Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1369: Utilitarian Player

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Co-hosts assemble! Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter (briefly and sans spoilers) about baseball in Avengers: Endgame and follow up both about Meg’s attempt to keep track of baseball at a bachelorette party and about pricing on Cameo for Kevin Pillar and Mike Trout, then talk about baseball and happiness, comparing their picks […]

Make it out, take it out, it's utilitarian Heartache, agilate, it's utilitarian Oh yeah, we're in love with this perverted world Yeah, come on When I walk down the steps, it'm just half the way across the world Oh yeah Good morning and welcome to episode 1369 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Sam Miller of ESPN along with Meg Rowley of Fangraphs., and Ben Lindberg of TheRinger.com. Hi, guys. How are you? I'm good. Hi. There you go. We've got a big abstract show ahead for everybody, but before we get to the abstract part, does anybody have anything they need to talk to us about? I have not watched baseball for three days because I was traveling, so no.

What happened with your moral dilemma about Vladito's debut? I did not end up watching any of it, which was the right choice because my friend had a lovely time that was unobstructed by baseball. So that was good, but I feel like I've been napping for three days and then I woke up and now the twins are leading the central it's very disorienting My reaction to your dilemma was that you should have watched

the game as rude as that might have been but then paid $200 to have Kevin Pillar send your friend a personalized apology Yeah A lot of people have contacted us have Kevin Pillar send your friend a personalized apology. Yeah. A lot of people have contacted us to explain.

Yes. And this is something I was vaguely peripherally aware of, but Blue Jays fans have written in to tell us that the reason that Kevin Pillar charges $200 on Cameo and evidently has some takers at that price is that he is extremely popular among Blue Jays fans, which I kind of knew but don't completely understand. And even some of the Blue Jays fans who wrote in to tell us about this did not understand exactly what it is that makes Kevin Flaherty so popular. I guess it's just that he was kind of fun to watch because he is a good defensive player, and he was one of the players from the 2015 team that stuck around for a bit and and held up pretty well and i guess that's all it takes but yeah

kevin pilar popular in toronto but no longer in toronto do you know if cameo kicks you off or or gives you like sort of a a nudge if you set your price too high because it seems to me that i would not want to give any of these messages uh if i could avoid it and so i might set the price extremely high as sort of like a status marker and be like i'm kevin pilar the three thousand dollar a message cameo guy like it seems kind of like you you'd see more people on there with just like outrageously high prices because a what the heck uh and b do you really want people to see that you're the you know the 25 a cameo you know actor or comedian like it seems to me like it would be good on your resume if when somebody you know googled you um

the fourth result was like wow he charges as much as h Hannibal Buress for a personalized greeting. Yeah. Yeah, someone emailed us actually to ask what Mike Trout would charge if he were on Cameo, which he is not. And that's kind of an interesting question because the question is how much could he possibly charge? Like what's the maximum amount that he could convince someone to pay? That is a different question from what's the optimal amount for him to charge if his goal is to make the most money. So I don't know. Just sort of scanning the site, it seems like there are many celebrities on there who charge like $1,000 or so, and I wouldn't say that they're necessarily more famous than Mike Trout, but the most expensive baseball player on there is Roger Clemens at 500. So I said that

probably Trout, if he wanted to maximize his returns, would also be like 500 or maybe 750 or something just because he's so much better than any other active player available. That seems right. Or he could like 499 it and be like, wow, he could get the best player in baseball for a dollar less than Roger Clemens sounds like a pretty good deal. Yeah, I would think it's to the company's advantage just to have anyone on there who's well known. So even if some very famous person charged an unreasonable amount, probably they would still want that person associated with their service. But maybe they do contact people to be like, hey, just so you know,

you are wildly overpricing yourself. Ben, anything? Yeah. Well, one thing I wanted to say, I too have not watched that much baseball since we last spoke because I think I've been watching either Avengers or Game of Thrones for most of the time since the last podcast. But on that topic, I think probably a lot of our listeners learned this past weekend that Avengers Endgame is a baseball movie. And I'm not going to spoil it.

The lightest of possible spoilers, really only a spoiler of some of the baseball content in Avengers Endgame. If you've seen Avengers Infinity War, and this will be a spoiler, so if you don't want to know how that movie ends, then fast forward a few minutes, I guess, but it's been out for a while, so you really have no excuse. But at the end of Avengers Infinity War, the bad guy Thanos snaps his fingers and he's collected all these infinity stones, and he just winks away half of all the life or sentient life in the universe. So half of everyone just disappears from earth. So when we pick up in Avengers Endgame, which broke all the box office records this past weekend, this is after that. And there's actually a bit of a time jump and we learn

that baseball is over. It seems there is a scene you see Citi Field. There's like a flyover of Citi Field, which is abandoned and seems somewhat decrepit. And then you overhear a snippet of conversation where actually one of the directors of the movie makes a cameo and says he misses the Mets. And so we are led to believe

that baseball is no more. And I want to know what you guys think about this scenario. If we had a Thanos snap and 50% of all people disappeared, would that be the end of baseball? You're not going to believe this, but this is going to come up later in this episode in a way. And so let's hold that thought.

All right, then. Okay, so here's a question I have about that, and I have not yet seen Endgame, so you can tell me that you can't tell me. You can't speculate. But Major League Baseball does Marvel-themed promos in partnership with Marvel, including Noah Syndergaard doing a thor bobblehead

sure as thor from so well that makes it a marvel sport it doesn't make the movie a baseball movie and so does noah cinder guard exist in in the the mcu well post-snap, he's got about a 50% shot. Poor Noah. I don't know. Finally, something worse for everybody than playing for the Mets. Yeah. All right. I don't know what that voice was.

I just went with it. I'm very tired, you guys. That voice was appropriate for that joke. That was that joke voice. All right. So we will return to this topic, evidently. All right. So we're going to talk today about something that we were going to talk about it before the season began, but we didn't get to it. And we were prodded into it by a recent email that sort of got us thinking again along these lines. We're going to talk about what we would dictate happen in this baseball

season if we could dictate anything and if our only goal was increasing the amount of happiness worldwide by as much as possible. So this is extremely complicated for one thing. Winning and losing and hits and outs are somewhat of a zero-sum affair. And so any team that you pick to win means that you are choosing to make other teams lose. I still, though, think that we all know that an act can bring more happiness to one person or more pain to one person than others based on the context of it in their life. I think one good example of this is the recent Chris Davis hit list streak, which I think brought a lot more unhappiness to Chris Davis, but also to the whole endeavor than it did when it was a Eugenio Suarez or

before that Craig Council, because Chris Davis was having this hit list streak while being paid an awful lot of money and while being formerly very good. And that's different than like if somehow the 900th best player in the world does, you know, kind of what he's sort of supposed to as the 900th best baseball player in the world. So nevertheless, the fact that we are going to be declaring losers unspokenly, but declaring losers makes it a little harder. I think that I have had difficulty thinking about this question for the last day, trying to separate the question of the most people happy from the question of making me happy or making people I know happy

or making the people who listen to this podcast happy. It's a big world out there and most of them are not listening to this podcast. But I think like the main challenge is that it's very difficult to define happiness. It always has been. I think this has confounded philosophers and philanthropists and parents and every person who's ever had to make decisions in their own life forever. It's difficult to separate happiness from joy. It's difficult to separate, you know, the fleeting kind of happiness from the sort of more permanent state of being at peace or self-actualized. And if you start to think about these things too much, then you can get to some

very strange endpoints like saying, well, maybe baseball should not exist and we should all spend more time being with our family or something like that. And I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true, but you can talk yourself into it. It becomes very challenging. And so this is all to say that I am nervous about this episode. I don't exactly know where it's going to go, where I'm going to go, where I don't know. I'm scared to talk about some of these decisions,

as strange as it might sound. So hopefully you guys both took it much less seriously than that. I may have taken it less seriously, but I also had a hard time with it. Just, I think, trying to get myself out of the mindset of someone who covers the sport, for one thing. Because the things that would make us happy, I think, are often things that would lead to us creating content and having things to talk about and write about. I think we have a big bias toward novelty, and I think fans in general like to see stuff they haven't seen before,

hence the, well, cliche but kind of true statement that you see something new at a baseball game every day. So I think there's that, but you also have to take into account that like, for instance, certain teams have more fans. And so maybe often the simple answer is just that the team with more fans is the one that leads to more happiness. So it is a hard one to answer. And even just like the distinguishing between a certain type of happiness and just a certain type of entertainment, like you mentioned Chris Davis, which kind of depressed me, but there was a lot of content created around Chris Davis and a lot of people consuming that content, which leads me to believe that there was interest in Chris Davis's slump, that people were seeking out what he was doing, that there was some interest from day to day and whether he had gotten hit. And so I don't know

whether if we're looking for a distraction from death or just something to keep us occupied, whether it was bad or not, even kind of depressing as it was. And there were even some positive aspects to it. Like it seemed like he was not getting booed so much as he was getting ovations and support. And then it was nice when he actually broke through at the end of it. So even that is not quite as open and shut a case, I think, as it seems like it would be. No, I totally agree. You're absolutely right. I think that the case that it being Chris Davis made it different than it being Craig Council holds. But I don't know whether that would means that it brought more, more, more pleasure to the world than if it had been Council or more pain. what would be the most painful way to see it end.

And I think we concluded it would be getting a hit against a position player pitching in a blowout. Yeah. Because people don't remember. Your memory does a very good job of sparing you from things. We forget stuff, and I think we have to forget things in order to survive as human beings, because if we could remember all of the stuff, we would just be incapacitated by all of the small bummers that we've accumulated over the course of our lives and we would forget like we forget all the hits

that very good or very bad baseball players have against you know really bad relievers or position players pitching but we would remember that we would remember that fact of his biography in an outsized way. And I think it would be quietly sad every time it gets brought up. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad that didn't happen. You're right, though. I think that Chris Davis did basically seem like he handled it well, that he hit some

balls hard and he could still smile when they were outs. So anyway, I have given no other instructions. We have a couple of categories, but otherwise there have been no instructions given, no limits on realism or definitions or anything like that. But I will state up front personally that I aspired to be fairly realistic, not necessarily practical, but realistic. And I focused pretty much entirely on the happiness of the baseball aware. So like, for instance, some cities winning the World Series would create worse traffic with their parades.

And so that would mean less happiness for the baseball unaware. And I didn't really consider that. Perhaps I should have. I also didn't really make it like I did did not create a scenario where, like to be, to be like broad and I didn't, no cures for cancer are coming out of my hypothetical season. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I probably also considered, I did, I did ultimately conclude that I was going to accept the premise that caring about baseball is a, is a net positive. And I was not going to pick any outcomes that were likely to turn people away from the game, and I would favor outcomes that

would cause more interest. I also shied away from extremely improbable outcomes, like, you know, saying the Orioles win the World Series or something. I consider that fair game. I didn't pick them, but I would say that that's fine. I do too. I think it's fair. It's just because you could say that the most improbable thing would create the most interest and the most happiness because the fans of that team would be just more happy

because they weren't expecting it at all and because everyone would get into that story because it is so improbable and no one would understand what was going on. So that, that's a fair answer, but I just considered it so unlikely that for me, it would sort of spoil the exercise. So, so I have steered away from that, but if either of you did not, I think that's fine too. Well, one of the first one of the categories was World Series champ so I guess maybe we'll just we should just start with with that so Ben who did you pick to win the World Series I picked the Phillies to win the World Series and

I did that for a couple reasons I think one we did we we went through and we picked all the division winners too. And I picked the Phillies just because I like the fact that they really tried and they invested. And I think it's better for baseball that a team like that that kind of went out and bought a bunch of players would be rewarded for that and possibly set an example to other teams. that and possibly set an example to other teams. And clearly there's a lot of interest and enthusiasm surrounding this team, whether it's because of Bryce Harper or because of the other players they picked up or because the team has been getting better. And so it's a gradual rise. Attendance is way, way up this year. They're also a pretty big market team with a history and a lot of fans. So if you're counting just sheer number of fans, you can factor that in. And they haven't won in a while. It hasn't been an incredibly long time compared to some other franchises, but they've been bad for a bit now. They haven't been in the

playoffs for a while. And so no one is sick of seeing the Phillies be a winning team. And I think Bryce Harper is a potential face of baseball candidate. And so to have him be on a World Series winning team and presumably have a good season if the Phillies are winning the World Series and justifying that contract, if anyone doubted that he was worth it, I think that would be a net plus for baseball. So for all those reasons, I think it would be a good thing if the Phillies won. Yeah, I think that personally, I don't have the, I cannot commit to 13 years of Bryce Harper being hated. And so I am rooting for him to be good for at least some number of years. I don't like it when guys sign big, expensive contracts with new cities and then they're immediately bad.

I find that to be generally painful. That's just me. That's a small sliver of happiness in the worldwide. But I also would like to see Bryce Harper do well. The city of the municipality of Philadelphia is no stranger to recent championships. And so you could make the case that as far as parade droughts go, there are other cities that would appreciate it more. But yeah, I feel like if you're talking about a city that would appreciate it,

they're good. A city that has historic, like in a long timeline, like the century-long timeline has been through some real some real slogs baseball wise and you figure the old timers in the city would really appreciate it and not a city that is going to infuriate i don't think infuriate the other 360 million or whatever americans with their success no i mean they they're easy to delight in as a fan base, even though they are sometimes gruff and rough and tumble Phillies fans. Philadelphia sports fans are wild. They're a wild time, and they are great fun to observe being a wild time in the face of victory or defeat, candidly.

So I think that you're probably right about that. They were not my pick. What was your pick? I picked the padres they would make me happy winning a world series because i picked them as one of my fun teams but that's not the reason why i uh i like very much the idea of there being a city that is just a baseball town i'm sorry i'm sorry to padres fans that they had to lose another franchise in order to sort of become just a baseball town. But I like very much the idea of a city that is just a baseball city where it's like, yeah, I'm from San Diego.

I'm a Padres fan. You know, everyone's wearing a Machado or Tatis jersey. And, you know, they come to the ballpark with cowboy hats for when paddock starts. they come to the ballpark with cowboy hats for when paddock starts and they, you know, they have this great fun young core and they spent money also. And they, it's beautiful there. You know, it's going to look great on TV. You're watching post-season baseball in San Diego and you're like, look at this gorgeous. And we're a baseball town and now we're world series champions and everyone likes San Diego. You know, People go and eat tacos and enjoy baseball. It sounds great.

So I picked the Padres. I know that they are not the largest media market of the very good fun teams or very fun, potentially good teams, but I picked the Padres for that reason. Do you think that the Padres winning the World Series would make more or less likely four more seasons of pitch? I think that it would make it less likely because I think the team's incentives to participate go down when they have actual baseball to showcase, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Maybe? Could be. I struggled with whether to pick the padres or the dodgers as my nl west winner yeah it's a it's a tough one because on the one hand they're kind of diametric opposites when it comes to just the prominence of the franchises and their recent success the dodgers win the division every year they now win the pennant every year and the Padres never do. So in that sense, obviously Padres fans would probably be more thrilled than Dodgers fans to be there. If you think that you can even calculate that, like maybe it's not even the Dodgers haven't won

a world series in many years and three decades either. So it's not like they've won recently. many years and three decades either. So it's not like they've won recently. LA has other teams and other things to excite them, but it's a much bigger city and it's a more famous franchise and it has more fans. And so I think it would be good for baseball if the Padres got good and went from being maybe the most anonymous franchise to the most prominent, at least for a period. On the other hand, I think there's also some value to the sport and to general happiness to having your most prominent franchises be prominent. So I have a hard time with that one. I'm going to pick the Padres for winning that division, but it's really close.

I think neither seem to win that division because my World Series winner is also coming out of the NL West, and it's the Colorado Rockies. And I think that, Meg, I think that picking the Padres is a good one and that, Ben, picking the Phillies is a terrible one. Because I really think that by far, by far, the most happiness-inducing championship is the first one in your lifetime, particularly if it's been more than—I think once you get to about the age of 20 or so,

if your team hasn't won one yet, you really start to doubt that it will ever happen. You start to worry that you will die without seeing it. And once you get to, like, 30, then it really feels like it probably won't. The odds seem against you. And if you have a team that particularly has never won one, to me there's not a big difference between what the Padres fan feels about the Padres' current drought and what the average Red Sox or Cubs fan would have felt at the end of those, other than the fact that the Red Sox and the Cubs got just this constant positive reinforcement from the media about how special they were, which is good.

And I'm not even snarking about like that. That's good. Like that. I think that's good. And then also somewhat painful. But like as far as the distance since the last one you saw, well, you know, they're the same. It's forever. since the last one you saw.

Well, you know, they're the same. It's forever. I was just talking to someone the other day about how when I was seven, I thought that like, wow, like I've been alive forever. Like I've been like the entire existence of the world, of my world has only lasted seven years and it feels like forever.

Like the beginning of your memories feels like a long time ago, no matter how old you are. And so then you start thinking, and I might live like another 80 years like that's a long long Time and now I'm you know much older than that and it kind of feels like the same amount of time has passed since my First memories like it feels the same like you that's it. That's the whole thing like that's the entire data set from your Subjectivity so the the padres have gone forever they've that's that and so to win the first one would be like a paradigm shifting thing like you no longer have to worry about dying without seeing it or about suffering for your entire life you've got one you're in the

books it's possible it has been established and the rockies are this the same way except for i feel like the rockies more than any other team really you can doubt whether it's possible like you we have not seen a rockies team put together really even two good years in a row or what what what's their franchise record like 90 91 or 92 wins they've never won a division i don don't think. Or is that right? Am I remembering some of these details right? You know, like they've been trying for three decades to build any sort of success at Elevation. And they haven't been poorly run. They haven't been without good players. They've tried their best.

They just happen to have these, like this huge obstacle that turns out to make it extremely hard to build a cohesive, successful roster that stays that way. And I feel like if I were a 38 year old Rockies fan right now, I would really have, I would probably maybe bet against it, against seeing a world series, even in the next 38 years, just because of how difficult it has proven to be. And so for them to win one, I really feel like would be like, you know, being told like that, you know, like being told that the universe loves you for the first time. I wonder if you could quantify the feeling, you know, if you had someone in an fMRI machine or something as their team was winning the first World Series ever, and I don't know, the second of their lifetime or something like that, whether you could even tell the difference.

Like, would the degree of dopamine release or however you would measure that. Maybe there's like a deeper lingering satisfaction that is different after the first one and kind of plays out over time but i wonder in the moment whether you can even detect that difference because they're both euphoric i think so oh well i of the three of us probably have the highest degree of active fandom for a major league franchise i think that's safe to say among the three of us so you're also the one of the three of us who can't speak from experience about uh so i qualify for this experiment in a number of different ways i will uh volunteer my body to science so now all we need is for the mariners to win two world series in my lifetime and for this podcast to last that long and then

we'll have an answer for you ben but i i will i volunteer as a tribute to science you like science it could be i mean everything i just said could be wrong uh because i felt pretty amazing when the seahawks won the Super Bowl for the first time. Did they win again? They did not. We're not going to talk about that. They went, but then they called pass. Is this what I'm remembering right?

Yeah. Yes, Sam. That's right. So if I am, one way that I could be entirely wrong about this is that it could be that you spend your whole life anticipating the first championship. And as soon as it happens and it becomes real, then the sort of like impermanence of it immediately becomes you start to realize, oh, they're just going to play a new season next year. This doesn't change anything. It was actually all an empty goal that i was pursuing

and so like that sort of anxiety about the meaningless of it all kicks in but then when you win the second one you're like oh well this was still fun too and it re it kind of reassures you that like it's just it's fun and you're going to keep having fun forever and ben and i both grew up rooting for teams that ultimately won multiple world Series in a short period of time. And I will say that as a Giants fan in 2010, it was like a completely tearful event. It was as happy as I could be. In 2012, I don't even remember if I watched the last game. It was fine. And so that would, and the third one, I mean, like more of the same, right? And that's, it's hard to untangle that from the fact that it was now my career. And I had it, so I don't really know why. But I always sort of felt like a big part of it was that after the first one, I quit caring as a fan.

But I mean, I'm certainly, I'm still a still a fair like it hasn't the fact that they won multiple more world series didn't make me less happy i don't think i'm having here i'm here right now having a good time so i don't know ben ben you you watch i don't know how aware you were but yeah you're not that young come on yeah so they won in 96 and then they won in 98 and 99 and 2000. And really, you don't think that 96 was like a much bigger deal? Well, to me personally, it wasn't because I was, I guess, nine at the time. And I was not as big a baseball fan as I would become. So I remember watching like the last out of that World Series, but I had not watched every game and like lived and died with the team at that point. So to me, when they won in 98, I was like a really devoted fan. And

even though they had won two years previously, and it was like one of the best teams of all time, that was great. I don't think the experience of like attending playoff games, because I used to go sometimes and I got to go to some World Series games I don't think that got any less special or enjoyable for me over that period and when they lost in 2001 I was like extremely devastated which no one should feel any sympathy for me but but I was even though they had just won a whole bunch of times. And I was still a kid. So, you know, if I had been older, probably I would have been more philosophical about it. But at the time, I was pretty much just as into every one. And when they lost, I mean, typical Yankees fan at the time, I guess I was not like, well, we'll get them next time. Or we've had our fun. So let's give someone else a turn i just kind of wanted to keep winning every time so maybe there was some slight difference and maybe because i was a kid it doesn't count and you experience it differently anyway but for me there was not a huge drop off

in enjoyment the padres in the last in this decade i'm looking at their top player each year this decade which uh you can look at on the franchise history page for a team at Baseball Reference. And they have not had the same top player two years in a row at any point in this day. Not even two years, like not two years, not in a row. They've had 10 years and Fernando Tatis is currently their 10th top player.

And only one player in that entire time is over four and a half war, which is like four and a half wars an all- like four and a half war is an all-star, but it's not even an MVP candidate. And these are the 10. Adrian Gonzalez, who was like a legit stud, right? I mean, legitimately fun to watch. Awesome.

But then Cameron Mabin, Chase Headley, Chris D'Onofia, Seth Smith, Justin Upton, Will Myers, Ulyssse Chassin, Hunter Renfro. And so you have to figure if they won a World Series. For a lot of Padres fans, you have to figure if they won a World Series, they would have a couple of guys who were better than that, who were stars. And in fact, this year they have a couple guys who are probably better than anybody I just named. And so just for Padres fans who get to see a level of play

that they haven't even seen like at one spot in the field for a decade would be pretty, pretty charged up. I wrote about that when they signed Machado. I think I had a table of like single seasons of some number of war or higher and the number of seasons per franchise over the past 20-something years. And I think Padres were second to last just above the Pirates. But yeah, it's almost shocking just how few star-level seasons and consistent stars the Padres have had throughout their history.

Yeah, so they don't get to know anybody. Now they get to know it. It's like they're all going to be in it. They're all going to be in it together in their baseball city, the city of baseball. The city of baseball. All right. Are you mad, Meg, that neither of us picked the Mariners?

No. Neither me or Ben. I'm not mad. All right. Have you seen the Mariners pitching? We don't need a World Series on that. Oh, can you imagine making the country watch Mike Leak pitch? It would be the worst.

What an unkind. It would... That infield defense. Good grief. I think America would fall in love with Daniel Vogelbeck, though. I think America would fall in love with him a little bit. I think that would happen. I did pick the Mariners as my division winner, least i did not so we uh we also picked uh all the divisions i don't think we need to

talk at length about about this but maybe we'll just go around and say who our six division winners are and if there's any particular philosophy that that you want to mention or not so meg why don't you start i will start i picked the rays because i just i think that this is going against the idea of numbers as as making the most happiness but i will say that between yankees fans and red sox fans i think i would still take the field in terms of i bet every other franchise and baseball's fan base, maybe outnumbers those two combined. It would be close, but I think it would happen. And so I think a lot of other baseball fans would kind of like to stick it to them,

to both those teams. And I also just think the Rays are super fun, and they're playing good baseball, and they're doing fun, creative things. and they're playing good baseball and they're doing fun, creative things. And, you know, so I think the combination of their own specific brand of baseball, which I find interesting and sort of intellectually stimulating, coupled with the screw-em aspect of the Yankees or Red Sox not winning, would maximize happiness. So I picked the Rays.

I picked the Rays too. I'll just say, I mean, I think that, yeah, no one goes to Rays games, but they do have fans. People watch Rays games. So there is a fan base there. And Yankees and the Red Sox, I think, are probably the two teams that would produce significant happiness by not winning in a large number of people. I think most teams win. If it's not your team, you're sort of indifferent to it. But those teams are probably the most likely to produce happiness in people just by losing or not winning. And then also, just my main grounds for picking them, I think, was that they're kind of one of the teams in the most precarious position in baseball in terms of like, likeliness to move or, I don't't know not be contracted probably but but go somewhere

else and not be there anymore and uh it seems advantageous and good for people in general to have the weakest franchises be stronger so i think that it would be good if the rays won a world series even if it hastened their departure i don't know whether that would lead to them staying or leaving, but it would probably be a good thing. It could save baseball in Tampa. Although if they moved, then... Right. Maybe that's the problem, right?

Yeah. We'd have to think about that more. But yeah, I picked the Rays. I picked, in the Central, I picked the Twins because as much as I think Francisco Lindor brings great joy to very many people, among other members of Cleveland's team, this was actually, I went in a different direction than the prompt on this pick because I think that this pick was about teaching Cleveland a lesson in addition to the twins having the patron saint of the podcast on their roster. And wouldn't it just be great to see Astadio in the postseason? Wouldn't we all just delight in that? So I picked the twins. In the West, I picked the Angels because I think that the combination of Mike Trout and Otani should just bring joy to millions. It

would bring joy to me. It would bring me joy to see Mike Trout in the postseason more often than he has been. And Otani for the first time in the postseason. What great fun. And then you could dream on what postseason Otani when he's back from the elbow will do. And so you get to forecast into the future and predict future happiness. And so I picked the Angels. In the East, I picked the Phillies, even though I did not have them win the World Series for many of the reasons that Ben outlined. So I will move along to keep us moving here. And then I picked the Brewers in the Central because I just enjoy them. And I think that their combination of their roster construction is interesting,

and Yelich is just maybe never not going to hit a home run ever again. I'm moving through these quick. And then I picked the Padres because I picked the Padres. Real quick, going back to the Rays and to what I said, Meg, I don't know if you were a Seattle Supersonics fan. Yeah. So is there ever a case that moving a team from one city to another if that other city is say has more fans and will quote unquote love them quote unquote more is good

for generalized happiness or is it always more painful to lose a team than it could possibly be to gain one and we should never root for it you should never root for it okay so i take back what i said about the raise well and it's tricky because then you're in an odd position where you're just constantly rooting for expansion right because i would i would like very much for seattle to have an nba franchise back but i don't want another city to endure what i did and what you know everyone i know uh who liked the sonics endured so um yeah so in that in that respect i guess it's good because you're rooting for the expansion sort of broadening of the sport but at a terrible price it's just the

worst all right i will do my divisions uh my division winners my division winners uh i'm gonna go out of order i have the rockies as you as you know although i could have had them going in as a wild card which would have been kind of fitting i guess uh but i picked the rockies i picked the blue jays because canada i feel like canada is a big area that would take national pride in something that otherwise would an area would only take civic pride in that felt significant to me uh uh i picked the angels for the same reasons you did although i really came close to picking the a's i have written before about how no team in baseball's fans in my opinion sort of get more out of a winning team and get less out of a losing team than the a's do and to me it really feels like when they're in it it

is flip a switch from when they're not in it in a way that I don't think is true for other cities as much. But I did pick the Angels. And then I picked Cleveland, the Cardinals and the Phillies, mainly because I really struggled with whether I wanted to have all surprising teams in there or not. If it was all surprising teams, I feel like then you get to that uh point where the sport starts to look like it's all luck based and i didn't know if i thought that people would be happier to think that the world's was the the world was just luck based but then i kept thinking about how well it kind of is uh you know in in big ways. Like, you know, all of these ballplayers were,

you know, to use an on the nose saying born on third when it comes to baseball, they were all born with the ability to do incredible baseball things. And that is true. And so maybe it would be better if we all realized that like, you know, there's tons of luck involved and then i started wondering if there's even free will and i uh decided ultimately to have uh it not that i to have it not be chaos and so i wanted to have some good teams that actually looked like they got there because goodness pays off and so those are my division division winners all right. Well, I had the Rays, although I think the Blue Jays are probably a better answer in retrospect. I had Cleveland just because they've suffered enough, longest drought, et cetera. And I see the appeal of making ownership pay for not investing, but that only makes a couple people unhappy, whereas them winning would make a lot of Cleveland fans happy. And there may not be as many Cleveland fans as there are fans of other teams, but they've suffered.

But you've already ruled out them winning the World Series, though. And so is it if they're in a World Series drought, does making the playoffs make the World Series drought even worse, or does it make it? I can confirm that not being in the playoffs ever for a very long time is actually very terrible. And I say that as someone who delights in little stuff and doesn't think that we should be overly fussy about postseason records at all. But it's nice to go to the dance every now and again. That's what I have to say about that. All right. Yeah, good.

You know, I took the Phillies, and I also took the Padres. That was a tough one for me, but I did take the Padres. Yeah, good. just can't really see that happening. But also just it seems like there's some advantage to having a team like the Cardinals that has lots of fans and a big geographic territory. It's probably good to have that type of franchise win. They have won, but they haven't won a whole lot recently. They haven't been in the playoffs since 2015. They haven't won since 2011. I know that's not really that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like we're a little less sick of the Cardinals than we were a few years ago. We're ready for them to be good again. It's hard for me not to pick the Pirates because they had the 20-year drought of losing teams, and then when they finally got good again, they kept losing in

the wildcard game, and now they've got an ownership that just doesn't spend much. And it's pretty depressing to be a Pirates fan. So if they somehow won, that would reward that ownership behavior, but it would actually make a lot of Pirates fans very happy. So I came close there, but ultimately I went with the Cardinals and then I went with the Mariners in the West also just because of the extremely long drought. I really did not think that market size was a big factor in any of these things, because I feel like if you take a team like, yeah, like the Yankees, who none of us even picked for the division.

So maybe I'm arguing a straw man here. But yes, more people would celebrate that win. But I feel like they would celebrate it, that they would celebrate it a little bit more shallow shallowly and i don't mean that as an insult to the fandom of yankees fans but just to say that they have uh they have a lot more things to celebrate about the city new york which is all that regional fandom is it's like a way of going look at my city i mean if the yankees don't win like they still have the best museums in the country, right? Like they still like get all the cool bands that show up. Like you, it's, they write songs about your city all the time. Like nobody's going to be like, boy, New York, I don't know about it anymore. And so,

um, so I don't know. I don't know how much municipal pride is something that we even literalize when it comes to our fandom or if it's just a sorting mechanism so maybe that maybe i shouldn't be thinking about it that way maybe maybe once you pick a team you completely separate the team from the city but uh i don't know that's sort of what i was thinking i don't i don't think that people separate it very much at all i don't think that they i don't think that they do i think you become accustomed to a lifestyle, right? And that's just part of your lifestyle. It's like, here's my very winning baseball team and I get to go to the Met. You know, and it's not something fancy or special, even though it is quite special. It's also everyday kind of special as opposed to some place that you visit on vacation that you take pictures of and you make a point of seeing, you plan out time in your day. A person who lives in New York, if they get to the Met and it's too late and it's closing,

they'll just go the next day. Other people don't get to do that. If they miss it, then they have to fly back to Cleveland, and who knows when they'll see it again. I'm kind of torn about this because on the one hand, baseball is this local regional sport. And so you're less likely to get like a team of the country that the entire nation gets behind. Like maybe the Cubs were that when they were trying to break their drought. But that's rare. That's the exception. I think for the most part, when your own team loses, you tune out.

I mean, we don't. A lot of listeners to this podcast don't. But in general, a lot of baseball fans do. And most people who don't care about baseball to begin with, who don't have a team, just continue not to care. And for me, if a team in a sport that I don't follow from my city wins, that brings me no pleasure. Now, maybe that's because I am a New Yorker and I have been to the Met within the past two weeks, and I'm just so thrilled about that that it doesn't matter to me. But I think there are bandwagon fans, but just because it's baseball and because it's

so locally driven, I kind of buy the argument that maybe just like the team that has the most fans is sometimes bringing more happiness to the world. I'm kind of hung up on thinking about teams moving now, and I'm remembering when the Giants almost moved, and it was like they had actually been announced that they were going to move, and I, as a naive 12-year-old who didn't know how the world worked and was trying to figure all that out,

was not sure whether you keep rooting for the team after they move. And I was assured by everybody who had been alive longer that, oh no, you definitely do not keep rooting for the team. But then it just occurred to me just right now, this very second that, not this very second, a couple seconds ago, that whenever a team has moved, there have been a handful of people from that city that also moved to the same city at the same time. Like I could have moved to the same city at the same time like i could have moved to tampa bay with my family that year and how weird would that be they're just there still i bet you would be um you would be even more attached because you know it's good to have things anchor you when you're in a new situation but like i i will say the following which is that

i have not paid very close attention to the nba since uh since the sonics became the thunder but i felt deep joy when the the thunder lost to to the trailblazers i was like yeah get you should you should get it damien lillard you do it who's brought you more joy in the last decade, the Thunder for losing or the Mariners? The Mariners, but because of the ecosystem. Baseball is like, this is the thing I spend time doing, whether it's professionally or not. So thankfully, my pettiness does not run so deep that all the many things that baseball has brought to me in my life are outweighed by my singular desire to watch a franchise in a state that I have visited only one time, you know,

die. That would be terrible. But I did enjoy them losing. Okay, so we're gonna do one more category, which is anything you want, basically anything you want to change anything that you would, you would have change about the league or about the sport or that you would make happen in the sport outside of winners and losers. So that's broad. I think we'll just call this one wild card.

I can go. I suspect we might all arrive at some more conclusion here. I would get rid of blackout restrictions. I think it would make a great many people very happy. It would not make the league happy, presumably. But I think that eliminating blackout restrictions so that you can just have MLB TV and stream and watch all, and the good people of Iowa who just can't watch baseball would get to watch baseball. And that would make at least all the people in Iowa who like baseball happy. So that seems great. baseball and that would make at least all the people in Iowa who like baseball happy. So that seems great. This was also my pick and we phrased it, I think, as a rule we would change, which is

maybe somewhat more specific than we're saying now. But this is a rule. I think it's a rule. It's not an on-field rule, but I counted it as a rule. So yeah, I think blackout rules, even though I am a cable subscriber, the blackout policy still causes me pain. Even if it's just like having to switch from one way of watching baseball to another, it's a minor annoyance that I encounter all the time. And obviously it's worse if you don't have cable and you're trying to watch your team. Or if you do live in Las Vegas or Iowa and there are six teams you can't watch. Or if you do live in Las Vegas or Iowa and there are six teams you can't watch, or if it's one of the really unreasonable territories where even if blackout rules make sense, there's no way that it makes sense for you because you're not close enough to that team to go buy tickets anyway. So I think that, yeah, doing away with this, letting more people watch baseball, it would probably be good for the league in a lot of ways. Maybe it would hurt the league in some ways in terms of, I don't know, cable revenues or something. But in the long run, probably good for people to be able to watch baseball, especially because sometimes you can't watch baseball even if you do have cable and you're trying to watch the Dodgers or whatever. And there's some local provider dispute and there's just no way to see it. this was uh also my pick yeah particularly at the beginning of each year

sometimes i'll have uh an issue with my uh mlb tv you know account or my my mlb app or something like that and i'll i'll uh wonder oh am i the only one with this and and so i'll search on twitter to see if lots of people are screaming about something and usually it's it's it's just me and what i find is instead thousands upon thousands of tweets that are furiously upset about a game being blacked out and so while it is not something that personally affects me or affects my happiness and in fact I think that when I'm listening to a game I usually feel happier at the end of those three hours because I've got a big pile of weeds that I get to throw away now. But that's just me. And I can't transplant my own lifestyle onto the whole world. And so

I think that sounds like a good answer. People really seem to hate blackouts. They're very intense about it. Can I offer a more serious one? And then you can tell me if I'm trying too hard. Yeah. You can tell me if I'm trying too hard because sometimes I do that. I also think that if I think if minor leaguers were paid reasonably, it would make a great many people happy. And not just because we, you know, we care about that. But I think that it I think about there comes a point in a sports life where like the balance of real stuff that is kind of yucky and bad can sometimes outweigh the fun and fantastical stuff. And I just think we should tilt the scales back to the fun stuff, and we shouldn't do that when it's not real,

because then we're abdicating our responsibilities as writer types and as people. But I think that we could feel better about baseball if we solved one of these big problems. And it feels like that one is the easiest to solve because it really doesn't take all that much money. So we should do that. Yeah, well, I mean, honestly, like just practically speaking,

again, all of this, every winner means someone else is a loser when you're talking about who's going to win a game. And so I don't know if any of anything we've said thus far would really tilt the scales very much in terms of the general overall human happiness. But we are talking about what are theirs? There are how many?

200 minor leagues, 6,000 minor leaguers. Those are 6,000 minor leaguers whose happiness is attached to this much, much more than my happiness is attached to the standings and all of their families' happiness as well. And I mean, in a much deeper way. And so yes, if we make it about us, true, I think that that's also a good answer. We would all feel a little bit better about the situation. But for the people who are most affected by baseball, that would probably most affect their happiness.

And I know that money does not buy happiness and so on and so forth. But the research seems to suggest that that is only true once you get above a certain level. And many minor league ballplayers are below that level. They are making essentially less than minimum wage. And for them, the actual utility of an extra dollar, let alone the thousands of dollars that they could probably view that they should be paid, would have a practical impact on their happiness. So yeah, that's a great answer. That's a great answer.

Oh, good. Okay. So yeah, that's a great answer. That's a great answer. Oh, good. Okay. It's not mine, but mine actually does sort of consider that as well. It's a more, I guess it's a minute because I just want to say that I have, I'm scared to say this. I wanted to, I want to write about this and it's not, I have not thought it through enough to someday write about it. So when I do someday, you can't hold me to anything I say right here. And also I hope nobody else takes this idea, but I think I would like to expand to 60 teams. I think that that's what would save baseball to expand to 60 teams right now. 60, not 32, 60. And I think that 60 teams would have so many benefits and they would all be awesome. of them though is like one of the reasons that minor league wages being low is such a bummer besides them being outrageously low and it feeling like monopolistic and exploitative but another reason is that a lot of minor leaguers don't make the

majors and if you made it a lot easier to make it to the majors, then at least the payoff to the sort of quote unquote internship or whatever. That's the third time I said quote unquote, but two of them were previously linked. But anyway, what did they call it? Didn't Congress call it an internship or something like that or an apprenticeship? Apprenticeship, I think. It would make more sense if you had a decent chance of actually reaching journeyman's wages at the end of it. And they make it practically impossible to get to the majors. There need to be a lot more major leaguers is what I'm saying. It would be great to have more major leaguers. It is one of the most joyful

things that you can do is make the majors. And I know that people might argue that it would devalue it to lower the bar that much, i don't think so if you just look at the population growth over the last century it would be at least as as exclusive as it was during baseball's glory days and so uh so a lots more major league debuts which i like b lots more financially secure ball players which i would think then would make the minor league years a lot less sort of terrifying and problematic. Three, it's a regional sport. They need to expand the number of regions

that have their own team, I think. D, we talk all the time about how there are no records broken anymore. If you had twice as many players as hitting 400 again, because they get to face AAA pitching half the time, basically. And I think that I have other reasons as well, but I think that you could also pair this with a shortening of a season, which I think would be probably good for,

for everybody. I think that the season is honestly, I think the season is somewhat uncomfortably long for the ballplayers. I think it's too physically straining for the style of play that they play these days. And if you shortened it, you could have healthier ballplayers. And if you had twice as many teams, you could still have the daily aspect of it. You could have, you know, basically like 100 games for 60 teams would actually be, you know, 25% more games or I guess 33% more games than there are right now. And so for those and other reasons, I would

double the number of teams. So this is like the inverse of the Thanos. That's exactly why. Right. So Thanos's position was that there are too many people for the resources in the universe. But what if instead of halving the people, you doubled the resources? And so that's what I want to do with baseball. I want to double the resources. Right. Okay. Yeah.

I wondered why he didn't do that also with his infinity stone. Unless you can't create matter even with the stones. I don't know. But yeah, that sounds right to me. Well, yeah, Ben, that wouldn't be realistic. Right. All right. And just think about like, I mean, how much, how cool it'd be for there to be more teams.

I mean, there'd be so many people who live too far away from a park right now who could go to a park and, you know, there'd be complications, but I've thought those all through and they work out. Don't worry. Yeah. I mean, some of those teams probably be tough to sustain maybe it would make it less special to to have a team if there are twice as many teams well then you get back to the place thing right because those other teams they're not in your place they're not in your right and just look

that team that's our team that's our places team don't care. And plus, I'd have five teams in New York, for instance. And so you would have I mean, like I said, there are solutions to all this stuff that are all perfect. But, but there are definitely more than 60 college football teams. Right. And people, people aren't like, wow, college football, it sucks. Like they like it. football it sucks like they like it indeed i would i would as a person who uh enjoys despite not having gone to a school in that conference or a school candidly that had football at all although let me tell you the women of bernard are great at rugby if you watch mac football it is really truly terrible football but it is also the best football there has ever been and so i think that um you could accommodate so many different aesthetics of baseball if you had that many teams because there would be some that would be truly terrible, but maybe in a way we find really delightful. Could be true. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

There's a lot more than 60, you know, soccer teams. There's a lot more than 60, you know, I don't know, things. Sorry. I think that you could, I think you could handle 60 teams. Okay. I look forward to the article Where you answer all the objections So can I take 30 seconds to tell you my other answers

We were going to talk about Who would lead the majors in war To make the most people happy I said Vlad Jr. Just because he's already making a lot of people Happy and it would lead to more Vlad Sr. tweets and fun videos and also the Canada thing and he's just fun and could be a big breakout star so he's my guy you had a category just name anything that could happen big or small and I

think it should be someone makes a credible run at the DiMaggio hitting streak I think that would just be you know any year that would be I think that would just be, you know, any year. That would be the thing that would make us most entertained about baseball, probably. And then lastly, this was actually inspired, this discussion. We had it today because of a listener email from listener Sam, who wanted

to know what the change in World Series outcome we would choose to make the most people happy. I took this as just like the loser of the series wins the series instead. I don't know if that's how he meant it, but I picked the 1997 Cleveland team beating the Marlins instead of losing to the Marlins. I think that would have a lot of benefits. Obviously, it would snap that streak of them never winning. It was a close series anyway.

They basically deserved it as it was. And those 90s Cleveland teams were just so much fun that I think they should be recognized. Even though 97, that was post Lofton, post Bell, post Murray, but still really fun teams. And I don't know, if you think the Marlins are not good for baseball, maybe them not winning would have sent them away sooner, and maybe the fire sale would have been a little less embarrassing if the Marlins had lost instead of winning.

Yeah, that's a good one. I would have probably gone with the Yankees in 2001, despite it being the Yankees. Yeah, I could get on board with that one. Yeah. Well, I guess since Ben forced us into the lightning round, Meg, do you want to answer those other two? You don't have to. I think that I like the answer of giving the Yankees the series in 2001. I don't think that you can do that without taking one away though oh then yeah that everybody's happy yeah well and then you got the 98 padres sure yeah i like that that's a good that's a good

trade these you can go tradesies on that because i think that you want i think you want them winning in 2001 because it just would have meant a great deal to a lot of a lot of folks uh but you know i i think that baseball should also be an exercise in sadness and fairness. And so they should lose one and then the Padres can get that one in 98. Do you have a war leader? I like the idea of Cody Bellinger doing it just because I've been enjoying it, but that's really recency bias. I think I would actually go with Acuna. I think I want Acuna to be the war leader because he's just so fun. Although we'll continue to feel gross about that contract if he does it,

but I think it's good to have fun and also seriousness at the same time. So I think Acuna is my actual answer. And I went with Mike Trout for the war leader, just because that is the one thing that we're watching that um you know that a hundred years from now could be the most you know historically significant he could be the greatest player of all time right and um i think uh i i think if uh if if i can do anything to uh to increase the uh you know the sort of significance of this era of baseball historically. And to give me something to root for every single day would be to make sure

that Mike Trout continues to not only be healthy and awesome, but historically awesome. So I went with Mike Trout. I think that Ben's pick for the 97 World Series is really strong because I don't think anybody really feels good about the Marlins having, you know, two for one thing? That seems wrong. I'm glad we engaged this question because your answers were good,

but also are you guys checking out what Trey Mancini's been doing with the Baltimore Orioles? Yeah, I was. Sorry, I was looking at the leaderboard to remind myself of this answer. Trey Mancini is a 169 WRC+. What's that about? What you doing, Trey? He got hurt, though. He's been out the last

few days. I think he got hit by a pitch. Did that happen while I was at this bachelorette party? Yeah, it did. Friday, I think. You lose so much. Yeah, you fell behind on the Trey Mancini news. Alright. Folks, thatini news. All right. Folks, that was fun.

Thank you. Thank you. Let's think of more things that we can talk about. Okay. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. All right.

That will do it for today. For what it's worth, I do think there would still be Major League Baseball in the post-Thanos snap world. Not right away, obviously, but the world would need distractions, perhaps even more so than it does now. People would still like baseball. You could still find enough capable baseball players, obviously. Of course, the quality of play would decrease significantly, but you could promote minor leaguers and keep things going. Sort of a World War II scenario where most of the starters went away and you just filled in the ranks. It was thought to be valuable to keep baseball going in those difficult times. So you

probably wouldn't be able to fill Citi Field, assuming you can fill Citi Field now, but I think after a period of years, you'd get baseball back in some form. Even in Interstellar, there was still baseball, right? There were still the Yankees, even though they were a barnstorming team and playing on a tiny field. We're talking about 50% of people. That still leaves a lot of people. So I believe baseball could survive the Thanos snap. Oh, and by the way, Williams Estadio went on the injured list this past weekend. Nothing too serious, a hamstring strain, but I did write an article about him and about how he became a marketing phenomenon, kind of traced the rise of his popularity, talked to his agent, talked to the Twins marketing department about what you do when a player like him suddenly breaks out after years of obscurity.

So that's kind of fun. I will link to it. It is of interest to people who are interested in this podcast, which you can support on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already pledged their support. John Anderson, Ian Swerka, Roark Adeline, Evan Kirkwood, and Zach Wurtz. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes and other podcast

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