Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1387: In Trout They Didn’t Trust

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about poor pronunciations, an oddity in Bash Brothers, a Byron Buxton hustle double, the running (but not running enough) Royals, whether to talk about and whether they did talk about the curiously contending Rangers, and a few takeaways from the Madison Bumgarner–Max Muncy kerfuffle, then discuss several insights they […]

No leverage, what could I do? But sail across the ocean for revenge. I know you thought about me more often than I thought of you. It is true Just admit it Good morning and welcome to episode 1387 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com Brought to you by our Patreon supporters I'm Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer Hey Ben

Hi, wow, you got my name right was refreshing, because I've been doing a lot of radio interviews lately. Let me tell you, they're batting about 500 on getting my name right. So this weekend, I did one. By the way, I'm happy that anyone wants to talk to me about the book and happy to come on your show and talk about it. And if you don't pronounce my name right, I forgive you. But one person first called me Travis, and then I told him I was Ben. And he said, oh, yes, of course, Ben. And then he called me Ben Lindbergh for the remainder of the interview several times, including a Travis Sawchuck that he threw in there. And then the next one I did, I was Ben Lindberg,

but it was Terry Sawchick. So not doing so well when it comes to the names, but they got the book title right, which is probably more important. I don't want to make this all about me, Ben, but when I hear Stefan Fatsis get his introduction at the beginning of Hang Up and Listen every week, it says Stefan Fatsis, the author of Word Freak and A Few it says stephen fetz the author of word freak in a few seconds of panic and of course he wrote other books before that including a baseball book yeah indie ball book which we liked and both read before uh this is sad i forget what it's called what is it called it's it's not in the intro so how are we supposed to remember exactly it was about the northern league yes you know it's a great book it's called uh wild and outside sorry stefan love that book yep i do love that book it's a great book it's one of the two one

of two great books about the northern league that came out uh around that time in fact i forget the name of the other one so anyway though now uh are you going to be introduced forever more as ben lindbergh the author of the mvp machine and Machine? Are the residuals for my book going to be? I don't think I'm going to be introduced that way by you. I don't know who will introduce me that way. If I'm on Hang Up and Listen, I guess I will be. You will be. What do you mean?

Well, when I go on there, they always say the only rule is it has to work. With Sam Miller, I assume they'll continue to say that until, I don't know, maybe if I write a few more books, then that'll just be erased. But that'll take some time. But you don't think they're going to call you the author of the MVP machine and leave it at that? I don't think so. I wouldn't. All right. Fantastic.

Okay. Ben, I was watching the Lonely Island Bash Brothers musical. Did you watch this? I tried. It's only a half hour. I know, and I still tried. I just wanted to bring it up because you didn't see this. You didn't get here, but the final song is just a rap

where they name every team. Yeah, that's the part I wanted to see, but I couldn't quite get there. You did. You wanted to make sure that you knew all the teams. You wanted to hear your team. That's a team I know. I just wanted to see how i couldn't you did you wanted to make sure that you knew all the teams you wanted to hear your team that's a team i know how they do it i was watching with jesse and we we both thought we'd give it a chance and uh we like some lonely island things we like andy sandberg we like baseball yeah just couldn't couldn't quite click for us all right well i clicked fine for me but

so the final song though is naming all the teams. And so they, uh, I, I happen to have the closed captions on at this point and 29 of the team's names were, were correctly written, but for Oriole, for Orioles, they spelled it O-R-I-E-L. Uh, Oriole, uh, O-R-I-E-L and Oriole is a thing. And Oriole spelled the way that I just spelled it, is actually a form of bay window which protrudes from the main wall of a building but does not reach to the ground, supported by corbels, brackets, or similar. An Oriel window is most commonly found projecting from an upper floor but is sometimes used on the ground floor.

Seen in Arab architecture, blah, blah, et cetera, so on. Lots of Wikipedia stuff here. But anyway, that's the thing. And so do you think there's any—there are 7 billion people in the world. How many of them do you think are aware of Oriole windows but not Oriole birds? Just probably a few architects out there, but that's about it. I'm looking at pictures, and I've seen windows like this. Would not have known that it had a name.

But yeah, now I know that, and I probably won't forget it. My guess is that the person who was typing this in simply guessed what it might be spelled like, and when the spell check didn't say that's not a word, they went, aha, I got it. Yeah. Which is fine. All right, so that's not a word they went aha i got it yeah just fine all right so that's my uh banter okay did you see byron buxton your favorite players hustle double i did oh man that was a great hustle double it was yeah that was because some i mean there are degrees of hustle double

where sometimes it looks like it could be a double if you hustle, whereas this one never at any point looked like it could be a double to me, which made it really cool because I guess at some point you realize, oh, it's Byron Buxton and maybe he can do this. And you're not seeing the base runner. That's the thing that I like about a hustle double is that it takes you by surprise in the same way that it takes the outfielder by surprise, because usually you can't tell that it's developing you just get a sense that it's happening when the runner has already rounded first and suddenly maybe you see the outfielder realize oh he's going and then he picks up some speed and then it'll cut to the shot where you see the guy running around first but for a while there you don't know that it's happening although you can see Buxton break out of the box really quickly here, which is, I mean, if I were Byron Buxton, he probably just runs really hard on everything because it must seem like everything could be a double to Byron Buxton. This was not

even, nothing about this was abnormal. It doesn't really look like the center fielder lollygagged, like he was doing what a center fielder usually does on like a couple hopper and it wasn't like way to the side where he had to go get it like it was going to be in the gap or something it was just a single and Byron Buxton just kind of breaking baseball this was great hmm interesting I to me it looked like a hustle double okay uh it was a good one you're right it. It wasn't something that you thought. You hardly ever do think a hustle double is going to be a hustle double until you hear the guy going for it. Right.

And I find those to be very stressful plays because, like you say, you don't get to see the runner going. And so really, you hear a couple of seconds of the announcer raising his voice before you have any idea whether he's going to be safe by 10 feet out by 10 feet or if it's going to be bang bang because it's all the running is happening off screen yeah yeah that was a good double he also had a good throw he's been playing some ball speaking of running i wanted to do a little update on the running royals because jo Joe Sheehan did one in his newsletter. And so he saved me all the work. So the Royals are running. They're running more than any other team out there.

They are, as we speak, 10 stolen bases ahead of the next closest team, the Rangers. The Royals have 60 stolen bases. And that's great. That's league leading. It's league leading by a lot. But I think it falls short of the really interesting threshold and Joe reaches the same conclusion. So just quoting from his newsletter here and updating some of the numbers for Sunday's game. And the signings of Billy Hamilton, Terrence Corr, and Chris Owings in the offseason. We expected the Royals to be bad but fun to watch.

They've mostly met those expectations. At 20-45, the Royals are heading for one of the worst seasons in franchise history. The 81 stolen base attempts, though, are at least providing some moments to cheer. Then he goes on, he runs some numbers, and he points out that the Royals had close to 7% of all steals league-wide When you would expect if you divided them evenly, they'd have 3.3% And so he says, I thought what the Royals were doing this year would be historically significant And it's not And he runs a little table So the 2016 Brewers, the 2007 Mets, they had higher shares of the league-wide stolen base percentage. And if you

go back to the 80s, the 70s, even though every team was stealing bases then, the league leaders then were racking up 9%, 10%, 11% of the league-wide steals. And there were fewer teams then, but still impressive. So,

Joe concludes, it's a little disappointing, actually, to learn that the running Royals aren't all that special. They may lead the league in steals, but nothing about their stealing bases is historically notable. And that is a shame. They're not on pace for anything interesting. And he also says here,

which I hadn't realized, that the Royals run frequently, if not well, with a 74% success rate that's just above average and a net negative base running rating. Their runners have been picked off 10 times most in the league, and they take the extra base at a below average rate. And that's a dimension to this that I hadn't really thought about, because if the Royals were running just a little bit more, and they were on pace for something historic or historic in recent years i'm still not sure i'd enjoy it if they weren't actually good at it i think oh oh here i

was i was gonna bust out my theory which is that that in fact what would make the royals interesting is if they were reckless if they were fast and incredibly reckless if they were constant if the tenor of an inning was constantly changing because they were either stealing second and third, second and third both, or getting thrown out. If they had 210 stolen bases right now and had been caught 140 times, that would be interesting. A stolen base on its own is just not that interesting.

be interesting a stolen base on its own is just not that interesting i i i mean it i we've had this conversation um and i've tried to be on on the side of the royals but when you watch a stolen base you're watching a stolen base you're not watching a movement you're not watching a a team that is breaking baseball you're just watching a stolen base and so there really has to be something about the way that they're doing it that captures your attention otherwise you're just watching a stolen base and so there really has to be something about the way that they're doing it that captures your attention otherwise you're talking about one extra stolen base every couple weeks that over the course of a season add up to you know a league high and so if they were i mean that's why the vroom vroom guy is so fun it's the vroom vroom guy is not fun because he's so fast he can get around the bases before anybody tags him it's that he's always in rundowns and getting thrown out it's like when will he get

thrown out this time that's fun by the way is the vroom vroom guy allowed to go backwards in a rundown i don't think so no i think that would be against his principles can he stop oh he can't even he can't even stop midway through and make the... Okay. And he has to save Vroom Vroom as he runs through. I mean, I agree. I would like the Royals, if they were going to reach a level of interest in how much they were running, I wouldn't want it to be just completely buffoonish. I would want them to have figured out a way to run at maximum capacity while, you know, adding one run more than neutral over the course of a

season yeah i wouldn't want it to be hurting them because if it's if it's just actively bad baseball i agree that if it if it were like off the charts like they literally ran every time i mean that might be that'd be riveting for a little while just because it would be something we hadn't seen before but then I think we would tire of it because it would be just so dumb to keep doing it and I think in order to be really interesting in the long run I think it needs to be

good baseball I think it needs to be helping them at least a little bit because if they're just running into outs over and over again I mean maybe you watch just because you're rubbernecking at the car crash, but that wouldn't really sustain my interest, I don't think, over a full season. No, but like, you know, if you're talking about a sort of a Herb Washington thing where you, or just like base stealers in the 80s,

like that's what we want to see. We would like to see, we would like to go back and see with the lens that we watch baseball through today what it would be like to watch Vince Coleman or Ricky Henderson or like any of the top 10 base stealers in like the 19 late 1970s and early 1980s when there were like eight guys a year would have 70 or more more stolen bases. I don't know if that's an exaggeration. I can't remember, but I think that's actually kind of close to true. And to see that right now would be interesting. That's what we want to see. But I mean, you know, you set this up, I felt like at the beginning of the year of like, oh, well, the Royals could break the recent team record of stolen bases, which is like 184 or something. And I was like, so they get 185 we're watching i'm i don't know i mean i want 300

yeah anyway they're running a lot they're running more than anyone else but they're not running enough to pique my interest so nice try royals but you're not making me tune in to watch a terrible baseball team all right do you think that uh this is not i don't want to talk about the rangers necessarily but i wanted to ask if we should talk do we have to arrange a time to talk about the Rangers necessarily, but I wanted to ask if we should talk. Do we have to arrange a time to talk about the Rangers? The Rangers are, wow. I accidentally included the dead ball era in my, I failed to take the fake years out of my query.

And so I have all these really insane things happening in the results for this. All right, so let's see. Stolen base is 50. really insane things happening in the results for this all right so let's see stolen bases 50 season with the most was uh 1980 there were 10 so now i'm gonna 50 that's 10 guys with 50 steals 10 so now i'm gonna go up to 65 which i think would be the most in the last decade and there were five in 1980 so five guys stole at least 65. I'm just going to go to 80.

Let's see if I can find a year with four guys with 83. So 1980 and 1986, there were three guys with 80 steals. All right. The Rangers, if the season ended today, would be in the playoffs. And we haven't talked about that. And I'm not feeling like we should. But I do want to talk about whether we should talk about it. Just like make a date, set aside an episode in which we will banter about the Rangers. Do you think that the Rangers are, are we to the point now where we have to?

Like if this were April 28th, I don't think we would have to. They have a, you know, the Rangers, they have a 530 winning percentage. don't think we would have to they have a you know the rangers they have a 530 winning percentage it's nothing that special about what's happening but we're you know coming up on the almost halfway point of the season and they are you know ahead of the red sox and cleveland and the a's and they would make the playoffs and so that's that should be an interesting story but it just feels so hard to i i would really i would have to do some digging to find a reason to think that this is a story that will still exist in a week or three. And I, off the top of my head, can't say that there's that much I would want to say about the Rangers

that we didn't already say with me gasping at hearing that slim lance lynn is is uh number two in war or whatever yeah my i had to write a had to write the rangers blurb for the espn power rankings this week so i had to come up with a fun fact for the rangers and my fun fact is this the rangers have given 140 innings this year which is like what a quarter of the innings they've thrown let me just check that real quick they have thrown fewer fewer than 600 innings. So yes, it is almost exactly one quarter of their innings. The Rangers have given 140 innings this year to pitchers with ERAs over six. Collectively, those 140 innings have yielded 142 runs. So those are pitchers with ERAs over six, but collectively, they have gone to pitchers with an ERA over nine. Well, a run allowed of over nine. And I guess if you were to talk about the Rangers, which we're not doing, but if you were to talk about the Rangers, you would talk about how like, well, maybe that's actually a good thing that you would rather in a way you'd rather be succeeding with this like incredibly like dead spot in your, in a way, you'd rather be succeeding with this incredibly dead spot in your roster

where you've just been getting massive negative production because theoretically, it should be a lot easier to fix that. You don't need to get Trevor Bauer or Madison Bumgarner or whoever else is on the trade market necessarily to upgrade on Shelby Miller and Drew Smiley, right? They've made it really easy to upgrade. And if they're already in the playoff hunt with 140 innings going to those guys, and they're sort of figuring it out as they go along. I mean, you've got Adrian Sampson, who was a non-entity in my life at the beginning of the year, but

has been successful first as a kind of a bulk guy for them. And now he's a starter. He is one of their starters. And he threw the 20, like the 20th complete game in baseball the other day, a couple days ago, and he's doing well. And Ariel Jurado, who is on their team, he's also been quite good. And now he has moved into the rotation. And so they have, you could like, you could go like, Ben, are we, are we seeing the Rangers? Are they

doing what the A's did last year where they had kind of a no name starting rotation and they had to patch it as they went and they got unexpected contributions and good GMing. And now you look up in the summer and they've got a pretty good 25 man roster with some really fun young sluggers and some pitchers that you're not sure you believe in. But who cares? They're pitching so well. And they probably won't push the Astros, but could they push the Astros? And then at the end of the year, they're in the wildcard game. You could make that conversation happen, right?

Yeah. This might be like when we look back later, the one time in the season when the Rangers were were relevant that that may be the case i don't know just looking at you know like their run differentials pretty good they've got a plus 33 run differential differential it is they are doing what they ought to do you know what their playoff odds are at fangraphs what are they this is before they lost sunday by the way one and a half percent yeah well that's the thing yeah So looking at their base runs. They're literally in the wild card spot right now. Yeah.

Their base runs record is sub 500. So it looks like they've had some good sequencing stuff, I guess, which maybe makes sense with the pitcher fun fact of yours. So, yeah, I don't think that we will be talking about the Rangers months from now. So I guess it's good that we got this out of the way, but they do have some interesting individual seasons, as you would expect from a team that people didn't expect to contend and is currently contending. We've talked about Joey Gallo on the show, but like they've got a few hitters and like a third of their lineup is minor league free agents who have been pretty good, like Hunter Pence, who is a swing rebuilder, and he's been good. And then Logan Forsythe's been good, and Danny Santana's been pretty good, like some blasts from the past who no one really wanted.

And they've cobbled together a good third of a season or so out of those guys. So that's nice. It's nice if you're the Rangers and you're not expected to contend, but you can avoid a season where you're truly terrible, and that's probably all it will be. But, hey, you never know. So what does that mean? I think we did it. No, we didn't then.

No? You just don't want to be clear. Revisit this and do more? I don't know that there's more. All right. Just to be clear. We did not. We could revisit this and do more. I don't know that there's more. All right. Did it? Okay, let me. Fine, fine.

Let's say we did. Hypothetically, let's say we talked about the Rangers. Was it worth it? I think it was. All right. I enjoyed it. All right. Nomar Mazzara.

Let me do a quick little Nomar Mazzara 20 home run watch that nobody else cares about, but I, for some reason am watching this he's on pace to hit 22 so uh that wouldn't be good i want him to hit 20 all right i got one last thing to talk about i don't like doing this but i want i need to talk about max muncie's sick burn yep yep most people will see this because when a ball player says something funny then the whole world smashes that retweet button It's just everywhere you get a blog post get it on a t-shirt and then it's on a t-shirt you get it on a t-shirt And it's not you know, I still have a t-shirt that says fire it through the internet. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah, I have a tweet. It's a twins logo and it says fire it through the internet it's a good shirt people ask me about

that it's the only it's the only baseball internet shirt i think i have like the only one of those things and i got it i think it came out around the time that i think it came out around christmas it came out he said it around christmas and uh i needed an idea for someone to get me something and i thought well i fire things through the internet so i got it and i've had it for like probably almost 10 years or so look it up people anyway so it'll be a t-shirt and everybody will love it it'll be his nickname on players weekend and we'll all retweet that and rj's aggregating it at cbs and every you know sorry r, RJ threw you under the bus there, but that's what we do. And, and this is fine, except that as longtime listeners of the show know, I hate this because

baseball players are not funny. They're never funny. And that's fine. You don't need to be funny. I'm who is funny. Nobody in the world is sad, but we don't pretend anybody else is funny, but we pretend baseball players funny you know who's funny is nba players are genuinely funny and you retweet them when they're funny and i laugh but we retweet ball players baseball players ball players even though they're not and something about that annoys me so uh so max muncy hit a home run uh madison bumgarner chirped at him for watching his home run and I think I'm as happy as anybody else that Max Muncy

then chirped back and you know tried to own, tried to give a vicious burn to Madison Bumgarner and so he said this is according to Max Muncy, Bumgarner said don't watch the ball run and I just told him if he doesn't want me to watch the ball

go get it out of the ocean and uh so deadspin said something like uh muncie roasts bum garnering andy mccullough who is the only person i i think in the world who thinks ball players are less funny than i do retweeted this comment and it makes no sense mike petriella said we should put him in the Hall of Fame for this line. And maybe we should, like, good. Like, great. I'm glad that somebody whatevered Madison Bumgarner, but he didn't roast, burn, or own him.

It makes no sense. It's true. I just told him, if he doesn't want me to watch the ball, go get it out of the ocean. Now, if he doesn't want to watch me watch the ball, go get it out of the ocean. That would make sense. Like, distract yourself by chasing down the ball that I hit 600 feet and is now bobbing in the bay. Your precious bay, your precious cove.

That would be a good burn, okay? Yeah. But he didn't say that he said if he doesn't want me to watch the ball go get it out of the ocean which just doesn't stop muncie from watching the ball it doesn't stop him in fact it requires well no it doesn't but it's more likely that distract him from watching the ball if bum garner went and jumped in the bay you might be watching bum garner instead but but can i just tell you what really gets me about this? It's not like

we picked this sick burn up on the field microphone in the heat of the moment. He said he had hours. This was a first inning home run. He had hours to edit this, to workshop it, to tell people.

Fuck sounds of the game or something to verify. Exactly. Like, I mean, at the very least, probably by the end of the game, you should have a better version of whatever you said. And his either it got worse or this was what, I mean, I think it's plausible that whatever he said during the tension on the field actually was better than this. But, and that he, maybe he mangled it after the game which i would like a lot more but but and again like i'm happy that i'm happy that max muncy might have said something even better than this

i'm happy that he said something dorky because to be honest we all i i my whole elementary school was saying wordy comebacks, wordy comebacks. I just read an article in Slate about Kawhi Leonard and how there's this proliferation of great Kawhi Leonard stories these days and how you can make your own. And the writer, who I believe was Nick Green, identified that one of the things that makes a great Kawhi Leonard story is that at the end of it, he always has some like, like, really, like, I don't know how to how to put it. But he has some phrase that is involved in this story of him like, you know, playing for the orchestra or whatever. He's got some phrase too. And so a lot of people heard the phrase this week, bored man gets paid,

bored being like rebounds, like bored man gets paid. being like rebounds like bored man gets paid and it's just so direct and succinct like it's not like he's like well you know the the early bird gets the nba lottery pick or whatever like he just like boom he just says buckets buckets exactly and so this is another story is that he talks trash and his talking trash is when he makes a basket he says buckets and when someone's going defense against when he's playing defense against someone going against him he just goes nope and like that's good that's like how you do this and so if if bum garner and started chirping and muncie muncie had just said splash you know like i think we'd all get behind that

and and i'm like it's fine that we also all get behind this thing like he is showing us that he is just like us a little awkward when he tries to burn someone he you know like this is a this is the jerk store called they're running out of you all over again right and that's cool i like that about ball players i like that about max muncy but don't put it on a t-shirt. This is not t-shirt worthy. Well, it's like, you know how so many great legendary quotes are kind of taken out of context or like the person who said the quote didn't even realize what was great about the quote. And the quote was like a sentence buried within a speech or something. And at the time, maybe it wasn't even like the applause line, but history judged that line to be the thing that we all remember. You know, that happens sometimes. So go get it in the ocean.

That in itself is a good line. Yeah, go get it in the ocean. You're right. And in fact, go get it in the ocean works. Go get it out of the ocean still would have been a little. No, I think it would have worked. Yeah, it's okay. Go get it in the ocean.

So go get it out of the ocean in isolation is good. So that is a good T-shirt quote. Put it on a shirt. Yeah. So we'll just conveniently forget that it started with, if you don't want me to watch the ball, because that doesn't really make sense. But just, yeah, go get it out of the ocean. That in itself is good.

So I think it's kind of like how we, you know, remember quotes the way we want to remember them. And sometimes there's like an extra word or two in there that kind of ruins it. So we just kind of cut that out over time. We just remember it as go get it out of the ocean. And it works. It works. Although Kawhi would have just said wet. Yeah. I was going to say that in general, I agree with Ted Berg, who tweeted after this incident, at some point, the pro-fun police became just as oppressive and authoritarian as the anti-fun police. I'm starting the ennui police to actively shame anyone who feels anything at all, which I kind of agree with, half-heartedly, I guess. I can't wholeheartedly agree with the ennui police but i think this was the rare incident i mean how many times have we seen this exact thing play out guy hits a homer he watches the ball which muncie didn't even really egregiously do this time and then someone jaws at him and it's madison bum

garn in like half of these stories so i'm sort of sick of this thing playing out again but this was the one case where i think i actually liked both guys better afterward because bum garner had his own quote good quote so very good quote yeah so he told andrew baggerly or at least baggerly reported it bum garner said i can't even say it with a straight face but the more i think about it i should just let the kids play but i just i can't yes they want to let everybody be themselves then let me be myself that's me and i suddenly like him now i know i i've i found myself also going through that process i i don't want to give him credit for being that self-aware but it sounds like he might be yeah so and he's not if he's not beating anyone if he's just yelling at them whatever who cares well he does doesn't he i guess he does beat

something does he i don't know does he beat him i think he has right yeah didn't there was a puig wasn't there a puig i don't know he yelled no he yelled at puig because puig like grounded out too hard i can't even keep track of these. They're all so silly. Madison, Bumgarner, Beanball. Anyways, if he's not hurting anyone in the current incident, who really cares? I mean, I do think people should express themselves

however they want to express themselves, but this is the rare case where I come out of it kind of liking both of these guys better and saying I'm glad this happened and that both of them expressed themselves and talked about what they did afterward, even if they mangled their quote. Yeah. I'm finding Bumgarner throws inside, but I don't know.

Maybe he beans them. I'm not sure. He shouldn't do that. No. All right. By the way, the other good book about the Northern League is called Slouchouching toward fargo yes i have that one yeah that's good all right should we talk about uh what we came here to talk about yes all right keith law did an oral history of the mike trout pick in the 2009 draft by the angels and it's just fantastic and so we're just gonna

we're just gonna maybe go over our favorite things or takeaways or something like that but it's really good ben writer wrote i think it was ben writer wrote an article about the mike trout draft in probably 2012 or so and i thought that was good too and you i would not have guessed that I was going to really, really, really need an oral history of that draft. And this is fantastic. I was just going to say, I've read this story in five different forms. How many times have you read Billy Rowell's name? So many times.

So many times. So that was the thing. When you said we were going to talk about this as the topic. I hadn't read Keith's piece yet. I was kind of meaning to get around to it, but also thinking, do I need to read this story again? Because I have read it just about how the Angels picked Trout, about how the other 29 teams did not pick Trout. I feel like every beat writer at some point has done like a why didn't this team pick Trout's story? But it turns out that I think I just have an insatiable appetite for TikToks of how this happened or didn't happen for every team. And this is the 10th anniversary. But as far as I'm concerned, I'll read an 11th anniversary version of the story. I'll read the 12th anniversary, 13th anniversary. Just keep talking to the same people or different people, whatever. Billy Bean gets in every one of these. Why is Billy Bean the official sacrificial GM of the first 23 picks? Like, I know Grant Green wasn't, like, a superstar,

but there were teams... Yeah, like, the A's were higher on him than most teams, and so he gets blamed for, like, knowing that he was good but still not taking him. Yeah, so anyway, this is a good version of this story, and I hope that there will be another version in the future, and I'll read that too, because it's just, in fact, in Keith's own intro to this story, he says, that has led to the chronic question of why the industry as a whole didn and we never stop wanting the answer to because it doesn't compute it doesn't make sense that the best player possibly ever but certainly now just wasn't picked until very late in the first round and all these teams decided that all these guys were better bets than he was and so we will read endless accounts of why that was

so because i guess we like seeing well we like underdog stories or you know guys who came out of nowhere and that Trout is kind of that at least given his success since then and maybe we also like kind of laughing at people and pointing and saying you didn't know the obvious thing your baseball scouts your one job is to recognize the best player ever when he comes along and yet most teams didn't arguably no teams didn't so i think we have just a bottomless appetite i think that the key thing here is that um well i don't know if this key thing i don't know why i segued with the key thing but yeah i don't i think that nobody knew this it's not just that a bunch of teams missed on it, but if you read between the lines here, the teams that were highest on Mike Trout also missed wildly

based on what they probably realistically thought he was. The Angels, who got him and who were probably higher than anybody as a front office, they also missed and didn't really believe what they were seeing in a lot of cases. Mike Trout arguably missed, didn't realize what he was. There's a thing in here where his mom was what's teared up and seemed surprised when a team gave him a questionnaire when he was a junior. He was still, as they put it in this article, fooling around switch hitting, like as though he were not going to be good enough somehow if he didn't learn how to bat left-handed as well. Or like he was just so good that he wanted to try that or test himself.

I don't know. Could be. Yeah, you don't really know. And then he signed for slot, which the origin story of that has always been like that, you know, his family promised that he would, you know, this has been held up as an example of how he's like, you know, he didn't care that much about money. He just wanted to play ball and be his best and that he had kind of maybe somehow given his word that he would probably sign for slot and he was going to be good for it.

But then he starts asking for more money, but only like a little. Like, it's not like he was asking for for like 10 million dollars for a bonus he was you know there started to be rumors that he was going to ask for a little bit more because some team had given him a little bit more and then ultimately he goes and signs with the angels anyway i don't know it's a hard to know how good mike trout thought he was but you don't get the impression that mike trout was convinced at the time that he was the best player in the world right that's what i'm getting at like i'm probably just making too much of those those details about you know his mom and the letter and the him and the bonus and all that but the the bottom line is that you spent a lot of time in that part of the country

at that time in history and you do not get the impression that mike trout was convinced that he should have been the number one pick or the number two pick or that he was gonna be like the slam dunk hall of famer that he was so even even he you know probably missed on Mike Trout so um so all right so why don't we just then answer this or describe the answer that we have having read this what is the answer to the question why the industry as a whole didn't realize Mike Trout was in fact Mike Trout when he was a 17-year-old high school senior, as Keith puts it? Well, there are clearly a few reasons, but I think one reason is that his greatness just is not as immediately apparent as some players' greatness is. And I think that's true today.

I think that's still true of Mike Trout. You hear that from a lot of people who watch Mike Trout and say, well, you can't even tell necessarily, you know, it's not the first time you see him at least, that this is the best player in baseball by far because, you know, you have to kind of see his holistic contribution and you have to watch his consistency day after day. But something about his build you know it's mentioned in here many times that he's sort of like a football body and sort of muscular

and doesn't look like the lean willowy slender type of prototypical athlete something about him and you know his swing is not particularly graceful really it. It's not like a, it's a classic swing, I guess, but it's not a swing that I would, if I were a kid, probably like practice in front of the mirror many times. It's just, it's not all that distinctive. It's quick and it's efficient and it's powerful and it works, but it's not really something that leaps right out at you, I don't think. So that's part of it. I think he continues to be someone who is not, his greatness is not immediately apparent in the way that some players' greatness is. And then you throw in all the other stuff, obviously, the being in Jersey and the Northeast and the weather and the Billy Rowell, poor Billy, Billy Rowell, this one kid from the

same area who was drafted a few years earlier and didn't pan out. And so evidently everyone decided that Billy Rell didn't pan out. So every other player from anywhere near Billy Rell also couldn't be trusted. Poor Billy Rell went to, you know, signs, goes to the minors, struggles for four or five years. It's probably a pretty tough time. Finally is released and quits the game and finally probably thinks, well, at least that's behind me. And then for the next hundred years,

he is synonymous with Mike Trout and why your favorite team didn't get Mike Trout. It's got to be somewhat, I have to imagine it's exaggerated, but man, they're pretty detailed about how they were thinking about these things. And you know, the crazy thing, I mean, I've heard Billy Rowell's name or read it. I should say read it because I might be mispronouncing it right now. I've never heard it. No.

I'm assuming it's Rowell and not Rowell, but who knows? But I've never read or heard Carl Thomer's name in reference to my child. I was just going to bring that up. All right, so I'm going to read this. So they're talking about how, even though it seems kind of silly, when you're like looking at a kid, you're like, well, who else has come from that college? And you're kind of thinking like, has anyone else come from his hometown or whatever? And so Billy Rowell is a New Jersey kid, like a bit benchji's right so anyway so here's an area scout for the northeast mike alberts people would ask what high school position

players come out of the northeast like when you've taken a kid from college people ask who's come out of that college the next year there was another high school hitter from new jersey carl thomor who'd almost lost his leg i didn't i regret to say I did not click that link yet. Neither did I. I thought about it. He was husky. He has a buzz cut. He talked like Trout. So Scout said, I'm not going to miss the next Mike Trout. That just tells you so much about human decision making,

is that they wouldn't take Trout because of Billy Ralph, and then they'd take Karl Thobor, or however you say that, because he kind of looked like Trout. It's just extrapolating wildly from individual examples. To be fair, you might learn something from that example, because if those kids are facing the same competition, that was the knock against Trout or against you know, against people from that area. They're not facing high level competition. And so when you're judging a hitter, it's kind of hard

to tell if the hitter's good, if all he's hitting is junk. So there's something you learn, I think, from one example that might apply to the next guy. Like if you were doing, you know, minor league equivalencies, like translations of the stats, then would factor in billy ral not panning out when you were projecting mike trout from the same area but it doesn't tell you that much these are two different human beings and to just be like this guy's got a buzz cut he's from new jersey talks like trout he says need a lot and he's always tweeting about the weather yeah so they uh the the postscript of that is the colorado rockies took no more i'm reading keith's uh in the second round in 2010 he hit 213 314 296 across four seasons three in short season ball before he

was released by his second team the chicago white socks i had always internalized the story as like well partly it was that nobody believed a kid from, you know, a cold weather northeast. Like there's always been a scouting idiom or not idiom, axiom, which is draft hitters from the south and pitchers from the north. Because pitchers from the north, they don't throw year round. They have sort of rest forced upon them by the winter. And so they're less likely to be hurt. And you don't really need to face good have sort of rest forced upon them by the winter. And so they're less likely to be hurt. And you don't really need to face good hitters to be a great pitcher. You just need to have good tendons. Whereas with hitters, you need to face like millions of good

pitches growing up so that you can cognitively develop the ability to do that. And so you need to see velocity. You need to play a lot, a lot. And so good weather for hitters is crucial. And so one story has been they didn't trust a cold weather kid from New Jersey and Billy Rowell. And the other has been that nobody really saw him. That like, I don't know, Billy Bean went one day and he popped out and somebody else went one day and it was a rain out and he only played like eight games or whatever. Like that he didn't, he played many more than that.

But there's like the story was like, it was impossible to find this kid he lived six hours out of the way and no one ever saw him yeah this really goes this really i felt like there's still scouts that kind of are you know pushing that that second story a little bit but the facts don't see the facts of this oral history seem to really contradict it he was playing teams were on him teams were on him and he was playing in all the showcases he was playing um on travel ball teams he was trying out for by the way he tried out for and didn't make the national team so like nobody like is since we're talking about people missing him he didn't make the national team when he was anyway.

So I thought that was really interesting. I was shocked that he could go to all these showcases and not get more buzz. And that I don't really know because, you know, like the speed is the speed and you'd think the strength is the strength. And I just don't know what else you're looking for at a showcase if not those two things. And so I came away still feeling a little bit mysterious about like why weren't more teams in on him?

He was being watched at these events where there are hundreds of scouts and hundreds of executives and scouts. And their whole purpose is to go look at kids from New Jersey play against kids from everywhere else. Yeah, I think there's a national scout in here who says what I was saying. He was strong, but nobody would describe him as fluid. He wasn't Ken Griffey Jr. He wasn't crude, but his stance was crude and there was some muscle in his swing, etc. So, I mean, maybe that's part of it. He says as far as passing the eye test, he didn't jump off the page. So I think that must just be what it is, right? Because there's nothing, I mean, the arm was the one kind of thing that you could hold against him, but then there's a scout in here saying he was throwing 87 off the mound, so his arm wasn't like terrible. So that wasn't a reason not to take him. And it's curious because you never really know with these retrospective stories, if you're getting exactly the truth of what people thought at the time. It seems almost inevitable that people's memories have shifted a little bit. It's been 10 years.

it a little bit it's been 10 years i'd like you know in 30 years when we've seen 20 different versions of the story i'd like like a meta-analysis of all of the mike trout draft stories just to see how people's stories changed over time you know if they said oh yeah he was second on our board one time and then he said oh he was eighth on our board the other time in fact within this very story i think the angels say they had him second but someone else says eighth eighth but they were gonna take him with the top two picks anyway so i i read that as that he was second on on eddie's on eddie bain's preference director uh-huh but that he that when they did their draft board he was eighth uh-huh uh that's how i read that and that so that like there it is if there's a hero in this story and i i mean i i found this to be very convincing but like you say who knows but if there's a hero it's greg morehart the scout who found him and i've always known greg hort

greg morehart the scout who found him but i didn't realize how much he was out on a limb with this so if all these you know depending on whether any with this. So if all these, you know, depending on whether any of this has been embellished over time in his own memory or others. How could you not? When you've seen Mike Trout become the best player in baseball and you're the guy who scouted and signed him, how could you not?

Like your memories must be colored by what you know happened afterwards. I don't know. So he is an absolute true believer. Like he is convinced not that this guy is going to be a major leaguer, but that he is seeing a Hall of Famer, that he is a no doubt superstar and a most likely Hall of Famer.

And he seems to have basically put his job on the line because at one point, let's see, at one point he hears that Mike Trout might not sign for slot anymore. And he calls and they're like, Mike Trout might not sign for slot anymore. And he calls and they're like, yeah, he might not sign for slot anymore. And Greg's just like, I got to go and hangs up and then calls his bosses and is like, he's good. He's going to. Yeah, he's all set.

And another time he was going to go to the A's workout. Well, let me do that. Let me just finish this part. The Angels would not have paid him over slot if these accounts are accurate. So if Trout had said, I'm not, I actually am, I'm going to, if he told Greg in that conversation, I won't sign for anything less than three. And Greg had told him, maybe if Greg had told his boss right then, yeah, he's teeteringering they wouldn't have drafted him because they they wouldn't pay slot tony regans wasn't going to pay over slot for him right there and so that's another example of how the angels are the team that went out on a limb to get him or whatever the team that was most in on him but there's a lot of scenarios like if they had picked in the top eight picks or the top seven picks that year there's a pretty good chance they wouldn't have

drafted him if you were to believe that he was number eight on their board and if he had actually gone through and said well and you know the red sox are offering me three million so you better not pick me unless you're going to match three and greg moore had accurately represented that to his bosses they might not have picked him and so that you tell the story you can tell the story about the a's well yeah so the a's wanted to bring in trout for a workout and billy bean was going to watch him play and more heart said that if they had gotten him in their ballpark and talked to him and watched him play all day, there was no way they wouldn't have taken Mike Trout because the more that the Angels were having a workout on the same day that the A's were holding that workout, which was not true at all. I guess he made it true after the fact, but he just made up a workout so that Trout had to choose between the Angels and the A's. And

I guess he had the relationship with Morehart because Morehart had played with Jeff Trout. And so he just sort of stole him away from the A's. This is like straight up Sam Miller stealing Danny Baptista in the Stoppers tryout stuff. This is pretty shady, but it worked. Yeah. And it worked again, though, like the A's did, you know, Billy Bean, as he notes in this, flew out, Billy and Farhan, quote, flew out together to go watch him. Normally not a trip I would make to see a high school outfielder from a small town across the country.

That didn't go well. Trout had a bad day and they didn't even get to see him run as Billy Bean puts it, but he was already enough on their board that Billy was flying out to see him. David Forrest saw him on a day when he hit three home runs, according to this. And of course, like all these showcases he was at so it's it's the the great mystery again is like did teams

miss out on him or did teams miss him like did did they was was this just an example of he just so happened to live in a place where it was hard to get to. And there weren't, you know, there weren't enough other good players to scout in his area at that time. And it's just this quirk that this Greg Morehart hustled out there like it was a hustle move. He hustle like not like steal, but hustle like go the extra mile like he drove out there to the middle of rural New Jersey and found him. And that's a fun story. fun story because you know like dollar sign on the muscle a lot of the book dollar sign on the muscle is about how the romance of scouting got eroded after the draft because it used to be that if you wanted to sign a kid well first of all you had to

find him you had to go out to some you know cornfield in oklahoma or whatever they don't grow oklahoma corn they don't grow corn in Oklahoma. Nebraska is where they grow corn. Iowa, they grow corn in Iowa and find the kid playing in the cornfields. And then you had to convince him to sign with you. You had to find, you had to sweet talk his family. You had to really have a relationship with his family so that they would trust you. And then you had to convince him that, that he should sign with you and you wanted to save some money at the time and so then the draft comes along and it's just like well now you're the only team that can sign him and so it's like a pretty simple thing and there's just not that much room to distinguish yourself anymore as a scout you get your pick you sign your pick you try to turn him into a major leaguer and the mike trout story is fun because it sort of harkens back

to that idea that you can be the team that sees mike trout as the next mickey mannell and everybody else sees him as you know somewhere between 20 and 60 on our draft board and that's a huge difference that it's fun to say comes down to genius and like whatever like that you made a difference that greg moore art should be in the angels Hall of Fame legitimately. Legitimately maybe the second most influential person in franchise history, if you think about it. And so that's the story that, that's one of the stories. And I don't know, it sounds like I'm working up to saying,

and I don't know if it's true, and that's not what I'm working up to. I'm working up to that's the end of that paragraph. Well, a few things that I want to point out. So I think the two people in this story who are quoted or are said to have really recognized who Mike Trout was and what he could be, Morehart and then also Mike Silvestri, who is the Angels cross checker at that time. And so Eddie Bain is saying that Morehart was putting Mickey Mantle comps on Trout at the time. And Silvestri, I think, himself said that he was putting Mickey Mantle and Ricky Henderson comps on Trout. So he said he was like Mickey Mantle, but not a switch hitter or Ricky Henderson, but right-handed.

I guess he means throwing right-handed because Ricky batted right. So those are the two guys who claim to have or are said to have really recognized what they were seeing. And I thought it was interesting because Silvestri says that he actually bumped down the projection for Trout, which was really interesting. So he says they were still using the system that the previous scouting director had used. There was some numerical system for grading players where you'd put probably tool grades on all their tools, and then you'd combine them in some way into an overall grade. So he says, the numbers it was spitting out, I was embarrassed. It spit out a 75 on the 20 to 80 scale,

meaning a potential Hall of Famer. I took it down to a 68 because I'd never thrown a 70 on someone before. And this is in line with the work that Rob Arthur and I did on the Reds scouting report database, where we found that all of those reports were really compressed and you'd see many reports just in the middle range and very few people were willing to go out on a limb. But Silvestri at the time was evidently saying he's Mickey Mantle, he's Ricky Henderson, but I i'm not gonna put a 70 on him yep why do we even have the scouting that is that is the single best detail in this whole thing because really it shows that they were scared of what they thought they saw and they

didn't believe it even the angels didn't believe it they had this thing in front of them and that it was too scary to think that you were that far outside of industry consensus and so even they pulled back everybody pulled back a little bit except for greg morehart who didn't pull back at all who just kept saying i'm betting everything on this i believe it entirely entirely. And he, I mean, there's lots of, the fact is that even being somewhat scared and even pulling back, they were still probably ahead of almost all the other teams.

And that's why they ended up with them. And the whole organization gets a lot of credit for that. But Greg Morehart is really the one person who just was not kind of cowed by the idea that, that, that you could see something that nobody else does. And that's why, that's the other way that this brings back the romance of the,

you know, pre draft thing is this, this idea that you're not part of 30 teams that are all, you know, in, in this big sort of group think industry, but that you could be the only one who who sees something truly and it's kind of inspiring to read this and and just see like

every page like everybody's like i didn't see him he popped up and then greg morehart pops into the thing and he's like well i thought he was going to be three times as good as mickey mano and then like you're reading on and it's like uh the Angels didn't want to offer him more than slot. And Greg Morehart's like, I sold my car and I gave it to Mike. Yeah. So a couple other things about Morehart. So I've talked to Morehart myself and I wrote a story for Grantland about four years ago now on Jeff Trout and how Jeff Trout was actually a really good player and hitter himself. And he had some injuries and everything, but clearly he had a lot of talent, not Mike Trout-level talent, but good talent. He was a

really great college hitter. So anyway, when I had Morehart on the phone, I had to ask him about Mike Trout, because if you're talking to the scout who signed Mike Trout, you're going to bring up Mike Trout. So he said the same thing to me. He said, and I'm quoting from the transcript here, I had just as much fun watching him play high school as I do watching him play in the major leagues. If you like baseball, you could have watched Mike in high school and you could have enjoyed it as much as watching the major league level. He was just a terrific player in high school. He's just a little bigger now and he does it on a bigger stage, but he still did a lot of the same stuff in high school. It doesn't seem like much has changed other than the address for Mike. So that's sort of what he was saying, that he saw this all the time.

Now, what I'm curious about, a couple of questions about Greg Morehart. First of all, how is he not like the president of scouting in baseball at this point? I don't know exactly. I actually asked him how his time with the Angels ended because I wanted to know, like, how are you the scout who signed Mike Trout? And you're not even with the Angels anymore. And you're just scouting for another team. And he was he didn't really say exactly what happened. He said, I think that's just the nature of the game.

God puts me where he puts me. I drafted Matt Harvey, too. The Angels could have had both of them. But that's just the way it goes. You make decisions puts me. I drafted Matt Harvey too. The Angels could have had both of them, but that's just the way it goes. You make decisions based on, yeah, now they do. You make decisions based on finances or making decisions a certain way. So that's all he would say. And I don't know the backstory there. You know, there's all kinds of turnover in baseball front offices. And I mean, the GM has changed. Eddie B Bain left and so now Morehart works for the Red Sox and Eddie Bain also works for the Red Sox and Mike Silvestri also works for the Red Sox so

I assume that Eddie Bain just got pushed out for whatever reason and so he hired these guys when he went there and scouts are not on long-term contracts and and for all I know so now Greg Morehart is the Canada area scout for the red socks according to keith and cross checks other players for the draft and it's just maybe this is what greg morehart wants to do like some people just want to be scouts and if you want to promote them to like a more office-based role they don't want it but he did the best possible thing that a scout could ever do. He is essentially the Mike Trout of scouts because he signed Mike Trout over objections. And no one in the history of scouting probably has made a bigger impact in a single move than Greg Morehart did.

And I guess it's still a small sample. It's one thing. Like there are some nice other quotes about how Greg Morehart's great at judging hitters, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, maybe you just recognize something about this one guy and it's not transferable to everyone. But you would just think that if you're the scout who signed Mike Trout and you saw the thing that no one else in the industry did, you would have your pick of jobs. You'd be a GM by now. You'd be who knows i mean i don't know greg morehart well enough to know what he wants to do or what his other strengths or weaknesses are but it is kind of incredible to me that the guy who signed mike trout is a not with the same team and b is in sort of the same position that he was at the time so that's one question i have about that the other one is do you think that

greg morehart is sick of talking about this yet and if not when do you think he will ever be sick of this i don't think he is i mean i you could imagine that it would be like if you were like marcy playground and you had to keep on playing sex and candy like twice every show uh but yeah sure you like mike trout too sure that's the point but i don't i i mean i don't think he's first of all i don't think he's asked to talk about it like that much he must be talking no no i mean about it no no no no no what i why by that much i mean like i don't think that he says mike Trout's name every day, for instance. Probably not. But imagine how many times, just swapping scouting stories with scouts or other people

in baseball, or he just meets someone in the draft. Maybe he has to tell the I signed Mike Trout story to impress other prospects that he's interested in drafted. So I mean, he must have told the story hundreds of times, right? In different contexts. At some point, he's still scouting, and obviously he loves doing what he does, and this is the best possible outcome of that kind of career. So maybe he's happy to talk about this every day for the rest of his life.

I don't know. But at some point, it must just be so rehearsed we should we should see if he would be a regular guest every episode sorry man and when he quits coming on then we'll know that he's sick of it i don't think so i don't know i mean i i i doubt it do you think mike trout is sick of being mike trout no no that's not a good question what point am I trying to make I don't know point yeah like chat would be sick of talking about one home run he hit over and over again I don't know I think if Greg Morehart had had been fired by the angels and then never signed another you know like never never gotten another offer if he other words, if he were not Greg Morehart,

but if he were a character in a movie who's really bad at life, who's got this sort of ability to be a good scout, but drinks too much and can't something his family, I don't know. And he's just miserable, and he's going through that sort of eight-year period where it's like, now it's pills. And every day he walks out and he's going through that like sort of eight year period where it's like now it's pills and and like and every day he walks out and someone's like hey that's the guy who signed mike trout and then throws a milk carton at him like then i think you'd be sick but that's not greg

morehart at all like he's a guy in the industry still right who's got you know like who's still doing the thing and gets proper credit for a thing that most scouts don't get the proper credit for. I mean, the other day, teams drafted a bunch of players, a bunch of future major leaguers, a bunch of future stars. And a handful of people will know who signed those players. But for the most part, the work that they did is going to be largely invisible to the to the thousands and thousands of people who are

packing these stands. They're not going to get rich for signing these players for drafting these players. They're not going to, you know, most of them aren't going to be, you know, set for life, they're going to have to keep working until they're in their 60s or 70s the sort of nature of the work that they do is going to be largely misunderstood by the public i mean i i think that the we we we basically know that like oh it's long hours and a lot of driving and you know motels and everything like that but i'm sure that that we don't really understand it and most people don't really understand it and besides most people don't really understand it. And besides the scout who signs him, there's all sorts of other people who would see the player

and you don't ever hear their name. You don't ever hear the cross checker who saw Mike Trout or anything like that. Or maybe the guy who scouted him in a wood bat league or something. And so here's Greg Morehart, the scout who did the greatest thing and gets credit for it that's incredible like good finally and so i bet he's pretty happy yeah i hope so when i talked to

him he was pretty humble about it he wasn't saying i yeah i thought he was mickey mantle he said i was very fortunate when i drafted mike that he exceeds expectations because that's who he is. He's not the norm when it comes to hard work. He can handle all the things that come along with the regulars of the game and all the things he has to do, whether it's TV stuff or meeting people, sign baseballs. Mike handles all that stuff so perfectly. No scout can see all that stuff. You just evaluate the ability.

You've got a good kid and a good family. You hope he maximizes his ability and that was something that came up in the story that no one really knew that he had this preternatural ability to adjust i guess they couldn't because they weren't watching him over a long time frame against the top competition so you didn't know that if he had a flaw he would just in a terminator kind of way just eliminate it and become great at the thing that was formerly his flaw. So I think he obviously exceeded even Greg Morehart's expectations. But if you were starting a scouting staff and you knew nothing about Greg Morehart except

for what's in this story, you'd probably make him a pretty high draft pick, right? If you were starting a team. I don't know what the rest of his scouting record is but this this single story it could be a fluke i guess but like he seemed to really know what he was doing and i guess you could interpret this as gee he basically deceived his superiors when they were asking about the draft demands and then he lied to the father of the kid and the a's's committed fraud against the A's. He got really lucky this time,

but if he behaves that way with every player he likes and he's not always right, then maybe that would be a problem sometimes. I don't know. Yeah, the only way that this story could be not fun is if you found out that every scout does this for every one of their players, that it's just this constant mad rush to get your guys picked and you will say and do anything because that's that's your that's your job you're that's your reward but nobody says

that nobody ever says that nobody ever is like telling the mike trout story and then they're telling what greg morehart did and then they're like of course everyone does that so i feel pretty good about the fact That not everyone does that You got more to do there's two things I want To bring up in this thing small things But if you got other things we can do other things These are small too so Billy Bean says Trout went like 0 for

5 popped out so we didn't even get To see him run which You hear scouts say you know I saw him Good I saw him bad it depends How he looks on that day. And I think that will probably be less of a part of scouting as time goes on because it won't matter what day you saw him because you'll have the numbers and the data on every day.

So I think there's also Eddie Bain in here says that he saw him on a day when he didn't do anything, but he still liked him and wanted to take him. That Eddie Bain quote is like such a dunking on everybody else. He's like, yeah, I went there, stayed through the fifth. He went 0 for 2 with a strikeout and a ground bat. Didn't even make it to first base. Didn't feel anything. I knew we wanted him. Called my boss, said, give him whatever it takes.

I'm out. And then Eddie Bain got fired a year later too, which was really wild because Eddie Bain is like was a legend already is a legend like that guy. It's like, well, right. Yeah. So anyway, that whole thing about like it matters what day you see him. Maybe that won't be as big a part of scouting anymore because we aren't judging players based on the single look by the single scout. So muddy baseline.

players based on the single look by the single scout so muddy baseline like can you imagine if you're like i i thought i liked mike trout but i got him on a muddy baseline day yeah right the other curious thing in here did you catch the thing about like the cardinal scout tipping off more heart about trout no that was kind of an interesting thing. So there's a Morehart quote in here where he says, I had taken this job with the Angels and St. Louis area scout Kobe Perez said, there's this kid Trout. You might have to look at him. He can really run. And that's the only time this comes up. And then that guy is quoted later in the story. He's with the Orioles now. But that was interesting. Like was Morehart cluedued into trout by a cardinal scout who said you should go look at this guy i don't know it wouldn't yeah it wouldn't seem that it wouldn't i mean i know scouts talk to each other talk to each other that was a thing in dollar sign the muscle right because the phillies scouts wouldn't talk to anyone and all the other scouts talk to each other cardinals picked michael waka in that draft too so you know maybe they was thinking i don't care i don't care what this guy knows we're picking first yeah right so yeah that's part of it too maybe anyway that was kind of interesting although i think more heart told

me that he saw trout at showcases maybe that's in here too and then he made the connection with jeff trout who he knew already so that piqued his interest but all right what did you have not michael walker sorry what's the story with michael michael walker they took instead of cory seager i think they took instead of cory there's a famous tweet from one of the big baseball writers who was like i don't know it's a tweet that didn't age well so whatever what am i talking about they took shelby miller okay yeah all right so uh there's a line in here i just wanted to know if you know what it means. It's describing him in high school, and it says, this is Mike Silvestri. The first time I saw Michael, he was playing a lot of shortstop at East Coast with his hat kind of pointing up in the high socks.

What is the hat kind of pointing up? What do you think that is the signifier of there? What are we supposed to take away? Does that mean that he's... Like he didn't look like a ball player or something? He didn't look right? He didn't have the good hat? Yeah.

Didn't have the good brim. I don't know. I wasn't sure. I liked that there is an official scouting jargon about how you wear your hat. And that I don't know. And i like that keith didn't even keith's like you either know or you don't know sam like i'm not gonna spell it out for you yeah uh look it up so the other thing is um the i have to i have to bring it up then i have to bring it up yeah we got to talk about this all right billy bean billy bean this is a quote from billy bean since then so this is this comes immediately after

the uh the heist the taking the the hastily arranging an event uh with the angels so that he wouldn't go to oakland and work out for Billy. And so then the next thing is Bean. Since then, Trout went on his own personal iron fleet in the Greyjoy. He's the fourth Greyjoy, just destroying us with a vengeance worse than your own's to remind the A's they should have taken him. This was clearly a quote that was given like on the day of the Game of Thrones finale or something. Well, is it?

Because it's a book. It must be. It's a book reference. I think that's one of the things that makes this so amazing, right? Is that this seems to giving a book plot reference, like a plot that only existed in the book and not the show, is a very aggressive move. It would be like if you were like,

remember that scene in The Godfather where Johnny Fontaine goes to the party after he wins the Academy Award, and everybody's like, what? And you're like, the book, idiot. I read the book. And everybody's like, what? And you're like, the book, idiot.

I read the book. So you think this is like a Victorian Greyjoy reference? Is it? The Greyjoy who's not in the show? It could be. He's the fourth Greyjoy. I mean, the part that doesn't make sense at all is just Trout went on his own personal iron fleet in the Greyjoy. On his own personal iron fleet. So is the gray joy a place

a geography no the iron islands is the place yeah okay maybe just got his words garbled here this is like go get it out of the ocean i don't know all right so and so you read the he's the fourth gray joy as there are three gray joys he's the fourth Greyjoy as there are three Greyjoys, he's the fourth, and he has many Greyjoy attributes. Yeah. I read it thinking that he was actually referring to the other Greyjoy. Because he's vengeance worse than Euron's. Yeah, or maybe that Euron, well, Euron, I don't know. I don't know.

I can't make sense of it. I barely know who any of these characters are. Yeah. I'm not good any of these characters are. I'm not good with Game of Thrones names. Yeah, no, this is just, this must have been in the middle of when everyone had Game of Thrones on the brain and he just went for the Game of Thrones reference because this doesn't make any sense to me. It almost makes me appreciate a Scott Boris analogy. Yeah. Yeah, it is a nautical analogy here, but it makes even less sense.

But is your feeling that Billy is saying that Trout is taking vengeance on the A's for not drafting him? Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Okay, good. Well, we've settled that. I think that's all I've got.

I've got a lot of highlighting on here, but I think that we can end it. Save some of this for the next one. So old school. You printed it out and highlighted it. I did. Yeah, I did. Wow. Okay.

All right. Yeah, well, I'll link to it. Go check it out. There are things that we didn't mention, even though we've mentioned a lot of things. So good story, Keith. Thank you. I look forward to the next version of this. Fantastic. Bring something else to life. Yep. All right.

All right. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening. Most of you noted and tweeted at me and started Facebook group threads about Williams Estadio was demoted to AAA Rochester this weekend. Not happy about it, but can't argue that he didn't deserve it. He wasn't hitting well. And between Marwin Gonzalez's positional flexibility and the other Twins catchers suddenly hitting like superstars, there wasn't a ton of room on the roster. However, he went 3-4 with a walk on Saturday starting in right field in AAA, and then on Sunday he went

three for four with a homer starting at catcher, so hopefully he will play his way back to the big league soon. It's funny, you know, we loved Williams Estadio at first when he made the majors without thinking that he would actually be a very good player. Then we started to believe that he might be more than a statistical curiosity. He might actually be good. Now he's back in AAA. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but we wish you well, Williams, and we hope you return to us soon. A couple people have suggested to me that I should start a Williams-Estadio for the All-Star Game campaign, and I just can't do it. If you were playing a little bit better, I'd be happy to. I'd throw my full support behind that campaign, but I've criticized too many All-Star votes in the past in the days when I actually

cared who got elected to the All-Star Game. I can't make a case that Williams-Estadillo actually deserves to be a Twins representative. They have a lot of really good players this year. It's true that it's an exhibition game and it's supposed to be a showcase for the game's stars, but even so, I can't in good conscience do it. But if you want to write him in, I will look the other way. I will not blame you. Now, after Sam and I recorded, there was news that was far more disturbing than even a Williams-Estedio demotion, and that was, of course, David Ortiz getting shot in the Dominican Republic. There was also disturbing security footage that accompanied this news. We don't know, as I record, what the motivation for this shooting was,

but someone just came up behind him at an event and shot him through the back or lower abdomen. Fortunately, he appears to be on the road to recovery. He was in surgery. By all accounts, it went okay, and that is a great relief to all of us because David Ortiz is a treasure. We must protect David Ortiz. He makes baseball better, so we hope he makes a swift and complete recovery. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Greg Papillon, David Medcalf, Tyler Omen, Eric Ensminger, and Thomas Neal Blank.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please go get my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. We're getting great feedback so far. We'd love to get some from you.

If you're in the market for a Father's Day gift, it makes for a fine one. And if you have gotten the book, if you've read it and enjoyed it, please do leave us a review on Amazon and Goodreads. It really helps us out. If you listen to me on this show, I'd love for you to have read the book so that I can reference it and not worry about spoiling anything or talking over anyone's head. So please pick up a copy wherever books are sold. We'll be back to talk to you a little later this week.