Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1329: Statheaded Elsewhere

Episode Date: January 31, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and ESPN’s Sam Miller banter about offseason content-creation strategies, recurring columns, and an alternate history in which Orlando Cepeda could have prevented writers from citing stats in stories, then (21:45) talk to longtime Baseball Prospectus writer (and author of The Shift) Russell Carleton about his departure from BP to take a job with […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1329 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined not today by Jeff Sullivan of Van Graphs, who was unavailable at this particular time, but by co-host Emeritus, ESPN's own Sam Miller. Hello, welcome back, Sam. Hello. Ben, I would just like to note that normally when you turn on a podcast, you're listening to a podcast and they start the episode and the you know one guest introduces the or one one host introduces the the other host or the guest host and yeah he says hi how are you and the other one says good and you think well that's weird didn't they just talk for 20 minutes

beforehand and yes they did but in this case i had not said a word yet to them that was real podcast talk you said hi i think when i said hi i well i said hi but you were already i i thought that you were already muted when i said hi so i logged on to this thing and i said uh hi or when you logged on i said hi but you have a you you log on pre-muted yes and so then uh you didn't respond in any way and then 80 seconds, you came on and said something like, okay, all right. And then that started that. So. Yeah. Well, we had been G-chatting throughout the day, so I felt like we were picking it up with that conversation as opposed to not having talked for a while. So yeah, we, in a few minutes, we'll be bringing on Russell Carlton of Baseball Prospectus, late of Baseball Prospectus, I guess, our most frequent guest, I think, during our time doing this podcast together. And he is leaving Baseball Prospectus after a very long stint to go work for the New York Mets. So we're going to talk to him about that. But a few minutes before we do that, how are you handling the January

doldrums? You always had a smart approach to the offseason, I think, which was that you had franchises that you would trot out for the very slow months where you would have certain ideas and articles that you would bring back year after year, probably more during the BP days than you do now, but you still do it. Like what the least exciting game of the year was a thing that you did for a while. You do the most defining memory of the year now that's a new franchise. That is smart.

I don't have any series that I can just keep going back to in these weeks when there's nothing to do. I don't like having the series. Usually, I think I have a lot of things I did twice, weeks when there's nothing to do i don't like having the series um usually the i i think i have a lot of things i did twice and then the second one i felt really burnt out by the time i i was on the second one and then i never did it again i always had a hard time repeating an idea and not just wanting to block quote huge parts from the first time i did it but i did do worst game of the year at least three, maybe four times.

That was a fun one. I liked that one. Yeah, that was great. That was fun. That might be my... That and I also, the World Series, I would do the team's fans. Remember those? Oh, yeah.

Well, now you kind of do like something about each player on the team. Yeah, that was a first time thing though well you've done similar things in the past where it was like uh reasons to root for people on certain teams or something i have done that twice you're out of ideas is what i'm saying yeah uh yeah every once in a while i really will be out of ideas and i'll think oh well i'll just go look at what i did this week last year and And it hardly ever applies. But I do like the off season as a time. I mean, the off season is great because everything has stopped. And so you don't have to worry about your article becoming more outdated by the time you finish it.

Yeah. It's so nice to be able to say last season. I just love that when you can switch over to last season or even better last year, when you can just do that and everything is final and it's locked away in that year and can't change ever again I have in this case the January doldrums have been I've actually you're gonna be surprised by this But because neither one of us ever did this at all at baseball perspectives, but I have been filing articles for later Oh, wow. Yeah, I have i have been filing articles for later oh wow yeah i have i have filed an article for june i have filed two articles for late march i have filed an article for next wednesday which even that yeah it's pretty extreme and i have filed two articles for news that will eventually happen. Huh.

Wow. I know. Are these like features that are, it's just pegged to a certain news event? This is incredible. Yeah, basically pegged to either news events or the calendar. Wow. I expressed my wonder at Grant Brisby's story recently on the podcast about having pre-written his Little league story and

then forgotten that he did that but both of those things were baffling to me but wow yeah ben for people who uh who never followed ben when he was the editor of baseball perspectives which there probably are a fair number of people uh but ben had a funny little thing at baseball perspectives which is that baseball prospectus had traditionally always been like you just publish everything in the morning and it kind of gave it the feeling that it was a daily like a daily newspaper or a daily magazine and so you could wake up and go what's baseball prospectus got today um and you could read it in the morning and then you know for the most part you you wouldn't come back until the next day you might read it in the morning. And then, you know, for the most part, you wouldn't come back until the next day.

You might read it in the afternoon. You might read it in the morning. You might read it whenever. But he kind of knew it was all going to happen all at once. And there had been efforts every once in a while to kind of have more stuff during the day and hope people would come back. But, you know, no one was really coming back because we had this rhythm. And so if you published something at 3.30 in the afternoon, no one was really coming back because we had this rhythm. And so if you published

something at, at three 30 in the afternoon, unless it was breaking news, unless it was a transaction analysis for Rob Robinson Cano signing or something like that, it wasn't gonna, it would get like 12 views in the afternoon. And so that was just how we always did it. And then Ben just started publishing things as soon as he got them. Like he would finish an article. He started with his. So he would write an article and then he would just publish it. And even though it was 625 p.m. And then he started, I think, doing that, arguing to do that for some of mine.

And I thought that it was because he was trying to maybe train people to come back during the day. But no, you just said, well, well i mean it's not going to get fewer views if it's up longer like it it exists now like time is only going one direction yeah and so why have it exist for less time in public than for more time and so you we just started publishing articles but the problem was that then sometimes wouldn't sometimes they would then look like they were the previous days and people oh yeah you'd have to move the publication date just time or something that story didn't turn out as good as i thought it would remember that time that you had a series where you were rereading and blogging about everything Nate Silver ever wrote.

I also have Baseball's Seven Wonders, which I think I got four. Yeah, we never found out what the other, there have probably been more wonders since then, maybe. I wonder. I know what one of them would be, I think. But yeah, what I did, Mariano Rivera's postseason, Mike Trout's rookie season, Ricky Henderson's old age and carrie wood's 20 strikeout game and then i just stopped that one i was still working on i think like if you look at it i think a couple of them came pretty late but yeah nate so i did a that was an that was a january doldrums wasn't it or probably yeah it was it was because it was when i was it was when i was editing the annual for the first time and i didn't i was too busy to write features for you like i didn't have the mental space to write pebble hunting for you it was just too hard for me to think of a full piece

so i thought i would make joe hamrahi happy by filing these daily pieces that were smaller and i so i was rereading every article nate silver ever wrote at baseball perspective starting with the original one and i would read it react to it summarize it and if uh if it was something with research which it usually was i would then try to re recreate the research with updated with with the you know 15 years of of stats that it happens and send to see if it's still held up. Yeah. And then I stopped. Right.

I was just thinking the other day how incredible it is that Nate was at Baseball Perspectives for as long as he was. Like he was at BP longer than either of us was, I think, right? He was there for, what, six years, at least seven years, something like that, which is pretty amazing. That's quite a run given how he has ascended in the world or at least expanded and come to the attention of many more people in the years since then, because BP, people cycle in and out. We're about to talk to one who is cycling out and people generally go on to bigger baseball sites and media sites or they go work for a team or something but nate has become

a celebrity a nerd celebrity at least and he was there for a really long time and uh that's it sort of surprises me in retrospect okay you had uh something that you want to talk about before we bring russell in here yeah real quick i probably probably won't be real quick i got a book recommendation a couple maybe i don't know a year and half, two years ago from Matt Trueblood. I think it was. Yeah, it was. Who recommended that I read Willie Mays, The Life, The Legend, a biography of Willie Mays by James Hirsch. And I forget what he said, but he had some praise for it that it's just like, it's like chock full of goodness or something. for it that it's just like it's like chock full of goodness or something and so i got it and read it a pretty pretty deliberately i read it i've read it a little bit at a time for about a year i read it very slowly but enthusiastically because truly this book has something on every page that you're like what how how was life like that or how was baseball like that? Or how was baseball like that? Or how did that thing happen? Or that's hysterical.

And sometimes I tweeted periodically. They would be so good, I would tweet. I took a lot of pictures of this book for later use. And there's one detail, though, that I wanted to bring up, which is that in 1962, Orlando Cepeda was Willie Mays' teammate, and Alvin Dark was Willie Mays' manager. So I'm going to read a little bit here. Okay.

Cepeda's troubles with Alvin Dark resurfaced at the end of 1962 with the publication of an article in Look magazine that Cepeda thought would describe him as the best right-handed hitter in baseball. The article, however, was called Orlando Cepeda thought would describe him as the best right-handed hitter in baseball. The article, however, was called Orlando Cepeda. Can he slug his way out of the doghouse? In it, Dark described his heretofore secret grading system for players. Unhappy with such conventional measures as batting average, home runs, errors, and stolen bases, he wanted to evaluate more precisely how players contributed to winning games. So he devised his own system of pluses and minuses. Thus, a home run in the first inning might get one plus, while a home run in the ninth that won a game might get four. There were pluses and minuses for everything, but the system was highly subjective and no one besides Dark understood

it. Regardless, he explained to Look that Mays graded out the best, and Jim Davenport was second, Regardless, he explained to Look that Mays graded out the best, and Jim Davenport was second. But Cepeda, quote, he had more minuses than anybody, Dark said. So I will just point out that I said that there's something on every page that's like, wow. And just in that paragraph, which is not even what I want to talk about, you just got an idea for a baseball prospectus unfiltered, right? Like Alvin Dark's grading system is rich with potential. But here's what I actually want to talk. Cepeda did slump during the stretch drive in 1962, but given his numbers, 306 batting, 35 homers, 114 RBIs,

as well as his track record of four consecutive All-Star games, Dark's evaluation was hard to fathom in 1966 when maize testified in a libel suit that cepeda brought against look what orlando cepeda sued the magazine for alvin dark's player metric system and so so I looked this up. And I am going to write about this someday. So everybody back off. But I looked this up. And it is true that Cepeda sued Look Magazine for libel.

And it went to trial. He lost. And then it went to appeal. And the original verdict was upheld. And so he lost. Okay. You can say that a ball player's first inning home runs or whatever Alvin Dark was trying Times versus Sullivan, which is a famous ruling that journalism students all learn, and probably other people, that basically says that the libel standard for public officials is extremely high. It's very high, right? And that was expanded from public officials, I believe, then to public figures. And that was part of what was at issue in the Cepeda suit is whether he was a

public official or not. I mean, he's not. So whether this applied to him, but anyway, he lost. And I just wanted to ask you how you think baseball would be different if he had won. So he sued the magazine, but he was managed by Alvin Dark at the time and for two years after that. So he never sued Alvin Dark directly. I don't know if he sued Alvin Dark directly, but it doesn't. If you are a publication and you quote somebody who libels a person, you can be held liable for their libel. Yeah. liable for their libel. I don't know if he sued Alvin Dark as well, but I mean, I wouldn't sue my boss probably if I lived in a pre-free agency world. Yeah, that's true. I was just listening

to a podcast about the Giants of those years and about Alvin Dark and how it was kind of, he wasn't really up to the task of bringing that clubhouse together with a lot of international players for the first time ever in baseball. I did not know about this episode. So, yeah, if he had succeeded, then presumably no one would be able to write anything about players being bad, again, in a subjective way. If you made it objective and it wasn't some black box system that only alvin dark understood i mean you could say that his batting average was bad

or his he didn't hit a lot of homers or something or it sounds like some sort of primitive win probability added maybe that alvin dark was homebrewing. Yeah. Well, the tricky thing, as we know, is that all stats, all use of all stats has an element of the subjective in it. I mean, this is something that we learned, I think, in our career as we moderated to some degree and learned to be maybe more cautious and skeptical in our own writing because you're always editing, you know, you're editing around the facts that you choose. You're picking and choosing the parameters of what counts as a stat in any individual situation. And if you're Look Magazine, here it's even more fraught because Look Magazine was quoting an objective measure. It was Alvin Dark's subjective measure. But for Look Magazine, it was a stat, right?

He had more minuses according to an expert's measuring system. They weren't saying Orlando Cepeda had hit bad home runs. They weren't saying Orlando Cepeda had hit bad home runs. They were saying that his manager's measuring system, which spit out weird frigging data, said that he hit bad home runs or whatever. Yeah. This might have made it that it might have forced writers in general to be more to use stats more at an earlier stage of all this because you would really have to put an emphasis on objectivity. But I feel like it would probably not do that. You'd probably have the opposite. Yeah. Be scared to use any stat.

Be scared to use any stat. Right. You couldn't say. probably the opposite yeah be scared to use any stat you'd be scared to use any stat right you couldn't say i mean just imagine all the things that we we could never have written yeah that simply by virtue of being a combination of negative tour de players abilities and not totally provable yeah all the like the inside edge fielding stuff that's like good fielding plays and defensive misplays, like all of that, they'd get sued out of business. I mean, if you were to cite Melvin Upton's war as being, you know. He's back to BJ now.

Okay. But he was Melvin when we were having the war discussion about him. And he was a free agent in his war. about him and he was a free agent in his war i think his war one of the wars was like 0.7 and one of the wars was like 4.2 or something and if you cited the four the 0.7 it could be in court fan graphs versus baseball reference yeah no i think that probably would have set the sabermetric movement way back or just killed it before it started it would just be yeah scouting take the teeth out of everything it would be like another sam miller article who would we think is the best player if we didn't have any stats right so yeah so i uh two two just

two little quick observations about this one not an observation just repeating repeating that Willie Mays testified in this. They actually had Willie Mays, the biggest star athlete in the world at that time, come to court to discuss whether the baby bull could ball out or not. And that's incredible too. Like just imagine if right now Mike Trout was in court to defend Cole Calhoun's platoon splits or something. Secondly, we all know, and one of the things that comes through in biographies a lot of times of old-time players, is that there was a different relationship between writers and players. And that in particular, players had their secrets, their personal lives,

and some of the things that happened behind closed doors covered up, even though it would have probably been newsworthy by our standards. It would have certainly been provocative to the public and the writers all knew about it. And so we tend to think, oh, wow, they had this cozy, cozy relationship. And I guess that my feeling from reading these books is that that is probably mostly true between beat writers and and players but in another sense columnists at the time were just savage they would and they didn't like they were just they weren't like citing facts or anything they were just relentlessly negative toward even the biggest stars in the world. And I

mean, Willie Mays had columnists who, like local columnists, who would just rip him to shreds over nothing. And that's all. That's my whole story. Well, I will point out, and I hope Orlando Cepeda is not listening because he's apparently pretty litigious, but Jim Davenport did have a higher war in 1962 than Orlando Cepeda did. So Alvin Dark, his rating system, he may have known more than everyone else did. I'm really risking. I shouldn't say this on a podcast that Orlando Cepeda might hear, but hopefully he'll sue Sean Foreman instead of me. Cepeda finished ahead of Davenport in MVP voting that year. Davenport should have sued all the writers who had a vote. Yeah.

Well, evidently it all ended well. I don't know whether they made up or not. They didn't get along at the time, but it looks like when Alvin Dark died, Cepeda said he was a great baseball man. So there's that. I guess it had a happy-ish ending. I wonder what the non-baseball implications of that would have been. If that had been upheld, then would it have expended to other public figures?

Would we not be able to criticize anyone? Well, I think, what, like in England? Right, you can't. Yeah. That's how it works. Yeah. I don't know. Huh.

Orlando Cepeda could have just taken down free speech single-handedly. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I'm going to write about that. Okay. Sometime. All right. So we will take a quick break and then we will roll Russell Carlton in here.

This is a fake break, by the way. Ben and I are going to stay with each other. Yeah. The elapsed time. But Russell's not here. so there will be a break while we wait for Russell to join us. All right, that's true. Okay.

So we're typewriter I love typewriter More than you know Okay, our completely real break is concluded, and we are back now with Russell Carlton, Baseball Prospectus' longest tenured writer, who has spanned his tenure, his reign, has spanned five editors-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus,

including the two of us. He has seen ownership groups come and go, and now he is finally going to work for the New York baseball perspectives, including the two of us. He has seen ownership groups come and go, and now he is finally going to work for the New York Mets. And we wanted to have him on one last time, at least for now, just because you have graced the program so many times in the past, I believe more than anyone else has. So welcome back yet again. Hi, Russell.

Hello. So you're going to work for the Mets. I feel like I've done a lot of these exit interviews over the years because we've lost a whole lot of writers to baseball teams. So these always start sort of the same way. Tell us how this happened and to the best of your knowledge, what you will be doing. So it was actually end of last month and I was in Cleveland. I was up visiting my parents for the holidays and I was driving my one-year-old twins and they were fussy.

And so I took them out for a drive to hopefully get them a nap. And I heard my phone beep and I thought it was my wife saying, you know, where are you? How are the twins doing? And so I got to a stoplight and I looked down and it was Adam Guttridge, who's an assistant general manager for the Mets, who I had on my Facebook feed and send me a message and saying, Hey, and, you know, and introduced and said, you know, can we talk? And so I kept driving around and like, well, what's going on on and so later I got back and texted back and I said hey what's going on and we we started chatting and you know one thing led to

another and the Mets had a position that they wanted to create that they thought I'd be good for and sure enough I I thought it was a good idea what they were saying so that's kind of how that came about thanks to my boys needing a nap. So as to what I'll be doing, I mean, I hate to sound coy because I'm not trying to be coy. I don't exactly know what I'm going to be doing yet. I mean, I kind of have the idea of it's going to be a lot of the same type of research that I do at BP, probably with better data. But we haven't gotten to the point where we're talking about what are they going to be the specific, what areas are they going to want to focus in. And I mean, I have a couple ideas, but we haven't quite gotten to that level of detail yet now, which is kind of an agreement in principle.

And we're going to, in the next couple of days, I assume we're going to be filling in the gaps on that. And we're going to – in the next couple of days, I assume we're going to be filling in the gaps on that. Is that surprising to you that it's this loose, that they don't have a very experience and that they've identified and that have good research ideas. And some of it's going to be me pitching stuff to them and them saying, yeah, cool, go with that. And I'm sure some of it's also going to be, hey, you know, we want to do something along these lines. And they were up front about that. And they said, you know, some of that's going to be collaborating with people they already have on staff. And some of it's going to be, you know, working in pairs. And then some of it's just going to be, you know, me sitting there running numbers and crunching stuff and seeing what comes out.

And, you know, seeing if we can come up with a cool idea, kind of the way I would just do a BP article. It's just that now my list of readers is going to shrink a lot. I am very impressed and also envious that you have been writing for 12 years and you still have cool research ideas to pitch. I listen to great podcasts like Effectively Wild. Yeah, I figured you'd just recycle and you'd come up with a 30-run manager and they'd be all impressed with that because they didn't read it the first time. I mean, we've all done that. I mean, baseball is such a wonderful playground of human experience. I mean,

I wrote a book that my publisher will now be happy that I'm plugging called The Shift, The Next Evolution of Baseball Thinking. And, you know, because baseball is a game, it puts humans in weird positions and tries to see what they're going to do. And there are just so many weird things that baseball makes you do that are kind of cool to poke at the humans that are playing it and see, you know, what, what comes of it and being a psychologist by training, that's, that's what I do. So, you know, it is the sort of thing where baseball just provides so much material that I think I could, I could be writing for another 50, 60, 70 years. And it, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't run out of topics, at least that, that are out there. I might run out of topics just because I'm not smart enough to come up with another one. I am curious. We, of course, have compared to 12. Am I right? 12 years ago?

Is that the right number? Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, I started writing it in 2007. That was statistically speaking, right? Yep. Stat speaking. And then you joined BP in 2009, and then you left to bid and then you came back so 2007 we're talking pre-pitch fx yep let alone everything else and so in that 12 years you

have had access to you know like like on an order of thousands of times maybe more data and things that we couldn't imagine would ever be public and so on and so forth has that i'm i don't know i don't even know if there's a question how am i but but i'm curious to know if that has actually sort of slaked your uh slate slate is the wrong way first stoked you're stoked slaked means to satisfy right yeah it's gonna say it's so has that stoked your desire for more uh for for the for the data that's behind closed doors are you like is like one of the great allures here that you have access to their data now and things that you've wanted to research but you couldn't research in all this time because

even with stat cast and even with everything else it just still isn't possible yeah yeah kind of um i mean that that's part of it i mean that's the you know i i mean i haven't i haven't had the you know willie wonka and the Chocolate Factory moment where he opens the door and they see the room full of everything's made of candy and the chocolate river. And I haven't had that moment of seeing what's in there. I mean, I have an idea of what all is going to be in that vault. I mean, there's only so many ways that you can say that somebody grounded out to short on June 11th. And so there is that part of it. I think that some of it is also, there are areas that I would consider ripe for research.

It isn't so much data that you need, but access. Something like player development, teams keep those things very, very secret unless you're writing a book about it or something like that. But, you know, it is that kind of ability to not only kind of do the research, but also influence policy is something that, you know, just as somebody who works in public health and does that as my day job where, you know, you get to do, you not only get to do the research, but you also then get to make policy recommendations and sometimes people actually take you up on them and you get to say, hey, you know, that was in part me. That ability is the other part of the allure that goes with it. You know, I mean, the data sets, I'm sure, will be cool. And it'll be fun to see, oh, you guys have, oh, you track that. That'll be interesting.

But I think that there's going to be more that I will personally be interested in. And I'm going to see if I can get them to not only kind of leverage what they already have, but say, well, what if we collected this? What if we did this? And we opened up this whole new area that's out there to see if something's hiding in that area of baseball. So we were just chatting before we started recording about the process of getting this job. And people might imagine that you go through grueling

interviews and you're subjected to hypotheticals and how much would this be worth and what decision would you make here? And that is how it works for some positions. But in your case, your resume is your interview is the last 12 years, really. It's like, hey, I've written thousands, millions of words about baseball. You know how I think, you know how I do analysis. It's like, hey, I've written thousands, millions of words about baseball. You know how I think, you know how I do analysis. It's all really laid out there in a much more comprehensive way than you could ever get a sense of in an interview. Yeah. I mean, I've done those kinds of interviews for other positions and some of the things where they say, oh, answer these five questions. And I've done that. And this, one of the questions that the Mets asked me was, you know, what are the areas that you have

that you would want to pursue? And I'm like, well, go to my Baseball Prospectus author page. And I mean, that basically sums it up right there. I mean, that's, you know, me kind of going, hmm, what shall I write about this week? And coming up with whatever idea I could come up with and then crunching out whatever I could. And I mean, there are a couple areas that I would love to do. I just don't have access to the kind of data that I would need to do it and that I mentioned. But that was nice to be able to point to that and say, okay, well, there's the answer to that question. Next. Yeah.

I've kind of met at the Mets. I take this personally because you were right in the middle of conducting some research that would have answered a question that I had posed on this podcast. And now I'll never know the answer because they hired you just a couple of weeks ago. I just did a passing thought. I wondered whether we could detect whether playing in a winter league actually benefits a player's development. If you just compared like two similar players and one of them plays in a winter league and the other doesn't does the guy who played in the winter league get better faster and you were gathering data you were going to do an article on that and then the Mets hired you and now you can't do that article and now I don't know am I supposed to do it myself I don't want to do it

myself so what am I supposed to do well I mean you have plenty of listeners out there and, you know, I mean, the data are out there. You just have to scoop them up and run it. I mean, I heard that and I went, oh, that's a cool idea. That's a cool question. It's the off season, you know, there's no major league baseball going on, but now there's winter league stuff and I wonder. You've been a great resource to me over the years, not only with help with my own articles, but occasionally I'll get an idea where I'll think, I want to know the answer to this, but for whatever reason, I just don't want to write this one myself. Maybe it's too complicated or, I don't know, it won't fit at the site I'm currently writing for, whatever. And I will just pose it to you, or sometimes you'll just tear it and take it upon yourself. And so all these questions I had have been answered by you for no charge, and that's been wonderful for me. The great article- Wait, wait, wait, wait. What was that no charge thing? Hang on a second here.

The great article I always had in mind for you that I never mentioned, and you might've done it. So if you did i apologize i i've read i probably have read i don't know 300 articles by you and you've probably have written 600 uh so i i'm not ashamed but you one time wrote an article about whether brandon inge really did uh make the a's 29 games better oh yeah uh in 19 2012 and you looked at whether brandon inj's teammates hit more home runs when brandon inj is there uh than when they then when he's not um and i always wanted to get you to replicate that for basically all the player seasons in history and see if there is actually one clubhouse chemistry god who stands above them all.

I think that one, I know I didn't do that, but I think somebody has done something like that at some point. I seem to remember reading something along those lines. I don't know. There's just so much out there, and I try to read as much of it as I can, but after a while, it all kind of melds together. Yeah. I think I've said this to you, that it's like the rule 34 of sabermetrics is if you can think of it, Russell Carlton has done a study on it because it's just, you've been writing for so long and so consistently and often on analytical topics where it's like you started with a question and then you tried your best to answer it. And so almost anything you could think of,, it might be from 2010 or something and maybe it's time to redo it.

But there's usually a Russell Carlton take on whatever question I have. If it's from 2010, you definitely have to. I definitely need to rewrite that. in this discussion or if in any interview, anytime, whatever, somebody actually did ask you like, okay, send me five clips that show you at your best, that show you what you can do and that show how, how you think and that you're especially proud of. And maybe five is too many for on the spot, but like three, what, what would be like maybe the three articles that you wrote that you're most proud exist and that people who maybe have not read 300 of your articles could start with? I mean, the ones that come to my mind that I kind of look back now and knowing that I'm going to be

disappearing for a while, that I'm happy or just kind of out there as a legacy. There's the series that I did with Kate Morrison at BP on front office hiring and how that's done and what are some of the pitfalls that go along with that one. I was especially proud of that when we wrote it. And I can only claim half the credit for that one, but at least it was a four-parter, so I guess that's two. it was a four-parter so i guess that's two and i mean there's the one that you know i'm like methodologically most proud of was you kind of made a sideways reference to the 30-round manager one that was that that was a cool one it was you know my foray into you know trying to figure out does a manager have an effect on his players in terms of helping them deal with the grind and i thought that was a i i thought that was, it kind of came together nicely. There was one I did on the intentional walk and why I think they should actually throw

four fake pitches. And I really liked that one. I thought that was, that just kind of, I remember after I was done with that one, I was really, really super proud of it and to send it off. So, I mean, those are the ones that just kind of jumped to my mind, but you know, there's every once in a while I'll, I'll be surprised that I wrote something like I'll, I remember one time I was, I had an idea for an article and I was, I was like, okay, let me go to Google and see if anybody's done anything like, like that. And sure enough, yep. I had back in 2013. Rule 34.

like that. And sure enough, yep, I had back in 2013. Rule 34. I was, I rule 34'd myself. Yes. And that was, you know, so I've done some of that. And there was, the one though that randomly sticks out to me is I wrote an April Fool's article and it was, it was about BP was going to be starting Mongolian yak Prospectus. And it was a bunch of, I mean, it was kind of a bunch of in-jokes and wink at the camera type of things that, you know, for April Fool's Day. And it was just kind of fun and silly to write. And I threw that one out. And I always liked the chance to just kind of be silly and engage in a bunch of in-jokes, basically, every once in a while. So I don't know,

maybe the Mets will let me do that once in a while. I loved the 30 run manager one, partly because I loved the methodology. It just seemed like such a creative and elegant solution to this really high level problem that I wouldn't think most people would be able to solve. And I also thought that it was great because even if you, even if you thought that it was total BS and that the manager is not worth 30 runs, it was a great way of thinking about the grind generally in a way that was really interesting and concrete. And I think about the 30 run manager a lot. I almost wish that it had you had only found like a 20 run manager because it would be easier it would be it would be like

the the smaller the number the easier it would be to believe but the lesser the less memorable it would be 30 runs is a lot of runs i also uh really love i was just thinking about this in fact today unrelated to all of this because I think about it a lot in your book you have one sentence or one I guess one section one half page or whatever about something that I think

explains a lot about modern baseball which is that baseball GM's of our generation yours and mine grew up playing video games. And we all remember playing video games where you beat Mario and then you, I mean, you're not going to go outside. So then now you play Mario and you try to beat it as fast as you can. And then you try to beat it with as many points as possible. And then you try to beat it where you get the 5,000 flag every time. And then you try to beat it without ever getting shrunken or you try to beat it without ever getting a

mushroom and you do the whole thing small and so on and so forth and so GM's grew up where you're not playing against another person you're playing against a Game itself like the the very concept of the game. You're trying to beat it in as many ways as you can beat it and so it a lot so a lot of baseball strategy in 2018 and 2019 makes a lot of sense when you think about GMs in that way, trying to essentially beat a game. Yeah. I mean, it was the idea of one player mode. I mean, you don't need another person to play a game. You just play against a computer and the computer doesn't care if you're totally scamming it or if you figured out its weakness. You just kind of keep going. And, you know, I mean, there are people who have studied chess or blackjack or stuff like that and tried to figure out, you know, how do you beat those games? And, you know, now you had 10-year-olds in their, you know, the comfort of my home and, you know, trying to get to Willamette Valley and trying to figure out, okay, well, what's the best way to do this? And if you can have a one-player game that is in still some way competitive.

And what that mindset is that I am going to break the game and I can even collaborate with someone else to beat the game. And now my social interaction around this game isn't competitive, it's collaborative. And so, I mean, it's, and the game itself is what you're trying to beat. Yeah. I really think, and maybe I'm not completely impartial here because of our long association, but I think you have been one of the most influential sabermetricians in the post-James era, and not because you have littered your wake with a whole host of acronyms and new stats that we all, you know, you didn't invent FIP or WAR or something, but you have done so much statistical analysis and plenty of gory math, and you've done many, many articles where you've concluded this is probably worth the third of a win. And the third of a win is worth this much on the free agent market. So teams are

possibly costing themselves some tiny sliver of an advantage. And if you find that sort of thing working for the Mets, that could be very valuable and probably be worth more to them than they're paying you. But I think that you have just constantly pushed us in all of these different directions where, as I think there was maybe before you at BP and elsewhere, a tendency to say we have all the answers and we know a lot. And it's true. We've learned a lot, but you've always been asking what we don't know. And it's like your first piece at BP after you made your comeback was called Hire Joe Morgan, which was just contrary to the typical take, obviously, not because you were trying to be contrarian, but you were just making the point that, hey, we have a lot to learn. player development and we're early to stating you know the thesis statement of my book essentially which is uh quoted in my book and you're you're probably quoted in that book and also the books eminem wrote more oh yeah anyhow you're all over the place probably every magazine article i've

ever written has had a quote either a direct quote from you because i sometimes would ask you or a block quote from something you wrote. Yeah. And it's like, you know, clubhouse chemistry and managers and all this stuff where it was like something that we really couldn't quantify, although sometimes you would try to and come up with approaches there. But even just to say, hey, this is probably worth something. We should look into this, even if you didn't have a grand conclusion about it that was i i think really valuable and spurred a lot of people to do a lot of interesting research so thanks thank you you know what's funny though i think the funniest thing is that your most influential thing like if you had to pick one thing that russell carlton's work is famous for it is stabilization rates for stats

and oh boy here we go and you you have been at wit's end for years because it is essentially always misused by everybody who cites it right pretty much so uh now you are going to a place where the things that you suggest will determine whether, you know, maybe whether Noah Syndergaard throws a change up or not. Does it does the does does the sort of long, perilous game of telephone that happens between your work and the end user kind of scare you now that there are real stakes? Yeah. I mean, if there's something I can take from it, I mean, I wrote that original article back in 2007 that eventually became Stabilization. And for a while, it was really cool because I'm like, oh, people are quoting me. That's so awesome. But the more I looked looked at it the more i realized that the way it had gone and the way that i had initially wanted it what i had wanted it for were so opposite of each other or not even

so opposite each other but they just they weren't they weren't in sync i mean i i originally had this idea of gee if i'm doing a sample if I'm taking a sample of, you know, player seasons and I want to look, you know, correlate home run rate with single rate or whatever. And, you know, how many plate appearances should I have as a good cutoff in my sample? And, you know, I came up with decent cutoffs for that. And the idea was that it would just be useful for kind of large N research, taking a look at kind of the broad picture of hitters or pitchers or whatever it was. And people started using it on an individual level. And it took me a while until I realized, wait a minute, that's probably not a good idea. me a while until I realized, wait a minute, that's probably not a good idea. And then to the point where, you know, I think I've written an article like each of the last four Aprils or something like that, where I kind of go, yeah, please don't do that. And in different ways, for different

reasons. And I mean, now going forward, I mean, there is, you know, a certain amount of responsibility in terms of, you know, I'm going to be giving live feedback to people who are going to be making actual baseball decisions. And it is something that I think has taught what was a very naive 27-year-old version of myself. Here's something that if you get too far out over your skis can happen that hopefully the 39-year-old wouldn't cost that much relative to what they would gain. Whereas now, I guess we talk about it more in terms of ethics and these teams just should pay this because they have the money. But in a sense, we've pivoted to talking about things like that in that way because it has happened in the years since you first wrote about that. Lots of teams are not paying their minor leaguers, but at least feeding them, which is something.

And that was something, I don't know if you were the first to really point that out, but I don't recall thinking about it much before you wrote about that. And then suddenly it was like the obvious answer that everyone had when asked, like, what could teams do to gain an advantage? It was like, well like well you know take care of your minor leaguers and that was something that maybe came out of your background and your your other professional life in developmental psychology which there have been lots of

sabermetricians who've just been moonlighting and have had impressive science-y jobs that have informed their research but i don't know have there been other people with that particular background? Because it seems like that has driven a lot of your baseball work. You know, I've come across people who were, you know, psychology majors or said, oh, yeah, I've got a background in psych and I read your stuff. And I don't, I'm trying to think off the top of my head. And of course, somebody's going to point out, oh, what about this person? I'm totally going to swing and miss on that. And I'm sorry, person who I'm totally forgetting who you are. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I have the thing with Feeding Minor Leaguers, when I wrote that, it was actually reading Dirk Hayhurst. And I was

reading his book, and he talked about that. And I was actually, I remember I was on my way to a child psychology conference for work. And so, I mean, it all kind of fit together. I was on the plane reading the book and, and sure enough, there was this, this idea that he brought up and I'm like, I should write about that. And, and that's, that's where it kind of came out. And I mean, a lot of the stuff that I find interesting stems from the fact that, you know, I spent people make decisions, but then also how do people grow and change? And, you know, when Hayhurst was talking about, you know, just how they ate on the, in the minor leagues, I thought, well, that's, you know, kind of fundamental right there. Then, you know, I started doing some math around it. But it is something that I have always very, very specifically tried to make a part of my work, and I will continue to try to make part of my work. Because, I mean, it's just the way that I think. I know there are a lot of people out there who have made their mark in sabermetric writing who have also specifically, and I think for the benefit of everybody, brought who they are professionally into it. And, you know, whether that's, you know, as in kind of Alan Nathan being the physics guy, and, you know, he's an actual physics professor,

or, you know, some of the people who have economics degrees and, you know, working from that angle. the people who have economics degrees and working from that angle. It's something that I encourage people that if this is something that seems interesting to you, don't be afraid to insert who you are and what you find interesting into your writing. Because you might think, oh, nobody will care. But when you find somebody who actually really knows what they're talking about on a subject, that's usually a really interesting person to talk to and hopefully a really interesting person to read something that they wrote. This is actually your second farewell to the internet, which doesn't happen a lot because generally when an analyst writer goes to a team, they stay there. But you are going to be working remotely. You're not relocating and you're not quitting your day job. So you could come back to us again someday. I hope that you do selfishly. But of course, if you are enjoying what you're doing, then I hope that you leaves and then comes back. They tend to stick. So I don't know if enough time has elapsed that you can talk about that first gig and what you may have learned from it.

But I'm curious whether that affected your subsequent writing in any way. I mean, I worked for the Indians from 2010 to 2012 in a capacity much like this where you know i wasn't i happened to be living in cleveland when i when i first got the gig but i actually moved to atlanta in the middle of it but i was working remotely and you know i was doing for them more project-based stuff that they were you know they would send me questions and i would i would try to find the answers as best as i could given my you know they they gave me a good amount of freedom to kind of look around and see what was out there. I mean, I think that at that time, the thing that most affected my writing when I finally came back to writing in public was that it was a good, it was a good break from, I had been writing for at that point three years on a weekly schedule before I left the public eye. And there's that, you've got to get something out by next week sort of thing.

And it was actually good for my development as an analyst to not be beholden for a while to that and to be able to say, hmm, I want to go a little deeper on this topic. And they would ask me to, and I would have the opportunity to do that and to take something that was more of a, you know, a couple of weeks worth of work to really find the answer to. And I will say that, you know, coming back and going back into that weekly thing, that weekly grind, I think that I carried that there were other topics that I had not previously felt confident to kind of tackle or kind of arcs of thought that I had not previously thought to tackle because of the weekly schedule, because I figured, oh, I can't turn this around in a week. And I felt more confident in my abilities as a researcher. And also that there were just other ways of looking at the game that were kind of a fresh perspective that I could then – I mean, I did reduplicate any of my Indian stuff.

But there were pieces where I was like, oh, what if I kind of took this angle on this other topic? I was like, oh, you know, what if I kind of took this angle on this other topic? And I know I'm being vague, but I have to be for NDA purposes. That's a long-lasting NDA. It is, but it's – Does it really still apply? It's been seven years. Does that NDA – I mean, I make it a point to try and respect that NDA. Just, I mean, the Indians were very kind. They gave me an opportunity that I greatly treasure. And I mean, to this day, a lot of the same people that were there when I was there are still there. And I think very fondly of them.

So just out of respect for them, I do try to respect that. Well, you were an editor's dream, which may not matter much to the reader, but you always had a topic just about, and you didn't require much work on the back end because occasionally you'd get really smart writers who would do brilliant analysis and the end result would be great, but it would take some work to get it there. It's rare, as many people have said, to find someone who can write in a really engaging way and also do the gory math. So you were one of the few who could do that. And I'm sorry for us that we're losing the pleasure of reading you on a weekly basis, but it is the Mets' gain. I guess maybe the last thing, I wonder, this has all been sort of a sideline for you, this whole baseball thing for the last 12 years. It's not what you set out to do. It has never been your primary employment. And yet you've gotten to do all this cool stuff. You've gotten to write for BP for almost a decade. You wrote a book that was really good. You have worked for multiple baseball teams

all while continuing to do the thing that you expected to do the whole time. So have you always felt like baseball is the side job and your main job is the main job or does that line get blurry at times? It has always been my secret double life. I have always been, I mean, I started this work in graduate school and, you know, before kids and, and I mean, it's a lot's happened to me just personally in the last 12 years, but yeah, I mean, this, it, it is, it has always been for the most part hobby time, you know, it, it has always been, you know, during the day I am a public health worker and I do research on children's mental health issues and suicide prevention and community health interventions and stuff like that. And, you know, and then at night I have this other thing that I do and, you know, some people knit, some people, I don't know, collect seashells, some people, you know, whatever, whatever they're into. And my thing was I, when I was in graduate school, I needed a free hobby, uh, cause I was a grad student living on a grad student salary. free data and I had some data courses under my belt and, and I loved baseball. So, I mean, it,

it, it, it started out as a hobby. It has always been a hobby and it's weird because, you know, I, I remember, you know, the first time that, that somebody who worked for a team said that, oh, you know, we read your thing and it was really good and we liked it and we kind of used it. And I'm like, whoa, wait, it just happened? And it's a very odd thing to say that, you know, there have actually been people who are willing to pay me to do that, to actually influence a real live baseball team. And I never set out to do that specifically I mean I'm happy it happened but it is it is a very odd feeling when your hobby becomes something that is kind of bigger but at the same time you have to realize that just from in how I organize my life as a human being that, you know, it still kind of has to have that. It is strictly still in the hobby box. And that's been a tough balance to strike over the years.

Yeah. I thought of one more thing to ask you, which is that I'm always hearing from people in baseball that they could not get the job that they currently pulled if they were applying for it today because just it's become so much more competitive and the criteria that they currently hold if they were applying for it today because just it's become so much more competitive and the criteria that teams are looking for just getting loftier all the time. Someone said that to me today that he has an impressive job in baseball. Who was it? He's quoted in my book, you can guess who it is, and that he's surrounded by all these people who are like speaking on a higher level than he is. And you see that in sabermetrics too, like you can do all sorts of things that Sam and I can't do that we have to ask someone like you to do for us.

And then there are people who can do things that you can't do. you can't do. There are people who know programming languages that you don't know and are familiar with these cutting edge techniques that have just arisen in the years since you've started doing this. So is that something that impairs your analysis? Or do you think that being able to ask the questions is really the important thing and that you can kind of figure out a way to answer them once you come up with them? I think that I benefit from the fact that, well, okay, let me start here. The foundation of any good, whether it's an article or if you're working for a team, some kind of intervention that or innovation that they're going to work on is a good idea to start with. And I have started from, I mentioned my background in psych and how I try

to draw on that. It's weird because in 2007, when I was first starting to do this, there was kind of this, there was kind of sabermetrics and it was just one thing. And there was a certain, I don't know, understanding that to be a good sabermetrician, you kind of had your fingers in every piece of it because there were only like two or three pieces at the time. It was pre-pitch FX. And so a lot of the stuff that was going on was kind of seasonal correlation and we had play-by-play data and how can we parse that out a little bit and some stuff around strategy and you know now just the explosion of other areas that have become fair game as data has i mean it has it has become to the point where you know there are areas of sabermetrics which i you know i consider myself to be fluent in terms of being able to read it and go, okay, I see where you're going with that. But I, I mean, I, I don't know that I would have the ability without really dedicating some time to it to do meaningful analysis in those areas.

And I think that when I realized that that was okay, that I didn't have to be the generalist anymore and I could stick to, okay, this is what I think I'm good at. These are the areas that interest me. And then by extension, they also happen to be the areas where I have training in how to parse that out, or I've done stuff over the years where I can just kind of pull stuff from my code library. I think that that's the biggest transition I've seen over the last 10 years in sabermetrics. And I think that that's the thing that when people think about, oh, could I get into this kind of writing? They have the idea that, well, you got to know

everything. You don't. I think it helps if you're good at one particular thing and that you can be conversant enough in the rest of it to where you can either nod your head or go, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. Well, you will be missed as long as this hiatus lasts. And the good news is that anyone listening who is thinking, I just heard of this Russell Carlton guy somehow, now he's leaving before I had a chance to appreciate him. He has left a very large library. So go get the shift and you can spend the next couple of years combing through his archives at Baseball Prospectus. And who knows, maybe he'll be back writing again someday. But you can find him on Twitter at PizzaCutter4. I don't know

whether you'll still be able to command people to read things now that you are working for a team. We talked about that, and that's not as much. I mean, you can follow me on Twitter. I will probably kind of do the – if you've ever followed somebody who got hired by a team, they get really boring really quick. Yes. I can't really talk that much about baseball and really what else is there to talk about on Twitter. Sure. You can follow me at PizzaCutter4, and I'd appreciate it.

I'll be sitting there going, oh, more people followed me. That's cool, but you won't really get much out of it. All right. Well, thank you, Russell, and good luck in your next life. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks for having me on all these times over the years. And I will be out here listening. I'm still allowed to listen.

And doing interesting analysis that we will never get to see. That's right. Just take our ideas and that's all. And for those of you out there doing podcasts and writing and wondering, oh, I will be reading and I will be staling. And because every team does. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Russell.

And thank you, Sam. You're welcome. All right. That will do it for today. Another Saber Nutrition bites the dust, at least from a public perspective. I've done a lot of these episodes over the years talking to someone who is leaving the public to work for a team. It's always a bittersweet moment

because I'm happy for them that they get to do a cool thing and I'm sad for everyone else that we don't get to enjoy their work anymore. But if you're a Mets fan, maybe you will indirectly enjoy Russell's work. If you enjoy our work on this podcast, you can keep it going

by supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Katie Razor, Shane Shuby, Benjamin Litvin, Sean Viziac, and Dan Friedman. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. Russell Carlton's in there, although he may be a bit less active than he has been in the past. You can send your questions and comments for me and Jeff to podcast at fangraphs.com. Or if you are a supporter on Patreon, you can message us through that site.

We will probably get to some emails next time. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. While you're picking up Russell Carlton's book, The Shift, you can pre-order mine, The FPP Machine, coming out later this spring. And Jeff and I will be back to talk to you very soon. We'll be right back. We're starting a new life Yeah, we're starting a new life