Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1500: Even More Things We Like About Baseball

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

In the third incarnation of a time-honored tradition that recurs every 500-ish episodes, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley are joined by The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee and ex-EW cohost (and current Tampa Bay Rays “Analyst, Baseball Development”) Jeff Sullivan to draft assorted things that they like about baseball. Audio intro: Beauty and the Beast Soundtrack, […]

Hello and that wasn't there before. There may be something there that wasn't there before. Hello and welcome to episode 1500 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as usual by Sam Miller of ESPN and Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. But today it's a special episode and we are joined by two of our favorite people in the world, Grant Brisby of The Athletic. Hello, Grant. And someone who has not heard this intro in a while and is probably having some deja vu right now, Jeff Sullivan, who is now an analyst in baseball development for the Rays, unless you've been promoted recently because all of your bosses have been hired to run other teams. I should have asked to do the intro because I

think I still know it. Yeah, it never goes away. Hello, everyone. Hi, nice to have you back. It's been a while. So every 500 or so episodes, we get together and we draft things we like about baseball, which seems like something that we need right now because we've talked about a lot of things we don't like about baseball. And this is the opposite of that. So we did this on episode 500. We did it on 996. And now we're doing it on 1500.

And these can be big things. They can be frivolous little silly things. Anything goes. things, anything goes. Before we start, Jeff, I won't waste everyone's time by asking you for details about your job because I know you can't tell us much, but what can you tell us, if anything, just about, I guess, how your life has been different over the past year? We were just talking about how you don't normally talk during these hours of the day anymore. See, I actually had a question for you, which was how much does it bother you that you did this in 996 instead of 1000?

A little bit. I don't remember why we did that. I guess we had big plans for 997 through 1000 or something. But yeah, bothers this a year ago. You know, it was about, well, do I stick with the thing that I know I'm good at and I'm comfortable at? Or do I try to challenge myself? And when you're in your 30s, it's a little, one might be a little less open to challenges because you figure you might just want to kind of fade into the darkness and allow yourself to pass and return to the earth. But it's been, it's been fun. I've learned a lot.

There's, I don't know, I learned a lot. I don't know. I can tell you I don't remember how to write. Like, I don't know the last time that I wrote something that was more than like three paragraphs, which it's fun because it means you can do more. But anyway, no, it's been a lot of fun. And I think that the thing I didn't necessarily expect, I'm just going to go ahead and pull the cover off. I don't remember if I ever said this before,

but for a while there through the end, I didn't care about baseball much when I wrote about it all the time and podcasted about it all the time. It was always fun to think about, but I had no real emotional connection. And it came back really fast and really strong. It helps that I work for a really, really good baseball team that I should point out was already really, really good without anything that I did and will hopefully remain really, really good. But I care about the

Rays a lot. i wasn't necessarily expecting that although i guess in hindsight it makes all the sense in the world but i like watching the games you it's just you care about them so much more and if we ever have a season god forbid where we win like 55 games then maybe it won't feel quite like that. But still, it is nice to know that one of those passions can be rekindled even when you are in, let's say, the middle stage of your life, which is the stage where everything kind of turns gray and brown. Yeah. And baseball development, what is that exactly? Is that like player development? Is that some other type of development? Is that just a generic term?

He puts the juice on the loss. some other type of development? Is that just a generic term? He puts the juice on the loss. Let's call it, it's R&D for people who don't have the skills to do R. So it's just D. Just giving them that D. Probably is Valentine's Day. The thing I appreciate about you is that I think you have the best Twitter account of anyone who has been hired to work for a baseball team, which is like the lowest possible bar because, you know, Dave Cameron tweets twice a year when there's a job opening or something. So that's what you're surpassing. But you still do have entertaining tweets at times because you're still a person

who has thoughts sometimes about non-baseball things. And sometimes you see a silly sign and you can still tweet that. That's not giving away proprietary information. It's just a silly tweet. I like that you still do that. Yeah. But that's all just ego scratching, right? That's just trying to be like, well, I had this platform and all these people knew me. And I just want to remind myself that all these people still know me. That's not really all that is because what I am now is a guy who's 3000 miles away from all of the people that he knows. Like I probably know more people in St. Petersburg now than I do in Portland on account of the blogging that I do from home. So that's, I mean, what is any social media, right? We're all just trying to pat ourselves on the back and try to think of ourselves as more

than we are. None of us are, but whatever. A hundred lakes, that's pretty sweet. Although I don't have any relatives who drew a funny map of North and South America, so Craig kind of won that one this week. Yeah, I've been yelling at my daughter like four days, do something funny. Disgrace. Go viral already.

Yeah, she's like acting in a school play it's come on i could do that right but i mean that's why you have kids right they're supposed to be extensions of you and if they're not that's the problem though when they grow older and you're like oh shit you're an extension of me you're not gonna do anything worthwhile for like 20 more years yeah yeah no i got a late start. That is for sure. She's going to start blogging about the Giants. No, no. All right, should we draft?

I guess we can draft. Jeff, you haven't been on the podcast for a while. You haven't podcasted at all. So why don't you get the first pick? It's not like we're actually competing for things here. Hopefully there's more than a very limited number of things that we all like about baseball and we won't overlap. So we're each just going to draft three things.

I think we'll see how it goes. So you want to kick it off? I believe our last podcast competition was the minor league free agent draft. And so you still destroyed us. Anything in the mail. You absolutely. I mean, you walked all over us. It was a historic performance in my creation.

Here's all Harold Ramirez. Okay, so I'll go first. I will not trade my pick, although I guess I could. I have a lot of things written down. I could trade my first overall pick for like the second and third, but I guess I shouldn't do that. Wait, wait, wait. I want to interrupt real quick.

Do you have a list of article ideas that are not Rays related? Do you still generate article ideas? Do you have hundreds of them article ideas that are not Rays related? Do you still generate article ideas? Do you have hundreds of them now? Can I have some? Can I have them? Whatever I think about now is very much, it's no longer as creative and it's more all the analysis stuff, right? So I just don't engage much with the more creative side of things because I don't have a reason to. And anything I think of for analytical purposes, just put into slack okay all right okay so you said you

have a lot of picks here it's not oh yeah and it's not because you've been furiously imagining the uh the the jeff sullivan vertical that you're gonna launch when you leave the race i don't want that. Jeff Sullivan vertical would be so tall. We have a tall front office, I will point out. There's many, many tall people, including one person who I think knows that he looks exactly like Doug Pfister, but is about 11 years younger. But when I was in the office and interviewing, I looked out there and I was like, oh, I guess we made an acquisition. No, that's just another guy in baseball development. Wow. Doug Pfister, that's two Craig Calcaterra references. For the listeners at home, one of the all-time great Twitter typos was him tweeting out a story about Doug Pfister, which still makes me laugh, but that's the context for that hilarious joke.

All right, continue. Some of your insights that must help the Rays would be or could be blog posts, right? Because I assume that if you're doing advanced scouting or something, you might realize something about a player. And in the past, that could have been a post or you might be looking at a league-wide trend or something and bringing that to the team's attention. And that could have been a post in the past. So maybe you're not doing like, I don't know, the baseball equivalent of LeBron James or whatever the weird posts that you used to do were, but some of this stuff must be

similar. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Give me some secrets. Give me some secrets about some Giants players. Come on. Give me some articles. I got four desperate baseball writers who are all trying to bark up the same tree because there's nothing, there's no currency that is more valuable than one simple article idea to help get you through the day. To Meg's great relief, I guess, but also burden, you're not writing much because of, you know, editing. So you have more time to think of ideas, but probably by the time you might have creative windows of time, your brain has killed itself. And so you probably don't get to think much. It's mostly mush right now. I didn't sleep on Tuesday night. And what I've learned is that your thirties are not a time for all nighters. Just don't do it. It's bad idea. Make you feel bad. This isn't a joke. It gets better in your 40s.

Well, it does though at some point, right? Because you end up not needing to sleep so much. I don't know how else to explain my grandparents. Yeah, no, I'm not there yet. So hey, Jeff, what are you picking? First pick, this is I think appropriate for the time of the year. My first pick, one of the things I like about baseball the most

is the feeling that you get to feel about your team, not only all spring training, but really a little extension of it that is, I think it's until your team loses its first regular season game. And I think the cliche expression would be that hope springs eternal and you can always see the upside in everyone in spring

because nothing's really happened yet. Even the worst teams in baseball have really talented baseball players who were, who were on them. But I just like that even despite all of the math that's out there. And even despite whatever impressions you might have of, Oh, my team has been last place three years in a row, or my team plays in Detroit. It's not very good that you can still come into spring and it's just, you don't want to even engage with whatever might be negative. Now I'm saying, I know that there's sort of a joke that on the first day of spring, everything is super, super optimistic. And then everything goes down the drain as soon as there's the first injury. So like there's news out this morning, like Mitch Hanegar had another surgery or mike

clevenger is having surgery and it's like all right well so much for the fun of spring now baseball has started but i really don't think it kicks in nothing baseball doesn't settle into routine until i think your team has its first win and its first loss of the regular season and until that first loss everything is magical is possible. If you want to think of like projection error bars, there is every team overlaps with like 95 wins by some percentage. And I love this time of year for exactly that. Oh my gosh. I cannot tell you how shocked I am at how sentimental you have become.

That was the most earnest thing I've ever heard. Right? The first time we did this draft, you drafted John Ulrud's lawsuit with his neighbor over a tree. And now you're going with hope springing eternal in the baseball breast. Because of the background of writing about the Mariners, spring was all that we ever had. Because it got bad fast, man. And that was always there so this is really a return to sentiment because when i would blog about the mariners things would be

sentimental until the bad things would would accumulate and then it just got negative but this has always been there but no this is i already drafted john oliver's hedge dispute so i can't do that again you've changed man you've changed, man. You've changed. His second thing is going to be that there's no clock. The grass is so green. Crack of the bat. Smell of the hot dogs. Hold on. Does John Olerud's property dispute have a sun? Because I could draft that. Well, one of my favorite manifestations of this is when teams and players make very optimistic predictions about themselves in the spring, which is something that I used to

track. And I used to do an annual article about that, just looking back at things that teams and players said about themselves in the spring. And almost without fail, they would turn out to be way over optimistic. And as I was just looking back through some links I had saved to figure out what to draft today, I found this old link that I had from March, 2015 about Jonathan Papelbon talking about the 2015 Phillies. And he said, I feel like we're going to contend. There's no doubt about that. I don't think anyone in this clubhouse, especially the veterans feels like we're not going to contend, et cetera, et cetera. They won 66 games. They did not contend.

Actually, 63 games. Sorry. And that's often what happens. And I've also done articles about how every clubhouse has a good clubhouse vibe in the spring, which is another thing that Jonathan Papelbon said about that Phillies team, that they're all getting along so great. It's a great group of guys. They're doing ping pong outside the ballpark, and everyone's getting along so great. It's a great group of guys. They're doing ping pong outside the ballpark

and everyone's getting along great. And then the season starts and they start losing and everyone hates each other. And Jonathan Papelbon starts strangling people. So yes, I agree that I like this time of year. Who do you think is more over-optimistic, players or fans of those teams? So when the players say it, or a gm or manager says it then you never know if they really believe it or if they are just trying to get the fans excited so it's hard to say if it's sincere i think a lot of fans do get over exuberant but there are also some fans who have that sort of self-defeating mets style attitude or like cubs in past years where it's just like oh here we go again what's going

to go wrong this time so i think it depends on the fan base but overall i'd say fans because when fan graphs used to do those fans projections they were always way over optimistic as a group and people thought that the players would all be better than the players could possibly be i i will i think it's the opposite i think that players mean it more. I think that players fundamentally respect each other's abilities. I think they look around and they see a bunch of good ballplayers and that's how they see each other mainly as good ballplayers. And so when they show up and there's a bunch of good ballplayers, they're like, yeah, this is a good group. We got some ballplayers here. Fans, on the other hand, basically think of most players as busters. They think like almost all of them are going to let them down and they're flawed in some way.

There's some hope that you get when your team makes some acquisitions or call up some young player that they're going to shoot the moon. But for the most part, I think fans do tend to see a lot of holes in players' games. And players tend to see a lot of their peers, guys they respect. Was that a Hearts reference? It was. Shoot the mid. That's good.

That's quality. Are you a Hearts player? Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah. Good. All right. All right.

Grant, you want to go next? You're our other guest. I, too, would like to draft the eternal vibrance of spring baseball. No. I'm going to draft the eternal vibrance of spring baseball. No, I'm going to draft going on baseball reference and picking literally any team from 1904 just to study their names and the pictures, the pictures at top.

But okay, so there are 16 teams in baseball as of 1904. Just pick one and I'll click on it. And I haven't gone through them yet. Boston Doves. Boston, well, they're not the Doves. So Boston is, they're the Bean Eaters. Oh, okay. You're a Bean Eater.

So the Boston Bean Eaters, they, oh gosh, you picked the worst one, Sam. They have Rip Canahill. They have the best team name though. That's true, that's true. They have Rip Canahill. They have the best team name, though. That's true. That's true. They have Rip Canahill. They have Kid O'Hara.

They have Doc Marshall. They've got Kaiser Wilhelm. Duff Cooley. So this is the worst one. And then at the top, they've got the top 12 players. And it's all these black and white. You've got Fred Tenney with just this marvelous mustache. You have Jim Delahanty, who looks like he swallowed a bug.

Tom Needham with a haircut that looks very institutional in all the wrong ways. Like, just any team you pick, any team is going to just be chock full of, like, wow. And here's the 1904 Cleveland N naps they have billy lush uh they have red donahue uh this one's boring too okay but i promise you that of the 16 teams i have found some good ones all right washington senators come on come on. Popping these new pair of shoes. They have Rabbit Nill. They have Happy Townsend. Lou Drill. Boiler Yard Clark.

Hunter Hill. Malachi Kittredge. Davey Dunkel. Beanie Jacobson. And they win. Not on the bean eaters. Yeah, right? So I just love just going to all these different pages and having a blast and looking at the pictures. It reminds me of the timelessness of baseball and how it is really we go back and it's the same sport and yet very much not.

And I love it. OK. 1904 Chicago White Sox has Nick Altrock. Yeah. Classic. Yeah. Classic. Yeah. No, I've mentioned him in articles before. love it okay 1904 chicago white socks has nick alt rock yeah classic yeah classic yeah no i've mentioned him in articles before he's you know he played with a jigs donahue yeah in episode 500 you drafted players with dirty words in your name on baseball reference so i saw that in a now it's old-timey name yeah but a i I was a little intimidated by the fact that there's a Wikipedia page for Effectively Wild podcast. I didn't know that. Everything you are saying right now will be preserved for posterity. Yeah.

You sent that to me in a DM, and I thought you sent me links to the podcast. And I was like, buddy, if you expect me to go back and listen to that, that's not going to happen. And then I looked at the list. I was like, wait a second. And I clicked through and there's someone actually paying attention which is terrifying but i saw that and i still went through because i think just going to 1904 and then when he gets like 1910 it's not as funny for some reason like it degrades over time uh but 1904s can i interrupt with the name in right

halfway between 1904 and 1907 is actually the first year of the Boston Doves, under their new moniker. And they had a player named, this is not a funny name exactly, but I think it is Big Jeff Pfeffer. Jeff Pfeffer. So his name was Big Jeff Pfeffer, which I think is great. Jeff Pfeffer. Okay.

J-E-F-F-P-F-E-F-F-E-R. Jeff Pfeffer. It's over-f-f-p-f-e-f-f-e-r all right uh but here's the great thing about big jeff pfeffer not actually named jeff not actually named jeff his nickname was he was known as big jeff pfeffer but his name was francis he was named big jeff Pfeffer because he was the older brother of Jeff Pfeffer. They named him. He got the nickname after the brother was born. They decided what to name him later. Wait, but Jeff Pfeffer was named Edward.

No. Wait, Big Jeff is two inches shorter than Jeff. Regular Jeff. Yeah, it's true that Jeff, original Jeff Pfeffer. To be clear, actual Jeff Pfeffer, right? Big Jeff Pfeffer is Francis Xavier Pfeffer. Jeff Pfeffer is Edward Joseph Pfeffer. There's no Jeff.

There's no Jeff. There's no Jeffs for two Jeffs. Can I just chime in? Have you all considered Feff Jeffer? Is this like a Big John, Little John? Is it like an ironic, like a sarcastic kind of thing? Like we call him Big Jeff because he's actually the smaller Jeff by two inches and 25 pounds? I don't know.

Big Beth Jeffer? Well, I mean, Big Jeff Fever was the bigger Jeff Fever. For a while, yeah. I mean, given that there were no Jeff Fers. But I mean, if you assume they were both actually Jeff Fers, then he was the bigger one up until probably. But let's also point out that Big Jeff Fever was two inches shorter and 25 pounds lighter than Jeff Pfeffer. That's what I just said.

That's what we're talking about. But they were growing. I mean, Little Jeff Sullivan, I'm guessing that that wasn't the case in 1888 when Big Jeff Pfeffer was six and Little Jeff Pfeffer was three. I mean, probably this nickname held for a long time. They were both pretty big by the standards of the day. I don't think he got the nickname when they were grown. I don't think we should be focusing on how big they were.

Hold on. No, let me say a thing. Shut up. Pause. Now it's not worth it. What if Feffer is a verb? like a big jeff oh yeah to pepper feffest like or that he faffs jeffs how much jeff would have jeff that

faff if and jeff that could bet jeff yeah this is what i'm saying this is why podcasts are not normally five people, I guess. I will say real quick that while we're talking about heights and stuff like this, that's also one of the reasons I wanted to draft this and I forgot about it, is that every picture looks like they have scurvy. Every baseball player from 1904 has rickets and scurvy and dropsy and the mumps and stuff. So that's also a reason to write. Yeah, dysentery for sure. You know, I heard recently that 98.6 degrees, the temperature that everybody knows is like

humans resting temperature that they have now found that's not actually true. That we're actually like more state with like, like our resting temperature and resting is the wrong word, but like our, our healthy temperature is actually like somewhere in the 97s but 98.6 came because when they did this huge survey of people they did it like 100 years ago when half the population did have scurvy or rickets and so they were just swooping in all these sick people and thinking that that was the normal state of human existence and so for 100, we've had thermometers that had temperatures that were based on kind of low grade illness, in fact. Yeah. That's what I always wonder about the old timey names is whether a hundred years from now, if everyone's still alive and baseball still

exists, whether today's names will sound equally archaic and quaint, or whether that was just a magical little period there of a couple of decades where everyone had consumption and strange names. Pick a team. Look at the roster. Yeah. If our vaccination rate is any indication, we might just have a return to all sorts of things. Also possible.

All right. Meg, you want to go? I do want to go. And I was so nervous that Grant would take mine. I am drafting. nervous that grant would take mine i am drafting i am drafting baseball scandals that either involve horniness or characterized by horny language hey wait wait wait wait i don't know man i don't know, man. I just felt right. What about my brand?

All right, go on. I don't know that much has brought me greater joy in the last year than like the Grand Junction chubs and the gas station dick pills and the banging scheme. You guys, there's been so much nonsense and so much garbage. And I can't enjoy this to my full capacity on Twitter because men are not to be trusted with the seeming invitation to remark on haunt content. They can't be trusted. You all cannot be trusted. Men on Twitter cannot be trusted,

especially. But it brings me joy in a way that I didn't know I was capable of feeling about 12-year-old humor as a 33-year-old woman. And so I say, bang on, bang away, but ask questions before you bang. There are a lot of baseball terms that are unintentionally dirty, like power shagging comes to mind. Sure, yeah. There are others. But yes, when you can couple the scandal with the unintentionally horny sounding name, it does kind of undercut the seriousness of the whole thing. Now, there are potential drawbacks to this because, for instance, my mother who is, you you know mom enjoys going to baseball games with me but she is not a baseball fan and she watched ken burns baseball and learned

of merkel's boner and that's an innocuous phrase for some but it radically changes when you are sitting at a baseball game in a public place with your mother and there is an error of some sort. And she says, is that a boner? Changes. Everything changes after that. Your life is altered. The landscape of language is different. So you got to be careful.

But also, you should just bang all the time. I mean, you've got, that's the same team. You've got Merkel's boner and Snodgrass's muff. I've always been fascinated that that's the same team. You've got Merkel's boner and Snodgrass's muff. And you've got to keep them away from each other. Your reaction here is why I was worried you'd be the person to scoop this pick. I'm a little distracted because I was reading the scouting report

on Reese McGuire. It says he can really crank it. You can edit that out, right, Ben? I could, but I won't. My fourth pick in this draft, if we had gone to four rounds, was actually going to be Merkel's boner related.

I was going to pick the final game of that season. I did not realize that Merkel's boner actually happened three weeks before the end of the season. And the final game of the season was even more interesting, in my opinion. But I didn't pick that. But I have always wondered, or not really wondered, but I've kind of half planned to do a survey of all the unintentional dirty words across sports to see which sport is unintentionally the dirtiest. And I can't, I don't think I want to do it until, I don't ever want to do it. So probably never will do it. But I just, I can't, it's not an article that I want to picture people reading and associating with me.

And so I don't know. It's, yeah, I would like to get there, but I guess what I need is to be more, you know, self-actualized as a human. But in the meantime, I do think that it's an underrated, unintentionally dirty word that we all say many times throughout the season without dying of laughter

is when we refer to the second spot in the batting lineup as the two hole see for me it's it's when we talk about consummating trades because that sounds like the way that jane austen would describe a banging scheme let's put it that way only two only two things you consummate. Yeah. One of the things I've learned actually on this side of the game is that is how it works.

Makes me think about Jerry DiPoto very differently. I mean, every team has different hotel rooms at the winter meetings for a reason. Some consummation put Jerry in the hospital. That's troubling. Hi, guys. I can confirm.

I did a little research. There have been eight plate appearances where Albert Pujols batted in the two-hole. Oh, no. So six games with Pujols in the two-hole. Yeah, it's not just the phrase two-hole, but it's that someone's in the two-hole. I never want to do this article. I'm really happy that we got to do this because like I said, normally I have to save my dick jokes for my family because I can't do it on Twitter. So it's nice to get to share this moment with my friends. I once did an article about old timey sheet music

and songs that was about baseball, but also about sex. And so they would use baseball language to kind of talk about sex in songs like I Can't Get to First Base With You, which has a smiling Luke Erick on the cover. If you can't make a hit in a ball game, you can't make a hit with me.

And it's all very suggestive. And this is going back a long way. So there's a long with me and it's all very suggestive and this is going back a long way so there's a long legacy of this sort of thing sam you're up all right i'm gonna pick willie may's house party the thing about willie may's is uh well there's a lot of things about willie may's and one of the things about willie may's is that he had a real soft spot for children and so when he goes to i'm gonna it's going to get a little bit like less fun for a minute when he goes to San Francisco, when the giants moved to San Francisco, probably some people know this. I don't know if it's well-known, but he went to go buy a house and

they basically wouldn't sell him the house because he was African-American and it became kind of a big thing in San Francisco for a little while because Willie Mays was, you know, being kept out of neighborhoods in 1957. And this was not secretly done or anything. It was pretty openly done. The city was trying to find him other houses and neighborhoods that wouldn't protest. And this was written about in the newspaper. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. Willie Mays ran into the color barrier. He and his wife were turned down in their attempt to buy a home because they are black. Mays, the say hey kid of baseball, is at 27, one of the game's all-time greats, both at bat and in the field. After looking at several houses, Mays offered $37,500 for a new

home at 174 Mira Loma Drive. It was the price the owner was asking, but after several days of waiting, Mays was turned down. The house is still for sale at the same price, but not to Mays. The owner of the house said that he was willing to sell to Mays, but that neighbors put such great pressure on him that he finally decided not to accept the baseball star's offer. Mays said that he was deeply disappointed. His wife was more bitter.

Down in Alabama, where we came from, she said, you know your place and that's something at least. But up here, it's all a lot of camouflage. They grin in your face and then deceive you. And, you know, San Francisco had a kind of a weird relationship with Willie Mays because he was incredible. He was awesome. He was a perfect franchise superstar. And a lot of times they were real jerks to him. And so Willie Mays spent a lot of his career with a reputation for being a fairly suspicious of grownups for good reason of the people around him, people who were trying to get him to do things or who were, you know, writing about him or talking about him. And alongside this, there's this whole parallel track where he's also interacting with the world of children. So in the biography, Willie Mays, The Life, The Legend by James Hirsch, there's a whole section in the index, kindness toward children by Willie Mays. And there are like 30 different sections in the book that this points back to. There are more entries for kindness toward children by Willie Mays than legacy and place in baseball history of Willie

Mays or iconic and legendary status of Willie Mays. There's a whole other section in the index for children's causes and charitable work. He really got along very well with children. And there are two stories I think that are the best Willie Mays kindness stories. But the very best one, I'm going to read the second one too, eventually. But the very best one is when he, so he finally, you know, he gets a house. It's a very dark period in his relationship with the city. He never really feels at home for those first few years. And then after six years, he does finally feel like he's settled down. He's a San Franciscan. He feels somewhat more accepted by the city. And so he goes and he buys another house.

And this time he has no problem. He buys the house. He refurbishes it and everything like that. And so this is what happened. Before he moved in on December 20th, his mailbox was stuffed with letters. Dear Willie, one wrote, I represent the neighborhood kids, a bunch of boys on 9th Avenue. We welcome you to our neighborhood and hope you enjoy it, David. And there kids, a bunch of boys on Ninth Avenue. We welcome you to our neighborhood and hope you enjoy it, David. And there are a whole bunch of these. Once settled,

Mays decided to have a housewarming for the kids. And he got a list of names from the Forest Hill Improvement Association. One mother dropped off nine children, all hers. Also attending was nine year old Amy Irving, a future actress. Mays gave each child an autographed picture and a record, and he served chips, punch, ice cream, and a cake decorated like a baseball diamond with toy players at the top. At one point, the host had to run out and buy more ice cream. Kids from outside the neighborhood heard that this was going on and they would come and they would like look inside and he'd go out and he'd invite them in. And eventually this housewarming party with just kids that was supposed to be 30 ended up with more than 100

kids. There's all these pictures of Willie Mays hosting them in his brand new home. And so even that, even that nice thing that he did for children, adults could be cynical about. There were people who were writing that he was only doing that as a contract ploy, that he was trying to raise his visibility and popularity right before his contract, which I think goes to the point that Willie Mays had identified, which is that adults were jerks and they all wanted something from him and they were all distrustful of him. But he had no suspicion of children and it was a beautiful thing, wonderful thing. The other best story of Willie Mays and the kid was when some kid knocked on his door and said he needed a ride to the ballgame. And so Willie Mays drove him to the ballgame. And then later that him. And so the kid brought a whole bunch of other kids and they all crowded into Willie Mays' Cadillac and

he drove them all home. At one point when they were on the way to the game, the kid realized he had forgotten his lunch. So Willie Mays drove the kid back to his house and got his lunch from his mother. So I don't know. It's a beautiful thing about a, it's a beautiful thing about, about Willie Mays career. And one of those stories that of a player being like accessible and unguarded and human that feels impossible today. I could see Mike Trout driving kids around. I would not be surprised. I could see Mike Trout wanting to, but it just doesn't feel like we have that world anymore. Like there, you don't, there's not that interaction between famous people and real people. There's a real kind of like sense that the public is dangerous maybe. And so it's hard to imagine it happening in anything other than like James Corden's prearranged sketch, you know? Yeah.

He does go back to Millville and hang out with his high school baseball kids there. But that's probably a little different. with his high school baseball kids there, but that's probably a little different. Did you get this idea because you've been to a kid party at my house in which I hired a woman to play Elsa from the movie Frozen? Was that your inspiration for this? I do remember that party. Yeah, it was wild, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Just like Willie Mays. Just like Willie Mays. What records was Willie Mays passing out to the children? Because you said that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Just like Willie Mays. Just like Willie Mays. What records was Willie Mays passing out to the children? Because you said that, right? It was like ice cream and records.

I did say that. I don't know. I'm not sure. What year are we talking about? 63, I believe. That's like some Herman's Hermits or something. Yeah. Was Ray Stevens alive yet?

The streak. I don't know anything else that's old i'm gonna go so earlier this week i was talking to grant and i was telling him what we had drafted previously and i joked that john bauker is still on the board that grant could still draft john bauker if he wanted to because he loves john Bowker. I'm not actually going to draft John Bowker, but that reminded me that I love quadruple A players and the concept of quadruple A players. So that is what I'm drafting here. And I love them because A, I like thinking that there is such a significant gap between AAA and the majors, that the majors is so special and so much harder that there are actually guys who can just crush in AAA and are just helpless in the majors because they can't

make the adjustment or they have a slider speed bad or whatever it is. There's like some slight little bit better that big league pitchers are than AAA pitchers. That is just the end for them. They cannot compensate. So I like that, but I also like the idea that this doesn't exist at all and that there's no such thing as a quadruple A player because that's kind of been a debate going back decades. Does this actually exist or is this just something that we imagine and guys get stuck with that label because maybe they struggle in a small sample or a scout thinks that they can't succeed, but it's not actually true. And I'm sure everyone has a favorite quadruple A player from the past that you can think

of. Like, I don't know, Jack Cust would be a good triple A player, quadruple A player, like Roberto Petugini, who has like a thousand OPS in triple A and like a 700 OPS in the majors. And sometimes these guys do get a shot and they actually do pretty well. Like I, I used to love Russell Branion. Maybe he's too good to qualify.

I'm not sure, but I always believed he was on the verge of being the best player in baseball or, you know, Dan Johnson or gosh, I mean, there's so many, you probably all have some in your mind,

Brandon. They are Phillips. Jeff and I watched the 2010 Mariners, so. Yeah. I think those are a bunch of AAA players. Oh, I don't know. Kiwa Ka'aihua. You should have gotten a different example.

Yeah. Calvin Pickering. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the original is Ken Phelps, right? The Ken Phelps All-Stars. This is what Bill James called them. But I don't know if this concept really exists anymore because like the sort of stats that Jeff can go look up,

maybe you can actually tell if a guy is good or not before he gets to the big leagues. And you can look at the pitch level and look by velocity and see, does he have trouble hitting velocity? And you can project with some accuracy whether he actually could be a big leaguer. But I really like just the mystique of the quad A player. And I hope that they don't go away. Rubio Durazo, there's another one. Yeah. I will add to that where I like the

uncertainty of where you've got the NPB, which is sort of like a 5A. It's like just a tier above AAA, maybe a tier below the majors. So there's that uncertainty there. If you succeed in Japan, can you succeed in the majors? And a lot of people do. A lot of people don't. And then there's like Korean baseball under that. So the Giants have Darren Ruff in spring training, and he was a monster in Korea. Is that going to translate? I don't know. The Brewers just gave a lot of money to Josh Lindblom. Is that smart? I don't know. I love that uncertainty too. So I am on board with Ben's pick. Great A. Good job. Okay. And I appreciate also that Russell Carlton, our pal who recently returned to baseball prospectus after a stint with the Mets,

he has changed his Twitter bio to call himself a quad A sabermetrician, which I think is brilliant because he's consulted for a couple of big league teams, but has not stayed on full time. So he has kind of dipped his toe in that world, but keeps coming back to writing, which we are all somewhat happy about to have him writing again, but that's a very self-deprecating of him. And I thought that was fun. One of the, uh, one of the, the things about the quad a concept too, is how it ropes in a bunch of players who are actually quite a bit better than quad a, but who somehow get remembered in that, in that. And so I'm just going to point out that Rubio Durazo, who you said, and then other people nodded in agreement was quite good as a major league hitter. He had a career OPS plus that was the same as Kevin Euclid's career OPS plus and Kirk Gibson's career OPS plus, for instance, and Nolan Arenado's career OPS plus.

And in seven years as a major leaguer, he you know know he had basically six where he was a clearly above average hitter and in his second to last season he got mvp votes so not really a quad a hitter at all but once you introduce the concept then you've got to fill that bucket with with examples and so it becomes a sort of a curse right sometimes they get that reputation and it's undeserved and then you get like jack cust, who finally gets a shot with Oakland. It's usually Oakland or Tampa Bay often, I guess, gives these guys a shot. And there he was at age 28, having a really good year out of nowhere and showed that he could do that. So yeah. And then there are other guys who never get that shot and maybe they would have

succeeded if they had gotten it, but yeah 2006 jack cussed was 27 he played the the season in portland oregon actually and he he batted 293 with a 467 obp and a 549 selecting percentage it was not actually the highest ops in the pL. Second place had 78. That was Chris Carter. Can I just chime in that I think about three years ago, I saw someone in a Jack Cust jersey using a payphone. That's a very old-fashioned sentence. like that is old-fashioned sentence that is like just like there's like a mental bingo that that ticks off that i just love that i just was driving by and it was a jack cuss jersey using a payphone and that appeals to me i'm the only like the y'all are the only people in the universe maybe some listeners who can appreciate that but i saw it so yeah did you get in a car accident sorry officer however

but did you see did you see him on the phone yeah like that calvin pickering didn't didn't we say calvin pickering like three minutes ago maybe sam horn okay jeff you're up again so i feel like what grand is describing is that he actually just saw Jay Gibbons, but he was in disguise. I'm going to retweet. I tweeted about it in 2014. I'm just going to retweet it right now during the podcast. He has receipts. Yeah.

That's weird. My brother just sent me a text about Calvin Pickering about four days ago. He became a coach. Oh, all right. Good for him. As a coach, he was no longer at his playing weight. So I will say with the first pick of the second round, I don't know a better way to put this. I'll say one of the things I really like about baseball is the unsolvability of it. The sabermetrics, Ben has written enough about the history of sabermetrics. And we've in our own ways, been analyzing the game for a while. And all the teams have been analyzing the

game for a while. And I mean, I've been part of a team now for almost a full calendar year. And I have learned a lot. And we've had some significant breakthroughs over the course of the past year. But nevertheless, you still can't predict baseball. I don't know if you've ever heard that expression before. That's something I picked up on uh behind the curtain but just for all of for all of the work that goes into trying to figure it out and and all the new tech and all the different ways that we're trying to break it down whether that's mechanics you wrote a whole book about you know player development and guys changing their swings or picking up new pitches or just using cameras to alter their pitches there is still there is no you think think even on the public side,

projections haven't really gotten that much better over the 10 or 15 years that they've existed. I don't know how you best want to test that and not all the same projection systems have existed over the course of that time, whatever. But the way that I try to think of it is like you're building, it's there like,

if you want to think of it on the team level there's like 30 groups of people building sandcastles on the beach and you can always just like dig your bucket into the sand and add another tower or wall or just bulk to your sandcastle so you can still have you can have the biggest sandcastle on the beach but you look down then there's always more sand to put in your bucket. And I guess into Scott Morris over the last year. No, this one makes sense. I mean, at a certain point, I guess a beach is no beach is infinite. Nothing is infinite.

The universe is infinite, I guess. But you can eventually get to the end of the sand. But there is effectively an infinite amount of sand in the beach. So you can learn something concrete about the game of baseball that open that just kind of turns a light on in the beach. So you can learn something concrete about the game of baseball that just kind of turns a light on in the corner. But now I'm mixing metaphors and expressions. So I can see how this happens to him. I think he probably goes in with like a note card with like two bullet points when he realizes, oh, that only took me 20 seconds. I got to fill like another 20 minutes of talking. The point is that you can

always make progress, but there's always more progress to make. I'm done. Pick second. Okay. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you, but I'm sure you know more than we do, but there's still probably plenty you don't know. Oh, we solved it. I didn't say that. We did solve it. Okay. Wait, was the point that you can always make progress but the but there's always more progress to make or was the point that you can always feel like you're making progress but you don't actually make any progress because it did sort of sound like the latter no because you do there is real there is real progress that is being made and i'm imagining the sand just immediately just like pouring down the sides

of the castle as no no it's kind of wet it's well structured sand then and i'm also imagining the infinite nature of the sand that you described where like you might get i mean if you're going if it is an infinite journey from here to there it doesn't matter how many steps you take toward there you are still as far away from the end. And so aren't you saying that there's no progress being made and it's all an illusion? Well, I think that what I said in there is that the beach is not completely infinite. There is progress. It's just that the progress is relatively incremental given just the elements of the things in the game that you can't predict. The weather, that's just a pitcher throws the pitch a little wrong for no rhyme or reason.

It's just the whole luck element. There's no no getting around it there's never going to be any solving of it so as much as we can actually learn about the game there's still always going to be pretty considerable error bars around any measurement that you're trying to predict which i i quite enjoy it just never it never it's another way of saying that it never gets dull to try to figure it out because there's feel like there are just enough nuggets of gold that you can kind of sift out. This is all over the place now. But there's kind of a sandy theme. I keep thinking about that moment in one of the bad Star Wars prequels where Anakin talks about not licking sand because it gets everywhere.

That was mostly for you, Ben. I love when I'm walking down the beach and I stumble upon some gold. Some gold nuggets in the sand. You can build sandcastles on the river shore. There's still

sand sometimes. Like a delta. What are we doing here? You can have rivers poured down from mountains where there is gold into oceans where there is not gold except the gold that has been deposited there from the mountains. Also, there's probably gold... I'm not a...

There's gold everywhere. Ships crash. Save us. Grant. You ever see those old people with the metal detectors? They're there for a reason. It's because they don't sleep. They're looking for lost jewelry, right? Which has gold sometimes.

Would you describe a... Is it a nugget? Alright. Is it a doubloon? Draft. Are you drafting doubloons? So, I am assuming that our pace is not going to allow us to draft three. So I'm going to pick one that is probably going to be a quick one because I don't think I have a ton to say about it.

Oh, my God. Just do it. And the thing about this is that it came to me when I was looking through a box of baseball cards. No. Okay. I'm going to draft that Paul Giamatti is the son of a Bartlett Giamatti. And I just love that. Every time I watch Paul Giamatti in a movie, I just love thinking like, that guy's dad banned Pete Rose. It's fascinating to me.

Paul Giamatti is one of the great character actors of his generation. And I just love that his dad was the commissioner of baseball. And while getting this idea, I looked up what he's been doing lately. And I didn't know, A, that they made The Catcher Was a Spy into a movie, and B, that it starred Paul Rudd. Like, someone should email me. Like, I get so many dumb PR emails. Someone should be like, hey, watch The Catcher Was a Spy, this major movie with Paul Rudd that you might be interested in. Yeah. And in that movie is the son of a Bartlett Giamatti. All right. Who makes a less convincing baseball player as an actor, Paul Rudd or Paul Giamatti? Paul Rudd were a baseball player,

we'd have to redo all our aging curve research. That's true. Oh, that's a good point. That is a good point. All right, Meg. Oh, crap. Okay, I have it. No, I'm ready.

I want to draft goof-based walk-offs. And so to give an example of this, you may recall in 2018 when the Astros won a game against the Padres because Eric Hosmer failed to catch an infield pop-up. And it allowed someone to score. It allowed someone to score, not the least of which is that not long before that, one day Cameron had gone to work for the Padres. So that was funny for reasons that are mostly specific to the people on this podcast. But I like goof-based walk-ups situation because, you know, like often he has to time when he goes to his own dugout to allow a guy to cross, especially if it's a, you know, if it's a walk-off home run. It's like, am I going to run into the hitter on the base path? And it's very tricky and I don't like it and I feel bad for him. We have all this attention we see this sad lurking figure and i'm really comfortable

making fun of eric cosmer but mostly it just shifts the emotional burden in a in a surprising way and i quite enjoy that so i am drafting goof based walk-offs if i'm not mistaken i believe that that alex bregman pop-up had the lowest hit probability of any batted ball in baseball that year. Yeah. And yeah, I was going to do an article on the least likely batted balls, the least likely hits or something like that. And the first one was a hit. And don't forget that breakman later that year,

I think a month later, like Jonathan history. Yeah. Like a drop third strike. And Jonathan Luke threw a ball at his head. Yes. Beautiful, beautiful moment in baseball history. Just banged off his head. Yes. Why do the Astros have to be involved with these now? They're all tainted. Yeah. I think we,

I think we may have talked at one point about how Alex Bregman's win probability added that year was the highest in baseball. And those two plays accounted for a lot of it. Yeah, like 20% of it or something. Yeah. Yeah. So I like when baseball affords us an opportunity to sort of shift our emotional expectations when it surprises us like that. And I always feel so bad for the pitchers.

And I still feel bad for them because they're still mad when their team loses, but it's less about them and more about the goof. I enjoy a good goof. Goof. All right. So I'm going to take Bo Jackson's 1990 score, number 697, which is, I don't know.

I don't know of any. Is anybody in the sweet spot where that card is a big part of your life and memory? Anybody? I literally had it in my hand an hour ago while looking for ideas for this. Dude. I swear to goodness, I had it. I have in my hand right now a Bart Giamatti card. And that's what I chose.

That's the score that was the 1990 score too right 90 donruss 90 dollars but i while going through that i was like the bo jackson card's pretty cool so that's bizarre that is bizarre all right so this bo jackson card everybody remembers the ken griffey jr 89 upper deck as the iconic card of of that era of the junk wax era. But you know, like a big part of what made the Griffey card such a big deal is that Griffey was really good for a long time. And so that card slowly rose in value until it became, you know, extremely valuable and a big, you know, a huge card that we all sought. But the Bo Jackson card, I think at the time,

card that we all sought. But the Bo Jackson card, I think at the time was an even bigger phenomenon because before the Bo Jackson card, like this was 1990 and there were only four or five, five sets of cards and there were no such thing as inserts or anything like that. And so there were valuable baseball cards that you were aware of, but there were basically only two ways that cards could get valuable. One was that, you know, you could get a rookie card and then that player could become really good over 10 years, but that took a long time. Or you could have an old card, but that took an even longer time. So there was no real chance that you were going to like open a pack of cards in 1990 and discover a valuable card. They didn't really exist when you were opening them. They only maybe became valuable in time. And then this Bo Jackson card comes out. And so this card is a picture that was taken from

a Nike poster. He's wearing shoulder pads and he's holding a bat behind his neck. And that's it. It's like shot from like the waist up and he's a shirtless and he's just there muscular and being bow and his name isn't on it. It's just black and white. There's nothing but the picture and the score logo. And then on the back, all it is, is the letters B and O in giant letters. And that's it. That's the whole card. And so this card was like an immediate phenomenon when it came out. And so there are a few data points for how big it was that I can tell you. So card shops at the time were actually limiting how many packs of card of score you could buy because they didn't want people coming in and like hoarding all the scores

to try to get the Bo Jackson. And so you could only buy like, you know, 10 packs a day or whatever in card shops. There were all these urban legends would develop that kids had heard about how rare the card was, how it was actually very rare that there were rumors that score had not printed as many of it. There were rumors that Nike had filed a lawsuit because they were using the image and so they had to shut down production. So we had been kind of, we were believing that it was a rarer card than it was. There were counterfeiters that were making counterfeit versions of this card. And so these counterfeit schemes became national news. The AP was writing about them.

They were making these cheap knockoffs. And sometimes card shops were even selling the knockoffs as knockoffs. And the craziest story about the Bo Jackson card was that Bob Engel, who was a major league umpire at the time, Bob Engel had been an umpire for 25 years. And I've read accounts that from from other umpires that he probably was on on in line to make the Hall of Fame someday as an umpire. And he got arrested in April of 1990 for stealing boxes of score from Target because he was trying to get that Bo Jackson 697. And he pleaded no contest to it and got probation and his career was over. And he never made the Hall of Fame. So that Bo Jackson card kind of kept an umpire out of out of the Hall of Fame. So so this card was huge. We all wanted it and put it in the case. And of course, nowadays, it's it's not really worth anything, right? It's like all the cards from that era. It's hardly worth anything.

You could probably get it for very cheap. But do you want to guess? Anybody want to guess how much it was at its peak? $3,000. Okay. Any other guesses? $3,001. There is someone at my door and my dog is going nuts.

So I will take this moment to briefly say $75. Okay. Any other guesses? No. All right. $12. Oh, no. That was the peak.

This was what it took to create a phenomenon in 1990 baseball cards. It peaked at $12. When Bob Engel got arrested for stealing the boxes from Target, it was $8. When they were doing the counterfeiting, I believe it was, oh no, I think Bob Engel stole maybe when it was four and the counterfeiting was when it was eight, but like basically $10. So imagine going to the trouble of counterfeiting a whole bunch of $10 bills that you can only get rid of in highly intimate face-to-face interactions with a very small niche community of collectors of $10 bills. That's how big this card was, that people were trying to counterfeit that somehow.

Anyway, to me, that is Bo Jackson's career in a nutshell. If you adjust for inflation, $12 in 1990 is $24 now. Yes. Twice as valuable. Okay. It's still a resonant image because Kyler Murray did the same pose and recreated that card just like a little over a year ago. So yeah, people still remember it. I still remember it.

So that's worth something. I would like to give credit to the Sabre Baseball Card blog, which has a very good post about this card by Matthew Prigg. And in his words, this was the definitive card of the junk wax era. And I agree with him. I think it is the definitive card of the junk wax era. I recently just, my mom has been dropping off boxes of baseball cards for the last, I don't know, five years and just saying, here, you take this crap.

And recently, within the last two months, I went through these boxes just to make sure there wasn't some like rogue Mickey Mantle or something buried in them. And friends, there was not. But I did select a few baseball cards that I pulled out. And I was like, oh, yeah, I want to keep this one. And that one was one of them. Instantly, you pull it out. It's a flood of emotions.

Like, yes, this is better than all the other baseball cards. All right. I am taking first baseman doing splits. I like first baseman doing splits. And I like that because first baseman are supposed to be the least athletic people on the field, or at least among them. You don't expect them to be very mobile or flexible. And yet there they are doing something that I could never conceive of doing.

And you don't even suspect it. You just see them hulking over there, not having much range, just sort of standing. And all they have to do is catch the ball. Then all of a sudden they do this incredibly acrobatic thing that you never suspected that they were capable of. And I love it also because, A, how much does it even help, really? I mean, what fraction of a millisecond are you gaining by doing the split? It just doesn't seem like it would ever make the difference in a call unless the umpire is just giving you the call because he appreciates the effort of you doing the split. Sometimes it backfires if you do the split a little too early, maybe, or the ball takes a weird hop or something.

Then once you commit to the split, you've kind of lost all your lateral mobility. You're just trying to get a little bit closer to the ball. And so there are times when it may actually hurt you, although it's still impressive to see. And I just really admire it because when I used to do the presidential fitness test, which I believe has been discontinued, which is merciful to all the kids today, but I assume that you all had to go through that. And parts of it were fine, but the sit and reach part was not part that I could do. I could do the sit, but I could not really reach. And so I really appreciate that ability in first baseman. And I don't really know exactly how they cultivate that ability. Do they just have it? Can every baseball player just do a split?

Can every professional athlete do that? Or do they work on it because they know they're going to be a first baseman? And if they haven't been a first baseman most of their career, and then they move over there, do they have to do split training? I don't even know the mechanics of that, but I really appreciate it. I'm so excited for you to get excited about Evan White. Does he do splits? Yeah. The first base, like it's weird to be like, Hey, let's be horny for a first base defense. Cause it's first base defense. But then you watch Evan White play baseball and you're like, Hey, I get it. It's an uncomfortable configuration of words, but I think you know what I'm trying to say.

All right. Grant, you got to go in like 10 minutes, right? Do we want to just toss out whatever we had left for our last pick? Lightning round? I sort of have to go like now. Okay. Sounds like your dog really wants you to go.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, this was fun thank you grant i guess you can uh you can just mute and i'll stop i guess okay i could say goodbye grant and grant's dog thank you we'll probably talk to you about the giant sometime soon okay all right bye all right anyone else want to mention any before we end? Can I do a roundling off the list? Yeah. Can I do an earnest one, but I want to do the earnest one last. So everyone else should go. Okay. Jeff, you got anything? I was going to say, I like innings that end with outs at home plate. Cause those are really exciting. But I think what I would have picked last is the general umbrella umbrella term is managers but specifically the fan understanding of managers because they're just this person that you know is really important and they're the face

of your team and they wear the uniform but you have absolutely no idea what they ever do except that you have very strong opinions about them so i like that there's just that whole interaction have you gained a greater appreciation for like behind the scenes stuff that we don't know about on the outside? I mean, of course, but there's nothing that you would ever expect a fan to actually grapple with because it's just not something that a fan would really care about. But, you know, managers are busy people. They have a real job.

But when you're a fan and I mean, you see this on Twitter all the time, you think I'll fire the manager because you brought in the wrong lever or whatever like this just as we've talked about so many times before there's a lot more to it than just in-game tactics but you just never see it and so fans are fancy one percent of a job and they decide fire this guy we've lost six games in a row or i don't know do fans ever say re-sign this guy defense ever lobby for re-signing the manager or is it just one of those like third base coach things where yeah if you win the world series I guess yeah bring that guy back we like that guy Sam you have any yeah I was going to draft the Houston

Astros drafts of 1989 90 and 91 uh when so back then there was not a limit on how many rounds a draft could go. They would like, they would just go, you would just go until teams started dropping out. And then until there were no teams left. And so most teams would take like, you know, 50, 40 or 50 rounds. And the first teams would start dropping out like in the mid thirties. And for three years, the Astros as a strategy just decided that they were going to go way longer than everybody else since they drafted 100 players. And I don't, I don't know why I like that so much. I go back to it every couple years and look at the players they drafted, almost all of whom they didn't sign almost all of whom never got drafted anywhere else after almost all of whom never made the majors. The Astros in their entire 1990 draft when they

drafted 99 players they had got negative six war from their first rounders there's like every time i do it i think this is going to be interesting and it's not quite but then i do see like a few things that are a little bit more interesting than i never noticed like the time that they drafted daniel pagan in the 87th round and then the next year, just to screw with him, they drafted him in the 95th round. I don't know. I just, I think that the Astros sitting alone in a room naming names that may or may not have been real while nobody listened or cared is like peak late round draft. And I plan to go back to it a few more times.

And they didn't have more farm teams or anything? They didn't have any place to put them? They didn't sign any. I mean, they signed one of their final 25 round picks that year. I don't even know what they were doing. I guess they were probably drafting follows. Maybe a lot of, maybe junior college players. it's hard to tell they did it year i mean they did it years and years and so then i i always have had this vision of i think that uh bob watson was the gm who came after that i have this vision of bob

watson taking the job as the astros gm after whoever it was during this period of the 1990s and like walking in and going ah they were hoarders and just like kicking over draft picks everywhere just like they you know like you've got these just like stacks and stacks of draft picks toppling over on a room and that's the vision I have of the 1990 Astros in the draft it's like what I like. I gotta save that. If you look at 1991, so the Astros drafted 96 players, but if you look closely, the Dodgers that year drafted 94. They

stuck around, and they were going one for one for one for like 15 rounds after every other team had finally dropped out. So the Dodgers finally just called it quits after the 94th round. And that's when the Astros chose Daniel Pagan

and then Brian Hudson. But it's just, it's a battle of attrition. Yeah. The last one I was going to take is something that we've discussed briefly on the podcast before, but the wildly exaggerated appraisals that baseball people used to have about what players were worth, how much value they added to teams, how much value they detracted.

Just before war, before we knew what the range of an actual star player was, people evidently had no idea. And you could just name any number for what you thought a player was worth. And no one could really call you on it because there was no win value stat. No one could say, no, that is demonstrably wrong. And so I've been collecting examples of this. I'm up to five. I welcome any that anyone comes across. I think one of my favorites here is Roy Cullenbine, who was a first baseman in the 30s and 40s. Not a great defender, evidently, but a good hitter. And there's this article from the year after Cullenbine retired. So he last played for the Tigers in 1947. And in March of 1948, there was an AP article where everyone with the Tigers just trashed him, just took turns,

just trashing his defense. So the GM of the team at the time, Billy Evans, said for 15 years or so, three big hulks of men, Hank Greenberg, Rudy York, and Roy Cullenbine were our first baseman. They could hit well and drove in a lot of runs, but they weren't good fielders. Someone, I think it was Steve O'Neill, that was their manager at the time, estimated we lost at least 15 games last season because of Cullenbine's play around first. Roy is a fine hitter and a good outfielder, but he's no first baseman. Can you imagine how bad you'd have to be at first base to cost the team 15 games? And then it continues. So genial gray-haired manager O'Neal nodded assent. Genial O'Neal before he resumes trashing Cullenbine. The rest of our infield should be much better

because the players can throw the ball without worrying whether Cullenbine will come up with it. He interpolated. Last year, the infielders would hesitate after coming up with a grounder trying to make sure they made only perfect throws. Even then, Roy didn't always get them. Then Evan says, that's right. Even a fine third baseman like George Kell almost got the jitters from it. So they just could not say enough about how bad Roy Cullenbine was. He was a four-win player, by the way, that year, and a five-win player the year before that. So he was one of the best players on the team,

as they were saying that he was costing them minimum 15 games with his defense. Then there's Whitey Herzog saying that a good third base coach can win 16 or 17 games a season for his club, which sounds wildly inflated. Then I think you told me about this one, Sam, maybe the scout in Dollar Sign and the Muscle, who says Andre Dawson's a better all-around player, but Moreno, Omar Moreno, saves our ball club 50 doubles and 20 triples a year that would go by most fielders. our ball club 50 doubles and 20 triples a year that would go by most fielders which i love because that one is he's saying relative to average just the average or most fielders even he saves 50 doubles and 20 triples which if you just take like the average linear weights value of doubles and triples that's 75 runs on defense and uh omar moreno was never worth more than 14 runs on defense in the season according to to Baseball Reference.

So that's one. Ozzie Smith himself. Let's see. The quote is, I may not drive in 100 runs each year, but I can prevent 100 runs from scoring against us. And as great as Ozzie Smith was, he was not doing that unless he meant relative to just no one playing shortstop, which that's probably fair. But compared to an average shortstop, he was not quite that good. And then the last one is a tweet from the writer Phil Rogers from last June, who said, Steve Stone is right, talking up play of Yvonne Rodriguez behind plate. I watched

a lot of it from the time he was 19. An AL manager once told me he saved Texas one run per game. Hyperbole? Probably. But he's the best I've seen. Lots of people think bench was better, but I doubt it. So that would be, you know, what, 15 win catcher behind the plate, just defense alone. So that's kind of the range. People just thought, yeah, this guy was worth 15 wins. He was costing us 15 wins. Sure. These are teams that only won like 70 or 80 games or something, but one guy was responsible for a very large portion of that. And I like that because it just goes to show, I think, that you really didn't have a great calibration or a sense of what things were worth before that was actually

quantified. So please, if anyone comes across examples, send me more. Meg? Yeah, okay. Yeah, do your earnest one. Oh, i'll do the two really silly ones first or the short short short i like it when fans misjudge foul balls like with enthusiasm like really get in there and i really think it was a home run but no it was a foul ball i like that just because fans are we're all this is sort of related to what you were just talking about we're we're bad at judging things sometimes. And like the strike zone, I think fans are bad about sometimes they get the foul ball thing wrong. But I really like their enthusiasm because humans are silly. So I like that.

I like it when pitchers unlock something, right? Like when they figure it out. I like it. It's a fun. It's inspiring. It's not the earnest one, but it is they figure it out i like it it's a fun it's it's it's inspiring it's not the earnest one but it is inspiring and i really like it when a veteran is involved you know shows him a new grip and then all of a sudden he can throw that great slider and you're like ah cool we we spend all this time and money on player development and we've gotten so much better at it and sometimes you just really need like a grizzled veteran to be like, hey, move your finger this way. So I like that.

But here's the earnest one. I like the friends we've met along the way. And I'm going to specifically call out a thing, which is that Jeff carried around with him, probably not actually carried around with him. He mostly left it in his house and didn't throw it away, but had in his home for over a year, a Ryan Stanek bottle opener that the Rays gave away as a giveaway. Cause you know, it's

funny cause the opener and I saw it on Twitter and I was like, Hey Jeff, I want that thing. Will you get it for me? And he did. And then we didn't see each other cause he lives in Portland and I live in Seattle and we don't have Appleman to bankroll trips to like hang out as pals anymore. And he remembered and brought it to winter meetings for me. And so I'm grateful for his friendship and for both of yours. In fairness, I had it sitting right next to that pair of socks that either Kylie or Eric had left in a hotel room in Las Vegas. That is true. I did end up delivering socks.

That was weird. I think that is very nice, Meg. Thank you. I think a bottle opener is the perfect giveaway, even if you don't have the pun. Yeah. Great giveaway. Great size.

Really useful. You're probably, it's not something that you want to buy. It is something that, I don't know. I think that it would be a nice thing to keep in your house. And also, you never know. Maybe, well, I guess they probably open the bottles for you these days, think that it would be a nice thing to keep in your house and also uh you never know maybe you uh well i guess they probably open the bottles for you these days and they probably don't they probably aren't even glass are they you're probably not going to be able to buy a bottle at the park

and open it but i don't know in the old days all right yeah the bottle opener was large and it had brian kenney's voice in it yeah you have to be careful about pressing the button because they, I will say the flaw in that giveaway was that the Rays did not have faith in their audience because they explain what the opener is. Like a little speaker on the background, they're like, and it's like, no, no, have faith, have faith in your audience to get the reference. All right. Well, Jeff, we have missed you. We're glad you could join us. We're glad that you enjoy baseball development and hope to talk to you again sometime. And please make the Rays do a mid-plate appearance pitching change this year.

I don't have that authority. Just drop a line. Just recommend it. Write a memo. I believe that I put it in Slack almost immediately after we talked last year. No one has done it yet. All right, then. What does that tell you, Ben? No one's as bold and visionary as we are. Okay. It's pretty fun to spend time with you all and Grant, who's gone.

Yes. All right. Bye, Jeff. Have a nice season. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thank you for listening. This was, I believe, the first time

we had all of the co-hosts of Effectively Wild on one episode together with Grant. Grant is almost an honorary co-host. For those of you who've been listening a long time, you remember that this used to be a daily podcast. We used to end every week on a multiple of five on the episode number. We did that again today with five co-hosts. It's all lining up. So that was fun. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have not heard episodes 500 and 996, go check them out. The things we liked about baseball then, I assume we still like. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going. Josh Newman, King of Motor Driving, Harold Walker, Joseph Blumenthal,

and Jeffrey Young. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we'll be back early next week with the next episode in our season preview series

which should feature two NL East rivals, the Braves and the Phillies. Talk to you then. No, so why not get away from the mess? This is my time, yeah, this is my dream This is my way, yeah, this is my life you know i like it so here's what i think about the houston astros