Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1416: Live at Saber Seminar (for the Third Time)

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

In the third episode of Effectively Wild recorded live at Saber Seminar in Boston, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk to Boston Globe sportswriter Alex Speier, author of the new book Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion From the Ground Up, about Boston’s championship core, the twists and turns of player development, why […]

Our love's gonna keep on glowing and growing, it's all we gotta do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep on glowing, keep on glowing, keep on glowing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep on glowing, keep Keep on going Keep on going Keep on going Well, hello everyone. Thanks for sticking around to the end of the day. And welcome to what will be episode 1416 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, normally made possible by our Patreon supporters and today also made possible by Saber Seminar in Boston, where we are. I know you know where we are, but I'm just telling the people listening in the future. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and with me is Meg Rowley from Fangraphs, who is sort of sick, but less sick than she was a week ago. Hi Meg. Hi, I got the real suit of Venn. I think I bought a house and maybe took out new student loans in order to acquire it, but we're going to do the best we can today. Yeah, usually there's a continent between us when we record these, but once a year or so we emerge from our respective recording caves and we actually

get to talk in person, which is strange but also also nice. Except that if you cough, you can't mute yourself in a live setting. Just dive off the stage dramatically. There's nowhere to hide. So as those of you in the room with us have no doubt noticed, there is a third person on the stage with us, and his face is familiar because he has been our capable emcee this weekend. And we wanted to give him a chance to take the stage himself. So this is Alex Spear from the Boston Globe. Hello, Alex.

Hello, and thank you. And I feel badly that normally a continent divides you. I should have had the two of you sitting next to each other, and yet here I am intruding. We're still separated. So Alex has been too self-effacing to turn Saber Seminar into a promotional opportunity for the most part, so we will do that for him. Alex has a book coming out this week, this Tuesday, August 13th, that will be of interest to many of you. I am holding it up right now. I have it in my hands. You can have it in your hands very shortly. It's called Homegrown, How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up, and you have some nerve coming on this podcast

to talk about a book about player development because I kind of hoped that I had the year to myself. You have some nerve publishing a book about player development in the year that mine was coming out, but here we are. We didn't coordinate our publishing schedules. I guess you couldn't really choose because you kind of had a championship to tie this into. But hopefully the bookshelves

are... It would have been a different book if we waited another year for mine. Yeah, that's true. But I'm sure the bookshelves will be big enough for both of us. So it probably seems like a long time since Theratux won the World Series these days, but it hasn't actually been that long. And I'm curious how this book came to be because it's a pretty hefty book and it's richly reported. And every now and then you'll see kind of like the quickie books that come out to capitalize on a World Series championship. And that is not what this is. This seems like something you've been working on for a while. And I inferred from the acknowledgements at the end that this project had been germinating for a while and maybe the World Series was just your opportunity that you

seized. Yeah I think it kind of hit the fast forward button on an idea that started in 2015 the Red Sox signed Yuan Mankata you all remember him and probably know him very well to the largest signing bonus ever given to a player with no an international amateur with no professional experience so 63 million bucks they spent on this guy. And I got to report on that both in spring training and then going to see him when he was making his debut in Greenville for the Greenville Drive. But the interesting thing was he wasn't necessarily going to be the best player on that team because that was an unbelievable affiliate. And I was, you know, at the time I was reporting on the minor league system of the Red Sox on a daily basis.

And Mankata was joining in late May a group that already included Rafael Devers and Michael Kopech and Michael Chavis and Mauricio Dubon, who was kind of emerging as a prospect, and Javier Guerra, who was kind of breaking into top 100 territory. And later in the year, he was joined by Andrew Benintendi and by Anderson Espinoza. So it was as good a prospect group as I had ever seen in a single Red Sox affiliate. I was around them a couple of times and thought, you know, it'd be kind of interesting to see what happened if they stayed, you know, if you mapped out where all of them went over the next five years, what that might look like and what that might tell you about prospect development and overlaid on top of that the red socks front office kind of seized and uh and went through some pretty drastic changes in their competitive fortunes went up and down and they had to figure out different ways of kind of supplementing this core that they had that they had emerging that ended up

intersecting in a very interesting way last year with a different core that they had formed and so it's a portentous time to think about that group and the one that preceded it so then you can't be mad because he was thinking about it yeah you beat me to it i guess but it was so interesting when your book came out because i would i would highly recommend like the mvp machine if you guys don't know about it, it's fucking unbelievable. And it's probably the most, I mean, I truly think that it's the most significant baseball book that I've read since Moneyball. It is so insightful in terms of how, how the landscape has suddenly changed. It brings together a lot of things that have been kind of, that have been disparate and that, you know, we've, we've approached them from an atomized perspective.

And all of a sudden you have a book that brings together what it's meant that you have these different tools, whether it's statistical or whether it's, you know, or whether it's technological, this great technological terror that we're all building. Right. And it synthesizes something that's happened largely since the beginning of that project. Because, again, like I was thinking about this starting in 2015, and I had been tracing the development of Xander Bogarts and Jackie Bradley Jr. dating to 2012, mostly. And the experience that they had coming up in player development was very, very different than what's happening now. And so like mine kind of came out after yours, but it kind of points to a more traditional player development, successful player development process. Right. Yeah. There are parts of the book where someone

will be struggling at high A or something, and it'll be like, he's getting down on himself and thinking that he doesn't belong at the level. And coaches will be saying, well, you're hitting the ball hard and that sort of thing. And I just kept thinking, well, show him the track man data, but then remembering, oh, there was no trackman data because this was 2012 or something. So how do you think that would have changed the trajectory of some of the core Red Sox players that you mention in the book, if at all? It's a little bit hard to say that they would have come up to the majors faster

because they basically all ended up bypassing double, like all bypassing triple a and many of them barely experiencing double a we have some indication of how it could change trajectories a little bit later where some of the inefficiencies that existed in player development might have been addressed for instance jalen beaks is someone who's not really you know not really heavily in the consciousness of people when they think about the 2018 Red Sox championship, but Jalen Beeks was someone who was drafted in 2014. So right as the Red Sox were starting to use TrackMan on their own

before it's being introduced at the big league level, but as it's starting to make its way through, and he overhauled literally every pitch that he threw in some way or other, whether it was the grip, whether it was the actual like shape of the breaking ball, whatever. He overhauled everything he threw. So all of a sudden, the Red Sox, who sucked at developing pitchers for a number of years, got a guy up to the big leagues as a kind of, you know, maybe he's a sixth starter, maybe he's a fifth starter, maybe he's a fourth starter, someone who had value who

allowed them to make a trade for Nate Evaldi. So there might have been a more balanced player development for the Red Sox between, I think that it affected pitching, you know, it was, you know, the technological advances probably affected pitching more drastically and more immediately than they affected hitting. The position playing core, some of those guys might have worked through some of their struggles a little bit quicker, but I think that a lot of the data, you know, for like Rafael Devers, they were able to give him track man data if he wanted to if they wanted to but it was still kind of traditional player development concepts that they were talking about with with him about like this is where you do damage on pitches right yeah the data probably would have said mookie bets was good so it's kind of like that's just against

but it's not because in 2012 when he was in lowell he didn't hit a damn home run and in fact didn't hit a fly ball to the warning track in lowell so you know like where does where do we go with that like would he have been even more would it have been even harder for a scout to have stuck out his neck for mookie bets in 2011 and to say this guy has a chance to be really good when the batted ball data would have indicated you know a guy who was able to spray, you know, to spray pitches around the field with like solid line drives. I don't know what his exit velo would have looked like when he was five foot nine and 150 pounds. So you obviously are contrasting two regimes that have different approaches and different

philosophies around prospects, but I think they both handle things in ways that are savvy and things that they want back. Like everybody else does. At what point in your story did you realize what a nice contrast having Frosty come in would provide for your narrative? There could not be more different applications between the approaches of different offices. And I'm curious how that worked out for you. Well, before I was thinking about it, its implications for the book, because, you know, I wasn't thinking of this book per se up until, you know, up until about 10 months ago. But it became startlingly, jarringly apparent, like the day that the press release was issued,

that the Red Sox were taking a very different path than the one that they had taken. There was a lot of concern, frankly, as there should be when there's turnover in an organization about what the implications were going to be for who was going to be fired and who was going to be kept around. There was significant continuity in a number of the departments, including player development. So some of the precepts were the same.

But the first, we kind of all thought, okay, there's a chance that a lot of these really good prospects are going to start to get traded. And then lo and behold, in the winter, you know, the winter arrives and Dave Dombrowski makes a four for one deal for a closer, which is a deal that, you know, that probably doesn't get done by Ben Charrington before that. The deal was headlined by Manuel Margot and Javier Guerra and both of those guys. That was considering what was being given up and the fact that they were redundant in the system.

Those parts didn't end up hurting the Red Sox. And in fact, Guerra is now trying to pitch in the Padres system. The part that hurt was the Dombrowski way when he included Logan Allen on the back end of that deal. And there had been a lot of discussion. You know, that was where there was kind of some discomfort among some of the people in his new organization like I think we might have been able to keep Logan Allen around when we were headlining the package with two really good players but Dombrowski is a deal maker and you know he'll round up when it comes to the price on

on trades and I don't think that he has any regrets about that I don't think a lot of people around the Red Sox have that many regrets although they would like to have Logan Allen in their organization now. Yeah, having an actual closer back and forth. Yeah, I think the Red Sox were third in homegrown war last year in the majors, but second in free agent war, so they kind

of did everything well. You could have called it free agent, and it could have just been about signing J.D. Martinez or something. But they wouldn't have been able to sign all of those guys but for the cheapness of the homegrown component right yeah well so you start out the the first chapter it's it's kind of it's a riveting narrative story i think it worked out well for you the 2011 draft which came down to the final few seconds and i don't know whether it's controlled chaos or just chaos because how close did the red sox come to not getting bets to not getting bets, to not

getting some of these guys? Because it really went down to the last few seconds before the deadline, the signing deadline in August. And I understand that there's a brinksmanship element and people are motivated to make deals at the end, but they left it so close and they're in the bowels of Fenway with weak cell phone reception. It's like you could very easily blow one of these signings. They lost contact with the agent for Henry Owens during the last seconds, right before the midnight deadline. And so they just kind of filed a number and hoped that the agreement had in fact gone through, figuring that they could unspool it if necessary.

It was like it's 1130 and they're like, maybe we should talk to these guys. Like it was making me nervous. just to read it it was what a weird thing that they you know that major league baseball had this kind of you know it was there was such a push to maximize the amount of money that especially high school kids could get and rightly so on their part they should push mlb teams because the mlb teams are going to stiff them for a number of years after they get up to the big leagues but you know there there had just been kind of this funneling over the last few years of the draft before the CBA changes of 2012 where, like, more and more and more negotiations

started going down to the August 15th deadline until finally that last year everyone had them going down to midnight, including the Red Sox, who had four first-round draft picks that they had to address, as well as this kind of interesting fifth-rounder named Mookie Betts. Well, someone who just had to be in 28 training line pieces in one day. It's nice to know that for vaccination versus in-trailing and extra-trailing, a lot of people have to pay the price for vaccination.

Well, I mean, it's an interesting indicator of, like, you know, the off-season has no deadline. And so it's suddenly become this like terrible paint drying type of phenomenon. So, you know, stick deadlines into anything where you want people to actually get something done, I guess. So you talk a lot about phase one and phase two and phase three in the book, the Red Sox understanding of their own point in the competitive cycle. The Charringtonian phases, if you will. So do all teams plan their seasons like Marvel movies? Do they all have phases? I don't know that there are, you know, Ben Charrington is someone who always had very, you know,

who still always has a very meticulous long range outlookrange outlook on things, and who is pretty careful about thinking about what the future is going to look like X years down the road. And there are benefits to that because you always keep in mind what's ahead. There are also disadvantages when you assume that there's an assumption of some predictability and sometimes rigidity of the future that can come back and bite you. So I don't know that everyone, I think that, you know, honestly, in my experience of covering baseball, I think that Ben Charrington has a unique personality in terms of how measured he is in examining the short term. Like he didn't get carried away when they won everything in 2013 and when it looked like they were about to have this like coming great era because Xander Bogarts and Jackie Bradley Jr. were suddenly going to become full season contributors

he was kind of like we'll see how it goes you know he's uh he's he's distinct he's distinct in that way so I don't know that everyone has it quite layered out that way. But you do see teams that excel in terms of, you know, in terms of charting the short term and long term courses. I think that the Dodgers have been, you know, the Dodgers are extraordinary in terms of how far out they've mapped the ability to maintain depth. Right. And you often see when a team wins the World Series that there are a lot of holdovers from a previous regime that didn't make it. And that's particularly true, I think, in Boston's case, where you can point to so many players who were from the Charrington era. And he talks about this in the book, and you have him even joking, you know, before he either was pushed out or left of his own accord, about how much the

next GM is going to enjoy all these players that he was trying to hoard. So how does he feel about that from talking to him? I mean, does he feel bitter at all about having assembled this roster and then not having been there to enjoy it? No, I don't think that there's—no, that's not really how he rolls. I think that there was a sense—he didn't want to leave Boston when he did. He felt like he had to. He felt like he wasn't really being given a choice. But I think that he took considerable pride in the fact that he had remained true to a lot of the principles of organization building that he had had,

even when he was well aware that in Boston, the consequences of not winning immediately could be his job. He, you know, he looked beyond that. In talking to John Henry during the year in which he ultimately was fired, he said, look, I'm interested in what's best for the organization. So if you at any point in this decide that that's not having me in it, that's fine.

We can discuss that candidly and what that might look like for you. And he wanted to be part of helping the Red Sox become good again beyond that really crappy, dark time of 2014-2015 that forced a lot of changes. I would invite Boston sports fans to be more comfortable with sadness. Seattle sports fans are uncomfortable. So I want to talk a little bit about the state of the farm now.

It's probably still a very close observer of the Red Sox. By our... It's disputable. By our case, the paragraphs, we have them as the least valuable for our system in baseball. And so, if the director was marked by his own cases, I'm curious what you think is the next phase in player

development and cultivation of them because they have some new groove. Some stuff might get weird this winter. I think that it's, you know, the Red Sox are at a really interesting point of, you know, they have, I just did a story on this a couple of days ago on the Boston Globe. In 2022, they have about $110 million in salary commitments already. And that's to like five, six roster spots. So that doesn't even

account for, you know, if they were to extend Mookie Betts, which is hard to do when you already have that number of commitments. They have, they do have, you know, they feel strongly that they have some players who are going to be underrated, mostly because they're kind of on the younger end of the spectrum. They have a lot of promising guys, as a lot of organizations do, who are in the short season levels, as well as, you know, A ball down. They have some guys with really high ceilings, but those guys are going to take a couple of years to mature.

The way in which they're able to supply depth over the next couple of years is not, it's not going to be that necessarily that steady a pipeline as it has been, even though they have a guy here, a guy there and triple A, double A. So this coming winter, they have some interesting long-term financial decisions to make that kind of play into the question of how their depth is structured in terms of prospects who are available in the near term to help. And so this is kind of where

they're going to have to figure out a different path than the one that they've been on. Yeah. Well, the guys you write about in the book, they're holding up their end of the bargain this year. So I mentioned that they were third in baseball in homegrown war last year. They're also third this year. And if you look at the best Red Sox players this year, it's Bogarts, Betts, Devers, Vasquez, Ben Attendee's tied with Martinez. So it's all the homegrown guys. It's just everything else is not really delivering the way it did last year. Yeah. Well, two of the elements that are critical to figuring out like, you know, so you get this homegrown core. That's not enough, right? That's not enough to make a great team. You need to supplement the homegrown core in the right way. And then you need to create the right culture surrounding it. So both of those things are kind of slippery. And,

you know, it's harder to get a reliably it's it's hard to get a a really good quality supplementation of that homegrown core because you're often dealing from a pool of older players whose performance is going to be somewhat less predictable and so we're seeing david price deal with some you know vicissitudes over the course of the season same deal with chris sale and same deal with a lot of the high price pitchers who they've, you know, again, this is a $90 million rotation that's probably performing like, I don't know, you know, spitballing at maybe a third of that,

maybe more than that, but I mean, maybe half. So that's slippery. And then I also think that the cultural side of things is really, really difficult. And that's why like one of the things I wanted to, you know, that was really interesting to me is that we think of player development as individual, right?

Like we think of a guy, oh, shit, he's so talented. Like he's got such great tools. And we measure all of that. But we fail to take account for what happens when you put people into group dynamics in like the kind of magic that might exist. Dan is, hi, Dan. I see you waving. Oh, their number countdown. Okay.

50 more minutes. Yeah. Okay. Can I see you waving? Oh, their number countdown. Okay. But yeah, so when you, you know, that culture is not consistent on a year-to-year basis necessarily. Fernando was referring to the difference between the 2008 and 2009 Rays and how stuff got bad in the 2009 Rays because players had, you know, players had different outlooks on who they were individually and thus collectively.

And I think that that's hard. I think that the Red Sox entered spring training this year with different— there was a greater focus on the individual, on different salary negotiations that were happening that make it more difficult to be locked in like crazy on everything that's happening during that three and a half to four hours a night on the field, which is a long time on the field, which is a long time on the field, by the way. Yeah, the chemistry stuff in the book, it just makes it seem completely impossible to predict. Maybe you can analyze it in retrospect, but you have the 2013 team that

excels in that area, and then you bring back most of that team, and yet everything seems to go bad the next year. Or even if it's like 2016 to 2017 or 2017 to 2018, like even if the team's record in some cases is the same, it was identical in some of those years. And yet the mix of players, for whatever reason, it's just, it can be completely thrown off by one little thing. And one, right, exactly. Like the pebble and the, like the pebble and the wheel can like throw, can like, you know, can mess up the whole thing and it is unpredictable you know because that one small change can have ripples that you don't necessarily anticipate changing the whole dynamic you assume that a culture can absorb some challenges and a lot of times you're wrong about that like it's culture is a is a really sensitive thing and

one that's unpredictable and like that just in my in my observation of this of these Red Sox you know of the Red Sox teams that I've covered and of those who have been around them tends to have a significant impact on individual and thus collective performance. What have you seen them doing this year? I'm trying to address that because you know throughout the book that the front office of the Red Sox were keenly aware of those cultural issues and were trying to have in-season interventions to help address them, especially with some of their younger players who they were, you know, very excited about for the future and were keen to have them from an eager school.

How have you seen, if at all, that would try to massage that all the way? Because clearly you can't just let things pass through until you get, you know, close eyes. Well, I'll, you know, I'll probably know more in about five years, right? One of the advantages of doing the book was that I was able to figure out stuff that was happening in 2014 with a lot greater clarity than I found, than I knew about then. But they are having more team meetings. They are having more, you know, they are trying to have, to assert leadership in different ways than they needed to last year. It's just that it's kind of like there's not a simple formula for fixing it.

So there's trial and error that happens. And right now, for a lot of the season, it hasn't really clicked in the same way. And, you know, you could have called the book Boston Ball or something, how the Red Sox solved player development. But you didn't do that. And I couldn't even tell from reading it whether the Red Sox necessarily figured anything out. You know, they clearly they put put together this great successful core. They built one of the most successful teams of all time. And yet they made many mistakes along the way, as every team does.

They had a lot of chance, I think, kind of come together. Certain guys who, it's just kind of a crapshoot to a certain extent in the draft. And they had a lot of misses. And they happened to have a bunch of guys just come together at the right time. And I couldn't tell how much of that was just kind of hanging on to this guy instead of that guy when it was a coin flip. Or there's so much randomness associated with everything. Part of it is the discipline to not trade some of these guys. But then again, they did trade some guys.

But they traded the right guys. They traded the right guys. And I guess that is skill. That's talent. Or maybe it's partly luck. It's hard to say. I mean, the reason why Dave Dombrowski was hired was because he has a history of trading the right guys and keeping the right guys. And at least for the purposes of the 2018 team, that certainly played out.

The fact that he kept Devers instead of Mankata. The fact that he kept Benintendi, again, instead of Mankata. These things ended up being critical decisions. So, you know, Ben Sherrington was the right person to, you know, to say we don't we. Ben Sherrington was very much of the we don't know shit school. And so, you know, kept the prospects together and wanted to see which ones were going to emerge. And then you had Dave Dombrowski saying, you know, we we better figure out some things if we don't know shit. If we didn't know shit before, it's time to figure some shit out. And so, you know, making a different set of moves.

And at a certain point, if you, you know, any homegrown core, or at least over the last, you know, as we've seen a number of them win over the last decade, they have to reach that pivot point. And others will fail because they do not make the right decisions in that moment. I'm not sure whether or not that means they figured it out. Like, I think that, you know, this is a sample size of one that yielded this incredible surpassing season. But, you know, there is a familiarity with, you know, there is a knowledge of the players that underlay some of those decisions that ultimately yielded the success. that underlay some of those decisions that ultimately yielded the success.

So Theo Epstein's goal was to build the scouting and player development machine, and they've succeeded, I think, to a certain extent. They've had World Series wins, they've had last place finishes during that time, but they have built this core. And I wonder whether you think it's possible to build kind of a perpetual motion machine team or a perpetual playoff machine the way the Dodgers seem to try to be doing and succeeding for the last several years. What derails that project? When it goes wrong, when you fail, when you run out of that talent,

what tends to end that run, do you think? Access to amateur talent is a big one, right? Theo Epstein, you know, his last year was 2011. They had access to a lot of supplemental draft picks that ended up being the Jackie Bradley juniors of the world. They had the ability to spend heavily on later round picks like Mookie Betts. That was huge. They had the ability to spend on Yohan Munkata, which they don't have anymore.

So those constraints are really going to impede the idea of a perpetual player development machine in some ways. really going to impede the idea of a perpetual player development machine in some ways um and then you know and then if you do not have extraordinary an extraordinary ability to create yield from you know from kind of lesser prospects in your system to turn a 20th round pick into a reliever who you can then trade for you know for an important supplementary piece to a playoff roster then that that affects things as well. I texted Dan Brooks to ask if I could keep asking questions. He hasn't answered, so I'm going to keep asking questions. That's a yes. Thanks, Dan. So we're at a point right now

where it seems like player development is maybe more important than it's ever been. It's always been very important. But I think right now when you have such a youth movement across the game, I think right now when you have such a youth movement across the game, you have young players, productive players who are very much underpaid relative to their older peers. Do you think the next five years, 10 years, are we heading for a time when you can go back to buying championships to a certain extent? If that time ever existed, will we see CBA changes that maybe make it a little less advantageous to stockpile young players just because it has to go that way? Yeah, at some point, like to see at some point, the players union has to recognize the fact that like they're taking their most valuable members and and structurally making sure that they're paid the least, which is kind of stupid. So that change has to happen at some point.

That'll swing the pendulum. The other thing that's happening is that there are a lot of good players who really aren't done, who are being like marginalized as really inexpensive players in the free agency market right now, or who are underrated on the trade market. So yeah, I think that there's probably going to, we're probably going to see in the next 10 years, I bet that we'll see like one or two teams that are able to win with this kind of hastily assembled, like, you know, 2013 version of the Red Sox championship team where you have a couple of, you know, veteran players, and then you make 12 off-season moves. Jerry, Jerry DePoto's dream, right? Finally, sorry, Meg. Finally, you know, finally yielding, like,

if you have the right, if if you if you roll sevens enough times at the craps table then you win a big old stack of money yeah i mean even if it becomes less advantageous from a surplus value standpoint even if you have to actually pay young players at a certain point you still count on them because they're the ones who are going to be good for the next several years whereas free agents you get them and maybe they'll be good for a year or two or a few years if you're lucky. But if you want to build this sustainable winner, there's just no other way to do it than to get young guys. Right. You need the multiple, if you want multiple phases, then you better have the young guys who are going to be good for a while and healthy for a while, right?

That's the other key thing about why, you know, we're at a time when, you know, young players stay on the field. And if you get 140 to 150 innings of like five guys who are elite in their early to mid-20s, that's going to help. So we have to name the new Captain America, the new Black Panther, to pass on the S.U. of baseball. Identify your next team. I used to do a baseball. I didn't fire him. I just believed that's what it was. I just wanted to get his extend. Wow. Yeah.

So is there a phase four, phase five? What comes next? Like I said, I think that this is going to be a really, really interesting offseason for the Red Sox. They have supplemented over the last few years this extraordinary core that they assembled. And now there's going to have to be reshaping, which is kind of the first time, save for the deals involving Mankata and some of the other prospects that didn't really come back to bite them

because they were redundant guys, there's going to have to be a reshaping probably that comes up in the next couple of years. Well, I think we've probably pushed the time limit far enough unless you have any last ones you want to get in, Patrick? Well, I'm going to try to learn how to cough. Yeah, you made it this whole episode. You're just going to cough.

Yay! Just held it in. You're going to go on a coughing fit for the rest of the evening. So Alex plugged my book, so I will return the favor. Again, it is called Homegrown, How the Red Sox Built the Champion from the Grand Up. It is out on Tuesday, August 13th. And it's not just a good look at how this particular team was built, I don't think, although that's enough. I think if you're a Red

Sox fan, as many of you are in this room, you'll be fascinated by how this team came together. But I think there are larger lessons in there for fans of any team about how you put together a World Series winner or at least how Boston did it there are multiple ways to do it but I really enjoyed it and it did not seem like a book that you wrote in 10 months that was yeah that was kind of the the mind eraser that we include in the very sick, you will forget one or both of those things first. That was kind of the mind eraser that we include in the pictures. So glad that worked out. All right.

Well, thank you, Alex. Thank you guys both so much. I appreciate it. And thanks to all of you. All right. That will do it for today. Just a short one. We talked as long as we could before they kicked us out of the room.

Thanks again, as always, to Dan Brooks and Chuck Korb and everyone involved in organizing and sponsoring the Saber Seminar. It was great, as always. Tons of illuminating presentations, lots of great conversations, and as Dan tweeted after the weekend, Saber Seminar has raised more than a quarter of a million dollars over the past nine years for the Jimmy Fund and the Angioma Alliance and their own scholarships that they give out. So it is a wonderful event, and we encourage you all to attend in the future if you can. I know there's a lot to talk about, things that happened this weekend. Cleveland and Minnesota tied atop the Central. Arstita Sakino hitting homers every day. We'll get to it all next time. And of course, we urge you to go get Alex's book on Tuesday. In the meantime, you can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild, signing up to pledge some small monthly amount

and getting yourself access to some perks while you help the podcast continue. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Patrick Marr, Eric Richardson, David Metcalf, Mike Secor, and Shane Barkley. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Send us your questions and comments via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

You can also go get my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Alex and I were joking that we should put together a player development book bundle, but you can create your own. They go together well. If you like my book, please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Oh, you made me feel so wrong Oh, you made me feel so wrong