Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1494: Listen to What the Bang Said

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap and consider the implications of the latest and greatest analyses of the Astros’ banging scheme, which appear to show that the team’s cheating didn’t increase its offensive production in the aggregate. Then (20:08) they talk to the man who made that research possible, longtime Astros fan Tony Adams, about […]

Does it really make a difference if we don't see eye to eye? Does it really make a difference to build your castle in the sky? Does it really make a difference at all? Are we gonna let the big things take over the small? Does it make a difference at all? Oh, oh, oh, oh Does it make a difference at all? Hello and welcome to episode 1494 of Effectively Wild,

a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing all right. How are you? I am almost done with this cold, so I'm doing good. All right. Just one more cough-free episode and you'll be home free. So you won't have to talk too much today because we have a double guest day. We're bringing on two guests. Later on in this episode, in the second half, we'll be talking to Woody Studenmund,

who is the proprietor of the Northeast League, which is a league in the tabletop baseball game, APBA Baseball, which dates back to 1960. The Northeast League was founded in 1960. So Woody is about to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the continuous operation of this league, which is sort of a fascinating story. So we will talk to him later on in the episode. Soon we will bring on Tony Adams, who made major waves on baseball Twitter this week by releasing a giant database of all the banging scheme data that he uncovered. Tony is an Astros fan, and he spent months and

many hours watching video and breaking down the sound from games from the 2017 season to see exactly when the Astros were banging and when they were not banging. And previously, we had not really had a record of this. We knew anecdotally that they were banging often and early, and we just didn't really have a record of precise pitches on which they were banging or not banging. And so other people have now taken this data, which Tony made available on a website that he built specifically for this purpose at signstealingsc Bill Petty on Twitter that have used this data, and it's pretty fascinating what they have found. And I guess you've seen this too. So the high-level conclusion is that based on the information we have and that Tony collected, there doesn't seem to have been an apparent benefit to the Astros in the banging scheme.

And what Rob determined, again, just using the bangs, if they were using some other method to pass signs, there's no way to quantify that. But based on what we can tell from this new incredibly rich resource, it seems like the Astros benefited a bit when they correctly banged, when they predicted the pitch that was coming. And yet they also sometimes incorrectly banged. And the penalty for incorrectly banging was much larger than the benefit from correctly banging. And when you put it all together, according to both Rob and Bill's separate analysis, it seems to have zeroed out essentially. And there doesn't

seem to have been a net benefit from the pinging scheme, despite the elaborateness of what the Astros were doing and clearly the illegality of it. Sorry, I said pinging scheme a lot. I'm just teeing you up to say banging scheme many more times I'd like to point out I have already done this on Twitter so I'm going to do the thing that Sam does where I refer to a tweet Rob has this line in his piece

more stunning is the fact that the Astros seem to be lacking any banging information and here's what I'll say you know ask questions before you bang it's good to know some have some information it'll never stop being funny okay the entire integrity of the game has at moments been in question we gotta enjoy it man we gotta like the parts that are funny and good good golly yeah oh so but to actually say to say something

to say a thing about this that is not just me laughing into my microphone first as a person who is famous for spending far too much time looking at stuff i just am in awe and so appreciative of the work that went into this yeah i know we're gonna talk to tony obviously 50 hours feels like a conservative estimate so we're gonna have to picket that a little bit because i i'm just in awe of the work that he did here i think the part of this that is the most interesting to me and i doubt strongly we will ever get a thoroughgoing tick tock of the decision making that individual players had and went through when they were deciding whether or not to bang. We won't know about it. We won't know about the motivation there.

But I think that the part of this site that was the most sort of fascinating to me, it was just like the variation in terms of the bang percentage, the amount of banging that went on. And so we have a clearer idea of sort of the scale of participation by individual players, which I don't say to absolve any of them from the intent to cheat at a team level

and the amount that they did. I love that Tony Camp was just like, no, in my 23 pitches, no bangs for me. Shall not bang. Shall abstain from banging. But I think that it is revealing that, you know, when we went into this whole thing, we were confronted with an Astros team that is very good. You know, the Astros are genuinely good at baseball. Cheating aside,

they are good at baseball. It is a very talented group of hitters. And so it was not surprising to us that they would, even in the search of sort of marginal improvement, perhaps embark upon a scheme that, you know, in aggregate added up to something, but on an individual level was sort of questionably efficacious. I do wonder, looking at Rob's analysis, and, you know, he was quick to point out that we will, I'm sure, be doing a lot of analysis of this data and trying to look at it and slice and dice it a couple different ways. But I wonder if there was theoretically a point at which the team might have stopped to say, is this really helping? And perhaps if they had had the reality check of it being sort of a net neutral,

if there would have been sort of internal intervention on the practice. And I guess, you know, in the commissioner's report, he did say that the players were starting to question whether or not this was actually that useful to them. But it's surprising that it would take so long for that question to set in because this seems like it was, you know, when they got it right, it was really right, but when they got got it wrong it really fouled them up and i'm i'm kind of surprised that it would take a season's worth of data for them to decide like i don't know about this i don't know about this banging we're doing might not be good for us this banging perhaps we should not bang yeah so

it does seem like certain players were comparatively celibate i guess we could say in the banging scheme we should we should say ben that is what we should say no one was entirely celibate everyone seemed to be banging to a certain extent and obviously if you're a type of player who sees certain pitches more often if you see more off-speed pitches, maybe you would have a higher percentage of bangs. So there's that too. But it does seem like there was some variation and who knows exactly why, whether it is because certain players like Jose Altuve, who seems to have a low bang percentage, is that because he objected to the banging or maybe he just didn't like the banging or who knows. But there are many explanations. But what this really kind of backs up for me, because we've talked before about sort

of how in the big picture, it's hard to find the statistical signal here that backs up the idea that it helped them a lot. And of course, you can never disprove that it helped them in some crucial pivotal moment. It's entirely possible that it did, even if it didn't help on the whole. And Tony's data includes, I think, only 58 of the Astros' home games from that regular season because he was not able to get the data for all of the others. So there's some room for uncertainty here, absolutely. But you would think that if there were a huge difference that it would show up in the sample that Rob and Bill were using.

And they tried to adjust for everything. You know, they adjusted for the pitch types and they adjusted for the pitchers and the batters and all of that. And it still just sort of washed out. back to something that we speculated about early on before we really had the detail that we have now which is that a if you sometimes are getting an incorrect call then that might erode your confidence in any of the banging i mean if the banging is wrong sometimes and you know in the back of your mind that you can't entirely trust it then maybe that does away with a lot of the benefit because there's going to be some part of your brain that's thinking, well, maybe or maybe not, I should still probably

approach this pitch the way I would normally. And Rob found that even when the bang was correct and predicted the pitch type, the advantage was only like 25 points of slugging or something, which is like obviously significant, but you would think that it would be much bigger than that. And so I wonder if that is because the bangs were distracting and just focusing on the bang kind of took the players out of their routine or whether it was because they weren't fully confident in the accuracy of those signals or what. And Rob also found that the Astros seemed to get the pitches wrong more often later in the games, like when relievers came in and maybe the signs

switched up. And so that's another factor. Some teams may have been aware of what they were doing and tried to deceive them, but it does make sense to me that it would hurt you more when it hurts you than it helps you when it helps you. Yeah, a bad bang can linger, man. Yeah. And as Rob pointed out, and as we've said many times, it doesn't matter whether it worked or not in the sense that they were cheating. And I was looking at Rob's mentions, and many people were responding to his tweets about this by saying, who cares? Doesn't matter. They cheated. Doesn't matter if it worked or not. And we're not disputing that. I don't know if anyone is disputing that. I'm sure someone out there on Twitter is arguing that if it didn't help, then it wasn't really wrong or something. But I don't think that's what most people are saying. We're acknowledging it was wrong. They thought it would give them an advantage. It was against the rules, etc. And they should be punished regardless of whether it helped them or not. But it's still an interesting question to ask about how much it helped just in order to figure out what we know and don't know about that season. And it's just a fascinating question about how much it would help to know that the pitch is coming.

And it's this quandary that it didn't seem to have helped all that much. So I think it's a valid question to ask, not trying to minimize the wrongness of what the Astros did. I think the only way in which it really matters is, you know, maybe you take it into account when you're summing up the whole scandal and is this an existential threat to baseball? And if teams continue to sign steel, does that mean that baseball is ruined and it's no fun anymore? I mean, in that sense, I think you could take into account that this might not actually be destabilizing the competition to a great degree. But I think it's just a worthwhile question regardless of the rightness or wrongness, which I think we all mostly agree on. Yeah, I think that as we look, you know, as we look back on that season, and then once we know more about what went on in Boston, as we look back on that season, and then once we know more about what went on in Boston,

as we look back on that season, I think the answer to whether or not it swung anything in a really obvious way with all of the, you know, understandable and necessary caveats about what we can and can't discern from this information is really important because it changes the, like you said, it changes the answer potentially in a very important way to whether or not this has altered our, you know, altered the fabric of the integrity of baseball. And I think that while the legacies of these individual players in the next couple of decades are going to be determined in part by this and by other stuff. I think it does pretty profoundly color our expectation of their true talent and how much we can trust their production, not only from that season, but going forward. And, you know, all of that is relevant

and interesting and important for us to understand, even if we're all in agreement that the intent to, you know, gain an advantage in violation of the rules is worthy of punishment, regardless of how efficacious it was. I think that this is a question that we need to try our very best to sort out. And not just because it continues to just be a really fertile ground for jokes, but because we need to, we need to know about baseball, right? That's what we're here to do is to know about baseball right that's what we're here to do is to know about baseball and so i think it's incredibly important for us to sort that stuff out i mean i would prefer that he not be affiliated with some cheats but like i will admit to a tiny

amount of relief that this didn't like fundamentally alter my understanding of how good at baseball jose altuve is even with all the caveats. It's like, oh, okay. So that's good to know. But I think that it's really important. It's really important for us to sort through. Plus, we have to, you know, we can't let this good work go to waste. Yeah, right.

Yeah, it's really amazing to think about, like, how much of the difficulty of hitting a pitch is not knowing what's coming versus the fact that these pitches are inherently hard to hit. They're going really fast. And if they're breaking balls, they're still going really fast, but they're also breaking a lot. It's just you or I could be told what pitch is coming and I don't think it would help us very much. No, obviously a big league batter, you'd think it would help them quite a bit more, but it may be that it's still just really hard to do. If you're trying to hit 90 something mile per hour fastballs that are moving a lot or wicked breaking balls, even if you know what's coming, it's still not easy. It's not automatic. It's not like if you guess right, you automatically get a hit or something. You still have to perform this incredible feat of coordination and hit that ball that's traveling incredibly fast and square it up. And even in the absence of banging, you can still make educated guesses about pitch types. And if you are cheating and you know the pitch type, you don't necessarily know the location. Maybe you can narrow it down a bit, but you're not sure if it'll be a strike or a ball. It's not exactly like being up 3-0 and being able to sit on a fastball down the middle. And if there's any doubt in your mind about whether you do know what's coming, then maybe can check it out. And I'm sure that they and

others will be doing follow-ups, but I'm glad that we have this data so that we could investigate it in a more granular way. And unless you have anything else to say about this, I guess we could talk to the man who's responsible for giving us this information. Yeah. The only thing I will say is that the pitchers who and grantedly some of this is going to be determined by that pitcher's repertoire right like if you throw a lot of speed stuff there's going to be more banging but we sure know who had the highest which pitchers had the highest instance of banging now and uh i would imagine that some of them are probably going to be fairly surly about it in a way that

is understandable so I will be curious to see what the fallout from that is because I can't imagine this is going to quiet players now that we know who was specifically victimized by this even more so than we did before so yeah that's a very good point

if you're a pitcher who's aggrieved about this you can now look up exactly's aggrieved about this, you can now look up exactly how aggrieved you deserve to be. Yeah, I mean, I did see some people, quote, tweeting Tony's tweets about this and pointing out individual pitchers who allegedly had their careers ended or seriously affected by facing the Astros during the banging scheme. You know, like people were tweeting about Mike Bolsinger, for instance,

who had a bad outing in a game against the Astros where the Astros scored 16 earned runs, I think. And he was a Blue Jays reliever and he allowed four runs and got one out. And he hasn't pitched in the big leagues again after that. And so the implication is, well, the Astros ruined Mike Bolsinger's career. And again, you can't completely rule these things out. But I think the idea that a single outing could just be the death knell for a pitcher, it's a little far-fetched to me. I mean, Mike Bolsinger had a nearly seven ERA in 2016, and then he had a six-plus ERA in 2017. It's, you know, he had a fairly long track record of not being a great pitcher.

And I would think that most teams are not going to rule a guy out or in based on a single ugly outing against the Astros. in based on a single ugly outing against the Astros. So it's something that you think about, certainly, when someone's career kind of tanks after an outing against a cheating team. But I think it's a little too simplistic to say that the Astros deserve all of the responsibility for drumming someone out of the major leagues forever. Yeah, but it is, I agree with that. And I also think that it isn't the worst thing to be reminded that even if their responsibility is a sliver, that they do bear some, right? Like there were, there were people, human people who were affected by this in a pretty profound way. And so, you know, I don't think that it's their fault into like as a group that he is no longer in baseball, but it feels a little more personal when you know I don't think that it's their fault into like as a group that he is no longer

in baseball but it feels a little more personal when you know who the guy on the other end was right right yeah yeah it's not not a victimless crime at least it it shouldn't be theoretically right even if it you know as a net practice didn't net them very much. It still affected individual pitchers, you know, earned runs and what have you. Right. All right. So let's talk to the man who made this all possible. He'll be back in just a moment with Tony Adams. Been listening all the day Will I listen for the one you know Will I listen, will I pray

It's a coming all the night long It's a coming in the day It's blowing through my stone It's whistling this way So we are joined now by Tony Adams, who is a longtime Astros fan. He is a graphic designer and web developer by trade, which came in very handy when he was making a website to house the data that he collected here.

And Meg and I realized that we've been talking about the Astros sign-skilling scandal, sorry, banging scheme for weeks now, months even, and yet we haven't actually had an Astro's fan on to talk about it, which seems like an oversight. We've been speculating about what this must feel like to have learned about this as an Astro's fan. Well, now we're going to rectify that oversight

and talk to Tony, who is an Astro's fan and also really did the legwork or earwork here to bring all this data to us. So, Tony, hello and congratulations on winning this week in baseball Twitter. Thanks. I'm not sure it's a contest I really wanted to be in. And don't don't look at, you know, don't listen to my at-bats. You might find some things that you don't want to hear. We'll be listening back to this audio to hear if anyone's coaching you in the background, any bangs going on. So tell us about your history as an Astros fan back to the beginning, and I guess leading all the way up to finding out about the banking scheme?

Well, I go back, I'm 54 years old and basically raised in Houston area and started watching baseball like a lot of people when, you know, early 10, 11, 12 years old, going back to Jose Cruz days, Cesar Cedeno with the Astros and went through finding Nolan Ryan and having all the excitement of that and going through the 1980 playoffs which you know was just so much excitement but it was just a heartbreaker particularly for a young kid my age I may have shed a few tears over that one and then you know then we move on to you know 86 and and that heartbreak and you know then we get busy on Bagwell and things look pretty good,

but we really can't seem to get over the hump as far as the playoffs. And we finally get to 2005, and it looks like we're all set up to go to the World Series with our rotation. Pujols hit the home run and screws up our rotation, and we finally make it, but very exciting. But, of course, we were swept. Even that was probably the closest sweep ever. Still, you know, a lot of excitement, but still just never quite got there.

You know, fast forward to 2017, and, you know, we went through all the lean years, and, you know, we were able to acquire all the players to the draft and have them come up. And, you know, a few years before 2017, you could tell the team was really coming together and before 2017 i actually i told my wife i think we're going to win the world series and as a base as a houston astros fan you don't have that level of optimism unless you really feel it it's just not something you say because just it just doesn't happen and uh so this team i mean it was a good team and they played it like it during that season and uh you know it was kind of a magical season and uh

then of course you know with the harvey situation is uh you know kind of took the whole city back and uh i mean we were we were broken for a while yeah and you were directly affected by that yeah definitely uh lost my house both my cars and virtually everything i owned so i actually had to leave my house in chest deep water with a trash bag full of clothes not basically oh gosh so that was it and i'm sorry yeah luckily, the city did come together, and it was really, in a lot of ways, obviously it was a tragedy, but it was such a good human feeling

about people helping each other. It's just hard to explain how the city came together and people that I never met before were helping me out. So the city was still kind of on its heels going into the post season and i was living with a friend i was 15 months displaced from my home i actually had to tear down my house and then they won it they finally won it but it was just it it was it was a lot of pent-up disappointment and frustration so i mean it, it was something for the city,

it was something for me personally. I think we definitely felt like we were doing something good, and it felt great. As you can imagine, any baseball fan, your team wins, it's been cool. So, I bought the t-shirts like everybody else and felt super excited about it and we're very proud and fast forward a couple years and you hear some rumors and then the athletic article came out obviously and then the video started getting posted that day and uh i mean within 30 seconds of watching the videos it's undeniable that they cheated i mean it's just you can't you can't avoid it i mean it it's right thereiable that they cheated I mean it's just you can't you can't avoid it I mean it it's right there which is one of the things about this candle I think that is

different than others like the Apple watch sandals you don't really have the visceral right thing of having a video in front of you and hearing the banging you know it really just impacts you and like i said you can't deny it it's there so that was severely disappointing obviously it's just you know all that excitement and all that that joy it kind of well it is taken away from to a large degree like i said i i still feel they could have won that year but the thing with all this is that you don't know so that's the real kind of tragedy this is we just don't know so you know that was obviously something that we had to accept as Astros fans that they did it it's there you can't deny it but then we got into this period of a lot of other stuff beyond you know what was was real or what we could actually see or hear in this case

and started getting into a lot of rumors and buzzers and all the speculation about they've been cheating for years and they were cheating in 2019 and all this other stuff and it just it just seemed like we went into kind of crazy crazy land with all the speculation and the rumors and you know it was bad enough what they did and that was obvious and but it was really frustrating from astro's fan standpoint to have all this other stuff that seemed to be coming out of nowhere and didn't seem to be based on any sort of fact it was really frankly a lot of it was just made up and uh the truth was bad enough. You didn't have to do it. You know?

Yeah. We didn't need to have to. So I understand why a lot of other fans think that Astros fans are defensive. Because we are. But not about the venue. I mean, there are some people, I think, that are still denying it. But that happens. Yeah. Until they wear the wires, stuff like that, it starts getting weird.

Yeah. Until they were in a wire, stuff like that starts getting weird. So that actually was where I kind of started to actually assume back. Somebody did a video of game five of the 2017 World Series, and they said that a charge whistle was indicating a breaking ball. I don't know if you saw that video, but John Boy retweeted it. It became a viral video. And he showed maybe three breaking balls with charge whistles before him. And it's a five-hour game with, you know, I think the Astros took 200 pitches that game.

Sure. That is a pretty small sample. So actually I went back and listened to the video, and there were 24 charge whistles and only eight before breaking balls. There were four before fastballs and the others were when the Dodgers were up or nobody was that bad. So it was just basically pretty clear to me that it was just a fan whistling through the game

like fans do during a World Series. And so I did a response video to that, but that actually got me into looking at the audio, looking for whistles and trying to notice the patterns and looking at spectrograms that I could create and so when the banking thing started I guess people were starting to do some analysis of it I thought well you know you could actually use that technique to look for the bank and I actually was waiting for somebody to do that and And it didn't see any real traction on that.

Although Rob Arthur at Baseball Perspectives did an article, and he did do a spectrogram on a few pitches to show where you could see the bangs. And that kind of inspired me, too, that, well, you could probably do that for everyone. And being a coder and a programmer, it was kind of an interesting challenge if i could write that and uh you know i've been starting to look at the data for the last year with all the

data available from mlb and started looking at the fat cast data and all that you know they had a tremendous amount of data points for each pitch and including a timestamp which was for me it kind of triggered something that well I have a timestamp I have video I could sync this all up yeah write an application that would allow me to to look at the video know what pitch was coming up you know make a selection and put that into the database and then jump to the next pitch and actually kind of all fit together at the right time so kind of started as kind of all fit together at the right time. So it kind of started as kind of a, can I do that?

I could probably do that type of project. I'm sure. I don't know if y'all have had those before. Oh, yeah. You don't really don't have a goal. It's just like, well, this would be kind of cool. And this is interesting. I've never really looked at this. You know, I've never really looked at spectrograms and audio analysis and all

that stuff and had really, I'd looked at all the data available from NLB, but I hadn't really done anything with it. So it did kind of start out as just kind of a fun project. And then it all started coming together. And I was able to actually look at this, the pitches. And it was kind of cool too, because I could just spend like 10 seconds on each pitch. I could say, okay, I'll make a selection if I heard a bang, say okay. and it was kind of cool too because i could just spend like 10 10 seconds on each pitch you know

i could say okay make i'll make a selection if i heard a bang say okay and it would literally jump me to the next pitch so it'd be just 10 or 12 seconds i'd be spending on each pitch was actually very uh effective and made the whole process about as good as it could be. And that was over the Christmas holidays. And I didn't quite realize exactly how many pitches. I guess I should have counted beforehand. It was a lot of pitches. Yes. I was going to ask, were there, you know, I think that Ben would tell you that I, of all people, am sympathetic to starting a project and then realizing you're about to spend many, many hours of your life watching, you know, 10 to 15 second long baseball clips to come to some conclusion. Were there any challenges going through your process? I know this was kind of

pulling together a lot of different approaches and data points to try to stitch it together so that you could do this in any kind of an efficient way, were there pain points along the way that you had to overcome in that process? There were different techniques I was trying, particularly with the spectrogram. I tried different packages to figure out if I could get a decent resolution and actually tried to do some things where I tried to remove the down-throughs from the audio because that actually made it more difficult to determine. In the end, I kind of rejected all that, because it made the audio artificial sounding, for one thing,

but it didn't really help that much. It seemed to actually kind of... I mean, if you listen to any game, there's just a lot of noise in the stadium, and beyond just the sportscaster system. That was one of the biggest issues issues was just trying to do that. But one of the big pain points is that it seems that there were certain at bat to certain pitches where the timestamp of the pitch was wrong. And so I'd have,

I actually had to figure out how many seconds I'd have to offset certain pitches. I did actually have to get into that level of detail of, okay, this whole inning is off by three seconds. I got to adjust every pitch in here by three seconds to make sure that I got it synced up with the video, which was actually important because that is where I got the audio for the spectrograms. Yeah.

So 58 games, more than 8,000 pitches, more than a thousand bangs. So as you were doing this incredibly tedious, monotonous work, what was your main motivation? Were you just hoping to get some answers just to either the wildly inflated ideas or the complete dismissals of it worked or not? Did you just want answers? Was this a way of kind of processing your own disappointment and sense of betrayal about that team? Initially, I did want to understand what happened. Because with all the rumors and stuff going around, I really just wanted to have some factual understanding of what was the scope. Because people were saying well they must have been doing it back to 2014 and all this other stuff and they heard a bang on them so i actually just really wanted to know the scope and also i i did want to have an idea of who was involved and what level because people were just throwing all of the players in the same boat with this and it was somewhat of a kind of a processing thing about you know what

did they do what why i mean what was going on and some degree to it was a kind of a pushback on all the conspiracy theories and all the rumors and the non-factual based things that were coming out i think i really wanted to have something out there even if it was a negative on a whole for my team that was this is the truth you know and let's please try to stick with the truth and data people you've got to appreciate this i mean that's that's very important and uh and i i guess too like i said it was in some ways it was just kind of uh well i could do it and then I started doing it, and I didn't stop. I probably should have. I don't know.

Once your 4,000 pitches in, you may as well finish the thing, right? That's part of it, too. And there were some, like I said, there were some challenges. But for the most part, once I had the application that I wrote up and running, it was pretty smooth and I could just kind of turn them out, you know, just a couple hours at night or a couple hours. I wake up early frequently and a couple hours in the morning and go through it and just keep going at it. And at some point I started to get the story of what was going on during the season.

So when I first started, it was the first part of the season and there wasn't much going on. And then it started to ramp up there. So it was interesting to, okay, now I'm seeing what's going on behind the scenes. And it did kind of tell a story for me and kind of kept me going with it and tried to see where did it stop and how big did it get, that type of stuff. Yeah, it is striking when you look at the site you've assembled, sort of how closely that timeline he is to what the commissioner described in his report. It was, I think, a kind of illuminating verification, at least for me, that the general contours of it seem to have been adequately investigated and expressed in terms of when they were using it most frequently when they maybe got a little spooked after farquhar right and that actually when that

when the report came out um and i had gotten to that point basically i had finished but i had to go back through and look at some things make sure that i didn't make a mistake sure but uh it was very interesting to see that they panicked because you can see it in the data yeah at that exact moment it basically drops off and um it's uh it was very interesting to have that report and then have the data that really um nobody else has really been able to see the level that i had and how it did all mash up. And he talked about how they tried a few things early in the season and then it started to ramp up a couple months into the season and it wasn't full force.

It's there. Right. And so were you able to confirm or corroborate the report which suggested that this continued into the postseason or were you not able to detect the bangs then? I wasn't. I did listen. I did not hear anything that I could discern. I mean, it's postseason games in Minute Maid Park, which is a very loud stadium. It's an indoor stadium and it's really known for being loud. And actually, I think this is one area where I wish that the commissioner had been more thorough

in his reporting about what actually did happen and who was involved. He says it went on into the post-season. The initial report from the Athletic said that it stopped before the post-season. And that was part of what, going back to why I did this, you know, looking to see, well, when did it stop? But he says it went on to the postseason.

He says it went on since 2018, but doesn't give any details. And so we really don't have any clue as to what they were doing and who was doing it, which is, I think has left a void in the story that has kind of let a lot of the, uh, the rumors and speculation, um, kind of feel. And I should note also that we mentioned the number of pitches and the number of bangs logged. Obviously, if there's a non-bang, that can be a sort of signal, too. If there was a fastball coming, that is still giving away information.

And Rob, in his analysis of baseball prospectus, was able to account for that by essentially looking at plate appearances where it was not all fastballs so that he could see if there was a bang on the non-fastballs. And then he just counted the fastballs as examples of the- And I appreciate that. And I understand what people's point with that. And there are some people have commented, well, I didn't log when there was no bang but i don't know how you logged that right i loved when there's a bang and if there was violence it's basically in the data and my goal was not really to do a high level or an easily medium level analysis because that's not necessarily my forte but you, but at that point, I have to start making assumptions, which is okay,

but I really wanted to say, this is what I heard, and I'm not trying to paint it in any particular way. And I made sure that the data I provided had all the IDs and such from the MLB data that people smarter than me could actually pull this in and make some analysis on it. And you can already see that happening in just a couple of days. And so that's actually very exciting. Yeah. I'm curious, you know, reading someone like Rob, who when he analyzed your data for BP basically found that the net effect of this was very minimal, that they didn't derive a huge amount of benefit in

the aggregate. How that hits you as a fan, I can imagine that it would be something of a relief in a way because it can validate some of the triumphs of that season, right? They were good anyway. But I also can imagine that it would be really irritating because why did they go through all of this if it even wasn't going to do anything so how does that work kind of strike you i think that it's great that analysis is being done and there is a reality of did it really help how much did it help i mean with all this sort of analysis you'll never know the exact truth that we can have some idea and even when i was going through this process i could look at a net bat and i could see well they banged for that breaking ball the first one but they didn't do it for the second

one or did it put a second one in the beginning for the third and you have to think as a as a hitter what does that do to you right i mean the throws are off balance i would think and you're also starting to question well is that bang right or what it was just a fastball or it just didn't get the signal you know even as I was going through it I was like was this really that effective because it seems like you know it probably messed you up more than would actually help you so as far as being a fan I mean I I don't know how much stock I can put in that uh obviously the commissioner's statement said that the players decided in 2018 that it wasn't effective thought it does make you wonder why did they do it if it wasn't effective um maybe they thought it would help and who knows i mean like i think there's a an inside story that we

haven't heard yet it's going to be very intriguing if it ever comes out about how this started and who was involved and what the thought process was so i imagine it's probably tough to be impartial where your own team is concerned and a team that you've invested so much in over the years but when the punishments came out did you feel that they were appropriate and and one thing i wonder is you know you do have people saying well they should vacate the title or the title should go to somewhere else. And then other people would say, well, what's the point of taking away the title? I mean, aside from the precedent setting and the slippery slope and all of that, but just, you know, they already won.

They got that joy. You experienced that happiness. That title meant a lot to you. So would taking it away even do anything? You can't really remove happiness that is already experienced retroactively. And yet, I wonder now that you look back on that, is it tainted to a degree? So all the emotions that must be going through you about that. In effect, it's been taken away from us, you know, to a certain degree. So I don't know what that formal process, what it would do.

And, you know, I think from the commissioner's standpoint, he's probably thinking, like you said, it was set a precedent. And we could go back and look at, you know, set steroids, and we could look at a lot of stuff and say, did this affect the outcome? So I really don't know. I understand why he didn't want to do that. From my perspective, I just can't feel that much pride in the fact that they won 2017 now.

And like I said, I think they could have won it. I thought they should have won without all this going on, but what they really took from us is we'll never know. That's the real playing field was tilted a little bit and so was it enough to affect the outcome like that we'll never know but i i can't look at that that world championship seriously in the same way well i i hope for your sake that the answer to this question is different than that one. But how are you thinking about this upcoming season? You have, you know, a lot of that same cast of characters in place. Obviously, you'll get to enjoy Dusty Baker as manager. How are you looking at 2020? factual thing that we know they didn't cheat in 2019 and they were a great team these are great players altuve is great uh all these guys you know they they uh they didn't it wasn't they're

not a fluke and it wasn't something that the cheating made them you know so much better than they they actually were so i'm actually very excited uh you know with the dusty baker signing i mean i i i really don't really know how that's going to work. I mean, obviously, he's got a great team. It's not like he has to—he has a very young team, but he has to have them play above the potential. He just has to make sure that they do play up to their potential, and I think he'll be very successful. you know, often we see a fan base will sort of rally around a team or a player, even in situations where it seems like that team or player really did do something wrong that should cost them some support. You know, even in the Astros case, like when Yuli Gurriel made his racist gesture, I think

when he went back to Houston, you know, he got a standing ovation. And that's not unique to Astros fans. I mean, I think of, you know, Jose Reyes getting a standing ovation from that's not unique to Astros fans I mean I think of you know Jose Reyes getting a standing ovation from Mets fans after his domestic violence suspension and it's just like hey this guy is wearing our uniform it's this sort of tribal reflexive thing right exactly and so are you expecting that it will be very much an us against them you know let's let's have our Astros back sort of dynamic this season or is there a real sense of you know anger or or outrage about this it's probably more just big disappointment large disappointment i i think part of two what's going on is that we were successful last year

and the team was very good and now people are trying to discount that saying you know that they were cheating then with it i think it would probably be virtually impossible to solve the protections that the MLB put in place as far as the delayed video and the monitoring, particularly in the playoffs. So I think that my sense is that a lot of fans want them to go out and kick some butt this year and prove that all eyes are on them, that they actually are worthy of being considered a great team and hopefully winning this World Series this year and proving that they could have done it otherwise.

So I think, yeah, I think they will rally around this team just because we're kind of tired of taking it from other fans at this point. I bet. I'm tired of taking it from other fans at this point. I bet. Yeah. Do you think of it as sort of a pervasive thing that affected the Astros' culture? I mean, it's tough to connect the sign stealing to, say, the Osuna trade or the Brandon Taubman incident.

There's no direct link really established but i wonder you know especially because the estrus had this reputation deserved in many ways i think for being innovative and ahead of the curve and you know very sophisticated with technology and all of that and and that was true and is true and yet i think has been reasonably overshadowed by a lot of this, which, you know, could be part of the same sort of mentality of let's look for any edge and some edges are legal and some edges are not. But, you know, I wonder about that whole, you know, as an Astros fan, seeing them do the tank and the extreme rebuild and all of that. And it's smart. And it's smart. A lot of what the Essers do is smart and made them good at baseball, but was maybe also questionable, I guess, from kind of an ethical perspective. Going through this and looking through all this, I was actually just like, the biggest thing is that this was not a high-tech solution. This was not. This was some guy looking at a TV and banging a trash can with a bat.

You could have done this in 1965. This was not sophisticated. This was, it says it came from the players and it specifically mentions Beltran. It makes me wonder, you know, when you talk about other teams and he's been on a lot of teams, he's been around the league for a long time and this was in his realm of possibility that they could do this. It wasn't something that he was, this is crazy. I've never seen this before. So it makes you wonder. I mean, obviously, we don't have any evidence of somebody banging a trash can.

But, you know, we obviously have the evidence of Boston with the Apple Watches. And now we hear stories from 70s and 80s and the 90s. And so, I mean, I don't have any critical evidence of that and certain degree it doesn't really matter because the astros did what they did and uh what somebody else did is kind of irrelevant to that i mean it does kind of point to the environment of baseball but um again they did it and it doesn't matter to a certain degree. And as far as the culture goes, I mean, there are obviously a lot of type A people in Astros management. But, you know, I don't see how that kind of translated into this. I think it was really just players wanting to get an edge.

And I think they may have just taken it too far. And I guess lastly, not to put you in the position of speaking for the whole fan base or passing judgment on the fan base. in the position of speaking for the whole fan base or passing judgment on the fan base, but, you know, you mentioned some justified defensiveness when it comes to some of the unsubstantiated rumors, and then maybe also on the part of some individuals, there's, you know, a circling of the wagons or a denial or a downplaying. Have you felt like, on the whole, the response by Astro's fans has sort of really grappled with what happened here and accepted it and reckoned with it and gone through the stages of grief. It's just hard to, you know, you see a few stray tweets from someone who's just pretending it didn't happen or just saying, well, everyone's doing it or whatever, and you don't want to

judge everyone by that. I think for the most part people accept it severely disappointed i mean people i've had several people you know email me or send me a direct message saying that i'm an astros fan thank you for doing this because well first of all a lot of them say at least it's the truth you know yeah and um and that's actually you know going back to it that's i think what people are they really just want to have this want to know the truth and in general though i think that most of them are accepting and the response has been actually more positive than i would have been actually very nervous about putting this out because i've documented my 100 and 1100 times

my team cheated and stuff it doesn't really make you but um I don't think they're going to put a statue up at Minute Maid Park. Yeah, in a way, it's sort of valuable, I think, that this came from an Astros fan. You might have expected if someone was going to put all of the 50 plus hours that it took to do this into this project, it might be a Dodgers fan or someone who felt wronged by the Astros as an opponent. But the fact that it's coming from an Astros fan, I think often that makes you an effective messenger if you're part of that group and you're saying, no, this is it. And granted, you weren't doing any analysis on the effectiveness, but just documenting what was happening here. No one can accuse you of being biased against the against the astros really so no it was actually a concern of mine too i mean i wanted it to come from you know from an astros guy and i'm still very concerned that that people might think that i wasn't accurate or i was trying to paint or sway

the data to make the astros look better there's 1100 bangs bangs. So I may have missed a few. I'm sure I did, because this is somewhat subjective in the analysis. You hear a bop, you hear a bang, you hear a boom. What is that? But on the whole, I think that people are responding to it differently based on the fact that it did come from an Astros fan. Yeah. Yeah, fandom can be a hell of a drug. So I admire not only the amount of time and effort it took to do this, but how reasonable you are for having embarked on it in the first place.

It would be nice to see that kind of level-headed assessment from more fans of every team. It is hardly a phenomenon unique to Astros fans. That fan is short for fanatic. That's true. It's right there in the name. I did have a worry about

retaliation from other fan bases. Nothing severe, but I made sure that my accounts were locked down and stuff like that. It's a weird world that we're living in, but like you said, I really just wanted the truth and I think that having that out there is beneficial to all of us and it was really the main goal. Just to try to know what happened and put it out there. vicious to all of us. It was really the main goal. Just to try to know what happened and

put it out there. Do you have any nieces with Twitter accounts? Just so we can establish that now in case anyone starts claiming to be Tony Adams' niece. I do. No burner account. I think actually Orbit has a burner account. But yeah, that's the weirdness that we've been dealing with. And I think you push back on all that, just trying to get back to what was the truth? What is the reality? And as data people, you really are kind of looking at what actually happened and you're

putting your analysis to it but you know it is it's a factual endeavor all right well thank you for putting all the time in you can find the fruits of tony's labor at signstealingscandal.com we will link to it and you can find him on twitter where he has many more followers than he did a few days ago to it and you can find him on Twitter where he has many more followers than he did a few days ago at Adams underscore AT. And yeah, congrats on the rollout. My compliments on that because it just kind of came out of nowhere and all of a sudden there's this beautiful functional website with all this data just sort of mic drop in the middle of the week. That was quite a surprise. Yeah, it actually had a bigger... I anticipated that there would be some

response to it, but it's been a little more than I did anticipate. Thank you for having me on. It's been great. Yeah, thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you. All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Woody Studenmund to talk about APPA, baseball fandom, and 60

years of the Northeast League. And yes, also a little bit about the banking scheme. the piano keep on rolling keep on rolling I'm gonna keep on rolling far as I can go keep on rolling keep on rolling so on episode 1292

of Effectively Wild, Jeff Sullivan and I talked to two people who were part of a stratomatic league that was just entering its 40th year of operation. And we thought, boy, 40 years, that is pretty impressive. And little did we know that that league had only been in existence for about two-thirds as long as the league of the man that we are bringing on now, Woody Studeman, who is a sometime Hardball Times contributor and brother of former Hardball Times owner Dave Stoodman. By day, he is a professor of economics at Occidental College, but he has also been running

the Northeast League of APBA, that is American Professional Baseball Association, a simulated baseball game based on dice rolls for going on 60 years now. This spring will be the 60th anniversary of the NEL's first draft. Woody, hello and welcome to the show. Oh, hello. Thanks. I should say, though, I haven't been running it the whole time. We've actually had four different presidents. Okay. You've been in it, then. Yeah, that's for sure. One of the secrets to our success is shared governance.

Rather than having a dictator, we try to work things out together, and that means we've got a collective investiture in the organization in terms of keeping it going and keeping it successful. Yeah, I will ask you about the secret to that longevity. But before we get to that, I just to sort of set the scene here, I think a lot of people are familiar with Stratomatic, and many people are also familiar with APBA, but for people who are not, can you give us a brief history of the game and how you discovered it and how it works? Sure. So APBA is basically a simulation game. So it takes the basic stats of the previous year and randomizes outcomes so the order is unknown. So you can play a game, and if you played it, let's say, 30 or 40 years,

you'd end up with stats very close to the stats that were used to generate the game. But in the short run, almost anything can happen. In fact, pretty much everything does happen. And I originally first read about it when I was a kid in summer camp in 1957. My parents said, no, you can't buy it until you're older, by which they meant, I think, until you forget about it. And by the time I was older, I'd buy the game and became addicted. At that time, we had a naval warfare club, which met every Friday in the basement of our house. We converted to a baseball league. And for three years,

we drafted, this is in high school, we drafted year by year rather than continuous ownership and played head to head. Then as we headed off to college, we realized that was not going to work. So we switched it over to a continuous ownership play by male league. This was in 1960. And it turned out that nobody else had done this before, or at least if they had, they'd all died off. So that we claim to be the first and no one has tried to counter that argument. And how did you initially go about persuading them to go from a naval strategy group to baseball? What was that conversation like? Well, you know, I have to admit that I can't remember. But I think that's because, in all honesty, they liked the strategy, they liked the idea of the strategy, but they were more baseball fans than they were naval warfare fans. In fact, I'm not sure who exactly is a naval warfare fan, per se. Yeah, this is a much more innocent pursuit that you've embarked on.

Exactly. It's hard to imagine a 60-year naval warfare league. And the origins of the game go back to the 30s, right, when Dick Seitz, the creator, just created it with his friends, and it was just an informal thing that he later turned into a business, and it's come down all these years to us. Well, let me interrupt, though, because that's not 100% correct. Because he bought a game called The National Pastime, which is virtually identical to APA in some respects. And he played that, and then he added ideas to it, made it better and better. And that's what he marketed in 1950. It you hear from so many Stratomatic players that it taught them so much about how baseball works on a fundamental level that you get a sense of sabermetric principles just because of the probabilities involved? So I assume that this works in sort of a similar fashion? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not a coincidence that I'm an econometrician because that's basically the same stuff only you get paid for instead of paying people to do it. Right. So why do you think the game has fascinated you for

all these years? Because there are not that many things that most of us do over that long a period that still bring us the same joy that they used to, and yet for you it has. Well, so first there's the challenge of being successful because in a continuous ownership league, you attempt to identify players who are going to be good when they're young. Then you draft them or trade for them and then you watch them mature. And so if you're successful at that, there's sort of a fun feeling to it. But in the long run, it's the friends. Most of the managers in our league have been in the league for 22 years or longer. Most of the managers in our league have been in the league for 22 years or longer.

And we have a convention once a year where we spend time together. And nowadays, the conversations start with, how's your family or how's your health, and then moves on to baseball from there. So basically, it's a friend group that gets together once a year that happens to play baseball. And I guess if I'd force them to, who knows, maybe we'd still be doing naval warfare games. What are, as you look back over the long history of your time in the league, what are some of the, maybe the early draft picks you made that were the biggest coups when you look back and realize, hey, I got that guy in the 10th round or wherever,

and he ended up being an all-star? Well, we don't use rounds. We use money. So we have sealed bids for the players in our drafts. And I did get Greg Maddox for 6% of my annual money total, which is a pretty good deal. But I remember more tradings. Normally, I'm not that good at figuring out who's going to be great. Three years from now, I'm figuring it out maybe a month before someone else figures it out. So I make huge trades. So I traded, for example, Vida Blue and Carl Yastrzemski for Mike Schmidt, that sort of stuff. Pete Rose and Bill White for Joe Morgan.

Those are the things that stick in your memory, the kinds of trades where the player is going to be good and you've managed to figure it out just in the nick of time. Yeah. And just to give people a sense of how long ago this was, JFK had just won the New Hampshire primary. A band called the Quarrymen was just changing its name to the Beatles. And as you mentioned to me via email, because you were starting with the 1960 cards, Ted Williams, who was in his final year in the majors, would be the NEL's inaugural home run champion. He was indeed, yeah. He had a good card that year. I imagine he usually did. So has the game itself evolved over the intervening decades, or have the changes in the actual real-life sport affected the strategy in the game?

So to show you how stuck in the mud we are, we still play with the 1986 version of the game. So we use the modern cards, but the boards we use haven't changed really at all in, what is it, 40, 34 years. So that, yeah, the game has changed. It's improved. Appa's better now than it was in 1960 when we started. But we don't care about that.

We want to stick with the tried and true game that we know and love. So we're basically a bunch of old fogies who enjoy getting together and playing these games. And perhaps we're not as good. We don't claim to be the best league. We just claim to be the oldest. We really enjoy what we're doing. And we're not trying to optimize things. We're trying to have a ton of fun.

In fact, as one of my friends says, we have to understand this is not reality. We are not simulating reality. We're playing a league to enjoy ourselves. And maybe that's part of the success. I think if you focus on replicating reality, you're going to be frustrated because no 162-game simulation can really come close to what actually generated those stats. Unless you cheat. Sure. Is there any banging scheme, any sign stealing in APA? I guess not. It's probably unviolated. Actually, there is. There certainly is.

There are two ways to cheat. The first is because we use a sealed bid auction, if two managers were to share their bids with each other, they have a significant advantage over the rest of the league. Yeah, that happened once. It happened once. And a player got ejected from the league. And later, he turned out to be a serial killer.

So we think that we actually could have helped society if we only told everybody about his cheating. Oh, my gosh. I feel like I need to hear more about that. Oh, yeah. There's a whole book about him. Luckily, I'm not in the book. I was just going to say, it should be a book. I need to hear more about that. and the opponent then carries out your instructions. And so there's always a chance that he'll roll a good roll for your team and he'll accidentally fall off the table or whatever. And one of the things that distinguishes our league from others is just the incredible trust we all have in each other. And I think what it boils down to is if you've known someone for 22 years,

beating them by cheating really isn't fun at all. I'm serious. Beating them by cheating is not fun at all because there's no money involved. We don't pay each other bonuses. Rotisserie pays money. I'm not sure why they do. They don't need to. And so I feel sorry for anyone currently in real baseball who's cheating because, in all honesty, you're not going to enjoy that.

It's simply not fun to cheat and win. And in what ways has the game evolved, not the version that you're using, but the later versions? It's become a lot more sophisticated in terms of, let's say, strikeout rates. Used to be there only were two or three different possibilities for pitchers to strike folks out. Now there's probably seven or eight different categories. It used to be the numbers were only one out of 36, and now they have re-roll situations where you've got basically 36 squaring possibilities for different kinds of extra base hits. So it's just become more accurate. It's not necessarily a better game.

It still has the inherent flaws of any simulation game, but it's become a bit more accurate in terms of card making. I'm curious, you know, obviously you're getting a ton of fun and fulfillment out of this. How much actual, like, live baseball do you watch? So unfortunately, that's a sad story part of that. I was a Dodger season ticket holder for 40 some odd years, went to many, many games, was born in Cooperstown, in fact, played summer baseball on AA field every day in the summer. So I'm a baseball nut. Unfortunately, my son passed away and I have

trouble being around large crowds, so I don't go to Dodger games much anymore. But I do write blogs. I go to visit all the new ballparks and write them up and evaluate them for the Harbaugh Times, which is now Fangraphs. I had to get the plug in for my brother. Thank you. I appreciate that. Was anyone who was born in Cooperstown in the 40s not a diehard baseball fan or is your fate pretty much set in stone? Well, I haven't met everyone who was born in Cooperstown in the 40s, so I don't know for sure. But there certainly are a lot of baseball fans. When you're playing ball in your backyard and you hit the ball a long time, a long way,

sorry, and it goes into the backyard of Sid Keener, who's the director of the Hall of Fame. You learn very quickly. I was walking through the hall one time and Lee Allen recognized me and gave me an extra copy of a book he had. He was trying to get rid of and wanted to make sure it got to a friend so that you do have connections because almost everybody you know is either related to the Hall of Fame or making money from selling stuff related to the Hall of Fame. Yeah. So tell us about the membership of the league now. Who other than you is the longest tenured members and does it tend to stay in the family or among friends over the years? So we recruit across the country. In fact, we have an opening right now. If someone is

interested, they should email me at woody.oxy.edu and let me know they're interested because the application deadline is fast approaching. But we run national searches. So we advertise everywhere we can. We try to get as many applicants as we can. We then put them through the hoops. We make them answer questions. We make them write instructions. We make them evaluate players. And then we pick the very, very best, and we try to indoctrinate them to come to the conventions so they can get to realize what crazy but otherwise fun people we are and become a part of the league for a long time. So I think it's not picking friends. Absolutely not picking friends. Some of them tend to be retired people, but some

of them tend to be professors. We probably have three professors. Most of them have a statistical bent. That is to say, they're not necessarily sabermatricians, but they're people with an inclination in that direction. And there are or have been descendants of former members, right? People taking over for... Correct. Our current president is the son of a former president. It's not royalty. He didn't hand it down. He had to get elected on his own. Okay. No nepotism in the NEL. So other than you, I guess, who's the longest tenured and what is the typical tenure of someone in the league? The average manager lasts around 25, 30 years. Okay. Some people wear out. Yeah. And they decide they don't want to be in a league like that anymore.

And others just keep rolling along. The person who we're replacing was in the league 57 years, was in my wedding, to give you an example of how close we are together, and only now is stepping down. And even there, he's not completely stepping down. He's moving into an advisory role with another manager. And is it essentially a lifetime job if you want it, assuming that you're on good behavior? Well, yeah, unless you kill somebody, we tend not to kick you out. Luckily, we have a good predictor for that. If you cheat in your draft, you become the kind of person who might kill somebody. We're not sure which is more, but that's probably a high correlation. We're not sure about the causality. Correlation is not causality. So we can't say that cheating causes that. But I don't know. I think it's really hard to generalize. We don't throw people out. We're

not Sparta. So we don't put people out who are just old, because sometimes old people have more time to devote to their hobbies than young people with four kids and a job and exercise and stuff like that, taking up their time. I don't know if you'll want to reveal anything further about the application process while you still have them pending. We don't want to give anyone a leg up. There's no secret questions, no secret questions. I'm curious, though, what, first of all, how many applicants you typically have when you have an opening. I would imagine, given how rarely they come open, that it might be a lot. And also sort of how current members, shall we say, of the league have distinguished themselves during that process. What are the things you're looking for?

Sure. Well, the most applicants we ever had for a spot is 13. So we don't get inundated. I think part of it is because the application itself takes a spot is 13. So we don't get inundated. I think part of it is because the application itself takes a bunch of work. You've got to describe who you are. You've got to talk about your experience. You've got to rank some players we give you. You've got to write up a sample set of instructions. So it actually takes work. And what we find is that the people who are not willing to fill out the application are probably not going to do all the work to become a good league member. So it's in partly a screening mechanism. And yeah, the people who are in the league did really, really

well in their application. It's easy to say that for sure. You can't get in unless you just blew all the other folks away. We're looking for really sharp people who would make good Andrew Freedman's typically will do well in this league, and that's who we're trying to find. So when your brother Dave wrote about the league more than 15 years ago now, he noted at the time that you had a 6-14 career winning percentage and 14 titles. Do you have updated stats there? Yeah, I think I'm doing a little worse. Unfortunately, when you recruit really, really good people, then they tend to beat you. But I still have maybe 590, something like that, maybe, I don't know, 17 championships.

But that's a good sign. We've had five different champions in the last five years. I think that's the mark of a strong league. You don't want to have a dictator making up the rules and then winning all the championships. That ruins a league pretty quickly. If you put the league first, it's much more likely to be successful than if you put yourself first. If you put the league first, it's much more likely to be successful than if you put yourself first. And are there moments or seasons that stand out in your mind with the kind of clarity that real baseball seasons stand out in baseball fans' minds?

I mean, you know, memorable series. Yeah, there was a time that Mark McGuire hit over 90 homers. That was pretty exciting. Our records are pretty crazy because we're, we're statistical replay and there's no one interviewing you every time you hit a homer. You're just, just the dice are rolling and off, off it goes. And in particular, not by, you can manipulate the batting order to improve the statistics of some people because we allow the unlimited use of the hit and run, which is patently crazy and unfair, but it adds a lot of strategy to the game that otherwise wouldn't be there. Parenthetical question would be, what was my favorite

up on memory? And believe it or not, it was based on the real world. The season was ending, and I'd calculated that Mike Witt, to get a particular grade that I really, really wanted, had to pitch a nine-inning complete game shutout. And since I'm in Southern California, I was listening to him pitch on the radio, pitch by pitch by pitch, and he pitched a perfect game. So that was pretty exciting. Yeah, that's pretty good. And is there like, I don't know, a legendary series or something that stands out in the way that some real-life series do? I suppose. I was playing in a World Series in a different league, not in the NL, but still it sticks in my memory. And I was down by a run in the last inning of the seventh game with a run on first and two out and Jim Ed Rice homered to win the game in the series. And that sort of gets your system going pretty quickly. And does there tend to be much trash talk or gloating, or is it all very friendly? I'm sure there's a lot of camaraderie, but do you get bragging rights to a certain extent?

You get bragging rights, but you better not brag. These are your friends. Picture winning a bridge game with your mother-in-law or something like that. Do you really want to brag about that? It's not going to help you in the future? Probably not. I see. Or father-in-law, Meg, for you.

I'm curious if there's ever been any discussion or pressure to move away from mail as the mechanism by which this is delivered or if you're stalwart. It happened about 15 years ago. We now do it almost all by email. Okay. And how do you keep stats and records? Is there a complete archive going back to the beginning? You got it. Oh, well, I shouldn't say back to the beginning.

Remember, I was only like 18 years old at the very beginning of this. So some of our early records are a tad incomplete. That's understandable. But over the last 30, 40 years, yeah, we're in pretty good shape. We've got a complete record going all the way back. So people can tell you who their career leader is and this and that. And we certainly have league records going way back. So I assume because this roughly mirrors real life, there's no one who has been a superstar in your league who is not a good player in real baseball or are there people whose reputations and accomplishments in the NEL vastly exceed or

fall short of their real life accomplishments? So in one season, if you get a fluke card in a small number of at-bats and you can somehow get the person into a lot of at-bats through injuries or rules, slippage or whatever, you can have fantastic seasons. Yeah, so one season, and also because the dice rolling happens one season at a time, you can have a great season for one year, but not a great career. Great careers in the NEL are great careers in baseball. Slam dunk. I see.

And tell us what the conventions are like. What's the atmosphere? What do you do? How many people are there? So just imagine the best vacation of your life happening every year. Sounds nice. That's what it is. When you walk in the door, you're just thrilled to be there.

So we have playoffs. We have World Series. We have three different drafts. We have an all-star game. We have a business meeting. We have three different drafts. We have an all-star game. We have a business meeting. We have a lot of talking and maybe a little drinking as well, and some eating of food and a lot of good camaraderie. Now and then even a golf tournament. It's simply and purely a lot of fun. And Meg, we've never had a female manager. We'd love to have you apply. Oh, wow. You're putting me on the

spot. I don't know if this answer will satisfy you. I do participate in a sim leak, but it is a little different than this. So perhaps the next time you have an opening, I'll contemplate. Okay. It's a deal. We'll make you an offer. Make an offer you can't refuse. How are your next 25 to 30 years looking mick are you are you available i i well i guess this is the good test right if i'm not interested in baseball at the end of 25 then i'm not worthy of being a manager well worthy worthy is not a word i would use but i would say not interested in being a manager there you go and are plus ones invited to the conventions is it league owners only or uh is it very exclusive or can friends and family or significant others come? It's even worse than that.

Typically, the plus one of the hosting manager heads for the hills or for the store or whatever. And if the plus one comes along, quite often they'll head for the store as well, making the manager pay, literally, for their being here on this weekend. But we've had a couple of spouses who really enjoy cooking and putting things on for the guys. But that lasts for a day or two, and then they're off taking care of wayward cats or whatever they do in their spare time because they simply can't stand to be around people as happy as we are. In all honesty, we're probably not good company because we're so excited to be with the other managers that talking to a spouse is almost like, I better not say anything. Yeah, you can do that the rest of the year.

I'll get in trouble. I'm about to head down the wrong track here. Okay. Yeah. Well, I guess you don't have to interview spouses as part of the application process to make sure that you like them. We sort of do because we ask prospective managers if they get a team, would they come to the convention?

And for many potential managers that means contacting the spouse. And getting permission to apply, basically. Yeah, I guess APA is maybe not as great a spectator sport as real baseball. Maybe watching dice rolls is perhaps not quite as compelling if you're not directly involved. Absolutely.

It's significantly worse, significantly worse, unless you know the people involved. And also, if you don't know the strategy, people get all excited. You try something really weird, a double switch or a pinch running, and everybody's saying, oh, I wonder if that'll work. And if you're not following baseball, that's one of the dumbest things. Let's just feel this guy there really excited because he switched from one card to another card.

Is that really worth talking about? And I assume that the venue for the convention changes every year. So do you have owners all over the country? So you never know where you're going to be going. Yes, we do. Yeah, we go from Ottawa to Southern California. So that's a pretty wide range. The last conventions were in, I think, if I remember correctly, Philadelphia, Cape Craw,

Florida, and Pasadena, California. And the upcoming one will be in New Jersey. I see. Florida and Pasadena, California. And the upcoming one will be in New Jersey. I see. And is it an honor to host or is that something that's just randomly determined or it's someone's turn? It's a lot of work. So that unless you volunteer, boy, we don't want you to do it because there's a ton of work because you've got to feed 10, 12 guys. You've got to deal with where they're going to sleep. It's a lot of work.

I see. It's also a ton of fun because you don't have to travel anyplace, and it's fun to show all the other guys where you live and what you enjoy doing and this sort of stuff. So it's an honor and a lot of work at the same time. And do you or have you played any other types of simulation games or fantasy games or tabletop games, or has your heart just been won by this one?

Well, I play a lot of military strategy games, as you can imagine, from my original naval warfare. So I get on the computer and conquer Europe or whatever. That's a whole different set of things where you've got to worry about logistics and strategy, and you're not really drafting players. And I used to play the Ethan Allen game. We all used to play those little weird baseball games where they're based on cards or spinners or whatever, but there weren't any real statistical validity to what they were doing. The beauty of APA, and to a lesser extent, Stratomatic, but the same kind of idea, is it's based on stats, so that if you could play, let's say, 30,000 seasons,

you might end up with some pretty inaccurate average stats. And is there a Strat-APA rivalry, or do the two get along? I think it's more like a sibling rivalry, where you don't want the other person to die or like that, but you sure hope you do better than they do. I see. And it really must be amazing to have this through line running through almost your entire life, because most people don't have that. You know, we have friends from this school or that school or this job or that job. And, you know, people come in and out of your life and maybe you reunite some point down the road. But rarely do you have a constant for six decades like this.

So that must be a special thing. The guy who introduced us, my wife was working for an econometric consulting firm, and the guy introduced us was talking, and she said, well, what should I ask Woody? He said, ask him what his license plate stands for. My license plate at that time was APBA. And so she knew what she was getting into before she got into it. I see. I think it's fair. You would not want to marry somebody and then find out they're in our league.

That's for sure. What kind of time commitment is this? I mean, obviously, when the convention comes around, it's an all-day thing, but from day to day, week to week, does it take up much of your time? In terms of playing the games, it's probably three hours a month. Because the games are, what, less than an hour each, right? Yep, you got it. And once you've played it for 60 years, you actually get pretty fast at playing the game. I think the fastest I've played is like one minute and 50 seconds. So you can go through that pretty quickly. But don't forget now,

you're trying to be Andrew Friedman. You're trying to scout players, evaluate players, make trades, watch games. So the amount of time you spend learning about baseball analyzing baseball strategizing is tremendous and that's just a ton of fun it makes watching baseball games just a whole lot more fun because you're actually analyzing what's going on you're scouting young players you're checking out your own players you're looking at what your opponent's players are doing seeing if you might be able to steal one from one of them and so that it makes baseball simply a ton more fun makes reading the paper every day a whole lot of fun. Yeah, I can imagine.

Although you might be too young to know what a paper is. We're not quite that young. Okay, gotcha. Well, one question I have, one of the great parts of Dave's article about this is where he mentions that you took that job of scouting so seriously that you would sometimes reach out directly to players to ask how many bases they were planning to steal or something like that.

Can you tell us about that, and do you still try to gain information that way? No, I don't do that anymore. But it's true that when Joe Morgan hurt his knee, I wrote him a letter and asked how he was feeling, if he's still going to steal bases, and he wrote back and said, yeah, he was. So I traded for him. I also called the Phillies' main office to find out about Mike Schmidt. And they said, oh, man, the ball's just jumping off his bat.

So I traded for him, too. But it doesn't work as well now because the advent of rotisserie baseball means there are people out there playing. And they don't play continuous ownership, but they're still investing a lot of time understanding what's going on. And so there's a lot more competition, but that also means a lot more sources of analysis information. It's a lot easier to manage in the Northeast League now than it was 50 years ago because there's so many either sabermetric or rotisserie-oriented publications and sources. I mean, look at your blog.

I don't think your blog would have existed 50 years ago. I'm not sure what blogs were back then. It was newspapers. I'm curious if there's anything about the upcoming season, either in your league or in baseball, as it's actually played on the field that you're especially looking forward to. Yeah, there are two. The first is the impact of the cheating scandal.

I can't believe there are only two teams involved, so it means people are hiding it. I wonder to what extent some of the huge home runs, and remember, I'm a Dodger fan, so I've been paying attention to this stuff. So the cheating scandal is one thing that all of us really care about. It's certainly a blot on the game,

but I'm not sure whether we've only uncovered the tip of the iceberg or what. Maybe that's just the pointiest point of the iceberg. Second is the home runs. The home runs over the last year have dramatically changed the entire tenor of baseball, and I think probably not for the better. But if you change back again, now all the player values that have been accumulated have gotten destroyed as well. And in a simulation game, it's difficult because the home runs wipe out a lot of the necessity for worrying about singles and walks and sacrifices and stolen bases. Just sit back and play Baltimore Oriole baseball, not the current kind, but the kind from 20 years ago.

Hopefully not the current kind. play Baltimore Oriole baseball, not the current kind, but the kind from 20 years ago. Hopefully not the current kind. So you have given your email address if people are interested in applying for the spot in your league, but if people have no APA experience and are interested in getting into the game, how would you recommend that they do that? They'd buy it. They should buy one, either Stratomatic or, well, I shouldn't say that. They should buy an APA game and start playing on their own. A lot of people start off by replaying a season of their favorite team. It turns out to be a lot of fun. Over 160 games, you can actually see you can get pretty close. That's not great, but pretty close and enjoy it. If you enjoy that, then you can move on to a competitive league. league. It's way different from rotisserie because in a continuous ownership league,

you're really becoming a scout of long-term value, not a person maximizing one year's worth of stats. How would they go about finding competitors or leagues to join? There are a bunch of places. I probably shouldn't give out the name, but there's an APA blog you could go to. There's an oppa between the lines website where people exchange ideas. And you can write oppa. They put on tournaments around the country all year long. So you could go on and meet like-minded people at those tournaments. In fact, if you go to oppagames.com, not to put in a plug, but I guess that is one, you can see a list of upcoming tournaments. There probably is one in your area. And has your league's longevity and the amount of time that you've been doing this made you an august figure in the APA community? Do people look to you or to the NEL for guidance or judgment about anything or just as an example of how long a league can keep going?

So, yeah, I think we're an example. So people know about us and people talk about us, but they don't look to us for guidance because remember, we're the old fashioned fuddy-duddy types, not doing all the modern stuff. So people know my name. I've had people driving next to me call out if I was the real Woody Studentman driving on an LA freeway. Obviously, you're not driving very fast on LA freeway, so there's time to have conversations. So that sort of stuff does happen, but he didn't ask for advice. He just wanted to know if I was who I apparently claimed I was. All right. And I guess lastly, if we want to go

read about the serial killer from the NEL, what's the name of the book or his name? I forget the name of the book, but his name is Gary Robbins. And I don't want to end the interview with his name. So you got to ask me at least one more question. Yeah, what else can we ask you? Can we ask a non-serial killer question? Mick, you got anything? Who's your favorite current active baseball player? Who's the guy you just enjoy watching the most? The most fun guy to watch in the higher major leagues is Yasiel Puig. He never does the same thing twice, and almost everything he does is interesting. And I can't believe that no team has realized that he's going to bring fans and seats into the park and hire him. Because while it's true he does overthrow the base now and then and get thrown out ceiling now

and then, he's so full of enthusiasm and joie de vivre that it's just incredibly fun to watch him. Yeah, I agree. And he's out there for the highest bidder, probably the best free agent still available. So someone sign Puig. No kidding. All right, well.

Well, thank you for calling. I sure appreciate it. Enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, thanks for joining us. And congrats on the upcoming 60th anniversary. And good luck finding a deserving owner. Take care. Thanks.

Sure. Bye-bye. All right. That will do it for today. The name of that book, by the way, is The Secret Life of a Bridge Player.

So that's a win for Woody. I guess it could have been The Secret Life of an Appa Player. Give Bridge the black eye instead. Thank you to Tony and Woody for coming on.

As always, I will link to all of the articles and research referenced on the episode on our show page and in the Facebook group. One brief follow-up to yesterday's episode, Sam and I talked about the enduring legacy and image of the Carlos Beltran strikeout looking to end the 2006 NLCS, and a listener asked us why that play in particular has stuck with us, and Sam brought up the fact that a couple other series ending strikeouts looking, the Ryan Howard strikeout to end the 2010 NLCS and the Miguel Cabrera strikeout looking to end the 2012 World Series, those have not really resonated the same way, and we acknowledged, I think, that the situations were different, but we didn't get into the details, and I think it's worth noting that the Beltran strikeout came in game seven in a 3-1 game

with the bases loaded. So a single could have tied that game. Clearing the bases would have won it. Whereas the Howard strikeout came in game six, albeit still with the tying run on second base and the Phillies down by just one run. And then the Cabrera strikeout in 2012, that was the end of a sweep. So that was game four and the Tigers were down by one run, but the bases were empty. So the stakes of the Beltran strikeout were certainly higher. By win probability added, it was higher than the others,

not much higher than the Howard strikeout, but just a tiny bit and a good deal higher than the Cabrera strikeout. And by championship win probability added, it was easily the most significant of the three. The championship leverage index was almost twice as high as it was in Howard's case, and vastly, vastly higher than it was in Cabrera's case, even though that was the World Series. Tigers were down 3-0 at that point. So even though it's the same play, in a sense, the circumstances were dramatically different.

And so the outcome was, in a dramatic sense, very different. So that has something to do with why it stuck with us. You can support us on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you want to support us in February, you can still do that if you do it today. Billing begins on the first of the month and you can help keep the podcast going and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners. Emily Johnson, Joe Mike Sell, Danny Madden, John Sagal, and Benjamin Pensurga. Thanks to all of you.

You can join the aforementioned 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 podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance this week and every week. And I know many of you are wondering about the team preview series. Well, guess what? It starts next week. Yes, this is that time of year.

Early February. It is team preview time. So starting next week, we'll be devoting two of our three episodes a week to team previews. Talking about two teams a day. You know the drill if you've been with us before. Always a great way to prepare for the season. So have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Love me 60 years and a day And I'll be true to you, baby

A hundred years after I'm old and gray