Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1398: What MLB Looked Like in London

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

In a bonus episode about the London Series, Ben Lindbergh talks to Darius Austin and Russell Eassom, writers and podcasters for the UK baseball site Bat Flips and Nerds, about their experiences at both Yankees-Red Sox games, why they think there was so much scoring, whether that brand of baseball was a good advertisement for […]

When it's crash, what goes nowhere? When there's no sun explodes, all goes black All goes black You and I, swinging on the Swinging on And forgot to come back We're all in the same boat And for the second straight week, I am moved to make a bonus episode because this has been an eventful weekend in baseball. So I'm not joined by Sam or Meg today. I am, in fact, joined by two people who can tell us what the London series was like on the ground because a lot happened this weekend. a perfect game into the sixth inning. We could talk about Baltimore beating Cleveland in back-to-back 13-0 games. That's never been done before, and now it's been done by the least likely team you could think of to do it. We could talk about our old pal Matt Albers recording his first save of

the season. Normally all of that would be banter-worthy, but this weekend was all about the London series. The Yankees swept the Red Sox in the two-game set, 17-13 and 12-8. That's a combined 50 runs, the most ever in two games between these two teams. 10 home runs, more than 59,000 fans in attendance at each contest. And although the tickets were expensive, they got their money's worth because there was a combined nine hours and six minutes of baseball. And I'm talking today to two eyewitnesses and I would say the finest sabermetric minds in the UK. I don't know if that's a fair statement, but that's what I've gathered. One is Darius Austin. He has been on the podcast some time ago, but he is a writer for

Baseball Prospectus on the fantasy side. He writes and edits for Banished to the Pen, and he's a writer and podcaster for Batflips and Nerds, the baseball site of record in the UK. Darius, welcome back. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, it's great to be here, and it's certainly been quite a weekend, which I'm sure we'll get into. Yeah, and we are also joined by Russell Eason, who is a writer for Batflips and Nerds as well. Russell, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Ben. Yeah, it has been a pretty eventful weekend. Yeah, well, let's talk about that. I am curious about how you guys got into baseball and what led you to this weekend. But Darius, you want to tell me what your experience was and where you were for the games? And then after you're done, Russell can do the same.

Yeah, so we were lucky enough, me and the Batflipers and Nerds guys, John McGee, Tom Pringle, Ben Carter, who do the podcast, we were lucky enough to get press accreditation, which was a little bit strange because we were kind of out there with a lot of professional journalists and we were taking pictures with Reggie Jackson and that kind of thing. So in the first game, I was actually up in the press box. I say that in quotes because it's not really a box. It was just kind of the seats with a little bit of extra stuff.

And then the second game I sat with a friend kind of out in just in left centre field. So yeah, pretty good seats really. I think there was a lot of hand wringing when the kind of the images came out of the park. And a lot of people thought it was going to be too far away. But actually I thought that the park looked great and none of the seats felt like they were a long way away so great views from everywhere and a really great atmosphere inside the park. Yeah Russell where were you? So I was with my dad and my sister who I invited down to join me in London for the weekend and I spent the first day in the right field bleachers and then the second day up

behind home plate so it was a different experience for me viewing baseball for the first day in the right field bleachers and then the second day up behind home plate. So it was a different experience for me viewing baseball for the first time with my family. My dad is a pretty long-term baseball fan, but my sister is a fan of sport. But she kind of gets forced to watch sporting games with the family because that's how we socialize. Right. And Russell, the last thing you wrote for Batflips and Nerds was about how the London Olympic Stadium would play and whether it would be a pitcher's park or a hitter's park. And I guess we know the answer, at least in these two games, which I don't know if they'd be representative if you played a whole season there. But what were you thinking heading into this

series about which side this would favor and why? And having seen it in action, have you changed your mind? What do you think was going on with these slugfests and home run derbies here? So my initial thoughts were actually that I thought it might skew towards the pitching. A lot had been talked about the fact that it was a 385-yard-feet fence for center field, but they actually had a 16-foot wall. And using one of Alan Nathan's trajectory profiles that matched that, it actually would look more like

a 395-400 wall with a normal 8-foot fence. So I didn't think there would be anything in that. And I thought the huge swathes of foul territory would cough up a few pop-outs, which wouldn't have happened in other games right and so that would kind of work towards that but what we saw kind of fairly quickly on the first day was the pitchers seemingly couldn't get any break so the first few especially for Pasello and for Tanaka they just left things down the middle of the plate which got taken out of the park

and the few chances that did seem to pop up into the foul territory, most of them went to Michael Chavis of the Red Sox who I think took one out of five or maybe six chances that he had to take these long running foul ball

opportunities so I will admit that my prediction was wrong for how we played over these two games. Small sample. It could be different if we watched a lot more games over an entire season here. Yeah, and I'm sure you probably saw the tweet by Buster Olney where he said that people with the Yankees and the Red Sox

were talking after game one about how ineffective breaking balls were, that nothing spun down, everything was up in the zone he said some believe the aerodynamics of the stadium affected pitches which i don't know how that would be the case because it's not like a windy place where you would expect that to happen or some high altitude or something right is there anything to that or is it just sort of the standard home run derby type baseball we've seen this year coupled with two really good offensive teams and the Yankees who are just a home run hitting machine? Yeah, I think the wind is definitely not a factor in the stadium. So it's the Olympic Stadium, which was designed for the 2012 games.

And it's actually specifically designed not to allow strong winds into it, specifically to do with the javelin and those sort of events. So you don't really get that strong winds, especially in the venue. I think what they were all discussing about was the humidity that was in the stadium. It was the hottest day of the year so far. I can tell you from where we all sat in the bleachers that everybody was sweating and drinking a considerable amount of water. So I can imagine on the artificial turf, it could have been even warmer down there, which could have led to some changes.

But I think it was more everybody was amped for what was going on. And it played a little bit more like an exhibition game than a traditional game of baseball or traditional MLB game of baseball. Yeah. So Darius, you've been to the States, right? You've been to baseball games. Having seen these games from the press box and then from the stands, I'm curious about what the atmosphere was like. What was the crowd like? Who were they rooting for? What was the energy level like compared to the big league games you've been to uh i thought the energy level was incredible really uh the only i game i've been to that i can compare it to was uh i went to the the opening series of giants dodgers a few years ago and then it was it was fairly comparable to

that i would say the main difference was that obviously in those games there was i went to at&t now oracle and so it was obviously heavily Giants weighted. Whereas in these games, there were moments where you got loud, let's go Yankees chance and then the Red Sox fans come back with let's go Red Sox. So that was kind of a little bit surreal to have, you know, obviously two very large contingents of fans, opposing fans getting those chance going, that kind of thing. But, you know, the responses to things, I think a lot of people thought, you know, what's it going to be like? Are people going

to think that a pop-up is going to be a home run? You know, respond strangely to that kind of thing. But it felt like a lot of people in the park were pretty knowledgeable. You know, they were cheering at the point you would expect them to cheer. It didn't feel unusual. It felt like the crowd was kind of knew what was going on. So yeah, I think the crowd was great. They were really into it. Obviously, the first game was like nothing I've certainly ever seen myself. So I don't know how that would have played in the US park. But something I think I would say is a lot of people, I think in the US probably would have left when it was 17-6 to the Yankees.

And the stadium remained fairly full through most of the four hours, 42 minutes, I think, of that game it was. I think a lot of people were there for the long haul. They were going to stay no matter what. So I know some people had to go home and leave. But the stadium was still pretty full at the end of that game, which is kind of incredible when you consider how long it took. Yeah. Russell, have you been to big league games before yes i've been to a few i've been across to uh city field and yankee stadium a few times that works taking me over to new york and uh being an indians fan uh personally i've been over to cleveland a couple of times to

some watch some series out there uh-huh and so i'm sure that you two must have talked to people who have been baseball fans in the UK but haven't actually seen BitClick Baseball in person before do you know from speaking to those people from observing them what that was like what that meant to them to actually have it in the flesh right in front of their eyes as opposed to MLB TV well Darius you can probably speak about Tom here because you were sat next to him yeah so so Tom my podcast partner and this for various reasons ended up being his first major league baseball game uh the Saturday game so yeah completely remarkable for him I think he said at the end of the game he didn't he didn't really want it to end he didn't know what to do with himself afterwards everybody kind of felt a

little bit delirious I think maybe that was a bit of the heat but also just couldn't quite it was a lot to unpack with the 37 hits 30 runs there was so much going on so I think it was just a lot to process at the time I think he was he was maybe struggling with it a little bit because it was a lot to take in but I think we we all agreed that nobody's ever going to forget that game I think elements of it were silly. There were obviously players really struggling with their command out there. I think, as Russell said, there was probably something in the breaking balls. And Alex Cora certainly said that there was a lot of that, you know, just balls being left up in the zone. But no matter what you made of the game, I don't think anybody who saw it is ever going to forget it.

And certainly for many people in that stadium, their first major league game, I think it was quite a remarkable one to witness. Yeah. Well, I'm curious about what both of you think about whether this was the best advertisement for baseball in the sense that, as you're saying, it was not really representative of what a typical baseball game looks like, even in 2019 with the ball flying. This is not what you usually see when you turn on the game and watch baseball. So I think there's a sense that people like home runs, people like lots of run scoring. So there was action in that sense. On the other hand, it was a very long game. Maybe it would have been monotonous or repetitive that there were just so many home runs hit, so many runs scored

under normal circumstances. Although in this case, just because so many of the fans had not seen baseball like this before, maybe the novelty of it kind of made it interesting no matter what the game itself would have seemed like to them. But what do you think? Would you have, if you had sort of drawn up a blueprint for what you wanted a baseball game to look like the first baseball game played on british soil you know for the majors and and to provide the best entertainment and the best advertisement for the fans would it have looked like this do you think darius i guess you can start yeah i i think in certain ways it was it was kind of ideal because there weren't many moments where nothing was happening.

There was a little period, I think, in the middle of the game just after the Yankees went 11 runs up where you just kind of worried that it was going to get a bit farcical, maybe if they'd gone even further up in the game. But then the Red Sox made that comeback and it kind of really turned things around and made the game even crazier. I know there's been a lot of debate about this a lot of people saying this this wasn't real baseball but i think for the

neutral you know the the brand new fan this was a thrilling game and a lot more engaging than a lot of strikeouts i think certainly if you're a fan sitting relatively far from the plate the strikeout is is much less exciting than than people getting basics than people getting home runs so i think it tended more towards what i i thought an ideal game would be i thought a higher scoring game would be the best for newer fans um so i i think the main negative of it being such a ridiculous game is that we are getting people saying oh yeah this this wasn't real baseball it's because it was in this small park or because the conditions were strange but overall i think a lot of fans who come to that park to see their first baseball game will certainly have been intrigued by it and perhaps will be more inclined to follow baseball than they would have been if it had been a 2-0 shout out something like that

yeah russell what did your family think and were you explaining that this is not the norm? So my sister her last season went to see a Dodgers game which ended 2-1 and she very much enjoyed the experience but she was like I'm not quite certain why you're into this game Russell and after the two games that we've watched this weekend she was like so we're coming next year right so it definitely drew her attention like she was definitely like cheering everything that was going on and when i was kind of sometimes explaining this doesn't happen all the time and april my sister was just like i don't care it doesn't happen all the time it's happening right now it's it's hilarious it's fun like on the first day we were sat next to a couple

of very passionate red sox fans who were getting very disappointed with what was going on but as the game switched and they were then going back in the other way of going like oh we could be getting back into this we're getting back into this that that kind of just atmosphere that was generated there I think was great and if it was anybody's first game it's not quite what I would have chosen I think a little lower scoring, but I think it's that intrigue that those games would have got, which hopefully will drive some of the younger generations or some just new people who watched baseball for the first time to watch more or go play baseball in the UK. Because as Rob Manfred explained a couple of times on some of the speeches he's given, that was part of the reason they have come out to Europe was to drive development and uptake of the game.

So hopefully having the game in your backyard will create some new fans, but you guys became fans without having teams come to you. You went to the teams. So I want to hear a little bit about your origin stories following baseball and what it's been like to follow it mainly from afar. Darius, I guess you can start because you've been watching baseball for more than a decade now, and you've also been following a West Coast team. So the time zone difference is probably pretty rough for you. Yeah, there are definitely times when I think, why did I decide to support the Giants? It's certainly difficult. A lot of their games basically start at 3 a.m. for me.

So the best way for me to watch the Giants live is actually often to get up a little bit early and hope that they're still playing, which is, yeah, it's difficult. But I think a lot of us UK fans have kind of learned to take what we can get. So I became a Giants fan basically because of Tim Lincecum. I kind of got invited to join a fantasy league and Lincecum was on my roster in 2008, the first Cy Young year. And so I kind of started watching highlights and clips of him and really fell in love with him.

And that's how I ended up, and not really at the time, thinking, oh, this is going to be really difficult to follow the team live. But a lot of us i think have found coping mechanisms and as the years have gone on it's become a lot easier to watch condensed games to watch things back we've learned the ways to get around it the coverage is so good now that we don't find it quite so difficult as we used to and it's uh i think um we do we are open i think to just watching any teams. The Cubs are very easy because they have a lot of day games.

Sundays are great for us because a lot of games start kind of 6 p.m. The 1 p.m. games on the East Coast are great for us. So we kind of all take what we can get. I think we probably maybe are a bit more diverse in our viewing than a lot of American fans who maybe follow one team because we just like watching baseball. And when baseball is on live in the UK, we tune in. So that's kind of how my experience is.

So yeah, it's definitely difficult to actually watch a lot of live Giants games, but I kind of like watching all teams anyway, so it's not too bad for me. Yeah. Russell, how did you get hooked? So my first memories of watching baseball was with my dad on watching a show called MLB on 5, which is effectively, there's been a few articles about that. There was one in The Athletic, but it was the one show in the UK of terrestrial television that was showing highlights or showing full games, sorry, not highlights. And they would be shown on like a Wednesday and a Saturday night. And my dad would record one of them

and over the rest of the week we would watch the games so I didn't really care much about kind of like the overall picture of what was going on but for like half an hour each day we'd watch a couple more innings of a game and then we kind of like slowly moved on so that was like my introduction when I was quite young but about six or seven years ago when I was a little bit disillusioned with British sports that I kind of took the full plunge into American sports so I was like I need to find a city that had an NFL team an NBA team an MLB team but also I didn't want to support a team that was good because we have a fairly British thing of like, you support the underdog.

You don't want to go out there and just support one of the best teams. So I kind of got a short list together. And after kind of just looking at a few games of different teams, Cleveland was the one that I came out with. I think the fact that they had the 62 year or six year long, like losing streak as a city without having a major trophy, I think finally brought me on to kind of, I'm willing to support this team. So it's been a wild ride as an Indians fan, as a Browns fan and a Cavaliers fan.

And I pretty much destroyed my work life during the 2016 postseason. That finals game ended at about 5 a.m., 5am, 5.20am here in UK time, and I went to work at 7 o'clock. But it's the balance we take. As Darius said, we watch almost any game that's available quite a lot of the time. So I'll probably get a chance to watch two Indians games live a week, but I'll probably watch another couple others, whichever the ones that are showing early that we can watch. you were mentioning that got a lot of you into the game to focus for at least a week or a weekend

on this subculture, this community that has been pretty tight-knit but not very visible to the American market. Is it purely like, well, finally they're paying some attention to us, or is it just purely a positive kind of, this is our time to shine. I would say it's got to be positive highlighting any of the different communities that exist in any sport or any kind of like social aspect like there's going to be so many different ways that people got into a sport. Yeah we're going to be slightly more niche and so there are some good stories that have come out about the MLB UK community and all the different people that watch baseball in the UK there have been a few other less well I don't want to say well

written but kind of more stereotyped pieces that are out there of just like oh nobody knows what this is they won't know exactly what's going on and that most of the people that will go to watch the game are will have watched sport in various forms. It doesn't take a lot to understand what's going on in baseball. Yes, there are the nuances that make the game really interesting to me, but you can understand baseball fairly quickly after you've watched it. And I think having those pieces was a little bit annoying, but it's just great to get any sort of exposure to this world that people don't know exists and it gives the chance for it to grow because you could

exist in the UK and just watch coverage in the States and have no idea if you're not really on Twitter that there are other people who follow it devoutly in the UK so it's a great thing for all of us here. Yeah it's been pretty surreal really I think it's quite odd thing for all of us here. Yeah, it's been pretty surreal, really. I think it's quite odd to have this spotlight on us. I'm sure you had Joey Mellows, obviously, baseball Brit. That's been quite a surreal journey seeing Joey. We know him well and it's been amazing because he's such a lovely guy and it's an amazing trip that he's doing, you know,

visiting all these parks and meeting a lot of fun people along the way um so i i think it's it's just good to to open this out um i think we get a bit frustrated sometimes that people are dismissive of us as a fan community that's saying we don't know anything about it we get a lot i think here in the uk of people saying oh it's just rounders isn't it which um for people who don't know it's it's kind of you know similar in principle to baseball but um not not really at all the same kind of game you kind of bat with one hand and people lob pitches up i guess maybe much more like the original version of baseball in the you know late uh 1800s where the pitcher was not trying to blow the ball past you uh something like that so uh we get a lot of that so i think that that can be frustrating for us um so it's nice to kind of have it highlighted that there are people out here who

follow baseball who understand baseball who are really into teams um so that's been good i think that that people are out here and uh we were fortunate to meet ken rosenthal and he was kind of i think surprised um tom is a padres fan and uh he was kind of, I think, surprised. Tom is a Padres fan and he was kind of surprised that there was like a Padres fan community out here. And there's a community for every team. We went around the park and we found a fan, took a picture with a fan of every team. And it wasn't that difficult to find one.

So that kind of shows you that the people are out there. So yeah, I think it's been really good. And I would say that I'm sure we would have a similar attitude. I think people can be a bit dismissive of, say, yeah, I think it's been really good. And I would say that I'm sure we would have a similar attitude. I think people can be a bit dismissive of, say, football, i.e. soccer fans in the US. And maybe, you know, I think there are some people in this country who think that the Americans don't know anything about soccer. So I think, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, oh, this is our game and other people don't know about it. like oh this is our game and and uh other people don't know about it but um i think this is maybe helping to open things out and help people to see that in the 21st century that it's not really like that anymore people can follow these games and there's lots of resources out there to help people

understand and these communities do exist right and i was going to ask whether there was any resentment of you know johnny come lately kind of bandwagon british fans who you guys have been watching the sport for years. You've been trying to drum up interest. And then all of a sudden, perhaps there are fans who are now just having their eyes open to baseball because they came and played games there. But it seems like a lot of the UK baseball community, it's not like a cloistered sort of insular group where it's just people protecting this nerdy interest they have that most of the country doesn't have and not wanting it to go big or go mainstream. It seems like a lot of it is focused on how do we get more people interested in this and how do we introduce

it to people who haven't heard of it or think they wouldn't like it. And so this must have been a really nice weekend to see people who even if you know here you wish they had gotten interested years ago even if it's just happening now because these games are being played and it's news for a weekend that must be great exposure and you seem like you're a big tent group welcoming people in as opposed to saying where were you all this time uh yeah it's it's beyond just this weekend. MLB have ran a softball tournament for the last five or six weeks.

So it was called the Softball 60 Tournament. They put a big thing, basically got nearly 30 teams put together. They gave everybody kit for the team. So everybody got given one team. Our Banfflets teams, we got given the Kansas City Royals. And so there were loads of people playing this softball tournament.

A lot of them had never really played softball before. They never really played any sort of kind of like baseball either. And it got a lot of people together. And after the people who took part of it, they offered like free tickets for Sunday to go, for people to go and watch. So there was quite a lot of people that went down because of that for the first time so that was great and yeah we are we don't want to scare away fans like i'm not going to go up to a new fan and ask them their thoughts on like era minus and obs plus like it's it's not the discussions to have with somebody who's kind of there for the first time it's the discussion i would love to have with certain people but there is plenty of fans in the uk community who aren't quite the same level

of nerds to baseball that me and darius are there are plenty of people who they love the game they love the american pastime aspect of it they've they're there to kind of like to watch it all they enjoy their hat shows they enjoy the fact that there are mascots of various degrees. They enjoy the things named after animals. There are various different reasons that people love baseball in the UK, and it's not just us nerds. Also, I'm curious what tends to be the obstacle if there is one when you are explaining the sport to people for the first time, or you're trying to communicate why you like it, or maybe it's some statistical concept, maybe it's something in the rules. Is there anything that you find has been difficult to convey that requires a little more explanation when you're

talking to someone who hasn't been exposed to the sport before? I guess Darius, you can take that. Yeah, I don't think it's too difficult to explain the the basic rules of the game i think the thing that that makes maybe makes some people's eyes glaze over a little bit is when that you tell them there are 162 regular season games and then the playoffs which is it's kind of a little bit incomprehensible to people who are used to football rugby um you know that there isn't really a sport in the uk that has that kind of schedule. So I think I certainly know people who say, I'm kind of interested in baseball, but I don't know that I can follow it for that long. Which I think, again, when you've got these couple of games a year,

that's definitely not going to be an obstacle for people going down because I think people are definitely going to still be into that kind of thing. It's more, if you're trying to get them into the game, it's how do you get them invested in that long haul. But i certainly don't think that's a problem for the the one-off uh series a year so yeah i think that would be the main thing i would say where where people are are like oh i'm not sure i can constantly follow this game because i'm just not used to this volume of of schedule right yeah that can be overwhelming even for us, even for me. So I could understand why that would be a bit of a barrier for people who are thinking of taking the plunge.

Is there anything that you saw this weekend or leading up to this weekend that you think could be better the next time around, whether in terms of how the events were marketed or how the games themselves went or just, I know that there was some criticism of the very high ticket prices and how that might keep certain people away from the games. Is there anything from either of your experiences over the past several weeks and this weekend specifically that you'd like to see MLB do a little bit differently next time around? I don't know what the ticket reselling market is like in the States, but it can be a bit of an issue here at the UK in quite a lot of events, be it sports or music. So quite a lot of people didn't get tickets because either they chose that it was too expensive or there was a very big rush

to get the tickets when they first came out and a few thousand instantaneously appeared on ticket reselling places for like three four five times the price which they were normally so maybe something i would love to see mlb do is to kind of like stop that i don't i don't know if there's the same no resale policy in the states as there is in the UK for quite a lot of things. But it'd be great if they could kind of stop that from occurring. Otherwise, they've just got to keep up with some of the things, one of the good things they did do. I don't know if you saw what the Yankees did, but they brought across Mariano Rivera, Nick Swisher, Reggie Jackson,

A-Rod came across, and they went and ran a skill session with one of the local teams in London. And they had all of their youth teams out there, which to me was great. And that's the sort of thing that if they do and they do it well, will kind of lead to a growth and development of the fans and the sport in the UK. As much as it's great to kind of have the games that you can come down to that skills event was i think probably the best thing one of the best things that happened this weekend yeah darius you went to that workout right uh we went to the uh the workout in the the park on friday yeah and um that was a nice thing for i think a lot of the

more hardcore fans a lot of people who were involved with the softball and that got invites to that. So that was a lot of fun to see the people down there. But John and Tom also went to the Thursday night stuff. So yeah, there was a lot of engagement going on. MLB have been really great with that kind of thing. There was the play ball park just outside the main stadium. They had a lot of kids from local schools down teaching them skills, you know, the basics of the game. Aaron Boone was talking about how he was kind of impressed that a lot of people actually seemed to know more than he was expecting when he was interacting with them. So I think that kind of thing has been great. I had a couple of people saying it would be nice to have like more kids out on the field during batting practice, that kind of

thing. But that's kind of minor stuff, really. so i think they've done a really great job with the engagement there the players were kind of saying that the main difficulty really for them was you know just getting getting used to the time difference going forward the five hours um so not a lot you can do to that uh jackie bradley earlier was was kind of saying you know that was his main advice for the cubs and cardinals just kind of try and get used to to getting your sleep cycle synced up a bit earlier so yeah I think for for the first go it was it was very smoothly run there were no big hitches that we noticed during the games I don't think and and everything seemed like it went off pretty smoothly I'm sure this is something you've been looking forward to for some time and is there any sense of of let down you know the come down after the

euphoric london series now or are you energized and feeling like we can build on this we can use this as a springboard to bring greater attention to the game i think uh we're pretty energized right now um maybe if you ask that in a couple of days we'd uh we'd have a bit of a come down just because it's it's been such an incredible weekend but uh you know as we went out of the park they were already advertising the cubs cardinal series for next year uh there were some giveaways during the games um a few fans won tickets for the the series already so they're already trying to build get people interested in next season um we've been looking forward to this for a long time and we'll carry on trying to get people

interested and already be looking ahead to next year because it's been an incredible weekend. So, yeah, I think nobody really knew what to do with themselves after Saturday's game because it was such a remarkable game. But I think right now we're all just kind of a little bit euphoric that this has happened and it's been a great success. And I think something that Nick Miller put in the Guardian newspaper this morning was that the baseball looked a lot more at home in the London Stadium than football ever has. And it really did look the part in there.

It was a terrific setting and we were all really impressed by how well they'd done it. So I think we're all just delighted that it's been such a success and hopefully they can just build on it for next year. So what plans, if any, does the community have to kind of keep the momentum going? For people who don't know, what is the typical network like? I know there are a lot of meetups

and people will gather to watch even when you don't have the Yankees and the Red Sox there. And obviously, Batflips and Nerds is a big part of the community and Twitter. So how have you kind of stayed connected with everyone who is part of this community? And what are the plans to extend it even beyond that core group? So there's a Twitter account, MLB UK Community, that does a lot of great work. They do meetups.

I think they had five different ones this weekend around the games. London, I think Worcester, Glasgow, all over the country. So really great stuff there. So a lot of stuff goes through that. We'll obviously carry on podcasting, writing on the site. A lot of UK fans kind of find their way to Black Lips and Nerds. People like Russell and many others have done a lot of great content for us so we'll keep putting that out and uh yeah i think mlb have been really good at driving the engagement lately with things as roswell mentioned the softball 60 things like that i think they're planning to do that again next season um so i think that that kind of thing is is really key in getting people interested in the game because i think there were a lot of people who hadn't

really ever played the game before and came down to that and really enjoyed it and ended up coming along to the game as well this weekend so yeah I think we've got lots of plans and hopefully a lot of people are going to come and find us through this and maybe start following just and we and baseball in general more regularly because the GB team were heavily involved this weekend Liam Carroll the coach of GB Baseball, was catching the ceremonial first pitch today with one of his pitchers throwing it to him. So it's kind of really cool to see that kind of thing involved

and hopefully they get a bit more support out of that kind of thing as well. And maybe with the Olympics coming up, they'll get a bit more funding. So I think, yeah, we're just kind of hoping that this is the stepping stone for a lot more baseball in the UK and a lot of new fans getting involved in the game is it easy for one to play baseball if one wants to i mean what's the presence of actual baseball teams baseball instruction coaching equipment because that is always a key to getting people interested in following the game is of course getting them interested in playing it themselves and familiar with the fundamentals in that way so there are 30 teams in the british baseball league which is one of i think four leagues that runs across the uk so that that

is split into kind of a tiered uh so there is kind of like a majors there's like triple a's double a's and they a lot of those teams all have junior teams, which people can come through. They also have beginner sessions for like adults or anyone the age to come down on multiple nights during the week. So they can come and actually learn how to play baseball. There's also a reasonable softball community within various places around the UK in London. like softball community within various places around the UK in London quite a lot of charities and hotels and even like the civil service have their own softball leagues so there are there is quite a bit of play that goes on to that so I think it's something that people can get involved it's more of maybe they didn't know that it was there before because it wasn't in brought to their

attention but if they were there this weekend and they did a bit of googling or doing a bit of searching you should be able to find quite a lot of things that are actually around maybe not so much your weight areas no i i live in deepest darkest north wales so it's a little bit tricky for me but um over kind of yeah in the in the northwest Liverpool Manchester there's lots of teams around there and certainly if you're in in the London area there are an absolute ton of teams in that so there's definitely opportunities out there it can be a little bit tricky but I'm sure there will be people out there who are inspired to go along and join things and yeah the league is

perhaps a little bit more thriving there are a few kind of players who have been affiliated with major league clubs before who have come over to GB and played for the various leagues. So it's been really good. And the reception, I think, as well for the European players. You know, technically, Didi Gregorius was obviously born in Amsterdam and also Zander Bogarts. There were Dutch journalists there today. So I think the European connection felt very strong. And that kind of thing, I think, will be built upon because, yeah,

they were definitely getting a ton of support in the stadium today. Did you get the sense, I don't know exactly how you would gauge this, but was the series well attended by American fans who were living abroad? Because one of the things that sort of surprised me in reading about the UK baseball community over the past week is that there doesn't seem to be a very sizable expat presence. You know, it's like there's room for more involvement by Americans who are living in the country. Obviously, there are quite a lot of them. So I wonder whether you could tell whether this was an all UK crowd or whether there were many Americans who were kind of taking the chance to see the game that they used to watch when they were in the US.

Yeah, so in the areas where I was sat, it was kind of like a good mixture of, you had American people who were there, you had British people there, you definitely had, there was a, on the first day that I was there on the Saturday, there was a Dutch contingent in front of us that had the Dutch flag with Go Didi on it. So there was definitely a European contingent. It's always quite hard to tell whether someone has come across from the States or whether they are an expat who's living here just by listening to them talk. I think you can generally tell more when they're exiting the stadium how familiar they are with the London transport system.

So I think there was actually quite a number of individuals who had come across for the games I spoke to a couple who said that they'd always had Ludden on their list and this was the good excuse for them to kind of come out for a couple of weeks and kind of do this in the middle so I think there was a number of Boston and New York Yankee fans who had come over and a number of Boston and New York Yankee fans who had come over. And of some of the expats friends that I know, they all went to the games. So even if they weren't like Yankees fans or Red Sox fans, they went to the games just to kind of catch up on what they'd missed out on. So I think there was definitely some of those there. I would have probably put it at about 60 to 40 of kind of

Europeans to Americans. So I think there was a strong contingent of both. Yeah, I just hope that there weren't a lot of potential new fans who were priced out of the event because of the high ticket charges. And obviously, when you do an event like this, your hope is that you extend the sports and you introduce new people to it. So if it's a lot of people coming over from the u.s to see something that they could see any day that's uh nice that they could take that trip i guess but i hope that other people who might have gone for the first time and really gotten hooked on the sport were not excluded as a result yeah i think the ticket prices did put some people off certainly i know people in the uk community who who kind of hope to get tickets who

maybe missed out on the the lower price brackets and kind of balked at the the higher ones so that was a bit unfortunate and I certainly did notice today I didn't notice so much on the Saturday game but on Sunday I think there were a few spots kind of behind home plate that that seemed to be empty seats that I assume were very expensive tickets that maybe weren't taken up. So I do think that's an area that maybe they could adjust a little bit. And I think the pricing scale was a little bit strange given how the stadium was set up. I think it's pretty steeply went up and I don't think that was necessarily wanted based on the quality of a lot of the seats so that's definitely something I think they could look at for next season and I know there were I think a fairly

considerable number I think maybe 5,000 tickets or so made available for like Red Sox season ticket holders who have obviously lost a home game as a result of this so I understand why they did it but I think they were made available for them rather than the UK fans and I don't know whether they were all taken up by Americans or whether they again went on the secondary market. Definitely something to look at. And I think that was something Manfred talked about earlier today, that it was maybe a bit of a kind of research opportunity for them to see how this had gone and maybe look at things that they could do better in the future in this kind of situation. Because I guess they're treading unknown territory in a regard. So before I let you go, I did want to answer a listener email here that I thought you might have an interesting perspective on.

So this is from Gavin, one of our Patreon supporters. He says, just listening to episode 1395 and Dr. Wills' interview about her work with baseballs, and that got me thinking about how the game would be affected if MLB just went all in on the different ball constructions and decided to intentionally produce the balls differently each season kind of like the new ball for each

FIFA World Cup. Dr. Wells identified 15 or 16 variables in a ball. If MLB manipulated some of those elements to make a more pitcher-friendly ball, hitter-friendly ball, and neutral ball, then debuted it at spring training. Do you think this would make baseball more or less fun? Bonus round, what if they made and played

a pitcher ball, hitter ball, neutral ball, and then a wildcard ball on a four-year rotation? Would people be looking forward to 2022 because it will be a pitcher's ball again? Or what about that 2025 hitter's ball World Series? It was way better than the Neutral Ball Series of 2024. So you probably are more familiar with the different models of World Cup ball than I am, and you've just seen what seems like an extreme hitters ball this weekend. Is the World

Cup models, those are mostly cosmetic differences, right? I mean, I know that occasionally they might play a little bit differently and there'll be some controversy about that, but basically it's what it looks like more so than how it behaves. That's generally the case. I think there was one probably like 10 years ago now where it was the first time that it was a seamless ball. So it was how they put it together was kind of like, it was like a fuse together instead was kind of like it was like a fuse together

instead of kind of like being seamed and that ball moved quite differently in the air than quite a few had done before but teams were given time to kind of like practice and get used to it and I think they got a load of the balls like in their warm-ups before the tournament so they kind of got used to it but there was still a few outlandish goals that were scored because that ball moved not the way people were anticipating it to. So I'm uncertain how I would want this to go, because I feel that if you change it every single year, and if you know that it's going to be a dead ball, would you promote different rookies up? ball would you promote different rookies up because you know like well this one's the contact hitter so this year i want the contract hitter and next year i want the power hitter if we know it's going to be the power ball the year afterwards so i i'm wondering how like the the players would deal with kind of like maybe being moved up and down from majors to minors because it's not the

right ball for them. I would probably find it far more interesting if you told them that there are these four types of balls and they are four unique and slightly different balls. And maybe each game there is going to be two sets of balls in play and you don't know which ones the two are. So you've just got to kind of like get used to it as the kind of the game goes on it becomes something else for the pitchers and the catchers and the hitters to work out to be like do we have the dead ball today do we have the live ball i would love to think how quickly a team could work out whether it's the the live ball or the dead ball or the power ball

right yeah this would be pretty disruptive i I think. Baseball is always changing, and the run environment one year is usually slightly different from the adjacent years. And it's nice, I think, that there are different periods of baseball. There's high-scoring era, there's the deadball era. It's kind of cool that baseball can be played in these different circumstances. But if you had it set up on a yearly rotation or if it was just sort of random from year to year, game to game, I don't know. I guess it would favor certain skill sets more.

It would favor very adaptable players who could, say, change their swing depending on whether you want to get the ball in the air or whether you just want to slap it somewhere because it's not going to carry enough. that would be difficult to plan for maybe it just lower the caliber of play or the the quality of player because you'd probably discourage some people from going into this sport where they can't count on the conditions being relatively consistent from year to year i don't know that that i like. I like when it shifts from time to time, but sort of institutionalizing the shift, I think, might be a bit much for me, where you

can't count on the conditions being the same from year to year. And it's almost like maybe it's not even different enough at times, because the juiced ball, the ball that we're using right now, it carries farther, but that's just kind of on contact. It goes farther when you hit it, but it's not like you throw different types of pitches because it's a different type of ball. It's almost not different enough where it's really just sometimes you get lots of homers and high scoring, but you're not really changing your style. I guess you're more incentivized to hit flyers and high scoring, but you're not really changing your style. I guess you're more incentivized to hit fly balls, for instance. But it's not like we've gone from slapping the ball around like Ichiro and it's Wee Willie Keeler back again to now everyone trying to get the ball in the air.

It's almost like you couldn't tell which ball is being used from one game to the next. I mean, maybe if it was like game one between the Yankees and Red Sox where the ball is flying, you might intuit that this is not the dead ball era, but you can't tell from one game necessarily which ball is being used at any one time because you've got high homer games and low scoring errors and vice versa. I don't know, Darius, do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I think there's, I don't know darius do you have any thoughts on this yeah i think uh there's i don't know an interesting psychological question there maybe that do people want to know what the the run environment is going to be like in advance um i think there's maybe something a little bit exciting about discovering that as the season goes on as opposed to being told yeah and i also think you maybe run

the risk of devaluing some of the the accomplishments maybe or i think it would be a little bit tough to calibrate certainly for a long time until we had enough data if we were in a more dead ball year and you know the the leader was batting 290 or something or uh yeah we were in a lively ball era and somebody was on pace for for 75 home runs and everybody like oh well they told us the ball was going to be due so nobody cares anymore yeah i think you you might run the risk that there'd be something there about people's mentality would shift and perhaps in a practical sense it doesn't make any difference but i do think the psychological impact of telling people in advance would perhaps have a negative impact on how people perceive baseball.

And for a sport with so much history and stocking statistics, I think that that might kind of undermine a lot of that. Yeah, you'd almost have to have separate leaderboards, separate records for the dead ball years and the juiced ball years. It would be kind of complicated. I don't think I would want this system. It would be kind of complicated. I don't think I would want this system. I have sort of enjoyed unraveling the puzzle of what's going on with the baseball in the last few years, and maybe we've gone a bit too far toward home runs at this point. I think would probably make it difficult for the sport to find fans when you have to explain, well, you see, this is a dead ball year, and this year they play the sport this way, and next year, if you're still watching, it's a juiced ball year, and it will look completely different. That seems like it would be sort of a tough sell to people. So I'm going to vote no on this idea, I think.

But I do like that baseball changes from time to time. So I appreciate the two of you staying up although I guess this is not late for you since you're used to watching baseball games at all hours but you've had a very eventful weekend I'm glad to get your thoughts and the eyewitness testimony so

can you each tell us a little bit about where to find you and what kind of work you tend to do and I guess for any uk fans who are listening who are maybe not plugged into the community how they can become part of it and for american fans who maybe have not read bat flips and nerds or other uk coverage what might they be missing that they should check out whether websites or podcasts so i I guess, Russell, you can go first. Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter at r-e-sum. So that's where I'll do that.

And most of the writing that I do goes up on the Bad Flips and Nerds site, which is just badflipsandnerds.com. And the Twitter for that is at badflips underscore nerds. If you're talking rather wider community stuff, as Darius mentioned, there's at MLb uk community on twitter that's where a lot of the events are being organized currently so that's a great place to go

if you want to try and get involved to see and watch games with other fans within the uk and with regards to other podcasts there is one called absolute bunts which is two gents who know little or not much about baseball trying to learn it and so that's what the podcast is about and there are a few others but I'll let Darius mention those Yeah so you can find me on Twitter at DariusA64, Russell already

gave the details for Batflips and Nerds and we've had a ton of content up this weekend on our Twitter feed, on Instagram, we've done Periscopes content up this weekend on our twitter feed on instagram we've done periscopes i did a live blog on saturday night which probably if you read it back now looks like a bit of a strange fever dream or something but i think it would probably be interesting for for anybody who didn't actually watch the game to to go back and read so check all of that out and we have with tons of content up on on our site people like russell doing the saving metric kind of stuff

but also a lot of uk fans learning about the game for the first time, their experiences, all that kind of thing. I would second the recommendation for Absolute Bunce, which is a truly hilarious journey. You've really never experienced anything like it, two guys trying to learn about baseball for the first time. They're a great pair of guys, John and Henry, so I definitely recommend that.

And I know a lot of Americans who've already listened to that and really enjoyed it. And then you can also find me over at Baseball Prospectus doing fantasy stuff and over at Banish to the Pen, where hopefully we are going to be updating the Sabre Metrics starter cards. So if you're a new fan who kind of wants to get into more of the stats, we released a series of kind of cards introducing a lot of the advanced metrics in baseball a couple of years back and we're just in

the process of updating those as well so that should be coming out soon all right well thanks i enjoy both of your work and darius i'm glad you were repping the effectively wild and bench to the pen t-shirts at the one that series appreciated that also. So everyone go check out Russell and Darius and Batflips and Nerds and the rest of the UK community. And hopefully it will only grow by this time next year when teams return to play there again.

So good talking to you guys. Thank you and good luck recovering from all the events of the weekend. No, cheers, Ben. Thanks. Thank you, Ben. It's been a lot of fun. All right, that will do it

for this bonus episode. Thank you for listening. You know, one lot of fun. All right, that will do it for this bonus episode. Thank you for listening. You know, one thing we didn't discuss was that this past weekend was a veritable font of unfun facts. As Ryan Thomas notified us on Twitter, MLB's communications department was tweeting messages such as this one in the bottom of the first inning of game one on Saturday. Quote, Boston Red Sox 23-year-old infielder Michael Chavis becomes the youngest major leaguer to hit a regular season home run in Europe with his three-run

homer in the bottom of the first inning of the 2019 Mitel and MLB Present London series. So that was the second home run ever hit in a regular season game in Europe. But yes, he was also the youngest major leaguer to hit one at that point. Congratulations, Michael Chavis. There were a whole lot of firsts in a regular season game in Europe this weekend. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It is the story of the current revolution in player development in baseball.

You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild signing up to pledge some small monthly amount help keep the podcast going and get yourself some perks the following five listeners have already pledged their support Steve Horniak, David Bosniak, Amy Lee, Ken Samuels, and David Cohen thanks to all of you you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and sam and meg coming via email at podcast of panographs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you're already a supporter dylan higgins had this episode off so you can blame any editing

errors on me we will be back with one more episode before the holiday and then one more episode after the holiday this week so if you're traveling to see family if you're lazing around the backyard you will have ample podcast content to consume so we will be back a little later this week Outro Music