my life. And looking back, I think it's because football always seemed to be more stat heavy and stat reliant and stat embracing. And same with basketball. There were just more stats. There was something about baseball, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, especially with, you know, Whitey Herzog's small ball that didn't appeal to me.

And maybe it's because that's not the best way to run a baseball team. But it showed up. I was a right when I graduated college, I taught for the Princeton Review and I taught SATs and I taught GMATs. But my favorite thing was teaching the LSATs because there is this section just essentially the entire section, it's like half the LSAT, is playing is that bullshit. You get a statement and you try to find ways why it is. They ask the question in different ways, like what if true would strengthen the statement or what is lacking in the statement or which of the following are relevant to the statement?

But all you're really doing is playing. Is that bullshit with every one of the statements before you? And it reminds me of that part in my brother Vinny, where Ralph Macchio is saying how great Vinny was, that he always standing up and calling out the magician. No, the rabbit's over there. I just have that natural predilection that I read any statement and I kind of want to test it like Bill James. I mean, isn't that his whole modus operandi to say, you know, is this true? How is this true? How do we know that that's true? And I'm naturally doing that with everything. But it's harder to apply the same sort of rigor to non-sports subjects or certain non-sports subjects, especially compared to baseball, where everything is play indexable. So how do you carry that over to topics where you

can't look up a complete record of everything that's ever happened? And there often aren't really solid answers that you can point to. Right. And the other thing is, even, you know, as Nate Silver and his 538 and that trend tries to apply it, elections happen presidentially once every four years, senatorially once every six years. It's a horrible sample size. Yes. Same as football. So I try to be honest with myself. And I try to say, you know, I always ask, why do I believe these things? Because I really, maybe this is part of it for the people like us who like statistics. Like, we really want to be right, you know? But we want to be right not just because we tell ourselves we're right or there's a story or a narrative about being right. Like, it just, I don't know,

it feels really tenuous when we're only guessing that we're right and we have a good amount of evidence. We say to ourselves, oh, I'm right for a reason. So I'm thinking about there's this tension now for people who oppose Trump. What's the right thing to do? To just stand athwart Trumpism and say no and try to object to him all the time? Or to, you know, if you're a politician, if you're Charles Schumer or something, work with them and try to do what you can to take what he and those of his ilk put on the table to try to work for America. And I'm really conflicted. I don't know the answers. So I've been trying.

So there's no stat that will give me the answer. But knowing that I'm conflicted and trying to figure this out, I just see what evidence is out there. And there's Bernie Sanders standing athwart Trump, you know, mocking him with meme ready blow ups of his Twitter feed in the Senate. But then Martin Indyk, who is a former peace negotiator for Israel, he took the Trump idea of let's put the let's put the this is stuff you always talk about on Effectively Wild. But let's go to East Jerusalem and let's put the embassy there. He said, well, here's a way that we could pivot off of that and it might help the peace process. And I said to myself, what Martin Indyk is doing is so impressive to me.

It's so patriotic. Like he knows Trump's a buffoon. He knows that everything he's doing is contrary to the efforts of peace. And he's just trying to take that because he cares more about peace in Israel than working with Trump. Anyway, if I had settled that in my mind, I might've been closed off to the Indic. I might've been kind of arguing with it as it went along.

I just felt that I was more open to both arguments and I'm still open to seeing what is the best argument. You know, getting more inputs. It's not a number and it's only one or two things, but just this openness to stimuli and then trying to make my conclusions based on the evidence, which is kind of opposite the way stats were in baseball pre-Bill James. And like a lot of people in the media, you did some soul searching in the week or so after the election.

And, you know, you had had the Trump anxiety hotline where you would cite the projections and the polls and the numbers. And I think based on what we knew at the time, reasonably say that the election was going to go the other way. And so it didn't shake your faith in the approach or the scientific method as a mindset, right? I mean, it kind of made you, I guess, more appreciative of the uncertainty and how something that is not the most likely outcome is still a possible outcome and that sort of thing. And maybe just like the methodological problems that you can try to correct and make the numbers more accurate. But I think a lot of people kind of said, well, wow, we can't know anything anymore and we can't trust stats. And you never had that deep a crisis of confidence, I assume.

No, no, because that's not true. I mean, Nate, you know, 538, their best projection always said something like, not always, but by the end said something like two out of three chances, 65, 35. Right. And so most people will say, well, that was closer than anyone else on Trump's chances of winning. How do we know he wasn't 100% right? I mean, there is this existential question of what does that mean he has a 65% chance of winning? It's not like a batter that will spray a ball somewhere, like people are going to come out to vote. So half of that projection is, you know, there's a certain chance that the polls are getting it right. And half of that projection is knowing every other election and seeing, you know, what are the chances that the polls were wrong. And let's not got it less wrong than everyone else, but there is a good chance that he got it totally right. That's 65%.

And how will we ever know? So no, it didn't shake my faith. What I said on my show and the Trump anxiety hotline was telling people that Trump is the best nominee if you want a Democratic controlled Senate. The analogy I made was if you understand this, if you're a poker player, you're sitting with really good cards, you're sitting with a hand that you think is going to win 80-something percent of the time. So we're not going to make the analogy that it's a dead, solid certainty because there's no thought there. What you want to do is push all your chips in. In fact, you're really eager when you have this hand that you think is dominating your opponent. You know, even a hand that, let's say you saw the other guy's cards and, you know, on the last card, he has four outs.

Right. And so, you know, you're a 90 percent favorite. You push all your chips in. And that was the analogy I was making, like the Democrats. It's not certain, but you should be really happy it's going this way. And we're pushing all our chips in. Now, I think people who play poker understand that there can be that bad beat. Maybe, I guess, in politics, we're not saying Hillary Clinton got a bad beat. We're saying Hillary Clinton didn't campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin. And that's all true. But I still think the analogy, analogy, I still think it obtains, you know, and I did a little soul searching. And I said, I think the way I express, it's very hard to express the difference between 90% certainty and 60% certainty. So I wanted to spend more time expressing kind of doubt where I was still really thinking that something would happen and I wound up being wrong.

But kind of couching it in something less than I'm really, really, really certain trying to express. I'm fairly certain. It's very hard to do those gradations of degrees. But yeah, I learned a little bit about, I mean, I went back and I listened to all the Trump anxiety hotlines. I learned a little bit about, you know, how I expressed certainty. And I was humbled by my, if listeners said, I thought you misled me, but many, many more listeners said, hey, you weren't the, but many, many more listeners said, hey, you weren't the only one that was wrong. And you offered good tangible insights along the way.

If the overall meta projection was wrong, that mostly isn't your fault. And I also think of the gist as an optimistic show, or maybe you as an optimistic person. And I don't mean blindly optimistic, but I think rationally optimistic. And you usually try to take the long view so that if someone says, for instance, that the country has never been more divided, you might point out that, hey, we're not all that far removed from an actual civil war. The country was literally divided. So relative to that, we're doing pretty well. And it's easier to see that progress if you kind of have that

perspective and you're not necessarily comparing to last year or five years ago, but maybe 150 years ago. And that is something that I think I also got, oddly enough, from baseball. I was a history minor. And I guess that's one of the reasons why you minor or major in history is to get an appreciation for things that have happened before so that you can recognize them when they happen again and be able to compare and contrast. But I think what really drove that home for me was a class I mentioned on the show before about baseball in American history. And we went back to a lot of primary sources, baseball writers in the 19th century. And it was just so obvious that people were saying the same things then that they say now and making the same complaints and sounding the same alarms and players are making too much money, you know, the same, the same things, but updated a little bit.

And so that is a quality that, that I think you, you recognize too, and you're able to kind of make that connection. And maybe that has to do with the lack of anxiety so that you are more able to maintain a level head about these things. But where do you think you got that quality from? Or maybe that's just another sort of innate thing. I think it's probably innate, but I think knowing stuff. I also am a knower more than a feeler, which my girlfriend says I can work on. But I'm empirically driven. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate in 1933 was almost 25%. It's now 4.9%. So if you think things are bad, they're not bad.

I mean, unemployment compared to the rest of the world is not bad. Since 1991, which was a time that I very much remember, I was in college, cancer rates have dropped by 20 or cancer deaths have dropped by 25 percent. You know, that's like an unbelievable number of people walking the earth who wouldn't be otherwise. And plus, I live in New York City. I totally remember what murder was like back then. Thousands of people being murdered. This year was, I think, 333. Now, murder went up in Chicago, but it went down.

It's tied or one-off from an all-time low in New York. And if you look at the rates of all this bad stuff in the world, like war, famine, pestilence, all the horsemen, childish or to live on anecdote or to live by how you feel or feel what other people feel rather than the actual facts of things. And while all of that, knowing that stuff makes me optimistic, the pessimistic part is actual progress might not be rewarded politically. You might vote against the guy who didn't deliver progress, even when he really did deliver progress, or some argument of, well, we don't feel like it's progress. I mean, if you could thwart actual tangible benefits

by just an argument and an appeal to emotion, you always can, you've always been able to. But when that is an effective enough political tool that that's what you need to get into office, look, a lot of other things happened in this election, but I do think we're entering this age of anecdote and where we could just discount all this tangible progress that people should feel. It would be one thing if there was this great comeuppance to the established political order

as we were in the middle of the Great Depression. You know, that would make sense. But now in 2016, when things are trending pretty good, when, yeah, some class of people is worse off than they were or feels worse off than they were, though they aren't really from 20 years ago, I don't know, it's just such an odd time to have a revolution when things are going pretty well. Yeah. And you talk about this all the time in terms of violence, whether it is worldwide, whether it's the number of wars going on at any one time, or whether it's domestic murder rates, and those things all have improved relative to basically any other point in human history. And it just seems like it's a really hard thing to avoid. Like, I'm half Jewish, my dad is responsible for the Jewish half, And he's a Jew who was alive during

World War II. So, you know, you would think that he would have a pretty good appreciation for the fact that things could be better, but they are getting better. And yet he tells me all the time, you know, I'm worried about the world that you're inheriting and things are scarier now than they used to be. And I mean, I can't think of a scarier time than the one he was born into. But it just seems like it's really difficult to maintain that perspective and kind of get above the day-to-day fretting about whatever the current crisis is. We are anandamide inflected half-Jews. I guess it's the other half. What's your other half, Swedish?

Catholic, yeah, German, Hungarian, Irish. Yeah. I got Catholic, Italian. I guess, though the Catholics aren't known to be a guiltless people, I guess, compared to our Jewish halves, they are. So the best book I ever, the best nonfiction book I ever read on this and possibly anything. Do you know Greg Easterbrook's The Progress Paradox? Yes. How life gets better while people feel worse.

Yeah. I mean, that's just it. Forget the book. Listen to the subtit while people feel worse? Yeah. That's just it. Forget the book. Listen to the subtitle. But it's true. It's so true. I guess the feeling matters. I do suspect I might have a big theory on this, but I definitely have these suspicions that the big change is social media, the changes in anything actual or tangible or things like murder rates or life expectancies. The big change is what social media has done. And it kind of makes sense as animals. We have to be aware of stimulus in our environment. So it was an adaptive strategy all these years to be really cautious about something

that seemed dangerous. Well, what would happen if I made a machine where you could be exposed to all the dangers of the world? And in fact, the dangers would rise to the top of your list. You'd be almost paralyzed. And that's kind of what happened. It doesn't really matter if good things are going on. We feel so much so paralyzed by the bad things like the war in Syria. That's terrible. If you're in Syria, it's bad. If you're in Germany, if you're in the United States, it's almost nothing. It's a potential, potential hardship. I guess unless you're just extremely empathetic, which maybe I'm not empathetic enough. Maybe that's part of the problem. Yeah. Well, maybe I think that probably has something to do with I'm a thinker rather than a feeler. Like if I was overly, I just read this thing against empathy. I think sympathy might be better than empathy. If you're always

putting yourself in someone's position, well, I guess the argument of this thesis was that sympathy is better because empathy is more easily manipulable. And there are certain people we identify with and certain people we don't. And we tend to identify with like people. And so it's just better to be sympathetic with people that you don't have a lot in common with. If you're going to be empathetic with people you have in common with, then you're only helping in groups, stuff like that. I think it's just better to know than to feel. I hate feeling. So now that we have covered the human condition and the course of history, I want to just ask you a couple of quick podcasting questions because for years I did the show every weekday. And if you count my Ringer podcast, I still do a podcast daily, if not a daily podcast.

So I feel a certain solidarity for other podcasters who do daily shows, and maybe this is too inside podcasting for some people. But I am always curious about the methods and what a day in the life of the gist looks like. How big a buffer of prerecrecorded content do you have? If you do get sick and you have to go on the DL, are you constantly scrambling for guests? I mean, what does the typical day look like? Six only happened twice. And I think I took off once. So I'll do kind of a mini show from home. I can record from home. So can you. So I'd record from home and throw it in there and say, sorry, I don't have a long spiel, which is my thing at the end of the show. But here's an interview anyway. And one time I did the full show while sick and I listened to it and I was deranged. I was really it was not right. I don't I envy you guys. I love your podcast,

but it's great to be driven by the news of the day. But you also, especially on a January 6th or 8th type date, you have to, you know, you have to go and generate your own angles and your own news. And so that's what I'm always having to do. So I have this list of just ideas, riffs on a news article. The small ones become the stuff in the beginning of the show. The big ones become the stuff at the end. I don't know if you know this, Ben. We've labeled our segments the P, the Q, the R, and the show. The big ones become the stuff at the end. I don't know if you know this, Ben, we've labeled our segments, the P, the Q, the R, and the S. This was when the Q and the R,

we used to have two interviews shows, but now it's mostly a Q. So the P, that's the first. And the reason we do that is because every show in the world has an A segment, a B segment, a C segment, a D segment. So we just went with P, Q, R, and S. But the S stands for the spiel. The P stands for Pesca. the Q stands for a Q&A. So it also works out. The small stuff goes in the P like a little observation or something about three minutes in length. The spiel is longer, maybe with clips, more developed. And it just depends on like how meaty it is, how much.

Like if it's a fun trifle, I'll deal with it in the P. If it's a fun trifle, I'll need to think of two or three other ones to make a theme of it in the spiel. But I'm always writing things down and I'm always kind of imbibing news. And we record interviews during the day, one or two a day, and then we stockpile them. And Chris and Mary, my producers, cut them up. And that's one of the secrets. Not a secret. We don't keep it secret. But that's why the show is palatable, because a 25-minute interview, even if you think it went really well, it's just much better as a 15-minute interview. Just taking out the worst answer of every interview helps the interview immeasurably. Can't believe I'm giving up. Yeah. It's the part where I mislabeled the spiel as the pig. Otherwise it's all and definitely keep Cracker Jack. And so, so with the bank of interviews we've done with the methods of thinking all the time, I usually go into the studio and record all my continuity, which is all the, the spiel and everything I say in between segments in one fell swoop. All it's mostly written down.

Sometimes it's bullet pointed. I stop and start and Chris and Mary make it sound really smooth. And, you know, that's the show. Somehow it's been possible. Yeah, the two interview thing. When we started this podcast, we did two topics a day. And we very quickly figured out that that was not a sustainable strategy or at least not one we can sustain while staying sane so we uh we cut it down a bit but uh you have you've managed to avoid the

length inflation that we have had i think we uh we originally planned to make this show just a a very digestible you know 15 minutes and you'd pop it on and it would be over and then gradually we just had a kind of mission creep and it got longer and more involved every time. But you've held the line on the gist pretty well. You really get longer than half an hour or so. Yes. The original name of the show was 20-ish Minutes. And if only we could have stuck to that.

But yeah, over 30, it's not fan friendly. Yeah. So last question. You are great at ad-libbing and just kind of doing podcast improv, but you always sound well-prepared at least. And you talk to people from all walks of life and you always sound as if you know the subject matter as well as they do. Maybe you're just great at digesting Wikipedia articles right before you talk to them. I don't know what your method is, but I found that to be a challenge. I used to write for a baseball exclusive site, and then I moved to Grantland and The Ringer, and now I write about all kinds of topics and TV and video games and even the

election a few times. And every time I do that, I feel, you know, at times a little bit out of my depth or I feel a little more uncertainty about what I'm talking about than I would if I were citing someone's WRC plus or whatever. So how do you kind of give yourself a grounding in enough subjects to be able to talk about things without warning necessarily? You might not even know what your next gist is going to be about depending on the news, and yet you still have to respond to it and cover it. So how do you do that? I just, well, I naturally have a lot of interest and I am eclectic in my taste, but you know, the answer might be since you are an expert, you are an actual baseball expert and you are relied upon for your expertise within the baseball circle. So, you know, maybe you

compare the other subject areas to that and that you're lacking in expertise with this other stuff. But since I've always been a generalist and even when I was a sports reporter, I was the sports reporter for NPR. So it meant all sports. So I never could get into in, in, I would say I have never, I had never on NPR and I will do the thing I mean I'll try to cite some really interesting stats definitely vorp because I like the way that sounds but I'll always have to explain it but I would say I've never got in depth on my most in-depth NPR report as you did in like your lowest third baseball perspective stuff so it's probably that you're comparing yourself so when you're asked to's probably that you're comparing yourself.

So when you're asked to write about politics, you're like, oh my God, compared to my baseball knowledge, I know nothing. But compared to your politics knowledge, you're probably fine for the task at hand. Yeah. Well, part of my preparation is just listening to the gist. I can just crib from your preparation for my own. So I think you have probably sent more listeners to my podcast than I have sent to yours, but maybe we can change that today. I hope that everyone listening, if you are not already a GIST listener, I know that many people found us through your mentions of Effectively Wild on the GIST or hang up and listen. But if you're not listening to those shows, you really should be. They are just a joy and they will make you smarter and they will entertain you. And you can find them at Slate or wherever you find podcasts. You can also find Mike on Twitter at PescaMe or PescaMI. And Mike, thanks a lot. This

was a pleasure. I just heard Ralph Nader call you a few days ago, a top five interviewer of the last 50 years. So it was a little intimidating to interview you, but I guess the lack of anxiety came in handy again. Yeah. And you are operating without the knowledge that you, through a series of events, probably got us into the war in Iraq. So that's good. You have that on Nader. All right. Great talking to you, Mike. Thank you. Hey, you're welcome. That was awesome. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five listeners who have already pledged their support, Kevin Reed, Andrew Thompson, Thank you. Subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. You can contact us via email at podcast at baseballperspectives.com

or by messaging us through Patreon. Jeff Sullivan will be back in the country a week from now, so we have two or three more shows to go until he gets back and a couple of good guests lined up. So have a wonderful weekend, and I will talk to you next week. I could carry that heavy load I really thought it would matter Far so good hair appears

So blindside, clean the slate So the next voice you hear will be Mike Peska. I know it will. Mike, you're on with Ben. I don't know what the big deal about Cracker Jack is. Did you ever go and buy a pack of Cracker Jack? I just wanted to make it so that the next voice you heard wasn't mine, but Harry Caray's. That was my only intention. I didn't know he was talking about... See, he says Cracker Jacks. It should be Cracker Jack, obviously. Yeah, right. No one does that, though. I don't know what the percentage of Cracker Jack versus Cracker Jack I reported on the value of the Cracker Jack

mention in Take Me Out to the Ball Game. And I compared it to the few metrics, but I said it's at least as valuable as having a Cracker Jack ad on every major league ballpark, right? And that alone meant that it was worth, I don't know, at the time, over $100 million. I mean, that is the greatest product placement in the history of product placement. Is there any other context in which people eat Cracker Jack? Besides the old ball game? Yeah. Just the small percentage of people who have no other way to get an 11 cent prize from China, who just can't figure out. It's either that or Burger King extra value meals, but they don't want their prizes too explicitly tied in with the latest blockbuster.

They want like a weird googly eye guy where sometimes you could get the eyeballs and the eye sockets and call it a day. We're wasting all this good Cracker Jack banter. Well, we weren't rolling on Cracker Jack. Let's use it. Yeah, sure. I'm recording.

Sure. Okay. Yeah. That was Cracker Jack, Cracker Jack banter.