Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1252: Beware of Baseball Grumps

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on an awful umpire call from the Mexican League, discuss the all-time top power-plus-speed players, lament Johnny Cueto’s Tommy John surgery, and acknowledge Mike Trout overtaking Mookie Betts on offense. Then they bring on Fangraphs writer Meg Rowley to discuss baseball grumps, good and bad broadcasting, the role […]

🎵 Again and again So special without suspense Welcome to the Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right. I understand you are going to miss Saber Seminar. I will not ask you why now, because I asked you that later in the segment we already recorded. In this episode, for pretty much the entirety of this episode, we will be joined by a recurring guest, I guess. Can we say recurring guest? Meg Rowley. I think we can. Sure. She has recurred.

Yeah. She recurs. She has one of her qualities. So Meg Row rally will join us and we'll talk about baseball grumps and we will also talk about on a darker note the roberta asuna trade and the fallout of the astros making that kind of maneuver and then that ends with the seattle mariners collapse in the standings meg will join us for about an hour and 10 minutes but before we get to that i did want to issue some sort of follow-up we talked a few weeks ago about a a

swinging strike that wasn't in in uh in the mexican leagues you uh you remember this segment there was very well how could i pitch a player swung and missed at a pitch the home plate umpire didn't react the catcher called for an appeal and the first base umpire signaled no swing and ball so that was the entirety of the video clip that i saw a clear swinging strike and then the umpire signaled no swing and ball so that was the entirety of the video clip that i saw a clear swinging strike and then the umpires decided to i don't know gaslight the battery and so i didn't really have any more information and that was uh very unusual but thankfully analyst and effectively wild listener octavio hernandez reached out octavio hernandez works with the diablos or at least he writes about the Diablos, I should say.

And he was willing to provide some additional information here. So I can tell you, maybe most importantly, I don't know which part is most importantly, but the home plate umpire and the first base umpire were suspended promptly for the rest of the season. No more umpiring for them. I believe fines were given to the other umpires for not immediately issuing a correction or uh just you know making sure that the strike was called but also importantly in that case the it did go in the books as a strike they they didn't uh they didn't allow it to stand as a ball even though the home plate umpire said it was a ball and the first base umpire said

it was a ball they changed the call after the pitcher came off the mound and the manager came out of the dugout they eventually turned it into a strike and as octavio hernandez pointed out it would have been fun to be in that conversational huddle among umpires just to try to sort that one out there there have been rumors that the umpires went out drinking the night before. I don't know if that's true, but it's easy to say because for one thing they're suspended and for another they made one of the most unbelievable calls that you'll ever see on a baseball field.

Real naked gun stuff again as Octavia pointed out. He did as far as the quality of umpiring is concerned in the Mexican leagues, it does seem like it is better than you might assume but you know this is like a major professional league and of course there have been some concerns with like game fixing and and just the league being something short of

perfectly responsible and ethical but octavio does uh give me a brief anecdote the that he has video of henderson alvarez you You remember Henderson Alvarez, Major League pitcher? Yep. Subject of entirely too many John Heyman tweets from like recent seasons. But Octavio says he has video of Henderson Alvarez almost going for the jugular of an umpire early in the season because he missed a middle-middle strike call when there was a base-stealing attempt. So, you know, mistakes happen. But I've seen middle-middle strikes called balls in the major leagues. I write about it several times every single year.

So umpiring in the Mexican leagues, pretty good. They're well-trained. Things are taken very seriously. The league issued a statement after this call talking about the umpires being suspended and how that shouldn't have happened. But, yeah, all pretty much resolved. We have great video, and i am relieved that it wound up with uh the pitch properly being called a strike because i honestly don't know what happens

if that were allowed to be called the ball as soon as you open the door for that one then the door is open for all it's just a whole pandora's box of umpiring yeah all right well the arm of justice has moved swiftly then i guess uh i guess we don't really have to feel bad for the umpires because they kind of brought that upon themselves. I don't know. That's like a level of incompetence where you can't even feel much pity because you kind of had that coming to you guys. Yep. I would agree with that. So do you have anything else you want to talk about before we move on? I suppose not because i'm actually the one who was going out of town and making us pre-record this episode so we don't have current fresh banter

because we don't know what has happened since we are talking currently but uh maybe you should try getting out of the house every now and then take a trip like me you're probably just uh sitting inside staring at your computer screen all weekend i feel like that would be bad for my skin i can tell you what's at least breaking news as of Wednesday, which is not breaking news for when this is published, but Johnny Cueto officially is going to undergo Tommy John surgery. It seemed like that was going to be inevitable. He had forearm problems that weren't getting better.

He was pitching poorly. Just another case of a player who tried to rehab and then was not able to come back and be healthy. Tommy John surgery is what happens with torn ulnar collateral ligaments, and God willing, Shohei Otani keeps it together, but the precedent is not very good. I will give you, it's kind of a stat blast, or it could be if this were an email show, but it's not.

But I did mean to answer this one in our email show. It's a fun fact, I guess. Home runs and stolen bases in the same game. I was asked about that. We were asked about that by listener Doug. He said, after watching Albert Pujols hit his 631st home run and steal his 111th base in the same game, I was wondering who has had the most games with at least one home run and one stolen base. My assumption would be Barry Bonds, just due to his home run and stolen base totals.

But maybe someone like Mike Trout is high on the list. How many times has someone hit a home run and stolen a base in the same game? Is the top of the list interesting? did it 102 times, which is pretty impressive. Lots of players never get to 102 homers or 102 stolen bases. He did those things in the same game 102 times. And then the next few names, probably not all that shocking. Ricky Henderson, 87. Alex Rodriguez, 65. Then you get Bobby Bonds at 61 Which is something that we were talking about On the Ringer's Slack channel the other day

We were talking about Vlad Guerrero And Vlad Guerrero Jr. And where he would possibly rank Among the best father-son combos We talked about that in an email show Not long ago But there's just no way that anyone Is ever catching Barry and Bobby Bonds

Because Bobby was very close to a Hall of Famer and Barry is maybe the best player of all time if you don't ding him for how he did that. So continuing with the list, Joe Morgan has 60, which is interesting. You might not think of him as that big a power hitter, but he was. He had power. Then Willie Mays, then maybe the first surprising name that you wouldn't guess, not an inner circle type Hall of Fame stat type career. Cesar Cedeno had 48 games where he had a home run and a stolen base. He was really an excellent player, but he just didn't age particularly well. He was kind of done as an excellent player in his, well, once his 20s were over for the most part, but he was very impressive

up till then. Then you've got Carlos Beltran, Bobby Abreu, Alfonso Soriano, Larry Walker, Tim Raines, Jeff Bagwell. That kind of surprised me. Jeff Bagwell, I forget that he had as much speed as he did. Jeff Backwell had 202 career stolen bases, which is pretty impressive. And then Daryl Strawberry and Kirk Gibson round out the top 15, or I guess we should make it top 16 because Jose Canseco is tied with Kirk Gibson. I also have my own mini stat blast. You might remember that through a couple months of this season, Mookie Betts was running a WRC Plus that was like over 200.

He looked like he could be the best player in baseball. Mike Trout, he's the best player in baseball. He's overtaken Mookie Betts in WRC Plus. This didn't just happen. This had already happened. But as we speak, Mike Trout is at 192. Betts is at 183. Jose Ramirez is at 174.

It's Mike Trout. It's always Mike Trout. Yeah. All right. So let's take a quick break and we will be back with Meg. me and it's about time you see that things ain't like

they used to be okay so we are currently joined by Hardball Times editor Fangresh writer and upcoming Saber Seminar media panelist Meg Raleigh. Meg what is going to be your role in the media panel at Saber Seminar media panelist, Meg Raleigh. Meg, what is going to be your role in the media panel at Saber Seminar? Did you ever anticipate you'd be on a media panel?

I didn't. I have to say, I hope people won't be disappointed because there are serious people on this media panel. And yeah, I wrote like 1200 words about Archie Bradley pooping himself. So I guess we're giving a full range of options, which is good, but I don't know. Hopefully people ask questions. It always feels a little weird when, you know, at Fangraphs you're like, oh right, I matter on this stage. And then you go up against people who like actually

do like real work and have access and talk to players and have stories and you're like, oh, you're like a professional. Yeah, it's like you leave your house pretty much every day, I would expect. Sometimes I don't leave my house during the day. Is Jason Benetti emceeing again? Because Jason Benetti's emcee skills

are second only to Jason Benetti's broadcasting skills. He is an excellent emcee. I think he might be. I will admit that in true form, true Meg form, when I don't have to plan a thing, I'm really good at like just showing up when asked. So I have not perused the agenda in full, although I'm very excited. This will be my first Saber seminar. And I know some of the people who are presenting who are very smart about baseball things. So I'm excited to learn and hopefully to hear Jason emceeing.

Yeah, Saber Seminar is the best. I am very upset that I won't be there. Ben will be missing Saber Seminar. Did you already explain why you're not going to be there, Ben? Explain why you're not going to be there, Ben. Yeah, I probably will have explained. I don't know. Podcasting in advance is hard.

Yeah, I will be in Missoula montana watching friend of the podcast and friend of the mariners ben gibbard play music and also other people at the travelers rest festival that the decemberists organized so i am excited for that as well i am only upset that saber seminar and travelers rest festival had been to coincide and i will not be at saber seminar so meg will be representing this podcast at Saber Seminar. But I do know that next week we're going to be talking again to Fernando Perez, who we had on last year for a live podcast. It was great.

And he's going to be presenting at Saber Seminar, and I'm sorry to miss that one because he assured me today that his presentation is going to burn many bridges. So I don't know what that means, and I look forward to finding out. Meg, you will be there. You'll see it firsthand. Yeah, I'll issue a full report. Wow. So by the time this podcast is published, you should have a post published at Fangraphs that is about, in general, allowing people to like baseball, but also you touch on baseball grumps,

and I wanted to ask you, first of all, what is a baseball grump? Well, so I was inspired by this incident. I don't want to call it a controversy. As I say in the post, like, I think we tend to, we have a bad habit of like indulging people's bad behavior when we, we maybe don't have to, like, there are times it's really important to get angry about things and like, and draw a line in the sand and say the things that we want to say when people behave badly. But sometimes it's just really dumb and we don't have to. So on this past Saturday, there was an incident, not a controversy, with the Braves broadcast booth. They were taking issue with the clothes that the Dodgers were wearing

during batting practice. It wasn't just an idle conversation. Like they definitely put some effort into this. There was video production and they had the broadcast team pull up video of BP. And it struck me as just this very silly and grumpy and unnecessary way of looking at baseball as it is now. And I would imagine that some of this is nostalgia and maybe a fear of slipping into irrelevance

that I think we all experience as we age. But baseball is very different than it was when these guys were experiencing it as young people. And that's okay. And there's nothing inherently wrong with Chase Utley deciding not to wear socks while he takes batting practice. Is that what it was?

Because I saw this story. Obviously, I saw the headlines about this story. But the degree to which I don't care about what the Dodgers were wearing while taking batting practice was such that I just I could not maintain concentration on the story long enough to actually ascertain what had made them so mad. So what was it that was angering the Grumps? Yeah, so Joe Simpson kind of took the lead on this. But I guess Chase Utley had sort of worn high pants like he wore his pants the way you do when you're going to wear high socks in a baseball game.

Because he didn't have socks. And I think Kike Hernandez had for one of the cancer charities, like the K Cancer t-shirt. And their issue, and again, issue feels just like giving them so much credit, right? But their issue seemed to be that they weren't wearing batting practice shirts in particular that identified who they were as players. They didn't have their name or number on the back. Now, in the aftermath of this bit of silliness, you know, people, I think, rightly pointed out that I guess that's pretty common for teams. I know that when the Mariners

take batting practice, they have players' numbers on their sleeves, but it's so small that unless you were sitting, you know, in the seats behind home plate and really paying attention, you wouldn't be able to necessarily pick out one player from another if you weren't already familiar with them. So it seems like a very silly kind of manufactured controversy. And of course, as these things tend to do, there was some doubling down around it on Twitter and a bit of kind of concern trolling, like I can't believe they would disrespect the Dodgers like this, as if the Dodgers, if they felt disrespected, could not then just walk up to Chase Utley and be like, hey, you know, put on a different thing. So it was very silly. And I wasn't going to really

say much about it, except that then on Monday, when we started getting more serious baseball news in sort of the aftermath of new bad tweets from Sean Newcomb and Trey Turner. And then of course the news that the Astros had traded for Roberto Osuna. It kind of stuck with me, those grumps in the back, because this stuff doesn't really matter all that much, right? It's like I said, it's manufactured controversy, but it strikes me that it, you know, we are living in a time, whether because of events in baseball that are more serious or depending on your view of the world sort of events outside of baseball, it, I feel, I feel guilty liking things a lot of the time. Like I worry about worrying, which is famously like emotionally healthy.

And so I wish that these guys would take seriously the idea that they should be talking about the parts of baseball that are great and inviting people to like whatever it is that they like about it rather than sort of hemming in the ways in which liking the game can be done in a good traditional way that respects the Dodgers and your right to know it's Chase Utley on the field while he's taking batting practice. So that was, I don't know, that's a long answer to your question. That's fine. We have people on to get long answers. When people give short answers, then it really puts the burden on us to ask more questions. Yeah, there have been other recent examples of grumpiness. Wasn't there a Matt Vesgergen grump about bachelorette parties at the ballpark?

And he didn't even explain what it was about that that was bothering him so. But evidently just the sight of people having fun. And I don't know if it was that they were not appropriately paying attention to the proceedings or I don't know what it was or whether that goes beyond grumpiness into just misogyny or what. But that was also a weird one that you can't even really follow what is making like when it's when it's like the John Smoltz kind of grumpiness where it's like baseball is bad now, I at least understand that kind of grumpiness. I don't care for it.

I hope I never espouse it myself. But that's kind of a tradition that's as old as baseball itself is, you know, former players talking about how the game used to be better in their day. And that cannot be the case. about how the game used to be better in their day. And that cannot be the case. It just can't be unless baseball really was the best in 1860 or whatever, which seems unlikely. So that I can follow, at least. It's not really what you want to hear when you turn on a baseball game that you just want to enjoy and you just have this middle-aged person just telling you how bad the thing that you're watching is.

have this middle-aged person just telling you how bad the thing that you're watching is but some of these other things i can't even really follow what the problem is yeah and i if we want to be charitable to sort of that maybe not that kind of hemming and hawing but i think that there is um a perception among a certain part of the baseball fan base and and baseball twitter whatever credence we want to lend to that, that the kind of fretting that at least the league does is sort of silly. So you see a lot of accusations that like Rob Manfred hates baseball. He doesn't like baseball at all. And, you know, we get kind of nervous about the stifling of innovation

we might get when we talk about banning things like the shift. And I think if we assume the answer to some things being bad for the game, we're in for some trouble. But I don't know that asking the question of, you know, is baseball doing okay is necessarily bad, right? Like that's how we show affection for this thing we care a lot about. We want to make sure that if there is something amiss that we're intervening on it early rather than letting it kind of get out of hand but i think you're right that this transcends that sort of healthy amount of anxiety that like i mean i'm not a parent that but that i imagine that like parents have for their children right where you have this background low level hub of worry because you like this thing a lot that you made and you'd like it to stick around and be a productive person.

But this sort of goes past that, right? Where it's like, well, we've tuned in. We decided to spend three hours of our evening watching this and now you're telling us it sucks. I'm like, it doesn't. We're here to watch it. We came on purpose. So I just don't know what, I don't's a it's a productive kind of thing and all it really serves to do is like make people feel bad about about liking baseball at a time when we do have

legitimate concerns about you know how many people are watching and going to the ballpark and that sort of thing it's funny you mentioned parents and and the just the background hum of concern because of course all of our parents have raised professional baseball bloggers, which, you know, they might respond to. Concern is justified. Yeah, concern very justified and ongoing at all family get-togethers. Now, with Commissioner Manfred, whatever his actual job responsibilities are, and to be perfectly clear, I don't know what they are. I don't know what a commissioner does except kind of manage the league and allow it to not collapse in on itself. I'll tell you what the commissioner doesn't do, and that's force the Wilpons to sell the Mets.

But that's for a different podcast. At least with Manfred, I appreciate that maybe he doesn't issue enough statements that are like, baseball is great, here's why. But he does seem open-minded in terms of ways of trying to make the game better and and trying to head off problems that are like clearly the game is getting slower and i i don't begrudge him for trying to make the game speed up so even though maybe it's not always clear that he does love baseball and maybe he doesn't love baseball like a child does i can i can approve of what manfred is trying to do but with these with these other baseball grumps we're just going to keep using that term i I can't tell.

Now, none of us, none of the three of us have ever been old men yet. So we have a different perspective than many of them do. And some of them are former players and some of them are just old broadcasters. But do, I guess this is really a question for either of you, but do you get the sense that there are a lot of baseball grumps? It's kind of a stereotype of people who complained about what the game is now and how it used to be. But is this, I don't know, in true effectively wild fashion, is this a trend or is this just an anecdote that we've kind of picked up on because there have been a few of them in a row? Well, I would imagine that baseball isn't so different from other aspects of our human lives where, you know, people as they age, it can be really disorienting to age, right? And we, I think three of us are relatively young people, but I'm sure we've all experienced this. Like I visited my family and my 16 year old cousin was there and we're not so far apart in age,

but she knows how to use Snapchat and I don't, and don't understand it and it is like purposefully not intuitive as a platform and it was one of the first times I was like oh my god this is how it happens right this is how the the disorientation in your own life begins where you just don't experience the world in the same way that you did for such a long time and you start to lose footholds and I would imagine that these guys, you know, baseball players, baseball coaches, everyone affiliated with the game spends so much of their life just in it every single day. And so I, I have some sympathy for the, the idea that like it is different than it was in a way that probably makes them really uncomfortable and probably

also makes them realize that, you know, were they young again, maybe they wouldn't have the same place in it that they'd had in the course of their career. And that all feels very normal and human. And I, you know, I don't know what the equivalent is in like running a soda shop. Wow, I sound like a 75 year old in, in, I don't know, being a doctor, being a lawyer, being a carpenter. Like, I don't know what the equivalent thing is in any of those fields, but I imagine that it's something that probably has happened in baseball for a long time because it happens everywhere for a long time. Yeah, I guess at a certain age, your nostalgia for things that you liked when you were younger

just kind of calcifies into thinking that those things were actually better, not just different or fondly remembered, but actually better. And I don't think we're at that point yet, but I feel like we're at around the point where that is supposed to happen. So I am watchful for that because isn't it like once you turn 30, you never listen to a new song anymore and you listen to exactly the same songs for the rest of your life or that's the stereotype it's like a thing that happens in your brain i think that you just kind of get closed off to new experiences to a certain extent unless you actively oppose that and i have older relatives who are kind of like that but i also have older relatives who are not at all like that and give me hope that it is mostly just a person-to-person thing and that if you weren't

like that when you were younger or if you're mindful of not becoming like that, then it's not destiny that you have to end up like that. And of course, there are lots of non-baseball grumps who are also elderly people and just never got the grump gene or it was recessive or something and it never took over. And you would think that like broadcasting would not be a medium that would attract grumps or select for grumps, right? Because half the job, most of the job is being likable. Now, I guess it's being likable to your audience. And if you're a baseball broadcaster, your audience is also largely old. And so maybe they are receptive to the grumpiness. Maybe being grumpy is a feature for a baseball broadcaster and not a bug if the rest of your audience is grumping right along with you. Yeah, so I will. I mean, I watch a lot of different teams, but I probably know in terms of longevity, I probably know that the Mariners broadcast team, the best in terms of familiarity. And I think you're right that there there can be active resistance to this

and people can sort of surprise you. You know, I think about someone like so Mike Blowers is on the the Mariners broadcast. and when he started broadcasting he was sort of a typical like former player right and he told former player stories and you know talked a lot about hustling down the line and you know a guy's grit and feel but I think that to your point about like seeking out people who maybe help you resist that impulse and I say that as someone who's like listened to paul simon every day for the last like week and a half you know he seems to have made an active effort a really active effort to talk to people in the game working now and figure out how to talk to them

about what they do in the game and i have seen i have noticed sort of the evolution of his broadcasting style where he's not gonna you know rattle off wrc plus for every guy in the lineup but like he knows what that is you know and he he's not so skeptical of statistics that he can't be conversant with you know jerry depoto when he gets in the booth or even with other broadcast partners who might be more statistically inclined so i think that if it takes a particular mindset and and I don't know Mike Blower, so I don't know if this translates to other aspects of his life, but he seems to have been resistant to staying stuck in a particular mode.

And it has made him not only seem open to sort of the, you know, the statistical revolution and that sort of thing, but also, you know, he's been less prone to some of the old white guy blunders with a diverse fan base and also a diverse team. And so I wonder if that conversation and the willingness to be in conversation with people and not just talking at people is a big part of what differentiates the grumps from the non-grumps. I mean, Blower still has his moments, but I think when he talks about how the game used to be, he's often sort of critical and self-reflective about the parts of that that maybe didn't make a lot of sense.

I know. I think it was probably eight or nine years ago, whenever Blower was pretty new, I remember even seeing them talk about UZR on the broadcast. And I thought at that point, like, at that point, that was progressive. Now, what we know beyond any shadow of a doubt is that the average baseball fan is old, also white and male, but just old. We're going to go with old, emphasis on old. And we know that most announcers in baseball, many, I think most, probably most, both TV tv and radio especially radio also old and i would think as we've sort of touched on the older the broadcaster and the more former player re the

broadcaster the more criticism you're likely to hear levied against the game today and there's too many strikeouts and not enough fundamentals and all that stuff players not wearing socks and batting practice i'd honestly before this i couldn't tell you if players did wear socks and batting practice many players i don't even I couldn't tell you if players did wear socks in batting practice. Many players, I don't even know if they wear socks. But anyway, I don't know how much of a relationship there is between the fact that the people talking about the sport are old,

so therefore the people following the sport are old, but can you... Who are some of your favorite examples, and I'll offer one as Pedro Martinez, but who are some of your favorite examples of people who talk about the game on a TV or radio media who are genuinely enthusiastic and curious? I'm talking not so much about writers like ourselves, but people who are really there with a major platform. I think, you know, his tenure since taking over the ESPN booth on Sundays has been sort of up

and down. But like, I think Alex Rodriguez has been amazing in, in studio, especially in the post season where you can just sense an enthusiasm about the game and all the cool stuff going on in the game. And, you know, how much better on average a major leaguer is now than they were 50 years ago,

just in terms of being an athlete. Right. And so I think he does a really good job. I think, you know, I'll say I think Jessica Mendoza sounds like she loves baseball more than most things apart from maybe her children. So that's cool. And it doesn't mean that it isn't critical or that you don't acknowledge the parts of the game that really could stand to change. But I think that when you come at it from an enthusiasm, it sounds productive rather than, you know, like you're trying to ruin everyone's good time. So that's good. I mean, I think there's

a kind of a next generation of broadcasters coming up that sound like they really might have a tonal shift. I mean, I can't imagine trying to follow Vin Scully, but Joe Davis has done a really good job. I think that Dodgers broadcast booth is just pretty great in general, and they play off each other well. I mean, we've talked about some of the changes in the White Sox booth that I think everyone approves of. So I think there are teams that are sort of embracing a way of looking at the game that is, I don't want to say overly positive,

but at least they seem to like it. They seem to like it and they seem to want us to like it with them. So I don't know. That does make me optimistic that maybe some of this stuff will phase out over time as we get people, you know, I don't want to wish people out of their jobs or anything like that, but as we get people sort of retiring and moving on and you have a new generation of folks who have been raised to see the game in a slightly different. But I think what bothers me is when you draw the wrong conclusion from that, which is that players are worse now and they don't know how to play the game or they don't know the fundamentals or whatever. The game is different.

And if you want to make the case that it's worse in certain ways from a spectator perspective, there are a lot of smart people who think that's the case, and maybe it is the case in certain ways, but it's not probably because the players are worse or they don't know what they're doing. It's because there are all sorts of underlying factors and incentives that have propelled the sport in this direction and are continuing to. So it's more complicated than just these young punks just don't play good baseball like we played good baseball. So if you fall into that fallacy, I think I could condemn that in a way that I certainly wouldn't if you just brought it up and discussed it and said, hey, I think that baseball was more aesthetically pleasing in some previous incarnation. That's fine.

It's all kind of a matter of taste but it's when you then take it a step further and say this is bad because these people are bad and we were better that's when you lose me well and i think that especially at this moment where the the game is dealing with some very real and pressing social issues that are very serious and are serious in a way that like baseball generally isn't right. It's, I mean, baseball is the best and we all, we three love it very much. And also it's pretend, right? It's made up. We decided it was like this and it doesn't matter compared to some other stuff. And I think, you know, when you look at the league and they are dealing with very real issues, some of which, you know, are a matter of making fans feel welcome and some of which are, you know, players saying things that are very hurtful to communities that, you know, they aren't a part of. for the people who are in the orbit of baseball players to then have a broadcast team care about Chase Utley's socks

just feels ridiculous. I'm like, if we're going to worry about baseball, let's worry about the stuff in baseball that matters. And to your point, if we want to, I mean, I love a good aesthetic preference conversation. I think that will come to no one's surprise. But if we're going to talk about what's wrong with the game, we have some really good examples of stuff that we need to sort out and think about how to address intelligently and in a way that is fair, but also compassionate. And let's talk about that and spend our energy figuring out how to address those issues in a way that makes sense for the people watching baseball and playing baseball rather than you know rather than socks who cares about socks socks are uh kind of a big thing we name teams after them all the time that's true so more than you think like yeah it's not just

the red socks and the white we've talked about this before but the cardinals are named after socks and i think there was another team too the red Reds? Yeah, of course. There we go. The Reds. Just four teams. That's four out of 30, which is two out of 15, which is a percent. Sox on the brain. And speaking, you mentioned aesthetic preferences. I would just like to say that as far as that goes, we were all wrong

about the Marlins. The Marlins are great. Their look is great. Everybody laughed at them because I think it was the whole Pitbull production that they brought out when they unveiled their new look but the marlins they look if they had a baseball team they'd be great but anyway it's like the the diamondbacks you know we hated those well i will speak for myself i will not assume that my aesthetic preferences are shared by other of you but i hated those d-backs uniforms and i think i kind of like them now like in a genuine way not in a you know no one else likes them kind of way but I think I really do like them and think they're kind of sharp and

snazzy and I'm very uncomfortable but I have come all the way around on the D-Packs so I don't know I like that I like uh I find that I like the good uniforms and I like the bad ones too I like the sometimes I like the bad ones more because it could be that I have no taste, but it's mostly just the boring ones that I don't care about. The D-backs, they took a chance. Good for them. Marlins, it's fantastic. Love seeing Marlins apparel when I've seen it.

And I've seen it. It's been around because people want to buy those hats. They're flashy. They look good. Yeah. I don't know. The aesthetic conversations are always weird because nobody knows anything. But yeah, it's, I don't know.

The aesthetic conversations are always weird because nobody knows anything. I do wonder with the broadcasters and the whole production, this is just a thought that I've only just had this week. But if you talk to your average baseball fan or maybe your average former baseball fan or not quite a baseball fan,

something you will hear very often is that people who go to the ballpark love their time at the ballpark and they don't care how long the game goes, and when people are watching from home, it's boring. This is not a new thing for this to come up on the podcast. Lots of people think watching baseball is boring, and I've started to wonder now how much of that is not because it's, I mean, baseball has always been slow. It's a methodical sport. Every pitch matters, so therefore there's space between every pitch, like 25 to 30 seconds. But I wonder now if it's less a matter of the pace of

the game and more if you just had, what is more fun? When you're listening to someone give a presentation or a talk, you are drawn into it when you can tell that the person cares passionately and is excited about the subject material. And so when you're watching a baseball game game and whether it's dry or you have someone who's just outwardly complaining about the game or the players who is who is that for who is supposed to enjoy that so i wonder if an issue that baseball might have to deal with is the fact that many of the television broadcasters just aren't sufficiently enthusiastic now we don't need to to upworthy the shit out of the game. Nobody wants artificial enthusiasm. But if you had, like Jason Benetti is a great example,

or you're just staying local. Aaron Goldsmith is another good example of people who are just so gripping in the way that they lend a voice to the game. It would be interesting to do a poll to do a survey of people's tv watching experience and try to separate it from like the team success because of course that matters too but to just see if people maybe in around white socks games don't find the game quite as boring as you think people would for a team that's so dreadful well i think that you've just found another polling post so that that's very fun. the province of former players.

You can do the same thing with the broadcast booth and that allows you to bring in different kinds of people and have a more diverse broadcasting core. So I think you're onto something, right? So I think you're onto something, right? It's like people who are genuinely enthusiastic about the game, people who like to have conversations with, you know, a lot of different kinds of people. And I think, you know, I don't want every broadcast to be something that is pitched exclusively to people who view the game the way we do, right? Because I think we need to acknowledge that, like,

not every baseball fan reads fan graphs. If they all read fan graphs, that would be great for fan graphs, but they don't all read the site, right? So not every fan is necessarily entering the game in that way. So I think the other thing that a good broadcast has to do is offer something to every different kind of fan as much as they can so that they are sort of respectful of the folks who have grown up with the game a particular way and maybe don't understand. I was at the ballpark today, and there were two gentlemen sitting behind me, and they looked up at the scoreboard at Safeco,

and I've heard people this season wondering, like, what does MV for mound visit stand for? But they were like, OPS. What is OPS? So if the entire broadcast was, you know, fan graphs, leaderboards, that would be a bummer for some fans. So you have to have a variety of sort of approaches. And I think if you also have a diversity of voices and underpinning all of that is just a really genuine crazy go nuts enthusiasm for baseball that you know you

have to dial up and down like you said you can't be you don't want the you know like all caps emoji version of the broadcast but you want someone who's genuinely enthusiastic and then able to pivot to different parts of the fan base and speak to them so that everyone feels going to keep mentioning him to pay him back for that shout out but he was just saying that there just has to be a reason why you said the thing that you just said and if it didn't add anything that doesn't necessarily apply to just casual banter but he was talking about it in the context of stats or graphics. Like there has to be a reason why you're citing that thing. And that's kind of what I always say when I'm talking about what I do or don't like about a broadcast.

It's just like, don't tell me something that isn't true or that is misleading in a certain way. Like I don't need you to be schooling everyone and teaching everyone the most advanced stats all the time and just making that an emphasis but you can just talk about baseball without saying anything that is actively untrue or devoid of meaning entirely like the classic example is just you know he's one for three against this guy and you can say that and it's fine but if you imply that that means something or that you should put some stock in that that and it's fine. But if you imply that that means something

or that you should put some stock in that or that it's predictive in some way, then I feel like you are actively misleading people. And that is the only thing that really bothers me. So I don't care if you go into a whole spiel about how it's small sample and it isn't telling and you need this many plate appearances for this stat to stabilize or something. I don't think we need to hear that on the broadcast necessarily, but just don't mention it if you don't think it's important or actually adds anything to anyone's knowledge or appreciation.

That would be a really good rule of thumb for Twitter too. Why are you saying this? What value does it bring? None? Okay. You don't want to stare at that too closely because what value are any of us? Yeah, no, that's a fair point. I forget I said it.

So we can just kind of make this podcast a little bit of a double feature, but we had a frenzied episode the other day after the trade deadline trying to talk about the 71 trades or whatever that happened on tuesday and so we we got to talk a little bit about the roberto osuna trade to the astros but we didn't get to dedicate an entire episode to it i don't know if it's worthy of an entire episode or i

don't know if it's maybe even worthy of an entire podcast season. Do we have seasons? This isn't a season. We do this year-round, baby. But anyway, Roberto Asuna, for anyone who doesn't know, I don't know what you've been doing, you missed the trade deadline, but Roberto Asuna, who is still suspended for domestic violence, is traded to the Houston Astros. And, of course, there was an uproar and a horrible, horrible statement issued by the astros that

essentially said we're liars about this statement uh that came out but i wanted to to talk more and collect some more perspectives on this because i for one thing i don't want to let this go you know the the trade deadline's over there are so many more trades that happened on tuesday so immediately asuna was almost out of some headlines but i one thing I've appreciated, like Buster Olney has continued to tweet about this, and he's got a major platform, Jeff Passan, toward the Astros to shreds, which I appreciated. I don't know how long these things have been happening. Of course, these are just white men who were writing these articles, and domestic violence is generally not something that white male journalists are able to speak to with very

much experience or eloquence. So I wonder, as we've seen Asuna's case is, of course, more severe and more horrifying than some of the other ones, some of the other players who faced suspensions, but this is not the first such player in these circumstances to be traded, to be good, to be valued, to be welcomed by a team. And I guess kind of the biggest question that I have is what, and sorry to put you on the spot here, but what do we do now? Yeah, so I would like to say actually very quickly, so I think that you are right. So it's important when we have these conversations, I think,

to center the perspectives of women, although there are men who are victims of intimate partner violence. So it is not exclusively an issue that occurs and, you know, affects women. But I think it's important to center those not exclusively the province of female fans or female baseball writers. So like, you know, Jeff, I'll say, I really thought you did a good job writing about it for Fangraphs. And I think it's important that when men are doing that, that they do it with some seriousness and consideration for not just the baseball, but the real human effect. And so, you know, we need to be thoughtful about who we're listening to and take opportunities to listen to people with expertise. But I do think it's important to have this be something that is a shared responsibility in much the same way that it's a shared responsibility in baseball organizations. So I will say that. But I think the league actually has the bones of a really effective domestic violence policy. I know

that they, you know, felt a need and a desire to be sort of moral leaders on this question after the NFL just horribly botched their own domestic violence policy in the wake of Ray Rice and many, many others. And so I think that it is a good policy in that it's collectively bargained. They have the buy-in of the union. I think that everything that we know about these investigations is that they are thorough and quite serious. And there's been a range of punishments and suspension lengths doled out, which I think, you know, it's icky to talk about this stuff in terms of severity because it's all bad, but there are, you know, meaningful differences between some

of these incidents. So I think that that part of the league's foresight to sort of get out ahead of it and also to acknowledge that these are often cases where you aren't going to be dealing with someone who has a criminal conviction, right? So you have to decide when the court system decides that they're not going to make someone unavailable for your baseball club, how do you deal with them? And I think that the one change that we are seeing is really necessary to that policy. And, you know, we saw the consequences of this with Aurelius Chapman, and we're seeing them again with Osuna, is that you have to make these guys postseason ineligible. And not forever. You know, I think most domestic violence experts and victims advocates will tell you that zero tolerance policies actually tend to be bad

for victims because if a woman's partner is going to lose his livelihood if she reports him she's less likely to report him to the authorities so if these guys are going to be in the league we have to figure out an alternative to that and we also have to kind of i don't want to infantilize them because they're making active choices but in some ways protect teams from their own sort of logical impulses, right? Which is that, of course, absent a domestic violence incident, you would want to trade for Osuna. He's a great reliever, and I'm sure he will be very useful to the Astros in their postseason run. and their postseason run. But we need to help teams understand that there are some things that we are going to say, we're just not going to let be market inefficiencies, right? We're not going to let it be an arbitrage opportunity. And so I think that if like you see with PADs, players were ineligible for postseason play in the season in which their suspension occurs, you would see that incentive sort of

maybe not fall away entirely. Like as soon as a young guy, he has years of control left. So there probably still would have been a market for him, but it might've been different and it wouldn't have necessarily incentivized a team like the Astros to go out and get him right now. So I think that would make a really big difference in sort of saying that we are not going to let

this horrible moment into people's lives be an opportunity for someone else. And I think the league has to step in to do that because absent that, I mean, this is an imperfect analogy, but it's like, and these are regulators in need of their own help. But you don't rely on financial services firms to regulate themselves. You have an SEC for that. Right. And the league needs to play that role of saying, look, we're going to we're going to acknowledge that front offices that are smart are geared to look at, you know, depressed assets, which is its own gross way of referring to human beings. But, you know, they're going to look at depressed assets and try to acquire them. And we're going to say that they are off the table for, you know, for a World Series run. And I think that would help a lot. that this has become a major topic of conversation and not just kind of on the margins of the sport or fringe internet communities, but major columns that are read by hundreds of thousands of people and major discussions. I mean, we are less than four years

from a point when there was no policy whatsoever. Osuna wouldn't have been suspended in 2015, right? It was August of 2015 that any policy was agreed to and put in place. So prior to that, he would have been just playing this whole time and probably suffering no repercussions, and no one would have been talking about it, at least not in the prominent way that it's being talked about. I'm trying to, I guess, derive some positive from what has been a string of negative stories in that none of these would have been stories a few years ago even because I don't think there was the awareness of the issues and just how harmful they are and we're years away from. I mean, the things that, again, we're not equating the tweets that are unearthed with what Osuna did, but the fact that that has caused such a firestorm is, in a sense, a sign of progress. in a sense, a sign of progress. I mean, I don't want to be the guy who's saying everything's great because things are better than they used to be when they used to be really bad. That doesn't mean that there isn't much, much work to be done. But the things that they were tweeting in 2011

and 2012, that was just how people talked, or at least, you know, adolescent males in many cases, and they could talk like that among themselves kind of openly because it just wasn't recognized to be as hurtful as it is now. And things have changed quickly to the point where this is not how players speak in clubhouses. And so when it does come out, you know, hopefully there is real remorse and these players are actually different from the people that they were then and it is causing them great shame and it's not just purely a PR thing, but they actually regret these things coming to light because it no longer reflects who they are.

That is what they say. There's no way really for us to know the truth of that or not. But this was kind of, you know, how players would talk among themselves to a certain extent just as a norm. And the fact that it is completely unacceptable now, I hope, at least is kind of like an intermediate stage along the path toward no one would ever even consider saying these things or it would be extremely marginal and you know hopefully we're in sort of the same middle ground when it comes to stories like osuna where we've gone from this would be completely swept under the rug no one would know no one would care no one would even suggest that a player should be suspended, let alone that someone shouldn't acquire that player because of this. You know, I don't know. I'm trying to find for the Mariners, right? We barely talked about that. I mean, I think that, you know, it's, it is discouraging on days like Monday to see

an organization like the Astros who, you know, their front office is peopled with some of the smartest folks in baseball and they just could not get out of their own way. in baseball and they just could not get out of their own way you know and issuing this totally like bum-fuzzled statement regarding osuna so there there is still progress to be made and i think that moments like that show us how far there is still to go but that i think you're right that the fact that we're even having the conversation that the league you know whether they were doing it because they felt a deep sense of moral obligation to the, you know, families of their players who are, you know, weirdly a part of that workplace, like they are entwined with a workplace in a way that I just think is so unusual.

I can't, you know, my mother is an employment law lawyer and I've described clubhouses to her and she is just like, how does that work? So it is a supremely strange workplace. And so whether they were doing it out of like genuine concern or PR, I mean, it matters, but in a sense it's advancing the conversation. And now we get to have these, these conversations. We do get to sort of hold teams to account to a certain extent. And I think that the general discourse, you know, there are always going to be fans who say, well, they just don't care. And, you know, there's nothing you can do about that. That's going to be a perspective that some people have about sports. And I hope they change their minds,

but no league policy is going to address it. But I think that if you, you know, you can look at this as a sign of progress. And I have some sympathy for baseball. It is very strange that this is falling to an employer, basically, to legislate, right? Like, in theory, the court should be taking care of this. And if, you know, if Osuna is found guilty, like, hopefully he'd be unavailable because he would be suffering legal consequences for his actions. But in the absence of our criminal justice system being able to deal perfectly with domestic violence, which we know it doesn't, I think that it is a sign of

progress and an understanding that, you know, that their fan base is going to, if the game is going to thrive, get more diverse, and that the people who are watching games are going to have a greater familiarity, unfortunately, with incidents like this, because they may have, you know, suffered them themselves. Or, you know, I suppose it's always been true that it may have been something that they've experienced in their family system. So I think that, you know, forcing those conversations and then making sure that we're listening as much as possible to people who have either experience with it, unfortunately themselves, or have expertise in how best to help organizations navigate this stuff and figure out a way to do it that's, you know,

sort of even handed, but also serious is really encouraging, because I think you're right, like, this would have bothered people four years ago, 10 years ago, but I don't know that the mainstream baseball discourse would have focused around it, even for as long as it has a couple of years ago. My fiance works at a college, and she'll talk ever so often about how weird and backwards it is that the college will often have to investigate cases of sexual assault so it's similar just on a grander scale here i do have two questions and i guess i should ask them one at a time i don't know how to overlap my questions but for the first of them then it's it's beyond obvious how the astros screwed up here they didn't have to This was completely unnecessary in every single way.

They didn't have to do this. We didn't need to go over that. How do you assess how the Blue Jays behaved in this case? They sent some mixed messages along where they said after the fact, it's really easy to say now, oh, we never wanted Osuna to pitch for us again. That's just easy PR points. There were times when they said they came to his defense. There were times when they said they were just going to wait on the courts.

From the time that Osuna was arrested and charged and suspended, how do you grade the Blue Jays, and what do you think they could have or should have done? Yeah, so I think that from a messaging perspective, it's been a really mixed bag. I think you're right that there have been times when they seem to have really gotten it and other times where they haven't, which is the thing I probably have the least amount of sympathy

for when teams screw up because it's like, you have all this money. You could hire people to help you figure out how to talk about this stuff in a way that is sort of appropriately sensitive. So that part, I'm not inclined to give organizations a pass on just because talking about players, even players who are compromised in some way, whether it's injury or lack of performance or whatever, is sort of part and parcel with what a front office does. And so, even though this is a much harder, less obviously a baseball-related issue, they are in sort of the business of talking about crisis, whether it's very serious or very minor. So I think that, you know, that I'm not inclined to give them a pass on. I think, you know, I think about what the Rockies did with Jose Reyes, and they just cut him. But they also did that because like Trevor Story was good. So it's nice that they cut him and just like ate the part of the contract that they had. But they wouldn't have probably maybe done that if they hadn't had a viable option in-house i think that you know if the if the blue

jays had really wanted to send a strong moral message they could have just cut ties but that probably isn't something that is um realistic even if we might want you know that kind of strong statement so i don't know I guess I'd give them like I don't want to give them a letter grade a low pass I don't know they're sort of like the Reds right like the Reds traded Chapman and didn't get a lot they didn't cut him but they didn't benefit hugely although I guess that sort of depends in the Blue Jays case on if Ken Giles can like pitch well again but they didn't so I don't know I think they did okay but they could have done better especially

in the public messaging so the the second question sort of the follow-up is say uh say you are a fan of of the Astros you're a fan of whatever team gets the next one of these players what do you do how do you how do you respond how much are you really looking for corporate morality? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I made the mistake of responding to some people on be or situation should be postseason ineligible by noting and he was a Dodgers fan he was wearing a Dodgers hat in his his Twitter picture that you know well the Dodgers they didn't trade for Chapman and and I just encouraged him to like be careful with that

because they will every team will disappoint. Like no team is going to stand up to their receipts perfectly, right? Every team has a bad history with something. They will probably mess something up in the future. All we can hope is that they sort of pass the test that is immediately in front of them and know that they won't pass all of them. And so I think that for Astros fans, you know, it's, it's not probably reasonable for us to expect them to like not be Astros fans anymore. And I think that people kind of find a level of comfort with it that's very personal. I know that there were a number of Cubs fans after the Cubs traded for Chapman who, when he would, you know, some of them did it when he registered a strikeout, some of them did it when he would get a

save, but they would donate to a local domestic violence organization so that, you know, they were trying to acknowledge this like gross situation and turn it into something positive for people who are still in a situation like this. So I think that, you know, if you have the means to do that and that feels right to you, that that's one way to do it. I think that one place where we can maybe draw a parallel here between what happened with osuna and and situations like sean newcomb and trey turner and josh hater is one thing i don't have a ton of patience for is fans of opposing teams trying to then leverage failings of players and use it as like a weapon against opposing fans because that's not

you being interested in like a a racism free game or a domestic violence free game that's like you using another person's horrible moment as like you know a hammer to take to someone that's a really unfortunate metaphor given this conversation but like it is know, that that has a kind of icky feel. So I think that Astros fans are going to have to figure out, you know, maybe they don't root for Osuna, maybe they root less hard for the team, maybe, you know, they contribute to domestic violence charities. You know, I think that if they feel strongly about how the team is behaving, they should make that concern known to the team because I do think that stuff matters to a certain extent. And, you know, I think they're in this unfortunate position where they have to hope that like if they make it back to the World Series, that some of the moments that are supposed to mean the most to them as fans don't have that guy on the mound. And so in that respect, the Astros really owe their fan base an apology,

I would say, because that's a bummer. That's a hard thing to negotiate. And like you said, they didn't have to do this. And so it's a bummer that they did. It might be the ALCS, but he's going allow like an unforgettable home run to rajay davis yeah it it is funny how those moments like you know you don't want to like you want to care about this stuff because you care about victims and you want there to be no place in baseball for violence. And it does, but it does kind of sneak up on you that sort of petty satisfaction when they fail.

Yeah, that is a tough thing for fans, I think, because your affiliation to the team predates this regime and certainly this decision and will probably post date it too and it's a lifelong relationship so when the current stewards of this franchise fall short of the standards that you set and then you have to deprive yourself of the pleasure of watching your team, which, you know, it hurts the team. It sends a message. And if you send that message, then that's great. But it's also doubly bad that in addition to this team making a bad decision, now it is hurting everyone else involved because it is depriving them of the pleasure of rooting for a team, which is not really for many fans or most fans the sort of thing that you can just say, well, I'll go root for this other team for a little while.

It's just it's kind of a hardwired thing that you grew up with and it's it's you're set for life. You're set for life. And so if you can walk away and just say, well, I'm not going to let this person's bad decision spoil all of the positive that this team has represented for me and will continue to. So I don't know how I would handle that. I don't know how I would handle that, but I certainly wouldn't say, well, you have to walk away and you're complicit if you keep rooting for this team that made this decision that you disagree with. Yeah, it's hard not to feel implicated by it. And I have a lot of sympathy for the struggle to know how to do that. I mean, I think that your obligation as a fan is to be, well, to be honest about what your organization did, right? Try not to minimize this choice and acknowledge it as a choice that they made and sort of accept that they've done this bad thing.

And so rather than be defensive about it, you know, be honest about what it is. And, you know, if you need to step away from it, I think that's fine. And if you want to stay and have honest, hard conversations, that's fine too. And, you know, it's like I love baseball, but like all of the like none of these teams pay their minor leaguers a living wage. You know, they do gross stuff. They make taxpayers pay for their stadiums. Like every team has has done bad things to varying degrees. And so I think that it's not necessarily useful to start comparing receipts.

But I do think you do have an obligation to be honest about bad behavior where you see it. And to the extent that you are comfortable, you know, supporting organizations that are going to counteract that stuff. And certainly being honest about what bad behavior they've gotten up to. I think that that's maybe as much as I would say that an average fan sort of has obligation to do, but yeah, it's, it's really a bummer. And there's so many fun players on that team. And this is going to, you know, this will follow them them this will be part of the astros postseason story and it should be you know that's that's not a a bad thing it is an unfortunate thing for people

who like that team and for players who you know have have not done what osuna did and you know there's no one to to blame for that but a front office that made a choice that we all find pretty distasteful we've we've talked about this for half an hour. We could talk about this for another three hours or more. I think for anyone who wants to read more on the subject, Rachel McDaniel at Baseball Prospect has had a very well-written article that was published on Wednesday that everyone should check out. And just to kind of close this down, I have been informed that Ben would like to ask you

a Mariners question. Oh, boy. Yeah, I'm sorry not to transition to a subject that would fill you with joy after the discussion that we've been having. But as we speak, so people will be listening to this in the future relative to where we are right now. So I cannot say exactly where the Mariners stand, which maybe is a good thing based on recent history. As we speak, the mariners have officially blown their lead i guess we can say that they are even now they are tied in the al wild card race with the

oakland days and i guess i want to ask whether it is better to have had a playoff spot and lost or never to have had one at all because you have had plenty of experience with the latter as well well well maybe in the future the mariners will will be back in the second wild card all by themselves it could happen possible it could happen i would rather have had this half season then i mean like je like Jeff can speak to this even better than I can because in addition to like experiencing it, he had to write about it. But like those soul crushing seasons when you're just so far out by July that you can't even look up, you know, those are worse because they're not fun. They're not exciting. And you just, you want to watch baseball. So you just watch bad baseball like every day.

And they lose by a lot. And they don't score any runs. You sound like a real baseball grump. Yeah, man. Well, at least I won't be nostalgic for the earlier days of my baseball youth. Although, like every millennial in Seattle, I do pine for 1995, so I guess I shouldn't talk about that. But yeah, it's been quite the fall.

I mean, we joked when Fangraphs went to Denver, I had the week prior in a fit of hubris said that, you know, we need to start talking about the AL wildcard picture. And we did. That wasn't a crazy take, but it ended up being a kind of cursed take. And I think the Mariners promptly lost five games of cushion. Yeah, it wasn't great today. Poor Wade LeBlanc. He didn't make it out of the fifth.

And the Astros hit some home runs as they are want to do and uh yeah it's it's gonna make the end of the year exit interview for the newly extended uh gm and manager really interesting i know you guys have talked about that but yeah huh we might feel differently about that decision come October. When the A's had the season with their 20-game winning streak, in August and September that year they went 42-12. That was amazing. They just sped right by the Mariners who played 500 baseball.

And over the past month and a half, the A's have gone 30-10 while the Mariners played about 500 baseball. You can say the Mariners have played worse and they have played worse, but honestly, full credit to the A's. They just basically don't lose baseball games anymore, and they have climbed all the way back. And it's funny, if not for the Mariners overachieving their run differential so much, we might be talking about how the A's are overachieving their run differential

by a little bit, but what are you going to do? It's going to be a fun two months. Yeah, I can't be the one who writes that take because i'm just gonna sound i'm gonna sound like a grump uh i i will say if i turn on the fan part of my brain i mean at least it's not the angels question mark i don't know i mean i guess people people probably won't delight. Like, they'll be excited for the A's as well they should be. Like, it's exciting. It's fun. And they have a lot of fun players.

So they're likable. But at least we are insulated. Like, people are just going to be sad for the Mariners. They're not going to delight in it, you know? It's not like if, I don't know, the Yankees never win again this season where people, probably including me, will be like, yeah. Yeah, at least it's not a collapse. At least it hasn't been to this point.

It's not like they just totally blew it and they were a week away from the finish line and they went 0-7 or something like that. They've been playing okay, about as well as you really could have expected them to play. They've just playing okay, about as well as you really could have expected them to play. They've just been overtaken. I don't know whether that makes it any better, but I don't know, maybe a little bit. I haven't really been in this situation as a fan, so I led a pretty charmed life in my time as a fan. Well, they get a couple against the Blue Jays. So, I mean, in in theory they should be in slightly

better shape come the end of the week but it would be very mariners to then hit a hard skid so i guess we're gonna find out as the constant ever-present reminder the rays according to base runs have the fifth best record in the american league the mariners are eighth five games behind tampa bay who traded ch Archer. Weird season, dumb sport. The Orioles lead the American League in runs per game since trading Manny Machado. I don't know what we're doing,

but Meg, thanks for joining us. They really do. Wow. That's amazing. And Nick Marquecas is a thing again. 2018 has been wild. Yeah, it's been Matt Kemp, Max Muncy.

Honestly, every podcast should just be about Max Muncy, but maybe that's what the offseason is for. Well, Meg, thank you very much for joining us. We kept you a while. I understand you have to pack and get to Boston, but you have successfully. It's always hard to record these podcasts in advance because you can't just necessarily talk about what's going on. You have to find some more evergreen subjects and we appreciate you coming to our reprieve. green subjects and we appreciate you coming to our coming to our reprieve yeah come to your aid yeah well i was i was happy to do it thank you for having me you can support the podcast on patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have already pledged their support include simon penchansky stephen wolkand daniel steinberg Adam Bichet, and Tom Lloyd. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and many other podcast platforms. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming either via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. So that will do it for this week. We hope that

you have a wonderful weekend. Even if you are not at the Traveler's Rest Festival or Saber Seminar, we hope you are doing something equally enjoyable, and we will be back to talk to you next week. 🎵 Music Playing 🎵 You could be the one, could you be the one that changes everything? You could be the one, could you be the one? You could be the one, could you be the one?