Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1489: Let’s Create an Award

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the symbolism of the baseball in Knives Out (beware of slight spoilers from 4:17 to 10:32), follow up on a few reader suggestions about outside hires who could clean up the Astros, and discuss the latest developments in the sign-stealing scandal, then try to invent a new end-of-season […]

So now he's out, cook him up, squash his head, cut him in the pot. Good morning and welcome to episode 1489 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast of fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg, the ringer. Hey, Ben. Hi. You saw Knives Out. I did. I also just saw Knives Out.

It is wonderful, fun, very smart. Everything that people were saying about it two months ago. I know I'm a bit late here to the conversation but it is as they said but i wanted to talk about it for a moment because it is the perfect example i think of what i meant a long ago when i said that when i said that any movie that has acknowledgement of baseball explicitly in it is is a baseball movie. Now, that was a somewhat flippant statement that was easily turned into a lot of annoying Facebook posts. However, I meant it, and Knives Out, I think, is the perfect example of what I meant and why I meant it. So Knives Out has a baseball in it.

A baseball appears. We bantered about this. You and I? Yeah, I think it was us, right, before you in it. A baseball appears. We bantered about this. You and I? Yeah, I think it was us, right? Before you saw it. So maybe you didn't really register what I was talking about. Really?

I brought up the fact that there was a baseball in it because I wanted to briefly discuss just the qualities of a baseball as compared to other types of sports balls when it comes to holding them. Oh, yeah, I do remember that. How satisfying it feels to hold a baseball as compared to other types of sports balls when it comes to holding them. Oh, yeah. I do remember that. How satisfying it feels to hold a baseball and toss it around and throw it and catch

it and rub it around your hands. It is great. And I'm brought up having a bowling pin instead. Yes, exactly. So that was about Knives Out, which you had not seen at that point. All right. So one of the subjects of this movie has a baseball at his study desk. Yes.

And, you know, this is a movie that is very much a constructed setting. So the scenery is all really important to the situation. It's a murder mystery, right? So anytime you have a murder mystery, you're watching very closely for the scenery, for the looking at the rugs, you're looking at the lighting, you're very aware of what the window situation is. So for instance, there are a lot of sweaters in it. And when I came out of the movie, the person I saw the movie with was commenting about the sweaters and how noticeable the sweaters were and how she liked the sweaters. And then we went home and in fact, there are articles about the sweaters were and how she liked the sweaters. And then we went home and, and in fact, there are articles about the sweaters in this movie.

So nothing is, is presumed to be, I mean, for good reason, everything is presumed to be part of the director's vision or the other people that go into making the movie. And there are no real throwaway details because you know that everything had to be constructed.

They did not simply walk onto a set and say, let's make a movie on this set. They had to build the set from the ground up, and every detail was intentionally chosen. And this movie in particular, I think really you get that feeling. Everything has to be chosen. And so they chose a baseball. Now, this is a setting that has a lot of decorative details that are

really important to the to the owner of the home. So there's a lot of, you know, kind of macabre elements that you see some of them very obvious, and some of them that you pick up in the corners, paintings, and you know, knives, actual knives, there's a lot of knives, and you get the feeling that you do in fact live in the home of a murder mystery writer and then you've got this baseball and this baseball and in some ways might seem a little well not out of place but it's very prominent it's displayed quite prominently on the desk and so you think well why is that a baseball why isn't that his grandfather's watch why isn't that his i don't know class ring why isn't that a you know a duck

drinking water whatever right it's a baseball and so that's you know you start by thinking well why did they put a baseball there and then the baseball starts to move around and i'm gonna i think at the end of this i'm going to uh there will be a minor spoiler a spoiler to a subplot of the movie not the main spoiler so So I think if you plan to watch this movie in the next six months, I would not listen to the next couple minutes. If you plan on watching it maybe more than six months from now, I think you're probably safe. You will forget this detail and it's not crucial, but all right. So the baseball is sitting on his desk. He has the main character. Well, not the main character. The subject of this murder has had a conversation with his son-in-law in which he reveals that he has incriminating information about his son-in-law.

The son-in-law sneaks into the study after the death has occurred to try to find this incriminating detail. And at the end of his search, he feels like he is now in the clear that he is not going to be busted for this incriminating material. And he picks up the baseball and ponders it for a moment. And then he tosses it outside. Okay, so the baseball has moved from the study to the yard. Not long after, the lead detective is walking through the yard, sees the baseball. It's out of place. He quizzically looks at it, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket.

Not a big deal is made out of it, but you do notice this. The baseball then disappears from the action for a while, maybe, I don't know, 45 minutes or so later when the game is clearly afoot and the detective is scouring the house. A dog is in his vicinity. He pulls the baseball out of his hand, throws the baseball for the dog to play catch with, and then he sees that the dog has deposited a clue at his feet.

And then now the baseball is gone again for a while. And then 45 minutes later, the dog appears again with the baseball in a family gathering. A family member takes the baseball out of the dog's mouth. It is at this point that the main action of the story is all resolved. this point that the main action of the story is all resolved we are now in denouement and the person who has taken the baseball delivers it back to its natural resting place on the study desk while there she sees the information that was supposed to be incriminating and that then in delivering the baseball back she is exposed to the incriminating information and that final subplot is resolved. And so in one sense, the baseball is almost just it's like an editing trick. It's like title cards for new scenes.

It's like saying there's a little bit of shift in the action. There's a little bit of directional shift in the detective work. Right. And so it plays a role in that as a fun detail. But again, you get into the question, well, why a baseball? Is it just because it can be thrown and can be picked up and can roll? I don't think it is. I think it's significant that it's a baseball because the final resolution of this subplot is between a daughter and her father. The daughter has previously given a speech about how daughters and fathers have a sort of a secret language

that they and only they can communicate in. That when you have that parent-child relationship, you communicate on a level that is not necessarily, that is a very narrow cast form of relationship. And that is shown in this movie in a very specific way. I think it's also shown, though, in the presence of the baseball, that she sees the baseball. She knows that this baseball is significant to her father. It's on the study desk. He doesn't have a baseball on his desk because somebody decorated his desk for him. You put that in your study desk because

that baseball means something to him. So we know that A, he probably loves baseball. B, that ball in particular is probably really significant to him for some reason. Either he played with that baseball and saved it, or it is a memento of some baseball that he loves. And so in that way, her recognizing the significance of it and delivering it back to him to his desk where she then sees his protectiveness of her and the fact that he had gotten this incriminating information about her sleazy husband shows that that baseball is the unbreakable thread in their relationship it is that thing that they shared is that connection that through which which their love is bound. And I think this is ultimately, in a significant way, this is a movie about how baseball is a part of the parent-child relationship that is indestructible and that is super significant. And so to me, baseball movie, right?

It is a movie about baseball. You think that's the main takeaway? I think that is one of the main takeaways. Yeah, I do. I do. I think that that is a movie about baseball you think that's the main takeaway i think that is one of the main takeaways yeah i do i do i think that that is a crucial takeaway that that baseball traveled around and you know you had your a plot which is the solving the murder and you know what's going to happen to marta and what's going to happen with the detective but then you have this subtext which is about the relationship between the father and his children. And most of those relationships have deteriorated, but you still have this strand that is strong

between him and his daughter. And it is not quite as vibrant as it was probably when she was a child, but it still exists. It is still significant to them and it's still significant to him. And in resolving that, in that final resolution, it really is a emotionally satisfying conclusion to this story. And it all depends on a that baseball circling the property and eventually finding its way back home through the daughter and be the fact that it is itself that it is explicitly I think that it is explicitly a baseball and not a knife or some you know knickknack or a rubik's cube or whatever it's like there's an emotional resonance to a baseball that i think we all kind of pick up what baseball signifies between families so so yes i do think it's a significant

detail that it's baseball i think it's a baseball movie all right i'm gonna see if i can go to the source and find out if your interpretation is correct. All right. But I like that theory. I hadn't thought about it quite that deeply. I was aware that the baseball sort of migrated throughout the movie and that it comes back to where it started. And as you said, it could be as simple and superficial as you have to throw it to a dog so that a dog could get it. And what else could it be other than a tennis ball, I guess, and who would keep a tennis ball displayed on their desk? A baseball is the thing that makes the most sense. But I think given the fact that everything about that movie was so well considered and in its place for a reason or multiple reasons even,

I think that's a compelling case. And if I had written and directed that movie and not thought of that, I would retroactively say that I had subconsciously considered that because I like the way that works. All right. I have a topic today, but I have still been not online. And so I don't know much about what's been happening the last three days. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to tell me whether there's anything else that's happened in baseball that we need to talk about, particularly, I don't know, well, maybe particularly tweet related, but not necessarily tweet related. Ben, what's been going on? Well, nothing to the degree of what we discussed last Thursday.

There were some follow ups to what we talked about. Jack McDowell, whose birthday it was on that Thursday, coincidentally, he came out the day after and he sort of injected himself into the sign stealing scandal by blowing the lid on the 1980s White Sox and their sign stealing scandal. He just he didn't want to be left out. He made it sound like he felt bad for the players today who are getting blamed for this because it's been going on in some form forever and so he wanted to give an example of another time that it happened or i don't know maybe he just wanted to be in the baseball news but he detailed this story he was on the 1980s white socks and he said that they were doing something similar with a camera out in a scoreboard sign in the outfield and that tony lara was the one who came up with it. And he cast some shade on Tony La Russa because Tony La Russa did that and also presided

over the notable steroid teams, one of the early steroid using teams, and yet still is revered in a Hall of Famer and has a job in baseball and all of that. So it seemed like maybe he had an axe to grind against tony rusa and that's why he felt like making that public but i am kind of curious to see if other players will come out and share their sign stealing schemes now that everyone's doing it wait do you really think that you maybe he maybe the quotes were more clear about this but i would feel like if i had played on a team in the 80s that had had a wide-ranging sign stealing system I would definitely be telling everybody about it right now because it's fun and I wouldn't necessarily take that as a sign of spite toward the manager I I'm I would be the the biggest

evidence that Jack McDowell's not right about this is that you would think it would have it would have come out by now and the reason think it would have come out by now. And the reason that it would have come out by now is because after a certain amount of time, cheating scandals are no longer scandalous, but they're fun. And they're part of the charm of the past. In fact, I was wondering how long the Astros would have needed to get away with it before this was no longer a blemish on either their team accomplishment or their individual accomplishments. Like for instance, I imagine

that if Carlos Beltran had been managing the Mets for eight years and Alex Cora had been managing the Red Sox for 10 years and AJ Hinch had been managing the Astros for 11 years and this all came out in 2028, then none of them would have lost their jobs. I don't know if eight years from now is enough. I was trying to figure out how many years it would take before nobody has to apologize for this. And I think that whatever Jack McDowell is describing, if it had come out three months ago, nobody, even if he had concrete evidence and tapes and surveillance and everything, I don't think there would have been a single apology for it. Now, given the conversation we're having right now, where we are in the middle of a sign stealing scandal and things that happened 25 years ago are in a way made current because we're having

a current re-negotiation about whether cheating is part of the game or not. Now I think maybe somebody would have to apologize for it. But in general, getting away with cheating in baseball is good as long as fine, has been acceptable, has been easily forgiven as long as you actually get away with it. Yeah, that's the thing that really sets this current scandal apart, I think, is that A, it surfaced so soon after it happened, whereas in the previous scandals that have come to light Generally, we heard about them years later

And it was kind of cloaked in this quaintness of a previous era and how it was so long ago We're not gonna relitigate how good that team was necessarily and the players aren't still on that team That's what really sets the scandal apart is that it's largely the same players still on this team. And so they still pose a threat to everybody. Yes, exactly. They're still arguably the best team in baseball. And so that's a big part of it, I think. But yeah, Jack McDowell,

I don't know exactly what his motivations were, but he says, we had a system in the old Comiskey Park in the late 1980s. The Gatorade sign out in center had a light. There was a toggle switch in the manager's office and camera zoomed in on the catcher. I'm going to whistleblow this now because I'm getting tired of this crap. There was that. Tony La Russa is the one who put it in. He was also the head of the first team where everyone was doing steroids, yet he's still in the game making half a million, you know? No one is going to go after that.

It's just this stuff is getting old where they target certain guys and let other people off the hook. So I don't know. It sounds like he's bitter about something. hear it happening which just makes it so inarguable and so unavoidable and inescapable and just makes it seem so bold and brash like they just were daring everyone to catch them essentially and you can't really see that with any of the previous sign stealing scandals because you can't go back and see the binoculars or see the telescope or see the sign out on the scoreboard or whatever it is. You just have to kind of take it for granted or take the player's words for it. And that's not quite the same. I just control-effed White Sox in Paul Dixon's Hidden Language of Baseball,

and there's another White Sox sign-stealing scandal in the 50s. June 23, 1956, the New York Times carried the story that Baltimore Orioles manager Paul Richards, who had just been swept in four games at Comiskey Park, had lodged a formal complaint with American League president Will Herridge that the White Sox were stealing signs with the aid of a scoreboard telescope. Herridge replied that there was no rule against sign stealing. And so it just, it happens over and over. So I don't know why McDowell did that, but that briefly became a story. And then there was another story because Congress got involved or tried to get involved, expressed a desire to get involved. Representative Bobby Rush sent a letter suggesting that Congress hold hearings on this basically because won't anyone think of the children and ethics and sportsmanship and all of that.

So even though no laws are being broken here the way that they were in the PD steroids scandal, there's still always a desire for Congress to inject itself into baseball's business, which as long as baseball has an antitrust exemption, I guess that's fair game. Did anybody refute Jack McDowell? Not that I saw. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah.

And what is Tony La Russa up to these days? What is he? Is he with the Diamondbacks now? He was with the Red Sox, and then I think he was with the Diamondbacks, and maybe he still is. He's Angels, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Two months ago joined the senior advisor. Yeah. So if the Angels had signed Carlos Beltran two months ago to be their senior advisor, we would probably assume that he would be fired in this current climate, right? I mean, or was Beltran only fired because he was the manager? If Beltran had been signed as the hitting instructor for the Mets, would he still have a job?

I think so. Okay. Yeah, maybe so. And so senior advisor, he would still have a job. It's just that he's the manager. Although, I don't know, hitting instructor, I guess you wouldn't want your hitting instructor to be the one who is stealing signs either. And if you had a hitting instructor, there's lower stakes to the firing, right? I mean, who really cares hitting

coaches get fired left and right anyway so why even retain his services so yeah i think there'd maybe be a little less concern about the corrupting influence but maybe not that much less concern and given that you don't really lose that much from firing a hitting coach maybe it still would have happened okay yeah and i see i see here that mike schilt said a couple days ago that he knew that the cardinals knew of other teams cheating so that i i think we've heard of suspicions if i'm not mistaken i feel like this is not suspicion but new maybe i'm wrong about that i'm not reading it that closely right now because i'm talking to you i just continued to control f in dixon and I came across a reference here to maybe what McDowell was talking about, although McDowell's not named.

But it says the period from the mid 1970s until the decade of the 1990s was largely devoid of accusations of stealing with or without electronics from any point beyond the playing field. from any point beyond the playing field. In 1990, the first charges of theft by television in many years occurred when the Baltimore Orioles accused the Chicago White Sox of cheating by putting coach Joe Nosek in the stands behind the first base dugout at Memorial Stadium so that he could look into the Oriole dugout, pick up signs flashed by then-manager Frank Robinson, and relay them by walkie-talkie to Chicago manager Jeff Torborg. The American League dismissed the accusations.

In April 1991, the Orioles again accused the White Sox of electronic espionage when they discovered that the video room at the new Comiskey Park was directly behind the White Sox dugout, providing manager Torborg and his coaches easy access to the catcher's signs, as shown by the centerfield camera, as well as the dugout and third base coach manager frank robinson who you suggested if he were still with us would be a good uh straight arrow genero to right the ship in houston said i'm convinced they are the one team that cheats and i guess according to mcdowell he was right about that yeah wow so the exact that's essentially the exact same scheme without the trash can yeah pretty much okay all right anything else well the astros had their fan fest over the weekend great timing on that i guess there would be no great time to have an astros fan fest jose

altuve and alex bregman were the big stars there altuve essentially said that the astros will prove people wrong and be back in the World Series and sort of cast this almost as an obstacle to be overcome, whereas Bregman was basically like name, rank, and serial number, just sort of saying that MLB did what it did and the Astros did what they did and he's just going to go out and play baseball. So less than satisfying, but short of completely coming clean and acknowledging their wrongdoing and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court, I don't know what actually would have helped. I guess that was an option, but it seems like they've decided that this is the line they're

sticking to. And we all know that the Astros PR approach has worked so well over the past few months. Beyond that, not much news. Just following up on that straight arrow Gennaro discussion, since we talked about that on our last episode, someone asked us who would be the equivalent of that coach from Necessary Roughness who could come in and clean the Astros' reputation. And we got a couple suggestions for Joe Maurer, just because he's squeaky clean. He's Joe Maurer. And Joe Maurer, as it happens, actually did comment on this sign stealing scandal just a couple days ago. He said what they did, it's cheating. To me, in my eyes, it's the same as using steroids or cheating certain ways like that.

So it's really disappointing. And guys that are playing it the right way, you're angry. It's just not a good thing. But I'm glad that they're coming out and punishing guys that are not doing it the right way. So that was a suggestion. We also got a suggestion for Dale Murphy because I guess he was like the Joe Maurer of the 80s and 90s. He's similarly squeaky clean and just unbesmirched reputation. So that's another one.

I think someone else may have suggested Dusty Baker, who is actually interviewing for the job. So that's a pretty good one too ken griffey jr was mentioned because of his clean image and uh someone suggested nolan ryan too i guess just on the basis of his being an enforcer and also he was fairly recently let go right by the astros or decided to leave on his own but nolan r Ryan was an executive advisor to Jim Crane since 2014. So he may be too close to the organization to be seen as a new outside voice. Yeah. I mean, three names that you might naturally think of have all been what? Either

interviewed or maybe not interviewed, just suggested for managerial roles in Boston or Houston, which are Dusty Baker, Bruce Bochy, and Buck Showalter. And so all of those, those three all have a certain amount of authority in the game. So those seem reasonable. Stacey Abrams, I was thinking. Uh-huh. Yeah. But you declared that it had to be someone in the game.

Yeah. All right. Let's see. Wow. I'm continuing to read about this. This Joe Nosek, the coach for the White Sox, was just notorious at the time for sign stealing. He told Sports Illustrated in 1997 he might go weeks without detecting a key sign, but that when he did, he could turn a game around. who was behind the dugout looking into the dugout yeah so this was uh this was that first scheme yeah separate i guess from the tv cameras yeah because it would i could see it taking a couple weeks to figure out what the what the sacrifice bunt sign is but the sign signs for pitches uh

unless you're going with the multi-signal thing which you would only do if you were being very suspicious, nearly paranoid. They're very simple. There's just one, two, three, four. So I would not think it would take very long to decode this. Some teams were said to be so afraid that their signs would be stoned by Nosek that teams came to Chicago with a new system. So yeah, I guess Jack McDowell's not really breaking news here. He's just sort of corroborating news that everyone had forgotten. Uh-huh. Yeah. All right. Okay. Okay. What's Jack McDowell's not really breaking news here. He's just sort of corroborating news that everyone had forgotten. Uh-huh, yeah.

All right. Okay. Okay. What's Jack McDowell doing these days? Other than throwing Tony La Russa under the bus, I'm not sure. Okay. Do you remember the name of Jack McDowell's band? No.

I thought that it was something else. I don't remember. It was a view. V-I-E-W was his first band their most notable accomplishment was touring with the smithereens in 1992 his second band stick figure that's his uh that's his second band stick figure uh lowercase s all right i think he's a college coach now queen's university of charlotte all right they play the game the right way. No cheating there. Yeah. So the Hall of Fame inductees are going to be announced Tuesday. So I've been thinking about awards, about recognitions, and about how they come to confer an authority that everybody accepts.

And it's not a given, right? Like I think we've mentioned this before, but you and I could declare that we were going to start giving out an award uh for like our own hall of fame call it something else call it the effectively wild hall of all-time champions or something and we could we could vote and you could need to have uh two-thirds of of the three of us on this podcast to get inducted into the hall of all-time What did we call it? I forget. What did you?

Yeah, I forget the name that we settled on 12 seconds ago. But yeah, nobody would show up for it though. Nobody would show up for this induction. It wouldn't be a big deal. And so somehow some awards become really convincing. Everybody wants them. Everybody recognizes them. Everybody argues over them. We put a lot of debate into the way that these things are given out. We all sort of take a sense of ownership. I mean, I don't have a Hall of Fame vote yet. And yet I've been arguing about, I've, you know, at various points in my life, I've argued about how the Hall of Fame should even induct people, even though I'm not one of the voters.

And we feel this way about the MVP award. We have these huge controversies over who's the 10th spot on somebody's ballot. And so those mean a lot to us. And then other ones, they don't mean much to us. And for instance, Silver Slugger is not as big a deal as Gold Glove as an award, even though hitting is both a bigger part of the game from a player value perspective and is much more likely to make a player famous than good fielding. And yet the Silver Slugger award largely goes without even announcement i don't like i don't know who won the silver i can kind of deduce who was likely to win the silver slugger

award uh but i don't remember those being announced this year i don't remember the finalists are there finalists i don't know if there are finalists whereas gold glove i could tell you a lot about gold glove winners i could tell you a lot about Gold Glove winners. I could tell you who the record holders are for most Gold Gloves at every position. I could tell you within a pretty small margin of error how many Gold Gloves every player of the last 30 years has won. And so Gold Glove, big deal. Silver Slugger, not as big a deal.

MVP, huge deal. Hank Aaron Award, which is for the best player yeah the best position player not the most valuable but the best position player which is a much clearer award and i think when people complain about mvp results they often say well we should it should be more like the hank aaron award for the best player and yet the hank aaron award despite being theoretically a much cleaner less controversial award is not really a significant i don't know when they announced that i don't even know who votes on that do i vote on that i don't think so i don't know what you get the results are significantly different like i don't either i don't know we always say this it'd be

nice if the mvp were best player not most valuable but i don't actually know if always say it'd be nice if the MVP were best player, not most valuable, but I don't actually know if the Hank Aaron Award is better. Like how many Hank Aaron Awards does Mike Trout have? I don't know. It's a great question. And certainly you have no idea how many second place finishes he has. Whereas, you know, I know his placement for every MVP season over his career. I can tell you right now, I can tell you with some accuracy

what the top 25 results were for the MVP voting this year. Chuck has two. He has two Hank Aaron awards. He has fewer Hank Aaron awards than MVPs. Fewer than MVPs. Wild. Yeah. And so I don't know.

Am I going to bring this into a directed conversation i'm not quite sure yet i've been thinking about it though i think i am i think i have a way of framing this conversation but so i guess i have two two options for how we can direct this conversation you are a fielding bible voter now correct how many years have you been a fielding bible voter i want to say three okay i love the fielding bible awards The Fielding Bible Awards are like the Gold Glove Award, except for they only give one for the whole, for all of the major leagues. They are voted by, quote, sabermetrically inclined journalists and bloggers. Each person gets a ballot of 10 names. All the ballots are published. of 10 names, all the ballots are published. And so what you end up with is a very, I would say,

very accurate results, be very transparent, you can see all 100 names or whatever it is that are that are named at each position. And so you don't just know who won, but you know, who finished sixth and who finished ninth and who finished ninth one year and second the next year. And so then it becomes, in a way, impressive data for tracking a player's defensive rise or decline. And you- One per position, by the way. It's not by league, but there's a fielding Bible per position. One per position per the whole majors. So there's not an AL and an NL, gold glove, second baseman. There's just a fielding Bible,

second baseman. Yeah. And so like when I was blogging about the Angels, for instance, the fielding Bible was great content because you could really dig into it. You didn't just have the,

he either won or he didn't win for a player, but you had where he finished. You had how many votes he got you had you even had which type of voters voted for him so you could maybe draw a distinction between well peter gammons had this person first but baseball info well i think maybe there's a baseball and what there's also isn't there a a non-human voter like a like drs is yeah or something like that in the fielding bible i don't think so. BIS Video Scouts has a ballot.

So those are people, but it's not a named person. And so that kind of represents, I guess, the, I don't know. I don't know what you would consider that to be. Maybe you would consider that a more committee style vote. Maybe you would consider it a more objective style. But you also have the Tango fan poll has had a ballot in years. It doesn't now, but it has in the past and so the ability to compare a player's results on the different type of ballots you have more

sabermetric types and less sabermetric types this ballot had you know peter gammons would have a vote and bill james would have a vote and so those might be quite quite different and you could say so anyway really rich source of interesting storylines and data and all of that. It is also, I would say, it's fair to say, not something that most players who have won the Fielding Bible are even necessarily aware of. It is not famous in the way that a gold glove is famous. It's not likely to be on any Hall of Fame plaques the way that your gold gloves are

certain to be on Hall of Fame plaques. And I don't know if you get I don't know if there's a trophy. I don't know if you get a presentation before the start of a game the next season, despite it being, I would say a much better way of deciding who will win than the gold gloves have, particularly gold glove voting before a few years ago when they revised it and made it more accurate. It doesn't have the same cachet. And so one way that we could have this conversation is we could talk about what we would do to the fielding Bible awards to theoretically over the course of a decade or something, raise it in profile to gold glove. Another thing we could do is just say, if we were going to invent an award right now, what would be our plan for over the course of, you know, one generation of baseball players

to change it, to grow it from idea that we had on our podcast to something that would on our podcast to something that would have cachet among players, fans be known and be appear on a Hall of Fame plaque. So which one do you want to do? I guess the second one. All right, so let's figure out an award and let's come up with a business plan for making this a significant award. So first, what do we want first, what do we want to write? Do we want to recognize something that is already recognized, but we're going to do it better, a la the Fielding Bible Awards? Or do we want to invent something, an award for something that is not currently recognized?

Like, for instance, we could do Best Team. We could do a Best Team award, and you give it to the best team. Or there's something like a modern, you could do a best team award and you give it to the best team or yeah you know there's something like a modern you could do best team defense best ensemble cast uh to knives out in 2019 no doubt about it best ensemble cast knives out or you could do best middle reliever or best you know like i don't know how you would describe it but relieve there is an award for best closer there's also an award for best pitcher that tends to go to a starter maybe there's a award for a modern reliever usage or something best bench coach best coaching staff best um player development team uh what would we

want to what would we want to recognize i think it does have to be something fairly niche, right? Because most of the major awards are taken for obvious reasons. So that's a problem. And related to your first option for what we could talk about here, just finding a way to make the Fielding Bible Awards bigger than the Gold Gloves, it's hard to do that. It's hard to overtake an award that has seniority, that has name recognition, that has history. I mean, that's the whole reason why we know the MVPs and we don't know the Hank Aaron Awards because Hank Aaron Awards go back 20 years, right? And MVPs go back, I guess, in their current form, what, more than 60 years and then in other forms for decades before

that so there's no continuity with the hank aaron award so you can't say well mickey mantle won three of them and so we can compare this current player to an earlier era's players and say he must be better because he has more hank aaron You can't do that. And that's like half the fun of awards, right, is using it as kind of a barometer of a player's career accomplishments, which you can't do if it's something you're inventing out of scratch, unfortunately. Well, you say half the fun. I would argue that it's considerably less than half the fun. It's part of the fun, but much less than half the fun.

And my evidence for that is that it did not take very long for the MVP award to become the MVP award to become a very high profile. It did not take very long for rookie of the year award or gold glove award to be something that was commonly cited among the players accomplishments. It did not take very long for the all-star game to become a significant part of a player's resume. And so now those were not competing with previous iterations of the same award. And those are big ones. Those are best player, best fielder, et cetera. Right. Yeah.

So they're clearer. I mean, but I would just say that the continuity was not a crucial. I mean, Babe Ruth played in a much of his career was played in a non-MVP era. played in a much of his career was played in a non-mvp era and then the part that he did play was in a you could only win the mvp award once era so babe ruth only won one mvp award but i don't think that in the 50s and 60s and 70s people said well what does it mean that mickey manil and willie mays are winning these mvp awards but we can't compare them to Babe Ruth so I don't know that the continuity is necessary to those things yeah maybe not I think it helps and and yeah I mean if you were the first on the block and you staked out that territory then that's one thing if you're coming along now and you're trying to displace the acknowledged leader in that category that's tough to do I

think you could if we were inventing a stat from scratch and a word from scratch you could backfill it depending on on what the stat is that's an option you could say well here's who would have won all those other years like we did for saves for instance when they invented saves as an official statistic we've since gone back and said that these were the saves in the years before anyone knew what a save was. But it's not quite as satisfying because, of course, people were not trying to get saves. They were not managing towards saves at that time. And so it's hard to compare to an era when that stat meant something and people were actually trying

to attain saves. And that would be sort of similar for awards. I mean, it depends. If it's a very objective award, then perhaps you could go back and do that depending on what it is. But a lot of the value, I think, of awards is knowing how a player or whatever we're awarding it to was perceived at the time, right? Even if it was perceived poorly, even if you look back at the old BBWA awards and you say, how the heck did this guy win that year? It's sort of useful to know just from a historical standpoint, who people thought was the most valuable at that time, even if based on what we know now, they were horribly wrong. So that's part of it, right? Just like the value of knowing how a player was perceived in his era and you can't really go back and fill that in after the fact no when i mean i challenged you

on your half of the fun is the continuity i think it's much less but i think you are right that much more than half of the fun is the perception uh factor of it that the awards that work the re i think one of the reasons that well i, I guess maybe the Mike Trout example defies us, but I think one of the reasons that MVP is more popular than Hank Aaron Award, part of it, I think, is that MVP is by design subjective. And while we get angry when people don't vote according to our preferred objective models of value. We also value the award because it is not a leaderboard sort, but it is in fact a poll of perceptions that that's what gives it value. And the more in a way, the more ambiguity that you introduce, the more subjectivity you introduce, the more the award

justifies its existence. You don't need an award to tell me who finished in the top, say, 2% of career war, which is one way that you could do Hall of Fame induction. But you do need an award to tell me who got 75% of 500 specific voters representing some sort of attempt at capturing public opinion during the course of the player's career. And for that reason, Hall of Fame voting seems to be still very powerful. I think if Hall of Fame voting all was actually really overlapped career wars perfectly, I think it would actually matter less. When you get the call from the Hall of Fame, it's telling you something that you needed the verification of. You needed them to vote so that they could tell you you were as good as you thought you were. If you had an objective number that always said that you were as good as you thought you were, then you would not need people to come and reassure you about it. You would just consult the record. as reflected through the eyes of people who watched that creates a powerful, I don't know, reassurance to a player or like a validation to the player. And so you could create a stat,

right? Like you're saying, you could create an award that you could backfill if it were very objectively derived. Like for instance, you could create a win probability added stat that you couldn't call it MVP because we already have MVP, but you could declare an award for the player who did the most to help his team win in a very precisely measured way. And that you could backfill very easily. You could go back and do find out who would have won that award in 1912 using the same metrics. But that award wouldn't be measuring the perception and therefore wouldn't have as much value. I think it would not catch on in the same way. Then it would just be a stat rather than an award.

It's weird that there's like a difference between a stat and an award. And what these awards that tend to catch on, you incorporate stats into your voting, but they are not themselves a shocking winner because nobody thought that he was that good or you didn't think he was that good but also that are surprising enough that you actually have to wait and see who will win it that the suspense of finding out who will win it seems very important to it yeah yeah it's a tough environment to create a new award now because I think we need awards less than we used to because there's so much information that's accessible to everyone that what do we even need a jury of peers to vote on, right? Because in the past it was like, well, I mean, most people couldn't follow baseball from afar. I mean, you'd read about it in the

newspapers. Maybe at a certain point you'd about it in the newspapers, maybe at a certain point you'd hear it on the radio, but you could not see the games every day the way that we can with MLB TV and game day and all of that. And so you needed these people who were in the press box every day and who were seeing the players and talking to the players. It was understood that they knew something that you couldn't know from home and now i'm not sure that's true and now in fact there may be ways in which being around a team all day clouds your judgment or makes you biased in some way not necessarily sometimes it makes you better at appraising performance but it could go either way and meanwhile we all have access to a lot of the

same information and so we're heading for a time, and I don't know exactly when we will get there, but we're heading for a time where I think we feel like performance is fairly well quantified. I mean, we feel like it's fairly well quantified now, but a few years down the road, we have stat cast war and probably it will break things down in an even more granular way than we have right now. And you'll have 10 different ways to judge value. And I don't know what a human could bring to the process, which is something that I think about even when I'm voting for the Fielding Bible Awards right now, because I'm not injecting much of my own subjective judgment into my voting because I don't feel like I see

enough of any one individual fielder's games to say he is better than the stats say he is or worse than the stats say he is. It's very difficult to do that. So often what I'm doing when I'm voting is looking at all of the stats at my disposal and saying, well, this stat says that and this stat says that. And I'm almost doing like a wisdom of crowds kind of thing and weighting them based on how much I trust them. And, you know, maybe I'm looking at some things and maybe I'm calling on examples that I have in my head, but I know that I probably shouldn't do that because I might remember one person's best play or another person's worst play, and then that would just skew things. So it's almost like I'm not really bringing much subjective judgment to it. Other than that, I know the information that's out there, and I can kind of weigh it and look it all up and maybe sum it up in a sense in my head. So I feel like that's kind of where as much so i mean they care they care about

someone's character but i think they care more about who's a good player and they know that without having to wait for 30 people to vote on it and tell them who they thought the best player was yeah you know i mean you're right that in a way we need these awards less than we ever have and yet i don't feel like we pay them any less attention or that we get any less. Some of us do get less exercised about them, but for the most part, they are still a big deal. We, they are a big enough deal that in fact, there are, I think more calls to reform voting, uh, than, than there were in previous generations. There were changes, there've been changes in the voting for some of these awards

because people still take them seriously. And ultimately, I think that there's still almost as much subjectivity in Hall of Fame voting. I wrote about this a couple of years ago. But while we've had some players get elected who I think sabermetric types were really excited to see them recognized. Overall, if you just compare two pair players based on how similar they are, you still often see a very wide range of Hall of Fame support despite very similar careers. And so it shows that there's still a ton of subjectivity.

There are 60 war players who make the Hall of Fame in their first or second ballot. And there are 60 war players who get like literally zero votes. And you might be able to very easily look and say, oh, well, yeah, Vlad Guerrero and Jim Edmonds, despite their war, were not actually equal players. But A, that's subjective. Like that's you. You are also making that subjective choice. And B, they're not so different that one is obviously off the ballot entirely after the first time. And the other is a pretty non-controversial inductee. Same thing with like Craig Biggio and Roberto Alomar, who are have roughly the same war as like Scott Rowland and Kenny Lofton. And same thing with Billy Wagner and Trevor Hoffman. And so same thing with Mike Mussina, who did make it in, but took a long time to do it, and John Smoltz.

And so there's still just as much subjectivity as there ever was. So while we might feel that we don't need the Hall of Fame voting as much as ever, it still holds, it still basically does the same thing it always did. And it is still, it has not lost any of its prestige whatsoever. Maybe that's just a matter of there being more baseball coverage. Maybe it feels like we make a bigger deal of it now because there's just more baseball coverage. And so everything gets made a bigger deal of now.

Yeah, that can't continue, right? Because, I mean, maybe it's arrogant to think that the way we think about the Hall of Fame voting is going to become the dominant mode. But it seems like as new writers get added to the voter pool and older writers get phased out of the voter pool, that things will swing that way where you won't have 60 war guys falling off the first ballot and other 60 war guys making it, right? I mean, there will still be a difference there based on maybe valid reasons, but I don't think you would even necessarily see Kenny Loftin falling off the ballot in one go today. I don't think you would. and you certainly see so many people lamenting that as a huge mistake but the BBWA so I think that slowly but surely it is heading toward a time when you know we're basically looking at war and like maybe war will get better and maybe war will or should add

playoff value because that's something people take into account. But other than that, it often comes down to PD or some other strike against the guy's record or character, or it's just a playoff success or something that has to do with fame more so than performance. But like Scott Rowland is doing pretty decently, right? And I think if you had put Scott Rowland on the ballot when Kenny Lofton was on the ballot, I think he might have been one and done. And instead, Scott Rowland is gaining right now. I haven't looked to see exactly where he is, but last time I looked at the ballot tracker, it looked like he was in line for a pretty healthy boost. And I think that shows some progress there because he totally seems like the sort of player who just would have disappeared in an earlier era. I was actually sent a paper that just came out last week. It's called Informed Voters and Electoral Outcomes, a Natural Experiment Stemming from a Fundamental Information Technological Shift. One of the authors, Shane Sanders, who's an associate professor of sports economics and analytics at Syracuse University, passed it along.

economics and analytics at Syracuse University, passed it along. And he and his co-authors looked at MVP voting results compared to war and found that in the years since war became available, there's clear evidence that the voting has been more in line with what war says. I think I've seen similar analyses about gold glove voting and advanced fielding stats. Although in that case, those advanced fielding stats are actually an input in gold glove voting. And I would think we'd see something similar with Hall of Fame voting as well. Does it seem at all significant to you or just kind of a coincidence or maybe not even a thing that I'm about to identify that while voting is perhaps arguably getting more objectively reasoned, more consistently reasoned by the the pool of 500 voters at the same time, the veterans committee is kind of like off the rails. Uh, do you think that's a, a connected backlash? Yeah, it probably is. All right. So we, okay. So that is, uh,

we have not yet picked our thing. Can I, can I, I, I have a thought of, while we've been thinking of this, I did not come with any awards in mind. Best Base Runner seems like something that is ripe for an award. It's a distinct skill in the same way that defense and hitting and pitching are distinct skills. And it's very exciting. I think it's an award that makes for good visuals. So if you were to announce this on MLB Network, you would have good B-roll. It is a combination of subjective assessment, and also there are many objective measures. And it's something that the players who are good at take a great deal of pride in being good at.

The problem is that it's also a much smaller part of the game than it used to be. much smaller part of the game than it used to be. So it would be in some sense, like if the MVP awards in the 1960s and 70s all went to 11 war players, and in the 2010s, they all went to two and a half war players, you might think, do we still even need this award? So that's one. Another one that I think maybe I like even better, I feel like the Rookie of the Year award is one of the only prestige or legacy awards that has kind of reduced in prominence. And I think that's partly because we now know so much about who the good prospects are that when they come up in like June because their service time was being gamed and they're really great, because their service time was being gamed and they're really great, but they don't play enough to compete against maybe the less heralded rookie who was there for opening day and who played all season and maybe put up better counting stats.

It feels a little bit like we're not really, we don't really buy it when the 25 or 26-year-old marginal prospect beats the 20-year-old superstar who came up late in the year, we don't quite buy that it's significant. And also it's not the fun result. You would much rather it be the, the, the fun player who, you know, and who's famous and who they're building marketing campaigns around and all of that. And so I think that rookie of the year is a slightly endangered award. The rookie status as a definition feels kind of pointless and arbitrary at this point. So maybe a, you would have a best young player award, maybe a best, you could have like a

best 20 year old, a best 21 year old and a best 22 year old. And whether they play 18 games in the majors or 140 games in the majors, whether they are a rookie or whether they debuted at age 19, like Juan Soto last year should have been eligible for awards. Like it's crazy that Juan Soto is too old to be rookie of the year, but a 25 year old who just got called up is eligible. Juan Soto is more interesting, more impressive, younger, and more the player that you actually want to recognize. And so maybe setting it up by 20 is differentiating 2021 and 22 is a bad idea because maybe the

race last year between Soto and Acuna would have been like fantastic. I mean, we had it, I guess, the year before, but maybe it would have been fun to see them go for it again last year, right? So like you could have like a i don't know what you would call it but you wouldn't want to define it as best you wouldn't call it best 22 and under uh you'd have to come up with some sort of like glitzy catchy name like best kid best kid uh best kid yeah well what was the award that you made up for like the the most exciting player in each season that you kind of crowned fernando tatis jr as the winner of that award in 2019 and you

came up with who was sort of the the most scintillating must watch change the channel to see this guy that's a good award yeah no that's a good award i don't know award. I don't know if I named it either. But yeah, that's a good one too. Yeah, having a race, somehow having a race between Fernando Tatis and Javi Baez last year as the most exciting player would be interesting. And it would be, it's probably too subjective. I think you just called it most exciting player. too subjective i think you just called it most exciting player and i would want it if it were like a fan voting thing that that invalidates it for me because then you just have the bigger fan bases would have an edge and people would be stuffing the ballot box i don't want that i want somehow like a dispassionate audience of people who can judge the excitingness of players and,

you know, people who love baseball and just will not be swayed by any allegiance to any particular team. I don't know who that would be. Not even, I guess like I would probably trust players voting on this more than I would trust players evaluation skills. So I'd be interested,

I guess, in seeing what they said, but I'd also be interested in just like what, I don't know, baseball Twitter said, I guess. Yeah, you want it to be, I think that the writers, while annoying with their results sometimes, are really the, have been the best voters for pretty much every award because they do have the expertise. They do tend to take this very seriously. They also promote their votes by writing about it. And they are a combination of objective, more objective than a fan and more objective than a player, while also not being fully detached from the emotion. And for something like Most Exciting, which I'm now looking at it,

I said that most watchable is the most accurate way to describe it, but not a great, it's clunky, and so it wouldn't work. But if you're talking about something like Most Exciting, the writers would actually also be especially qualified to do this because they are engaged in storytelling. They are constantly trying to draw out the best, most exciting content. And so they, I think, can identify it in a way. And so, yeah, you probably want that. You probably want it to be, you want to have it be, you want to have a

bunch of wrong results, mostly right results, but enough controversy, enough disagreement about what the definition means that everybody gets annoyed, but then continues to discuss how they define it. So I think you probably would have writers do it. Now, is there a way to have it be baseball Twitter? I don't know. I think that there's something about MVP voting and all that where it's limited to 30 that feels less accurate to me. If I step back and think about it, I think, well, that's not the way that you would do this. You would want to have all the baseball writers do it. But on the other hand, 30 is a digestible number of ballots. A lot of the

intrigue of the results is not seeing who wins. A lot of it is, but a lot of it is seeing who's on the ballots. And if you had 500 ballots or if you had 20,000 ballots, because you were doing this by baseball Twitter, then you probably would lose the ability to really digest each vote in a way that matters. Yeah, I guess I'd want to see maybe not every writer voting for it, but a representative sample of all of the different chapters. I don't know if there's still any tendency to vote for someone you covered, but especially in a most exciting player vote, there probably would be. Because if you're a baseball writer who's covering a team on the East Coast, let's say, you're not going to see a guy on the West Coast team that you're not covering

nearly as much. And so you're not going to know that he is as exciting. So that would be a bit of a problem because you just have a better sense of who's exciting if you're seeing them all the time. So I would want the voters to be like, you know, I guess, Internet writers who do not cover a particular team or something. I don't know. Maybe that's just too restrictive a sample, and it also happens to be the sample that we would be in. But I feel like if it were this year, everyone would have said Tatis, right? And everyone would have agreed that that was probably the right choice, and that would be good. That'd be good to know after the fact, because this is the sort of thing that you don't necessarily know 20 years later, 30 years later, when the player is old and slow or retired, you might not know that at one time he was the most exciting player in

baseball. And I would want to know that. It doesn't matter that most exciting is not a qualitative, qualitative, uh, I guess it's that it it's it is not necessarily part of winning baseball that you could be you could be you could be very exciting and be a total failure at your job and so does it need to somehow be defined in a way that you also have to be contributing to a team would it get lost in pure subjectivity if it didn't matter whether you were good or not? Would none of the players give it any credence if they did not see it as being part of their contribution to the team's mission? Well, how often is a bad player exciting? I mean, maybe Williams asked Dio.

Sorry, Williams. But it doesn't happen all that often that a non-star would be a contender for most exciting i don't know if you eyeball your list i doubt that there are many bad players on your retroactive list of most exciting player because if you're bad if you're just making outs all the time how could you still be exciting like if you're if you're billy hamilton or something like what we hoped billy hamilton would be where he's just the fastest player in baseball and he's stealing a ton of bases but maybe not getting on base a ton and not hitting for power and so he's not a superstar but billy hamilton could have been the most exciting player and just merely a good player

but in the end he was not even a good player. And so he would not have been the most exciting player either. Yeah, there's a different, I think that using the word exciting rather than entertaining does almost guarantee that you're going to get good players. And I'm looking at my list and yes, I don't see anybody except Billy Hamilton, who I did not ultimately declare the most exciting player that year, but he was named. I don't think that I have anybody else in here who was not quite valuable. And so, yeah, it could be like how we've said that like in a weird way. I mean, in a small way, I think that Mike Trout leads the league in war every year is this great endorsement

of war because he is so uncontroversially the player who should be leading the league in war. I think over the course of a few years of awarding this, if it were always somebody that you also recognized as a superstar or as super valuable at the time, it would give a certain authority to it as a true award as a valuable award and it would probably create a voting precedent that you don't just vote for the quirky player but truly exciting and to be truly exciting you almost have to be contributing great value i think that's the best choice the only other one that crossed my mind is like a valuable intangibles award. And that's hard to do because that whole term intangibles just has a lot of baggage of people claiming that people had intangible value because they didn't have actual value and they wanted to invent a way for those players to be valuable, but I'm not talking about just like moving the runner over or something. And so we like that he plays old school, hard-nosed baseball. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about like an actual intelligent rating of intangibles where

as our stats get better and better and more and more comprehensive, I'd be very interested, better and better and more and more comprehensive, I'd be very interested, even more interested, in finding out what some wise counsel thinks is not currently included in those stats. And that would be a helpful thing for me to know after the fact when I look back and think, well, who was possibly better than the stats gave him credit for at that time? here is what a a wise counsel of i don't know who it would be sabermetricians or people who work for teams although maybe they'd be incentivized to vote for their own players or something but someone who really does contribute in some way that the numbers can't or don't currently quantify whether it is something like game calling or working with a pitcher. So, you know, Yadi Molina would witness Ward every year, but maybe he should.

And then it could also be something like, you know, J.D. Martinez tutoring other hitters on his team to hit better. And so he added value in that way, but it's not actually counted in his stats. And so I don't know how you could ever get people to know where the actual intangible value is, because if you know, then you could conceivably quantify it, and then it wouldn't be intangible anymore. So that's a problem. But if I could come up with some award that would actually tell me, here are the players who are underrated by stat

cast war or whatever the state of the art is because of something that that war is not designed to measure or can't currently measure that's something i would want to know but i doubt that i could actually get that answer by hosting this award yeah almost impossible to vote, to know enough to vote for anybody who isn't on your team. And so that seems like a problem. But as we said, the goal is not the goal. Well, maybe the goal is to get the right answer every time. But the success of the award ultimately is not dependent on actually getting the right answer all the time. And so I think that I would personally find that award to be quite unsatisfying because I would not trust any vote that wasn't for a teammate. On the other hand, I don't think that would stop it from becoming a big success, a big hit.

Yeah, it could be. Yeah, it might just morph into a good guy award, and it would be another heart and hustle Roberto Clemente award. I don't know. I would say that if you're a good guy, that shouldn't get you a vote in that award. But if you're a good guy who in some meaningful way, your goodness actually improves the team, according to people who would be in a position to know. So, you know, not just a good clubhouse presence, but someone who prevented hazing or made all the rookies more confident in themselves in a really significant way or bridge the language barrier in the clubhouse and really brought the team together, something like that. But, you know, maybe then it just turns into kind of a good clubhouse presence award. But then maybe being a good clubhouse presence eventually will be the only intangible thing that actually matters. So I don't know.

Yeah, we did an episode a long time ago about Baseball's Rushmore, who we would put on Baseball's Rushmore. And that's a very, very small group. But thinking about that, I wonder if there's an award that you just call Lifetime Achievement Award and it recognizes, you know, a person every year for their contribution in any in any part of the game at any level in any particular field so that you have a way to recognize everybody, you know, from, you know, a broadcaster to a writer to a player to a GM, to an umpire to a commissioner to anybody. And there are ways I mean, anybody who makes that contribution tends to be recognized in some way by you know, at the Hall of Fame museum or in popular culture or whatever. So maybe it's not necessary. But like kind of a broadened baseball Rushmore where a person is added to it every year without any real limit on what sort of role you're restricting it to. I don't know, that would be tough. And the tricky thing is who you would trust to vote on it. A lot of people would not vote for

Marvin Miller for self-interested reasons that mean, you know, nothing to me that I would find to be very specious reasons. And so it would be hard to have a voting pool that would agree on what a positive contribution is without it becoming totally mundane and anodyne. And so maybe you would end up with a very blah, like kind of like least disagreeable definition of contribution. So maybe that's a bad idea. I don't know. I kind of like this most exciting concept.

And I think that we should keep thinking about it. And maybe before the season starts, maybe we actually can create a structure for like, I don't know, stage one of simply like recognizing it as a concept and talking about it through the year. Yeah. Okay. I like it. All right. All right.

Since we started this episode with a discussion of a baseball movie, figured I'd wrap up with a quick mention of a baseball show. I was watching the first episode of season two of Sex and the City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, in which Carrie briefly dates a New York Yankee. And the four friends go to a Yankees game. And Miranda is a big Yankees fan. And so they're sitting out in the upper deck. And the York Yankee, and the four friends go to a Yankees game, and Miranda's a big Yankees fan. And so they're sitting out in the upper deck, and the new Yankee comes up, and Miranda says, Last year this guy was Mr. September. He hit 10 home runs in 9 days. He batted.373. He drove in 47 runs. His on-base percentage was.410. I'm not sure all of that makes sense. I don't think you could actually drive in 47 runs in 9 days. Even if you hit 10 home runs.

That's a pretty tall order. It's theoretically possible, of course, but it would take quite a confluence of clutchness and runners on base. But I was somewhat surprised that Miranda cited his on-base percentage. Not that a 410 on-base percentage is so great if you're batting 373, but still, the fact that she cited OBP, that episode aired in Juneune 1999 so that's years before moneyball came out and obp really went mainstream so i don't know if someone on the sex

in the city writing staff was reading bill james or rob nyer or baseball prospectus but on base percentage mention in sex in the city in 1999 i was not expecting that we all just try and get into the game for a second come on show us what you got last year this guy was mr september he that. It occurred to me that this new Yankees stats, I couldn't help but wonder about my own. It occurred to me that this new Yankee character, this Mr. September, must have been based on Shane Spencer. Because, of course, he came up in 1998, the year before this episode aired, with the Yankees. And he had that explosive September, and in fact, people were calling him Mr. September. And it can't be a coincidence that Shane Spencer also batted.373 in 1998, although that wasn't entirely in September. He came up earlier in the year and had a few games and actually hit better than that in September. He also hit 10 home runs, although only eight of them were in September. But what is kind of curious

is that they have this new Yankee batting.373 just like Shane Spencer, except the new Yankees on base percentage is.410 and Shane Spencer's on base percentage was 4-11. So why keep the.373 batting average and the 10 home runs in the Mr. September but change the OPP by one point? This is the kind of thing that will haunt me. I guess just so that there's some slight deniability and it wasn't literally Shane Spencer's stats that you're citing. Although Miranda's already saying that he hit 10 homers in 9 games, which is not actually what Shane Spencer did. Shane Spencer, by the way, only had 27 RBI in his 27 games, and that's with the 10 homers. I should also note that the Braves signed Felix Hernandez to a minor league deal with an invitation to major league camp and what would be a $1 million salary if he makes the majors.

That happened after Sam and I spoke, so we'll probably talk about it next time, and I'm guessing Meg may have thoughts. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Patrick Klopfenstein, Tosca Salts, Noble Zarkon, Alexander Bertland, and Carter Fornash. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively

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And we will be back with another episode very soon. Talk to you then. The life, the life, the life is so exciting. The life, the life, the life is so exciting. The life, the life, the life is so exciting. The life, the life, the life is so exciting, baby. The life, the life, the life is so exciting, baby. Life, the life, the life is so exciting. The life, the life, the life is so exciting.

The life, the life, the life is so exciting. The life, the life, the life is so exciting, baby.