Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1160: The Podcast of Continuing Education

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and his Ringer MLB Show co-host Michael Baumann speculate about how the slow offseason will end, answer listener emails about sabermetrics and salary depression, sumo wrestling and the Hall of Fame, and baseball in winter weather, compare the careers of Omar Vizquel and Nomar Garciaparra, and analyze unorthodox new Padres relief pitcher Kazuhisa […]

Since you have left me, I'm all alone. I need your help, I can't stand on my own. I want you back again. Oh, oh, oh. I want you back again. I want you back again On another baseball podcast, Michael Bauman, also of The Ringer. Hello, Michael. Who are you? Long time no talk. Wow. At least on a podcast. We didn't have dinner in real life recently. We did. I have touched your human form and seen you consume human sustenance. Yes, in a 90-degree restaurant on a 10-degree day.

Yeah. But it was nice to see you in person. But yeah, when I opened up Skype to call you, it said that we had not chatted in two months. And I thought, wow, I guess that's true. Skype-wise. We've talked since then. We just haven't podcasted since then.

We have not Skyped in two months. And then your Skype crashed in an attempt to prevent us from doing this, but we're doing it anyway. And thanks to everyone who has inquired about the Ringer MLB show. We appreciate your interest. We are on hiatus for the offseason.

We don't know exactly when we'll be back. It's not a Bauman and Lindbergh level decision, but we'll be ready when called upon. Although, as it's turned out, if we were going to be off for an offseason, I'm so glad. This was the one to do it. Oh, my God. I'm so glad. This was the one to do it. Oh, my God.

I am so happy that we're on hiatus for this offseason because I just cannot imagine trying to fill. I mean, I can't. I'm staggered that you're able to do one baseball podcast. What would we even be talking about? I don't know. I miss talking to you, and we would be happy to do it but i don't know what we would do it about it you know it has been it's been tough just to do one so very very fortunate that we're on hiatus it's not the worst timing well speaking of that we've got what five weeks or something until pitchers and catchers now not that pitchers and catchers means anything

things can happen after that and they often do and they certainly will this year but what do you think will happen what will be the resolution to this inactive offseason like fast forward six weeks will we be back in that situation from a few years ago where guys who had qualifying offers and draft pick compensation attached to them were just sitting out spring training hoping for offers? Will teams blink first? Will the players cave and take smaller deals? How do you think this is going to happen? Because these guys are going to play somewhere in 2018, presumably.

Yeah, I think the players are going to cave and take smaller offers, and I think that that's going to turn into a league-wide strategy which will stop short of anything that will legally qualify as collusion. And it'll just drive down the prices for everybody except for the Machado, Harper, Donaldson class free agent next offseason. I think if there was a great demand for somebody like Jake Arrieta, who's not the pitcher he was a couple of years ago, but he's still a very, very good Major League pitcher. You know, there are 30 teams that could use him. You know, if the interest isn't there for him,

let alone somebody like Eric Cosmer, then his overall, you know, what he's going to get paid is going to go down. And this is why Major League Baseball, here, you know, we've been on hiatus for two months and I'm immediately jumping back into shouting about how the league is screwing labor. But this is why,

this is why every lockout works for the owners across every single sport. It's because the owners have other sources of income and the players, you know, the players only have this one five to 10 year window to make all the money that they're ever going to make in their lives. And in some cases their children's lives. So like they can't afford to to wait out billionaires. And in this case, billionaires who have other options to fill, you know, to fill those positions

like, you know, Jake Arrieta can't go work at a bank or something. Well, I guess he probably could, but like but he's not going to. Whereas a team that's interested in a pitcher could. Well, we could sign Jake Arrieta or we could sign Lance Lynn or go trade for somebody else. I know you love Lance Lynn. I love Lance Lynn. This is something that we've done. I've changed my brand to Lance Lynn's biggest fan in the time since we've talked. Yeah.

I'm not sorry I missed that part of your development this winter. But yeah, I mean, every big free agent who's out there now has a good reason not to sign him. So it's hard to, like, you talk about collusion, and it is almost suspicious that every team almost has held the line like this. the line like this and you look at each individual guy whether it's arietta or jd martinez or darvish or just hasmer all these guys who are the class of the free agent market are all guys you look at and think i don't want to sign that guy for six years or seven years or five years even and so on one hand you can kind of see why it's happening if that's the expectation that those players had when this offseason started and what their agents were telling them they could get. I mean, Hosmer reportedly has those offers. And if he does, I don't know why he's sitting on them.

I would take them before someone thought better of it. But it's hard to see where the line is between teams just getting smarter and some sort of nefarious strategy here and i don't know how it's all gonna work out but i tell you a secret ben sure something that the post moneyball generation of of statty baseball writers and you know every team specific fan in the universe like they don't want to talk about there is no line between nefarious and getting smarter like the job is to pay people as little as you can for performing a service, not just in baseball, but in capitalism. So as teams are getting better at doing that, you know, it shouldn't be a surprise that

the line between collusion, you know, actual capital C collusion and just every team sticking to what they think is the smartest, most salary depressing strategy. Like, of course, that line's blurry. Yeah, there's an email actually that we got that I wanted to read here. We might take a few emails because I'm not sure that we'll have a full listener email show this week. But this one is from Alex, and it is very much along these lines. And he says, said, a huge part of advanced analysis is determining the most efficient ways for teams to spend their money, so writing about whether player X is worth what team Y decided to pay him comes with the job. Given modern aging curves and team control structures, this line of thinking

seems inevitably tilted in one direction, i.e. more free agents are going to be overpaid than underpaid. I guess my question is, how seriously do you take this line of thinking? Is there any danger we'll reach a point where advanced stats simply convince teams that marginal value of free agents is so low that in many cases it's simply not worth the expenditure and maybe we've reached that point already and i think you kind of turn this on your head once when you did the ranking of worst contracts in baseball but you did it from the player's perspective instead of the team's, right? You kind of tilted that on its head, which was clever. And there, well, thank you. I thought it was pretty clever myself. And you see, you know,

individual writers, particularly, you know, people who aren't necessarily on a beat or, you know, the buster only types, but folks at BP and Fangraphs who are very, very, you know, they're very smart statisticians, people who can really read into the numbers in a way that even I can't, who recognize this. And so, you know, their personal, you know, political socialism is leading them to sort of change the way that they approach baseball analysis, or at least the, I don't think the analysis changes, but this is what I was getting at with the bad contracts piece last winter, is that our language ought to change. Like, you know, the way we describe what teams do, that, you know, that just sort of is what it is.

That's always been the game. But we as citizens of this capitalist society can change the way that we describe it. And there's a, you know, there's a cognitive dissonance that you need to be able to hold two ideas in your head that one, you know, you want the team that you root for to conduct its business intelligently while also being able to hold in your head the idea that on the aggregate, when everybody conducts their business intelligently, that's bad for the population at large. So I think that's, that's really where you have to get to. But yeah, I think before you got to the question, I was just like, yes, this is all so. Yeah. And yeah, I've noticed in my own writing, even I'll try to steer away from words that

I might have used in the past to refer to a player. Like if I say like player X's property of this team or something like that. Yeah, that's a big thing. Yeah. And obviously it's true in a way. Sports work that way, and they work in ways that most industries don't, and players can just get drafted and traded and have no say in it in a way that none of us would actually stand for in our own lives.

So there's a way in which those words are accurate, but they're also just sort of Distasteful when you put it that way Yeah language is normative Right so related question From listener named Mark who says This question has a science fiction Slash black mirror bend to it

What if MLB players contracts were Determined by a model increasingly More and more data is being tracked and used By employers to determine salaries, promotions, etc. In Major League Baseball, a lot of data is already tracked. Players have scouting reports kept on them, box score stats, player tracking, and probably much more. War and perhaps even more complex proprietary models kept by teams are already used to determine contracts. But I ask, what if a model, from the moment you were drafted, flexibly paid you what you were worth?

What if Mike Trout actually made $80 million in 10 war seasons rather than his rookie contract, for instance? What if that lumbering 35-year-old first baseman who lost his power stopped burning a hole in your team's wallet? This is obviously far-fetched, but logistically, I imagine the league and the players' union agreeing upon a model, and perhaps it's updated from time to time to account for the new sources of data, for changes in league revenue, and to reduce the effects of Campbell's Law. I imagine, say, a neural network being agreed upon as the model, and the model being fit with a different draw to each player each year, so that players don't have a chance to overfit their play to the model they are given. Like any good Black Mirror technology or innovation,

this obviously would have unforeseen circumstances. I'm just curious how you guys think a model-determined salary league would look and whether it is in any way a good idea. So, you know, I talk about this sort of Marxist fantasy of the players deciding, like the entire MLBPA just saying, no, we're, you know, we're just going to quit and we're going to start our own workers collective. And, you know, I think there would have to be some sort of baseline salary, like every, you know, everybody who plays X number of games, you know, you get a share just for being on the roster. But beyond that, like, you know, distributing the marginal revenue, I imagine something like this is probably the fairest way to distribute the wealth of the league among the players. So as far as like, I ranted about this, there was an episode right after you had done your

driverless cars podcast at the ringer where I said something like just because it's computerized or a model is is automated doesn't mean it's objective. Like somebody has to program the computer. Right. And that person is going to program the computer with whatever biases he or she has. So that's where the black mirror comes in, the sort of dark unintended consequences is what do you put into the machine? Because that's sort of how arbitration works. It's not that automated, but that's kind of – you've got certain inputs and you set precedents based on those inputs and that's why saves are still such a big financial motivator to this day even though that's not really ideally how the modern bullpen works anymore.

So it's – yes, unintended consequences. I mean it's – but it is nonetheless an interesting thing to think about. I've missed your revolutionary discourse. We're going to change the world one of these days through our podcasting. No, we're just going to talk about changing the world. Somebody else will actually change the world. There is this weird way in which we will devote a lot of our outrage to conditions in baseball because we cover baseball and because there are things that we perceive as unjust, whether it's public financing of stadiums or pay for minor leaguers,

all of these things that we think should change. And so I guess because we cover baseball, or at least we used to, neither of us has written about baseball in three weeks. No baseball writing on the horizon, but one day we will again write about baseball in three weeks. No baseball writing on the horizon, but one day we will again write about baseball. So we devote our energies to it, I guess, because it's our little fiefdom. It's our little corner of the world.

Obviously, there are worse problems in the world than pay for minor league players, bad as that is. But I guess we are not experts about every problem and we don't have a platform to talk about every problem. And so we kind of talk about the things that people will listen to us talk about. Yeah. So, I mean, I would actually say paying for minor league players is an actual real world injustice. It's pretty bad. Or something like Matt Harvey coming back for Matt Harvey's innings limit in 2015, something like that.

innings limit in 2015, something like that. And that's why I write about these things in baseball, not only because this is sort of, you know, this is my turf, but because, you know, it's an example, it's a metaphor for and everybody knows the names of the players and the GMs and the owners and the numbers are all public. So even though the numbers are much bigger than you working, you know, at your retail job or your accounting job or, you know, whatever else you do for a living in the real world. The power relationships are still the same. And this expands even to, you know, social issues, you know, non-economic social issues, you know, like how we deal with domestic violence, how we deal with language that we use around

something like mental illness or, you know, or masculinity with the Steven Strasberg thing in the playoffs. Like these, you know, these attitudes show up in the real world, but they, you know, we have these bright, very, very low stakes examples that, you know, I think are useful as, you know, if you're trying to send a message about the way the world ought to be, they're very useful as object lessons. So even though they're, you know, like I said, low stakes in and of themselves, they have immense pedagogical value. So it's not just like that's what's in front of me. I do think that having something to point to like that is useful. All right.

I've got a couple more emails I want to get to before we get to our main topic, but just a couple quick items of banter. get to our main topic, but just a couple quick items of banter. First one, David Lorela in his Sunday Notes column at Fangraphs pointed out the comparison between Nomar Garciaparra and Omar Vizquel, which is actually a pretty fascinating one because they are separated by about one war's worth of value, whether you use Fangraphs or Baseball Reference. And so David's question was, which one is more valuable? And that's an interesting question in its own right, I guess. According to each of the war models, Vizquel was worth about one win more than Nomar, but obviously over a much more extended period. But I wanted to ask you which career you would rather have,

if you could have had Nomar's career or had viskel's career and i'll just lay it out here so nomar played 14 years in the majors but kind of really he played about half that he really played about seven years in the majors and then after that he played like 40 games a season you know he he had he had like that one renaissance year, I guess, 2006 with the Dodgers. But really, he was always on and off the DL playing partial seasons. So he was there for 14 years. Vizquel obviously was there for 24 years. And money-wise, we were just talking about money, if that's a factor for you.

Nomar made more. He had career earnings of $78 million. Vizquel had career earnings of 78 million viskell career earnings of 63 million obviously both the marginal difference yeah well off pretty comfortable yeah yeah so which would you want would you want the hall of fame peak and nomar literally does have a hall of fame peak if you go by his seven-year peak is almost exactly the average peak for a Hall of Fame shortstop. It's actually a little bit above it. He was worth almost 40 wins over a seven-season span. Essentially, all of his career value was from 97 to 03. So do you want that span where your peak is as high as anyone's peak and you're a rookie of the year and MVP runner-up and perennial all-star and all of that.

Or do you want Vizquel? And Vizquel's not like a scrub who just hung around. Obviously, he was a very good player. He made all-star teams. Yeah, he made three all-star teams. He did. Yeah, neither one has won a World Series, by the way, which is relevant here. Nomar technically has a ring from the 04

season when he was traded, but neither has won. So yeah, Vizquel, obviously good player, three-time All-Star, many gold gloves, et cetera. But which one do you want? Do you want the amazing peak or do you want to just get to do the thing that you love to do for a quarter century? Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that at least if you ask me, and I don't want to speak for you, but that Nomar was the better player. Like that's, you know, if, but I think I'd rather have the Skells career

because I mean, the thing about playing until you're 45 is it means you play until you're done, like until you don't want to essentially. And there's something about like Nomar because he was the boston rival to the young jeter and the young a rod was to and just by virtue of being the best player on the red sox for a few years was uh you know a notorious and somewhat polarizing figure and just seems like everybody loves omar viskell like you know i don't think he's within 10 miles

of being a hall of famer, but I think he was great. And I certainly like him and found him enjoyable to watch when I had the opportunity to do that. So I would just, this might just speak to my own personal lack of ambition, but rather than be NoMar, I just, Omar Vizquel wouldn't have kept getting invited back. He wouldn't have kept getting coaching gigs if people didn't like him. So just you know rather do my job and make my 63 million dollars and win my 11 gold gloves you know just be very popular in the game and that life appeals to me a little bit more than than nomar's which you know just felt like it had a whole lot more drama yeah omar took up a lot less of our time adjusting his batting gloves. He was comfortable with his batting gloves, I guess. Did he have batting gloves?

He did, right? Yeah, I think so. So I think I'm with you there. I mean, Vizquel, he wasn't just like a player who would fade into the background. Like he had a skill that made him really fun to watch and made him stand out. He's, you know, maybe the best defensive shortstop of his era and so he wasn't just like a replacement level guy who hung around forever or just a very unremarkable player who hung around forever he had his remarkable moments as well yeah and you know and it's you know given all other things being equal if i had the choice of being

the best defensive shortstop of my generation or the best contact hitter of my generation, then, you know, I find defense a lot more aesthetically interesting. So, you know, that's, I might just rather have that skill. Yeah, I guess it depends what you're looking for. If you want to be the star, if you want to be the best player on your team. Yeah, I don't know that I necessarily want that. So I'm fine not having that. But if you want to be the best at what you do, then maybe you take the Nomar career

because he was the best or very close to it for several years. So there's certainly something to be said for that career too. Anyway, it's an interesting comparison because they were both roughly equally valuable if you look at the career value, but they got to it in dramatically different ways. So I also want to ask you about the little tiny bit of baseball news that actually did happen over the weekend or one of the things that happened, which is the signing of a player who very quickly has become very important to you. I don't know how

this- I hadn't heard of him a year ago, and now he's like, I'm as interested in this guy as anybody who's going to move except for Shohei Otani and the best pitcher in this free agent class, Lance Lynn. I am no stranger to forming very deep and quick attachments to Japanese players. Based on absolutely nothing. Yeah, so I understand. So the Padres signed Kazuhisa Makita for, what, a half a million dollar posting fee and two years and four million, something like that. So he is a reliever, a submariner, submariner?

I don't know. Submariner, right? Submariner would be like a Tacoma player or something. An actual somebody who. Yeah, AAA for the Mariners. Submariner is actually how you say somebody who, or the person who works on a submarine. In the silent service, yes. Right.

So what do you like about Makita and what should we know about Makita? Well, I like that he's the other Japanese guy coming over. I always liked Hideki Okajima because he was the other Japanese guy when Dice K was on the Red Sox. And Hideki Okajima was awesome. Yes, he was. For like two or three years. Yeah. The Diamondbacks also signed a Japanese reliever to Hirano, but he does not stand out in quite the way that that makita does at least delivery wise yeah i mean

there's the delivery is not as important as just short sinker ballers who don't get anybody out as evidenced by like we're gonna mention brandon kintzler in the interview coming up you know i staked out my my place is the biggest brandon kintzler fan in baseball media i think you know i made that pretty clear by now but i don't get anyone out, you mean via the strikeout. Or don't strike anybody out. Yes, because they do get guys out, which is part of the appeal. I also like pitchers who don't walk anybody. Yes.

And Mikita walked less than a batter per nine innings in his last season in Japan. I'm just so excited I can't get, like, I'm just getting completely tongue-tied. So short sinker ballers are huge for me. You know, everybody strikes everybody out now. Let's see somebody who actually makes the hitter do something with it when he puts it in play. And it's interesting, if he just came over and not convinced he's going to be good, but they think it's likely enough that they're willing to commit to him for more than one year on a major league contract. So I think that gives me a lot of confidence that he will, for no other reason than that, he'll succeed. And the most important thing is Kazuhisa Mikita maps perfectly onto Inagata Davida. And I think that's really the most important thing about that you need to know about him as he embarks on his major league career. So we're going to have a lot of fun with

that. 2018 Twitter repertoire. Yeah. So his stats, let's see, the career 283 ERA, he is 32, or I guess he just turned 33. Well well his career stats maybe don't reflect quite what he's been the last couple seasons or the last few seasons really he struck out about five per nine sometimes fewer and has walked well last season he walked five guys in 62 and two-thirds innings and I don't know what his ground ball rate is. Maybe I could quickly look it up on Delta grass, but I imagine to have an ERA in the ones and twos as he has had in most seasons, he must have a Brad Ziegler-esque ground ball rate to get away with this kind of contact rate. So obviously it can work. There are pitchers who work like this, but I mean, it's different

doing it in NPB and doing it in mlb but i'll be interested to see if he does and you mentioned brad ziegler like who's the last guy who threw like that who wasn't interesting in some way right that's the other thing like boring people don't resort to this so like and i guess like the the ultimate avatar of this would have been somebody like disco hayes yes like chris hayes the newscaster, was around and people were quoting him for like 18 months before I realized he wasn't Disco. So I guess that shows you how plugged in I am to cable news versus obscure Royals minor league pitchers from the dawn of baseball Twitter. Yeah. Anyway. Only a 50% ground ball rate, it looks like, last season. Surprising.

Yeah, that is surprising. I wonder if it was higher in the past. It's tough if you're only getting half ground balls and you're only striking out five. And if he's striking out five per nine in NPB, I'm guessing he's probably not quite going to get there in MLB. So that's not the easiest profile. Isn't the league-wide strikeout rate lower in Japan? Yeah. Am I just making that up? I think that's probably true. Let's see. Yeah, the year before, his groundball

rate was actually even lower than that. So not really a Ziegler-esque groundball rate. It's just pinpoint command and control, I would imagine. And maybe the release point and the fact that he's coming from down under, which is always fun. No, he's coming from Japan, Ben. Very good. All right. Let me just see if I can see how hard he throws here. I am guessing not very.

Ah, yes. Okay. So Makita, of all Japanese pitchers who threw at least 60 innings last season, he had the second slowest average fastball velocity, 128.8 kilometers per hour, which, according to Google, is exactly 80 miles per hour. So that is how hard he throws, the second slowest pitcher. There is a pitcher who throws considerably slower, Hirofumi Yamanaka. He throws only 121.3, which is 75 miles an hour. So that's impressive. Don't know if his name fits any famous rock songs.

Yeah. Anyway, if this works, if Makita succeeds, he is not going to succeed in the way that any other major league pitchers. Even if it doesn't, it's going to be interesting. Yeah, exactly. Right. Is this going to be enough to get me to watch Padres games regularly? That's a good question. Yeah. With no Yungervis Salarte to watch anymore. Why even tune in? So couple quick emails and then we're going to get to the meat of this thing, which is maybe somewhat surprising, but we'll get to it in a second. So this one comes from Matt, a Patreon supporter. It is sort of a Hall of Fame question, but not really. He says, like you, my interest in Hall of Fame season has waned with each passing year. One issue is how players are voted in after their careers end. The five-year gap was supposed to make it easier to realistically assess the impact of a player, but perhaps the wait just reinforces the thinking that these players are supposed to be moral exemplars that stand the test of time instead of just being the best at what they did at the time they did it. So if we

want a baseball museum that reflects the times in which players played, not the moral dilemmas 10 and 20 years after the fact, what alternative is there? Another sport with a long history, love of statistics, and adherence to tradition is sumo wrestling. While sumo does not have a hall of fame per se, they do have the Tomioka Hachiman Shrine, where the name of every wrestler to reach the highest rank, Yokozuna, is inscribed. But Yokozuna are not elevated to that rank after their career is over. Instead, it must be achieved while they are still active competitors. To be eligible, you have to compete at the second highest rank in the sport. You then need to prove dominance by winning or getting runner-up in multiple consecutive tournaments.

A commission of laypersons outside the sumo association will vote on your eligibility to be elevated to Yokozuna. That recommendation will be forwarded for review and approval by the association. These wrestlers thereafter compete as living legends with distinct privileges and reputations. How would this look in baseball? MLB could set baseline statistical measures of achievement over a certain number of seasons, then appoint a commission to review and recommend candidates after each season. Then players like Kershaw or Trout could be recognized for their achievements and continue to achieve with that elevated status. This also could have addressed the PED issue. If the Hall's job is to assess who is dominant in their time at the time, Bonds, Clemens, and many more would have been

inducted well before their careers ended, perhaps even before they used PEDs in the first place. How much would this change the Hall of Fame process and how it's perceived? Could this sidestep some of what makes these debates so frustrating? So could another Japanese import, in this case, not Nikita, but the Yokozuna system— You speak fluent Japanese now after this last 10 minutes of this podcast. What do you think? Could this work for baseball? I think it depends entirely on who makes – that's a ton of bureaucracy. It is.

And it depends entirely on who makes that up, whether that's the oldest people in the BBWAA and whoever's on the Veterans Committee. Like if those people are making those decisions, then it's going to change the composition of the Hall of Fame not even one bit. Yeah, there is a risk that it does the opposite of kicking the can down the road it just kicks the can up the road i guess right in that you just have this debate and discussion earlier i mean the thing is that setting statistical milestones would be tough because baseball is always changing yeah right so know, you can't really have the round numbers because of the different eras and then you get into ballpark adjustments and error adjustments. So it's difficult to set that sort of baseline in baseball. I mean, I don't know, you'd probably

end up with just some system where we're all disagreeing about something in the moment instead of later on. I mean, I guess the moralizing would be reduced and the need to just go over the same players year after year after year long after they've retired. So maybe this would be a more efficient process. I like it. The idea of competing as living legends is interesting, but we kind of get that. It's not official, but like Mariano Rivera and latter day Derek Cheaterater and chipper jones yeah you farewell tour guys like yeah yeah you know anybody anybody who gets gifts i think is is a baseball yokozuna uh-huh yeah adrian beltre is

at the head of the class yeah so i like some elements of this idea but it definitely you and i want to start you know making a list of the Yokozuna of baseball, like I'd be up for that. And we could lobby MLB for like a special jersey patch or something. That'd be fun. It might just be a bunch of obscure relievers in our case, but it would-

And Brandon Geyer. Yes, right. All right, last question. This is from a Jeff, not the Jeff, but a Jeff. How different would baseball be if it were played during the winter instead of the summertime? Baseball podcasting would be different in that we would have something to talk about right now. But do you think the sport, I mean, obviously.

It would be unwatchable and probably kind of dangerous. Yeah. I mean, it would be indoors for one thing, right? It would just be in domes. I mean, there's a reason why i don't think that's the spirit of the question i think maybe not i mean obviously there's a reason why baseball didn't develop in the winter time it's very difficult to play when it's cold and snowy so if you did play it in the same venues then the rays would win the world series every year for

one thing the rays and the astros and the Blue Jays and the Diamondbacks, they would kind of have a lock on the playoff spots, presumably. So that would destabilize things. But what if you made everyone play outdoor? I mean, it would just be sloppy and dangerous and not very fun. I just think, like, the first half of Game 5

of the 2008 World Series, just that all the time. Yes. So there's a good reason why baseball is not played during the winter, except in places where it's not winter during our winter. It is, in fact, summer, and it is played during our winter. So yeah, I don't see much appeal to this idea. I mean, I guess it would prioritize players who were very hardy and came from cold climates and were used to. Players with good circulation.

Yeah, right. So players who were not sensitive to cold and could somehow maintain their grips on the baseball despite having completely numb fingers. I don't know if that's a skill, but we would find out. Jovanas Nevaraskis would win the next five Cy Young Awards. Yeah. I actually have no idea how cold it is in Lithuania. I don't either.

It's colder than a place like Wisconsin. So maybe Jordan Zimmerman would be good again. Yeah. I think he'd throw a lot more strikes. I think there would be a lot more. I think it would be incredibly – no, I think it would be incredibly pitching dominated because it would be physically painful to hit the ball like yeah you know if it was five below out there but it would also be uh but you'd have no grip on the ball that's true i don't know and i guess that like they wouldn't throw a lot more strikes but

there would be a premium on throwing strikes just to get the defense off the field that's true that you know actually you want to solve pay supply That's how you do it Yes as we record this right now It is 17 degrees Which is actually warmer than I was thinking It has been in the single digits Here in New York for days And the river outside my window is freezing solid

So yeah I think Mark Burley would be the highest paid pitcher In winter baseball Just because he would keep the game moving. You want to know what it is in Houston right now? What is it? 64. Yeah, but you're in Houston.

I know. It's got its pluses and its minuses. Yeah, throw that back in my face in April when it's 98. was my desire to podcast with you after our long layoff here that i dangled something in front of you that i have always been plucking away and listeners to our podcast know that you are a big college baseball fan you covered college baseball you love college baseball you are constantly trying to sneak college baseball onto the ringer mlb show and i'm constantly grumbling about it rebuffed changing our Changing the subject. It's kind of become a bit sort of a comedy routine, but it also has a kernel of truth

to it in that usually I do not want to talk about college baseball. But I messaged you a couple of days ago and said, do you want to talk about college baseball on a podcast? And we're going to do that now with Justin Vollman, who is the founder and CEO of the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network, which is a nationwide network of mostly college students, not entirely, who are scouting college games and are trying to get major league clients involved and are producing articles for their website. And it's this really impressive and ambitious organization. So we're going to talk to him about how that got off the ground. But before we do, I just want to clear the room,

clear the floor for a minute and just give you a chance to make the case for college baseball, because it's not something we talk about on our podcast or this podcast very often. Don't I know it. But you love it. And I want you to explain why and try to persuade other people that they should love it too. So, I mean, if you want to know why I love it, it's because I went to a huge baseball school. Like if you don't have that personal connection, it's so much harder to get into the game. So like I'll give that disclaimer up front. Like if, you know, like South Carolina turned out, there were probably close to half a dozen big leaguers who were there when I was there at some point.

So there's a personal connection. But once you get into the game, the biggest thing for me is spring training. If you know, if you live in Philadelphia or Seattle or Minnesota or one of those places where you haven't seen the sun for four months by the time it gets to late February, and you want to make a trip to go stand at a tiki bar in Surprise, Arizona for a week, then I could see the appeal of spring training for that. And just personally, like I did a spring training trip, got more reporting done in a week than I did in any month of the regular season. It's just, it was incredibly useful professionally for me. But apart from that, I wouldn't watch a second of it. It's the most useless sucker bet from an entertainment standpoint, particularly because as pitchers and catchers are reporting in mid-February, the college baseball season, actual real life, high stakes, high level, regular season baseball is going on.

And once you get in a in a conference play the major league baseball season's starting up so you can sort of watch college baseball on the weekends and then mlb during the week that's sort of how i always divided my time when i was covering both at the at the same time from a spectator standpoint it's like there's something of the minor league element to this where it's dirt cheap it's you know it's high level enough that in person you don't really tell the difference. The, the stadiums are actually like, there are a lot of very nice college baseball stadiums ranging from like the 10,000 seaters at places like Texas to like the Miami of Ohio has an incredible ballpark in the middle of the woods in Oxford, Ohio for, you know, for instance. Kent State is one of the most fun places I've ever

gone to see a baseball game. And it's a place where you can take your family, in some cases, for free. In very few cases will a college baseball ticket cost you more than like five or 10 bucks. So if you just want to be outside, have that live baseball experience, college baseball is so much better bang for your buck than pro baseball. The other thing is, if you're at all interested in scouting, this is like these guys are going to be the big leaguers of tomorrow. You could go see, I covered Kyle Schwarber in college. I covered Ian Happ in college.

I covered a couple top 10 draft picks. Even in the Midwest, you go to a place like Vanderbilt or Florida, you're going to get guys who are going to go number one overall. So if you're at all interested in developing opinions or honing your scouting eye or anything like that, then you've got to go see these guys live. And you can see a lot of them at once. And particularly if you go to, there's a big college baseball tournament every year in Houston at Minute Maid Park

called the Shriners Classic. And you could see nine games in three days and see probably close to a dozen future big leaguers. One of my favorite college baseball players to watch right now is the first baseman for TCU, Lucan Baker, who's the, he was a true freshman when I saw him there. He shut out

Rice for six innings and he's not pitching anymore, but he was an incredibly polished pitcher for an 18-year-old. He's also the biggest teenager I've ever seen in person. He hit one out of Minute Maid Park. They had the roof open. He put it on the other, he put it on the next block over the left field seats. And the other thing is, you get this, this is a lot of the appeal. I think of college basketball, football is at a certain level of sport gets homogenized, uh, that there's, there are only so many ways that you can win with major league talent, only so many tact, you know, tactical ways that you can approach the game. And you get to see the level of play is lower than it is in Major League Baseball. You still see guys

throw a 95. You still see 450-foot home runs. These guys can all play. They're all incredible. But the error rate is about... Errors are about twice as common in college baseball as they are in Major League Baseball. And the difference between seeing a routine ground ball and it being a 98% play and a 94% play, just terms of the excitement is huge. It's just that level of uncertainty because you never really know what's going to happen. Even at SEC schools or ACC schools, you get from, if the starter gets knocked out early, the middle of the bullpen, you don't know if those guys are going to be able to throw strikes. It's all very, very, just a whole lot more uncertain. So I think that makes it, that's not for everybody.

Some people just want to see the game played at the highest level all the time, but I like a little bit of weirdness. And the other thing about that weirdness is that there was more than one way to win in college baseball. And you get schools that start to have identities and some of the very, very top level schools, places like Louisville and Florida and Vanderbilt and TCU, they're essentially major league teams in miniature. So like everybody throws 95 with a big, big breaking ball. Everybody hits, everybody runs, everybody plays good defense, but you also get guys like Nick Sine, who we talked to on the ringer show, who like he got

hit by a pitch about once every 10, once every 10 at bats in college. Right. Like there's still does. Yeah. And so, you know, he's one of the fastest runners that I've ever seen on a, on a baseball diamond. He probably doesn't have the hit tool to hack it in the majors, but he was a star in the Mac and you get identities like Florida state. Everybody there has great plate discipline. Everybody draws walks.

They have a 400 OBP as a team every single year. Cal State Fullerton, everybody throws strikes. That's the one thing that they teach. And they're great developers and pitchers. You know, guys who Thomas Eshelman, for instance, was a converted catcher who turned into their Friday night starter on as a true freshman and wound up walking like 18 guys his entire college career. And he's another guy who, you know, that trick is sort of,

he's in the high minors with the Phillies right now. I don't know if he's ever going to, you know, he's not that extreme a pitcher anymore, but it's not like that trick doesn't really work, but everything works. You get guys like there was a pitcher for Manhattan named Taylor Seward, who was a sub-mariner and just, you know, he threw like 300 pitches in a weekend just because his arm could could hold up to that. And he was their best pitcher. You know, they took him to the regional and that's, you know, that's what they needed to

do to win. So the other thing and, you know, that weirdness extends to uniforms. It extends to stadiums. Manhattan, who I just talked about, they for a long time set up a temporary park every Friday in Van Cortland Park in New York City. And they took it down every Saturday or Sunday when they were done playing. And Michigan State's ballpark has its backs up to a river. So there's a hill in fair territory because they just needed to build the wall up in right field to the point where it's's 302 feet out to straight away right you know you don't get that weirdness in major league baseball the other thing from the entertainment uh perspective there's another thing yeah so like there's there

are best the best days to watch sports out of the year are days where there's a lot of it you know it's the first it's the first couple days of the wildcard round in Major League Baseball. It's the height of bowl season in college football. It's the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, the first weekend of group play in the World Cup. That's, you know, that sort of thing. It's the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. It's just wall to wall. It's, you know, it's 64 teams. So it's the same number of games as the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament.

And there's just baseball on from 11 o'clock in the morning to 2 o'clock in the morning. And, you know, you wake up on Saturday and you do it again. You wake up on Sunday and you do it again. And there's just nothing like that in Major League Baseball. So, and when you get, you know, this brings back up, like, you get the Florida guys. You get Carlos Rodon was an unbelievable big league pitcher you get guys who actually are those major league quality players Alex Bregman Andrew Benatendi were these kind of players they you know Andrew Benatendi hit like 420 with 20 home

runs in 60 games uh his sophomore year at Arkansas and that's you don't get those guys don't stick out that far among the, or above the crowd, you know, Brandon McKay, who's going to be, he was the number four pick. He's either going to be Randy Wolford, Doug Minkiewicz.

He was unbelievable. He was like Clayton Kershaw mixed with, I don't know, Joey Votto in college. So like, if there's something, there's just so much of it, you'll be able to find something that appeals to you.

So, you know, the kids haven't had the personality trained out of them yet, which, you know, was great for me as a reporter. I think that comes through as a fan. I don't know if you've ever seen the rain delay videos. Yes, there are tons of rain delays like this. They just do sketch comedy, essentially your prop comedy to kill time, you know, while a rain delay is going on. So it's just, it's the word that's coming to my head is pure, but maybe more joyful, more tactically interesting, more unpredictable. So that's, you know, it's as much as I try to ran this down your throat, like I recognize it's not for

everybody, but anybody who, you know, wants to know how to get into college baseball players, you know, interesting players, interesting teams, interesting programs, coaches find me on Twitter. I will, I will be your Ellen page in inception and I'll be your audience avatar because it's just such a wonderful thing. And I don't know, the biggest thing is, I don't know why you'd waste seven months or seven weeks of your life watching spring training when this is going on. That's the, I don't do that either. So, yeah, I mean, but yeah, I mean, you've made a very impassioned and comprehensive case. I think the obstacle for me is just that I have a hard time keeping track of who's in the big leagues at this point. There are 1300 something major leaguers with, you know, eight man bullpens. And so the idea of having to learn a new crop of college players every four years is daunting, to say the least.

Yeah, it's easier if you're into the draft. Right, yeah. I'll say that. And I always figure, you know, the guys I need to know, I will know when I need to know them. You know, they'll enter my radar when they need to, essentially. And I'm sure it's fun to know them before anyone else knows them and to see them when they're not finished products and not quite as polished and all that. But for me, it's kind of just a bandwidth issue. I don't know how you remember where every player went to college. Somehow you do is just the weirdness, the greater range of possibilities in team strategies, in player skill sets, just the profiles that don't work haven't been weeded out yet. And so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you wrote a book about Indy Ball and every six months you come up with another NPB player who's doing some weird thing that wouldn't work in Major League Baseball.

some weird thing that wouldn't work in Major League Baseball. And for every interesting person in indie ball that you've written about, every interesting person in MPB, there's an analog in college baseball. So that's – I don't think we're approaching the non-Major League Baseball side of the sport differently. We're just getting those players from different places. Yes. Okay. Well, now that we have found common ground, let's take a quick break. And we'll be right back with Justin Vollman of the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network. to school and i hate it there i hate it there everything i want i gotta wait yeah i waited all right so we are back and we are joined now by justin volman college graduate as of a few weeks ago from the university of alabama roll tide it's very important day for alabama is it yes it is

roll tide what happened the tide rolled the tide tomorrow hopefully we We'll see. Okay. You guys will have to keep me apprised of all tide rolling developments. But Justin, before graduating from the University of Alabama, founded and is currently the CEO of the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network, which I've been really intrigued by since I found out about it. And despite my lack of knowledge about college baseball, it just seems like a really cool idea that I've been wanting to know more about. So Justin's the guy to ask. Hey, Justin, how are you? I'm good.

Thank you guys for having me on today. Yeah, our pleasure. So tell us about the origin story and just the general layout and operation of the network. Sure. So about a year ago, I started the company. But the story starts a little bit before that. So before I started the company, I worked in numerous different avenues of baseball. I worked at the headquarters of Trackman in Stanford, Connecticut. And I also worked for Whitecaps of the Cape Cod Baseball League. And while working

for the Whitecaps, I saw that there was, my job was to be the liaison between the team and the scouts. And I really saw that there was a lack of knowledge and exposure for these smaller school players. So just as a story, we had a player on the team, Jordan Sheffield, very well known, ended up being a first round draftee by the Dodgers from Vanderbilt. And so all the scouts knew about him. But we also had another pitcher on the team named Tyson Miller, who went to a small D2 school called Cal Baptist. And before coming to the Cape League, none of the scouts had heard of him. Everyone was like, oh, where's this kid go? Where is he from? Because he was 6'4", throwing 93 to 95 and was one of the top pitchers in the Cape League that summer. And he ended up going from unknown to being drafted

in the fourth round by the Cubs. So I just saw that there was sort of this need in the collegiate summer leagues, especially where there was no scouting system in place. A lot of the way that they get their players, it's mainly relationship based because the coaches of these teams are usually D2 or D3 coaches. So they have their own teams that they need to run and recruit for. So they're going to be spending most of their time on the job that is their paycheck for the whole season. So they didn't really have time to go and see a guy play in California if the coach coaches in Rhode Island. So I really saw that there was this need to sort of introduce sort of an intermediary screening process to make sure that these players not only are quality,

but also not only quality players, but also quality human beings. Because a lot of what the summer leagues rely on is their local communities to support them. And if a player gets arrested in the summer for a DUI or gets in a fight, then some of the families might not want to host the players the next year. So I really saw that there was a need not only on a skill level to make sure that the players that they were receiving recommendations from these coaches, that they were actually as talented as their own college coaches said they were, but also that they were quality human beings that would represent the different various summer leagues well. And so then I also thought of expanding it to major league teams as well, because there's just, honestly, there's just so many college baseball players and high school baseball players, not only in the United States, but across the

world. And there's just not enough manpower to see them all. I mean, if you have one scout covering the whole state of Alabama, he's going to go that big SEC game because he can see five to 10 prospects, he might only go to that D2 game once, if's, say, one prospect. And if, say, it's February, 40 degrees out and the kid's throwing 88, well, then he's not going to come back and see him. He's going to write him off as a prospect. So what my company is trying to do is to serve as that third-party independent scouting network to sort of bring light and exposure to all these players that don't necessarily get it, but that deserve it because they're just as talented as many of the high level D1 players. So it sounds like a good idea. How do you start building something that you're hoping will be a nationwide or even international network? You get the idea,

what's your first step? Because I know you've expanded dramatically since then. You have many, many contributors covering all sorts of areas. How did you get from there to here? Sure. So I started it last December. It's actually been a year since I started the company. And when I first started it, I worked with a few of my fellow former interns at TrackMan. And we worked on developing this infrastructure. So mainly the way that I went about it at first was I would contact sports management professors across the country. I tried to connect with as many sports management students as possible on LinkedIn. And really, I was trying to build the infrastructure as much as possible

through word of mouth and to try to get these professors to recommend their best and brightest students that want to work in baseball. Because we also, beyond trying to be a scouting network for players, we want to try to give college students the opportunity to build their sort of scouting portfolio while they're in college. So if a student goes to school, say, in Boise, Idaho, he might not have the opportunity to get that baseball experience that teams look for while he's still in school. So we tried to do that. And so we contacted professors and really, we had 50 scouts last spring, we were really beta testing the product and seeing what would work and what didn't work. And then I really started establishing MLB type hierarchy where we have all of our area

scouts across the country. Then we have assistant regional managers and regional managers. So we have five of those, and they're in charge of expansion for each of their regions. So we have a regional manager covering the Midwest in Canada, the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic, another one covering the Southeast, Southwest and the West Coast. So from last year to this year, we've grown to 125 scouts all across the country. We also have five scouts in Canada as well, because we really believe that Canada is a developing baseball nation. And there's a lot of talent up there that doesn't get the exposure that it's deserved. So we started off just doing those man hours and trying to contact as many professors as

possible. But as we've become more established as a brand and a company, I've recently partnered with Teamwork Online and gotten our job postings up on there. And I've also, there's a job posting website called Handshake that a lot of colleges use and we post our internships on there too. And I think it's, I think about 150 schools have access to our job postings on Handshake. So we have definitely grown more sophisticated

in the ways that we've found our scouts, but we definitely try to go for quality over quantity. So even though we have rapidly grown from zero, just me, to over 125 people, we have a very strict application process. We make sure that these kids are going to be grinders and really want to work in baseball because if they're not going, we do training programs throughout the preseason and we really try to make sure that we give everyone that wants to work in baseball the opportunity to learn and to grow further in their baseball

knowledge. And that process is almost as interesting to me as the actual scouting network itself is how you get, you said 125 scouts. Obviously, if you want to try to cover all those, American amateur baseball is just gigantic and that's the way you got to do it. You've just got to get so many boots on the ground, but you've got to get 125 people who know baseball, who have some kind of scouting eye, who can write a little bit, which is harder than you'd think, and are going to meet deadlines, are able to put together a staff that size. And this is something that even just from an online sports affiliate network, something like SB Nation, where you see they've got very, very high quality people at their bigger sites at their home site. But the farther you get out into the edges of people, unpaid bloggers for team sites, the quality drops off. So how do you make sure that if you're putting your name on, you trust somebody who's out watching the Northwoods

League in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, who you might never have met? Is that delegating through your regional managers and assistant managers, how do you assure that quality? Yeah, especially because I would imagine that a lot of the people who know baseball and are qualified to make observations about players at the college level are players themselves. And so they must be busy with their own baseball practice and games. And so that must limit their ability to travel around. So I too am just amazed that this has gotten off the ground the way it has. Sure. So to answer Michael and your question, it was a lot of questions. No problem. But obviously maintaining the quality of our work is fair amount and important. And we have our scouts not only collect the qualitative data,

the scouting grades, their own observations, but we also have them collect quantitative data, like beyond the box score statistics that if you're not at the game, you will not be able to get those statistics anywhere else. And we also have them collect video and velocities as well. So we really want to make sure that even if, say, major league teams, obviously, they have their own scouting networks that some of their scouts have had 20 years of experience. And so they're empirically going to trust that scout's knowledge and expertise more than they would trust our entry-level scouts. So we really want to make sure that even if they don't trust our 20 to 80 grades, we have that empirical evidence, that data, those quantitative statistics that will really try to back up what we're reporting from

the field and also will provide that video so that they themselves can analyze the video themselves and make sure that they can sort of see that what we're reporting in the field with our scouting grades is the same as what we're reporting as the same that what they're seeing on the video. So and also to answer your question about training. So our regional managers and our assistant regional managers are all really experienced. They, just to take an example, our Canadian regional supervisor, Richard Berfer, he handles the Midwest and Canada, and he scouted for five years. He's in grad school now at Western University under Mike Sohn, and he has a depth study in the biometrics of pitching. And so he has been scouting for PBR and scouting Canadian prospects for about five years. So he is one of

our very top tier regional managers, and he developed a 40 page scouting guide that all of our scouts are required to read and go over. And in this off season, we've been using it to, we've been using each week to sort of train the scouts. So we'll send them out, say, one example of a training program we did. We sent them game footage of a College World Series game from 2014. We told them to watch Trey Turner and Carlos Rondon and have them collect the statistics that we'll be looking for in the college season. So we give them, they submit those reports once a week, and then our assistant regional managers and our regional managers give them feedback on those. So we've really used it

not only as a way to train our scouts, but as a way to have a weed out process as well. Because we've seen that if a scout can't handle doing, say, one training program a week, then he's probably not going to be able to submit three reports a week like he will in season. And also, I like how you brought up SB Nation and how some of the quality can suffer when you get a infrastructure as big as SB Nation does. So even though we've grown really fast, all of our scouts will be paid at the end of the spring season, and they get paid based on the amount of reports that they do. So the more reports they do, the more money that they get paid. But also, we want to make sure that their quality doesn't suffer. So they don't want them to be saying trying to do 10 reports a game. So we've sort of made it so they're only focusing on if they go to

three games a week, they're only going to submit three to six reports a week. That way, they can really drill down and not have to watch the whole game, but really try to focus in on one player and train their scouting eye to what they'll look for in the regular season, what talent really looks like on those lower level D1, D2, D3 high school levels. And that really strikes me as where the value is for teams. And obviously, you're publishing not just scouting reports, but some reported stories on these players. So there's the dual mission. But when I was covering college baseball in the Midwest, I was the only national writer there most of the time. There was maybe two or three people covering that region on anything but a hyper-local basis. And that was in a big year for the Big Ten with two top 10 picks in that year's draft in the Midwest. you know, particularly scouting departments get pared down and we're seeing some teams like the Astros are just shrinking their scouting departments to almost nothing. You know, the value is not, you know, you see somebody, you know, one or one of your scouts see somebody that they've never heard of or had never gotten eyes on. And then, you know, they spend a seventh

round draft pick on that person. It's you guys are going to see them and they get the reports, they get the video and there's, oh, you know, we should send a cross checker here. We should, you know, we should send one of our people here to, you know, actually check that out. Is that kind of what the the proposition is, I guess, for team clients? Sure. So yeah, for in regards to our team clients, that's really the value we're trying to show to them is that we'll be there when you're not. And we'll also be able to sort of help your scouting systems better deploy their resources. So like I was saying earlier, if there's that small school prospect in, say, Alabama or Texas, we'll get you those statistics and those video and those velocities that you aren't going to get unless you're there. So, I mean, in Texas, any given night, there could be 500 games going on, college, high school, D2, D3.

And there's just even if you have five area scouts, you're not going to be able to see every game in Texas. So we really want to try to help fill in that information gap and make sure that those players who are in those D2 and D3 schools and those JUCO schools that aren't the top priority for these teams to go see, we want to make sure that they don't get written off because say they just have one bad day or they get written off because it's bad weather or they get hurt. We want to make sure that these players get the exposure that they deserve. And so the written side is another side of the company. We're sort of have a couple of different sides. So we have the scouting side and that's our main run up to new generator. But then we also have a dedicated writing team that's separate from the scouting

side and they do different stories on we really try to make it so they're doing exposure on those lower level prospects so like we do a monthly piece called pluck from obscurity so we try to focus on a major league player each month that came from a lower level d2 school or was drafted in the 40th round or had an interesting story so this past month we focused on brandon kintz. Now the I think he just got re-signed by the Nationals a couple weeks ago. So he was an interesting story. Brandon Kintzler story. Yeah, I thought I'd cornered the market on Brandon Kintzler, but apparently not. Yeah, so he was in and he had a really interesting story. He was injured a lot. He was drafted in the

40th round. And he really had an interesting story of how he's gotten to where he is, and to be successful in the major league. So that was one of the players that we focused on for this past month. But we've also published a story just this week on the University of British Columbia and how they're the only school north of the Canadian border that plays teams in the United States. They're a, I believe, I can't remember off the top of my head, but they're either Division II or an NAIA school. They were NAIA when Jeff Francis went there. Yeah, and so they come south into the United States, and they are a very talented team.

And they, I believe, have finished, they've made the playoffs in each of the, I think, three of the past five years. Don't quote me on that, but they've been very successful. And so we wanted to sort of show that there's not just baseball in the southeast in Florida and Texas and California. There's baseball not just in the United States, but all over the world. And there's these talented players that don't necessarily get the exposure that they deserve. One interesting thing that I liked about the Shohei Otani story is I think the part of the reason that he went to the Angels was that the Yankees had sent Billy Epler and his team for the past five years to go see him every year.

So they were on him probably as early as any team. Billy Epler himself was on Shohei Otani earlier than maybe any other team in the major leagues. And I think for a lot of these prospects who are in high school and like that don't necessarily get the exposure they deserve, obviously Shohei Otani was a Japanese phenom, but back in five years ago, they could have been saying, oh, we're focusing on you Darvish now or Mashihiro Tanaka. So it really, MLB does a year by year process. So even though they will focus on guys that are a couple of years out, there's just not enough manpower to say, okay, we're going to focus on, we're going to send our scouting system to go

look at these guys that are two to three years away from being draft eligible, because just a lot of stuff can change in those years. Players get injured, players transfer. So it's really important, I think, to sort of show that whole picture of where a player went from when they're in high school to, say, they went to a JUCO, to D2, to the major leagues. And so this year, we're really going to be using, this is our first year of acquiring these statistics that we're going to be. And we really want to track and see the players that we collect this year and see how they do in the next three to four or five years and see not only how they perform in college, but how they perform in the major leagues and see if there's certain statistics that correlate success while they're in D2 or D3 or high school

that correlate to success in the major leagues. So we really want to try to provide that whole picture of a player. So this is kind of a Shark Tank style question. My cable box has been set to ABC because of The Bachelor and Shark Tank is on the 22 hours of the day that The Bachelor is not on. So I've had Shark Tank on the brain. But is it possible to pull off the goal you're trying to achieve here, which I think is very admirable that you are intending to pay all your contributors because many better established and better funded companies than yours have gotten away with this free labor just by exploiting people's willingness to have a platform, essentially. So having 125 contributors, a network that large getting paid by the report,

five contributors, a network that large getting paid by the report. How do you plan to do this? What's the breakdown, do you think, between, say, advertising, between team clients? Have you worked out that this is definitely feasible? Is there some sort of funding beyond the revenue that you're bringing in? Sure. So our main revenue generators are the scouting side. So our clients are major league teams, collegiate summer leagues, player rep agencies, independent leagues. And we're also going to be actually rolling out market to college teams as well. We want to sort of help them get videos on, say, JUCO prospects or high school prospects that or even the teams that they're going to be facing where there might not be video. So a lot of the deep high level D1 teams will play schools that like say, Presbyterian in North Carolina, and there might not be a lot of

film on them. I worked for Alabama baseball two years ago, and I really saw that there was a limited amount of film on especially the smaller school guys. So that's another area we're going to target. But like you said, feasibility of the product is obviously a paramount to any new startup. And we've seen a lot of interest from MLB teams and from our other potential clients. So that's going to be the main revenue generator. We also are buying radar guns for all of our scouts. We're going to be buying them from Pocket Coach Radar. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but we'll be supplying all of our scouts with those. And so obviously, these are all things that cost money, paying our scouts, paying our writers, paying our analytics team, paying our social media team. And so we're working on making sure that we have enough revenue to

obviously keep the lights on at the end of the season and make sure we're going to focus on getting ad revenue for the site because we have all that original written content. And our viewership has actually grown tremendously in these past couple months now that we have a dedicated writing team. And so we're hopefully trying to partner with smaller type businesses that are looking to like smaller type tech businesses, sports tech in particular, that are looking to get their name out there. And we really want to try to make sure that we build each other up together. So I've been talking with other small sports startups as well, like Baseball Essential is one that I talked with, among other ones. So we're going to try to get ad revenue, client revenue, but client revenue is going to be the main thing that allows

us to pay all our scouts and all our interns. And we really want to make sure that we are a company for the next five to 10 years, because we really think that there's a need. And we really want to make sure that these players and also not only these players, but these college students get opportunities to showcase their talents to major league teams and wherever they want to end up getting a job, whether that's in journalism, scouting, social media or analytics. So I don't know if you're like going through enough of this material to really have identified a favorite player. Do you have like a favorite find that, you know, you guys got this Juco first baseman from, you know, middle of the woods, A&M in Kentucky or something that nobody else was on? I'm trying to think. I can't quite narrow down a favorite player, but just one of my favorite players just in college baseball is Kobe Vance of Alabama.

Obviously, he goes to a big SEC school, but he's one of those diminutive second basemen. I have a particular affinity for the Jose Altuve's of the world. So he's one of my favorite college baseball players. He's five, six built like a tank and he's very athletic. So he's one that I feel could make an impact on the next level because he's got that drive. So even though he's five, five, and he's still built like a tank, I think that he could have a positive impact in the next level. On a smaller school perspective, I really haven't dug down too deeply into the players that I looked at. We were working with the Brewster Whitecaps last summer to try to help them look at players that they had already gotten

on their roster. So it's just honestly, looking at this year, I think I'll be able to give you a favorite player in the future, but not right now. I don't think I have a favorite player that we've found yet. So I would guess that most of your scouts are still college students at this point, as you were up until a few weeks ago, but presumably that will change as the business gets a little older, your scouts will grow older. Is there a plan for sort of transitioning beyond college for the scouts? Is this like a Logan's Run sort of situation where when you turn 21 and you graduate, you have to turn in your college scouting card? Or can you continue? This is presumably your full-time job for the foreseeable future. But if people want to continue after they graduate, is that something

that you're willing to consider? And I would also imagine that probably you're going to get teams starting to approach your scouts and you yourself, possibly, to try to hire you away and poach you and have them in their own scouting networks. Because that's part of the incentive, I'm sure, for many of the scouts to participate in this. It looks great on a resume if you're trying to work for a team. Exactly. So we don't just have college students, actually, as our scouts. We actually, funnily enough, one of our scouts is an NYPD officer, and he's been an NYPD, I think he's in his mid-30s, but he's been an NYPD officer for about 15 years. And once he gets those 20 years, he wants to transition into baseball scouting. And so he's actually one of our scouts. So we really, I would hope each year that we have to hire a new batch of 100, 150 scouts, because I really want all of our scouts to go work for MLB teams, work for player rep agencies, our writers to graduate into work for fan graphs or baseball

prospectus or the ringer. And I really want to help. So when we hire all of our scouts next year, we can say we can bring a bunch of them to the winter meetings and say, yes, we have 25 scouts that work in the Major League Baseball, and they work for these organizations. We want to sort of become not only a feeder system of these smaller school players into MLB, but also a feeder system of these college students, or not just college students, but these aspiring baseball operations people into Major League Baseball and into whatever avenue that they want to work in. So we're trying to sort of establish that network, not only presently, but in the future,

where we can have these, we can keep going and keep graduating our scouts and have them go and work for Major League teams, because we really think that that would not only provide credibility to our company, but also would provide a huge benefit to major league teams as well. Because obviously, there's just so many people that want to work in baseball every year. And I went to the winter meetings. And one of my favorite things, it's the sea of blue blazers, all the kids that want to work in baseball all have blue blazers on. So you can always tell who the job seekers are. So I really want to try to help all these students and all these postgrads or older people that want to work in baseball, I really want to help them get the practical experience that they need that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to

get while at the same time learning everything that they need to know about baseball scouting. Obviously, they can't learn everything, but getting a foot in the door where they can go to an MLB team and say, I've evaluated these 50 players, here are my scouting reports, here are what I think of these players. So it'll give these students and all of our scouts a little bit more of a tangible work product where they can go to these interviews and not just be saying, oh, I've evaluated this person in your minor league system, I've actually done, I've gone scouting, collected video, I've collected velocities, and I can analyze what I've seen and provide that to you in a tangible basis, which I think is really important. And that's one of the main selling

points to our scouts is we hope that they graduate and go on from us and go to work for major league teams. So I tell all my scouts that I'm always willing to look over a resume or a cover letter, because I really want all of our scouts to graduate and work for another organization because I really think that that's the ultimate goal of my company is to have all these D2 and D3 and lower level D1 players go on to the MLB and see success. So we also want to have the same thing with the people in our company. We want to have our scouts, our assistant regional managers, our head of content. We want them to work for bigger companies and graduate from a startup to a more established

company because then when they go look at their resume, oh, you worked at this company. Oh, this person has graduated from Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network to the Ringer, to Fangraphs, whatever, to the Rangers. I think that'll just provide more credibility with our organization, the more people that we can get in those major organizations. Yeah. It sounds like Michael and I are going to be out of a job pretty soon with all these graduates of yours. I wish you some success. We're worried enough about Zach Cram coming up behind us

and making us redundant. So you mentioned earlier the importance of finding out about the person. Obviously, teams want to know about the person. They can look up the stats. And as the years progress, more and more schools will have TrackMan in place, for instance, and video will maybe become easier to get. And so one of the things that can set scouts apart today that can really provide value is finding out about the personality and the background and the work ethic and all of that. How do your scouts attempt to do that? Because I'd imagine you don't want to pry and be intrusive. And it's not quite like it is if you have, say, a major league scout at a

game, the player is going to be willing to talk to that person because they know they can dangle a draft pick. And maybe that's not the case with someone in the collegiate baseball scouting network. So what's the line, I guess, between trying to pry and trying to offer some useful information to teams about what one of these players is actually like as a person away from the field? Sure. So one of the most important things that my organization thinks is we want to really work on establishing relationships with the coaches of the schools that we'll be covering. So if one of our scouts goes to a high school game or a lower level D2 or D3 game, there's not going to be a ton of scouts there. So it'll allow our scouts to get more access to the players and to the team

than would otherwise be available, say, at a Vanderbilt or University of Florida or one of those bigger schools. Because I feel as, when we establish those relationships with these schools and they understand that we're really trying to bring exposure to their players and really want to help them graduate into major league baseball or get looked at by a top tier summer league or get a scholarship offer to a big major D1 school. We really want to make sure that we have those mutually beneficial relationships with the coaches and our scouts. So that's one of the most important things that we'll try to do in the spring season is establish those relationships. And we think that by establishing those relationships with those coaches, and by getting more access to the players than you otherwise would be able to, we think we'll be able to better analyze the player's character.

Because not only does it analyzing a player's character, it doesn't all have to do with meeting the player, talking with them. It's also about we're going to have those players, our scouts there from BP to the end of game. So they're going to be able to see, okay, does this kid pout every time he hits a fly out in BP? Is he going for home runs nonstop? How does he react to getting struck out on three pitches in a row?

How does he react on an over four day three pitches in a row? How does he react on an 0 for 4 day? So we'll really be able to show, we'll be able to analyze these players' reactions on an in-person level. So even though we might not meet the player in person, we'll be able to watch them in their games, where if you're not there, and if obviously some of the high schools might record their games on video, but it's kind

of be kind of difficult to see what they're doing in the dugout, see what sort of how they act when they're on the field or when they're off the field. So we can really see by being there, what type of character they have on the baseball field, because obviously, by talking to the coaches and talking to other players and other coaches on opposing teams, we'll sort of be able to find out and put together sort of a picture of what this person looked, what this person is like, not only on the field, but off the field. All right. Well, from reading our emails and tweets and Facebook comments, I know that we have a lot of listeners who want to get involved, who want to work in baseball in some capacity,

some students, some long since graduated, but still interested. So for those people, I know you are looking for writers, you're looking for scouts. So how can people get involved? Sure. So they can check out our website at cbscout.net that has our careers page and that has all the application info. We're on Teamwork Online. Right now, we're mainly looking for scouts in the West Coast region, as well as the Southeast as well. We've pretty much established our scouting in the Northeast, the Midwest, the Southwest, but we'll also be hiring again for next season, obviously.

So we'll be doing that hiring. We're sort of going to be establishing a May to June sort of internship session. So we'll be doing all of our hiring for next season in the spring months when we'll also be going through all our reports. So they can check out our website at cbscout.net. They could email our careers website, our career email, careers at cbscout.net. And definitely we want everyone to apply because we're really looking for people. Our goal is not just to be in America and scout American baseball talent. We really want

to expand further into Canada, especially in Vancouver, British Columbia. We want to expand to the DR, Puerto Rico, Japan, Korea. We really want to become an international scouting network and try to find as much talent all across the world as there can possibly be. All right. Well, we wish you luck. Today, Alabama, tomorrow, the world. Exactly. We wish you luck. It's an impressive organization and a great idea. And I look forward to seeing how it grows so people can find you on Twitter. Also, the network is at CBScoutingNet. And you

are at Justin Vollman. So Justin, thank you very much. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you are at Justin Vollman. So, Justin, thank you very much. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you guys having me on today. All right. Michael and I will be right back with a few quick closing thoughts. So I think it's really cool that Justin is like, you know, we get emails and stuff from people who are want to get into the business essentially, asking, what do you do? And the subtext of this is sometimes, can you help me get a job? And the answer to that is, no, I don't have any hiring power or anything like that. But the most important thing as a

writer, particularly a young writer, is getting reps that, if you're the kind of writer who needs to go to games, you know, go to games, write scouting reports, write articles. And I think a lot of the time people are just starting out, put too much emphasis on hooking up with a place like Fangraphs or BP or one of the SB Nation sites that has like an established cache. Like it's okay to just start your own blog. And I think it's cool that Justin went out and made his own, made his own platform essentially. And is, you know, giving a platform to other people and paying them, you know, which is rarer than it should be. You know, there's, I, you know, I guess that, that sort of spills over into advice that, you know, I would generally

give to the people who email me and by so doing make me feel old as hell. Right. Yeah. It's valuable to have a good school and a good GPA and be able to list various skills you've acquired, but it's very valuable, I think, to have demonstrated that you've done something, that you have a project, that you have a portfolio, just a proof of concept. It's not asking someone to trust that a smart person can turn into a productive employee, but showing that you've already built something and produced something that they would want to have on their team or on their website. And I think that's important for like, you know, you get to the BP local or something like that. Like, you know, I got to Grantland through Crashburn Alley,

which was on the ESPN Sweet Spot Network when that was the thing. But like the way I got good enough to write for Crashburn was writing for smaller blogs or, you know, just writing for my own edification. It's just practice, practice, practice. And, you know, it's not even like it is getting, you know, building a portfolio, but it's also like making your mistakes, figuring out what works for you as a writer and what doesn't. And sometimes like, just go out and do your own thing. And that's going to, you're going to get more control. You're going to do, you know, if you're writing your own blog, you're going to want to write everything, you know, every word that appears on that site, as opposed to paying your dues,

doing, setting up game threads or something like that. So I applaud Justin. It's scary because like you want to build that, you know, you want to feel like somebody's reading your stuff and often nobody's going to be reading your stuff. But I, you know, if you're, if you have that kind of constitution, I, that's one path that I would recommend. And I think it's very, very cool that Justin is, you know, gone out and created something. I agree. All right. This has been a long episode, but hey, we, we haven't done this in a while. You haven't talked in two months.

Yeah, we had a lot of content stored up here. You promised me a college baseball podcast. I did. You tried to run out the clock. So I don't think I didn't notice. It didn't work. So, all right. Well, hopefully we'll be podcasting again soon.

You all know when we know, but it's been a pleasure. Thank you for filling in. I miss you. The missing is mutual. So that will do it for today. Fortunately, we never started talking about the crown. Thisra who wanted to know what he should do to work in baseball. Ezra, this episode was your answer. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Richard Schaefer,

Kevin Dynan, Matthew Whitrock, David Rifkin, and Angela Pereira. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Closing in fast on 7,000 members. You can also rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance on this marathon episode. Please replenish our mailbag.

You can send us questions and comments via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. I will be back to talk to you later this week. Together.