Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1487: We Remembered Some Guys

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Red Sox firing Alex Cora, the Twins signing Josh Donaldson, an uptick in online player pettiness, fans taunting the visiting Astros, and a baseball-themed Jeopardy! clue. Then (22:30) Ben and Sam Miller banter about baseball fandom as a form of family bonding and the appeal of Remembering […]

I don't know what to offer you, I'm lonely, broken, lonely And another one goes, and another one goes by Sometimes when I step outside, I see it standing right in front of me And another one goes, and another one goes wild Hello and welcome to episode 1487 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello.

It has been a wild week thus far, and so we are presenting our podcasting kind of out of order. So Sam and I recorded a non-time-sensitive episode on Monday before the Astros report came out. Then we bumped that back a bit, put it on the back burner so that you and I could discuss that report. That episode is already out. Most of this episode is going to be what Sam and I recorded on Monday. But since we recorded our last episode together, there's been more big news. And so we felt that we had to step in and record a new introduction to this episode

that would cover that. So it's been a sequencing issue, but I think hopefully things will settle down a little and we can just continue to record in order after this. Anyway, the big news that we are here to talk about is twofold. The Red Sox fired Alex Cora, and the Twins signed the last star-level free agent available, Josh Donaldson. So with Cora, this was inevitable as soon as the Astros report came out and detailed all of the ways that Cora contributed to the Astros' sign-stealing efforts, and presumably to the Red Sox sign stealing efforts, although that has not yet been revealed. And the question was, would the Red Sox fire him now or would they wait for that MLB investigation into the Red Sox sign stealing to come out before doing so?

And evidently they decided that there was no time like the present and they parted ways with him on Tuesday. I think we should just take a moment to marvel at the last 24 hours. Yeah. In the last 24 hours, I know that the beginning of Hinch's tenure in Houston, he did not have the reputation, setting aside the cheating part of this, setting aside the banging scheme. You have to get one more of those in there. Oh, one more. At least. That's optimistic of you.

Setting aside that, he had a pretty sterling reputation and managed to escape even the Brandon Taubman incident and some of the club's hostility toward credentialed media relatively unscathed. I think that Cora, as we discussed on the pod, was very well respected. In Boston, you can tell that there is some regret at the inevitability of this decision in the Red Sox statement from ownership on this decision, but two of the sort of bright youngish stars in the managerial ranks, and now they are both gone. Yep, just like that. So I think that's a pretty stunning 24-hour stretch in an already busy offseason. So there's that. I think, as you said, as we discussed earlier today,

that this was coming. I don't know that there is a tremendous amount of benefit to getting ahead of that decision, but I also don't think that there's anything to lose. I mean, it's just they were going to be in the market for a new manager, you know, what, a month before pitchers and catchers report, no matter what. Not ideal.

Remember when the Red Sox fired their general manager like really early to get a jump on the offseason? Remember when the person in charge of putting together and managing the 2018 team that won 108 games in the World Series both got dismissed like a year or a year and a half or less after that world series win i'm not laughing because it's actually funny i'm just it's sort of it's stunning it's a stunning turn of events so you can tell from the statement that cora regrets the inevitability of this and you can tell that the ownership i think was probably not super pleased although as with the astros i think that you know the galaxy brain part of me thinks that there was probably an understanding reached between the ownership of the team and the league that something like this was going to be necessary as part of a cleaning house to address the sign stealing stuff but man what a what a

decade for managerial moves in boston yeah seriously that's not an easy not an easy spot fourth manager since uh francona was fired something like that and all the turnover with the gms and presidents of baseball ops so yeah i mean, I guess now Haim Bloom gets to bring in his own person or maybe not necessarily because it's the middle of January, which is not really a great time to hire managers. So I don't know if they'll just promote bench coach Ron Renneke for now unless he ends up being implicated in whatever science dealing report comes out about the Red Sox, but that would be the easy move, I guess.

The statement is sort of interesting because it's not like Red Sox ownership came out and condemned Cora and said, oh, we're so disappointed in Alex or anything like that. They said, this is a sad day for us. Alex is a special person and a beloved member of the Red Sox. We're grateful for his impact on our franchise. We will miss his passion, his energy, and his significant contributions to the communities of New England and Puerto Rico. And then Cora doesn't really directly address all the news that came out either. He says that it was the best thing for the organization. I don't want to be a distraction to the Red Sox. So maybe he is saving his either remorseful or defiant statement for when that report comes out and when his suspension comes

down, as it almost inevitably seems like it will. This is not going to stop him from getting suspended. So he was not going to be managing in the majors this year and potentially for future years, regardless of when they decided to pull the plug. You know, the guy who helped to, not single-handedly, I'm sure, but helped to sort of spread that practice beyond Houston, who was doing so at a club that had prior infractions, it just seemed likely that he was going to face a multi-year suspension at the very least, if not a lifetime ban. So, yeah. a lifetime ban so yeah yeah and i guess once that report comes out then there's no benefit to continuing to be associated with that person like you don't want people to conclude that you are standing by that person or that you're not bothered by those findings and i guess it behooves you to move on and figure out what you're going to do as soon as you can. So yeah, no downside to doing this, to acting as swiftly as they did. I wasn't sure when it would happen, but not shocked that it happened so soon. No, not shocked either.

And then the twins said, hey, hey, over here. Yeah, I know. They should have released this news on a less busier news day in baseball. Get the fullros or the red socks for the news cycle clearly this move was a direct shot a sign of aggression move that will haunt them through the entire regular season against the oakland athletics and their trade for tony kemp which also happened which happened yesterday as the astros report was dropping. So, yeah, I think that we should invest in that rivalry. But, yes, the last really significant free agent on the market is off the board, and it is January 14th.

It's like two months before some of the other nonsense last year. Sure is great. Yeah, I don't know what we're going to talk about for those two months but but it is probably good for baseball that these things have happened ben now we get to get real weird though we get to get so weird yeah i love it when we get to get weird me too so this deal is for a guaranteed four years and there's an option at the end of it, so there's a buyout also, so there's a guarantee of $92 million.

It could be up to five years and $100 million, and Donaldson is still a really great player. I don't know if he will be for the entire life of this deal, but for now, he's excellent. He's coming off a great season, and the Twins were sort of stymied in their pursuit of starting pitchers. And Donaldson doesn't help in that respect, except that he does improve the defense considerably, which was not a strength of the Twins last season, especially in the infield.

And Donaldson's presence allows them to shift Miguel Sano over to first base. Donaldson's presence allows them to shift Miguel Sano over to first base so that's a big defensive upgrade and obviously a big offensive upgrade for a team that already had a heck of an offense so really this team this lineup has lost crone and scope from last year's lineup and added Donaldson and I guess a full season of arise which, which seems like a net positive. And I don't know that everyone from that lineup last year will hit as well as they did in 2019, but still they now have six guys who hit 30 or more homers last year, which even in 2019 inflated home run hitting is something. And this is really a pretty powerhouse lineup. So they didn't get all of the starting pitching that they wanted to get,

but runs saved in the field are as good as runs prevented on the mound. Runs added at the plate are as good as runs prevented on the mound. They're all runs. They're all wins. So this makes the Twins better, and it makes the al central suddenly even more exciting i find well i have i have a couple of thoughts on this the first of which is that there is something sort of inherently satisfying about a guy who got a late start you know it has

been really didn't break out onto the scene until his late 20s, kind of making good in this way. So there's that part. So, you know, good for Josh Donaldson. I think that you are right that, you know, the first half of this contract will likely look better than the back half. He's 34. Yeah, he's 34. But so Jay Jaffe is writing about this deal for Fangraphs.

Right now, Donaldson's Zips projection for 2020 has him at almost four wins, almost three in 2021. And then the production starts to tail from there, which isn't that surprising, especially given his age. One of the things that I find really fascinating about the Twins, because I think they're a smart organization, they have approached the way that they are constructing their roster, I think, in a way

that is cool and dynamic. They have done some interesting fielding work. They were one of the first organizations this past year that we heard about encouraging catchers to go to one knee to try to improve their defensive sort of lateral positioning back there. At a time when we see a lot of organizations trying to maximize positional versatility from their players they have a lot of guys who are sort of locked in to where they are just by virtue of not being particularly sterling in the field so it's just

i don't know it's just interesting right there are a lot of ways that you can build a roster as you said runs or runs and wins or wins and you can get at them a lot of different ways. And they have clearly elected to prioritize the offense, at least among their position players, and are a little less concerned about how things have shaken out defensively. I guess they have a very notable exception to that statement in center field. But it's just an interesting, different way to pull a bunch of wins together than what we see from some other teams where you want guys who are competent enough at multiple positions where you can play them you know on the infield or in the outfield or you know in the stands where they're

gonna catch balls too so it's just i i like that we have a slightly different way of constructing that same set of wins. And yeah, they're going to thump. Yeah. My stars will they thump. I know. You've got the new and improved White Sox. You've got the Twins who can mash. You've got Cleveland who can still pitch.

So this is suddenly kind of a competitive and potentially even fun division. So that's a nice change from recent years. Yeah. And, you know, to have multiple teams in that division really trying to try is good. I do worry, and I don't say this to excuse the behavior, but I do worry that Cleveland will look at this and say oh heck and start

shedding yeah let's trade some work guys while we're at it yeah this is the biggest free agent signing in Twins history so good for them and it does leave the Braves with a comp pick but without a third baseman.

So they'll have to figure that out. And I don't know if this will maybe kickstart the trade market at third base, whether this accelerates discussions about Chris Bryant or Nolan Arenado. I suppose we will see. There were other teams that were in the market for Donaldson at various points, and they didn't get him. So, yeah, exciting move. And the last major one that we will see for a while, unless it's a trade, we might still see some of those.

Yeah, you say that. You say those words, and then I'm going to end up editing a whole bunch of trade pieces, and we're going to have to get it back on the podcast, and it'll just be it'll just be a busy busy time and then no one will ever remember who any of the players are in any of the teams could be could be true i will also say by the way i made a note to mention this that i've appreciated the pettiness that has surfaced over the past day or so not all of the pettiness not the most mean-spirited of the pettiness,

but there has been some player pettiness that has amused me. For instance, it was noticed and reported that Aaron Judge seems to have deleted his Instagram post from 2017 in which he congratulated Jose Altuve on winning the AL MVP award over Aaron Judge. So at the time in November 2017, he wrote MVP, nobody more deserving than you. Congrats on an unforgettable 2017, Jose Altuve. And that

Instagram post is conspicuously absent now. So it seems like he may have gone back in the wake of the science-stealing news and decided that Altuve maybe was not more deserving than he himself was. So that was kind of amusing. And even more amusing, I think, is that Mike Miner kind of tap-danced on Alex Cora's professional grave here. I'd completely forgotten about the Mike Miner-Alex Cora beef. Do you remember on the last day of the season or Mike Miner's last outing,

his 200th strikeout controversy where Ronald Guzman dropped what would have been an out thereby allowing Mike Miner to get another strikeout, which was his 200th of the season. And then there was this whole backlash to, oh, that's a Bush League way to get your 200 strikeout and alex cora was i think one of the people who expressed displeasure about how the rangers handled that situation and cora said i'm just happy our guys play the game the right way and so here comes mike minor months later long after i had forgotten about this story, to tweet, but he plays the

game the right way. What you got, Pete? And Pete is a reference to Red Sox beat writer Pete Abraham, who tweeted something about how what Mike Minor did was unprofessional. So Mike Minor, off the top rope, no one really remembered the Mike Minor story, but clearly he remembered what Alex Cora said about that strike out and he chose this time to gloat see i find this out earlier today i said that we should stop being so impressed and amused by some of the twitter beef but i i grant an exception to both of these i think that judge's thing is just delightful because that is a subtle you know he's not he's not he's saying something without saying something.

That's always fun. And I had totally forgotten the silliness about this. I just happened to be reminded of that ridiculous story. Yeah, man, that's great. That's fantastic. Ben, did you see that the Staten Island Yankees are doing a trash can giveaway? Oh, yes, yeah. One of the things I'm looking forward to i think in the 2020 season is just seeing the creativity that visiting fan bases will bring to taunting the astros throughout the season because you know

there are going to be signs and cardboard trash cans and taunts and coordinated cheers and who knows what like they're not going to let the Astros forget what they did which given the fact that some of the 2020 Astros are also 2017 and 2018 Astros is I think fair and reasonable so those players didn't get suspended or directly punished but fans will attempt to punish them in other ways. I agree with everything you just said. And I would like to say the following, which is it is specifically funny to me that a Yankees affiliate did that

when they have been subject to their own bits of nonsense around this stuff and just generally has a real Icarus-y kind of vibe, man. Yes, it does. It is early in the going to be so confident. I mean, fans, oh, Ben, the signs. The signs we're going to see. The faces I'm going to be able to grab.

I nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. But I think it's really different when it's fans or even like a stadium DJ. Yeah, that's all fine. But it's January 14th, and we know we're not done with this just generally. I'm not saying with the Yankees in particular. I'm not saying that, but just generally we know we're not done, and folks are out here getting sassy with their marketing campaigns,

and boy, is that ripe for some wax wing nonsense. Oh, I'm so excited. Yeah, me too. Yeah, Batman and I joke sometimes about how if we tried to copy our pal Jason Concepcion and his excellent NBA desktop show, if we tried to do MLB desktop, we'd have enough material for like three episodes a year or something because there just isn't nearly as much drama and public beef in baseball as there is in basketball. But these last couple of days have given us enough material for a few shows. It's been the rare exception where people are actually publicly airing their grievances about the Astros and the Red Sox and all of this coming home to roost.

So given that we don't get that much of this in baseball, I'm enjoying at least some of it. I just am thinking, I'm just realizing all the faces and signs I'm going to get to screenshot. You know what? A lot of material for you. Yeah, it's great. It's like anticipating a birthday present. I know I'm going to get it. It's like, oh, there's 2,000 words sitting out there for me. I just don't know what they are yet. Oh, what a delight. And finally, congrats to Ken Jennings on winning the

Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament. But before he won, there was a question that was very much in line with many of my interests. The category was portmanteaus, and the clue was a kyber crystal-powered weapon plus baseball statistics analysis system of Bill James, which is just like the Venn diagram of multiple parts of my personality and professional life. The answer, of course, or I should say the question is what is lightsaber metrics? So kudos to whichever Jeopardy writer came up with that clue. And kudos to former Effectively Wild guest James Holzhauer, who entered it correctly, of course, because he knows a lot about sabermetrics and everything in general. So that was fun. That tournament was fun. That tournament was fun.

That clue was right up my alley. Yeah, it's nice when people make art just for you. Yeah. All right. So we will take a quick break, and then we will bring you the conversation that Sam and I had before all of this hubbub happened. And you and I will talk probably next week. Sounds good. No matter how hard I try to be just one of the guys, there's a little something inside that won't let me.

No matter how hard I try to have an open mind, there's a little clock inside that keeps ticking. I am Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right. Good. I just want to quickly wish a happy 70th birthday to my father.

Today is his birthday. I have told him this in real life, but I also want to commemorate it here just because I've noted this before, but my baseball fandom is so intrinsically intertwined with my family life and with my relationship with my father. And all of my fandom and all of this podcasts are pretty clearly in dialogue with him today. And so in my mind, even though he doesn't appear on this podcast, although he has asked a couple of questions for email episodes, he is a recurring character.

He's just off screen all the time. So I want to say happy birthday to him. Yeah. Happy birthday to him. I'm envious of that aspect of your fandom because I don't really have that. No one in my family cares all that much about baseball. I didn't really get my baseball fandom from anyone, I don't think. I don't know, there were sort of peripheral fans in my family, but I guess no one who I think really passed it

down to me, maybe indirectly, but I've always been kind of out on an island there in my little clan. And I wish that that were a bigger part of my family life. I'm really fascinated by that aspect of it. So I'm going to ask you about that in a minute. My dad also was not from a family of baseball fans and came to it late. And that's one of the things that has always struck me as so interesting and different is that he almost learned this as like a skill that he picked up later in life. Like one might decide to learn how to do woodworking. He decided to learn how to be a baseball fan and he kind of committed to it as a hobby

and got really good at it, but also didn't really have any of that background. You were fairly young when you started being a baseball fan, but all the same, do you remember what it was? Like, what was your first game? Why did you do it? I think my first game was a Yankees-Blue Jays game, and I was rooting for the Blue Jays at the time because I had seen them in the 93 World Series and I'm half Canadian and I guess that was enough for me. I was a bandwagon fan and I thought this team is

good and I like their uniforms, so I guess I'll root for them. But I didn't really root for them. I was a totally nominal fan and then I didn't pay attention for a couple of years. I didn't really- How old were you at this point? Well, I didn't really become a fan, like a true fan, I would say until like 97, which is when I was, I guess, 10 or so, turning 11. So I went to my first game a few years before that, but I wasn't paying attention in any serious way. So I had like an uncle who liked the Yankees and an aunt who liked the Yankees, but I wasn't particularly close to the uncle. And I don't know, maybe it sort of passed to me through them a little bit, but it

wasn't like something we discussed every day at home. So I think I probably just got introduced to it because I don't know, I lived in New York and there were teams around and you take a kid to a baseball game because that's something you do with a kid, even if you don't really care about baseball that much, I guess. And for whatever reason, it just took. I think it helped that the Yankees were entering a dynasty as I was entering that period of, you know, kind of the peak age of starting to care about baseball. So it was pretty easy for me to fall in love with it. Yeah. So I imagine it was such a topic of conversation in the region when you were a kid that the Yankees were always around and they were exciting and there was always something they were playing for. If their dynasty had began in 2001 instead of 96, do you think that you probably would not have been a fan what was winning really a necessary part of those first few years of caring or did the game itself and the routine

latch on to you as a as a diversion all on its own it's hard for me to say because that was kind of all i knew at the time i mean i can't really go back and say if they had been bad would i have cared because they weren't bad so if i had been just a few years older and I had gotten introduced to baseball when the Yankees were at their low point in the late 80s, early 90s, yeah, maybe I wouldn't have cared. I don't know. I mean, I lived in upper Manhattan, just a few subway stops away from Yankee Stadium, and that was just the perfect time for a kid to be a Yankees fan. So there's really no way for me to say whether things would have been different, but I think there's a decent chance that if I hadn't happened to come of age alongside some of the best teams of all time, I might not have been quite so enthused about it.

So yeah, that probably was part of it. And then I got into the history and I had like an eighth grade English teacher who was just extremely hardcore baseball fan and he really got me into it in a bigger way I think and I borrowed books because he had bookshelves full of baseball books and he would just loan them to kids whoever wanted them and he had an after-school gathering for kids to talk about baseball so that probably took it to the next level. But yeah, I can't really disentangle it from the team that I was most likely to root for being the best at the time. Did you collect cards?

Yes, I did. Yeah, I liked cards. I had superhero cards too, but mostly baseball cards. And I had big binders of them. I didn't really know necessarily who the good players were, but I did have a cousin who was into baseball. He played college baseball, and I'd see him every now and then and bring the binders, and he would tell me which cards were good. Yeah, I think that the two crucial things were my dad being into it and having it on the radio all the time and then baseball cards.

I think if they had never invented baseball cards, there's a pretty good chance that the habit wouldn't have stuck with me. The profit motive throughout my childhood was there and it kept me really interested all the time. And of course, all those cards turned out to be totally worthless. And yet they were, I mean, they were, I got so much out of them. I got much more out of them than I realized I was getting out of them. I kept on waiting for the payoff from the cards. When I was collecting them, I always thought someday all of this is going to result in money. And that wasn't, apparently that wasn't the point at all at the time.

All right. So there's a Hall of Fame announcement coming up in about 10 days, which means that we're getting the Hall of Fame tracker that Ryan Thibodeau runs, and we're seeing whose votes are up and whose votes are down. And there's a whole bunch of first ballot players this year, one of whom is going to make the Hall of Fame. His name is Derek Jeter, and then a whole bunch of them that are not. And I always like this, these first ballot names, because even though they've only been retired for five years, they, A, have already kind of fallen into the remember some guys camp of memories.

And B, they had these players by definition had to have had a long career. And so you see their name on the Hall of Fame. And I don't know, it's weird because like you take a player like, I don't know, Raphael Fercal, you take a player like Raphael Fercal, and you live with with his existence for a really long time. And you have some ideas about him and you have some moments that you remember and you think about how good he was. And then you put him on a Hall of Fame ballot. And it's a it's sort of a totally different thing because you then think of him against the line of the Hall of Fame. And you think, oh, wow. Yeah, he was he was a Hall of Fame level player

for moments. And then he clearly is out of place here. Like you see Raphael for call's name right next to Roger Clemens name. And that's a weird clash. But on the other hand, there were he played a long time and there were times when he seemed like he was going to be a Hall of Famer. Anyway, the exercise of reviewing who the first time ballot guys were got me thinking about the concept of remember some guys. So I thought that we would maybe just remember these guys, the first ballot players, and talk about what we remember from each of them. But before we do that, so I assume most people know what I mean when I say remember some guys, but probably a lot of people don't.

So let's remember some guys was a feature that Deadspin introduced, what, maybe a year and a half, two years ago. And the concept is very simple. David Roth would open a pack of baseball cards or a pack of baseball cards would be opened around David Roth. And then he would be asked if he remembers that guy.

And then David Roth would say, yeah, no, I remember him. He had shaggy hair and played in Topeka for a couple of years. And then he came up and some gum got stuck to his shoe. And it would be this weird melange of memories that were both very specific and and also like like probably not how the player

would have defined his career but it's what lodged into david roth's memory of them and then you would also remember that that player as david was remembering. And it was a strange, strangely powerful thing to watch David remember these guys. And my impression is that that feature was kind of a smash because it was just a one-off video thing when Deadspin was introducing a whole bunch of one-off video things. And they kept on making more of them. And then they started doing Remember Some Guys for other sports. I think they do pro wrestling Remember Some Guys. They did before Deadspin died. And Remember Some Guys, within like a year, I feel like it just became a shorthand that we and other people just toss off whenever one starts nostalgizing.

whenever one starts nostalgizing. And so I don't exactly know why it's so powerful to see someone remember Bernard Gilkey. Bernard Gilkey, I asked David this question and Bernard Gilkey was the random name he threw out. But I feel like at this point in my life as a middle-aged person who has been a baseball fan for decades. And like, in a way, the experience of remembering Bernard Gilkey is almost the point of being a baseball fan at this point in my life. Like a large part of the point is that I can remember Bernard Gilkey and that it gives me a little bit of a jolt of happiness to remember bernard gilkey yep but why why is that why do you have a theory for why it is fun to remember any of the thousands of player names that have lodged in our in our brains over the course of our long fandoms well i think it's probably to some extent because you're remembering what you were when you learned about Bernard Gilkey the first time, right?

You're remembering what the world was like then. It's just like any nostalgia exercise. I think it's like the member berries from South Park. It's just like, remember this, remember that. Yeah, because that was this formative period in my life. I don't know if it would be fun, for instance, to... I think remember some guys is best when you are of roughly the same age as the person who is remembering some guys, because if the person is remembering guys that you don't remember, that's not quite as entertaining. It's still fun. I think David's a little older than I am, and so often he would be remembering guys that I didn't remember firsthand.

I might know their names and a little bit about them from just learning about them later, but I wouldn't have any personal memories of those guys. And I still liked watching because David is very clever and funny, but I think it's best if it prompts the same memory in you. I think it's best if it prompts the same memory in you. So if you were watching someone much older remember some guys from the 50s or the 60s or something, I don't know, would that be fun? Maybe, but probably not nearly as fun, right? I think a large part of it is that you can also remember the guys. And it's reassuring. I think it's like this shared collective memory. It's this thing we have in common, which takes us back to not necessarily a better time or a simpler time but maybe a simpler time for you personally because you were a kid at the time and baseball was your world so i think it's that and maybe there's also

an element of sort of like proving that you're a member of this club. Like I wouldn't want remembering some guys to be an exclusionary exercise, but there's some like, you know, testing yourself, proving that you know baseball because you remember the most guys. So I think that might be an element of it too. Yeah. Like I'm looking at the 1991 Twins page right now and Kirbyby puckett was a 1991 twin but i don't feel like i don't see kirby puckett's name and get nostalgic even though he he was also there at the time it is specifically the the jolt of happiness is the unexpectedness of the name that you are hearing. Yeah. Like, so Shane Mack, for instance, has a very high, remember some guys value on this page. And I would say that Scott Laius, for some reason, has a high, high, remember some guys value to me. Dan Gladden does not because Dan Gladden is still in my life

as a broadcaster. And I haven't, I have heard his name in the last 20 years. And so there's something about the name having essentially fallen into like ice off out, out in like some mountain somewhere and, and then been frozen unchanged. And then we're unearthing it and going oh this name is still the same it's it's unchanged denny nagel is still the same name now that it was and like uh you're you're you're flooded with recognition yeah and it can't be like a superstar that's not fun to remember because everyone remembers those guys and we remember them regularly even if they're not playing anymore you come across their name because they're at the top of various leaderboards or whatever so they're never far from your mind yeah so it

has to be someone sort of obscure and that's again what i was getting at it's like you had to be there basically in order to really remember the guys. I mean, they're guys I remember who I don't have any memories of, as I was saying, I know that they existed, but I don't know if that really qualifies as remembering them. Maybe it does, but it's not like it transports me back to a time when they were playing and I was experiencing their play. It's like, you know, I came across that later. I picked it up secondhand. So I think a big part of it is that belonging, that sort of sense of shared collective experience that you are sharing with the person who is remembering the guys with you or who's prompting you. Like it's

more fun as a group activity too, right? It's not something that you enjoy as much, I don't think, as a solo activity. It's like if you're getting together with some other people to remember some guys that they also remember, then it's much better that way. And if you have cards, if there's a visual attached to it too, that's even better because then you get the 80s cards that you remember and you get the facial hair that was popular at the time, and that's a big part of remembering some guys. That was probably the number one thing that David would remember about guys was their mustache or their beard or their glasses or something that made them distinctively of that time. them distinctively of that time. Yeah, I still don't quite know what my relationship is to a player like Shane Mack, who is one of the great was one of the greatest baseball players in the world. And so at the thing that I valued the most at the time, he was one of the best in the world at the time. But also his identity is particularly for

remember some guys purposes. His identity is one of, of, of mediocrity of, of you can't remember like whether he was good or not. He wasn't that great. He wasn't a legend or anything like that. And it's like, you're kind of stuck in between. Remember some guys is sort of stuck in between honoring them, honoring their achievement and also ironically mocking the mediocrity of it. to have these players who are sort of godlike to you or were godlike to you as kids because they were, I mean, you would have gone and waited in line two hours to get Gene Larkin's autograph when you were 10.

But now as an adult looking back, you remember Gene Larkin as the guy who was, you know, just some generic utility player out of thousands of them and that clash between recognizing the lack of of of historic accomplishment but also how large they loomed in your life and how large they loomed in your imagination at the time and how there were at bats where gene larkin would come up and your mood for the day was dependent on him i guess what i'm saying is i'm not quite sure whether this is an honor or if it's ironic and i think it's both at the same time and somehow we're holding both of those things together yeah and i think it's think it's partly a prideful activity. You're almost boasting about remembering the guys. I remember Paul Sorrento or whatever,

and you feel good about the fact you're a true member of the tribe because you still retain some memory of Paul Sorrento, but then it's simultaneously sort of a self-deprecating activity because it's like, why do I commit some space in my brain to Paul Sorrento? This is the most useless information that I could possibly retain. And yet I can call to mind something about Paul Sorrento right now when I have forgotten much more important and historically relevant information from the period when Paul Sorrento was playing. So I think it's, again, both at the same time. And it's also like it's kind of the opposite when instead of remembering some guys, you come across those guys now and they're old and you read about them dying or getting in trouble or you just read that they're 80 years old now or something and that just makes you feel old that reminds you of your

mortality whereas remembering some guys when you remember them they are perpetually 33 or whatever and you're remembering a time when you were further from death also and i think it's reassuring in that way in the way that it is to remember whatever fashion from that time or tv shows from that time or music from that time yeah yeah yeah john john boys in the about i don't know eight or so years ago ago, had a bit where he would ask, who is the most Braves player? Or who is the most Royals player? Or I think he would sometimes say,

like, who is the most Orioles and Braves player? Like player who represented, somehow was on both of those. And there'd be this rush to name players who were Royals or whatever team. And that was sort of the same concept. And Josh Wilker, of course, what he when he would write Cardboard Gods, it would be sort of the same thing. He would pick a random player who was usually from a generation just slightly behind mine. And so I would read Josh Wilker more for the writing than for the for the nostalgia. But

I think the nostalgia was certainly a part of his reason for writing those and why a lot of people liked them. So it is a very powerful thing. And I don't think it's just the way that David does it. I think that the nostalgia is like kind of a second or third phase of being a baseball fan. You have your childhood experience where you're you know passionate and you think that you're the first you know that your generation is the generation this is like the

the one true era of baseball and then as you get older you get i think you go through a period of nostalgia for your youth and then i think when you get older, still you get in a, I think I haven't gotten there yet, but I think then you get into a phase of, of over-idealization and only your generation, only your youth is real baseball. Then you start to get angry about the, the baseball that is too unlike your youth. And so right now we're in the, I think we're in the, you and I and David are all in that nostalgia phase. And it's interesting. So I asked David what he attributed to. He answered, and then he asked if that helps. And I think implied in that is that he knew that I was going to read this, but then I asked if he minded if I read it and I have not heard back from him yet. So I'm

crossing my fingers and I hope that I'm not going to. So David said, in terms of the actual process with regard to the remembering, it's some combination of basic nostalgia stuff and to finally go ahead and be pretentious about it, feeling some connection to the sort of broader story of baseball. I noticed early in my life that baseball stuff stuck in my head in a way that other, more useful things just didn't. I'm lucky to have been able to use that for work a bit, but I think that's true of a lot of people. These random transient dudes that you care about

intensely for a summer or two snag in your memory as a fan in a very particular way. It's like the way I remember summer camp counselors or teachers, but they don't make baseball cards for them. And also all of them, in my case, had less interesting names than like Bernard Gilkey. So that part kind of explained itself. It is true that a large part of this, a large part of being a baseball fan as a kid is exposure to a lot of names, different names, names like unfamiliar names, unfamiliar first names, unfamiliar last names. The first thing that I ever remember writing, like attempting to write

as a writer, which I like when I was first identifying as a writer, was a book that I wrote for my grandmother as a Christmas present when I was like seven. And the concept of this book was very simple. It was saying how it was showing how important the letter, the alphabet was, because if you didn't have the letter M, for instance, you wouldn't have marshmallows. I don't know why I thought this was important to think about. Like, can you imagine a world without marshmallows? If we only had arsh aloes like that, like somehow, like somehow that would mean that there was no like sugar or what, what was I doing? Anyway, so this was a, this was a multi-part series where I would do like all foods and

all animals and then all names. We would have no mics if there were no M's because everybody would be named Ike. All right. This is the book I wrote for my grandmother for Christmas. And so I had to think I had, I needed to come up with 26 names and as a six or a seven-year-old ordinarily, that would be very hard. But as a six or seven-year-old baseball fan, it was really easy. I had hundreds of names in my storage. And that comes up all the time when my daughter will ask me about a name or like she'll be reading a book and there'll be an unfamiliar name, maybe an archaic name or maybe a name from a different part of the world or a name that I whatever. And she'll ask me about that name. And inevitably, almost without fail, I will say, well, I knew a baseball player with that name. And so anyway, the names are a big part of it. But yeah, summer camp counselor. That's a good comp because I also remember summer camp counselors that seemed so big at the time, so cool, so memorable.

And looking back now, of course, they were 17. They were just 17-year-old kids. There was nothing particularly special about them. And yet if you put eight of us from the cabin together to be nostalgic about that 17-year-old, all of those feelings would kind of come come back to you. Do you think that you'll enjoy remembering Marwin Gonzalez 30 years from now, the way that you enjoy remembering Shane Mack right now? Well, it doesn't feel like I will. It doesn't feel to me like I will now. I don't even feel emotional about Marwin Gonzalez at all. and i don't i probably didn't feel

him i think at the time most of the shane mack experience as a kid is you're flipping through cards hoping to get ken griffey jr and instead you get shane mack and so it's kind of disappointing unless you happen to for some reason need shane mack to fill out your set and so then your your binders of cards would just be filled with like eight of the same Shane Mack card. And it certainly was, it's not like Shane Mack was my favorite player or anything. I had no emotion about Shane Mack at the time. So no, I would not, the feeling I have now is no, how could I care about Marwan Gonzalez? But I'm sure I will. And in fact, you know, JJ Putts, JJ Putts, I should say,

JJ Putts is one of these players on the Hall of Fame ballot. And the first, I mean, when I saw his name, I thought, oh yeah, JJ Putts. And it was like, he retired five years ago. I was writing about him. I wrote about him. I wrote about him as a professional. And I do have a little bit of that feeling about JJ Putts. So yeah, I think I will. I think I'll have feelings about Marlon Gonzalez. Okay. We'll see. All right. So the Hall of Fame ballot this year has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 brand new players. I don't know how this will go, but I'm just going to say a player's name, and we're each going to say the first thing that we think of when we think of that player.

Okay. I think that inevitably we will sometimes want to say more than one thing. I'm going to make allowances that we can say up to two things if want to, are the first thing. And should I say, I mean, often the first thing that I will think about is just like what that player looked like or, you know, his batting stance or something. Are we excluding that very basic level of recall? Because I won't always have like, oh, I remember this big hit he had or something like that. Oh, I remember this big hit he had or something like that. Often it's just a And part of what I'm interested to see is what even type of thing we come up with, if we have answers at all.

Okay. So, all right, I'm going to name a player, and then you can take a split second to think about it, and then we'll say what the first thing we thought of for that player is, okay? All right. All right. First thing, Jose Valverde. Okay. All right. say what the first thing we we thought of for that player is okay all right all right first thing jose valverde okay all right well i think i've got two things all right i i think my thing is his

very bombastic save celebrations uh remind me stands out in my mind yeah that was peak save celebration time like i feel like there was that there was like a six or seven year and fist pump or maybe raise both arms and yell something. I mean, he kind of incorporated all the ways that you can celebrate a save, except not like a choreographed routine necessarily. He didn't have a signature move so much as it was just sort of unrestrained celebration, I guess. unrestrained celebration, I guess. The two things I thought of, one was that I vaguely recall him having a season where he had a, I think he saved every game.

I think he went like 50 for 50 in saves, something. And that this was a pretty big achievement to him. But at the time, he was not really seen by analysts as an elite closer, as an elite reliever. And so there was a little bit of a clash between the perfection of his traditional stats and the perception of his pitching. That's a little vague, but basically what I remember is he went, think he went i think he went like 47 for 47 in saves and that was a big deal like something like a record or something like that the other thing i remember is the 2000 i think 12 postseason when he started the postseason as the tigers longtime closer and by midway through, Phil Koch was closing games

because Jose Valverde had kind of bombed in the postseason at the worst time. Yeah. I remember his nickname, Papa Grande. I guess that's a thing we can remember. That's right. I had forgotten about that. I just went to his baseball reference page, and the headshot is perfect. It captures him seemingly in mid-save celebration.

I don't know, mid-ejaculation. I don't know. Not that kind. But I don't know what he's screaming about, but he's screaming about something. I assume that's not an official headshot, so I don't know if that's just like a cropped photo of him. Because if you mouse over it, you can see his previous headshots that B-Ref has. And it's just standard headshots. And then this one is like an action shot of him in mid-yell.

So I don't know. It's fitting. I just, I'm looking at an article from his retirement, which was headlined, the crazy career of Papa Grande is probably over. And I found this article because I was looking for the fun fact, which was that he was perfect in 2011, 49 for 49 in converting saves, which is pretty impressive, right? And so this article has two photographs at the top of the blog post. One of them, he is kind of squatting and screaming and beating his chest.

And then the other one, he is slamming his glove to the ground. So very demonstrative, like you say. And so, yeah. All right. That's what we remember about Jose Valverde, who saved 288 games in his career and finished fifth and sixth in Cy Young votes and twice got MVP votes and was a three-time All-Star. And might as well do this. How much do you think he earned in his career? Oh, boy. This is always so difficult.

$30 million. $42 million. Okay. All right. 30 million 42 million okay all right and we should also say that all of these guys that we're remembering right now are pretty high caliber players because they made the hall of fame ballot to begin with so you know lots of guys who it would be fun to remember were not good enough or didn't last long enough to qualify for the ballot so a way, these guys aren't even obscure enough to qualify for full remembering guys like did Shane Mack. Shane Mack probably didn't make a Hall of Fame ballot, but

he's probably, I mean, he was a pretty good player at times, but it's, yeah. Right. Jose Valverde. All these guys are pretty good. Yes. Jose Valverde teammates the year that he saved 49 games include Andy Dirks and Wilson Betamete and Casper Wells. Those are some real remember some guys types. Shane Mack didn't play 10 years, so not eligible. Wow. That's shocking to me.

All right. Next name, Alfonso Soriano. All right. I saw a lot of Alfonso Soriano. All right. All right. I got two again. Dang it. Yeah. Alfonso Soriano. slight guy but very wiry he had those strong wrists and he would just whip the bat around and even though he was not bulky he had a ton of power and i guess this is a second thing that i'm remembering but he came extremely close to being a 40 40 guy he was he did he was a one homer oh that's right yeah because there was the one year where he almost got there, right? He had 39 one year, I remember. Yeah.

Like he had the stolen bases, but he was stuck on 39, I think, for the end of the season and he never got there. But then that's right, which I think gets overlooked a lot because, of course, that game ended up going the other way. But he was the one who gave the Yankees the lead in the eighth inning off of Curt Schilling, who had been dominant that whole postseason. And Soriano hit a solo shot, I think, and I think it was an 0-2 home run. And he kind of went out of the zone to get it as he often tended to do and he like raised his arm rounding first base and that was a big homer everyone would remember that homer if Rivera hadn't blown the save in the next inning but now we remember Tony Womack and Luis Gonzalez instead of Soriano. But I think Soriano had a bunch of big hits and game winners or walk-off hits in that postseason. 40-40 is one of the things that I most remember. 40-40 is still a pretty rare thing.

I think maybe four players have done it. And the first time it happened, you thought they were going to give the Nobel to jose canseco the first time that he did it i mean it just seemed like such a a big mark to to pass and it still has been done very rarely and i don't know if anybody has actually done it since soriano i'll have to check that but i remember the 40 40 particularly i remember it because the other thing I remember about Soriano is that he was traded for Brad Wilkerson. And I remember that offseason being convinced that Brad Wilkerson was going to break out and be a superstar. I think that Pakoda really loved Brad Wilkerson and kind of didn't like Alfonso Soriano, who was leaving a hitter's ballpark and had declined a little from his peak years with the Yankees. And it seemed like maybe he was actually on the decline. So Soriano's two years with Texas, he only had an OPS plus of 105 those two years.

And so there was a feeling, I think, at the time that maybe Brad Wilkerson might actually be the better ballplayer. And I was all on board the Brad Wilkerson bandwagon at the time that maybe brad wilkerson might actually be the better ball player and i was i was all on board the brad wilkerson bandwagon at the time and then soriano goes to washington and is 40 40 and brad wilkerson didn't do anything and uh so i remember him you know it there was this weird period in the 2000s where like you would take these really contrarian stances because it felt like the easy answer the simple answer we was had to be wrong we were we were so against the simple answer that we were constantly looking for places where actually brad wilkerson is better than alfonso soriano and then the extremely predictable thing which is like the much more famous player who everybody obviously thinks is better, outperforms your breakout pick. And you're

like surprised that the breakout pick didn't beat Alfonso Soriano. So I just remember feeling a little bit abashed by that. Yeah. All right. So that's Alfonso Soriano Let's go to Josh Beckett Oh boy, Josh Beckett Well, I guess the number one thing that came to my mind I don't know if this is really representative of Josh Beckett But just the fact that he was in that giant trade The Dodgers-Red Sox trade with Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez And everyone, James Saloni, whoever else was in that

deal. Beckett was, I guess, one of the players who was still pretty good at that time. Or, well, I don't know. He had been good fairly recently, at least. And so there was some hope that he would still have something to contribute to the Dodgers. And I guess he was not terrible for them, but he didn't last much longer. So that's not really a very representative thing about Josh Beckett because he was a great pitcher at times and won World Series or at least a World Series. But yeah, that's what came to mind. Yeah. That experience of trying to untangle what a player's value is given their contract was a big part of that period of baseball where, you know, Josh Beckett was traded. And I remember trying to figure out whether he was considered an asset in that trade or whether he was part of the dump part of that trade. And I don't know, that was when we were both writing.

And so we have, we're filtering this through our experience of trying to generate content, content. But I remember thinking of that trade and trying to disentangle whether Josh Beckett was, was, was somebody the Dodgers were happy to get, or whether the Red Sox were merely happy to get rid of him. I remember two periods of Josh Beckett's career, both of them specific moments, I should say, not not that specific, but both of them high periods for him. One is in 2007 when he was a Cy Young runner up. And I remember having a conversation with a friend that year when we were just talking about his pitches, his stuff, and how I thought he might be the best pitcher in baseball at that point because the visuals of his pitches were so

extraordinary and you felt like he could manipulate a ball like nobody else at that period. This was after, you know, the Pedro, Maddox, Randy Johnsons had all either declined. Basically, they were all still active, but all in decline. And there was a little bit of a vacuum for who the best pitcher in baseball was. And Josh Beckett just seemed like he could do things with the baseball that nobody else could, and that he had finally reached that full, flourishing period of his career. And then that was really, that was sort of it. That was,

his peak was one year. The other thing I remember is my cousin getting married during Josh Beckett's performance in, I think, game six of the 2003 World Series when he pitched the Marlins to that title. He was the MVP of that series. so when i hear josh beckett's name i think about the banquet hall that i was in and i see the colors of the walls and i hear the the ambient noise of that wedding ceremony and i remember the awkward best man speech and i remember trying to get home late that night i didn't get to see that start i just knew that it was happening i was hearing updates Yeah really good postseason pitcher

He was also in the Hanley Ramirez trade Which is another notable trade he was involved in Alright Heath Bell Okay Well I don't know if this is just because We were just talking about David But I remember what I'm sure David Would remember which which is that he was traded from theres that sort of took me by surprise. And then I also remember

that he used to sprint in from the bullpen, which was always an amusing sight because he was not really someone who was physically built for sprinting, but I guess that was his way of psyching himself up on the way to the mound. Yeah. I also remember he fell for getting really good right after he got traded from the Mets. And I'm unlike David and you, I am not from New York. I remember that anyway. That was, this was prophecy by baseball perspectives at the time. There was a sense that his performance had actually been quite good in the minors and that the Mets had been blowing him, wasting him, and that he was poised for a breakout. And then this was that period when Kevin Towers was just collecting strike throwing relievers who would go

to Petco and become, you know, like mid ones ERA pitchers. And that's, that's what happened with Heath Bell. Yeah. He had much better peripherals during his years with the Mets, even at the major league level than he did his ERA. So big gaps there. I don't know if anyone was talking about XFIP at the time, probably not, but there were like gaps of two runs or more his last couple of years with the Mets there. I'm looking at Heath Bell's search results on Baseball Perspectives, and it is a picture of him in a Nationals hat, which I don't remember. And it says Heath Bell pitcher, New York Yankees, which I don't remember. If you wanted to tell me two things that are the least memorable about heath bell it is his time with the nationals apparently and his time with the yankees also apparently yeah i'm on his page and he did not pitch in

the majors for either of those teams so it must have been late in his career bouncing around the minors or something also oriolesoles, he was an Oriole. I don't remember that either. No, not in the majors. In the majors, he was a Met, a Padre, a Marlin. I remember the Marlins here. And a Diamondback and briefly a Ray. Yeah, well, the Marlins year was pretty significant

because that was the year that the Marlins signed a whole bunch of people. And most of the moves seemed pretty good and sensible. And it was like, oh, look, the Marlins signed a whole bunch of people. And most of the moves seemed pretty good and sensible. And it was like, oh, look, the Marlins are trying. This is going to be good. This is going to be interesting. And then they signed Heath Bell, who seemed to have almost no value at that point because his peripherals had been crashing

and he was like 34 years old. And they signed him to what seemed to be much bigger contract than anybody had predicted. And the whole Marlins offseason then looked like it got reframed from, oh, they're finally putting it together to, oh, they're just unhinged. Like Heath Bell was such a mocked deal at the time like he was not seen as being a smart addition at all and it reframed all the other moves as maybe just the marlins being the marlins which ultimately it was all right next brian roberts all right for me it's uh this is sort of a nebulous one i think just i saw a lot of him when he was with the Orioles and would play the Yankees a

bunch of times every year and he was just a really good all-around player at his peak that's uh basically what I remember like he got on base he stole bases he kind of he had like one big year I don't remember which year it was but he had a big year where I think he hit for more power than he typically did. And he was just like a really, really great player, like one of the best players. And I don't think he really repeated that, but he was quite good for several years. Just kind of an all-around good player. Yeah, he was. What I remember about him was not the all-around.

It was the doubles he had. I think maybe he he had like 50 doubles and maybe also like led the league in doubles a couple of times. Am I close there? Yeah, I'm looking now. Yeah, he had. Yeah, he had big doubles years. He had 50 or more three times. Yeah, exactly.

So big doubles hitter, which is always enticing. It always makes you wonder whether he's going to, whether those doubles are going to turn into home runs. And he was also very fast. So there was a speed power thing, but then there was the period of, of terrible injuries. Yeah. And he couldn't stay healthy. And this is the story of the second baseman who has a big year, The story of the second baseman who has a big year, like a really big year, and his peak lasts like two years, though. It seems like it's always second baseman. There's a whole long run of second baseman in our lives who had big, big, big years, but it was very fast. So you've got Marcus Giles, and you've got Mark Loretta, and you've got Aaron Hill.

Maybe Brett Boone could fit in there. Jose Vidro is one of those. Brian Roberts, of course, is one of them. Carlos Baerga was a little longer than that, but it was just a few years at the peak of his career, and then it was over for him too. So there's always some second baseman who just puts it all together and has like, you know, 26 homers and a little bit of speed and like a six or a seven war. And then two years later, it's just gone. It's weird. Yeah. The year I was remembering was 2005, 7.3 baseball reference war that year. Yeah. And I think he had concussion issues and maybe some sort of PD connection at some point and he didn't do much after 30. But, yeah, his second half of his 20 is quite good.

Yeah, loved Brian Roberts. All right, let's see. Next we have Eric Chavez. Ooh, okay. All right. With Chavez, I think, well, I mean, A, I remember him for the back problems. It was always a back problem. So being perpetually injured was one of his things. And you always thought like, wow, if he could just stay healthy, because when he was healthy, he played well. And when he did have healthy seasons, he was very good, but he never could really stay healthy. And then the other thing I think I remember is just his general defensive excellence, like diving plays in foul territory, catching pop-ups in foul territory,

like that big, expansive foul territory in Oakland. In my mind, he would just range all over there and make some pretty incredible plays. What I remember is, I'm going to say it was probably 2004, before the 2004 season, I remember Peter Gammons picking him as his AL MVP pick for that season before the season. And I remember adopting that position and also believing that Eric Chavez was going to win the MVP award. And secondarily,

what I remember is within the last few years, looking at his page and realizing that he never made an all-star game. It felt like, I mean, there's obviously the sadness of the way that his career was derailed by injuries after he was so good. But it felt like for those few years when he was with Oakland, he was fully actualized. It never felt like he needed to get better.

He was a superstar at the time and yet somehow never made an all-star game, which I guess now that I think about it, if Anthony Rendon had developed back issues last offseason, we probably would be thinking about his career the same way, where Rendon was essentially an MVP caliber player every year and pretty widely recognized as a superstar. And yet somehow the most basic recognition of a superstar had eluded him and he had somehow not been an all-star.

So Chavez made it his whole career without ever making an all-star game, which is wild. I mean, he had, he had just like a bunch of great years, MVP finishes. He was a gold glove and a silver slugger the same year. How do you win the gold glove and the silver slugger? What else is a third baseman beating you at that they're making the all-star game in front of you? I guess fame. Yeah. Previous accomplishments maybe.

Yeah, and he kept trying to come back year after year after year, and he would just play a few games here and there, and usually it didn't go that well although he did have that like renaissance season toward the end of his career he was with the Yankees and he got hurt I think again but when he was healthy yeah actually his the last three years of his career he had a 120 OPS or higher but each time it was like 113 games, 80 games, 44 games, and then he was done. But even then he could kind of hit. Yeah, he could. That 2012 season was a lot of fun. I think there was a lot of popular joy about his resurgence and the fact that he had found a role as a

part-time player with the Yankees, having success on a winning team, really crucial, some big hits. And that was a nice little phase after a lot of, after like four years where, I mean, the four years before that were every bit as bleak as say, the final four years of David Wright's career. He never played more than 175 plate appearances in those four years.

He was never anywhere close to average. I mean, four years is a long time for a player who was also at the time like the one highly paid player on the Oakland A's. And because of that, there was because of how much we filtered teams through their payrolls at the time, there was a sense that, you know, he was he was burdensome to them. And so that's that made it especially, think hard during those four years and so when he finally came out of that as as a as a valuable player who we had kind of thought was just playing out his contract until he could

retire it was really a joyful time all right JJ puts yeah I uh I don't remember that much specific about him other than that. He was very big and threw very hard and had one year where he struck out a ton of guys. That's what I remember. One good year. I was, uh, if I had to guess, I would guess it was, uh, I'm going to say a 1.15 ERA and a ton of strikeouts. That's what I remember. One good year. He was incredible. All right, I'm looking now. 1.38 ERA, 13th in MVP voting for Seattle. And it's very funny that we both mentioned

a ton of strikeouts because by the standards of just 10 years later, there weren't that many strikeouts. He was striking out 10 per nine. Big deal. And wasn't he in a big like wasn't he in like a big five for one trade from seattle where was he in like the franklin what uh darren o'day maybe was he in like a darren o'day trade or someone with franklinierrez, was he in a Franklin Gutierrez trade?

Who was he in? Yeah, a three-team trade with Sean Green and Jeremy Reed to the Mets. Yes, okay, so Sean Green, not Darren O'Day. Wait, is Sean, am I thinking of Sean? No, Joe Smith, Joe Smith, not Darren O'Day. Yes, Joe Smith was in it. And Franklin Gutierrez, yeah.

And Franklin Gutierrez, yeah. And so, yeah, he was basically a closer who got traded for like five pieces. That was Seattle's – that was the year that Seattle decided that they were going to commit to defense. And so they spent the offseason – this was the year I think after the Rays had gotten good all of a sudden and the articles were all about how the big change had been that they had upgraded their defense. And then the Mariners did the same thing, and they had this incredible defense on paper at the time, and Gutierrez was a part of that. And I think people were excited about the Mariners in 2009, is my recollection, because of the J.J. Putz trade. Yeah, well, they did well. I mean, that was like the, the Jack Z defensive makeover time, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Putts was a big part

of that. All right. Brad Penny. Boy, I mean, I, I don't really have any specific memories of Brad Penny. I don't think, uh, I mean, I remember who Brad Penny was, but as far as like specific years or seasons or anything, I don't know. I remember him as a right-handed Marlins pitcher. That's, he was pretty good for a while. Yeah. I remember Penny as being part of that Marlins rotation in 2003, which at the time, also in retrospect was it was really young and really deep. And it seemed like the Marlins could have a dynasty just on their pitching alone. So they had 25 year old Brad Penny, 21 year old Dontrell Willis in his rookie year, 23 year old Josh Beckett Beckett, 26-year-old A.J. Burnett. And they also had Mark Redman, who was good that year, and Carl Pavano, who was good that year. And I remember

Penny being part of that and vaguely remember liking him the most as the hipster Marlins pitcher to like, because he wasn't quite as heralded, but he had good strikeout to walk and ground ball rates. And so by whatever Pocota was using in 2004, he projected to be pretty good. And I think he had a couple of like really dominant starts at the time. And then wasn't he part of the Paul DiPodesta trades that everybody revolted against?

I don't remember. Yeah, he was traded for Paul LaDuca. So he was in the Paul LaDuca trade that got Paul DiPodesta, you know, basically run out of Los Angeles because DiPodesta had traded the human element. Penny was the main, Penny and Hisap Choi were the main players that the Dodgers got back. And the baseball prospectus position at the time was look at how the Dodgers just got these two great players. And the LA times position at the time was, can you believe that Google boy has traded away the heart and soul of the team? And when the Dodgers, I don't know, did they collapse that year or did they just fail to, to advance something? It was, I guess they didn't collapse

because they won the NOS, but maybe they didn't win the division series. It was seen as proof that Paul DiPodesta had blown it, had ruined it in the same way that like the John Lester trade that Billy Bean did was seen as flawed because they lost the wildcard game and they didn't have the heart

or whatever they needed at the time. So Brad Penny was that. Yeah. Which is weird to associate someone mainly with a trade that he was a good part of and yet cost a general manager's job. It's very weird. He's just such a he's just such a supporting player in that trade. and yet that's mostly I see Brad Penny as being significant to the Paul DePodesta story. She probably wasn't even that. Probably Paul DePodesta. I'm probably over-exaggerating how much that trade even factored into Paul DePodesta's eventual demise in Los Angeles.

Adam Dunn. All right. Well, I guess I remember a lot about Adam Dunn. I remember he hit like a 530-foot homer one time, or at least it was reported to be that long. like sabermetric versus old school stats kind of guy. Like he was a fire Joe Morgan guy who would come up because people would not like Adam Dunn, people who liked old school ways of playing the game or whatever. And saber people liked him because he hit homers

and he got on base and walked a lot. And then it was always like Adam Dunn versus Juan Pierre was something I wrote about when he retired because they had identical wars at the time, which was interesting because they were such dissimilar players. And I remember that he hit 40 homers a bunch of times. I think some consecutive seasons in there he had 40 homers. Yeah, I remember him hitting 159. homers yeah i remember him hitting 159 and i remember yeah that's right i remember him being fast when he came up that he was huge and had huge minor league numbers and he also was fast and when he was 22 he might have been the most physically impressive baseball player in the world

to me at the time he reminded me of of how I felt about Frank Thomas when Frank Thomas had come up and just looked like a high schooler playing against middle schoolers. And yeah, I loved Adam Dunn along with everybody else. It was part of the, part of the mid aughts culture war that you liked players like Adam Dunn and other people hated players like Adam Dunn and you would stand him to your death. So I loved Adam Dunn at the time, but you know. Yeah. All right. Let's see. Carlos Pena. Well, with Pena, obviously you remember the Moneyball stuff about how there was, you know, Carlos Pena versus Hattieburg controversy and then the A's traded him and then I really remember

how he broke out with the Rays in 2007 and was like one of the best hitters in baseball if not the best hitter in baseball and he was like a free agent signing that no one had really paid any attention to and he was not making much money but he was hitting 40

something homers all of a sudden and that kind of came out of nowhere yeah i remember carlos pena being left-handed yeah i mean i remember a lot of i remember him also the things you said but for some reason the first thing that came to my mind is he's left-handed and i just stuck on that i remember him being a really top prospect a name that you knew well before he made the major leagues. And I remember him, I don't know. I just, I guess I don't really remember. I just remember a left-handed power hitter. I mean, I remember other things, but I mostly remember him just being a classic left-handed power hitter who would come up with his left-handed

power and that's it. All right. Yeah. Paulico well i just i mean i remember how beloved he was by white socks fans i remember he had a big hit i mean he he caught the last out of the 2005 world series as a first baseman and he like ran out to the mound with his arms raised and i think he had he had alam in that series, like a come from behind Grand Slam. Maybe it was one of the earlier games. And so I remember that specific hit. But otherwise, I guess just sort of generally how long he was a White Sox and how popular he was there. Yeah, I remember imagining him as a catcher. I remember him being a major, like a 40 home run major leaguer and imagining him as a catching prospect, which

is what he originally was. And I don't know why, but I remember him. I remember him being a free agent in the year that the, the, before the last couple of years, the year when the free agent Okay. which is maybe as we had expected at the time. And I think Canerco got the biggest deal of the offseason, and it was for like $48 million. It wasn't like a big deal. There were no huge deals. So I remember him being a free agent that offseason as well. Raul Abanez? Well, I guess I primarily remember Jeff Sullivan's Twitter avatar of Raul Abanez

throwing the ball into the ground. But I also, on a more positive note, remember just Ibanez blossoming late and hitting like more homers in his 30s than a lot of legendary players. And like 2012, when the Yankees got him, he went on a pretty incredible run and he hit a ton of home runs for them in not a lot of playing time and then was super clutch in the postseason that year and had like a couple late game winning, I think, home runs. And there was like one game where he hit a game tying home run and then also hit a game winning home run. I think he had like a pinch hit for A-Rod in the middle of the game. Yeah, because A-Rod was hurt. Whoa, was he hurt? No, A-R rod was getting benched right well rod had been dropped to eighth in the lineup that series and then he didn't he actually just

get pinch hit for by raul abanaz or how abanaz had somehow be taken over in almost like a like a semi platoon with him that postseason well i think I think A-Rod was hurt. He had a hip thing, right? I think because he got surgery for it after the fact. So he wasn't inactive, but he was playing through injury at the time and he was bad. So yeah, I remember that. But yeah, just the general arc of his career was pretty extraordinary. Yeah. I, all of that, what you just said. First thing I think about is the drama in that postseason with A-Rod, though, where Ibanez was the other option

and was having the postseason of his life with these huge home runs. And so I just remember his role in that story. But yeah, I think I've said it before Abanez I don't even know if this is technically true but I always think of Abanez as a player who had a hall of fame 30s but you do most of your work getting to the hall of fame in your 20s so it's not like he got anywhere close to hall of fame levels but for half his, he was as good as most Hall of Famers are in the same period of their career, which doesn't count for that much, but always seemed like a pretty

impressive achievement. All right, Sean Figgins. Well, I remember how fun he was for a while with the Angels and then how unfun he was after that with the Mariners after they signed him to that deal. Or was it the Angels who signed him to the deal and then the Mariners acquired him? No, Mariners signed him to the deal. Okay. And yeah, he just kind of fell off the table after that. But for a while there, he was so fun because he was small and he would hit lots of doubles, right? And he got on base a lot and stole a ton of bases and would hit for high averages and was just sort of a spark plug who was quite valuable for a few years.

Yeah, I loved Sean Figgins at the time was maybe my favorite player in baseball. And I remember him for a few things. I remember him leading the league in walks, even though all he was was a super fast player with no power and like the last person you would walk. I've always been fascinated by players who walk a lot, even though your primary goal as a pitcher is just to not walk that player. You know, old Ricky Henderson is my classic example of that. I'm obsessed with the final years of Ricky Henderson's career. And Sean Figgins was kind of like that when he was good. You, all you had to do was just don't walk him. He can't hit it over the fence. He's going to steal second. And he led the league in walks. That's crazy. He led the league in walks. And so I loved that he was a super utility player. I used that word a lot when I was writing about him because he was a super utility player. I use that word a lot when I was writing about him

because he was a super utility player who would play everywhere. And then he finally got a position of his own with the angels and he was really good at it. He was, uh, uh, I thought a very underrated defensive third baseman and one of the best at the, at the time. I mean, I remember him, him and Beltre basically being the two best defensive third baseman in one of the best at the time. I mean, I remember him and Beltre basically being the two best defensive third baseman in the game. And I'm looking now, and in fact, that year, 2009, he was a plus 29 third baseman, according to baseball reference, which is a huge number for a third baseman. And so those are the things I remember about Sean Figgins. I love Sean Figgins. Yeah.

Also that he was very quiet. And Raphael Fercins. I love Sean Figgins. Yeah. Also that he was very quiet. And Raphael for call. His arm. I guess that's the thing that stands out the most. I wish we had stat cast for his arm because it was probably, I'd be curious to see how fast he was throwing because he just had a rocket arm. Yeah, for me, it's his speed. I remember him as the fastest player in baseball for a time. I don't know if he actually was, but he looked like the fastest when he ran. And he would do this little like he would do this running swinging thing, which was not quite a bunt, but was also not quite a swing. And I don't think I ever saw it work, but it looked like he was trying to invent a new way of hitting this sort of running half swing. So I remember him doing that. I think that when for call was in his first couple of years, he was maybe the most exciting player in baseball close to it, just in sort of the same way that Tatis is a now he was extremely fast, extremely strong, quite young, and knew how to hit really well. And he felt like he was going to beat you 100% of the time. And I'm looking now and it's really amazing how kind of unexceptional his numbers were.

I remember him being way better than these numbers. All right, Bobby Abreu. I loved Bobby Abreu. I loved Bobby Abreu. Well I guess for me what stands out is that he was traded to the Yankees at right around the time that I was starting to get into sabermetric stuff really in a big way so I think Baseball Between the Numbers which was kind of a formative book for me had come out I think that year earlier year, and that kind of converted me. And then the Yankees traded for him. They didn't give up much. As I recall, I think they gave up their former first round pick who never amounted to anything and a reliever or something. And they

got Bobby Abreu and he was so selective and so patient and he had such good on-base percentages even at that point in his career when it was toward the end it was just sort of a joy to watch him and as someone who had really become converted to the cult of on-base percentage and all of that not too long before that he was someone I really enjoyed watching and I think he took playing time maybe from Bernie Williams, which was sort of sad because Bernie was maybe my favorite player of all time. But that was right at the tail end of his career. And he was pretty much done at that point and had been done for a while. So it was bittersweet. But it was nice to see Abreu, who even at that point was just such a force in the batter's box and

really is like a near hall of famer not a hall of famer for me I don't think but but a great player I loved Bobby Abreu I think of him I remember him having the best eye in baseball yeah thinking of him mainly as that the player with the best eye in baseball. I also think of him as having one of the steepest aging curves as a defender. Very few players existed as good as he was when he was young in the field and as bad as he was when he was old in the field. And so I just think of his career arc as being kind of the typical, like that is what aging looks like to me is Bobby Abreu in the field going from young to old. And I love that he was such a good hitter. So good in the batter's box, uh, that it never, he, he, he never was a burden. He was even, even as a DH,

even as one of the worst defensive right fielders in his old age, he was still a fun player to have on your team. And somebody who probably if he came up to bat right now as a 47 year old, 46 year old, whatever he is against my team, I would probably still be nervous. Yeah. Probably still wouldn't swing at bad pitches, but he went, he went something like, Couldn't swing at bad pitches. He went something like, I think he went like 15 years without swinging at a 3-0 pitch, and then he finally did. He did have a reputation for being wall shy.

I don't know how merited it was, but people would certainly say that about him. He'd be afraid to crash into the wall, and so he would stand back and let catchable balls go over his head because he didn't want to go close to the wall. so he would stand back and and let catchable balls go over his head because he didn't want to go close to the wall jason giambi uh gosh i mean i remember him being sweaty very sweaty huge throbbing biceps vein and uh he just kind of like he went from this like long haired wild child with the a's to this shaved corporate type, just straight-laced guy with the Yankees, which was sort of a strange transition. But at least early in his Yankees career, he was still really excellent. He won an MVP award, right? And he was one of the best hitters in baseball for a few years there, just a really great hitter.

And then he had some weird, like he had a pituitary tumor or something, and he lost weight and he missed playing time. And I don't know what the story was there, but that sort of sapped him of some of his strength. But then he had that late period in his career when he became the veteran mentor. And he would go to like the Rockies or whatever and play 40 games or something, but be on the roster all year just for leadership, which was sort of surprising because no one would have projected that for Jason Giambi when he was young. Yeah, I remember those years, those late years most. They really stuck in my mind. And I particularly remember the year that he was with the rockies in that role when he was um when he was actually quite good as a pinch hitter uh he had like a

nine something ops as a pinch hitter and it seemed like uh that was his to me that was almost like his most fulfilling year because he was he was legendary around the game for his clubhouse presence at that point in a way that um i think was uh above the other clubhouse uh gods at the time and he was seen as like the titan of them all um and he had this really successful year as a 40 year old pinch hitter in a in an era where there are not many 40 year old pinch hitters anymore i also remember him having so his two incredible years at the beginning of the decade, and maybe that whole five-year run from like 2000 to 2005, I guess, so six-year run. This came when replacement level

was still kind of being figured out and war, which at the time was all there was, was warp was being figured out and being recalibrated and changing from year to year. And they went Warp 1 and then Warp 3. And if you look at those old articles at the time, which in my writing career, I have reason to often consult with old articles, which of course are still in the same amber that they were lodged in at the time. And so they haven't been changed or updated with the wars. And so you see these charts that have war as we knew it in 2003 or 2004. And you'll just come across a Jason Giambi season when he was, you know, he was the best player in the American League at the time. You'll come across a Jason Giambi season where he's like 18 war. And so in my mind, I just think of those few years of jason giambi as being above and beyond anything because they were like 18 war seasons and if you look at

them now they're like nine or ten more but all right cliff lee so cliff lee i think of as uh well being one of the best pitchers in baseball maybe the best pitcher in baseball for like a few years there. And another sort of late bloomer, I guess, because he had had that year where he was terrible. And then he went to the minors, right? And then he came back as a new man and won a Cy Young award. And it was amazing. And so I remember that transformation and just generally how great his control was and his minuscule walk rates and great strikeout to walk ratios. Yeah, the strikeout to walk ratio is what I think of. I mean, he was setting records at the time. He was leading the league at the time. And looking at it now, the strikeouts weren't that high. And now that we use strikeout minus walk rate more as an analytical relationship rather than strikeout to walk rate because of how it can be distorted by the denominator, basically, Cliff Lee probably would not rate quite so highly in my mind now as he did at the time but all the same i mean

these fips were outrageous he led the league in fip a couple of years uh and in 2000 like 2009 10 11 i probably i i'm pretty sure i thought he was the best pitcher in baseball and i don't see any reason to reassess that he probably was the best pitcher in baseball for maybe as many as five years. And that's great. Yeah. That's great. I'm glad he's on this ballot. He was definitely a Hall of Fame level pitcher for a non-Hall of Fame level length of time.

So 43 war in just 2,000 innings, which is a lot for 2,000 innings. All right. And the last first timer is, is Derek Jeter. And I don't really have an answer for that. I don't really, no single thing comes to mind. Derek Jeter is, is just a brand in a way that it's hard for me to think of him as anything

other than this bright, shining, famous thing that has always been there. So if I had to think of a single thing, it would probably be, I feel bad saying this. It is probably just the sheer mass of his negative defensive war, which I think is, it's a testament to how great he was that despite all of that, I have zero doubt that he is a hall of famer and an all-time great uh but it is a huge negative number and every time i look at it i i sort of like i mean his and gary sheffield's are

like the runaway negative defensive wars of our era of course he was a shortstop so he had defensive value that gary sheffield didn't but still it's a big number and i like looking at that page and being overwhelmed by the size of it yep yeah I mean I remember so many specific things about Jeter that we could do a whole podcast about it so I don't know that there's any one like obviously you remember the highlight plays that you've seen a million times the flip plays and the running into the stands to catch the ball play and all the jump and flip plays. And I mean, it's Derek Jeter. I remember all the commercials Derek Jeter was in. I remember who Derek Jeter dated. I remember the walk-off in his last game at Yankee Stadium. I mean, you know, there's a million Derek Jeter memories. You don't have to remember that guy because everyone

remembers that guy. All right. Well, we did them all. I'm glad't have to remember That guy because everyone remembers that guy All right well we did them all I'm glad we got to remember these guys Because as Meg Often points out we should remember them Even though they're not hall of famers most of them Just having long careers Getting on the ballot it's a big thing That deserves to be celebrated and I know that

Jay Jaffe has given each of them Their due in a series at Fangraphs So we have remembered those guys. Hope you have too. Yeah. And there really is almost no difference in a, in a, in a, there's almost no difference between these players that we just talked about and the actual hall of famers. The margin is so, so, so, so razor thin. And it's, uh, in a way it's a kind of a great injustice of the world that there's such a stark dividing line in how history remembers them and how we see them because um they they were also

huge parts of the sport and they maximized their talent and they were incredible and they were phenomenal and um so yeah remembered all right that will do it for today. Thank you for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already made that excellent decision, signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Michael Hamilton Hart, Ken Kopin, Joel Watts, Will Hickman, and Canard Pack. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. I think we will get to emails next time. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back

with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Forever Days disappeared Into months Into years All that feeling Forever Do you remember How when you were younger Summers all lasted

Forever Days disappeared We'll see you next time.