Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1318: The Keeper of the Game

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about New York Met Rymer Liriano and the minor league free agent draft, David Robertson signing with the Phillies, Robertson’s underrated record, and a Sabermetrics Mount Rushmore, then (14:43) talk to Retrosheet founder and president Dave Smith about how he started Retrosheet, the organization’s mission to collect a record […]

I know it's hard to give up when I don't want to be saved Take me in your heart again And I know where to keep your heart up but I won't do it again Don't you go and leave me here, my friend Hello and welcome to episode 1318 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello.

I have good news for you. Potentially good news. What's that? Your eighth round draft pick in the minor league frayden draft reimer liriano has agreed to terms this is a minor league contract but he has at least signed somewhere and he is signed with the mets whose current center fielder is juan lagares they have rajay davis around as a backup i don't know if reimer liriano is a real center fielder at this point he's played a lot of all outfield positions down in the minors but he

is still 27 years old and he hit fairly well last year in triple a so you might have a you might have some sort of opportunity there if if say Juan Ligaris gets injured and the Mets decide they don't want to pay for someone better and Rymeliriano he's their man yeah that would not shock me yeah that's one of the the nice after effects of the minor league free agent draft. It's fun when we do it, but then it's fun throughout the year because you see these names that normally would mean almost nothing to you. Right now on MLB Trade Rumors, there's the minor MLB transactions post and you just scan past these names. this guy in a while don't know this guy don't know where this guy will be but because we have this connection we have this stake now in Reimer Liriano and Jairo Diaz and all these guys who otherwise we would be paying no attention to it's just this nice little jolt oh that guy I have an interest in that guy's success we talked the other day about the possibility of Terrence Gore getting 100 stolen base opportunities and stealing 70 bases but not batting would you be infuriated by that or would

you just accept that you get no credit because you knew the rules going into this i know i was gonna say i should have stipulated that we're counting plate appearances and batters faced and stolen based opportunities or pinch run appearances that would that would be nice yeah that would be pretty frustrating i think if gore were on the roster the entire year and got like three plate appearances or something. But it would be worth it because Devin Marrero, Terrence Gore. I don't know. I don't remember who Kieran Lovegrove is. I don't remember who. I don't remember who. And John Bernie's a pitcher.

Okay. Well, still. John Bernie's not a pitcher. Not a pitcher. Okay. So that's interesting. So you went with, I think by my count, that would be seven position players and four pitchers. And looking at my own selections, I took nine pitchers.

I think Josh Lucas is a pitcher, right? I don't even remember the people I drafted. But I'm pretty sure I took nine pitchers and two position players. And I went with pitchers. I intentionally prioritized pitchers because I thought that stuff will just play up and it's easier for a pitcher to just emerge or become needed out of desperation

because pitchers get hurt. And I figure position players are just more likely to stay in the minors if they're already in the minors. So was that anything you gave thought to, or was that just an unintentional accident? No, it was not. I mean, if this were an amateur draft or some other type of draft, I probably would lean toward position players just because they tend to be more reliable long-term. But for this, that was not my strategy. I would be curious if anyone has some time to waste and wants to waste it on this, what the positional breakdown of our minor league draft picks in the past have been, just because I'm

guessing that it's just a lot of like backup catchers and utility guys and left-handed relievers and probably, know short stops maybe guys who can play short but also other positions those guys that you think are just more likely to stick on a major league roster at some point well you got anything you want to say about david robertson yeah i think we should talk briefly about that so david robertson representing himself on the free agent market this year signed with the phil Phillies for, what, two years, $23 million. David Robertson has been just one of my favorite leavers for a while now. And I think he's probably underrated just because he hasn't really gotten that many saves. I mean, he was a closer for three years or three years and part of another year, but

he is just really one of the top relievers in baseball since he came into the game. If you look at all relievers since 2008, that's when he broke into the big leagues, although this is equally true for since 2009 and since 2010 and since 2011. He is the fourth most valuable reliever, according to Fangraphs War,

after the trinity of Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen, and Craig Kimbrell. Those three guys, obviously the highest profile relievers of this era, flamethrowers and closers. And then you've got David Robertson, number four, who does not throw nearly that hard, but the way that he succeeds has always fascinated and impressed me. There's just an element of deception there that has served him really well what i what i did enjoy when i was doing some research i wrote about robertson on on thursday and going back to 2002 just using some fangraph stuff he has the second largest reverse platoon split for any right-handed pitcher he has dominated lefties from the very beginning he's had a he's been better against lefties than righties nearly every single season of his career

by weight and on base average. He has been 50 points more successful against lefties than righties. So it is interesting in a case like this. The Phillies had been looking for left-handed help all over their pitching staff, and they wound up signing a righty who is basically a lefty reliever. And it's fascinating. I agree with you that I think he's been underrated. I thought I remembered some recent season

where he wasn't very good, and then I went back through his numbers, and no, it turns out he's always been pretty good. And I think there was just one year his walks got out of control or something. But it's really interesting because he stayed so good. He's always gotten so many strikeouts, but his style of pitching has changed fairly dramatically.

He used to throw about 75% to 80% fastballs, and last season, for the first time in his career, he threw more curveballs than he threw fastballs. It's just, I think, the telltale sign of a real good major leaguer is someone who can stay good for a while as opposed to just being a flash in the pan for a season or two. You have to be good while making adjustments, and Robertson has done that.

That's what everyone says about relievers. That's the stereotypical line. They're just flashing the pans, and you can't count on them from year to year. And that is often true, which is maybe partly a product of the types of pitchers who become relievers, but also just a product of the small samples, and you throw 60 innings, and you can get a weird babbitt beer and look bad. But he has never had one of those years. And he's been in the big league since 2008 and has always been pretty good and sometimes been extremely good. So I think we should celebrate that sort of consistency. So do you think he did a good job at agenting? Did he represent himself well as

two years 23 with a 12 million dollar club option for a third season in the range that david robertson deserves it's not as big as his previous contract of course but he was younger then yeah so he it had been reported that he wanted three years and players usually want more than they end up getting unless they're lance lynn who was probably as surprised as the rest of us but But at the end of the day, David Robertson is going into his age 34 season. He's older than all of the relievers who recently have gotten three or three-year contracts or longer. And, you know, you can say, well, Joe Kelly got three years and $25 million, and he has a worse record.

And, you know, Kelly is three years younger than Robertson is, but also he has that interesting stuff robertson doesn't throw 100 miles per hour and the difference in value of the contract is only two million dollars and there is that the club option at the end so i think robertson did fairly well and it is also worth considering even though it doesn't make a huge difference but by representing himself david robertson does not have to pay an agent commission here and we don't know exactly what his old agent was asking for. But I think the standard is usually in the vicinity of 5%.

And in this case, that's more than a million dollars that David Robertson gets to keep for himself. Although I guess he also doesn't get to keep about half of it because it goes straight to the federal government. But in any case, he does get to make more money because he didn't have anyone else do the work for him. more money because he didn't have anyone else do the work for him so this is not really the stupid money that phillies fans have been hoping the team would spend since their owner said they would do that but their bullpen looks pretty solid now i guess has some interesting arms the the potential to succeed that whit merrifield thinks the royals have the phillies actually have some of those guys i guess this is good because poor uh sir anthony Dominguez doesn't have to pitch every single day now. Right. I was looking at their bullpen picture earlier today after adding Roberts into their

depth chart, and it looks good. It's funny because they were looking for so many lefties, but they already had Adam Morgan as a lefty. They acquired James Pazos, who's a lefty. They acquired Jose Alvarez, who's a lefty. So they already have lefties, but there is a good mix here of righties and lefties, pitchers who are good and pitchers who are better than good. And one of the things that Robertson said, whether it was an interview or a press conference, I don't know, but he said on Thursdays that he doesn't really care when he's going to pitch. He's not coming in thinking he's going to be the closer. He said he just wants to throw basically high leverage innings. He wants to make sure that he's pitching in the back of the game. But whether it's the sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, it doesn't really matter to him. And that is clearly a write-up Gabe Kapler in the Phillies alley. I can't imagine that they lied to him about how he's going to be used, but this is a team that's going to have a number of options moving forward. And I would expect that Robertson and Dominguez are going to end up sort of tag teaming the closing role and just kind of handling it depending on whether good lefties are coming up or not. It's impossible to answer this with any

certainty, but would you say that the biggest dominoes are likely to fall sometime soon on this free agent market or not sometime soon? It seems like there's just more smoke surrounding Manny Machado than Bryce Harper, and then Harper may drag on for a while, but that Machado may be resolved sooner. It feels like it. I don't, it's more of a gut feeling than anything else. You're just kind of mentally connecting these things that I've read. But, you know, I've seen enough writers who were more sourced saying things like, oh, Machado should happen somewhere within the next week.

And I don't know why that would be true. It doesn't have to be true. We saw, I think, the majority of huge contracts last year were given out in even February or later. But in any case, I mean, last year was weird and an outlier. But still, yeah, that's true. Yeah. The two biggest free agents last winter were, I think, Yu Darvish and JD Martinez, or at

least they were at the top of the lists, the rankings heading into the offseason, and they didn't sign until, what, mid-February. So, yeah, it could drag on for a bit. Yeah, something like that. But, you know, the pool of suitors is so small for players of such a magnitude that it does feel like Machado should happen relatively quickly. What happens after that, I don't really know, because on the trade market, the Marlins are holding so much up by not yet having traded JT Real Muto. It does feel like Real Muto, Machado, and Harper are kind of like the big fish that are left and the other pieces are going to, the chips will fall where they may, but Machado's coming and I kind of

forget you come back from sort of slowing down over the holiday and you come back and you're like, oh right, there's still like a lot of action that's left to happen. It's not just the doldrums that have in the way that we used to think of January and February. There's still like, I don't, I'm not going to, maybe even most of the off season left to go. I haven't like looked at the board of names

to move around, but like there is an awful lot even despite that pre-Christmas flurry of activity on that Friday afternoon. All right. So we have got a guest today, and I am excited about this one, because really just the foundation of everything we do on the show and in our writing would not be possible without our guest, who is Dave Smith, who is the founder and main operator, steward of RetroSheet, is the founder and main operator steward of RetroSheet, which has just contributed an incalculable amount of knowledge to the store of all baseball knowledge. And we got a question from a listener named Charles months ago that I don't think we ever answered on the show, but

he wanted to know who would be on Sabermetric's Mount Rushmore if you just had, you know, four faces to put on a mountain somewhere. I don't know if anyone has a spare mountain to devote to Sabermetrics Mount Rushmore, but obviously, you know, you put Bill James on there. I think maybe you put Sean Foreman on there. You definitely put Dave Smith on there

because just every question, I mean, every stat blast we do, every play index, everything would not be possible without RetroSheet. The effort to collect accounts of every game in baseball history, which is ongoing and which has made unbelievable progress. And as Dave will say, is almost 95% of the way there. So I think those three definitely on it. I don't know who the fourth is

maybe you you smush up dick kramer and pete palmer and combine their faces on there since they collaborated a lot or maybe someone more recent like tom tango i don't know there are a lot of sabermetric and research pioneers but retro sheet is just the foundation of every advance in baseball research that has happened essentially over the last few decades. So I am thrilled that we get to talk to Dave about the origins of that effort and how they have made so much progress and how they are continuing to add to the historical record. Well, I can't follow that introduction with anything better. So why don't we just get rid of it? All right. We will be right back with Dave Smith. Everything is free now.

That's what they say. Everything I ever done. Gotta give it away. Someone hit the big score They figured it out That we're gonna do it anyway Even if it doesn't pay All right, so as promised now,

we are joined by baseball research royalty, Dave Smith, the founder and steward of RetroSheet. Hello, Dave. Hello. I am very excited to have you on belatedly because RetroSheet has given us and everyone in this community so much over the years, and you are responsible for that or one of the people primarily responsible. So I hope that a lot of our listeners are aware of what Retro Sheet is and does and how it came to be. But for those who are not, can you give us what I'm sure must be by this point a well-practiced rendition of the origin story and how it actually started?

Sure, I can do that. I don't mind telling the story, though. I'm always happy about it. I could possibly say, this is a little corny, but Retro Sheet began on July 18, 1958, when I was 10 years old and I went to my first Dodger game at the LA Coliseum, which is a pretty awful place to see a baseball game. And one of the things that happened that day is that my father bought me a Dodger yearbook. And in the back of that yearbook were amazing columns and tables of data, how each Dodger player had done the year before by month, with runners in scoring position, all the stuff that we now take for granted. I'd never seen such a thing before. Of course, it turns out that all of that was compiled by Alan Roth,

who's like the founder of Sabermetrics, in my opinion. And I looked at that. I'm 10. I said, well, I'm going to be him when I grow up. That's just all there is to it. A lot of little boys did too, but that's pretty much what happened. Now, of course, I didn't really start it then. I started collecting baseball scorecards and scoring every game I went to. But RetroSheet really began in the late 80s, after Project ScoreSheet died, although I would never say we were a successor to Project Scoresheet. That's a very different sort of thing. But RetroSheet began in 1989, and we decided from the beginning we would be completely volunteer, no money, ever changing hands. Everything we ever did would be available for free to anybody, and anyone who volunteered to help us would know that their labor was going for free.

So I contacted teams and sports writers and announcers and fans, and we ended up getting thousands and thousands and thousands, in fact, hundreds of thousands, of game accounts so that we could then convert them into the appropriate computer format that anybody who's ever seen RetroSheet knows what that format is. So you want more than that? That was good. I think you mentioned Project Scoresheet. And for people who just aren't that aware of what the research landscape looked like at that time, or just how inaccessible everything was, you had Elias Sports Bureau, of course, the official

record keepers of baseball. And then for the public, he were just kind of out of luck. You could drag around a giant tome of baseball statistics, but it was hard to find things publicly. So can you give us a sense, a quick recap of Project ScoreSheet and Bill James' role in this and just the public research and crowdfunding or crowdsourcing efforts to actually compile some of this information. Of course, crowdfunding wasn't a concept then, but that's an interesting way to put it. You're absolutely right about the inaccessibility of any kind of baseball data. The only kind of stuff situational, like what are your batter's records against left and right-handed pitchers? I mean, that's about as fundamental now as you get. That was impossible to find in 1984.

Impossible. You might get something out of a team's media guide, which might have it for a few players, but not every team would have it. Well, Bill James started Project Scoresheet with the 1984 season. In one of his abstracts, he put out a call for volunteers across the country to score games and send them to a central place where they would be computerized

and the data would be made available. And he did that. And he did it for a few years. And there were some very significant inner turmoil. And the project basically died. And I don't really want to talk much about Project Scoresheet. I'd much rather talk about RetroShade. What happened with Project Scoresheet is, in my opinion, is that there was money on the table. And a small number of people were making money off the volunteer labor of a large number of people. And oddly enough, the large number of people decided this was a bad thing. And so when RetroSheet came to be in 1989, the very, very first thing we said is, we will always be free. We will always be open. Everything that we have

will go to anybody. And if you volunteer for us, you know that your work is going to be given away to anybody. And if you don't like that, and that's just fine if you don't like that, if you want to somehow be compensated for your work, you got to go someplace else because we're not going to ever have any money on this. And Sherry Nichols, whom I wrote about at The Ringer last year, was one of the figures who was instrumental in setting that course and deciding that RetroSheet would be- You bet. Sherry was the first vice president of RetroSheet. I didn't need any persuading. I knew that the money was a problem, but she was just adamant about the nonprofit status. Actually, I think she coined the term that RetroShoot is not non-profit, we're anti-profit. I think that's what she said. So we're going over the origin here. And if you could just very simply, leaving aside all the internal politics or potential internal politics,

just could you walk us through what it was like at the very beginning to just go through the process of data entry for as many games as you got? Because you can imagine when you try to envision what that process would look like. It's not very sexy, but clearly a lot has been done, a lot got done. What was the average day in the first years of RetroSheet? Well, that's a wonderful question. We started slowly, as you might expect. We got some good publicity. Paul White in Baseball Weekly, and then later when he was just working for USA Today, some good publicity. Paul White in Baseball Weekly, and then later when he was just working for USA Today, was very

favorable about us very, very nicely. And so we'd get some publicity and people would call me, and I'd send them our input software and some score sheets, and they could translate the score sheets from the team's notation, or you as a fan however you scored a game, that had to be

translated to some sort of standard form and then that has to be entered into the computer. And depending on what that scorecard or score sheet looked like, that could be half an hour for a game. And then the actual entry of the game in a computer is like 10 minutes. But on round numbers, 45 minutes to an hour per game. And we had over 100,000 games done that way. So do the math on that. And it's just terrifying how many people were willing to spend that much time on it.

Now, my job has always been as the central coordinator. And my great regret, I don't know if it's a regret, but a reality is that this all has to be centralized. If it doesn't all come to one place, if you don't have all of these accounts in one place, you'll never keep track of it. It can't be piecemeal everywhere. And since I created it on the place, I'm sitting down in my basement now with my 11 file cabinets that are still filled with old score sheets.

I'm slowly but surely scanning them to try to clean out the file cabinets to make my wife happy. But we had to get these things all processed. And remember, in the early 90s, you didn't just make an attachment to your email to send these things out to people. They were done by U.S. mail. I'd mail it out to people. They'd enter the games.

They'd put them on floppy disks. Remember floppy disks? They'd put them on floppy disks and mail them back to me, and then I would massage them and sort them and get them in the right place. It's an incredible amount of time for each game to get it done. The fact that there were so many people willing to spend that much time. There's a few people who did a ton of games, but like Clem Conley did over 15,000 games by himself.

I hesitate to even ask this question because it's already just, it grinds the brain to think about doing all of this in the first place, but then anywhere along the line, because RetroSheet is responsible for so much of our understanding of the history of baseball statistics now that we research, that we take for granted. Was there an editorial process, an oversight process just to make sure that there weren't data entry errors or other? Yep, me. That's a pretty arrogant short answer, but it's back to the centralization. Of course, other people helped, to say the least. People who entered their own games would do their best to proof it against what was available.

Newspaper box scores, USA Today box scores, and so on. But the overall data quality, comparing them to official numbers, that has to be centralized. If I have, let's take a season, 1983, which is when we started, and we go backwards. We always count backwards. Since Project Score Sheets started in 1984, we started in 1983 and went back. To get 1983 done, I probably had 50 different people inputting games, and some of them would make syntactical mistakes, and some of them would misread scorecards.

And once they all come back to me, they all have to be rationalized, and they all have to be compared to the official statistics, and it has to come out right i can't have um 1983 i can't have uh oh who'd be big big home run here you can't have steve balboni hitting three extra home runs because our data was incorrect you know this stuff has to be done right and there was no way not to centralize that that's a clumsy sentence but i could never figure out a way to get that last bit of nitty-gritty proofing out of my hands. And in fact, that's still pretty much true. We are so accustomed now to having this information. As Jeff said, we do kind of take it for granted. If baseball reference or fangrass is down for five minutes, I get impatient. I bet. Yeah, it's the old standby. We are all so used to it.

Many of our listeners never knew a world where they could not just look up almost anything instantly. Before that was possible, when there was just so much that was unknown, was that a source of constant frustration? Or was it not really because you just had never known anything different and you just never expected that information to be accessible? That's perfect. I quint-plined for something I had never imagined. Right. I mean, it's that simple. I mean, looking backwards, oh, my God, I didn't have all this stuff in 1965.

Well, nobody ever thought about it. I mean, this isn't a direct answer to what you've been saying, but I have one thing to throw in that I've often thought, gee, if only I could have started earlier than this before I got distracted by life and so on. But it wouldn't have been possible because before the mid-'80s, there basically weren't any personal computers. I know there were some apples around in the early-'80s and so on. But widespread use of personal computers is a mid- to late-'80s phenomenon. And I always say that the personal computer did not make RetroSheet easier, it made RetroSheet possible, because it allowed me to decentralize things as much as I did. I could get things in the hands of lots of people, lots of people could do this stuff.

We didn't all have to sit in the room, we didn't all have to be connected to some big mainframe. Without the personal computer, none of this would be possible. So out of curiosity, going all the way back, as far back as you can, where do things currently stand in your percentage of games complete? Well, I always like counting from 1901. There's a lot of reasons for that. Rule changes and the leagues were more or less stable beginning in 1901. From 1901 through 2018, there have been 197,339 games, so just over 197,000 games. And we have play-by-play

information for 186,000 of those 197,000, which is 94.4%. Wow. Yeah, that's really amazing. Well, it's absurd. When I started, I said, we would maybe one day get like a quarter of the games played since World War II, if we're lucky. And this is beyond imagination. I emailed you less than a year ago when I was working on that article on Sherry, and you were at 93.8% then. So you've picked up another percent of all of the games played since 1901 since then. Well, every percent is a little harder to get, of course. Right, exactly. Yeah, so when you started, and I'll ask how you have continued to make progress, but when you started, what were kind of the biggest treasure troves, the biggest scores that you just landed an enormous gold mine at once?

Well, that's a wonderful question. The first, one of the very, very biggest ones we ever had was one of our very first ones. And that was the Baltimore Orioles. I presume you know Eddie Epstein. And Eddie is a friend. He's also a graduate of the University of Delaware, so I got to know him that way as well. And he was working for the Orioles. And he found out about us, and he talked to their PR people and arranged for me to drive down to Baltimore and pick up all of their scorebooks, each one in a giant three-ring binder from 1954 to 1983. And so Baltimore is about an hour from here. So I went down and picked them up and brought them back. And so I have 1954 to 1983. So you're 40 years worth of, of, of Orioles scorebooks sitting on my, my dining room table. And then I had to copy all of them because I had to Xerox all these things. I had to give the books back and then I started sending them out to people.

So that was such an unbelievable beginning. I mean, right there, frankly, was more than I thought we'd ever get. I couldn't believe that the teams would cooperate because like a lot of people, I had written to teams asking for data and they would, some of them were polite, some weren't polite, but they'd blow you off and say, no, we don't have it.

I now understand that they probably didn't have it. It's not that they were trying to be mean with it. They didn't have it. And so once I found out that the Orioles did have this, it was just incredible. And that was fantastic. And then I asked the Orioles if I could drop their name with the Phillies. I live basically halfway between Baltimore and Philadelphia. So I asked if they would put in a good word for me with the Phillies.

So they did. And I drove up to Philadelphia and got all of their books. It just becomes word of mouth. And I went to the Pirates. And then I went to Minnesota, and it just kept feeding on each other. But that first collection from the Orioles is just always going to be near and dear to my heart. It's not the biggest thing we have, but it was just an unbelievable start. I'll tell you about our biggest thing in just a minute. I think we kind of glossed over this somewhere earlier, but of course we all understand that RetroSheet is a website.

It is a wonderful resource. It is online. But you started in 1989. I don't remember exactly when the Internet began for public use, but I'm pretty sure it was not widespread in 1989. So what was RetroSheet's original form then? It was people who heard about us would write to me and ask for game data, and I would put it on a floppy disk and mail it to them. And that happened until 1994, the first time we put anything on a website. So what was the biggest score? The biggest score, Alan Roth, the saint that I wanted to become when I was 10 years old, the greatest sabermetrician,

Dodger statistician from 1947 through 1964. He kept not only play by play, but pitch by pitch of every Dodger game for 18 years. And when he died, his material was collected and given to the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles. I think they have a different name now, but the Amateur Athletic Foundation. And I arranged with them. I sweet-talked my way into their good graces, and I arranged for them to send all of his score sheets to David and Sherry Nichols

because David worked for Xerox at the time in Palo Alto. And they copied all of these. It's 2,700 games. So it's of these. It's 2,700 games. So it's not only that it's 2,700 games. They're in amazing format. They're on paper that's like 11 inches by 17 inches. So think about that for a second. I mean, what are you going to do with a stack of 11 by 17 inches?

These enormous things. And he color-coded them by opponent. So, for example, all the games against the Giants would be on white paper, but all the games against the Cubs would be on blue paper, and all the games against the Reds would be on red paper. So David and Sherry not only copied all these things, they had to adjust for the different color backgrounds of all the paper, which is really tough for the copying technology in the early 90s.

Thank God David worked for Xerox, and he was using their absolutely state-of-the-art machines to make these incredibly good copies for us. That's always going to be the center for me, just because I've always been a Dodger person, even before I went to the first game. And having lost stuff, and the pitch-by-pitch, it's just a wildest dream come true. It's all I can say.

Oh, this is maybe a challenging question, but so you have now addressed the greatest trove that you have received, but can you think of like the strangest source, just like the most unusual place where you just wound up getting a game that you didn't already have? That's a great question. There's a lot of strange ones. We get a lot off of the internet even now. There's a guy in Chicago, Joe Stilwell, who scans eBay and the auction websites. And if people are selling scorecards programs for auction, and there are quite a few people that sell old scorecards that came out of their attics or something like that. He gets on and follows that every day, and he will look at their listing, and very often these people will post scans of the scorecards. And so we download the scans, and we get them that way. Now, it seems a little bit cheesy, but we're not stealing from them.

They're posting the thing up there, so we just take all of those. So the strangest one maybe I ever got was we needed one last game from the 1977 Seattle Mariners, from their first season. We needed one game because the team's records were only so-so. The nice thing is you can often get the game from the opposing team. So sometimes we have two accounts for a single game, one from each team. Sometimes we only have one. But there's this one game I could not find. Well, I wrote to the Seattle team several times, and they were intrigued,

and they got me connected with their radio announcers, and they had me on pregame show one night before Mariner's game telling about Retro Sheet and how I just deleted this game. Three days later, I got it in the mail because a fan who had been to every game had scored that game, and she sent it to me. That's great. Yeah. So at what point did large organizations start coming to you as opposed to you going to them and with your hand held out and asking for information and data? At what point did you become the resource that everyone was seeking stuff from you? Well, not about everybody, but it happened pretty early because the Orioles, I did some reports for the Orioles and for the Silvers, but the first real big connection was the Minnesota Twins, of all

places, because the Twins somehow found out about us, and they were getting ready for Dave Winfield as he approached his 3,000th hit. And they were going to do a booklet, a nice magazine-type thing on Winfield's life and career and all that kind of stuff. And they wanted to have a list of all of his base hits, and they couldn't find them. They got some from this team, some from the Padres, of course, some from the Yankees, because Winfield was a twin then. So they contacted me, and I filled in all the blanks.

And so the booklet they created, which is a beautiful booklet about Winfield, in the margins, they have all these stories, stories in the margin down the sides. They list each hit and the inning and the opposing pitcher and the type of hit it was. They got all that stuff from me, except the ones they'd come up with themselves. And I got a nice autographed copy of the book, autographed by Winfield, and also an autographed Dave Winfield bat, which I wasn't expecting at all. This thing's the size of a telephone pole, I would like to point out. He's a big man, and this is a really big bat.

So that was really the beginning because that got us a lot of publicity, and then so many of the teams started asking for things. The Dodgers did because I was always begging the Dodgers and doing anything I could to ingratiate myself with them. I started doing reports for them, and then I did some for the Cardinals, and I did some for the Reds. It just kept going on and on and on. So at this point, do you have to do active recruiting for new volunteers, or are there enough people who come to you that you're just able to pick and choose?

That's a great question, too. You're really on top of this. Amazingly enough, I don't do much recruiting, partly because I'm so busy with all the other aspects of this. I don't really have time to put out newsletters or anything like that anymore. I'm not sure how I would recruit him. There are so many people that speak nicely of us. I mean, Sean Foreman, besides being a really great guy, runs the most fantastic baseball site in the world, and he gives us credit all over the place. Sabre gives us credit all over the place. So I'm happy to say, I guess it's a measure of success that we are fairly visible. You've said all these nice things tonight. We're fairly visible and people do come to me.

I don't have to go looking for people anymore, which if anything is convenient because I'm doing so many other things. We had David Neft on the show in 2017, episode 1097 to talk about the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia and the research efforts that he had to do to make that. Was that something that was helpful to you, all the scouring of microfilm to find stats and game accounts? Did that transfer over to RetroSheet? Not directly. I know David Neft. We get along real well, but not really. Many old newspapers, I talked about getting scorebooks from teams and announcers and fans. Many old newspapers also had play-by-play in them. You may or may not be aware of that, especially before World War II. You could have an evening paper selling for three cents or something like that,

and all these are all-day games. So you're coming home from work at 6 p.m., and they're on the newsstand for your three cents. You get the evening paper, which has the full play-by-play of that afternoon's game. They had a story, but they listed batter-by-batter, batter-by-batter of the entire game. We've probably gotten 25,000 games that way off microfilm. I get microfilm through interlibrary loan. One of the great perks of my former job, and I'm retired now, I have access to interlibrary loan, and I get to have access to these old newspapers. I can get game accounts that now. Yeah. And I wanted to ask about that also, because sometimes you don't get complete

play-by-play, but you get partial and then you can work out the rest of it. So can you describe the process of figuring out what went on in a game when you know some things, but not everything? I call these games deduced games, where we'll say that the evening newspaper had the first six innings, but they had to go to press early, so they're missing the rest of it. We can look at the newspaper accounts in that city and the opposing city from the next day, and we can come up amazingly accurately on filling in the gaps. We can place with well over 90% accuracy. Every walk, hit, strikeout, double play.

What we don't get is detailed fielding credit. Do I wish we had fielding credit? Of course. But in the end, if I know this guy made an out, given the level of information we have, whether he flied to center or grounded to second is not important enough to keep that game off of our website. So we release these things with a code that shows unknown play.

He made an out. We don't know how he did it. So we've got probably 20,000 games that have been deduced this way, and we've got about eight people right now that are actively doing it, and the greatest achievement is how complete they are. We have recently finished 1936 season, and since we go backwards, that means we now have at least a deduced version for every play of every game from 1936 forward. I understand that it's presumably been shifting over time.

You mentioned, for example, the last game in the season for the 1977 Seattle Mariners, but have you had certain white whales? Are you chasing certain games right now where you're just, I mean, I know you're trying to fill in as many gaps as you can, but certainly there have to be individual games that capture your attention more than others. You're absolutely right. And it's sort of funny because every game matters. Yes, we want them all.

You bet we do. But when there's a hundred games missing for a season, well, that's frustrating. When there's one game missing for a season, well, that's frustrating. When there's one game missing for a season, on our website, we have a section called Most Wanted. Can you help us? If you look at 1973, there is one game. September 29th. Houston versus Atlanta.

Someone's got to have it. Well, I can't tell you how much time I've spent looking for that game. I've been in both cities. I've been in both parks. I bet you I've talked to 15 sports writers from those two places, from all of the announcers, Pete Van Weren, who was really helpful. It's not that. Now, we have deduced the game,

so we have a deduced account of this game on our site, but having a real full play-by-play, if it were 10 games, it would be annoying. If it's one game, it's just incredibly infuriating. Have you ever relied on oral history? Do you need a written contemporary account? Or if there's someone with a photographic memory who was in the stands that day and says, I remember exactly what happened, or you just talk to a bunch of players from the game and piece it together? Has anything like that ever happened? Well, the last person, I will say with some respect, the last person you should

ever talk to about what happened in the game is a player. The very last person. They're never right. Now, Jane Levy wrote this incredible book about Sandy Koufax. She wrote a good one about Mantle, and she just did one on Babe Ruth. But she wrote a book on Koufax, and I consoled with her very heavily on that. And she gave me lots of credit. It was just fantastic. And she had me track down anecdotes that players had told her. I tracked down 56 different anecdotes.

Joe Torre, what he did the first time he ever faced Koufax. Henry Aaron, what he did on such and such a date. Ron Santo, what he did in Koufax's perfect game. 56 of these. Every one was wrong. Every single one. And the most egregious one, this is just incredible. Maury Wills swears, there is a game in the ninth inning.

The Dodgers were ahead either 5-0 or 6-0. There was a run on third and one out, and a ground ball hit to Wills, and the Dodgers were clearly going to win the game. And Wills threw home to get the guy out at the plate to preserve Koufax's shutout because he loved Koufax so much. He said Roseboro almost dropped because he was so startled. Okay, great story. Not even close.

There's nothing that even vaguely resembles that situation. And I looked at every single play a bunch of times. So the players were well-meaning. All these stories were good, flattering things about Koufax, but they just weren't true.

I said all those were wrong. There was one person's account who was correct, and that was Koufax. Yeah, because that's interesting because occasionally a player will really shock you with their recall of, oh, I threw this specific pitch in this situation. Or it was, you know, here pitchers remember sequences that they threw. Batters sometimes remember how a pitcher approached them. But then there are these big things. Yeah, occasionally it's true. But, yeah, I've had the same experience trying to track down anecdotes.

I had to really swallow my tongue once. The first time I met Rick Monday was in spring training. He was at the Dodger game, and he was with me before the game. And he's talking about what happened in his first all-star game appearance. And I was like, oh, God, Rick, that's just not right. That's not what you did, you know? But I managed not to say that to him. Have you made people upset?

Like, have people resented you as the fact checker? Yeah, there's one person I made very upset. I take pride in being a pretty nice guy that most people get along with. Okay. I was really rude to one ex-player one time. Can I say who it is? Sure. If you'd like to.

Okay. It's Dale Swain. Now, not exactly a major figure, but he was a major league player. He's a hell of a lot better athlete than me. And before our website was as complete as it is, I used to prepare reports for players for each batter. I'd give them the details of how he did against each pitcher, and for each pitcher, how he did against each batter, and so on.

And most of the players loved going over these things. I'd point out, you didn't do so well against him. I got a great story about Ron Fairley on that one. But anyway, so I did this for Dale Swain before a game in Washington one night. David Vincent was with me, and Swain was coaching for the Brewers,

and we're down in the field, and I gave Swain his detailed report. Here it is. I hope you like it, and that's about it. And Swain looks, and he immediately tears through about the middle page. Ha!

You only had me hitting one home run off Jack Morris. Every report I ever see says I only hit one. I know I hit two off him in one game. And he's getting really belligerent about this. And I'm saying, well, you know, if everybody has it with one, you know, it's probably... But I didn't say that. I said, well, these

have all been checked really, really carefully. Well, I know that. I did two in one game. I finally said, well, maybe in batting practice. I was just disgusted. Our numbers aren't wrong. So where are the accounts coming in? I mean, you're mostly, I would think, working backward now into the earlier days of baseball, and that's harder to find. Is all of this coming from people scouring microfilm? Is it coming from people finding things in their attics?

How did you get from 93.8% to where you are now? Well, the other thing which has happened is that happened in the last 10 years is that the Baseball of fame, which is run by the hall of fame library, which is run by some incredibly wonderful people. Jim Gates is the head librarian. He's, he's a saint that they have scorebooks that many, many sports writers or more accurately, the families of sports writers after they passed donated. For example,

Tom Swope, who's one of the greatest sports writers in history that never seems to disappeared, scored every Cincinnati red game from 1920 to 1964. And his family donated his scorebooks to the Hall of Fame. And I drove to Cooperstown. I made seven trips to Cooperstown over the last 10 years with a camera. And I photographed all of it.

I photographed about 20,000 games by doing it that way. And that is a major source because these are guys who are sitting in the press box watching the game. It's their job to get it right. Now, of course, they make mistakes, but these are by far the most reliable. And what I found early on is the accounts from sports writers were really good, partly because, as I thought about later, the writers would refer back to their scorebooks when they're writing their stories for the day. The ones that were terrible were announcers, because an announcer is probably not going to go back to the second inning very much. And they had all kinds of mistakes where they just weren't paying very much attention. Is there a particular question that you have been thrilled to be able

to answer? I mean, RetroSheet has answered every question that's been answered in the past couple decades of baseball research. But even if it's not necessarily some advanced study that uncovered some new aspect of the game, but even just a piece of trivia that you always wondered about, any particular discoveries or ways that you've been able to set the record straight that really stand out in your mind? That's kind of a neat question, too. Not really. I mean, I'm thrilled that so many people reference our work. The Baseball Research Journal from Sabre comes out every year, and a bunch of the papers there have used our stuff. You go to the Sabre Convention, a lot of people reference us as a source. That's really wonderful. I don't think, I understand your question, but I don't think there's any, like, oh my god, I didn't know that,

da-da-da-da. I don't think that's true. I was going to ask something else, but now I feel like before too much time passes, we have to ask for your Ron Fairley story. Oh. When Sabre was in Seattle in 2006, I had a press credential from the team, and I got to meet Dave Niehaus, who was their announcer then. He was since passed, of course. And Fairley was his color man. And this is when I was still preparing reports for people, and I gave Fairley his report, and he's going crazy. Now, he just loves it. Now, you probably know if you've read Jane Levy's book

that I have an audio tape of the Koufax Perfect game. Do you know that story? No. Well, let me finish Fairley, then we'll get, well, I'll digress. You have too many good stories. So Koufax was my guy. The reason I went to that game in 1958 is that Koufax was pitching. Not many people chose the games they went to in 1958 because Koufax was pitching.

I was ahead of the curve on that one. The first pitcher-batter matchup I ever saw was two Hall of Famers, Koufax against Richie Ashburn. Ashburn walked. In fact, Koufax faced six batters that night. He struck out two and walked four, and he was gone. And I was crushed. And the next day, by the way, Koufax started the same next night against the Phillies and pitched seven innings.

Well, so Koufax had always been my person. And then he becomes a great pitcher, and this is just unbelievably wonderful good luck. he becomes a great pitcher and he's got this just unbelievably wonderful good luck and it turns out that in the early 60s i was uh personally keeping score of 25 consecutive dodge games an old peterson score master book uh i would keep 25 consecutive dodger games at some point during each of the season night when i went off to college i stopped doing it well one of those games was the kofax perfect game and jane if you've read Jane's book, you know that she sort of frames her book around the perfect game. She writes a chapter about his childhood, then an ending of the game, then about his childhood, then an ending of the game, and so on back and forth.

And she had been doing this, and she found out about me, and she sent it to me to proof, and I did. And I said, oh, and by the way, do you know I have an audio tape of the game? And apparently she had a heart attack when she read that. Nobody else has it. And Vin Scully recalled the KFI radio studios in the ninth inning. He said, you might want to record this. And the Dodgers sold and probably still sell records. It was a 45 RPM record then.

I don't know what the format is now of him calling the ninth inning of the Kofax game. But none of the rest of the game. And I have the game. I have the whole thing. I actually missed in the first inning. That's another story. I'm missing the ninth inning of the Koufax game, but none of the rest of the game. And I have the game. I have the whole thing. I actually missed in the first inning. That's another story. I'm missing the first inning. And so I send it to her, and she puts it in the book.

She used it in the book. She's just thrilled beyond belief. I'm so happy about this. And I assumed that after her book came out and people read that I was missing the first inning, that people would start coming out of the woodworks, well, I have that whole game. It's never happened. That book's been out 17 years now, and no one has ever come forward.

I apparently really do have the only copy of that game. Now, what is the dumb luck chance that it would be recorded, and by me, who's going to save all this stuff forever? It's just ridiculous. So I have the game. I sent it to Jane. I sent a copy. I gave her an extra the game. I sent it to Jane. I sent a copy.

I gave her an extra copy and she sent it to Koufax. I gave a copy to Vin Scully. My meeting with Vin Scully was pretty wonderful, too. I sent a copy. She sent it to Koufax. And the next week, I got a message back, an input back from Koufax. And I'm looking at it right now. It's framed and on my wall. An incredibly beautiful

picture. It says, Very best wishes, Sandy Koufax. And it has a note. Dear David, thanks for the tape. It sure helps to make a person feel young again. Sincerely, Sandy. Well, you know, I just died and went to heaven. I mean, there's nothing better than that.

So, Ron Fairley. Fairley played in that game. You knew I wouldn't forget. We're back in Seattle. And I'm giving this stuff to Fairly. And we start talking. And he looks at me. And he says, now, at this point, I'm what?

I'm 58 years old. But at this point, Fairly looks at me. And he says, you're the kid with the tape. I said, yes, I'm the kid with the tape. Yeah, this is fantastic. And he hugs me. And this is what? Because Fairly and Emily played in that game. The Dodgers only scored one run, which you probably know.

Lou Johnson walked, Fairley sacrificed him to second. Johnson stole third and scored when the throw to third base went into left field. So Fairley was in that game, budding, making a sacrifice. And so I listened to that tape, and they got the play wrong. That's not the way the play went. Yeah, Ron, it probably is. I don't think Vinny missed it on that one. So the story that he told me, that was all wonderful.

And he's looking through all the stuff, and apparently he could not hit Bob Veal to save his life. Now, Fairley was a left-handed hitter. Bob Veal was an intimidating left-handed pitcher, 6'6", 250, whatever. He was just a huge guy. I'm sure you remember that. And Fairley could not hit Veal. And so I gave him the stuff.

I don't remember the numbers, but you look across there and his record, he had like 12 at-bats with 9 strikeouts. It was something really awful. And he said when he was playing for Montreal, one night they were going to play Pittsburgh the next day. And Gene Malk is Montreal's manager. He said, Fairley, go on and get drunk tonight. You're not going to play against Ville tomorrow. It's not going to let you see him. I'm not going

to do that to you. So Fairley goes out, and he got just blitzed, he says. The next day, they're ready to play, and whoever it was that was going to play in his place, the right-handed batter that was going to play in his place, hit himself in the mouth with a foul ball during batting practice. Blood all over the place. So Fairley's in there. Fairley's in there, three sheets to the mouth with a foul ball during batting practice. Blood all over the place.

So Fairley's in there. Fairley's in there, three sheets to the wind, hung over. He looks out to the mound, comes from the first and looks out to the mound. He can barely see where Veal is. He says, I'm just going to take three pitches, go sit down, hope he doesn't kill me. And so the first pitch comes inside, and I try to lean back, and he hits off the end of the bat, off the knob end of the bat and falls. And Veal looks in. Are you OK?

And Frehley said, he was so good I couldn't even take a pitch off him. I loved. Yeah. So you said when you started, you didn't expect to get anywhere close to where you are now. So having gotten to where you are now, what are your expectations now? Do you expect completion at some point in the future? That's a sad question. I've been asked that many times. And the answer has to be no. By completion, meaning a fully authentic, reliable play-by-play account for every game,

no. If we mean deduced games, yeah, we'll deduce them all. I mean, it will take a while, and some of the deductions will be of better quality than others, let's be honest about all of this. But actually, having real play-by-play accounts of every game, that's not going to happen. There's just too many games played between the St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators in 1912 that nobody really cared about. We're not going to find all of those. What do you see as the value, I suppose, of collecting games that no one saw more than a century ago? I mean, certainly we want to collect them all, but are there still discoveries being made, advances that can come from that old data? Of course, once you get a giant library as you have,

then you get such an enormous sample that you can do any analysis you want really with what we already have. So adding to it is great for completionists, but I suppose in terms of being able to break new ground, that pace has probably slowed. Well, the new ground, I think you're absolutely right. But adding two more decimal points after what we already know, having the extra information I still think is valuable.

I make a research presentation at Sabre every year and use our data to do it. And it's incredible. I did a real good thing, I think, on relief pictures. I won the Best Presentation Award for it. I did that three years ago on relief pictures. And let's talk about the use of the closer. Well, how much do you want to look? Well, I'm going to look at 100 years worth of data and see how things have changed. So what it means is that the conclusions we reach are that much sounder. Even if they aren't groundbreakingly new, they're really much more supported because they got so much behind them. And I find that to be a really, really valuable thing. So when I started this, I had one vision in mind, which was wouldn't it be neat to use modern sabermetric analyses,

Bill James stuff? Wouldn't it be great to use sabermetric analyses with old players? Like how did Duke Snyder do against left-handed pitchers? It turns out he was every bit as bad as everybody said he was. What was Babe Ruth's left-right split? It turns out he didn't have much. He had everybody. But we didn't know any of these things, of course.

So I started with the idea of using modern analytical techniques on old games. Wouldn't that be fun? But then I sort of morphed into, well, the historical record itself, just have it around so people can see it. That's what museums are for. I don't mind seeing us as a museum. Sherry Nichols always called us a library. The stuff is there for people to take. I think that's a fantastic image, too, and I always liked that. But the other comparison I started using early on, it's like collecting baseball cards. The great thing about

this is it's a finite set. Now, it's a hell of a lot of games, but it's not an infinite number. There is an endpoint. When you're collecting your baseball cards, you want that last card, even if it's, you know, Rocky Bridges or something, if you want that last one to complete the set, I want that last 1973 game to complete the set. That drives me as much as anything else is completing the set. So understanding that so much of the priority has always been working backwards and trying to get as many games from the beginning as possible. Of course, all current data is available from new games, games from 2018. It's all out there for everybody in incredible detail.

How streamlined is the process of just inputting data from MLB? Do you even need a human to look at it or does it just get put directly in the database? It's not automatic. I have written a program that takes the MLB data and converts it to our format, because, of course, they don't do it in our format. They do it in their format. And it takes me about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes every morning during the baseball season to do all of the previous day's games. So if there are 15 games the day before, you know, a nice full day, in about an hour or so,

I can have them in our format. And I do that every day. So that's another, you know, completing the set of hooks. It's a lot easier. Now, the programming to do that was a non-trivial thing. It took me a long time

to get those programs running properly, and they always get tweaked, but it works. Yeah. You were a professor of biology for decades throughout this entire time that we are talking about. Yeah, for 40 years I was a biology professor. Yeah. How did you juggle this full-time job of collecting every baseball game with your actual full-time job?

Well, it helps to have a wife who's a saint, okay? And she's a baseball fan, too. She's not insane like me, And she's a baseball fan, too. She's not insane like me, but she's a baseball fan. And not only did it take an amazing amount of time, and you know the old joke, she knows where I am,

I'm down in the basement. But the other thing is that it cost money. I mean, I was spending my own money on... When I said there's no money, it means there's no money coming in. It didn't mean we weren't spending money.

It was mostly me spending it. And so we'd have phone bills, of course, and lots of postage bills and all that. And early on, she said, well, your hobby is supposed to cost you money. I mean, that's just the most wonderful, supportive thing in the world. Now, I would say that during the time I worked, I've been retired five years now. During the time I worked, I probably spent about 30 hours a week on RetroSheet, which is squeezing it in there because I'm teaching lots of classes at the same time. Since I retired, I'm probably spending 60 hours a week on RetroSheet, 8, 9, 10 hours a day I'm doing this. So I've gone from having a full-time job at the university to having a full-time job here.

And it's obviously a wonderful thing, but it's my choice. I get to be doing all of this. What are we currently interrupting? Are you in the middle of inputting something that we are delaying you doing? No, no, no. Well, actually, when you called, I was working on inputting one of the games that one of our volunteers has deduced, a 1935 game, because that's the season we're back to, that he recently deduced and he sent me an email attachment, a Word document, and I've been inputting it into our format, and so they'll have that all processed real soon. So that goes on every day. I get a few of those things.

So I remember there was something I wanted to ask and forgot to until now. You said RetroSheet kicked off in 1989, and anyone who's ever used the Play Index or looked for this information on Baseball Reference would understand that pitch-by-pitch information is available going back to 1988. What is it that was special about 1988?

That's when Project Scoresheet started collecting pitch data. And that's a good answer. That's simple and direct. Yep. So if our listeners want to help and want to get involved, if anyone listening happens to be at Astro's Braves game on September 29th, 1973 and wrote down exactly what happened, please let Dave know. But if not, how else can they potentially help? more volunteers because what we're left with these deduce games is really tough i'll be real honest about that this is not for the faint-hearted a lot of people try to god i just can't do this

well that's fine i totally understand that it's a hard thing to do and some of the people i have that are working on that are much better at it than i am i thought i was pretty good but tom tress who in chicago who is the retro sheet treet treasurer now, is just fantastic. And Rob Wood, I presume you know Rob Wood. Rob has been doing deductions too, and he is incredibly careful about this. It's kind of stunning. So there aren't many volunteer opportunities. What I've tried over the years is to get people to go to libraries and get interlibrary loan and get old microfilm.

It turns out that's a hard thing to do. A lot of people don't really have access to that. You have to pay to get the microfilm and all that kind of stuff. So it's not a very easy thing for most people to do. And that's one of the perks I had as a university professor is I get free interlibrary loan, which I still do, even though I'm retired. With emeritus status, I get full library privileges, which is nice. And I can still have access to that. But people, we really don't need any more volunteers, which is a stupid thing to say. Of course, we always need volunteers.

But what's left to do is the really, really hard stuff. I see. All right. So last question, I suppose. I mean, what you have collected here has to be one of the just most voluminous data sets on any human hobby in history, I think. voluminous data sets on any human hobby in history, I think. I mean, baseball is just the most obsessively chronicled human endeavor there is, or at least among the fairly frivolous ones, at least on the surface. But why do you think it is that baseball draws people like you, people in the sciences, why we care so much about every last detail jeff and i certainly feel the same way

about wanting to uncover all these things we had an email that we answered yesterday on the show thanks to dan hirsch at baseball reference someone asked whether there had ever been an alphabetical batting order whether all the last names yeah good question it turns out it has only happened once in recorded baseball history, at least until you extend the record further back. It happened in one game in 1934, and that's the only time that all of the surnames in a batting order were in alphabetic order, which is completely inconsequential and meaningless, but also really cool. Yeah, great to know. I was very excited to learn that. So what is it about baseball that draws us in this way, do you think? Why do we appreciate the sport the way that we do? Well, that's interesting. I've always thought, you know, since football has risen so much in popularity over my lifetime,

what are the main differences between baseball and football? And part of it is almost everybody played baseball or something like baseball at some level, you know, gym class in high school and stuff like that. But not very many people ever played football on any serious level. So I think people have a more personal connection to baseball than to football. They can imagine it. But it's also true, baseball hasn't really changed. I mean, as I like to say, second base hasn't moved in 150 years.

But if you went back to a game in 1920 and looked at it, you'd understand everything that was going on. And if you brought somebody from there to now, they would know everything that was going on too. If you take somebody from 1920 and drop them into an NFL stadium now, he would have no idea what they were doing out there. So I think it's the constancy of baseball, the stability is a large part of its attraction.

And it's also so daily. It's the so daily. You know, it's the everyday football. The first half of the week, you're tearing your guts out over last week's game. And the next half of the last half of the week, you're tearing your guts out over next week's game. Baseball, you gotta get over and move on.

We got another game tomorrow. And I think all those things help to make it more attractive. Mm-hmm. Well, it's been a pleasure and an honor to talk to you and have you on. And just thanks so much for all the work that you've done and continue to do. I doubt that Jeff and I would be in this line of work if not for you. I don't know what we would be writing or talking about.

We would just have exhausted all the possible topics. So thanks so much. It's just an incredible contribution That you have made to the game Well you're welcome and to say it's a labor of love Is a complete understatement Alright thank you very much Dave Okay bye bye Well thanks again to Dave and I have

A great appreciation for what he's accomplished Because one of my earliest jobs Was working at the Elias Sports Bureau I think I spent one summer and two winters At Elias and all I did was go through a bunch of microfilm from the Hall of Fame, just daily records of many, many players' seasons, their bats, their hits, what they did each day, and then just very tediously and laboriously input each of those records

into Elias' computer system and finish a player, make sure all his totals added up, eventually get through an entire season and make sure all the totals added up, and of course they never did, and then you had to go back and figure out where you screwed up. Extremely monotonous task, and that was pre-podcasts, so it wasn't as easy not to be bored. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming that I'm still staring at Jim Constanti's game logs from 1950. Did a lot of data entry before I attained this glamorous post of podcast

co-host. Anyway, that was just a taste of RetroSheet's Herculean task. You know, one more note on Robertson. Back in August, I think it was, listener Dan emailed us about some unusual contract incentives that David Robertson had in his last deal. He had a gold glove incentive, an MVP and Cy Young incentive. We talked about what he'd actually do to have to earn that money. Well, he may be representing himself now, but he is still negotiating unlikely incentives, as Dan emails us to point out again. John Heyman reported that Robertson gets $50,000 for an all-star appearance. Okay, that's not unlikely.

$50,000 for a gold glove. $50,000 for LCS MVP. $50,000 for a gold glove, 50,000 for LCS MVP, 50,000 for silver slugger. If David Robertson wins the silver slugger, I will be somewhat surprised. 100,000 for World Series MVP, 100,000 for Cy Young, with 50k for second place and 25k for third place. Some pretty far-fetched incentives there. But hey, why not? He's also apparently donating 1% of his salary to a club charity, so that's nice. And one other quick note, you'll recall when we had Cubs minor leaguer Connor Myers, the UPS delivery driver, on the podcast recently, he was talking about the Cubs mental skills program and how helpful it's been for him.

Well, the Cubs just hired another mental skills coordinator, and it's Bob Tewksbury, former MLB pitcher and former Effectively Wild guest. So if you're a Cubs fan wondering what your team just got in Bob Tewksbury, check out episode 1205 for that interview about sports psychology, as well as Bob throwing Ephus pitches to Mark McGuire in 1998. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. I want to give a special salute to Effectively Wild listener Zach Wenkos. He's the one who conceived and conducted this year's Effectively Wild Secret Santa. And not only that, but he made a video montage of every gift that was given and posted in the Facebook group. I will link to that, even if you did not get in on Secret Santa. It is pretty fun to watch all of the gifts.

A lot of care and thought went into them. Some really cool items were exchanged. I'm hoping that this becomes an annual tradition, and that after it went so well the first time, it becomes even bigger next time. So thank you to Zach. It was really cool that he came up with that idea. And I think it really brought the Effectively Wild community together. Following five members of that community have pledged to support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild, John Foster, Ryan Vianno, Russ and Adam Goldstein, AJ Schreier, and Luis Torres. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

Your ratings and reviews are appreciated. Help us rise up the rankings and attract new listeners. Please also send your questions and comments to me and Jeff via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we'll be back to talk to you early next week. Just wanna keep making records Day in, day out, fade in, fade out Making records day in, day out Just wanna be making

Daily records