Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1272: Take Money to Make Money?

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Trevor Story’s close call, then (9:04) bring on former MLB pitcher Michael Schwimer, the founder and CEO of Big League Advance, to talk about the mechanics and morality of giving money to minor leaguers in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings if they make the majors, […]

🎵 I say I'll make it Don't break out Dude, and you'll feel like the world's coming down on you Hello and welcome to episode 1272 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. You always make that into a question the episode number for those who don't know behind the scenes there is a screen that we're both looking at presumably that does have the episode number of the episode that we're currently recording on it but uh you always sound somewhat uncertain about whether it is actually that episode or not i'm never really

sure how i'm going to say it whether it's going to72, 1270. So I just kind of go into it and see what my brain does. And then I kind of surprise myself. It's a nice little, I don't know, three times a week, little miracle. Really, I guess I only do the intro like kind of once a week, some of the weeks. So every so often, I just kind of surprise myself. It's important to surprise yourself. So we have an interview today. Do you want to tell people about the interview? Because it's going to take up most of the episode yeah almost 98 of the episode will be a conversation between ben myself and michael schwimmer who is the founder the president ceo the everything of big league advance a company that you might have read about in recent months either in a sports illustrated feature that was written by jack dickie or perhaps like uh like

with us, you first heard about Big League Advance because of a lawsuit initially filed by Francisco Mejia against it. Big League Advance is a company best known for essentially investing in young players, paying minor league players some money in return for some percent of their future earnings. And so this is a really interesting model now. It's a model that I think we both wish didn't have to exist, it does given the current baseball landscape there's been a lot of conversation about getting money to minor league players to young players so that players don't have to wait so long until they can actually make a living and so we thought that we would talk to the face of the company who

says he doesn't really like to be in the spotlight but he has little choice but to do a lot of interviews these days because his company has had a little bit of a mehia related negative pr and. And so you got to go out, do a little bit of damage control, but more importantly, just to kind of get the word out there to let people know what your company is doing. And so we have a conversation with Michael that goes on for over an hour. Yeah. Ken Rosenthal has written about this company. Cheryl Ring has covered it multiple times at Fangrass. And Michael Schwimmer is a former major league pitcher himself, and thus, Schwimmer is a former major league pitcher himself and thus, of course, a former minor league pitcher. And if you read some of the stories about big league advance, he will explain that he has lived the minor league life and he has seen

teammates dumpster diving to look for food because that is apparently how desperate minor leaguers can get at times. And so his company has been somewhat divisive. There have been criticisms. We will raise those criticisms with him. And then we will, between the two of us, discuss the interview briefly after we finish talking to him. So we will get to that very shortly. But just a brief bit of banter.

But just a brief bit of banter, there was a scare for the Rockies and Trevor Story, who it sounded like briefly might have UCL damage, might potentially not be able to play anymore. It was reported by Ken Rosenthal that he did have some damage, but it sounds now like his UCL is intact, that there was only inflammation there. There's no structural damage. Hopefully that will be the case. Now, at this point in the season, almost no injury is truly devastating because we've just got a couple weeks left here, and you take out even a good player like Story and replace him with someone, and it can only do so much damage to your chances, really. Now, with someone, and it can only do so much damage to your chances, really.

Now, in this particular case, of course, Story is very good, probably would be quite a lot better than his potential replacement, and Rockies, of course, need every win right now. So, glad that disaster has apparently been averted there, although I will admit to wondering, when it looked like he might have UCL damage, whether Story, who couldn't throw, would be better than Ian Desmond. And that is, I think, an open question. Because if you were to play, I mean, we found out Shohei Otani is hitting with a UCL that requires Tommy John surgery. It's obviously possible. Now, I think the elbow that he hurt and the fact that he's a lefty swinger potentially puts less stress on his arm and makes it easier for him to do that, or at least more likely that he can come back and hit while he's rehabbing, which would not be the case for Story, presumably. But I assume that he could keep hitting with this injury if he did have this injury and you could just kind of stick him at first base and you only have to make so many throws at first base i guess the ones that you

do have to make are pretty important but the difference between story and desmond offensively pretty significant and uh the only problem is that i guess you might have to just move desmond over to short because i don't know who would play short otherwise. So you might be stuck with Desmond either way. Yeah, right. I know it was, I don't know, roughly a month ago, a little under, that the Cubs wound up training for Daniel Murphy, getting him from the Nationals. I was confused at that point why Daniel Murphy didn't end up with the Rockies. And Ian Desmond had apparently been on some sort of hot streak. I don't know.

But over the past month, Ian Desmond is last on the Rockies in war. He's had a WRC plus of 59. He's been very good he's stolen six spaces so credit to him harada para also been bad carlos gonzalez has been bad ryan mcmahon has been bad even nolan arenado has been bad but i don't know this isn't the point to talk about the rockies the point is that we nearly got to talk about a hypothetical that wouldn't happen in baseball but now we get to talk about the hypothetical about the hypothetical that wasn't going to happen in baseball. So Trevor Story, the non-throwing first baseman, would it have been better? I don't know, but it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't.

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the non-throwing outfielder, and that's obviously a bigger problem than non-throwing first baseman. I mean, first baseman involved in a lot of plays, but on most of them just has to stand there and catch a throw from someone else. So there are many games, probably most games, right, that the first baseman gets through without having to make any throw of consequence. I guess he would have trouble throwing the ball around the horn or something after a strikeout or throwing the ball back to the pitcher. But that's not such a problem. And I should ask you, put you on the spot here.

If you had to choose over the entire season, who has been the Rockies' best hitter, according to WRC Plus? Oh my goodness. Well, not a lot of great options to choose from. I would have said Deronado, but evidently not. Well, we're looking at Matt Holliday. Matt Holliday, who began the year on television. 56 plate appearances. He's got a WSO plus of 146. So Matt Holliday, a fun little late season story. I don't know how much it's going to matter, but he has been getting playing time in part because Hirota Parra is not good. So fun little quirk, Matt Holliday, TV analyst slash part-time Major League Baseball player player and he has been very good yeah by the way

one more thing about desmond i saw a discussion of this in a thread in our facebook group he actually has had a 2020 season 20 homers 20 steals and yet he is sub replacement level according to baseball reference so his is the fourth ever sub replacement level 2020 season he joins the illustrious group of joe car 1990. You can always bet that Joe Carter will be the answer to this type of question. And Ruben Sierra and Derrick Bell in 1993. Desmond also has the lowest ever OPS plus for a 2020 season. That's 81. The previous lows were Joe Carter and your boy Keon Broxton last year at 85. All right, so we've got a long interview lined up and then a brief conversation coming after that.

So we will just get right to that. We will take a quick break, and we will be back with Michael Schwimmer of Big League Advance. This song goes out to the great Roger Angel, who just turned 98. Still the greatest. Happy birthday, Roger.

Roger and Al, good buddy. the greatest. Happy birthday, Roger. Okay. And so now we are joined by a guest guest I think we've both long wanted to book. We have Michael Schwimmer, who is the president, founder, the CEO, the almost everything of Big League Advance. I think if you've been paying a lot of attention to baseball over the past few months and maybe you've been paying attention to the minor league pay versus major league pay disparity, you would have read a few articles about big league advance, and so we thought it would be sensible to talk to the guy who is in charge of it. So, Michael, hello. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you guys very much for having me on. Absolutely. And so, I guess the easiest place to start, for anyone who is not yet familiar with big league advance, which I think is the core of what you're working on right now is sort of, let's call it justice and pay in a sense for minor league players. What is the core mission statement, the core value of your company? You know, on our website, bigleagueadvance.com, we kind of have our mission statement lined up or, you know, the about us page, all that good stuff. But, you know, what we're trying to do is help players achieve their dreams. You know, minor league, I'm sure everyone in this podcast or most

people listening to it understand that the, you know, $5,500 a year in minor league pay, and it's really hard to, you know, make a living that way. So in the off season, if you're me, you're reffing basketball games, babysitting. If you're guys now, all the players we talk to now, I don't know if you, you know, the number one, the number one job is Uber driver in the off season. And, you know, wouldn't it be nice to have enough money where you can focus on training, eating healthy, you know, in all the, all those things and give yourself a better chance at becoming successful and reaching your dream, which is becoming a major league player. So that's, that, that is So that is the mission and that is the

goal of our company. So for those who don't know, you were a pitcher yourself. You made the majors with the Phillies a few years ago. You have lived the minor league life and you know how hard that can be. And maybe we can get into that. But this company is a company. It's not a charity. It is a for-profit business and that is how you present it. And for you, this may be a personal thing, and you may want to help minor leaguers because you've been one, but you have investors, you have a board of directors. Presumably, they are not all motivated by altruistic concerns. They want a return on their investment. Right. I'm not all motivated by altruistic concerns. I do think that

it's not a mutually exclusive situation. So as an example for me, had I had enough money, right, I made probably about a million bucks playing in the big leagues. And if I had enough money beforehand in the minor leagues, maybe someone gave me a hundred thousand bucks for 10% of my future earnings, something like that. Now I can go to ASMI, I can get pitching stuff done. And I can look really analyze my motion and make better decisions with mechanically, maybe I don't get hurt, maybe I make 10 2030 million dollars playing baseball. I'm not saying I would have or not. But my point in this is that you can both make money and help players. Basically, and really mathematically, all you need to do is be able to help them by more than the percentage that they assign to us.

So in players get to choose the percentage they give to us. A lot of players do deals for two, three, 4%. So the money they're getting for that, are they going to make more than 2% in their career by doing a deal with us? So it really doesn't matter how much money they have is they think, okay, by getting this money now, so I don't have to be an Uber driver, I can work out, will I end up making more than 2% throughout the course of my career because I did that or not? You know, and so I think that if a guy, you know, makes 100 million bucks and he does

do have 2%, we get $2 million, even if we gave him, you know, 50,000 bucks, well, maybe if we didn't give him that 50,000 bucks, he doesn't make that $100 million. So I don't think they're, you know, mutually exclusive events i think that you you can both be in it to help players and being it to make money i don't i don't think there's much of a difference honestly and jack dickey wrote an article about you and about bla earlier this month at sports illustrated he mentioned in there that you had signed 123 players with an average payment in the neighborhood of $350,000. Is that still up to date? Do you have any? No, that is not up to date. We're signing players every day. And since the Sports Illustrated article, been fortunate, more than 100 players have reached

out to us asking for two deals. And from that, I'm an ex-minor leaguer, can I work for you? I mean, it's been really positive. And so several you know, we've been able to – several of those players were on our list, and we were able to make deals and get deals done. So we are at, I think now – a lot of them are still in progress, but I think we're at like 127 now, if I'm not mistaken. So one of the reasons – I think actually the first reason that Big League Advance came to my notice, and I think this is something I share with a lot of people, but there was, of course, the temporary Francisco Mejia lawsuit that has since been dropped.

And I know that this has presumably done some damage to the company's PR, but Francisco Mejia ultimately dropped his charges. But initially, it seemed to feel like there were some predatory techniques and that your company, I don't know what the words were, maybe harassed him or essentially tried to take advantage of Mejia in signing him. Now, I understand, of course, because that has been dropped, Mejia no longer stands by those accusations. But I guess just for the sake of this podcast, you couldn't not ask it. What would be your response to Francisco Mejia? What was your argument?

So yeah, and I have no problems talking about it at all. So I certainly don't mind you asking. So Francisco Mejia, let me start by saying my job and the most important thing that I do is to make sure that the player understands exactly what is going on. And from day one, that was a priority for everybody. Myself, Paul DePodesta, partner, our board of directors. I mean, we have a lot of people with a lot of integrity and a lot of character, and we want to make sure the players

absolutely understand what is going on. So we take every precaution and make sure that that happens. understand what is going on. So we take every precaution and make sure that that happens. Not only do we send them the contract, we insist on them having their own lawyer review the contract for them. So even if, and we've had it many times where a player says, this is great, I'll sign right now. We say, absolutely not. You need to get advice from your lawyer, your agent, your financial advisor. We're happy to talk to whoever you want to talk to, to make the decision. Then once they do do that and they say, okay, I'm ready to go, here's the lawyer, here's everything that was reviewed, we then on video, we record,

we record questions, we ask the player questions to make sure they understand all of the material parts of the contract. So for Francisco Mejia who did a deal for 3%, you know, we did, we asked, hey, do you understand, you know, if you make $100 million, you're going to owe us $3 million over the course of your career, you understand if you make $500 million, you'll owe us 15 million over the course of your career. And we explained that the tax side of it, how we get paid all the material portion parts of the contract. Also, obviously, you know, if you don't make it to the major leagues, you'll never owe us us any money and and we do that on camera to make sure they understand before the signing occurs so it is again it is essential that that players understand I never you can has any players that have ever talked to me no one will tell you

that I tried to sell them to get them to do the deal that's not my job I would never be able to do it and I wouldn't frankly wouldn't be able to sleep at night I just want to make sure that the players have the option and they know this is available to them And that's my that's my entire job. So obviously with Francisco Mejia, you know the complaint That was the first thing that people the general the public had heard about us as a company and the complaint was obviously filled We were just completely false accusations and just straight lies and the good news about it from our standpoint was they weren't just like lies like a he said she said. We had proof to back everything up. So when he says he didn't have a lawyer review it, which he wrote in his complaint, we have an email from his

lawyer that he chose that redlines the contract in order to help his client Francisco Mejia. Okay, When he says he didn't understand the contract, we have texts from him saying that, of course, I understood the contract, but I'm upset. Look, when Francisco Mejia came out that we paid him $360,000 at the time he was, you know, when we signed him, he had 42 games in A ball, wasn't close to a top five or 10 prospect. But eventually he became that. And after that, the complaint came out, I had more than 50 people call me, hey, I'm so much better than Francisco Mejia. Why did I get less than $360,000? These are all players aren't even top 100 prospects, according to, you know, websites, right? It's just the players just generally think they're better than other players. So we try to

keep that confidential. But the point of the case was, you know, we look, we had everything, you know, full proof. And I think that once we showed that in discovery, look, here's the proof of what we have, that we did everything the right way. You know, he dropped the case and to his credit, apologized to us, which we did insist that it be public. And he did pay a portion of our legal fees for causing us the trouble. causing us the trouble. So I guess to be to be clear, now this is all over. But in in your estimation, so you signed Mejia when he was very new to affiliated baseball. And of course, he, he has graduated the point where now he's considered by some people to be a top 10 prospect of baseball. So in your estimation, do you think that Mejia filed this or that maybe his lawyers filed this because they just were looking for a way out of the contract they designed? My personal belief, and this is a personal belief, is that somebody told him, look, this is a big company. If you make a stink, they may settle and give you a couple extra hundred thousand dollars. And I think that he may have believed that and tried to do that.

That's my personal belief. I do not know that for a fact, but that would be my guess. And so as you mentioned, this was the way that a lot of people found out about Big Leak Advance, which is not ideal. And you had kept a pretty low profile publicly before that. And since then, you have talked a bit more. You are talking to us now. You are doing interviews these days. Is that in part a response to that initial way that people found out about the company and wanting to correct that impression? It is. And this is something that, look, I guess I said, you mentioned I am the president and CEO of Big League Advance, and I made a big mistake. And I'm the first to admit that. I personally

don't necessarily like the spotlight. I like operating kind of under the radar but that's not what the company needs the company needs me to be doing podcasts talking to you guys and explaining to people what we do because and explain to people the truth look I mean we we're going to lose money on 80 plus percent of our deals we have with players you know it's just simply because there's 7,000 minor leaguers, less than 10% will play one day in the major leagues, less than 3% will make more than two million, get to arbitration, right?

And here we are offering an average of close to $400,000 to players who have enormous amounts of career risk. And if they don't make it, they don't pay us back anything. Shoot, if they play three years in the major leagues, and if they do it, you know, they make 1.5 million, they're still paying us back 150,000, they still make a lot of money on doing this deal, you know. And if they become a superstar, then what I tell them is, look, if you become a superstar, if you do a deal for 5%, instead of making 300 million bucks, you'll make $285 million. So you are going to be losing $15 million

that you would have had if you do this deal. And that, that, those are really the only kind of three options that, that, that can happen with this. And as you mentioned, many players come to you for those who do not, how do you try to initiate that conversation? So right now, all players come to us in one way or another, and. And that is, so whether they come to us directly or they show up on our list. Again, we have 127 players now, one in every organization and multiples on different levels. So we'll call that player and say, hey, do you mind having Joe S. contact us? We're interested in doing a deal. And because players that do deals with us

love our deals and love what we do and respect what we do professionally, they always, every time make the introduction. And then they'll call us and then we explain everything to them. We had initially done it a different way with contacting their agent first until we found out that that was a big mistake. And so that's why we do it this way now. And I know that you keep the details of your model proprietary for obvious reasons, but there are certain players that you want to invest in that you see as good investments and others that you would not offer these terms to because presumably you don't think that they're going to be big leaguers. You're not going to make your money back. Can you give us any sense of how many players or what percentage of players your model

would say are good bets? If you could sign everyone who your model recommends that you sign, how big would your client roster be? It'd be huge. We'd have thousands of players in a five-year period or three to five-year period, which is how long our second funds last, literally thousands. But going into the model, it's not the players. You wrote in the article, and it's true that more than 75% of the players that do deals with us are outside the top 300 prospects when they do a deal. Now, for you guys as the educated listener, I define 300 prospects as top 10 in an organization, you know, which is not a perfect science, as you know, you know, the Mariners 11th best prospect isn't going to be as good as the Padres 30th best prospect. No offense.

No offense, Jeff. But, you know, so it's not a perfect science, right? But that that's how we do it. And we have there are guys that are top 10 prospects in all of baseball. So number one on their team, top 10 in all of baseball. Several that we won't offer deals to because they don't hit our model. And there are guys that aren't even in the top 30 that we will offer deals to because they are in our model. Our model is very, very different than what really other people look at. And I think it's really kind of groundbreaking what my team has, you know, I started it, but now

my team has really been able to crush it, led by Jason Rosenfeld, who, you know, Harvard graduate, two-year president of Advanced Analytic for Sport Club. And he, you know, he's the head of the analytics team and brought on an unbelievable team to figure out what really is important in baseball. And I'll just give you kind of a little tidbit, but basically nothing on a stat sheet matters. Not anything from batting average, the old school stuff, to war, to weighted on base, none of it really matters. Everything has to be conceptualized at the minor league level

to a point where, I'll give you an example. So me and Ben hit 10 home runs each, but I do it in Lehigh Valley in AAA in tie games versus Clayton Kershaw. And Ben hits his 10 home runs in El Paso in 10-0 games versus the team's fifth reliever. I have 10 times more power than Ben does in this scenario, at least. But in the stat sheet, we both have 10 home runs. Also, you look at why on-base percentage doesn't matter or WOBA doesn't matter because I'll make you the good guy here, Ben. So if I'm 100 for 100 with 100 broken bat doubles over the first baseman's head, right? And you go 0 for 100 with 110 mile an hour lineas right at the center fielder for outs,

you're way more valuable than I am. But WOBA, war, every stat you're looking at, all the sabermetric stats, I'm this great player and you're terrible. But our stuff, Ben is great, I'm terrible. Because that's a lot more predictive of future success. And really, the competition is huge. We wait. Look, you go to the major leagues, you're facing major league pitch. There's no such thing as bad major league pitching, no matter what people kind of say. And so when you're in the minor leagues, what do I care if you're putting up numbers against

bad minor league pitchers? You'll never face those guys. How do you perform against pitchers that we think are major league type pitchers? Because that's what matters for major league success. That's why you see a lot of guys that are these great numbers in minor leagues, they come up to the major leagues and they really struggle. Well their great numbers will most often come against bad minor league competition and against good competition they don't do it as well, but the sample size is less so their numbers overall will be more impressive. I should say that no offense is taken. I think

the Mariners first best prospect is worse than the Padres 30th best prospect, but that's, that's a different conversation. So I honestly, with the Padres, if you take out their top five prospects, I still think of the best organization in terms of prospects. Like they're so much better than everybody else. It's not even funny according to what we're looking at. So I guess two questions to go back to back. One, so what you've just been talking about, for example, it sounds a little bit like what we see at the major league level, expected Dwoba. We see this with Trackman stuff and StatCast stuff. So are you saying that, do you have access to minor league Trackman or Trackman-like data? I am not going to comment on that.

Okay. Well, then let's go with the second question. Going back a few minutes, you've talked about the players that you would like to get signed. You've also talked about players that don't hit your model. So presumably, because so many players are coming to you, you are having players come to you who your model likes and players who your model doesn't like. So what does the conversation go like when a player approaches your company and you don't want to offer him a contract? Yeah, so what we tell the player is, you know, I will, you know, give them time of day on the phone, obviously, and explain to them that we don't have an offer

and also give them like three or four kind of tidbits of what they can do to improve themselves for our model to get an offer and tell them that we keep them on the you know any player that reaches out to us we we keep every player on the on the you know the big board if you will is what we call it but you know and if they hit our model and we'll reach out and we'll make a make an offer but you know players are really gracious about it they understand and we'll also an offer. But, you know, players are really gracious about it. They understand. And we'll also say, hey, listen, we would still like if there's another player on your team that we like, can we reach out to you? And they'll say, of course.

So that player can also help, you know, in that regard. And we've hired several former players to work for us. So, you know, there's always opportunities after baseball as well. We try to help and do what we can. I'll give you another example. There's a guy, you know, Michael Barash, who I think, you know, we can say we did a deal with him. And then he voluntarily retired like a month later, two months later, we're not asking for the money back, we got no problem. In fact, we still talk to him and want to help him. You know, he's getting a job at Texas A&M baseball. And who knows that there could be a player from

Texas A&M we may like, we may say, hey, let's, let's reach out. You know what I mean? It's a play with the player's money. They can do whatever they want with it. We'll never make a penny back from him. And I, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to try to help him still. I know how hard minor league life is and I want to help out as many people as I can. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in the day, but you know, it's, it's, it's, it's what my passion is, is what I want to do. There is, I guess, a perception problem here in that I think the critics of BLA will say that these are players who are in a disadvantaged situation, particularly some of the Latin American players. You know, maybe they're young, maybe they're not getting the best advice, although, as you've said, you seemingly insist that they do. But I guess it's tough to get people to root for BLA because no one roots for Rumpelstiltskin in the Rumpelstiltskin story to get the queen's firstborn child, even though the queen agreed to give up the child

and got taken out of a tough spot. Of course, you don't collect firstborn children, probably a bad business model. Babies would cost you money. But I've seen people say that you are preying on or profiting from a tough situation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like just even you saying that just like makes my skin crawl because it's just a downright and outright lie. And anyone that knows anything about our company cannot have that opinion. I understand why people have that opinion initially because of the Francisco Mejia complaint. So I get it. Right. But anybody that knows about our company and how about this?

Talk to the people it affects. Talk to minor league players. We have players that have been released. Right. I mean, we are if you if you if you look at what we're doing. Right. If players aren't multi, multi, multi millionaires, they're getting money that they never would have been able to get.

Where is the this is what this is the problem with America, right? No one cares about the guy that doesn't make it. Nobody. So if there's a hundred people that do our deals that don't make it and now we've helped set their lives up. I mean think about these are 25 year old players that have no other life skills that now have to enter the workforce with a wife and a kid and now they have an extra couple hundred thousand dollars to their name that can start their second life. But apparently America doesn't care about them.

I mean, everybody should be rooting for us. You know, we're the ones that we are, if you want to say what we're taking, which I would never consider taking because again, we're helping these players, but we're taking from the players that have $300 million. You know, we're giving to all the players that have nothing, that have to start their lives all over with absolutely nothing. Now they can start their lives over with hundreds of thousands of dollars. And ask minor league players what they think about it.

Ask any minor league player what they think about it. So far to date, not one player. And we've got guys that graduated from Ivy League schools that do deals with us. You know, this whole like Latin player idea is so ridiculous. Latin player idea is so ridiculous. How do we have Ivy League players, players that have double majored, and they're doing these deals because they understand the risk profile here. Every human being has a different amount of risk. Let me ask you a question, Ben. Ben, what do you shoot from the free throw line, would you say? Gosh, I haven't shot from a three throw line so in years i don't know let's say you're 50 free throw shooter sure okay let's just pretend okay and if i told you here take this

free throw and if you make it you get a thousand bucks okay if you miss you get nothing or i'll give you a hundred dollars right you don't shoot you're probably gonna shoot the free throw if i told you i'll give you 10 billion billion if you make this free throw, or if you miss, you get nothing, or I'll give you a billion dollars to walk away, you're going to take the billion dollars. That's your choice because that's your – now, if I ask the same question to Elon Musk, it might be a different answer, and the numbers are going to change for everybody.

It's the person that's willing to take – what kind of risk are they willing to take? For people to insult players, again, they talk about Latin players, but you insult a double major in an Ivy League school because of their risk tolerance, I think is upsetting and it's just not right. So if we agree that the current system for paying or really not paying minor leaguers is bad, and you say that you're trying to help players in this position, are you conflicted at all about having a business that in some sense depends on that system continuing to be the system? No, I fight as hard as I can against it. Just so you guys know,

in 2011, I was honored with the Phillies. I was a team rep for them in the union, and we were the best team in baseball at the time. And at the union, one of my goals was, and I joined the licensing committee, the executive subcommittee that negotiates the collective bargaining agreement, and I went to Mike Wiener with his full presentation on how we're gonna save minor league baseball.

And my idea was all players that make more than $5 million give up 1% of their earnings, and they don't even have to, it's tax--free so it doesn't even go to them right the owners match it and now minor league players make $30,000 a year but this is the presentation I brought to them okay I have shown a track record ever since I was in the minor leagues of doing everything I can to help minor league players Garrett Brocious has got the the class action lawsuit trying to save my only place I'm working directly with him

I am fighting as hard as I can to get minor leaguers paid period now. This hurts my company I don't care about the company. I care about minor league baseball players. That's what I care That's why I started this and that's what I'm passionate about and I will do everything in my power But I hope to make enough money with big league advance so I can start a union and pay players my damn self You know, I mean this is this is what i want to do and this is what i am passionate about because it's not right it's just not right and the union won't change or do anything about it because as the union told me when i brought to them this plan they they you know basically told me to take a lap and hit the showers right i mean they said look we're a union and the union is the best union in the world the

best in the world at doing what it does, which is protecting major league players. And they're great at it. And Michael Wiener is, in my opinion, the goat. You know, Marvin Miller is the OG and Wiener is the goat. And he was great at it. But he said, look, my job is to protect major league players. You're asking me to take $15 million out of their pocket and give it to people we don't protect. Of course we're not going to do that.

You know, and that hurts me because these are the same minor league players that are going to be major league players. But the problem is it's not all of them. It's less than 10% of them. So no one cares about the 90% that don't make it. And these are my friends. These are people that I'm seeing that are going, starting their lives with nothing. And these are my friends that I grew up with. And that's why I started this is maybe I can help a few, maybe I can help a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. I certainly won't be able to help everybody, as you said, it is a business,

but that was my plan. And I would still fight, I would love to sit down with the owners and MLBPA and go over this plan and how we can really help pay minor league players. I would love nothing more than to do that. Quote, Michael Schwimmer, I don't care about the company. I don't. My investors know that. So when I went to every single investor meeting,

and you can ask any of my investors, I said, look, you can invest your money in Apple stock, whatever fund you want, or you can invest with me. And if Apple stock goes to zero, well, sorry, if every person we invest in goes to zero, never makes it, at least we've helped out hundreds and thousands of people. I thought every single one of my investors that. And I do care about the company. It's just not my number one priority. I just want to say that. Of course, I care. Of course, it was part of the conversation. So I understand when you first brought this proposal to the union in 2011. Obviously, as you say, it was, I'm not going to say it wasn't met well, but it was not followed up on. The union had minimal interest in doing anything about it since then.

Now, if you look at more recent headlines, I don't know how much of this is just, you know, social media bubble, but there is, it seems like there's been more attention paid to very, very extraordinarily low minor league wages. So this is becoming something more of a storyline. It's made several major news outlets not just the the subtle boutique analytical ones so when you're in your sense you have all these conversations with players and and the lawyers representing those players but if you've had conversations at all with teams and i guess i know that you have is there any sense at all from anyone you've talked to who works for a team or any even anyone who is in charge of a team that there's any any interest at all in the teams trying to change this on their own.

Because you figure one team has so little incentive right now to, like, maybe not so little incentive, but right now a team is not pushed to pay its minor league players more money because nobody does it. But you figure if one team did it, and if there were any sort of advantage to be gained there by the players just having better lives and developing better, then all of a sudden every team would go after the

exact same advantage. We're seeing this with the opener right now. The opener is spreading because the Rays have had success. Teams mimic one another. So if one team paid its minor leaguers, you'd think that it wouldn't be long before all of them did. So do you think that there's anyone out there who's even remotely interested in being the first to take the plunge? So the answer, and I can tell you, and I talk to, I talk to multiple

members of every single team all the time, right? With our pitching, with our pitching injury stuff and through Paul DePedesta's connections, my connections. And actually there's not one single person I've talked to that has not said that they're they love what I'm doing and thank God someone's helping out these players not one that hasn't said that they want the system to change but they will never say that in public ever not one of them and it's because it's it's their own these are all front office people these aren't I'm not saying owners tell me this right these are front office people none of no one thinks it's right but the problem is it's you can't change it one team at a time because it has to be a league change you know that the owners the owner it simply can't be a

one-off team situation I wish it could but I believe that they have certain you know rules as an ownership group that look they have a the monopoly on this and they're not going to change it and they have a stance on it and listen their stance is probably legally correct like I think if you look at this from a legal side of it and I'm not a lawyer but I think they have pretty good ground you know now if you look at it from a moral and ethical side that's where I have the problem but look there are internships people do take internships for less money

you know they are seasonal workers, whatever they want to call it. I mean, I can, I, again, I get it. I just don't think it's morally, morally right. And front office members, not one has ever said to me, what I think we're paying minor leaguers. Yep, that's fair. Not one.

And I'm talking, I'm talking, we're talking hundreds of people here, not like a couple. Not one has said what they think is, it's fair. But it's not up to the front office people. It's up to ownership. And I hope ownership comes together and realizes this. Unfortunately, they won't. And I know they won't because they spent $1.6 million lobbying for the Save America Pastime Act. And guess what?

The union doesn't push back. The union doesn't care about this. That's the problem, really. The union and the ownership, it's all about business and the bottom line. And companies have to think about the bottom line. And look, they're not, I understand 99.9% of companies think about the bottom line first and foremost. And so they're not different than that. The problem here is that each group, I don't blame any of them for doing what they're doing from a business standpoint.

The problem is let's get together and do something that's, let's do something that's right. And let's do something that's right by these people. Yeah, it's going to cost us some money. But at the end of the day, let's do what's right. Instead, the MLB spends $1.6 million lobbying for the Save America Pastime Act, which now essentially guarantees minor league wages to not improve, which was devastating for me to read. But you know, that's just, that's where they're at. I mean, that's the actions speak louder than the words. So one thing a lot of people have talked about is you look at last winter's free agent market at the major league level, and I don't think there's any real evidence of collusion,

but clearly teams were treating free agency differently. There seems to be less money available, especially to the middle class major league free agents. So there's been a lot of conversation about how the free agent market has changed. It's presumably not going to change back. Teams are smarter than ever with their money. So there's been a lot of conversation about the sort of conflict between the union and the owners at the major league level in that the major league players might not be getting the same kind of money as they did before. Now, that's a worthwhile conversation to have, but it's really a focus on sort of the 1% versus the 0.1%, if you think about who gets to be a major league for agents at all. So to have that conversation taking place about money at the major league

level, do you think that is a benefit to your company to have more conversation about player compensation in general? Or is it sort of a distraction to have people focusing on major league jobs instead of minor league money? I think this is one thing that the media has gotten really wrong, to be honest with you. Look, if I was running a team, I pretty much agree with the free. I think they were asking way too much. Teams are getting smart now. Why am I going to pay a fourth or fifth starter five to ten million dollars a year when I got my guy in triple-a that's gonna be just as good for five hundred thousand dollars you know I mean I I don't you I think is way

more on the class I think teams were really smart in this the teams were finally getting smart it wasn't the teams are stopped spending money as teams are getting smart and learning how to you know work the system which is what teams should do look the Patriots do a better job of working the system than any team in the NFL and they win. You know, the smarter the teams are and the more you can manipulate the system, the better you're going to do this. You see the same thing with service time and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. I mean, look, if I was a Blue Jays, I'd do the exact same thing because that's what the best thing to do is. Now, is it the right thing to do? Of course not. You know, paying these players,

I think is, I think is the class that was very, very different. I think there are 12 major league players right now that will make more than $500, half a billion dollars in their career. And the finances in baseball are only going up. And you've got to see this at the union. I mean, it's all based on the local TV deals. The Phillies are coming up. I mean, it's going to be crazy the amount of money that's going to be going to players.

Now last year was a complete, you know, it was the types of players that were available. And look, I mean, let's go back. Let's look and see. Were those players worth those deals? Everyone was complaining about it before the season. Were any of those players outside of JD Martinez, and he was the one that, you know, most people liked anyways, and he got a pretty good deal. But how's Lance Lynn doing?

How's Cobb doing? I mean, should they have paid him more? The team's made the right decisions there. And more importantly, it doesn't matter, even if they pitched well, they made the most probable and logical decision at the time. And that's not going to change until actually the system in the beginning needs to change

in order for that to happen. If the AAA starter make gets the major leagues has to make two million dollars instead of 500 000 maybe the math changes and now people get paid more so i don't blame teams for for making smart decisions i just think that when this stuff happens the system needs to change not the teams the teams should always be trying to do what they can to win games. And it's up to the league to change the system so that what's right fits what's the incentive to win. After you invest in a player, do you do anything to help them develop, to increase their odds of making the majors, whether to help them or to improve your own investment? Or is it just, here's your check and maybe we'll talk to you again when you make the majors? Oh no, we absolutely do. We, we, we, so this is, this is kind of a weird thing for me

because I know some players being a player, some players want the money to get out of my way. Anything you tell me, I don't care. Right. And I don't want anything. And there's some players that want everything. So I give the player a choice. I am here for you. Whatever you need, let me know. Now we're not going to do things like get them endorsement deals because that's what agents do, right? Or anything like that. But we've had, after the pitching injury stuff came out, we had several pitchers, hey, can you work with me this offseason to really help my mechanics? And now this is going to be tough because now teams have a say in what they think and I have a say when I think, but it's up to the player in the offseason. And I will work with every single player that we have or

don't have really because I want to see players perform and I want to see him give give them the best chance to succeed and I work with a lot of players on a lot of different things now again I have to be really careful because I'm not an agent so when they say hey can now I have this money where's the best place to you know invest this money there is a question I get all the time. And I have to say, and I would love to tell them what I think, but I also don't want to be treated like an agent. So I say, talk to your agent, talk to financial advisor.

They can help you. Even though I'd love to give them more of my personal opinion on that, I don't. But things like, hey, pitching mechanics. I have over half my pitchers at the end of an outing will text me, what did you think of the outing? I watch about 60, 65 games a night, minor league baseball games. Now keep in mind there's splits, you know, splices out. One game might take me four minutes because I'm looking for one at bat or a pitcher. And I'll go in, I'll tell them about the sequencing they're using. I'll go into everything

with them. And it's really, really helped. And we've had several players that aren't top prospects make the major leagues as pitchers. And they will tell you that it's because of a large part because of the help that we've been giving them. So the company is just a few years old, and it's been reported that you were able to raise more than $150 million from investors. And obviously, with the business model, you have to be willing to lose some money for a while, and then hopefully it pays off in the long run. So can you say anything about how long you projected initially that it might take for the company to be profitable and whether or not you're in line with that expectation? Yeah, it's going to be, can we be profitable before all my hair falls out? Now, look, we've raised more than $150 million. We've

returned about $300,000 or $400,000 to know, that's tough, but that's what it is, right? I mean, this is what it is. I told all my investors, again, the same thing. If you lose money, at least you're helping people. But also the best case scenario is we're breaking even on a player in seven years. They got to be, they're an A ball. They got to get through the minor leagues, through the first three years of that, plus a couple years of arbitration just to pay us back. I mean, that's seven, eight years on average. Now, again, we get players, we've actually signed some major league players, and very few, less than a handful, but every player's on a different track. And we've got guys that are in AAA that we've actually signed a player, three days later, he got called up. So that's happened as well. But

most, but the majority of guys are going to be in in AWOL when we sign them so yeah on average about seven eight years per player for break even so you are your company is effectively a source of money and of every player who is an affiliated bowler at least I assume the majority of players I guess I don't know at the minor league level but everyone has an agent so you sort of spoke to this a little bit but what is the relationship between your company and the various agencies? So we have a good relationship with almost all of the agencies and agents, and it didn't always start that way. And there are still some that are very against what we're doing. And the reason is, and this is what took me too long to kind of figure out, was I'll give you the whole story about it. So when I very, when I started this,

my whole thing was I'm going to go to the agent and the agent's going to love it because it's going to help their player become more successful and increase their chance of making it to the major leagues. And it doesn't hurt anything about the agent's pocket. That was kind of how I logically backed into it. Right? So I was like, okay, we'll go to all these agents. Our first 50 deals, we signed one player. This was abnormally smaller than I had thought was gonna happen, but it's fine.

Again, I'm not upset ever when a player says no, but I went to players that said no and asked them, hey, no problems, you said no, I got no issues with that, just out of curiosity, why? One player told me, I don't wanna give up 35% of my future earnings. Like, wait, what? Of course you're not giving up 35%, that's crazy.

Another player told me, look, I may not make the major leagues, and if I don't, I'm gonna owe you so much money and I'm gonna have wait, what? Of course you're not giving up 35%, that's crazy. Another player told me, look, I may not make the major leagues, and if I don't, I'm gonna owe you so much money and I'm gonna have to file for bankruptcy. Said, wait, wait, wait, wait, you don't owe us any money if you don't make it. You get to keep all of it. That's the huge benefit of this, right?

And I had explained all of this to agents very clearly. And then what I found out with one agent who's a good friend of mine, and I'm like getting flustered and calling this guy, I'm like, hey, what the hell's going on? And he says, Schwinn, how do you not see this? And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, look, I love you. What you're doing is helping players, but you also got to realize I'm going to forbid every one of my players from doing these deals. I was like, wait, that makes no sense to me. You're going to have to explain this to me. He goes, listen, do you know how hard it is being an agent? Do you know

how hard it is to find a player that gets to arbitration? It's two, three, and 100, right? I said, yeah, so? He goes, look, I have to sign a player every single year. So the player that, if you give one of my guys a million bucks, he doesn't make it, I get no credit for that, nothing happens to me. Now, if you sign a player for a million bucks and he is one of the very, very few

that gets to the major leagues, becomes good, gets to arbitration, now it's time for me, me being the agent obviously, I'm talking to him, says now it's time for me to cash in on this but I won't be able to because Scott Boras and other agents will come out to this player and say look how dumb of a deal you made with Big League Advance, you're gonna owe them so much money.

If I was your agent, I would have never had them do this deal with you guys. And then that player is going to then leave that agent and go to a different agent. So the original agent gets nothing from the player. So now I'm sitting here like, well, okay, so now I have to go to players, you know, because I can't go to agents because that's obviously what's happening here with a lot of these guys and why some of these agents are just outright lying to players is because they believe, you know, it's a, it's a revert, it's a, their, their incentive are not in line with the player. So the people that don't like what we're doing, there's only, again, a small number of people that don't like what we're doing. If you don't

like what you're, we're doing, that means that you only care about the people that make it and are uber successful and you don't care at all about the people that don't make it. And that's what the agent was telling me. Look, I don't care if the guy doesn't make it and has an extra million bucks. What do I care about that guy? I'm not going to make any money off him. It's the guys that make it. That's the only guys I care about.

So the core of the company's mission is to get minor leaguers paid when the teams are not paying them. But of course, you have at least more recently branched out into another venture, which has to do with injury prediction, injury forecast. Ben and I mentioned this briefly. This came up in the Jack Dickey Sports Illustrated article that Ben had mentioned. Toward the bottom of the article, it focused on an injury model that you say, I believe even you were surprised by how effective it is. Now, when Ben and I mentioned this briefly on the podcast the other week, we expressed a certain amount of skepticism. It seems like pitcher injuries are nearly random. Now, you tweeted, and I'll just read here.

Most recently had a, Effectively Wild most recently had a podcast relating to the predictability of pitching injuries. Unfortunately, they got a few things wrong. I am happy to come on the podcast to discuss at Ben Lindberg. So let's discuss. How would you, I guess, top down, what would you say is a summary of your pitcher injury model that you have been presenting to teams? Well, so when I started Big League Advance, I came up with the modeling of this. I was only investing in position players, not pitchers at all. like my model wasn't nearly good enough for pitchers as it was for position players and then obviously you know paul d podesta came on and really helped a lot of

the pitching stuff and really helped improve the pitching modeling but it still wasn't close to as good as our position players so we were still just going to invest in in offensive players and not pitchers the reason was we couldn't predict the injury. So we have these guys that this guy is going to be this great pitcher, and he gets hurt a lot of the time, guys on average. So they end up not making what we think they're going to make. So these are our models worse. And I was always obviously obsessed with pitching injuries.

That's what ended my career. In 2013, I had a tour in my labrum, and I got from Dr. James Andrews, talked to him at length, read everything I could read on pitching injuries, biomechanics, all that kind of stuff to see if I could figure something out. And I tried to test for things that people were saying and none of it really worked. But in order to test for it, I had to get all these pitching videos. I believe, including teams, I have the largest pitching video database. And right now, it's more than 12,000 pitching videos dating back to the early 2000s. And what I was able to do was look at biomechanics and really learn, use my knowledge about pitching to take angle measurements of certain parts of delivery. It ended up being 26 different angle measurements. So like when your front foot lands, you know, what degree

is your arm at flexion? What degree is your knee bend? All this kind of stuff, right? 26 of these I'm drawing out and charting for 12,000 pitchers, you know, my team and I, right? And just keep in mind, this was before, this is like a bunch of summer interns and people that are working for us. this was before this is like a bunch of summer interns and and people that are working for us this is before Jason and his group came in and what we found is look there are certain ranges you want to be in and and look I can tell like a pitcher has a high chance medium chance or low chance to get hurt but it wasn't good enough to be anything quantifiable so we it was good enough for us to use as our model but certainly not good enough for like teams you know I mean I look I mean someone yeah this guy's got a high chance.

Great. You know, what does that, what does that really mean? It wasn't until I brought on Jason and the team with Zach Bradshaw, who's a machine learning expert who won the Kaggle competition. Angus Mitchell, who was like a master coder we got in, who was teaching at the, he started his own code academy company. And really these, and several others, those are just two that really say, hey, let's take a look at this video

and all the stuff you have and all the documents. Let's see if we can make some sense of it. And what they did still floors me. So I was looking at it, and I think I'm a creative thinker, but I was looking at it so linearly, and it wasn't until they came on and explained to me that it wasn't a linear problem that it really hit me.

So, for example, for the 12,000 pitchers at foot strike, let's say the correct angle is sometimes, the most healthy angle is going to be between 20 and 40 degrees. So I was looking at 20 to 40 degrees. So if a pitcher fell outside, he was more likely to get hurt. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. You have to stop looking at everybody as a group of pitchers you have to figure out how they got to that position so how they get to that position and if he get if they get to it a certain way with all the all the angles before that then his correct

degree should actually be 35 to 55 degrees not 20 to 40 everything I was doing was true that the group as a whole should be 20 to 40 but on an individual you can actually predict where the angle should be at given points of the delivery I know is this making any sense conceptually yeah yeah so conceptually so it's like so I'll give you the exam the Chris sale exam so Andy Pettit is one of the cleanest deliveries we've seen in like history like he's got one of the best deliveries Chris sale by nature in my original models like this guy's all over the degree board like he's gonna be terrible right and then they show me no no no no look how Chris sale gets to all these positions and it ends up being one

of the cleanest deliveries we've seen you know we had an 8% chance he's gonna get hurt in three years in 2012 for For other people, we have a 90 plus percent chance they're going to get hurt in 2012, in the next three years. So, and if you're looking at that over time, if you look at like our predictions over time, keep in mind, the model is built before the back test. I think it's very important for the statisticians out there. This is not like a gaming of any sort of system. It works for any year going back. And if any prediction that we have a 75% chance or more that a pitcher will have a

major arm injury within three years, it's over 80% of those pitchers actually do. When we have it under 25%, it's about 14% that actually do. And we're able to really separate everything. It's not like only a few pitchers are in each. Two-thirds of pitchers fall in the over 75 or under 25 category. So, you know, I'm looking at trades, and I'm looking at this, and I'm looking at Taiwan. I'm going with the Mariners again. Sorry, Jeff. But this is actually a really positive thing for the Mariners.

We're looking at Taiwan Walker at the time of trade had a 91% chance to have a major arm injury in three years. They get Mitch Hanegar and Gene Segura for that. Well, if the Diamondbacks had our system, there's no way they'd make that trade knowing they're going to get somebody that has a 91% chance of having a major arm injury in three years. And so that's the kind of information that we're selling to teams.

Now, again, we're doing it in a very, very cheap way because I know teams aren't going to believe anything until they see it for themselves. And the idea is we're selling it very cheaply to teams initially. And that way, once they get it, they can see it for themselves. They idea is we're selling it very cheaply to teams initially and that way once they get it they can see it for themselves they're gonna realize how valuable it is now we do division exclusivity so only six teams can have it and no one else in their division can and that's where it's gonna really get bit up in the many many millions of dollars is what I'm projecting I mean it's a I mean these are huge decisions

teams are making and and look big league advance advance, this is what, you know, our motto with our team is we can solve the unsolvable. Like everyone's been trying to figure out which minor leaguer players are going to make it and which ones not. We've solved that. Millions of people try to figure out when pitching injuries, you know, how pitchers, are they random or more likely than others? And we've solved it.

And it's kind of shocking to believe that we did. I wish I could take the credit for it, but I can't. It's really my team that I had was the real reason that happened. So I think that, you know, it's a complex problem. It's a difficult task. It's not hard to believe that you could improve upon what's out there in the public sphere, which is essentially nothing. You know, it's just isolated, subjective opinions from evaluators that who knows what the

track record is or whether they actually proved to be accurate. I think the source of some of our skepticism was that you might have cracked the code of something that teams, of course, have been trying to crack themselves and have large R&D departments and resources devoted to this and millions of dollars at stake, and in some cases have invested in- Right. And we have way more. We have way more resources than teams do, is the answer. So how is that possible? Because I know that teams have invested in some biomechanical analysis or a company like Kinetrax that does markerless motion capture. They're all trying to do this. in some cases they have

access to the players directly you'd think that that would be an advantage in some ways so you would think why would it be so are you confident that really that no team out there has done what you've done and and if so why do you think that you've been able to do that i know that to my knowledge no one has however there is one team in the major leagues that has like a slew of super, super, super healthy pitchers. So my guess is they have something really close or if not what we have. But there's no way other teams do or else they wouldn't make the decisions they make. Be honest with you.

It'd be obvious if a team had it because we would know that every trade they make and everything they're doing, they're getting healthy. Like just again, you know, the decisions they make, you know, the fact that the Cardinals don't trade Alex Reyes I know the Cardinals don't have anything right because we we had him in 99% and he's number one prospect you could have traded him for an absolute you know package of three or four guys so obviously the Cardinals don't have something you know that you can you can do it that way and figure it out but the reason is we have a better team than anybody in baseball and it's because we can pay them you gotta understand teams there's

so many people so many smarts people that want to work in sports that they get paid that teams can get away with paying them fifty hundred thousand dollars a year you come work for me you can get double triple that plus get equity in the company and now you're working for a sports analytic company so we were able to get the very our team is almost 10 deep now of the very best. I mean, again, the Kaggle competition is a machine learning competition that it tracks like your skill.

We have the person that finished in first place in that competition, right? I mean, this is worldwide. Like the next 10 finishers, English was not their native language. You know what I mean? These are the people that we have that nobody else has.

So teams may have bigger budgets and can get different things done. We have, there's no way you can tell me that our team isn't the best sports analytic team around. You just can't tell me that. And it's because we can pay them more. That's who we get our guys from. We steal all these guys.

We stole one of the, a great young up and coming Dodgers analysts, we took him because we liked him. You know, we can take all the best guys from all these teams and they work for us now. That's why we're able to do what we can do. And that's why, and teams have noticed this. I mean, two soccer federations tried to hire us,

multi-million dollar contracts to do advanced analytics for their soccer team. Two NBA teams, two NBA teams contact me saying, I want to get rid of my entire advanced analytic department. I want you guys to be the back office on a multi-million dollar deal a year situation. I mean, the sports world knows because they know the people that we've hired and they know where they come from. And so, you know, that's the difference. And that's why we were, in my estimation, that's, well, that's not my estimation. It's what I. And that's why we were, in my estimation, well, that's not my estimation. It's what I know.

That's why we were able to figure it out. Our team was at least. And I think that we have access to more video than teams do, frankly. It's not about being around pitchers now. That doesn't matter. It's about, you have to test it based on pitchers in the past.

Obviously, with the injury model that you have, a lot of it is proprietary because this is something that you're trying to license. You're trying to sell. You don't want to give away the game. But one of the things that you have, a lot of it is proprietary because this is something that you're trying to license, you're trying to sell, you don't want to give away the game. But one of the things that you have said, and this, again, we'll just keep citing the Jack Dickey article, but you've said that you have, based on your own research, you've found that there does not seem to be much of a link, if any link at all, between pitching velocity and injury risk. Now, it's one thing to say that and find that in results, and it's quite another to explain it scientifically because intuitively it doesn't seem like it should make sense. So if you could offer at least a theory or two theories. This is where you were wrong.

I can imagine. This is why I want to come on the show. You bring up Alex Reyes, Michael Kopech. It's easy to just anecdotally say, well, here's the guy. Actually, we had Kopech as being pretty clean. We were wrong on him, by the way. So if you could i imagine when you you find a result like that and you think well how do we explain this so how how would we at least if you have a theory no i first of all let me start by saying i can just tell you what it is i don't have a i don't

have i can't tell you mathematically with certainty why it is i can just tell you what it is. I have theories as to why it is. My number one theory that makes sense to me is first of all it's the type of player that's getting hurt. If you look at Tommy John injuries over the course of years it's actually going down yet velocity is going up. So it's really hard, statistics people understand, to cause correlation. So I could say to you, listen in the last 10 years pitching innings has gone down. So if you pitch less you're more likely to get hurt. That's BS. We all know that right so but that's the same thing over time Velocity has gone up and injuries have gone up So that's has to be what it is because it makes intuitive sense

But those are people that aren't really thinking about the actual problem And here's why so if what you're saying is true that velocity matters Okay, then what you also have to be saying is that pitchers 10 years ago, 20 years ago, okay, they're not trying to throw as hard as they could. So what I know for sure in being a player and being around pitchers is that every pitcher since I've been playing has tried to throw every pitch pretty much as hard as they can. No one's sitting there for an entire game, I'm going to throw 90% the whole game. You're trying to get out, someone's trying to take your money

on the other side of it. You are going to throw as hard as you possibly can. So you're causing the same amount of stress, if someone's max velocity is 80 miles an hour, you are causing the same amount of stress if somebody's max velocity is 100 miles an hour. We had a Roldis Chapman who throws 106 miles an hour before anybody else did as a very very clean delivery so if velocity mattered

you'd have all those guys getting hurt but it's just not the case again they all try to throw as hard as they can so they're all putting the same amount of stress on their elbow and their shoulder it's not like all of a sudden some guy who was able to close their eyes take a magic bean and then they can throw harder than their ligaments could allow. That's not a possibility, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not a, because everyone's always trying to throw as hard as they can, they're putting the same stress on their ligaments as someone that's throwing, can throw at 100 or 80. And that's why we have, that's why our model is so good. We have people

like Jeremy Helixson, who throws, does not throw hard at all and he has what scouts would call it a clean delivery yet we had a 93% chance he was going to get hurt in 2012. this guy doesn't throw hard it's mechanics it's biomechanical now again I'm not trying to say that velocity has no impact on injuries because I did find very very weak correlation so there is a little correlation so it's not saying it's absolutely nothing to do with it. It's just such a small factor when you're thinking about when it comes into like biomechanical factors, which are way, way more predictive and way more significant than velocity. So you touched on this a little bit, but you have been proposing this model.

You've been meeting with certain teams. And I guess to whatever extent that you can open up about this, I imagine that most teams approach these meetings with, I don't know if it's cautious optimism or optimistic caution, but teams all want this information to be accurate, but teams also presumably are skeptical that it can be as accurate as you claim that it is. So what has been sort of the landscape of team responses that you've encountered so far? Well, so far, I can tell you every team that I've met with has verbally agreed to a deal or hasn't gotten back to me yet. So no team has told me no yet, which is good. And again, I tell teams a lot more than I'm saying on this podcast,

give them a little bit more information, but not enough to where they can copy it themselves. This is a business. But also in fairness, let's just throw all the cards out there. I'm going to the first of the teams that I know best that I know the front office guys, Paul and I know the best. So, you know, we haven't gotten to the teams that we know least. And my guess is they're less likely to do it. Again, I'm thinking probably 15 to 25 teams will end up doing this. And you'll see the teams that don't are going to end up getting stuck with all these injured pitchers because everyone's going to be taking advantage of them. So I think that teams sort of realize that and understand that.

And that's that's kind of the feedback we've been getting from teams. But all teams are very skeptical. I just want to say that up front, like they're incredibly, incredibly skeptical. It isn't until I explain the team and the backgrounds of everybody working on it till they do they really get it. It isn't until I explain the team and the backgrounds of everybody working on it do they really get it. So you are someone who clearly has pretty big ideas and is not afraid to tackle them. And I know this was something that you thought about a lot of out-of-the-box ideas

even when you were still a player. And in that essay article, there is one anecdote about how you thought that each team should have a designated fowler in the lineup to tire out the starting pitcher, which is something that we have talked about on this podcast. And I am wondering what other ideas of that nature or even bigger you might have. What's your next company going to be devoted to? Well, look, I got to tell you, all the old school baseball guys out there listening to this, if I took over baseball, you'd hate me. But this is what I think about baseball. I want to go and give you my overall landscape.

Look, the game is becoming less entertaining. Everybody kind of knows that. Games are long and there's not balls in play. Okay? The good thing is this is not unique to sports. So when teams get smart and figure out the best way to win, and that goes to less entertaining, you need to change the rules.

It's up to the league to change the rules. And we've seen it happen over and over again. In basketball, teams figured out that, hey, if I got a 10 point lead with four minutes left, I'm just gonna dribble the ball and play four corners. What does the league do? Okay, we gotta put a shot clock in because no one wants to watch that, right?

Then you get Wiltshire, you get all these great big men in basketball. Everyone's surrounding the paint, and now every lane is clogged, and it's just less fun. What do we do? We got to get spacing. Let's put in a three-point line. Look at how great these changes are. Yet at the time when these changes are proposed, you get the old curmudgeons that say, that's BS, you know, that you're killing're killing the game it's gonna change all the stats

with the three-point line blah blah blah well in baseball this is what we're seeing and I've got I think I've got a really good fix for it so because teams are realizing the fewer balls in play look you don't take the bat off your shoulders unless you can have it hit an extra base hit you got to get yourself on second base or better so you're seeing a ball in play every eight minutes. Why? Because the way hitting has changed from a mental standpoint.

If you talk to any player that played in 1990 or earlier, they're all what I would call C-ball hit ball hitters. They're not sitting on a pitch. Any ball that's coming at them, they're reading, reacting, and they're swinging and they're hitting. Now, just about every hitter is a guess hitter. You gotta be a perfect pitch in a perfect spot until you get to two strikes you know i'm sitting on if you're sitting

on a curveball and you get a fastball right down the middle you take it because it's not the pitch that you're trying to do damage with right so how do we change the rules to fix this it's pretty simple in my view first you get you have to go with an automated strike zone and i know you've touched on the automated strike zone in the past but but I think it makes the most sense. It moves the game along. It's easy, blah, blah, blah. But here's the key. You add the three-point shot to baseball. So the strike zone has nine quadrants, right? If you as a hitter take a pitch that hits the middle part of the quadrant, it counts as two strikes. Now it's statistically disadvantageous to take a pitch down the middle.

You could strike out on three-one count. You have to swing the bat more. You can't become a guess hitter. Or if you do, you better guess right. Balls will be in play twice as much. Games will take 15, 20, 30 minutes less if you do that. Now, all the stat people, baseball is a traditional game. I understand that, but I'd rather have a more exciting game for fans than worry about

old school stats and who can break whatever records, in my opinion. That's how I would change it. Another, you know, what I think I'd do well is if I'm in a situation, you know, I'm an efficiency snob and I like to see what I would do, you know, better and what teams are doing. I think teams can do something right now that would be completely game changing. And I don't know why team, all teams don't do this, but you, do you realize like, and I have not heard you talk about this on your podcast and I think it's so obvious, but you realize catchers call the game and pitchers. Do you know how much of a joke that is you're telling

me that a catcher who has to catch a slider at 86 mile an hour slider from hell in the dirt right that he has to simultaneously block the pitch while getting the exact reaction of the hitter to that pitch to know what to call next or you're telling me if a pitcher has to call the game where he's throwing a pitch or exerting a hundred percent effort and looking at where the pitch is going while simultaneously looking at the reaction of the hitter to figure out what to throw next. How is there not an offensive coordinator in the booth that has all the metrics, you use all the pitch FX data and you say, okay, this is the most probable pitch to throw. Then here's the reaction I got. You called down to the catcher, you know, just like an

offensive coordinator, wouldn't football and say the next pitch is a fastball away. Boom. Like, how does that not happen? How would you have felt about that as a pitcher or how do you think most pitchers would react? It's the best. If I got somebody that has the statistical capabilities up there, that's going to call the right pitch. That's the best thing. Are you kidding me? That, that, that, that, that's exactly what I want. And it's, it's, it's such a kind of an easy thing to, if you can make better pitch selections, why wouldn't you do that? And you're telling me a catcher that has to do all this stuff can make a

better pitch selection than guys. Some guy has all the data, all the information, all the sequences, all the algorithms to determine this and where the defense is playing. I mean, that, that to me is so easy.

And there, I have a hundred of these things that are so easy, but, but nobody does it. And I don't, I'll never understand why, but you know, that's anyways. We can talk on another podcast.

We can go over the other hundred things. You mentioned before we were recording that you could talk for 10 hours. We've already kept you for one. We should probably wrap this one up. But now we've left the door open for a future conversation about how baseball could be different and better. We've got a whole offseason to fill up in case you're not too busy. Well, I got one more stat for you. Sure.

The sabermetric stat of the day. You ready? So in all my statistics, I told you about how great my team is, right? And they did a full analysis and the single greatest and most creative podcast name in the world is Effectively Wild.

So well done. Thank you. We did not put a lot of effort into it. But how great is that name? It's perfect. I love it. Anyways, it turned out to be a pretty accurate descriptor. Yeah. But well, we appreciate that. And we appreciate your coming on and talking about your company and your various ideas. I think it helps to hear it from you as opposed to reading it from you or from someone else. So I think it has been a good conversation.

All right. Well, thank you guys again for having me on. So quick postscript to the conversation. I think we're happy that we got to have Michael on. He is an engaging speaker. And, you know, I had my doubts about the BLA model just from reading some of the things that were out there and certainly finding out about it myself through the Mejia suit. I think it was only natural to have questions about what

they were doing. And I think Schwimmer has done a decent job of answering those questions. And I think the way that we probably both feel is that we wish that there were not an opportunity for BLA to take advantage of. We wish that minor leaguers were paid and they didn't have to take a deal that potentially could cost them in the long run because they would just be making a good wage now and everyone would be happy and that would be nice. So in that sense, it's an unfortunate situation, but I don't know that I think that this company is making that situation any worse and that there's anything nefarious about it. And potentially it's making things better, at least for certain players. Yeah.

Like you, when I first heard about it because of how we first heard about it, I thought this seems like it's a company that could be preying on players. But I know people have brought up the student loan comparison, but really it's more of an investment. And if you really drill down, it is effectively a taxation system that takes money away from the most lucrative players, the players who are making tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars down the road, and then redistributing that money toward the players who are making next to nothing. And I think that's a noble goal. It's a noble plan.

Of course, we wish that this weren't the case. You do wonder when you're starting this company and you're telling other investors and other partners in the company, like, okay, this is the goal. We're going to start signing players now. They're going to be in the minor leagues. Maybe we'll start seeing money in eight or nine years. This is a real long-term plan. And of course, if you're signing players every year, then once you get to that six, seven, eight-year point, then in theory, you're starting to bring money back on a regular basis, especially if the company gets more and more popular. But yeah, I would imagine the short term, it's kind of a little difficult to keep up momentum because I don't remember exactly how long big league advance has been in operation, but it hasn't been that many years.

And so presumably they're still waiting on their first real big contract. You don't really sign for a huge contract until you're close to your free agency years. So it's a patient game, but it seems like it is a game that has its heart in the right place. Yeah, and I mean, rather than tax players who are making money in order to pay for other players, you wish that you could just kind of tax teams to pay for both. I mean, tax them in the sense that they would just pay these players a better wage. And, you know, whether for moral and ethical reasons or just for practical reasons, you would think that if these players think there is such a benefit to them in taking this money so that they can train, so that they can afford to live and eat, I mean, clearly no one wants to sacrifice their

potential earnings in the long run. They're doing this out of need, out of desperation. And you would think that a team, if only, you know, A, to allay that anxiety that those players must be feeling in the short term, but B, because if they think there's that much benefit to doing it, then there's benefit to, for the most part, want that to be the case. And as you said during the interview, if one team does it, then there's almost like a peer pressure, you know, not to break ranks, to be the pariah who's going to force all the other teams to start paying minor leaguers. But you do wonder whether some team eventually will decide to make that decision, probably not out of the goodness of its heart, but just as an investment in itself, the way that BLA is making investments in players. Right. I had this thought flying back from a trip a week

or two ago, just thinking like, if I could have a sit down with one owner and I could just, you know, it's impossible to get access to owners there. There's a lot going on in a billionaire's life. But Schwimmer alluded to the, I guess, potential existence of some sort of rules, some sort of understanding between owners that no one will do this. No one will just be the one team to pay minor leaguers. It has to be a league-wide decision. But I would like to know what the discipline would be if one owner did decide i'm going to be the guy who who does it because you lose your competitive advantage presuming other teams follow suit very quickly but on the other hand you would leave a pretty powerful legacy as being the owner who finally but look we it's really easy for us to talk about

other people's money just as the same when we're talking about free agency because we're talking about billionaires now and paying minor league free agents for unknown returns and maybe the owners ultimately don't really care. But if there are any owners out there in the Effectively Wild audience and if you're still paying attention to this postscript to a long podcast interview, just consider the possible benefits

of paying the minor leaguers. And at the very least, feel free to send us an anonymous email that highlights where in the ownership, I don't know, bargaining agreement. I guess it wouldn't be a bargaining agreement. The ownership scroll that you unfurl and you look at all of the rules in cursive that explain how an owner is to behave and operate a baseball team. Just highlight the rule that says you can't pay your minor leaguers because I would at least love to know if it's written down. Yeah. One thing that's kind of curious, I thought, it's been reported that Fernando Tatis Jr. is a BLA client. He has said so publicly and they don't usually reveal who their clients are. But in this case, he said he was one. And I'm curious about why he would be

motivated to do that. I mean, we can't really know the specifics of his situation, but he's obviously a top 10 prospect in baseball coming into the season. And he signed a deal with BLA last offseason, this most recent offseason, I think, which is after he had already reached AA and was a very highly touted prospect. And according to the article that Ken Rosenthal wrote, it allowed him to hire a personal trainer, eat better food, get a better apartment, etc. I don't know if those are just generic benefits or specific ones that he cited, but it's kind of curious. And, you know, he says later in the article that if he ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars, he won't even care about the cut that BLA gets because he will be rich either way. But I wonder, I mean, for one thing, his dad was obviously a big leaguer and made close to $18 million during his career. I don't know what their relationship is or what their financial situation is now. But between that, between the fact that he signed with the White Sox initially for $700,000, which is not nothing, and then he's also very close to the big leagues.

So I wonder why for a player like that, it made sense to do it. I could see a player in the lower minors who's maybe not that highly touted, not that close to the big leagues, not getting endorsements or free equipment or anything. But Tatis, I would not have expected because he just is such a good bet to make much, much more than that money. And now I guess Tatis can talk to Francisco Mejia whenever he wants about his relationship with big league advance and see how they feel about their long-term prospect. Yeah, that's right. And as for the injury model that we talked about, we don't know any more than you, the listener, knows about this model. And so in a sense, it's hard not to be skeptical. And I'm sure that Michael would understand that. And as he said,

teams themselves have taken a skeptical stance until convinced otherwise. And that's kind of the problem because he has this proprietary model that he claims is very accurate, but he can't tell you how it works because if he tells you how it works, then it's no longer of value to anyone. And so, you know, it's the old Sagan standard, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He is saying that it works and maybe it does, and it's certainly exciting if it does, and he seems convinced that it does. But without us being able to see what goes into it or even to see its track record of success, it's hard to do anything other than just shrug your shoulders and say, well, I hope that's the case because maybe it will help pitchers.

Now, I don't know. That's another question. Does it just identify the pitchers who are bigger entry risks or does it help you preserve those pitchers? To what extent are the flaws in the mechanics that make them red flags? I mean, to what extent can those be corrected or are certain guys just going to break and there's nothing you can do about it? I don't know. But potentially, if there is a way to change

players' delivery so that they are not quite as severe injury risks, that would be another bad thing about baseball that could potentially be improved. Yeah, right. I think we both came into this conversation skeptical about the injury model. I think we both come away still skeptical enough because, you know, we don't get to see it. We don't get to dig into it. We don't get to play around with the results and learn for ourselves. We have, I think, no choice but to be skeptical for a long time just because injuries have been the next frontier for so long. And you still see teams getting pitchers injured all the time. So it seems like the league hasn't quite figured it out.

So we are both very hopeful that either big league advances onto something or maybe other people are onto something at the same time. We don't really know. And I guess we have little choice but to monitor from the outside and see if pitcher injuries become more concentrated by teams. And to see whether certain teams have a consistent, sustainable leg up on keeping their pitchers healthy. And then we'll be able to glean, I don't know, something from that. Mm-hmm. All right.

So we will wrap up there and hopefully we'll have Michael on again at some point. So if you have feedback, questions, comments, we will file them away for the next time we talk to him. One more thing. Michael mentioned during the interview that you could ask any minor leaguer what he thinks about big league advance and that they wouldn't have anything negative to say. So I tried it out. I sent a message to Brewers minor leaguer Jonathan Perrin, whom many of you might remember from episode 1196. He came on and talked to us about minor league pay or the lack thereof. So he says there are a few

different people doing stuff like that. I know a few people who've been approached. It's an interesting concept, but the fact that something like this can even exist pretty much shows you everything you need to know about what is wrong with the way the pay structure is set up. Certainly an interesting business model. I'm interested to see how it pans out. I don't fault him at all. The current situation allows that business model to exist, and if anything, I certainly don't have a problem with it where he is investing in a player slash product more than the actual team is, and he won't reap near the rewards the actual ball club will if that player becomes an established big leaguer. So that is more or less what Jeff and I were just saying, but coming from an actual

minor league pitcher slash investment manager. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Invest in this podcast's future. Just go there, sign up, pledge some small monthly amount. Five listeners who have already done so include the following. Jordan Ryan Peterson, Andrew Taylor, Dustin Palmatier, Joel Gillespie, and Aaron Schaefer. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild.

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