Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1298: The Paxton Pact

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Tommy Milone and Willians Astudillo, Bryce Harper‘s awful fielding in 2018, two more examples of percentages greater than 100, and Adrian Beltre’s retirement and atypical, incredible career, then (23:34) bring on new FanGraphs managing editor Meg Rowley to talk about both sides of the Yankees-Mariners James Paxton trade, […]

Skin can feel my lips, they tingle, tense anticipation This one is an easy one, feel the word and melt upon it Words of love and words so leisured, words are poison, thoughts of pleasure Die, and so you die Hello and welcome to episode 1298 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg from The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan from Fangraphs. Hello. I don't have a Williams F to do. Fun fact, nothing has happened, but I do have a winter ball. Fun fact. Okay. I don't know why you would be able to know this, but I'm looking at the Venezuelan Winter League,

the Mexican Winter League, the Dominican Winter League. Do you know what pitcher, at least what qualified pitcher, has the lowest ERA? I sure don't. Tommy Malone has thrown 34.1 innings. He's been playing in the Dominican. 34.1 innings for Tommy Malone. 21 hits, 0 earned runs, 2 walks two walks 32 strikeouts now he's allowed

three runs unearned i don't know i don't know what the deal is there but tommy malone era of zero over six starts so that's uh that's pretty special good for tommy malone who by the way was in the majors this past season yeah i don't know if uh i don't know if you knew that. As was William Sestadillo, who has still not struck out in 109 at-bats. So your daily update that nothing has changed. So later in this episode, we will be meeting the new managing editor, different from the old managing editor. You've met her before. It's Meg Rowley. She will be joining us to talk about her new job, but also at length the James Paxton trade from both the Mariners and Yankees sides. But just a couple of quick things I wanted to get to before then.

I wrote about Bryce Harper's defense. You have already written about Bryce Harper's defense. I think Mike Petriello is working on his own post about Bryce Harper's defense. This is the new Kyle Freeland, except about a player people care about and we'll actually click on so we all wrote about this because it is relevant he is the big name free agent one of the two and he had a horrific defensive season last year like one of the worst of anyone one of the worst outfielding defensive seasons of all time. It's odd because he doesn't really have a track record of this. He's been fine as a fielder, not amazing, but fine.

And everything just completely fell apart in 2018. And if you're a team that is thinking about giving $300 to $400 million to Bryce Harper, you would want to know why that happened and whether it will happen again. So you did some research that was useful to me because I didn't have to do it. So you've looked at guys who have just had a big single year decline in whatever stat you want to cite, and you can cite any stat for Bryce Harper in 2018, and he was terrible in it. There's a lot of consensus there. And you found that guys who really have a big drop off in one year tend to regain about a

third of what they lost in the season after that, which in Bryce Harper's case would still be very bad. If he were two thirds as bad as he was last year, he'd still be bad. So I tried to figure out why he was bad. And it's not just like a single season defensive stat thing like if you look I mean the eye test just look at the misplays there were a lot of them he just did not look good as an outfielder last year a lot of bad routes and just balls clanking off his glove and weird ones where he was just kind of standing there and didn't catch it anyway or he was going back on a ball and it just went over his head for no real reason. Just lots and lots of plays like that, which I embedded in my post, if you want to go click on it. And the odd thing is that he didn't seem to get slower, at least at

his top speed. Like that's the thing that would concern you if he had really lost a step. And Scott Boris, of course, had an explanation. He said that Harper's legs were tired because he had hyperextended his knee in the previous season and that that was still taking a toll on him. But his sprint speed on the bases was essentially the same. His sprint speed in the outfield, which is a stat I got from Tom Tango, was essentially the same. So his top speed was the same, yet he was truly terrible. So it's kind of a perplexing case. By the way, some of you

may be wondering whether Harper's playing center field had something to do with his poor performance in the defensive metrics. We did get some Lister emails about that. Not really, maybe a little bit. This was the first time he had played center in a few years. He had not played center at all the previous couple seasons, and this year he played more than 400 innings there and obviously in center he's being compared to a higher caliber of fielder which would make him look worse in a relative sense but he was also really really bad when he was in right field being compared to right fielders which was the bulk of his time and the bulk of his negative defensive stats so probably didn't help but wasn't the whole reason yeah i noticed in the what is it the one star plays that stat cast yes they track one through five star and in one star plays he was

like one of the worst outfielders i mean look he was one of the worst outfielders in baseball period according to the numbers but he i think he made something like 70 percent of catches on like the 91 to 95 percenters which is just bizarre it's the kind of thing that makes you want to write it off to luck but i mean it's it's just it's a terrible look when you go into a contract season yeah he even had a zero star play which he didn't make it i didn't even know there was a zero star play i guess it's just the plays that everyone makes so they don't even display it on the website but he had one of those it was i think it became a matt carpenter double where he was just standing there.

And I don't know if he lost it in the lights or the clouds or something, but he just stood there and it dropped. So lots of weird ones like that. But my theory, which I have developed, is that he was just kind of taking it easy out there a little bit more than he has in the past, which in one sense is not a bad thing because he used to be a guy who would crash into outfield fences and hurt himself. And he did that in 2013.

He crashed into a wall. He hurt his knee. He went on the DL. He had to have surgery after the season. And he tweeted something at the time. I will keep playing this game hard for the rest of my life, even if it kills me. I'll never stop. Hashtag respect the game. And he was 20 years old at the time, and people change between 20 and 25, and they change even more when they're about to enter free agency,

and perhaps when their team is not playing very well and is probably not going to be a playoff team, which was the case for the Nationals for much of the season. So I think, and the most compelling evidence to me, it's hard to say what someone's effort level is or whether he is easing off the gas a little bit, but there's a stat for everything these days. And there is a stat that Sports Info Solutions tracks, which keeps track of the number of times that a fielder dives or slides. Just literally, they watch all the plays and they count the number of times that someone dove. And Harper, as a young player, used to dive all the time.

So 2013, that year he hurt himself, he dove 10 times in 314 opportunities, which was the sixth highest dive rate among outfielders with a certain number of opportunities. So that continued 2016 to 2017. He had 764 opportunities, and he dove 11 times and slid 17 times. I know no one knows really what the baseline is for sliding and diving. It's like once every 60 opportunities or so, someone will dive. So in 506 combined opportunities in right field and center field this year, he dove one time, one dive, and he slid four times. And obviously diving is not always good. There are times when you shouldn't dive.

times when you shouldn't dive but the fact that he used to dive and slide all the time and this year he almost never did to me suggests that maybe he was being a little bit careful and you can understand why he would be in fact the one time he did dive he was kind of like cradling his hand after because i think he jammed a finger or something and that can happen and if you're about to be well he's already rich but really really rich, I can see why you might just kind of ease up and say, eh, I'll play this one on a hop. And it's interesting because he's shared in outfield some of the time with Adam Eaton, who is another guy who just is like a balls-to-the-wall kind of effort guy. And Adam Eaton has missed a good chunk of time due to injury. Now, he didn't in 2015, he he didn't in 2016 but then he had major

knee surgery and then he had some some aches and pains in 2018 adam eaton has played just about 120 games the last two seasons combined because he hasn't quit and so when when you have both hurt themselves running to first really hard and slipping on the back right so yeah yeah i believe i believe that's correct so uh yeah even if you do conclude now i'm looking at a mark simon article from uh from the the baseball info solutions blog from april 27th of 2018 and the headline is why does bryce harper have negative five defensive runs saved so it's interesting that this season bryce harper you know if you figured maybe he gave even less of an effort as the nationals faded from the hunt he was bad from from the get-go his his poor performance was kind of

evenly distributed but that the the idea that he gave less of an effort as the team faded from the race is different from the idea that he gave less of an effort because he was playing more conservatively on purpose now you could say because he wound up like 20 runs worse than average, he was too conservative and Bryce Harper would probably agree with you. But the good news is that Bryce Harper will be paid for what he is expected to do. I don't think anybody expects him to be a negative 20 or something like that again, but it will be very interesting to see where his numbers end up in 2019 for sure. Yeah. I'm going to guess this doesn't cost him that much and that teams look at this and say well he's been fine before he's not old his peak speed didn't decline so probably he you know i don't know if it's a good thing that he was taking it easy and kind of

putting his personal gain perhaps before the team and not going all out after every fly ball there are some also where he just like got to the ball and didn going all out after every fly ball. There are some also where he just like got to the ball and didn't catch it for whatever reason. So it wasn't just that he wasn't getting there. So maybe there was more going on. It was also his arm. His arm was one of the very worst in baseball, if not the worst for an outfielder. And that was weird too, because in the past, he's been pretty good at throwing guys out. He had one outfield assist all year this year, despite playing lots of games. But what I will say is that this was the first season in his career where he didn't miss a single game due to a reported injury.

And I would think that if you're looking at investing in him for the next decade or more, that might be a more encouraging data point than the defensive slide is a discouraging one. Just because when he was young, it really looked like the only thing that could derail him would just be him hustling so hard that he hurt himself. And he seems to have found the ability to downshift a bit, and maybe he downshifted too much, but maybe once he has that money and he doesn't have to worry about his financial future, he can just kind of go back to his previous effort level, but also not crash into the wall because that's not good either. So maybe he'll find the happy medium. Yeah, if I were a team, I'd look at Harper's numbers, but then I would

think, well, what's the underlying reason here? And if his athleticism hasn't actually actually really changed and if he's still running just as fast and maybe we don't have access to his first step data but if his reactions are are basically the same then i wouldn't be too upset or worried by him because you'd figure well the skills are all still there do you have anything else you'd like to say on bryce harper i don't think so okay so i know you have something else you need to do quick and maybe we should spend two minutes talking about adrian belcher I don't think so. Headline, darts players let rip in flatulence row at Grand Slam of Darts. Reuters. Players set more than just their arrows flying at the Grand Slam of Darts this week, with opponents rowing for who had emitted noxious smells during their match.

Media reported on Saturday twice. World champion Scotsman Gary Anderson, 47, won Friday's match 10-2 to reach the quarterfinals, but his Dutch opponent Wesley Harms, 34, said he was affected by the, quote, fragrant smell, end quote, Anderson, had left as they played. It'll take me two nights to lose this smell from my nose, Harms told Dutch television station RTL7L. RTL7L?

Anyway, sure. However, world number four, Anderson said, the smell had come from the table side at the Aldersley Leisure Village venue in the English Midlands town of Wolverhampton, suggesting it was from the crowd. Finally, the point. Quote, if the boy thinks I farted, he's one thousand and ten percent wrong. I had a bad stomach once on stage before and admitted it. So I'm not going to lie about farting on stage. He was quoted as saying by the BBC.

I might as well just read the rest of the quote. Every time I walked past there was a waft of rotten eggs, so that's why I was thinking it was him. It was bad, it was a stink. Then he started to play better, and I thought he must have needed to get some wind out if somebody has done that they need to see a doctor. Seemingly, he says it was me but i

would admit it what is the deal with so much farting happening in the grand slam of darts i don't know but judging by the attention it received they should fart more often because it would be good for darts as a sport i mean i lost track of how many people sent this to us it was definitely upwards of 30. So thanks to all of you. But I thought we were done talking about more than 100%. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah.

Wait. Oh, I didn't read this all the way to the end. This is by the PDC chairman, Barry Hearn, who has helped transform a sport which now attracts sellout crowds. Anyway, on a slightly more serious note, this is a top-level competition involving highly skilled sportsmen, so we have no intention of renaming the event the Grand Slam of Farts, as some have suggested at a turn. I have, that's right up there with the drunk curling team in fun stories from the past few days about sports that we perhaps should pay more attention to. I have one more note about the greater than 100% thing. And this one, I just sent you a link. I'm going to play a very quick clip here.

This is from a Fangraphs Audio episode, episode 636. a very quick clip here. This is from a Fangraphs Audio episode, episode 636. Listener Roland was going back and listening to old episodes of that podcast to mourn Carson's departure, and he was listening to an episode you were on, in which you were talking about the only rule is it has

to work, and he was asking whether you had been invited to participate in the project, I believe, and here's the clip. No, I'm pretty sure that was a Ben and Sam project. But I think now Grant Brisby and I want to write a book basically driven 110% by jealousy of their book. Yeah.

And I don't know what we would title our book. Can you become the GMs of another team in the, whatever, the Pecos Bill League or whatever it's called? Just have a rival team just erase them to the conclusion of the book by the way that's a great sequel to that book 110 percent jeff sullivan you said it and i have now listened to the clip in its entirety and uh and i stand by what i said now grant and i never got around to it because we're also driven 115% by apathy and by laziness and by remembering that whatever jealousy one possesses is fleeting because you become

preoccupied by worries about your own existence and death. So we have not gotten around to writing a book, but if we did, it would be 110% better than yours. Okay. All right. And then, yeah, let's just a couple minutes on Adrian Beltre. I think we probably talked about him last year when he got his 3,000th hit. I know I wrote about him. I'll link to that. He's had a fascinating career. It is over now. He has announced that he is retiring, which is sad. I don't think any of us wants to lose Adrian Beltre as a player or as a personality. He will be missed in GIF gifts and also on the field. And he's just a really interesting career trajectory. As I think we've talked about before,

he went from being underrated because he was great at defense and we couldn't account for defense. And he was a good hitter that looked worse because of the park he played in. And so as time went on, we got better at appreciating how good he had already been in his 20s with the Mariners when he was seen as disappointing with the Dodgers. underrated that whole time. But then after age 30, he became incredible and just got better and didn't get any worse on defense, but became a better hitter. And I tweeted this earlier, but in terms of position players from ages 31 to 39, Adrian Beltre ranks eighth all time in war. And the other names up there are, you know, inner circle hall of famers so he has been that kind of player for the past decade so he's not just one of the best recent players he's really one of the best players certainly at that position of all time and it took him a while to get there

and it took us even longer to realize that he had been closer to that for longer than we thought and this is a player who, Adrian Beltre, if he were to play next season as a 40-year-old, which he's not going to, but he's projected by Steamer to be a 2.3 war player. So, you know, you see a lot of players who get to the end of the line, and maybe they're a little slow to realize it, and they just kind of get worse, and they get quite bad before they fade away. Maybe they end up even having to take like a spring training NRI or something. But Adrian Belcher, last season, he was hurt and he didn't play up to his usual standards.

But Adrian Belcher was a fine player in his final season with the Rangers at the age of 39. And he would be projected to be an above average player again if he came back. His defense just never really waned. He was a great defender at third base almost until the end. I don't know. I haven't checked the math to see how many players have been so much more valuable in their 30s than they were before their 30s. I'm sure somebody else has already run those numbers or will shortly, or maybe it'll even

be me. But we figure he would be at or near the top of that list. Just a really truly remarkable career it's amazing i know we've talked about this before but it's amazing to me how so much consensus seems to have built around the idea of him not just being a hall of famer but a first ballot hall of famer which is one of those honors that is doled out to few and players few and far between and i i hadn't thought of adrian beltree as necessarily having a first ballot hall of fame career but then i don't really care about the designations

if a guy's good enough for the hall of fame just put him in right is where where i stand and i i wouldn't want to visit a hall of fame that didn't have adrian beltree in it now i wouldn't want to be a baseball fan of a league that doesn't have adrian beltree in it and that's for the first time in my adult life. That's something that I will be confronted by, which is sad. He's been in the major since 1998. He's been in the major since basically the beginning of what has been called the steroid era. And or the first juiced ball era, depending on how many Ben Lindbergh articles you've read.

He's just crossed a lot of different eras in baseball he was around a decade before there's pitch effects I remember in his final season with with the Mariners he was playing with through some injury problems but he had a WRC plus of 81 he was 30 years old and he didn't hit for any power he had an isolated power of just 114 that year and he didn't look like he was very special but I don't know if i've ever seen a player improve his stock as much as beltre did through that pillow contract and it was was beltre basically the case that put pillow contract in the public vernacular yeah definitely his red socks year that was that was big yeah yeah i i kind of traced that trajectory in my article last year of looking how no one referred to Adrian Beltre as a Hall of Famer

for much of his career, and then suddenly everyone did. And it happened just in a few years because he had really extraordinary seasons in his early 30s. And suddenly it was like, yeah, lots of guys look like they could be future Hall of Famers from the second they get to the majors. And no one was really saying that about Adrian Beltre until relatively late in his career, but he made up a ton of ground. And as you were saying, if you play that long, generally you will be bad at some point. And Beltre is on a pretty short list of guys who weren't. I have a Dan Hirsch fun fact for this. I saw the tweet. Yeah. So there have only been 107 players who have played 21 or more seasons as Beltre did.

So of those, you would think that a good number of them would be good that whole time, because if you're bad at some point, you don't get to play 21 plus seasons. But still, of those 107, only 11 never had a negative war season, not at the beginning, not at the end. And one of those is Adrian Beltre, who never really even got close to that. He was just a good player all the time. So he will be missed. Going all the way back to 2003, there is defensive run saved data existing since 2003. And the player with the highest DRS since 2003 is Adrian Beltre at plus 222 runs.

And second place is Andrelton Simmons at plus 184. Now, granted, Simmons has played less than half the innings and had a more difficult position. Andrelton Simmons is amazing, but Adrian Beltre just way up there, blowing everybody else away on the leaderboard. Very special player, special character. A player about whom I don't think I ever heard anything particularly negative, aside from his proclivity to swing at low away sliders in his Mariners years.

But that was about it. So he is a great character loss and a talent loss for the game of baseball. His final season, he was worth 10 defensive runs saved at third base as a 39-year-old, which is just incredible. So going to miss Adrian Beltre is something terrible, but considering how he put his life on the line to play baseball as a teenager, he has earned just incredible 60 years of retirement and just spoiling his family. Yes. All right. Well, someone else just tweeted us about the dart farts. Let's end this intro. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Meg Rowley to talk about James Paxton and Meg Rowley. I'm sorry, but I had no place to grow Oh, James

My life for you is stronger, don't you know Okay, so last week we were joined by the outgoing managing editor of Fangraphs. Now we are joined by the incoming managing editor of Fangraphs, or I guess you've already come in, Meg Rowley. Hey, Meg. Hi. So we had all planned to convene on Monday night to talk about your new job,

and then Jerry DePoto intervened, as he has before. It feels sort of strange to joke about Jerry the way that we normally do at this particular point in time when both he and the Mariners are being investigated for allegedly discriminatory behavior. But this was right out of the DePoto playbook transaction-wise, except that he didn't do it on Thanksgiving Day. So I guess that was a small kindness.

Yeah, Jeff and I were joking over text as we were getting ready to record this and then realizing that Jeff had to go rapidly write about Paxton. The timing could be worse, and I suppose it's not completely off the table knowing DePoto. So you might hear from us again as you're eating turkey, but hopefully not. Well, tough first day for you emotionally. I guess you probably had

plenty on your plate. And then first they came for Mike Zanino, and now they have come for James Paxton on your very first day. So what are your thoughts? I guess we'll get into the actual transaction in terms of how it helps or hurts the Mariners and Yankees, but how about how it helps or hurts you emotionally? Well, in a weird way, it's like a very small kindness or maybe a not so small kindness of the Mariners to provide for me on my first day an opportunity for Jeff to put Yankees in a headline and trade at the same time. That tends to do well for us. Traffic is up in the rally era yeah thanks thanks for the clicks jerry so i guess in that respect it was nice it's funny i i tweeted about this so i will

do the annoying thing where i reference my own tweets but you know the day that appleman gave me my like called me to formally offer me a position at fangs last December was the day that Shoei Otani signed with the Angels. And then on my first day as managing editor, Paxton gets traded to the Yankees. So I have like this weird link in my own career advancement, though I guess the good news for Mariners fans is that at least at Fangraphs, there's nowhere else for me to go. So the rest of your roster is safe. I guess you reflect, and I mean, not to go all butterfly effect here, but you figure when Showa Yotani decided on the Angels,

I seem to recall, I can't put myself exactly in that frame of mind, but I seem to recall that it felt pretty strong, like more likely than not that he was going to end up in Seattle. So how hard or easy or in between is it to just reflect on that day and think that had Joey Otani decided what seemed to be the clearer decision that probably none of this would be happening.

And if anything, the Mariners would have made maybe the playoffs and they wouldn't have traded their catcher and their best starting pitcher. What, how do you, I've lost enough of my fandom. I don't know how much of it you have lost, but you're still actually in Seattle. You see that with your own eyes. Yeah, it's funny to reflect on sort of the change in my fandom over that time.

You know, the last couple of weeks have maybe not been a great time to feel enthusiastic about the Seattle Mariners just in general. But I remember being in the midst of personally very excited, like, you know, kind of bummed out that Ohtani was going to LA and that I wasn't going to get to root for him in a Mariners uniform. And yeah, I guess the entire shape of this year would be different in a lot of important ways.

And I might be more enthusiastic still, but without the same cause to reflect on it. Because as you said, I think, you know, if they get Otani, the entire direction of this probably looks pretty different for them. Even if, you know, the sort of aging roster issues still exist, I think the window is perceived to be and probably would be pried open quite a bit longer.

So yeah, I don't know. It's weird. It did happen, the lessening of the fandom i think it was sort of inevitable that when you're faced with the rest of the league and the option to watch baseball that remains fun the entire year that you will opt to do that both out of professional obligation and maybe self-preservation. So it's different now. I did not renew my season tickets. That seemed silly to do. I was like, if I'm going to go, I should just cowgirl up and go as credentialed media. So yeah, it's different now than it was.

And in just such a short period of time, it's just only been 11 months. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Robinson Cano, Kyle Seeger, and Felix are the only players remaining from the 40-man roster that DiPoto inherited. I guess he can't get rid of those three quite as easily as the others. If he took Seeger away from from you that would be very cruel but i think he has made some mention of aiming for a 2020 to 2021 window so he's sort of acknowledging that they're not really

going for it to quite the same extent in the next year at least not that historically it's made much of a difference whether they're going for it or not they haven't gone so maybe it doesn't feel all that different but does that time frame feel realistic to you or do you see this trade kind of fitting in with that i mean i i guess i do i think uh there's been sort of a general feeling of being a bit underwhelmed uh with the return here i mean there there's interesting stuff and they're interesting players, but outside of Sheffield, it seems maybe a touch light for Paxton. I don't know. It's an odd thing because there's so much, when you look at what is left on the major league roster, like outside of those three guys, you know, who presumably outside of Cano and I guess Felix is done after this year and Seegers through 2020.

I think that's right. So there's still going to be a lot of churn needed to get this roster up to playoff standard by 2020. I mean, who else do they have to pitch apart from now, Marco Gonzalez and Sheffield, you have a bunch of less good and uh and continually aging as we all are players so I get what he means and presumably they

will look to make other moves that will supplement that core but um there's still there's still a great deal of churn that's going to be needed to get them to a place where you're like yeah this roster could compete with the Astros. Sure. That seems like a thing that could happen. So I think they're making the right decision. I'm glad to see them making a decision that seems to indicate a clear direction because as you noted, there's been sort of this in the middle, we'll hope for 85 to 90 wins and a wild card spot mentality in that organization. And I think that they're getting realistic about how likely that is to happen. But I don't think we're done with DePoto.

I suppose we never really are. I feel like your rotation discussion was a little disrespectful. The Sam Miller Minor League Free Asian superstar, Wade LeBlanc, who at this point might be the Mariners' number two starting pitcher. I don't know. I mean, I own a Wade LeBlanc jersey for reasons that I will not know in five years and be very unclear about. Yeah, he will be there and he will throw innings and some of them might be fine. Much like Jerry DiPoto and Scott Service, he was given a contract extension.

So one of the, the question now, because the Mariners have traded two-year player Mike Zanino and two-year player James Paxton, it's what's going to come next? And I think at least publicly there have been sort of mixed messages on how far the Mariners are going to go. But you could at least, I think Jerry DiPoto, based on some tweets, the idea is to kind of reset and hope to be competitive in, say, 2020, 2021. And many teams have shifted their windows forward or backward. I guess I don't really know what their perspective is. But one of the things that those teams tend to have in common is that they have good young players and what the mariners have is what was at least a week ago the baseball's worst farm system now it's a it's a little better because they got three players from from the yankees but does it feel to you like if the mariners were to stop here or if they were to say trade Gene Segura or

Dee Gordon but keep Mitch Hanegar keep Marco Gonzalez keep Edwin Diaz does it feel like the Mariners are trying to skip a step or do you think that they can thread the needle where they in 2018 they tried to thread a different needle and couldn't succeed it feels a little like skipping a step I mean I think the pitching is gonna be a problem until we feel like it's not which is like a dumb way of saying that but you know like you said they have Wade LeBlanc I think the pitching is going to be a problem until we feel like it's not, which is like a dumb way of saying that. But, you know, like you said, they have Wade LeBlanc. I think they have Mike Leak for like another year. Rasmus Ramirez is gone. Like, you know, they don't have they don't have talent in the high minors that is obviously going to slot into those innings in two years.

in two years. And so I think that we hopefully are seeing like the results of an incomplete project that will start to fill in in the next couple of months and over the course of next season. I mean, they have said that they're holding on to Edwin Diaz. I think that that will prove to be not true if I had to hazard a guess that either in short order or around the deadline next year that like he will be flipped for some, you know, something something meaningful they'll hold on to hanager and as well they should but i mean i think they still have pieces that they need to fill in to be anything like a competing team those holes seem the most obvious and glaring in the rotation but you know they're they're not they're not done by any means and if they say they are I think that they are kind of misjudging exactly how far they have to go to compete even at the wildcard level with some of the other rosters that are out there in the AL. I mean, this team isn't going to beat, I mean, anything can happen in a one game playoff.

But like on paper, this team doesn't beat either of the, you know, Red Sokees or a's or rays probably and those are the the teams that you expect are going to be in that conversation at least over the next year it might shift a little by the time the mariners are actually competing again in earnest but i don't think that they can be done and and do what they want to so paxton is obviously one of the best inning per inning starters in baseball over the past few years he oh oh wait i should i should interrupt you because i wanted to i was we should convene we should address this this is like a a classic sports writers on television panel this is like a steven a smith is james paxton an ace is that where you're going is that where you're

going with that because i feel like that's where i'm going yeah pretty much okay'm going. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, okay. So let's panel this. Who's going to be affirmative? Who's going to be negative? And who's going to be in the middle? I'm just the moderator, I guess. All right, you're the moderator. You're not going to make me take the anti-Paxton position against Jeff, are you? That seems very rude.

Okay, let's all yell over this. And whoever is the loudest wins. I mean. Okay. So is James Paxton an ace? Ace is a word that I don't even know what impression this is. It's kind of like the Hall of Fame, right? I saw there was a lot of bipolar Twitter feedback on this because I put ace in my fan graphs headline because go to hell, everybody else.

And I, much like with The Hall of Fame to whatever extent I care about The Hall of Fame which is low I am a big Hall of guy and I think I'm also A big ace Guy in that I think there's There are a lot of people who feel like there are like five

Aces at a time there was One person who I saw not to just pick on Random Twitter people but it was like James Paxton doesn't hold a candle to Chris Sale, which I get in terms of raw performance. But the idea was, oh, James Paxton has never thrown a full season. Well, Chris Sale has never thrown a good second half. So what are we even really comparing here? So James Paxton, ace, go. I mean, I would say yes. And I think to the durability concern, innings pitch concern, I get that. I mean, I think that people tend to forget that a lot of his injury stuff has been early was the result of like what appeared to be pretty poor conditioning,

which has been largely addressed. And then after that was like super fluky. It was like getting hit by comebackers and never breaking his elbow, but being hit kind of near it. And so I think that like the durability stuff is both a real concern and one that I'm surprised that we continue to care so much about for a guy who hasn't had Tommy John, doesn't seem to be damaged in like a real structural way, at least as far as we know yet, which of course

can always change. But like who's throwing 200 innings anymore? Like he's an ace enough in 2019 and on a per inning basis he's one of the best pitchers in baseball so what are we talking about was that a good sports radio impression yeah uh loud enough yeah i could amplify it in editing maybe just to make you sound you don't have to make me shout at people i'm not a shouter by nature can you make it more shrill? I think we have to be characters. That's not what shrill sounds like at all. I'm just falling down on the job.

Terrible. Ben, what do you think? The ace debate I've always found frustrating because no one can agree on what it means. It's like arguing about the MVP award or something where some people think value matters and some people think it's just best. With the ace debate, some people think it's the best pitcher on that person's team.

And other people think it's just a nebulous group of like, I don't know, a handful of pitchers maybe who have earned that label. So I don't think he compares to like Verlander or Scherzer or like that class of ace that has been just as good and also pitches a lot of innings every year. So he's not a workhorse or he hasn't been, but he is, if you want someone to make a single start, he would be among the first names that you choose. So that's not really an answer. I guess I would not call him an ace, but I would call him one of the best pitchers in baseball anyway. I don't know. For me, like, I guess the track record of endurance, however fluky

his lack of endurance is, I think that is a big part of acehood. So I should ask then, because in my headline, I said, oh, the Yankees now have a second ace. And I saw a lot of people who were also negative about Luis Severino. The last two years, Luis Severino has been worth 11.4 wins above replacement, according to Fangraphs, which is the fifth highest for any starting pitcher in baseball. It's Chris Sale, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Corey Kluber, and then Luis Severino. He has a similar RA9, war, whatever. I know he had like a rough second half half and then he hasn't been great in the playoffs but are we is luis severino in aces he's sort of an uh iffy ace on the same level as paxton

where it's like ace quality but just doesn't have the consistency or where are we on severino well he has gone 190 plus innings in back-to-back years so i think he has a better case probably than paxton does i don't know he's he was inconsistent last year to the point where by the time the playoffs rolled around no one really trusted him or knew whether he'd even be the guy who would get the ball in the big start so that argues against it I guess I mean so I think you're right that like the being on the field is like an important thing how much of a skill it is just to go back to the paxton point like it does matter but i think it matters increasingly less

as long as you're able to reliably throw like 170 but uh i don't know severino's pretty good i think that yankee fans are rude and they should be less rude but it's also a sports radio take and i think that we tend to perhaps forget how rare like true consistency and performance is guys tend to be kind of up and down maybe not to the extent that severino was toward the end of the year but there's a lot of streakiness in in every picture even the very very good ones and everyone's capable of a bad start so i don't know ace ish ace ish two two two pretty close to consensus aces with that team makes me uh excited for james paxton because he's going to probably win a ring sometime according to mlb.com the definition of ace is ace typically refers to a

team's best pitcher though it can also be used to describe an elite pitcher in general therefore a team with multiple elite pitchers is said to have more than one ace that wasn't helpful at all so there are 30 number one starters by definition in major league baseball right now of course like the yankees number four starters better than the marlins number one you know but if you figure there are 30 number ones then i don't know where where do you draw the line for age 15 should there like do we is that just do we choose the 10 best starters at any moment? 15, 30, 60, 120? 120 pitchers?

That's a lot of aces. I don't know. Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks used to have this debate all the time on the Up and In podcast. And Andy McCullough sometimes just pronounces who is an ace and who is not based entirely on gut feeling. Like, I think for him, you don't look at numbers. just pronounces who is an ace and who is not based entirely on gut feeling. Like I think for him, you don't look at numbers. It's just like if the guy has an aura of acehood, then he's an ace.

And if he doesn't, then he's not, which I kind of think is how a lot of people define ace. Maybe should not be how they define ace, but it's such an unspecific term that maybe it doesn't really matter how you define it. All right, let's try this. There are, sorry, Meg, there are four aces in a deck of cards, and there are 52 cards, right? So that's 7.7% of cards are aces.

Now, let's say there's 150 rotation slots. There's 30 teams, five slots, traditionally. Then if you multiply that by 150 slots, then we would say that 11.5 slots would be aces. So we're around 10 to 13 pitchers at a time could be aces based on the deck of cards translation. I will stick with that, actually. I like that. That's as good a thing as any. Yeah.

That's as good a criteria as any. While you were talking, I was looking up a very sports radio fact, which I think settles the Paxton debate. We think Mike Trout's pretty good at baseball, and he is. In his career, he has struck out four times in a game, four times, and one of those times was against James Paxton. So I think Paxton is an ace because he did a really hard thing against the best player in baseball. Except who are the other three?

Are they also aces? Forget the other three. Well, okay. This is good. This is gonna... Oh, no. This does not... This does not bolster James's case.

From Juan Lopez. Ace. Clearly. Let's see. That is Pax. Oh, who's this other Seattle pitcher? Wade LeBlanc. Wade LeBlanc.

Wade LeBlanc. Wait, I think the other Seattle pitcher is also James Paxton. He did it twice. Never mind. Ace. He's the only pitcher who has done it twice. Ace. Only one who's done it twice.

Mike Trout. Mike Trout has batted 30 times against James Paxton. 179, 233, 250. That's a 483 OPS. That sucks. Now, sure, you could say, okay, David Fries has slugged 750 against James Paxton, not an ace. Mike Trout has hit worse than Jake Marisnyk and Delano DeShields against James Paxton, not an ace. Mike Trout has hit worse than Jake Marisnyk and Delano De Shields against James Paxton. But by the best player criteria, if James Paxton can beat Mike

Trout, he can beat anybody ace. I think one of my favorite things about this is that the Mariners managed to only win one of those games, despite Paxton only giving up one run across both of them. Who was involved in this loss? God damn it, Danny Farquhar. You're on the mend. Never mind. I take it back. You're an angel.

Dominic Leone also had a bad day. Oh, no. I'll be curious to see what Paxton looks like with the Yankees because he's been one of these high fastball, high four-seamer guys who keeps throwing his four-seamer higher and higher and striking out more and more guys. And now he's going to a team that throws really fast fastballs, but also throws really few fastballs and tends to throw a lot of breaking balls. So I wonder whether they will increase his breaking ball percentage in some way and whether that will help him or hurt him. Jeff, you wrote about this. Do you have any prospect insights for us with the three guys

that the Mariners got? Well, okay. So Dom Thompson Williams is the least interesting of the three from a prospect hound standpoint, I guess. But what is fun about him, he's kind of a distant flyer. He's 23 years old and he topped out on high A, so he's got a long ways to go. But his first year in the minors, he had three home runs. Second year of the minors, he had three home runs. And his most recent year in the minors, he had three home runs. Second year in the minors, he had three home runs. And his most recent year in the minors, he had 22 home runs. So that bodes well. I think that's a sign of progress. He's one of those low-level athletic flyer types.

But what is interesting here, I think that from the beginning, when James Passon was available, the Yankees seemed like a natural fit. And Justice Sheffield seemed like he was likely to be in the package. And that is what Jerry DiPoto seems to have demanded for a month. But the second piece to me, classic Sestouli guy, classic Carson Sestouli guy, Eric Swanson, who is two and a half years older than Justice Sheffield. And Sheffield has been a top 100 prospect a bunch of times. And Swanson has never, to my knowledge, been a top 100 prospect.

But last season in the upper minors, Swanson was as good, if not better than Sheffield, threw more strikes, missed as many bats, better strikeout to walk numbers, all that stuff, low ERA, low FIP. And Swanson also throws his fastball in the low to mid 90s, and he has some extra stuff. So Sheffield has the hype, and he was a first-round draft pick in the past. Swanson was not. And Swanson is older and, I don't know, maybe just has a funny-looking delivery. A lot of people seem to think that Swanson is like maybe a fringe back-end starter, but maybe a multi-inning reliever, kind of like a Tampa Bay Rays kind of pitcher, if you will,

one of those bulk guys potentially. But I wonder, with Sheffield, so much of it is going to come down to well can he learn to throw strikes you know like Sean it's the Sean Newcomb conversation a little bit except that Newcomb I think missed more bats even in the minors than Sheffield has so there is a stuff hype that's on Sheffield but I think that looking at these pictures closely my sense is that at least based on the consensus Sheffield is being overrated and is not a great centerpiece, but that Swanson is being underrated and is a very interesting second piece in this package. So I've really come around on Eric Swanson, whose name I had never heard even once before until yesterday.

All right. Do we have any more Mariners, Paxton thoughts? Well, let's see. Meg had referred to, I think it is worth repeating again, just because so many people will be pointing to Paxton's durability concerns. So Meg already said some of these things, but I would just like to hammer the point home. In 2014, Paxton did miss a lot of time with a strained lat. And in 2015, he missed a lot of time with a strained tendon in his left middle finger, a finger that he could put to great use to those critics regarding his durability today. But in around 2016, Paxton put in a lot of work with his conditioning. He lost some weight, looked

better, grew a mustache, which was bad, but then that kind of came and went. But in 2016, he made 31 starts between AAA and the majors, and the only starts he missed was because he got hit by a comebacker and had a bruised left elbow now in 2017 there was a strained left forearm and there was a strained pack those are bad but in 2018 he I think he missed a start or two with pneumonia don't care he had a sore lower back that I think cost him to miss one start but probably he wouldn't have missed it if they were in a playoff hunt. And he missed a few starts with a bruised left forearm because, by the way, he got hit by another comebacker. So unless you think that James Paxton just has some sort of weird magnetic left elbow

that attracts comebackers, like there's nothing. Of all of these injuries, only the strained left forearm that cost him like a month in 2017 is worrisome to me yeah everything else seems like it's it's not that big a deal and you know meg when when you've watched paxton he when he's going well he goes deep into games he pitches like an ace like a workhorse he'll go 110 pitches or whatever and he'll he'll keep his velocity deep in the game so i think that when yankees fans see him for themselves, then they are likely to be very impressed. Yeah, I remember the first time like so and you wrote about this in your piece. And you know, as people who've like paid maybe too close of attention to him, this won't be news to either of us. But like, you know, when he started getting really good,

he first had that Padres start, which didn't go well in terms of giving up runs, but he was throwing strikes. And then he had that really great start against Cleveland, which happened to be the same game as Edwin Diaz's pro debut. And I was watching that game with my dad in a bar, and I looked up, and there's James Paxton at 110 pitches throwing 100 miles an hour. So he does stuff that is cool and, as you said, workhorsey. And so if we can just cross our fingers and our toes for him, hopefully he'll finally be able to put together that 180, 190 inning season. And if he does, I think his team's going to be really good.

We have updated projections now at fangraph so based on steamer this is look i know this is absurdly early but we're doing it anyway based on steamer now uh we have some pretty good separation here red sox dodgers indians astros yankees all projected for between 93 and 96 wins and nobody else is above 89 the Mariners have fallen into the same group as with the Reds and the Padres well that sucks but anyway the Yankees clearly have have gotten close to the Red Sox I mean this is this is so early there's a lot of stuff that's going to happen but like already you can kind of look at this and say well we have here's the tier of the top teams it It's going to be the same five teams. Well, and if they manage to, I mean, Paxton isn't going to be cheap in arbitration, but like compared to other free agent options that they might pursue. Like they're not like this doesn't tie up money that they can't spend elsewhere.

So I imagine that, you know, they will continue to deploy, and then they'll be really good. I'm going to have to grapple with weird feelings. Just go. You know, I'm not going to say that. I will not say go Yankees, but I will say that I am excited to feel irrationally angry at Yankees fans when Paxton has one bad start and they turn on him. I'm excited for that.

That's going to be great. Yeah. As I think Mark Losanti said in a tweet to you, as long as he starts well and never slumps, he should be fine. He should be fine. Aww. So in your new role, I guess one of your responsibilities is to make sure that the website has a post on

James Paxton. I guess in this case, Jeff volunteered, so you didn't have to press someone into service. But that was the thing I think that caused the most anxiety for me, not to increase your anxiety, but when I did a similar job at Baseball Prospectus, I always felt like, okay, something could happen at any moment, and then we have to mobilize and find someone to write about that thing, which can be tough because these sites only have so many full-time employees, and people have jobs and families and things and reasons why they can't write an instant reaction post. So you've been on the job for about a day and a half at this point, and there's been a Paxson trade trade and Adrian Beltre has

retired. And I guess it's now your job to say, hey, someone do something about this because otherwise it won't get done. It is my job. And thankfully on the Beltre score, Craig Edwards is on it. Yeah, it's and I have the added wrinkle. This is just you know meg quality of life concern of being on the west coast and so my day is starting earlier than it did even a week ago although we have been people have been good on staff about getting stuff in in the evening so i can not get up at five but yeah it's it's funny we're fortunate in that we do have a pretty robust staff and everyone does a good job. So we can kind of spread those poorly timed trades around a little bit. And I think people are pretty keen to write those posts because they tend to get good engagement and allow you to have a take on relevant baseball news, which is always fun for people.

But yeah, it's a new stress. for people. But yeah, it's a new stress, different from the hardball times where I just would worry about us not having anything to run and it being very obvious that there was no content on that website. You know, people volunteer themselves pretty well over at Fangraphs, but I am a worrier by nature. And so now I have a longer list, which we'll see how that goes. Well, so one challenge that you face is that teams keep hiring people from your staff. Now, on the one hand, that has worked out pretty well for you personally, I guess, in that you got hired after Dave Cameron went to the Padres. And then less than a year later, Carson Sicily went to the Blue Jays, and you're now the boss of Fangraphs. So you're like a team hiring

David Appelman away from owning Fangraphs probably at this point. So that's good. On the other hand, it is hard to keep people employed when you are running a site like this. And that is another thing I have some experience with. And it's tough. I mean, when I was at BP and we would lose Mike Fast or Colin Wires or Max Markey or one of these brilliant stat people, there aren't just a lot of those just hanging around waiting for the next opportunity. of content it produces, which I know that you are also familiar with, because these historically very statty sites, very sabermetric sites, sort of started out with very statistically flavored content and research and studies. Not that the writing wasn't good and engaging too, but there is this resistance among the old guard readers, I think, to the idea that they can be more than that and that there is more than one way to cover baseball and that you can look at all the stuff surrounding the game as well as breaking down everything in very complex statistical studies. But even if you

wanted to keep it the same as it was in the beginning and you just wanted literally graphs in every post because that's the name of the site, it would be harder to do today because everyone who does those things just gets hired as soon as they do them twice. So you almost have to adapt. And yet when I was at BP, I felt a pressure to keep it a place where groundbreaking work would be done, statistically speaking, too, because that was kind of what distinguished it from many other sites yeah i am not above hiring assassins or engaging in very nasty threats to keep our staff intact

no i mean it's like it's the nature of the game i mean there there is a benefit to sites like fangraphs and bp when teams hire your people because you're able to say to new writers, well, like, if you want to get hired by a team, this is a good place to cut your teeth, right? And we accept that we aren't going to get you for very long. But in the meantime, you're going to write good baseball words for us. So there is some symbiosis to that relationship. But no, it's hard. I think that it is a, it's the sort of thing that people worry about for like 24 hours whenever a departure is announced and there's always a bit of hand-wringing about like what is the you know what is the direction of fan graphs i think that has you know that was especially true

when dave left because he was literally the first full-time employee of the website and so you know you do worry about it but you there's there's do, right? It's just part of the cycle. So I think that my approach to it is largely just to think about and try to have a deep bench of contributors and part-time people who either work for us or who I'm aware of in the industry more broadly, who, you know, we might look to to be the next whatever, because we all have supplanted other we might look to to be the next whatever, because we all have supplanted other people who were thought to be indispensable. And, you know, Jeff, and like, and they are and they're important voices, and we miss them very much. I mean,

there's always this weird tension, because it's like, you're very happy for your friends getting to go live their dream. But you also wish that their dream was to stay and hang out with you forever so that you didn't have to replace them. But I think that having some churn there is actually really healthy for the industry because you're right that this looks different than it did 10 years ago. It's not, you know, the core of what we do will always be statistically driven and analytically driven baseball analysis. But there's a lot that you can build around that, that, you know, takes bits and pieces of it and gives readers a much more complete understanding of what baseball is, which is all we're trying to do, right, is to understand baseball. And so I think that some of that forced churn has required us to be creative in the way

that we look at the game and the kind of writing that we value. And I think that's largely been to the industry's benefit because some of those big breakthroughs in, you know, sabermetric research have already been done, right? And we're kind of operating around the margins, at least until, you know, MLB accidentally releases all of the StatCast data to us. So I think it's good for us to be forced to be creative. It's like when I was writing about the 2015 Mariners, it was terrible, but it was an incredible exercise because it forced a, you know, when you write about a bad baseball team, you have to do a lot more work to make what you're doing interesting. When you face,

you know, staffing changes or a landscape that looks different than it did a decade ago. I think that it forces a creativity that is really cool. But I would prefer that everyone stay for now at least. So related to that, what are your thoughts on sort of like building a bench, so to speak? Because people, whether they're part-time employees or whether they're full-timers who just get another job or whatever, people do come and go. There is that churn that you were referring to. And there is always an effort to replace anyone lost. And maybe this is anecdotal because a decade ago I was immersed in the team blogosphere.

And so I was more aware of what was going on in the team blogosphere. And I knew what was going on with maybe newer or more unseen writers. But how do you think that when a place like Baseball Prospectus or a place like Fangraphs needs to find a new writer, how do you make sure that there are enough writers out there and that you know who they are and where they are? Because, you know, it's when you're writing at the national level, it's quite difficult to be in tune with everything that's being written, especially from more unknown sources. It feels a little like there's maybe less generic analytical baseball

writing than there was. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe I'm just not seeing it. But what's your current philosophy or idea on making sure that there always are replacements and you know how to find them? I think that it's really hard because you're right that we can't read the whole internet. And I don't want to. I think Twitter is a really good tool to get the cream of the cream of the crop to rise because we actually, I think, do a pretty good job of promoting writers who are new but really interesting. I mean, this will be embarrassing

to Rachel, but like Rachel McDaniel is a really good example of this where Rachel was nowhere. And then Rachel has been everywhere. And that's due in large part to the talent that is evident in the writing. But so like that is a good mechanism through which to find talent. But I also am nervous about relying on that exclusively because there are more good options out there. So I try to read as extensively as I can. Increasingly, I rely on other people recommending writers to me, which does happen, at least has pretty consistently in my role at the Hardball Times, where we've been focused in the last couple of years on sort of helping to build that bench. But there is sort of a feeling right now when I talk to other editors

that the pool is not shallow, but a bit stagnant and we haven't seen quite as much churn there as we want. So, you know, I think it's reading really widely and then giving people outlets that are good proving grounds and hoping that those outlets pay. So like that's been an important part of what we've done at THT where, you know, our freelance fee isn't like the richest out there, but you do get paid every time you write. And I want to, I think that, you know, places like the athletic or the hardball times where everyone's getting compensated for freelance work are good places to start to identify those folks. But it's hard because you're cognizant of the fact that every staff at these places

is pretty small. And so a hire that doesn't work out can be a problem and is harder to absorb than it might be at some place that has a really large staff. So I think that it's important to give people a lot of chances in sort of the part-time and freelance realm so that you get a pretty good sense of like, oh, is this person sort of an obvious, an obvious next full-time person, but it's hard. So this is my call to the Effectively Wild audience to like, let us know when you, when you read people who are good, because we

take the responsibility of finding people seriously, but we also know that we can't read the whole internet. So if there's a team blogger out there that we should be looking at, let us know. Has working with such a wide array of writers over the past year of varying experience levels and training, given you sort of a conception of what the most frequent fixes are that you have to make, not necessarily hyphens, even though hyphens are very important. And I want to say that in case Carson is listening. But in terms of more structural things, stylistic things,

getting to the point things, Just, I don't know, what are the pitfalls of posts that you read? Some of this is really, this is going to sound a bit condescending because some of this stuff is really basic, but I see it crop up a lot. So I'm going to do it. It starts with the pitch. You should pitch. Don't send editors full work. You should pitch. Save yourself work if they they aren't gonna like what you're writing. So pitching is good. But I think, you know, it's a lot of like basic copy stuff that tends to get in the way.

You know, it's harder as an editor working with freelancers, it's harder to sort of take responsibility for fixing the baseball sense that a person might have. Although sometimes, you know, I will offer feedback if things are obviously wrong, saying, well, like this isn't how that works. Or, you know, this is work that exists that you should be aware of that sort of contradicts what you're saying. But I don't know, it's like basic copy stuff.

Like give yourself 45 minutes after writing a piece away from it and then you know read it again because you'll find a comma splice and you know seven times that you used that unnecessarily a lot of unnecessary that's out in the world people are crazy go nuts for that as a word that they don't need that's a place where you need that. Other places, not as much. But I think that mostly it's reading broadly yourself as a writer. So I did not realize how much of my job would be getting a pitch and Googling it and saying, how is your thing different from this thing? And the writer saying, it's not different. And then being done.

So I think that both in terms of your own development as a writer and your sort of observation and observance of professional niceties with editors, reading as broadly as you can so that when you're pitching work and writing work, you're aware of the broader discourse around baseball analytics is really useful because the places where people turn in stuff that ends up going through really extensive rewriting is when they will address a point that has been like largely settled by baseball analytics or isn't settled but is very well sort of established as as a body of research and they're not engaging with that so it's kind of like the eyes are bad right the article yeah right yeah i mean

like or i've gotten pitches for i'm i am developing a new stat for evaluating pitchers and they'll tell me what's in it and i'm like but so this is baseball reference war this is what they account for in baseball reference war so i think that some of it is just making sure that you are yourself well versed but then also just like being your own voice i read it's very strange knowing both of you i get a lot of like jeff sullivan and ben limburg and sam miller imitation pieces i'll kill him well and it's just and i got one a couple weeks ago that was clearly this person, whether they meant to or not, doing a Meg. And I was like, what is this? It was wildly disorienting.

And then I had to think a lot about my own writing, and that was uncomfortable. So, you know, and it's an understandable impulse, and I think we all do it when we're starting out, where we read people we like, and we like how they think about the game, and so then our voice tends to sound like there's a little bit but i think um you know be cognizant of when you're doing that

because often it will be if it's not obvious to you it will be wildly obvious to other people i'm like oh this is this is a jeff piece cool so jeff didn't write it so it's a little less good i think like whenever for the past several years whenever people have talked to me or sent me an email just asking for advice because they want to do this for some weird reason as a job don't do it

don't do it oh my god I live in a shoebox so the number one piece of advice is always just write constantly. Force yourself to write, right? Make yourself write a few times a week because that way, even if you do begin as sort of derivative, it only makes sense to be inspired by your favorite writers in whatever field you're writing in.

But the more you write, the more you kind of force yourself to find your own voice because you can only be derivative so often. But anyway, that wasn't really the point of the thing I was going to say. That was a follow up. But I guess where we are, we've seen a lot of front office openings at the executive level this offseason and Kim Ang continues to get opportunities that don't come to fruition, whether I don't know exactly what she's hoping for or not. But there's been a broader conversation about having a woman as a general manager. Now, you are not the general manager of a baseball team, but you are on paper and also in reality, you are a woman who happens to be now the managing editor of a sports media company, which is a rarity on the internet,

in the world. Now, I understand that this has all happened very quickly for you. You know, Carson gave notice late in the game and this you have only just recently wrapped up your first official day in this managing editor capacity. But have you had a moment to think about what your standing is, how it looks, whether this is a mark of progression or just kind of good luck? Have you thought about the greater weight of what your role is now? Only a little tiny bit because I worry about feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to do a good job as a result of that. I mean, I think that the luck part is good to talk about. The luck part is good to talk about whenever someone gets a full-time role, which isn't

to say sometimes we overdo it with the luck thing. So luck really matters and the networking really matters. And both of those things probably matter too much if what we want is a writing and editorial core that's like broadly representative of the world. Because, you know, people who are good at this are often obviously good. And the goal is to get other good people who are also probably similarly obviously good in front of the right people rather than to de-emphasize the quality of those people who are good. and then I was on Jabo and then Sam saw what I wrote on Just a Bit Outside and asked me to join BP. And then I went to a Staten Island Yankees analytics event and you, Jeff, were there and we were like,

hey, let's talk about James Paxton for like an hour and became friends. And then when Paul was leaving, I was a person whose work you knew and you knew I was not a monster personally and like that helped so that part is lucky and like most people can't go back in time to like talk to you about James Paxton but there is also a like a part of this that is I think when you take seriously trying to give other people opportunities that's part of your responsibility as a as a I don't know what the

right word is as like a person who's doing this, not for the first time. I'm sure there, I know that there are other women who are managing editors or sports publications, but it is a rarity. You know, I take seriously the responsibility to try to bring people with me, um, because there aren't a lot of women in baseball writing, sports writing, generally baseball writing in particular. We are particularly underrepresented when it comes to women of color in this field. So I think that I've mostly looked at it as a thing that happened. It didn't happen because I was a woman.

I happened to be one. I didn't want to overemphasize it when writing about my vision for the site. overemphasize it when writing about my vision for the site. But I do think that I feel a pretty keen responsibility to make sure that like, I am not the last one of these, probably, you know, hopefully for everyone involved, the last one at Fangrafts for a while, but certainly not the last one in the industry. So yeah, I take that responsibility to the extent that you could call it that pretty seriously. And I worry, you know, I worry about making sure that I'm saying the right thing, especially on sort of socially charged issues, because for better or worse, I think that I will be looked to as someone who's

like supposed to have a take on this stuff. And so I take that responsibility seriously as well. But it's also strange because like the day to day of my life isn't super different than it was. It starts earlier in the day and I'm editing different people. And at some point I will no longer be directly responsible for all of our freelancers at the Harville Times. But like, you know, I still work from home and I'm still drinking coffee out of my fan graphs mug, which is great. And, you know, I was going from home and I'm still drinking coffee out of my Fangraphs mug, which is great. And, you know, I was going to winter meetings anyway. But now when I'm there, my, you know, my position is just going to be a little different than it was.

So it's both very weird thing to think about too much, and you will either risk being overwhelmed or becoming horribly self important. And I don't want to be either of those things. So yeah, I think so. The last thing I guess I wanted to ask is, the managing editor role, at least at Fangraphs, has changed a little bit. When Dave Cameron had it, he was doing some editorial work, but also he was doing a lot of writing. And then when Carson took it over, there was sort of a dispersal of the responsibilities in a sense. And what I'm getting at is that you first came to the industry's attention as a wonderfully talented writer. And of course, now as an editor who constantly has things to edit, it forces you into a position where you are doing less writing. It makes you actually, in a way, it's like a

promotion, but in a sense, it also makes you a little less visible because editors do a lot of quiet work sort of behind the scenes. So this is not to put you on the spot, since this is a podcast that people for Fangraphs might be listening to. But what is your ideal amount of writing output? Because I'm sure writing, it's where you made your name first, it's where you're very, very talented. You're also a talented editor. But you know, writing is what I think you like to do the most. So how much writing do you hope to be able to do once you get settled in this role? That's a good question that you're right. Interested parties might be listening to the answer too. No, I think ideally what I would like to have it land on is like two

posts a week and the podcast and a chat. You know, it's going to change. The answer is going to change pretty dramatically once we decide what we're going to do with the Hardball Times editing role, which please don't ask me because I don't know yet. We don't know yet. We're figuring it out. It's on our list. It's on the almost the top of my list. And I know it's near the top of David Appelman's list, but we don't know the answer just yet. We want to take our time, make the right choice. So I think that once that is sorted, things get a lot clearer in terms of what my day is going to look like. Because right now I'm getting up around six, having been at least in the first two days graced with content that can go up at 9am Eastern. I don't need to get up earlier than that. And then editing during the day. And I'm, you know, our sort of publication calendar kind of wraps up in terms of the stuff that I'm

responsible for around one or two, because, you know, if you publish things after that on the East coast, you're not going to, you're people aren't going to read them until the next day anyhow. So in theory, once THT is off my plate, I will be able to write in the afternoons. That sounds lovely. Sit there in the afternoon, have a glass of wine, write some baseball words. Sounds like a good day, but we're not quite there yet. So a couple of times a week, plus a chat, plus the podcast, your rival coming for you. No.

No, are you actually going to talk about baseball on that podcast? You know, probably to a shockingly greater degree than Carson ever did. And I say that with a tremendous amount of affection. Yes. I think it's, you know, as both of you know, there's a nice balance to be had there between serious and silly. And I think that those things in concert can result in some really cool conversations. So that will be the approach that I take. Having now figured out how to edit podcasts, we're in business. Sky's the limit. We can go anywhere. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned no one

reading things after a certain hour. It's not until you get access to traffic for a website that you realize how much people slack off at work. I mean, maybe you know if you've ever had a job and have slacked off at work. But it's funny how you would think that, hey, after work hours or on weekends or something, that's when people will read their baseball content because they have so much time to do it. Nope. No one reads anything then because they want to read it when they're sitting at their desk and bored. So that's how the economy works, I guess. Yeah, we are infinitely grateful. We have just boundless amounts of gratitude for how little you all care about your jobs.

Shout out to the people at work right now listening to this podcast. Makes our job possible. I pay my rent because you are weirdly indifferent toward paying yours oh god when people talk about so i've never been threatened by the talk about like automation threatening our jobs because no one's going to automate whatever it is that that we do but if they automate what other people do and then they don't go to the office it's a problem yeah oh no we're indirectly threatened yeah no we have to take down the robots. They are our enemies. We should learn from literally every movie and just fight them.

Fight them with all we got. This is why I don't want robot strike zones. Yeah, and people say Fangraphs wants everyone to be robots. No, just the opposite. Just the opposite. We believe in people and their weirdness, their stats, and their fallibility, and also the fact that like just on the strike zone thing we couldn't anticipate them trying to find an out by a guy coming off the bag for 20 tenths of a microsecond when we did replay we think we know all the stuff that's

going to come out of an auto zone excuse you no we do not Well, that's a topic for another podcast, which we have probably already recorded and probably will record again. But we should let you go because if we don't, Fangraphs will not publish any posts today. So that's important. Yeah. Okay. So people can find you on Twitter at Meg Growler, me growler. I don't know how to say it. Meg growler's right. They can hear you on Fangraphs Audio, and they can read you at Fangraphs and also read your influence on other people's posts without even knowing it, but it's important.

So thank you, and good luck, not that you need it, in your new role. Thanks, guys. You know, I was just on MLB.com, and I saw a headline that said, MLB's best contact hitter is a free agent. And I thought, what? Williams Estadio is a free agent? Turns out the article is about Michael Brantley, which I guess, sure, in the group of players

who've played more than 29 Major League games, Michael Brantley, pretty good contact hitter. But I think that title is reserved for Astadio at this point. Small sample and all. Well, it sounds like there may be another Mariners trade brewing, but I'm posting this podcast before that trade can be completed. So that will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already done so. David Gottlieb,

Nathan Valentine, Scott Mazzuno, Stefan Eisenberger, and Quinn Stack. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Now more than 8,500 members in there talking baseball at all hours of the day and night. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Your reviews are very much appreciated. And you can send us questions and comments via email at podcastofffangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Remember to sign up for Effectively Wild's Secret Santa. If you're interested in participating, check the link on the show page. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his

editing assistance. We will be trying to get in two more episodes this week despite the holiday. Probably do some emails, probably do something else, maybe with a guest. So we will I don't belong to you. I belong, I belong, I belong to that steel driving crew.