Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1320: Mets Are From Mars

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo going viral yet again, his iconic winter-league home-run pose and the state of celebration in baseball, the improbable personality of an improbable player, Astudillo’s future in Minnesota, and the Mariners bringing back Dustin Ackley. Then (23:59) they talk to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Systems Engineer (and […]

Great expectations for someone Doesn't anybody know how to have fun But I'm gonna be a big star I'm gonna be a big star Someday Hello and welcome to episode 1320 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Jeff, has anything relevant to our interests happened since the last podcast? I don't know

what we're going to talk about today. I was at the gym last night on Tuesday night. Got there around, I don't know, 6 o'clock p.m. And I like to go climb and I'll keep my phone. I'll bring it around because in between climbs, I don't know if you've gone climbing since we talked about that the last time, but in between climbs, I like to just sit. You have to rest yourself. And so while I'm sitting for a few minutes at a time, I'll just check my phone, see what's going on, see if I need to, I don't know, like hurry home to write about Bryce Harper or Manny Machado signing or maybe Jerry DiPoto traded his team for the entirety of another team. And so I was climbing and Tuesday night that there's there's a lot more notifications than than there usually are over here let's let's see what's going on my and my

mind started to race because i was thinking what i don't i don't tweet so often that i'm like known to be the point person for almost anything so i wasn't sure if like there's a showy otani thing or maybe just some some big trade maybe i got looped into some sort of annoying twitter thread where like some slut I get tagged and then everybody else just starts talking amongst themselves. Then I looked at my notifications. I don't know what your phone does, but when I open Twitter on my phone, it

sets a cap at like 20 notifications or something, even if there are more than that. I go over there and I'm like, all right, 20 notifications. What's going on? Then I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and there's, 20 notifications. What's going on? And then I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. And there's like probably 150 notifications because I mean, everybody who's listening already knows where this is going because Williams Estadio hit a home run and pimped the living shit out of it all the way around the bases. Although to be honest,

maybe an even more impressive job was performed by the announcer who held a note for the entirety of Estadio's circumnavigation of the bases. But in any case, big home run that caught the attention of, I think, everybody in the world. ESPN tweeted about Willian Estadio hitting a winter ball home run. Although, not just a winter ball home run, to be clear. This is not Willian Estadio showing off because he hit one home run. This is a playoff home run that he hit for his team in Game 5. 1-1 game, eighth inning. That's right.

Big homer. Hit it off of D'Aless Gara, a former and possibly future Major League pitcher. Two outs in the inning. 1-1 tie, bottom of the eighth. In Game 5 of a best-of-seven series, the series tied two games to two. So a huge home run that Estadio hit. He is now 8-for-20 in the playoffs with a home run. He is likely, I think, to be with a home run. He is likely,

I think, to be the league's MVP. Yeah, this is amazing. You know the tired, wired Twitter meme? This is like tired is bat flips and wired is what Astadio did here, which is not a flip at all. It was just a pose with both of his hands just resting on the bat knob as he was watching to see whether this ball would leave or not he went down to get this ball now he's already down because he's williams estadio and he's just not a very big guy but even for him he kind of golfed it and then he did a little bit of the carlton fisk thing and he was kind of gesturing it fair. And then he was doing the pose, just gazing at it as it went out. And then he just had a joyous, he just basically skipped around the bases, high-fived everyone he passed.

It was just wonderful. And how lucky are we? How much joy has this man brought us over the past year or so? And how improbable is that? Like, he's such an improbable player in every way, statistically speaking, and that's how we were introduced to him, is just the guy who never strikes out and also, at the time, never walked and never hit home runs. And that was fun, but what were the odds that then that player who shouldn't exist would then turn

into, like, the most fun player even aside from that like i would guess that i don't know 90 or more percent of the people exposed to this clip had no idea who williams estadio was i mean he was on the top 10 plays on sports center most people not listening to this podcast not watching twins games probably don't know and if they know him they probably don't know that he is this strikeout rate outlier and yet this is like the third time he has gone viral in the last year right like less than the last year because he had the no look pick off in spring training as a catcher and then he had just the sprint around the bases that was made into artwork and memes and gifs and now he's had this i don't know if i'm forgetting anything there were other fun plays mixed in there but it's like i mean he's

just among the the better known base is williams has to do the face of baseball don't forget i think wasn't there a hidden ball trick that he did oh wait yeah hidden ball trick too it's like never striking out is like the least well-known thing about him at this point. He's just getting headlines for being himself, basically. In the last few years, I wonder, like Bartolo Colon has a huge fan base, right? Everybody loves Bartolo Colon because he's like 74 years old. And he's a big fat guy who was playing baseball. And for a little while, he was pretty good, too.

He had an incredible comeback story. I don't want to diminish the magnitude of what bartolo cologne accomplished but certainly by the end cologne was no longer very good and and people people loved him it was one of those things where i know that people did like bartolo cologne but the fan base felt more ironic than sincere to me at least online in in the way that so many things on the internet are not actually genuinely felt but i thought like people i thought that at the core it was it was mostly people making fun of bartolo cologne i thought that he was just like oh look at this big fat guy trying to play baseball and maybe i'm completely wrong about that you can correct me i won't know if you do but you can still do that if it makes

you feel better but astadio comes along and like he is i'm not gonna say he has a similar build to cologne but like he's similarly removed from the mean of your standard baseball player. He's also 18 or 19 years younger than Cologne is, but he's listed at 5'9", 225. He's probably like 5'1", 425. I don't know what he is, but he comes along. I don't know who first identified him, whether it was you or Sam or even somebody else, just seeing him in the low line. Carson Sestouli. Carson, too.

There were people at Baseball America who were making a big deal of it. Yeah, I think there were a few independent discoveries, hopefully, in Estadio. But yeah, someone was first. We weren't first, but someone was. And, you know, there was the discovery of Estadio at first being like, oh, look at this weird player who never strikes out. But then over time, certainly in the last few years, it started to become more of, hey, this guy actually could and even should make it. He's still a catcher.

And now he's actually learning to hit better. And then the powers come along. I know you were just making this point, but what were the odds that a player who is so many standard deviations removed from the average in terms of his statistical output becomes a player who's good enough to make the major leagues? And he has this charisma and likability that is also multiple standard deviations removed from the average. Those two don't have to go hand in hand.

There's every reason for him to be super boring if he wanted to be. He's just like, yeah, I don't strike out. I just hit the ball, and I'm not interesting. But the dude is incredibly interesting, and it's just so much fun to watch. The clip from the winter ball is exactly what we all want baseball to be i know brandon mccarthy tweeted something to that effect a lot of people tweeted something to that effect that that sort of enthusiasm is infectious you can't watch that clip and not smile about it unless you're yeah well i don't want to say brian mccann because

that's the tired joke but i mean honestly unless you're brian mccann yeah actually i was going to bring that up because i saw some people almost preemptively saying, like, anyone who complains about this, like, they don't understand what fun is. And it seems like at this point, I don't know that that many people actually are making that complaint anymore. It seems like everyone's just so conditioned to think that someone somewhere is complaining about it. And I'm sure someone somewhere is. that someone somewhere is complaining about it. And I'm sure someone somewhere is. You can always just find a random Twitter person who is tweeting something about whatever it is if you're looking for someone to say, yeah, this kind of person exists. But I don't know. I'm certainly not going out of my way to find anyone who is condemning William Testadio for this display,

but I didn't see anything high profile. It seems like almost like maybe we've moved past that. I don't know. Maybe that is the legacy of Yasiel Puig's time in Los Angeles. I think he was a great player at times, but I think he brought this into the public eye and really made us have this conversation. And he was such a flashpoint for looking like you're enjoying yourself on the field that I think at this point, people sort of accept it. I'm sure some people are still annoyed about it. But when Astadio does it, I just, I don't think you can interpret it as him showing someone up. It's just joy. He's just having fun out there. He's just playing a kid's game. It's what we say we want all players to do so i don't know whether there actually was a backlash or whether we're just inventing straw

people at this point who actually have a problem with these type of plays but hopefully that that kind of backlash is is receding and i think i think it i think it's gay marriage at this point and not to not to get political but of course, there's a pretty rapid, politically speaking, there's a rapid flip in society's estimation of the validity of gay you could search twitter and it doesn't take very long to find a few people who were saying oh fastidio we're pitching in my league says someone who plays softball with other 47 year olds he'd get a i don't know underhanded pitch right to the ribs or something of course some people are still out there and there are still going to be pitchers in the major leagues who who take offense to stuff like this and throw pitches at hitters that's not going to go away until the uh the population of of those traditionalists reaches like a i don't know a negative critical mass until there's like 10 of them or less at which point there's just going to be no support at all for that sort of

vengeance on on the field but i think i think the conversation is over the the battle has been won it was it's a humiliating battle to have gotten involved in in the first place because i can't understand the argument against players performing with emotion and passion the whole damn thing is a freaking performance that they're putting on for us wearing their big fluffy pajamas or in alternate cases they're super skin tight pajamas and it's all it's all just performance art right so why would you not what artist under any circumstances do you want to watch do his or her job and not emote in the process? This is so much more fun. It's hard to believe that this was actually like a conflict, but it's over. It's never coming back. The conversation is we won. All the fun people won. Baseball is slow, but it can be fun.

Yeah. One of my friends was making this point to me earlier. I hadn't really considered this, but the idea that baseball is so hidebound and hates fun and celebration, and there's certainly something to that. But it's pointing out that the home run trot in itself is just inherently sort of a self-aggrandizing act. Like you can't – I mean you can just put your head down and run around the bases but you're still sort of like that could just be a formality we could just say well the ball went over the fence and you scored however many runs you scored and that's it you can go back to the dugout now but we still make them go through the motions of actually running around the bases while the other team is hanging its head and And that's, it's almost like

just a built-in celebration in a way that you don't really get in a lot of other sports. Like I'm trying to think of a comp for that because of course you score a goal, you can celebrate, you score a touchdown, you celebrate, or maybe you get fined for that too, or you used to, but that's after the play, right? And the home run trot is part of the play. It makes the play official and it is sort of inherently a celebratory act. So why not look happy while you're doing it? Right. How is David Ortiz not showing out the picture when he took 35 seconds around the bases when Adam Rosales is doing it in half that amount of time? And just because it was like mainstreamed and made official, everybody has to do it.

Just because it's permissible doesn't mean that if you go slower. We certainly have seen enough video evidence, I think, in the minor leagues of players who just really took their time to get around the bases. And then there's a conversation at home plate. And that's even where there's a critical difference. Because if you do something like that, if you do it with the intent of trying to make a scene and showing up the picture that is when you can understand someone being upset no one likes to have their noses rubbed in it but a bat flip is well look we don't need to relitigate this we're all on the same page we know what a bat flip is and what a bat flip isn't yeah i don't care about bat flips anymore just give me the bat pose this estadio has pioneered a new art form

it says is that if you if there were and let's agree that there should be multiple Williams Estadio statues erected at Major League ballparks to this day. Right. What do you choose? Yeah. What do you, what do you choose? And I think there's the two contenders, right? There's the one of him looking silly, riding a third base with his hat flying off. And there's him on like kneeling as if he's listening to like a motivational speech at halftime from his manager, on his bat watching a home run sale out of the ballpark which is which is the better statue

yeah or i guess yeah those are the the leading contenders i mean the the no look pickoff was pretty cool and but maybe you need that to be in motion to really convey how cool it was whereas this yeah i i don't. I've seen someone made a drawing of him with his hair flowing behind him after his helmet flew off and it's all different colors and it's beautiful. And I think that is probably my favorite. But for an actual statue, I think I might like the posing at home plate with his hands on the bat knob. Pretty great. And it's funny that this happened just hours after we were dismissing the idea of televising Winter Leagues as something anyone would care about.

And then suddenly, everyone in the world, it's on SportsCenter, the Venezuelan Winter League. But again, probably an outlier because William Testadio is an outlier in all things. I was pitched a topic by Fangraphs' Alex Chamberlain overnight. He came to me. He referred to me as the foremost Astadio enthusiast. I don't think that's true. I think it's now shared amongst the world.

We're all Astadio enthusiasts. Yeah, many way tie. Yeah, many way tie. Billions of people in the world who love Astadio now. But he pitched the idea that, is Williams Astadio the last and best shot at tying or breaking Jordan Maggio's 56-game hitting streak? And I tried to run through a little bit of math there's no way i was going to calculate the actual odds of

doing that because that's there's it's so much more complicated than you'd think but i did at least go to the steamer projections for 2019 and i calculated for everyone the the rate of hits per plate appearance it can't be hits per at bat, because of course, if you bat four times in a game and you draw three walks and you go over one, a hitting streak is over. That's an over, and you can't do anything about it.

Walks don't help the hitting streak. So looking at Williams' STD, at least according to the Steamer, he has the third highest projected rate of hits per plate appearance in baseball. Now, the guy in first place is a Rockies minor leaguer named Deonathan Daza.

I think that's a weird reach. He's played a half-season double-A. I don't know what that's all about, but to his credit, he's posted really high averages in the minors. And the guy in second place, more predictably, is Daniel Murphy, who has been very good in the past, also is playing in Colorado,

doesn't strike out very much. Colorado is kind of cheating. It would only make sense that, I think, if anyone were to threaten the record, it would happen in Colorado, maybe Boston, for a right-handed bull hitter but those are those are the two hitting streaks don't get asterisks i guess but astadio still indeed up there maybe not that surprising because his his tendency to not strike out doesn't have to help him here if he just hit really bad balls in play and indeed his career batting average on balls in play is

is not league average it's it's below it because he is a right-handed hitter who is slow uh which you would know from looking at him but he doesn't walk he doesn't get hit by that many pitches and if the if the power turn is real he might even be better than the projection so in any case as to do probably like a top five or top ten candidate to be the most threatening player to joeMaggio's unthreatenable impossible hitting streak it'll never be threatened the only thing that really it would come down to then would be placing the batting order and how often you play Estadio not in line for regular at bats with the twins which is a shame also he's not someone you would

traditionally imagine at the top of the lineup when you would get more opportunities but on the other hand the twins did lose their leadoff hitter from last season and there's not a whole lot of players on that roster you would want to have at the top of the lineup given that nelson cruz people like that are going to be in the middle so i don't know this is a reach but hit astadio second or first yeah well that's the big question now i mean he's been such a big story and yet it's not really clear where or how he's going to play, but he has to. Like, he's just legitimately good now. He's also, I mean, I guess Nelson Cruz is now the most famous Minnesota twin. But after that, it's got to be Williams Estadillo, right?

I mean, who else is, I don't know that Byron Buxton or Miguel Sanoa. I don't think any of these guys is moving the needle as much as William Testadillo, who's just become a cult hero. So I don't know, you look at the Twins death chart on MLB.com right now, and he's listed as the starting third baseman and also the backup catcher, which doesn't really seem, I don't know, it's hard to know how he slots in. Like there's not that clear a path to playing time, you would think, just based on his pure performance. But it seems like he's getting better as a player. And he's also just as a pure marketing ploy.

He just seems like someone who is worth a lot more than your typical bench player. He is, I guess he's optionable, right? Because his contract was just purchased for the first time last season so he has options the twins can put him in the minors if they wanted to be spoil sports twins if you're listening don't effing do it and here's here's what here's what i think actually makes the most sense if the twins are going to make room if they want miguel senna to play a third base whatever trade williams has to do to the rockies that and not just saying that because i wanted to be in colorado but the rockies don't have a very good catcher. They could use him. He's apparently not a starter for the Twins. Put him in

Colorado and just let him hit. Just let him bat 600 times, see what happens. He'll hit like 350. It's the perfect environment for him to be in. There's no real catcher depth that would be negatively threatened, I guess, in that you don't really worry about Tom Murphy or Chris Iannetta or Tony Walters. Let Astadio go to Colorado and start. He can also back up at first base when Daniel Murphy is doing whatever or Ian Desmond is doing whatever. Williams, Astadio in Colorado, it's got to happen. Yeah. I wonder if you were trying to trade or trade for Astadio. Does the fact that he is just a cult hero, does that even enter the negotiations? Is it like, well, here's his pure projection.

This is what he is worth war-wise. Or is it like, hey, he's super famous and personable. And if you're getting Estadillo, like you're going to get an Estadillo bobblehead day and you're going to have a new most popular player on your team. I don't know whether that enters the baseball operations conversation,

but if you were like in the marketing department and your team acquired Williams-Estadillo, that'd be like the best day of your year. Here's what I do. Let's say you're, I don't know, the Phillies, right? And you are trying to sign Bryce Harper or Manny Machado. Let's say you come up short. Let's say, I don't know, Machado signs first and you're like, well, we missed on Machado, but we're at least going to try for Harper. The day it comes out that Harper signed with somebody else, you trade for Williams Estadio. Everybody is pleased. Yes. He's the consolation prize for every big free agent you miss out on. I like that. All right. Well, I don't know what we'll be talking about next, but I'm sure it will involve Williams Estadio.

So keep doing you, Williams, and we'll see you in spring training. So I don't really have any other big baseball news. I have some very small baseball news, which is that the Brewers signed Jake Patrika, who is one of my minor league free agent draft picks, one of my more boring ones who I picked purely because he's been in the big leagues a lot lately and hasn't been particularly good, but he's been there. And they signed him to a split contract. So he is on the 40 men, which sounds promising. Okay. I mean, the other minor news, maybe you're going to bring this up. Jaime Garcia is retired.

I was not. Yeah. But you brought up Jake Petrica. The Rangers signed Shelby Miller, which whatever. The Mariners. Forgot that Shelby Miller existed, actually. And he still throws pretty hard. It's just a shame about what it looks like. But the Mariners have signed 2009 second overall draft pick Dustin Ackley to a minor league contract. I'm going to read you. Well, I'm going to ask you, what do you think was Dustin Ackley's on-base percentage last season in AAA?

And I'm going to give you three options. The three options are 178, 278, and 378. Which was Dustin Ackley's on-base percentage last season? Gosh, I have almost no idea. I don't know how long he played or where he played. I haven't really been keeping close tabs on Dustin Ackley. I will say he had a short stint somewhere and it was 178. 378, Dustin Ackley. Last season as a 30-year-old, still more walks than strikeouts.

He's still got it as long as it is the ability to get on base against inferior minor league competition. But anyway, he's going to report to Tacoma, but it would be funny to see him end up in Seattle as one of my friends put it. This is like God-level fan trolling. This is just, you there are certain players i think even when it's like the old administration you should just know to stay away from and if i were in charge of the mariners i

would have stayed away from this one but whatever jerry you're opening old wounds yeah who are they gonna bring back chris snelling next or who would be another disappointing Mariner who would be mixed feelings? All of them! Yeah, I guess a long list you could choose from. All right. So still no Machado news, still no Harper news. So we have got a guest today. It's a guest I'm excited about. So some of you will remember that on episode 1144, we talked to a volcanologist, Eric Clemente, who Jeff is a big fan of, and we talked a little

bit about baseball, but we mostly talked about volcanoes, let's be honest. And today we are talking to someone from another scientific field that is loosely related to baseball, Shannon Towie. She works for NASA JPL on multiple Mars missions, and she's also a big baseball nerd. So we're going to talk to her a bit about baseball and her Mets fandom and also her work at NASA JPL, which is really kind of cool. So you got your volcano nerd episode, and I get my space nerd episode, something for each of us. And let me clear the air by saying that in talking to Shannon, which Ben and I have already done, I referred to Eric Clemente as being a professor at Denison College. I misspoke. It's Denison University.

Denison University. I am so, so very sorry to everyone who I offended. Sorry to all those Denison grads out there. All right. We will be right back with Shannon. why the moon becomes a shrieking skull. But I thought I heard, I thought I heard NASA clapping. I thought I heard, I thought I heard NASA clapping. So I am enough of a space geek that I get excited

when I see that someone from NASA has followed me on Twitter, and even more so when I see that her Twitter bio says she's a baseball data nerd, because that gives me an excuse to have her on a baseball podcast to talk a bit about baseball, but also about space. So we are excited to be joined now by Shannon Towie. She is a mission planning and execution systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She works on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars 2020 mission. Shannon, I don't know what incredibly cool and complex work you are currently not doing because you've decided to leave a little early to appear on a silly sports podcast to talk about a silly sport, but thank you for being here.

Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Well, my first question is, why are you working right now? Because I actually emailed a few people at NASA last week about a story that I'm working on, forgetting that the government is horribly broken. And I got a couple auto responses that said, NASA is currently closed due to a lapse in government funding. I am in furlough status, therefore I am unable to respond to your message at this time. And JPL is federally funded, but you are still at your post. So I can only assume that means that you are so essential that society would collapse without you. Well, that's not entirely true. However, JPL is actually managed by Caltech and we're contracted by NASA. So during federal shutdowns, Caltech usually steps in to keep us open. We're the only NASA center currently working,

but almost no one at JPL has been furloughed so far. So what are you working on currently? So as you said, I currently work on two missions, MRO, which is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. That's a mission that's been going on for a while. It's currently in operations. It's an orbiter on Mars. And my other project is Mars 2020, which is our next rover mission that will be launched in 2020. And I'm working on some ground data tools for that. Before you joined JPL, you had another cool science job. You were a detector technologist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, working on one of the experiments that previously played a part in discovering the Higgs boson. So I guess at some point you faced a decision like, do I want to keep working on discovering subatomic particles and explaining how the universe works? Or do I want to discover life on other planets? Just like one of those typical career choices that we all encounter.

Yeah, I worked at CERN. So I did a physics undergrad. So that's what my major was in. But upon graduation, I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to keep going through like a physics PhD track or do something else. And so I was lucky enough to get hired on for a year at CERN so I can try to figure that out. And it was a total blast to work there. I learned a whole lot, got to participate in a lot of very cool projects and research there. But when that was sort of after a year there, I was kind of ready to come back and try to pivot into engineering. So that was what led me to JPL and my current position. Yeah, you just kind of took a gap year, just worked it.

Yeah, it was a good gap year. Everyone does when they're just graduated from college, trying to figure out what to do with their life. I'll just go search for some subatomic particles. It worked out. In fact, as a Mets fan, that year was when the Mets were in the World Series. And so we were doing an experiment at CERN that was a 24-hour experiment. And I was signing up for the overnight shifts because that was when the games were on for the time zone. So I was like, I'm going to be up at 3.40 a.m. to

watch the World Series anyway. So I might as well stay up the whole night. You mentioned the Mets. I think it's my responsibility to at least say the word baseball in this podcast, and so that mission has now been accomplished, and we can move on from there. But whenever anyone is maybe younger and just really, really emotionally invested in sports and when something happens, some authority figure will say, oh, you should look at the bigger picture, have some perspective, you know, it's just sports, whatever. And few people might be more capable of looking at the bigger picture than you, given that you were looking at one of the biggest pictures that is in existence.

Also the smallest picture at the same time. Also the smallest. That's true. That's true. Everything is inside baseball. But what is then, maybe this is too deep of a question, what is baseball to you? How do you consume it? And how are you invested, given the magnitude of everything else that you do a lot of data analysis in both. And I've been interested in sort of baseball data probably since forever, pretty much. I sort of started getting into baseball as a kid around the last time that the Mets were

good before 2015, which was 2006, which was when I really started like watching a lot of baseball games and trying to, I don't know, just, it just got into as a fan. And then my dad actually gave me a book, which was one of like the OG baseball stats books, I think it was like the hidden game of baseball by Thorne and Palmer. And then I read through most of that as like a young teenager. And that really sort of got me sort of more into baseball, because you could kind of see that there is some pattern behind it and some kind of logic and predictability and how it operates as a system. And so that was around the same time that I was getting into physics as well. And so I think that maybe that was related. Maybe it's just sort of an interest in trying to figure out sort of the hidden logic behind systems that we

see either if it's a baseball game or particle physics or whatever, you know, still you're gathering data and trying to make inferences. And I find that rewarding. Yeah. And you have a personal site where you've published some research. And a couple of years ago, you did a post on pitcher classification. And I'm sure that if you wanted to apply your skills to something a lot less interesting and of value to the universe and the species, you probably could have done that in baseball. Did you ever consider trying to work in baseball or were you just always kind of locked into what you ended up doing? I kind of considered it around when I was like applying to jobs outside of physics, but I didn't look that far into it probably because I wasn't

quite sure at the time. now I think it's definitely more the case that that a lot of baseball professionals really like sort of people with physics backgrounds but a couple years ago like I wasn't sure that was the case and I knew some people at JPL already and like it kind of felt like that was sort of a more natural progression but it's not to say I won't never work in baseball like i do think baseball is a lot of fun so but it's definitely sort of more of a niche than maybe what i was looking for at the time there are there's no shortage of let's say i know there are like phd climate scientists working for baseball teams now there are just phds from all kinds of different fields that are working

baseball to say nothing about science very cool yeah yeah so you know maybe maybe after this uh particular podcast gets published then you're gonna you're gonna start getting some emails well we have to after the rover next rover lands let's get through that yeah right are there questions in baseball that fascinate you i mean maybe not as big as life on mars but it just in terms of mysteries about the game or things that you would want to look into or discoveries that have been made that you've been particularly fascinated by? Yeah, I've been trying to follow some baseball research. I am really interested in pitchers and pitching and either pitch sort of pitch sequences or sort of just individual picture development which is probably like that that blog post that you mentioned like i try to get into

sort of like picture classifications and for like individual pictures but some of the questions that i'm mostly interested in are kind of the more sort of like physical questions like how much can we determine from like a pure physics standpoint, you know, like speed and spin rate and like all the sort of like physical parameters of a single pitch that you can record? And can we say things about sort of the greater game from those like, you know, sort of pure physical measurements? I think that's really interesting development. And I would love to, you know, learn more about what people are doing there. its development and i would love to you know learn more about what people are doing there so yeah is a rover with 23 cameras more complicated than stat cast or the same about the same yeah roughly the same probably no would you as a as i guess the uh the most recent mets fan that we've

spoken to on this podcast certainly maybe maybe the only mets that we've spoken to on this podcast. And certainly maybe the only Mets fan we've spoken to since the Mets were placed under new management. Can we get the official statement from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on your estimation, your evaluation of new general manager Brody Van Wagenen? I think we need to give him at least a full offseason before we can make any statements. I like what he's been saying, but I'm not not gonna make an official

statement from nasa on brody did you what look i don't know how much you're at you actually get to think about the mets during the offseason i don't know what your day-to-day is like we're trying to suss that out but you know i i believe that it came down to the finalists being van de wagonen and high and bloom from the rays and doug melvin from the Brewers before. Did you have a rooting interest? And if so, what was your rooting interest? You know, I did try to follow, but I didn't know enough really about the particular candidates. I thought that Brody Van Wagenen might have been kind of like a wild card. That's true. So I wasn't quite sure how to evaluate him. I did think one of the other guys was like a young, like very analytics focused person, right?

That would presumably be High and Bloom coming from Tampa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bloom. So I thought he would have been a more interesting choice. Because I know, well, rumors on Twitter is that the Mets analytics department may not be quite as advanced as some other teams. That could use you, probably. Yeah, so I was hoping for them to sort of, you know, to some other teams. They could use you, probably. Yeah. So I was hoping for them to sort of jump more into analytics.

But the Mets have sort of overarching problems, I guess, in their front office besides using more analytics, which is sort of the will pawns. Right. Yeah. Actually, yeah, I don't know if Bloom would have been a more interesting choice. Maybe it would have been a better choice. I don't know if Bloom would have been a more interesting choice. Maybe it would have been a better choice. I don't know.

But interesting, perhaps not. But yeah, there's actually kind of an interesting physics mystery surrounding the Mets right now. I don't know if you're aware of it, but you could look into it and maybe solve it. But Jeff has written about this, that it seems like there's something strange going on with Citi Field suppressing exit velocity and offense. And no one is quite sure why. Yeah, I did read that the other day.

And that is an interesting mystery. Yeah, I should look more into that. Because I can tell you that I don't want to. But yeah, I think that is like sort of an interesting question. And you definitely sort of felt like physics has come into play in baseball stadiums before. Like, I don't know, of an interesting question. And you definitely sort of felt – like physics has come into play in baseball stadiums before, most obviously with the Rockies and how the atmosphere there affects the game.

And it would be interesting to see if there was some mysterious force surrounding city fields. Maybe it's all the planes. Who knows? That would be interesting looking, too. Get a sample of Queen's Air and bring it to CERN and bounce some stuff on it and see what shows up. Yeah, and try to sort that out and rebuild it somewhere else. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you a non-scientific question about Mets fandom, because I alluded to this on our last episode. I've talked about it a bit before, and I think Mets fans get mad at me when I say this, but it is my contention that Mets fandom has not suffered as much as it makes itself out to be suffering, just relative to other fan bases that have had it equally bad or possibly worse. I'm not saying it's been great to be a Mets fan over the last several years. It's been a challenge, but they were in the World Series just a few years ago, as you mentioned. And they have been good during your lifetime, which would not be the case with some other teams. So it's been bad in a lot of ways. And it's a big market team. And so

you kind of hold them to different standards i guess but i don't know is it new york centric like big city like we should be the best and therefore if we're not the best we have it harder than everyone else or do you think it's a legitimate complaint that mets fans have suffered and have earned their right to be bitter about everything i think they everyone has a right to be bitter about their team being bad. However, I think Mets fans sort of probably not uniquely suffer, but there's always sort of a gap between sort of like fan expectation. And it comes off as the, you know, ownership and the front office being sort of unwilling to commit to changes that a lot of Mets fans think would help the team.

And so I think a lot of the Mets fans suffering comes from like the idea that the Mets are a big market team that a lot of time Mets fans think is managed and like a small market team that they're sort of like a disconnect between sort of the fans expectations and what is delivered in the team as a final product. And so, but there are teams that have suffered more, for sure. I mean, was it was it not? Fundamentally, what I've troubled with is it was it not just a few seasons that the Mets went to the World Series? I mean, that's enough of a surprise to me that like, that'll hold me over for like, a couple more years, probably. Because I was not expecting the Mets to be to be super good that season and that was a lot of fun to watch just like in half of that season so yeah if you could figure out something about

the physics of health and pitcher strain and keeping guys off the DL that might be beneficial too yeah for sure I've definitely been like reading about some interesting biomechanics research that people are doing that's kind of insane trying to figure out sort of the injury risks of different players which i think is really it's really cool i don't know a lot about that i think it's interesting so i know when when i'm not working and working on baseball then generally if i'm going to make conversation i want to make conversation about something else whether that be volcanoes or just like mountains or something squirrels something unrelated and

as for ben if he's not working on baseball i am given to understand that he enjoys to talk about things that aren't baseball as well so when when you when you are to work are you are you one of the rare lucky few who actually is so passionate about what you do that you just want to talk about that all the time or would you rather when you're off the clock would you rather talk about what you do or would you rather talk about the Mets? Well, considering I have way fewer opportunities to talk about the Mets, I'm always ready to talk about the Mets off of work. Most of my social group here in LA is a lot of fellow engineers and scientists. So I do talk about work off the clock a decent amount.

So every time that I find a baseball fan or so, like, that's a lot of fun. So there's a lot of overlap between baseball fans and scientists historically, or at least sabermetric researchers and scientists. It's just not quite the same as baseball fans in general. But is there like a favorite sport at JPL? Is there if there is a favorite sport at all, would it be baseball? Or are other things still more popular as water cooler conversation? There's a lot of Dodgers news because they've been good. So I won't say that people generally talk about sports in casual conversation at JPL. That's not really the largest interest, probably, of most JPLers.

But out of all the sports, I would say it is discussed pretty often. I have some baseball fan friends at work, and we are always talking about what's going on with the Dodgers. always talking about what's going on with the Dodgers. But I think out of the whole nerd population in general, I think baseball is a pretty common sport to be a fan of. So considering that we have encountered some challenges just getting your Bluetooth headphones to pair with your computer for this interview, I'm sure it cannot be easy to communicate with spacecraft in orbit around a distant planet or even on that distant planet in the future. So tell us about your day-to-day job. I guess now, how does your work break down between the MRO and Mars 2020 and to the extent that you can without losing all of us because we know nothing, what do you do? Yeah. So first of all, how we communicate with our spacecraft,

no matter where they are in the solar system, is through three large ground stations around the world. So we have one in Goldstone, California, which is about four hours east of LA. We have one in Madrid in Spain and one in Australia. And we use these stations to both send commands up to all the spacecrafts and to receive data from all the spacecraft. And so my day-to-day duty is on MRO, which is a spacecraft that's currently in operation. I work on building sequences for it. So I'm part of a team that sort of writes a big plan for what that spacecraft is going to do. We build it for two weeks at a time and my team schedules all the communication. So when it's going to talk to Earth, like to those DSN stations that I mentioned,

and when it's going to talk to other spacecrafts, in particular the rovers and the landers, and when it's also going to do certain engineering activities that we schedule to sort of keep it in operation and keep it healthy. One of the important things that MRO does besides science is a relay. So when Curiosity and the New Lander InSight, when they take data, they send that data up to MRO and then MRO sends it back to Earth. And so we coordinate overflights where we fly over these landers where they can send us data. There are a few other orbiters that also work on this, but that's like sort of a primary thing that my team works on on MRO is scheduling when to do those communications.

And then for 2020, I have kind of a different role. I'm doing more sort of like software development stuff. So one of the things that I'm working on is how we're going to be able to determine that the rover is healthy on a day-to-day basis. The rover planning goes pretty much every day. We plan one day at a time in the rover's life. And so at the beginning of the day, when you get into work, you want to be able to quickly see as an operator

that everything from the previous day executed as expected and that there's nothing dangerous that happened to the rover and make sure that everything's okay on board. And so the software that I'm working on for my 2020 team will help the operations people sort of quickly within the first 20 minutes or so decide that, you know, everything happened according to plan or that if things didn't go according to plan, it's okay. And then be able to move on to the next planning phase. And so for people who are wondering why we're sending another rover to Mars, we've had a few. There are a couple still there, although Opportunity is still quiet and hibernating, and hopefully we'll communicate again someday. But what is kind of the

main objective or the main objectives of the mission? Why do we keep going back? So 2020 has a sort of different set of responsibilities than our current rover Curiosity or MIRB-B, Opportunity, we call it MIRB-B. So one of the things that 2020 is going to do differently than the previous missions is that it will actually cache samples. So when it drills into rocks or the ground, it'll store that sample that it gets in a little tube and it'll cache that tube that it gets in a little tube, and it'll cache that tube in like sort of a pile of samples that will later be returned to Earth. And so sort of like the first mission is sequence of missions that JPL is going to send, where we determine that we can sort of

build a cache of material that we can keep like clean and keep pristine samples, collect them at scientifically interesting sites, and then eventually return those to Earth with future missions. There are also a few different instruments on 2020 that weren't on Curiosity. A lot of the instruments are next generation upgrades from the ones that we sent on Curiosity, but one new one is a tech demo for creating oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere, which is an important thing that we need to demonstrate is possible before we send sort of more complex missions that need to sort of launch off of Mars or to send humans to Mars. And so 2020 is sort of the first spacecraft in a series of spacecrafts that we want to send to demonstrate

that we can sort of send stuff to Mars and get stuff back sort of to prepare for a future human mission. And I don't know if it's the most important part of the mission, but it has a helicopter. And I want you to tell me about the Helicopter Scout, which sounds like something that would be difficult to do on Mars where there's not a whole lot of atmosphere. So how do you make something fly on Mars? Yeah, the Mars helicopter is a very cool project. It was sort of a late addition to the program. And it's very cute. It has these huge blades. And it's very small and has these huge blades because it needs to fly in the very thin Martian atmosphere. It will be sent with the

rover, and then the rover will release it after it lands. And it will do a few sort of test flights. It's also a tech demo, so we're not expecting to get science data out of it per se. It's just like a demonstration of, you know, to characterize how well it works. And it's very cool. It will do, I think it has around five planned flights in its mission, but it's technically a different mission. It's just flying along with 2020, but hopefully we'll get some really cool data from it. And it is really exciting to send. So yeah, everyone was pleased to find out that it was going. So it's currently being built on the 2020. And if you come to JPL, if you look at like the clean room there, you can see certain parts of 2020 coming together, which is really exciting. Yeah, over the past few minutes,

you've explained to us in some detail what it is that you do. And of course, you were just talking about the helicopter. Now, you've already said that most of your social circle in Los Angeles is fellow engineers, but you must have occasion every so often to meet a stranger, family friend, friend of a friend, that kind of thing. And when you introduce yourself and you say what you do, is that one of those things that leads to a lot of follow-up questions or pretty much like none? Usually a lot of follow-up questions, I would say. Most people are pretty interested in what we're doing, which I think is great.

It's important to keep interest high. What are then – what would be – I know we're here asking you some list of some obvious questions, but what are the most common questions that you're getting from people with however often you are interacting with people that you hadn't met before? I do get a lot of questions about sort of like competition and sort of how space has opened up to commercial interests. I get asked that a lot. I don't know if that's just people I meet that care about startups and stuff that are in space. But I get asked a lot about what is NASA's role in space versus these newer companies that are also putting stuff into space and what our major goals are as an agency. A lot of people think that NASA is kind of too conservative of an agency, which is, I guess, a little fair. But a lot of questions about when we're planning on sending human astronauts to Mars and a lot of questions about politics recently.

So how the drama in the federal government has impacted us. So I think those are sort of the most common lines of inquiry is either like a commercialization or like so you guys need to pay attention to what goes on in congress kind of a thing which which we do what is it like to work on something that is so long-term oriented i mean solar system exploration missions go on for decades the planning and the building and then the traveling and it's just such a long-term process there are people who have been working on missions from the 70s and 80s since they started. Now, you have come in a little bit later. I guess the Mars 2020 mission officially was announced in December 2012. I'm sure it started in some way before that. But still, you're looking at, I mean,

you know it's supposed to launch in July 2020. It's supposed to land on a specific day, 18th of February 2021 currently. And so you can mark that on your calendar and know that it's going to be really exciting and also anxiety inducing and terrifying because it's never a routine matter to land something on another planet and have it be in one piece on the other end. You mentioned you can see it slowly being assembled. I mean, that's got to be kind of cool, but also difficult just to wait to see the results. Yeah, that's true. Working on Mars missions, I think, is definitely the easy mode for time.

A lot of the scientists who work on either the Jupiter system or Saturn system, it takes many, many years for a spacecraft to even get to Jupiter or Saturn or beyond after they're launched. And so there are a lot of scientists at JPL and around the world who are working with data that you may only have one or two missions go in your lifetime that can collect data for your research goals. And it's kind of mind boggling to me as well. But I think it also sort of every time that we've sent a mission somewhere, we've learned a lot. There's no shortage of interesting questions to ask about the solar system or outside the solar system. And so I think a lot of the scientists here who are probably sort of frustrated by, you know, our physical limits and our economical limits are sustained by the satisfaction of looking at something that in a way that has never been looked at before and be able to learn something about, you know, a new environment that is always surprising and always interesting.

that is always surprising and always interesting. And so I think on the long-term scale, like it is, they are long-term projects. All of our missions are long-term, but the rewards that you get are also like, you know, can sustain you for a long-term as well. So I think a lot of the people are very passionate about their subjective research and they, you know, just love the opportunity

to be able to argue for a mission to get sent and to have that mission go through to completion is really satisfying. It's like a five-year plan. It's one of the reasons that the baseball executives never get fired anymore is because everyone's got a five-year long-term plan and so it just takes a while to see how things work out. So this is good for your job security. You just keep pointing to the long-term.

There's no reason for you to be dismissed in the immediate. Anyway, unrelated to that, there's an article posted today to Nature. It's titled Earth's Magnetic Field is Acting Up and Geologists Don't Know Why. It talks about the erratic motion of the northern magnetic pole. And you can tell me if I'm stupid or wrong right away, but to what extent, if any, in your work do you have to worry about or account for polar drift or even the dreaded reversal or flip? We are concerned with like geomagnetic storms. I know those can have an effect on some of our satellites and they can also have some effects. I think most normally we have effects on our DSN,

like our ground stations from just normal weather, but space weather is definitely also can impact the, you know, amount of data that we get per like attempt to send data. I think a lot of the Earth missions that we have, a lot of them are sort of more interested in, you know, I guess just studying whatever that they can study about like the drift of the magnetic poles. And that's not something that is super well, I mean, I don't know a whole lot about this. So I don't want to say anything that's wrong. But I don't think that we're super concerned about magnetic drift or even a magnetic reversal. I think neither of those cases sort of are indicative of some planetary catastrophe or sudden planetary catastrophe. So I think, I mean, I hope that we're not too concerned about that outside of maybe some of the performance impacts

that a large magnetic event would have on our Earth's satellites that drift in and out of. That's good. We can worry about the other planetary catastrophes instead. I think, yeah, I think there are other planetary catastrophes that would matter more. instead? I think, yeah, I think there are other planetary catastrophes that would matter more. So one way I continuously tie this back to baseball, I think, is that in both astronomy and baseball, there are really thriving citizen scientist communities. And there's a lot of work that gets done on the internet, whether it's crowdsourced stuff, whether it's image processing, a lot of initiatives that actual valuable science gets done. And obviously that's been the case in baseball too, where data will get out sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes the crowd

and the public actually gathered that data. But it's a little different now in that lots of the leading sabermetricians get hired by teams, but there's still a lot of valuable research that gets done and that teams pay attention to. Is that the case in your work as well, that there are people out there on the internet just doing interesting work or valuable work that you will look at and discuss and say, hey, maybe we can incorporate something here? Yes, that's definitely the case. We have had sort of amateur astronomers that have discovered new asteroids, which is obviously always a good plus to us to be able to catalog new objects. And so there's definitely a big community of amateur astronomers that NASA really sort of depends on.

We also sort of are required to have a lot of sort of public engagement. And the more that we can involve people with sort of NASA's missions and science goals, the better. And there are sort of a growing number of citizen science focused projects, either whether or not they're sort of analyzing images. So like as a citizen scientist, you can go online and volunteer to sort of characterize various images and, you know, find different patterns in those and like submit those to a big database. And there's been a lot of

cool results that have come out of rather than having like some, you know, poor group of grad students go through, you know, 100,000 images trying to pick out the interesting parts that you can actually, you know, train citizens to do it. And then the public has like a sort of granted interest and can learn some science to do it. And then the public has a sort of granted interest and can learn some science along the way. And it helps sort of everyone be able to make more discoveries and also improve sort of science literacy among people. Because the more that you can communicate to people, the better. One person that I knew in undergrad who I went to a talk with once said something that's stuck with me since

that was like, if the general public doesn't understand, you know, if it's earth science or astronomy or solar system science or anything about Mars, then it's not the general public's fault. Like, you know, it's our fault for not communicating better with them. And so that definitely stuck with me as sort of a statement of responsibility towards the public education part of NASA's mission and other science missions. And I think that's important no matter what you're doing in science. Like if you can't communicate it to the public, then, you know, it's worth a lot less than it could be.

So you were a systems engineer. You were on Twitter. I'm looking at your Twitter profile right now. You're talking about the abundance of citizen science. I don't know what the science astronomy version of fangraphs would be, but I'm sure that it exists. But one thing that I think Ben and I are both aware of being on Twitter and dealing with sports is that sometimes baseball Twitter is bad. Is astronomy Twitter good? No. It's a short answer. I know there is a lot of abuse thrown around, not at me per se,

because I'm not popular enough on Twitter, but a lot of the more popular science communications Twitter accounts that I follow, like fellow scientists who engage a lot on Twitter, it can be a rough, rough go. There's like a lot of sort of unfair abuse and other social ills, go. There's like a lot of sort of unfair abuse and other social ills, especially if you happen to be, you know, female or minority in some way can get really sort of nasty on Twitter, along with other social media, I presume. So the short answer is, is like, no, it's probably not better than baseball Twitter. So we were talking to my friend eric clemetti a while ago an earth sciences professor at denison college and i like talking to him because i'm a volcano nerd and one of the things that i've become aware of through through his work and writing is that there exists a lot

of frauds a lot a lot of people who who like to suggest that they can predict earthquakes or predict volcanic eruptions which at present are just not things that can be done, certainly with regard to the earthquake. So is there, in your field, can you think of some sort of an equivalent of just people, frauds, quacks who come off making these broad proclamations to draw attention that just don't really exist? And I guess one would be, you know, extraterrestrials, but outside of maybe the obvious one, is there an equivalent? Yeah, I think there are definitely a few other obvious ones that I can think of are like the conspiracy theories for the moon landings being fake. The conspiracy theories about flat Earth and, you know, NASA lying to you and making up pictures or whatever. I don't know really

their pseudo arguments, but there's definitely sort of a competing like source of not correct information that's trying to communicate with the public which I think is what makes sort of our outreach more important is to not like like Steph Curry came out and said he didn't think the moon landings were real like we you know we can't have that you know these are like influential people that are you know are promoting these fake theories for who knows what reason. I don't really know what motivates a lot of the conspiracy theorists, but it's sort of frustrating to see when that sort of gains traction in the wider community. And then you have public distrust towards groups like NASA or CERN, which is another big target of conspiracy

theorists, you know, about that the Large Hadron Collider is going to open a, you know, hell portal or that we're inviting demons into the world or something. So that is frustrating to everyone who works in science or around science is to, you know, try to combat those forces i know like when you like even go to youtube and search cern like their whole front page are like these wild conspiracy theories you know you need to go like page two before you find like an actual certain video and i think that's i think it's really something that we need to figure out sort of as the you know science and engineering community and maybe with the help of social

media to also, I don't want to say crack down, but be able to promote things that are more correct rather than sensational. I don't know, that's a hard question, but there's definitely a lot of misinformation out there about science and the mission of a lot of scientific agencies. And I think a lot of that sort of responsibility for fixing that, like, does fall to the scientific community. But there's no real sort of easy answer there. And, you know, that's something that a lot of people are worried about that I think is rightly so. Yeah. Well, maybe our last question, other than Mars, because I don't want you to hurt anyone's feelings. Where are you most

excited to explore? Let's say in your lifetime future mission, maybe some of the lessons that are learned from the missions you're working on now could help us go somewhere else. What's the most exciting solar system target for you and why? Yeah, I think a mission that I'm really looking forward to and a lot of people at JPL are looking forward to is our Europa mission, which is our next flagship mission after Mars 2020. It's expected to launch somewhere around 2026. And this will be an orbiter to Europa, which is the moon of Jupiter, which is sort of arisen as a primary target for people looking for life in the solar system outside of Earth. Because Europa has what we believe to be a heated ocean underneath the large ice surface. And so anytime that you have heat and water, what we

found on Earth over the past few decades has been even in almost the near total absence of light, that life can originate in those environments. And so that's sort of one of the missions that I'm really looking forward to. I think Europa is a really interesting science target and I think it's very cool that we're getting to send a mission there. So eagerly awaiting those results about 10 years from now or so. But that's definitely a mission that we're really excited to just start ramping up on at JPL outside of Mars. So that'll be a really cool target. I'm also sort of interested in some other moons of Saturn. As you know, Cassini, we ended the Cassini mission in 2017.

And Cassini took a lot of really good data about moons of Saturn that are really interesting, like Enceladus and Titan. And so a future mission that I would want to propose would be to go back to Enceladus to look more at the plumes there and the really interesting geological processes there. So I think that would be really exciting to look at as well. There's lots to look forward to. Yeah, there's no shortage of places to go. And the MRO has enough fuel to operate for another, what, 15 years-ish. So you've got plenty of time if you want to keep doing what you're doing.

But if you do decide to go into baseball and help the Mets out, I'm sure a lot of our listeners would be pleased about that. We will keep up with what you are doing and what JPL are doing, and best of luck hitting the right crater that you have targeted to hit and not hitting it too hard. We hope that the missions are a success and everyone can find Shannon on Twitter at SShannonT.

Thank you very much for taking time out of your day for this. Yes, thank you so much too. Thanks for having me. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening. That was a treat for me. Hopefully it was a treat for you too. I had another NASA JPL systems engineer, Molly Bittner, on a video game podcast once to talk about Cassini. So basically, I will try to shoehorn a NASA JPL systems engineer into any podcast I do. If you work on space stuff, let me know. Maybe I'll find an excuse to get you on a podcast sometime. So Jeff and I talked about what we thought was the big Brewers signing of the day, Jake Patrika. Turns out if Jake Patrika makes the Brewers, he's going

to be throwing to Yasmani Grandal, who signed a one-year $18.25 million deal with Milwaukee. Again, that is one year, $18.25 million for Yasmani Grandal. Kind of incredible. Jeff and I talked about the state of the free agent market and baseball economics on our last episode. This would be the latest sign of the free agent apocalypse. You, Yasmany Grundahl, second on my list of catchers. He's just a good player. It's kind of ironic that he went to the Brewers because Brewers fans are probably predisposed to thinking that Grundahl is worse than he was because, of course, they got to see him in the NLCS last year. Not his finest hour, but he's been about an average blocker over the past little while. And of course, he's one of the very best framers in baseball, and he's been a good hitter.

And he just turned 30. If that guy has to settle for a one-year deal, something has gone awry. Now, there has been some reporting that Grandal was offered or might have been offered or was in discussions that could have led to an offer with the Mets that would have been in the neighborhood of four years and $50 to $60 million.

If that's the case, then you have to lay some blame at his agent store for misreading the market, thinking that there would be way more out there for Yasmani Grandal. Maybe there should be, but it doesn't seem all that likely that there ever would have been. Still, one year and 18.25 million. Yes, he came with a qualifying offer, but that is just a pittance for a player of his skill. So quite a bargain for the Brewers. We're now in what's shaping up to be an intensely competitive NL Central. This is a big upgrade for them. Gotta hand it to them. They went and got Kane and Jelich last winter. They went and got

Grandal now, not to mention Jake Patryka. We've talked a lot about how they've done this rebuild. There's a lot to admire and emulate there. The Dodgers have lost a lot of talent this winter, voluntarily, obviously, but it seems like they still have some work to do. Maybe Grandal gets paid next winter because he won't be subject to the qualifying offer and that NLCS performance will be behind him, and if he has a good year, he could definitely cash in then instead of now, but you just can't count on that anymore.

I know Grandal's not really regarded as a superstar, but you look at the numbers. If you include the receiving, he sort of is. The market's just a mess right now. So Jeff and I will probably touch on this at greater length next time. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already done so. Max Smith, Colin Simning, Katie Razor, Will Crosby, and Shane Shuby. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. And thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with one more episode this week. Talk to you soon. I'm off on a rocket ship Prepared for something new I'm off on a rocket ship Ecstatic with the view

I am scared of the things that come in And I want for the things I don't have Cannot stand to be one of many I'm not what they are