Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1524: Let’s Read Two

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller split up to talk to the authors of two new baseball books. First, Sam speaks to Sports Stories newsletter author Eric Nusbaum about Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. Then (33:18) Ben brings on Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond to discuss […]

And if you are shy, just not much of a talker Don't impress the people that you meet Might as well be a lonely walker In a lonely town, on a lonely street Good morning and welcome to episode 1524 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN. Ben is not here at the moment. Later in this episode, Ben will be talking to Jared Diamond about his new book, Swing Kings, which I have not read. But first, I'm going to be talking to Eric Nussbaum about his book, Stealing Home,

which Ben has not read. So we're doing it this way. Two great books, I assume, two conversations, but split up. So Eric, hello. Hey, Sam, how's it going? It's going well. You know, I mostly the reason that I wanted to have you on is just because I wanted to just rave and rave and rave about this book. I know most people probably have not read your book yet. I would like to tell them about it. I would like to ask you a few things about it. But mostly, I just want to just continually make the pitch for it as a book that people should be reading. I just think this is an amazing book. So well done. Congratulations on that. Thank you. So yeah, I'm the one who's raving. Don't try to butt in here.

I'll just listen. So this is the book about the history of Dodger Stadium in a very, very simplistic way. It is sold as the history of Dodger Stadium being where it is and the neighborhoods and the communities that were there before. I was very excited for this book just because you wrote it, and you're a great writer, and I thought you were a great writer for a very long time. But I think I went into it with a pretty narrow expectation of what the story was actually about.

I expected to learn that there had been people living in Los Angeles in the middle of the last century, and the Dodgers took their land. So I was imagining a simple story. I was imagining something along the lines of that famous one-mile chapter in the power broker, where you have lots of personal details about a neighborhood. It would be, you know, a worthwhile light shown on the residents who'd been, you know, made invisible. And there would be this ominous and tragic tone that I would find echoes in modern living, but it would basically be a pretty simple land seizure at the heart of it. And this turns out to not be simple at all. The story, the sequence, the book, and the Dodgers themselves are relatively minor players in it all. The sequence that leads to the

paving over of the Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop communities begins with a utopian vision for public housing, and then it goes in so many unexpected and complicated directions that I was completely wrapped and learning something new on every page. This is not really a baseball book at all. More of the action I think takes place in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee than ever happens on a baseball field, and what, two-thirds of the book is over before anybody even mentions building a ballpark, if I'm right. So it is a really complicated, interesting story about Los Angeles and also about baseball and also about complicity. And it is incredibly readable.

And I just can't hardly believe that a book this good was written by a normal person I have met and not by like some New Yorker writer out there. So that's my, there's my first rave. Okay. You can say something now. Thank you again. That's extremely kind. Did I get anything wrong? Would you say? No, I don't, I think you actually got it pretty right. I mean, you kept on saying how complicated it is and I guess that's true. It's pretty complicated, but I'm hoping that that's not meant in a scary way. Like, don't be intimidated by the complicated nature of this story. It's a fun read about systemic corruption and racism. That's right. It is not a technical read in any way. It's that, you know, like, this is going to make it sound a little bit simplistic, maybe, but like the chapters are quite short and the sentences are quite beautiful.

And when we say complicated, I just mean that like, for instance, you go back to Cortez and so the history, you're bringing in threads from all sorts of different directions. And it's complicated in the way that life is complicated, not in the way that an Ikea manual is complicated. Unlike an Ikea manual, this book is full of words, but IKEA manual is complicated. Unlike an IKEA manual, this book is full of words, but it does also, like an IKEA manual, have pictures. So I'm going to give you, I have three or four compliments that I would like to do one at a time, and I'm going to have you, I think that that's going to be the thread of the conversation is,

I would just like to ask you about each of those things that I was really impressed by. So one of the things that I was incredibly impressed by is So one of the things that I was incredibly impressed by is the level of detail that you have, personal detail about the people involved. And anytime someone is writing a feature article, doing feature writing, the writer knows that like the key here is we need to have detail.

We need to have really specific details that prove that we really dug into this. And it's hard to get good detail. It's hard to get people, a lot of times the sources don't know what is going to be good detail. So they don't always give you the detail that you want and they maybe don't want to share the detail and memories are hazy. And so you end up, you know, knowing that you need like say 10 great details to make this piece sing. But instead of getting 10 great details, you get 10 details and like two of them are great and eight of them are kind of pointless. And you massage those details into like metaphor and like overwrought description. So it seems like they're meaningful, but in fact, a lot of those details are kind of pointless.

You do not have that going on here at all. You got 10 good details. Every time that 10 good details were needed, there were 10 great details. I gasped at one point when you describe the way that Abrana Arechiga kills a chicken, the way that her method for strangling a chicken was just so perfectly placed. And so I was wondering, this is action that took place 60, 70 years ago by people who are no longer living and who I would have assumed in a lot of cases wouldn't have left a lot of written documentation. So when you went into this, how did you know where to start looking and where did your reporting take you? And was the reason that you ended up with so much detail that the sources that you did talk to were really excited by this project and were just like overflowing with helpfulness? Or did you have to find, I mean, did you have to find this stuff in crates and boxes and libraries and things? So it really depended on which part of the book. For the Odechika family, for Abenana in particular, I was lucky in that she has grandchildren who were living.

Just one daughter who's still alive who I did not get to speak to. But her grandchildren, at least some of them, and her friends and her nephews and people who live in this community with her, remembered her vividly. And they, I mean, they were incredible. They were generous enough to speak to me and to give me a lot of their time and to share these stories that were sort of kind of, I didn't have to do that much. They were beautiful stories. I mean, hearing about how she would, you know, kill a chicken and by swinging it around by its head and then give the talons of the chicken to her grandkids to play with as a toy. I mean, as a writer,

there's not much left for me to do with that. Just share it with the reader. I was pretty blessed in that regard. But in terms of, you know, written documentation, they didn't leave that much. You know, these were people in Palo Verde, whoever they focused on, who were not, I think in the book, I call them underdocumented. You know, they did not leave boxes and boxes of written records. They weren't famous at the time, particularly. I mean, they became somewhat famous because of their situation, as the book explains. But like, it's a lot of oral kind of history that's sort of been passed down from generations and a family that, you know, kind of values its roots and was generous enough to share their

stories with me. Was there any suspicion that a person showed up right now wanting to write this book about actions that I imagine are still somewhat raw in the family and that have been over for 60 years? And in some ways, just given the way that the Dodgers and Dodger Stadium are now such institutions, I would imagine that maybe there would be a feeling that no writer is going to take on those institutions, that we just take it for granted now that Dodger Stadium is part of, I mean, it almost feels like Dodger Stadium is a permanent part of Los Angeles history, a sacred cow when clearly it isn't. So did you have any difficulty convincing them that this was a story that should be told right now? Some of them were really excited to talk pretty much right away, and some people were not. You know, the family is not and was not a single body.

Everybody has their own opinions. And I think one of the things actually I tried to get across in the book was that these communities were full of people who were independent minded and people who had their own ideas about the best way to go about living and the best way to go about fighting. And within the family and within the people I spoke to, there were different ideas about, you know, what was right and what was wrong, whether they should or shouldn't talk to me or another journalist. And there's different opinions about the Dodgers too. Some of the other, a lot of the characters,

a lot of the people involved in this are politicians, are businessmen. And you occasionally will refer to something that you found in their papers. And I have never gone looking through somebody's papers. What is that? What do papers look like? They literally just, it's like, it depends. They look like? They literally just, it depends. They look like papers. Usually you go into an archive and there's a librarian or archivist who gives you a little

sheet of paper and you fill out what folders you want from this finding aid and it'll kind of list what they have. And then they bring you the folder and you sit at a desk in a big room and you look through it very carefully. And then if you need another folder, you ask them and they bring out the next folder. It's this very kind of arcane process that's very manual and slow, which I find appealing. But different archives and different libraries, you know, have different levels of detail to their finding aids. Some, you know, some collected papers are extremely well organized and meticulously cared for. And some are just boxes of stuff that

you look through, depending on maybe the budget of the institution or the care with which the initial librarian put it all together, or with which the probably dead person left their papers for posterity. It just depends. But it's a lot of just sitting there and like, literally just like page by page looking through stuff. And do you get the feeling when you're looking at them that the person who left their papers behind has carefully culled anything that might be interesting or that might be that might complicate their story like does it feel like it is a a crafted and curated document or series of documents that will make them look good or is is everything just like i mean are there like receipts from the gas station thrown in there and

you just get the sense that like somebody went in, maybe even after they died and just put it in a box? It depends. Some people are like that with the receipts from the gas station. One of the people I talk about in the book is Frank Wilkinson. He's kind of a main character. He's a housing official in LA and his papers are full literally of like receipts for hearing aid batteries and like little notes for his like, you know, doctor's appointments and these very kind of trivial but strangely intimate scraps. Whereas like I was really fortunate in that the O'Malley family allowed me to look through some of Walter O'Malley's papers when it came to the construction of the stadium. And I got the feeling, and I don't know for sure that because those are more privately kept, it's not a public resource necessarily, that those papers were pretty carefully curated. Even though, to be honest, those papers contained a lot, at least what I imagined was a lot of Walter O'Malley in them. I guess, since the last thing about this

topic, did you find that, I mean, I would think if anybody would really be against this book being written, if you give them like the two minute pitch of what it's about, it would be the O'Malleys. Because probably the O'Malleys have fended off, you know, people who have been bringing this fight up or this, you know, I don't know, the history of that land to them for decades. And they probably would not have expected a particularly generous reading of what happened in the 50s and 60s. Did you have to talk them into opening their papers to you? Yeah, I did. I mean, I kind of, I tried to be upfront and say, you know, this book is really focused on the Oretchika family and on this community. And that was my, you know, my ambition was to tell the story a little bit kind of more from that perspective.

And then I also wanted to talk about the construction of the stadium, and I wanted to be fair. And I think the O'Malley family is justifiably defensive about it because, you know, you said at the beginning of this that your expectation was that the story would be that the Dodgers took the land from people. That's really not the story. The story is a lot more complicated and a lot more tragic than that.

And I think the O'Malleys are frustrated that the kind of simple broad strokes narrative has become sort of the inherited mythology, whereas the truth is really that a lot of the events in the story, most of the kind of action of destroying these communities took place long before the Dodgers came to LA. Yeah, and a lot of it took place even led by people who I could imagine you writing very sympathetic books about otherwise. And so that I guess goes to the second compliment that I have for this book, which is that it is so morally nuanced and I keep using the word complex and maybe that's a word that will scare people away. So I'll just say nuanced that a lot of times you really have to just pause and think about how you're going to process the information.

It does not read very easily as like, now I'm reading the good guy chapter, now I'm reading the bad guy chapter, and this is either good for the good guys or bad for the bad guys or whatever. And as an example of this, Frank Wilkinson is, like you say, he's one of the two main characters in this book. And he comes into it because he was a extremely idealistic young man who had visions of this really utopian vision of public housing and in a modern city. And, you know, he was really, really driven by his ideology. And at one point, you mentioned that to his daughter, she felt like she was living with her own Atticus Finch for a father. OK, so you put that, that seed has been planted.

And then a couple chapters later, once the houses of Balaverde have been trucked away, some of them, according to legend end up on on movie lots and according to legend further some of them are the the houses in the film adaptation of to kill a mockingbird whether that's true or not you couldn't pin down but let's assume it is and so you're reading this and you get to the you know the houses that have been taken from this community are now in to kill a mockingbird and you've know, you've already got this Atticus Finch idea about Frank Wilkinson. And so like, there's this immediate, like, oh my gosh, so ironic. But then you stop and you're trying to figure out like, which direction is the irony? Is it ironic because Frank Wilkinson is

destroying the neighborhood because he's a bad guy. And now the houses end up in this movie about an idealistic good guy or not. It's like really hard to tell because clearly Frank Wilkinson is, I think in most ways, somebody that you write extremely sympathetically about. And one of the main people that brought the Dodgers out here, maybe the person most responsible for bringing the Dodgers out here from LA's perspective is a councilwoman named Roz Wyman, who I think in general is a, I don't, there probably is a statue of Roz Wyman somewhere in Los Angeles. Deservedly, she was a complete, completely historically significant trailblazer. And yet Roz Wyman and Frank Wilkinson are two of the, maybe the two most responsible people, I guess, I guess,

maybe except for like the Chandlers, for the communities of Balaverde, La Loma, and Bishop no longer existing. And so anyway, that is just to say that it's very morally nuanced, right? You're constantly trying to figure out how to assess these characters and their actions. So that seems like really a burden as a writer. Like it's much easier when you know who the good people are and who the bad people are and when you can make their actions very clear and simple to the reader. Was it hard for you to not fall into kind of clearer channels where you were like kind of funneling each of these people into a lane? Did you find

it challenging? And would you rather have written a simpler story? No, I mean, it was challenging, but I never really would have considered doing that. I don't think the story, I mean, ultimately, like on a gut level, you want to tell the truth as much as you can, you know, as you kind of find it to be when you're doing your reporting and your research. And writing a story that was like, this is the good guy, this is the bad guy, wouldn't have felt right to me ethically. It wouldn't have felt true to these people and their motivations and intentions to the best that I could, you know, research them and report them. So I tried to write a story that was true to each individual's life.

And, you know, whether that was Walter O'Malley or Abrana Arechigai or Frank Wilkinson, trying to figure out what made these people make these choices and how did these choices that they all collectively made, and that some people who are kind of off-camera in the book, you mentioned the Chandler family, they're a big part of this. How did all these ingredients, how did all these decisions wind up with all these tragic events and then ultimately Dodger Stadium? Like what happened? That was sort of the motivator. It wasn't really to like tell a tale of good and evil. in any way complicated by that? I mean, is it? Have you found anybody, I guess, who's frustrated by that, that it's not clear how to root as you're reading this, that this is a book that is just

sort of constantly challenging you to reassess who you're pulling for in every chapter? Not yet. I mean, people seem to, to be fair, it's only been a couple weeks since the book came out. And I don't think that many people have read it yet. But I think that people have generally understood that there were a lot of big historical forces at play. And that, you. But I think that people have generally understood that there were a lot of big historical forces at play. And that, you know, I think in a good novel, your characters are not all 100% good or 100% evil. I think they're all kind of doing their best and being true to their own personalities. And I think that I tried to write this book in a way that reflected the personalities and the motivations of the people

in it, even though they were not characters, they were real people. So, so far, I think people have understood. I also would say that I think the Rechiga family and the residents of the communities are good guys in this book. I think they were really wronged. And I think that reading the book and seeing, seeing kind of what happens to these communities, it's hard not to feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for them. I mean, at this point, it's mainly grandchildren who are survivors. Do they still... I think there is a loss anytime you take a neighborhood away.

There's something about a neighborhood or there's something about a culture that can't ever be replicated if you break it apart. And so I think there's a sense of loss regardless of what the answer to this next question is. But do the grandchildren feel like this was injurious to their family long-term? Do they feel like, well, everything kind of worked out? I mean, I know by the end of the dispute, the specifics of the dispute get boiled down to the difference between two assessments of the property value. And if you look at this dispute as merely between $17,000 and $10,000, it's not like a world-changing injustice. It is an injustice, but not a

world-changing injustice. So do the family members that are surviving, do they see it as an injustice over the different assessments, the $7,000, or do they really feel like the loss here still lingers and is something that they think about? There's not one answer, right, for an entire family. I've spoken to people who feel different ways about it. I would say, though, that boiling it down to $7,000 isn't really fair looking back on it, right? You're looking at what ultimately happened was, despite many good intentions and some not good intentions, was that the city and county governments and federal government, really everybody, confiscated a bunch of land, ostensibly for a public purpose, and then sold the land to a private business and then finally kicked off some families so the private business could use the land. That's traumatic, I would say. I think it was traumatic to the entire city of LA. And I wouldn't write it off as simply $7,000. Although,

had the government been more kind of flexible and understanding at the time, I think a lot of problems could have been avoided with those $7,000. So this leads into the third compliment I want to have for this book, which is that it really deftly handles issues of complicity and pulls the reader, who is presumably a baseball fan, into the question of complicity because we are, of course, drawing joy from this ballpark, from this sport today. And we are doing that without necessarily having reckoned with the fact that, you know, complex society often produces injustices and that they don't get necessarily appropriate recompense for that. And so there's this one really quick chapter in particular that I'm

going to read that I think I fell very deeply while I was reading it. So this is a chapter about a, well, I'm just going to read it. Chapter 63. At the start of the 1959 baseball season, the Orechuga family journeyed down to City Hall, which back then was still the tallest building in L.A. and which was still visible from the hill in their backyard. Mayor Norris Paulson was hosting the Dodgers for a ceremony to launch the new season, a meaningless official gesture. He planned to proclaim the week,

Good luck to the Dodgers week! But as the Dodgers players descended from their charter bus and up the marble steps of City Hall, nine members of the Arechuga family and one neighbor, Glenn Walters, interrupted the proceedings. Walters, a tall blonde screen actress deep into middle age, stood out in any crowd, and especially among the Arechica family. They held aloft picket signs. We are being forced out so the Dodgers can move in. Mr. O'Malley, if you want our property, pay for it. Go back to Brooklyn, O'Malley. Paulson put his arm around Dodger manager Walter Alston. He made a

joke or two and tried to laugh the whole thing off, but as the Dodgers lined up on the steps for a portrait with Paulson, Walters began to yell and push forward. Walters was a regal-looking woman with an air of an earlier time in the way she carried herself, shoulders back. She had appeared in more than 50 movies, usually as an uncredited extra. She had a presence and a voice and knew how to use them. According to one newspaper report, she hugged Manuel Arechga, her longtime neighbor. This man is 72 years old, she said, her voice rising. He has worked every day of his life, and what does he get? You take away his home.

She pushed closer and closer to the team. Thieves, she yelled. Bandits. When one player, who was never identified, began to laugh, Walters, who was taller than him by a good measure, turned, leaned over him, and called him a pipsqueak. Finally, Walters was escorted away from the scene by plainclothes police officers. She hurled a picket sign at the mayor. The protest was over.

City Hall and the Dodgers players who were there, I mean, I can just feel their awkward uncomfortableness. Like it's so much easier to not be confronted with a protest. I think there is a feeling like that. I don't know that we all we all kind of want to just be polite and have people be polite to us. And it is a challenge to be confronted with hard facts about people who were wronged. And particularly because the people who were wronged, like you can't expect them to be silent about it. This is not a small thing for them. This was their whole life. This not a small thing for them. This was their whole life.

This is a huge thing for them. And it makes total sense that they would use every tool at their disposal to make noise about it and to try to overturn it. And yet, while I'm reading this, having, you know, I've had 250 pages that have made me identify with and feel sympathetic toward and feel a great sense of empathy for the families there is still like a big part of me that is identifying there with the dodgers being kind of like uncomfortable and not knowing whether like how i'm supposed to react and i think that's partly because of the sense of i don't know, the sense of complicity that every once in a while comes up in our sports fandom, where we know that to some degree, we're all taking resources from a community, from a society for the hobby that we have. And so that is just, I don't know. Eric, I don't know what to say about that. But I mean, I'm sure you had to think through these same things because you are a sports fan. It's not like you're writing this from a position of wanting to abolish sports, wanting to tear down the stadium. You write from a position of really admiring the stadium and being a longtime sports fan. You've made your living writing about sports. You have not made your living writing about sports from a contrarian perspective, but actually writing about sports like a sports writer would. And so were you constantly kind of having to interrogate what your feelings are about your role in this system? And did you come away with your fandom shaken in any way? Or did you feel that that these things can can be reconciled?

I think this book in many ways was sort of the like, expression of my lifelong journey of figuring out my sports fandom, and trying to make sense of what it is to be a sports fan and a healthy way to have a relationship with sports. And to sort of think deeply about sports and its place in our society. That's part of what's drawn me to the story for so long and why I spent years wanting to write this book and then while I was writing it turned into an absolute crazy person who would dream about it every single night. It is complicated and I don't think there's a clean answer. Obviously I love sports, I love baseball, I love the Dodgers. You know, I grew up a Dodger fan in LA and going to Dodger games and my affinity for the Dodgers and affection for

Dodger Stadium in particular is part of what made this so powerful for me, what made me so drawn to the story. I think that we should always be critical. And I don't mean critical in the like negative sense, but critical in the sort of academic sense, I guess, of things that we love. I think if you're going to love something, it's good to examine it and think about it. And one of those things that I love is baseball. And a lot of the baseball in this book is sort of excavating why it is what it is in our society and how it became such an important sort of force in America in the middle of the century and why LA was so desperate to have a team. And kind of getting to better understand that was really helpful for me in kind of putting

my own fandom into context. And I also think really crucial to make this book work at all. Do you have any prescription that coming out of this book for whether anything should be done, whether I as a fan should be doing something, whether the Dodgers as an institution, whether the city of LA should be doing anything, or is it enough in your mind for people to simply give attention to this, you know, to what happened, to be aware of it, to incorporate it into their own sense of right and wrong and how society should work.

But does this call for us to do anything, for anybody to do anything? Should I feel called to be doing something? I don't know if you should be called to be doing anything, but I do think the Dodgers should acknowledge this. In 2000, under the Fox ownership, they briefly acknowledged that they had a little ceremony and they actually extended a literal olive branch, but it was a pretty short-lived and kind of janky expression of apology. Wait, what do you mean they extended it? They like to the members of these communities, the elders of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop, some of them came to this little church near Dodger Stadium and they had a little ceremony,

kind of an apology for what happened. But I don't think it's just on the Dodgers. I think it's on the city of LA and the county. I think as a society, we should reckon with the choices that we make. And I think it's fair to say that we messed up in the 50s as a society. I mean, I wasn't there. I wasn't born yet. Neither were you. But we as a society did wrong these people. And I think that government and private industry acknowledging those things would be healthy and good and a good start. I also think that we should think about what we want our sports teams to be in our lives and in our cities. It's really hard to overstate how important an institution like the Dodgers is in L.A.

And I think it's fair to ask that these institutions, which kind of pin down so much of our society, are also answering to all people in our society and accessible to all of our society. The TV deal they seem to have just struck might be a good start. I don't know. I know Roz Wyman is still alive. How many people from this book are still alive, roughly speaking? Are any of them are? Is this pretty much all ancient history to the LA power structure? I think it's pretty ancient history to the LA power structure. In terms of the politicians who were kind of involved at the time, Rosalind Wyman's probably the last one who's still alive. And she's still pretty active in democratic politics, which is amazing.

Fortunately, she didn't want to talk to me for the book, but she's spoken to other writers about it pretty extensively. And, you know, Peter O'Malley is alive and he was not pulling the strings, but he was around watching his father. And he, you know, the O'Malleys have done a pretty incredible job of kind of curating and presenting Walter O'Malley's legacy. The Walter O'Malley website is extensive. And to their credit, they go a lot further than the Dodgers in acknowledging the actual events that happened. And they talk about the housing deal and the stadium and the Dodgers in their tours of the stadium, from what I understand, don't,

they don't really mention this. They kind of, as a policy, I think, don't talk about it. I think, you know, you have some of the, you know, one of Abrana's daughters is still alive. You have some grandchildren and some nieces and nephews who were teenagers or even older at the time who are still alive and remember. There's people who remember. It's not ancient. You know, it's a history that isn't recent, but it's recent enough to still feel fresh to a lot of people who lived through it. All right. Well, Eric, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you for writing this book. I'm really glad that you wrote this book. I know that it was a book that you had on your list of things to do for like literal decades, right? Like since you were a very young writer and that you worked on it for

a very long time. So I would just say I'm really excited that you get to cross it off, if nothing else. But I hope everybody will read it. I don't want people to be intimidated by it. It is a very readable book, very enjoyable. It's an incredible history book about just a city. And there's so many joyful things in it. And it takes so many unexpected twists. I learned, you know that song? Not you. You know, obviously.

But the song Zoot Suit Riot by the Brian Setzer Orchestra. I learned a lot about the actual Zoot Suit Riot. And as a LA County resident. Sam, I believe that's the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. That was the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. You're right. The Cherry Poppin' Daddies. That was the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. You're right. The Cherry Poppin' Daddies. Sorry about that. As a resident of L.A. County, I was embarrassed by how little I knew about it. Not that embarrassed. I'm excited at how much more

I know. I really want to take the walking tour of L.A. now with you. I want you to take me out to Dodger Stadium's parking lot and point at everything and tell me where it was and what you know when you describe a view that a photographer had i want to go to the to the hill where that view was and put all this geography in motion after after the pandemic we'll do it all right we can do it we can you come well i guess you're in tacoma now but uh we can stay eight feet apart all right eric thank you very much thank you and now ben now, Ben will be talking to Jared Diamond about swing games. Oh yeah, we're going to the laser show. Oh yeah, we're going to the laser show. Come on baby now, don't you know.

We're going down to the laser show. Come on baby now, don't you know. We're going down to the laser show. All right. So I am joined now by Derek Diamond, who is a national baseball writer for the Wall Street Journal and is now the author of a book, Swing Kings, the Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution. Hey, Jared. Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to. Congrats on the book. And I think that this one really kind of resonated with me because obviously I've been interested in this subject myself. And I think that you and I and Travis Satchik all kind of independently got fascinated with this whole revolution in player development and coaching and mechanics around the same time. And I know that Travis and I had our own origin stories. I think Travis really got into it because he was covering Marlon Bird when he was a beat writer for the Pirates. And I kind of got into it because I was just so fascinated by Rich Hill and his transformation. So what was it for you that really gave you the bug?

Because you have to really care about a subject to want to write a book about it, at least to write a baseball book, which is probably not going to make you mega rich and famous, although I hope it does. I hope so, too. Now, I don't mean to jump on Travis, but really it was Marlon marlon bird for me too because my first year covering baseball was 2013 i was covering the mets that was the year the mets signed bird as a to a minor league deal it was the most nothing signing of all time no one thought anything of it of course he makes the team by the beginning of may he's the mets cleanup hitter he had an incredible season gets traded to the pirates and the rest is history and I spent all year sort of badgering him about, all right, so like, what's going on? How are you doing this? You're 35 years old. No one thought this was possible.

And he wouldn't say. He was very coy. He's like, oh, I made some changes to my swing. Wouldn't really get into why or how until much later in the year, really after he got to Pittsburgh, basically, was when he finally first acknowledged that he remade a swing with an independent coach named Doug Latta. And the first four months of the season, I'm just saying, what is going on? He wouldn't tell me. But once he did tell me, and once he told Travis and others, once it got out there, I just became fascinated, especially when more stories like this started sprouting up, sort of culminating for me with Josh Donaldson having Bobby Tewksbury throw to him in the home run derby. And that's sort of when I realized, okay all of us, the idea that these players who were already really good and got to the top of their profession and were there for years in some of their cases had a higher gear, had more talent that they had not unlocked yet. Because I had always assumed that if you were going to be a big leaguer and stay there for a while, you must have already extracted everything that you could out of whatever natural talent you had because it's so competitive and so difficult. And yet it turned out that that wasn't the case, that these veterans like Bird and like Rich Hill, 35-year-old guys, were all of this time seemingly not getting the most out of their

abilities. And I think the question that everyone has, especially about the swing and this home run revolution is, why did it take so long? And I think you did a good job in the book of explaining why and how the old swing, the swing down and squish the bug and all of that was sort of rooted in baseball tradition and that this actually was a smart way to swing the bat in the early days of baseball when the ball was dead and you wanted to hit the ball on the ground because you could get on base more reliably that way. So why do you think it took so long? I mean, this is decades and decades, even going back to Ted Williams explaining what the optimal swing was. Why did it take so long for these ideas to really be embraced?

Yeah, I thought all of what you mentioned about the early, earliest days of baseball really fascinated me, this idea that people were taught to swing down because it actually was beneficial to swing down in the early 20th century and late 19th century because the ball wasn't made to fly and there were no fences or if there were, they were 10 million feet away and players didn't even wear gloves or they had really rudimentary gloves. So I didn't know when I knew there was no gloves. What I didn't know when I first started doing the book was the all time records for errors in a season in Major League Baseball are all the first, you know, 20 seasons of Major League

Baseball's existence, which did I mean, I just had never thought of and didn't know. So that was that's a big part of it, that the swing was always taught to be this way. And it just sort of continued on and on. And beyond that, though, what really struck me, and what I really learned during the book is what the criteria was to be a coach in Major League Baseball for most of baseball history. It was very shockingly simple. It was basically you played Major League Baseball, and're a manager and you were friends with the manager. Basically, that was it.

If you fit those two qualifications, you could be a coach. So what happened was there was just this endless cycle of coaches teaching what their coach taught before them, who was teaching what they taught before them. And you just trace it all the way back to the beginning of baseball. There was just no room for innovation. It was just this endless cycle of sort of uninspired coaching that was passed on through generations and generations. And it took people as far away from sort of the epicenter of professional baseball to say, maybe there is a better way. Maybe the answer to why do we do this shouldn't be because it's always been done that way. Yeah. And a lot of people have asked me after the MVP machine came

out, why did it happen now? Or why is it happening more quickly than the sort of first sabermetric revolution, at least as we portrayed it in our book, we described this as sort of the sequel to that, another phase of the sabermetric revolution where first it was about finding good players who were already out there, whose contributions were going unrecognized. And then this next phase was sort of about getting the most out of players, making players better, which was not something that Moneyball was really concerned about. And so the question is, well, this seems to be adopted faster than that. That was decades and decades of Bill James writing in obscurity and others doing studies and teams not really paying any attention or actively sneering at that stuff.

Whereas now I think this is happening a little more quickly. And maybe that's partly because the technology arrived at the right time to measure this stuff. But also, I think it was that teams were just sort of ready to give these guys a chance. And you talk about Craig Wallenbrock in your book, who's maybe the most prominent character, and he sort of got an audition with a team, but the team, the White Sox in his case, just wasn't ready yet. So I think, at least from my perspective, you kind of had to have people running these teams who were outsiders themselves, who were then willing to give outsiders a shot at actually instructing

players. Because previously there had been this divide between the front office and the field, and it was like, well, you can't actually tell what the coaches what to do or the manager what to do. This is their area that they get to control. But once you started getting some non-former players running teams, it seems like maybe that was the key where they said, well, I'm an outsider and I had something to add here. So maybe Craig Wallenbrock will. Exactly. I think you really just hit it just there, which is Moneyball was all about bringing, not all about, but a big part of it was bringing some of these outsiders into the fold, into front offices. And suddenly,

those people who are one's outsiders are far more open to bringing in outsiders of their own than their predecessors. If you're an Andrew Friedman, or you're a Billy Bean, or you're any of these one-time outsider GM types, of course, you're more open to people like yourself, people that would have considered unconventional hires five, six, seven years ago. So I'm not surprised that those people are now saying, I was a weird hire, and this is now the mainstream. There's probably a better way to hire people under us as well. Yeah. And that's really opened up the possibilities where coaches without high-level playing careers have been hired. Women have been hired to coaching positions that they previously hadn't occupied because there was this experience-based barrier for entry.

People who put stuff out on social media or on various websites and showed that they know what they were talking about got gigs. Granted, not every outsider does know what they're talking about. There are outsiders who were just as clueless as some of the coaches who were preaching counterproductive practices were. But on the whole, it's better to evaluate candidates based on whether they can teach and not how well they could play. So how do you explain the players who did hit for power and did have flyball-oriented swings during the years when that was not really the standard instruction in professional baseball?

Were these players just sort of naturally inclined to do that and they were good enough that no one messed with them? Or were there people who weren't really instructing the suboptimal mechanics and you could kind of get away with that approach? I do think that great hitters come out of the womb great. No one ever taught Mike Trout to swing the way he swings. Mike Trout picked up a baseball bat when he was two years old or five years old, and his body organized itself in such a way to hit the ball as far as possible. Every child knows that he

wants to hit the ball as far as he possibly can. Not everybody's body knows how to sort of organize itself in a way to allow him to do that, great hitters have that no one ever had to teach Alex Rodriguez or Albert pools how to swing a bat in fact you could you sort of hear that by listening to them talk I think anyone that's heard Alex Rodriguez on Sunday Night Baseball or any of these guys they say why Alex has said I think I try to swing down I try to hit the top of the ball then you actually watch what he did and he's not doing that at all and that's when you realize he's only he's saying that in reverse he's saying he does that because he was always told that's what you should do to have a good swing although in reality his body knows that's not the right thing to do and he's

swinging up and hitting the bottom of the ball and hitting the ball in the air so I I think there's just sort of this natural selection to it where, for the most part, great hitters did it right. And then there was probably throughout history, tons of guys like J.D. Martinez who had enough athletic ability, natural athletic ability to make the major league sort of get by on sheer force of will, because that's how guys like Martinez got to the major leagues doing what they were doing. Their swings were suboptimal. His swing was mechanically sort of flawed, but he had so much natural athleticism and willpower and sort of drive that he was able to will himself to the

major leagues. I'm sure there's other guys throughout history who with a little bit different instruction or a more optimized swing mechanic could have been even better players than they ended up becoming. Yeah. And I thought one of the most interesting aspects of the book was when you spoke to a movement expert, essentially, about why it's so difficult, why it's challenging to change your mechanics. And I guess it makes sense to anyone, you know, you build up this muscle memory. And by the time a player gets to the big leagues to dramatically reinvent himself at that point, it's challenging. We all can experience that and commiserate with that based on whatever physical activities we perform. But there's really

a difference between, say, a slight minor adjustment to a swing and one of the more radical reinventions that can just mean that an entirely different part of your brain has to get activated and that can make it orders of magnitude more difficult. Absolutely. But what's amazing about pro athletes is their bodies are basically designed to be able to make those changes faster than for someone like you or someone like me or a normal person. If you have, that's where sort of your genetics really comes into it. You can't just teach somebody how to be a major league hitter. Trust me, I tried while writing the book.

Didn't quite work. You need to be born with some natural athleticism. And if you have that, you're going to be much sort of more easily able to make the changes you need. You could sort of more easily force your body to learn new tricks, as it were, than for a normal person. So it really is sort of a combination of technique. And you just got to have it. That's sort of a frustrating thing about it. It was frustrating for me, this idea that you could have the perfect swing mechanics and still not be a great hitter, because it is a combination of art and science.

And it can't be everybody, but if you have that ability, you have the body, you have the hand-eye coordination, the reflexes, with technique, you could go from being sort of a fringe player to a star. So for the players who haven't successfully adopted this new mold of swing, and granted, it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. There may be some principles that a best swing has in common for all players, but the exact angle that you should be shooting for differs based on your attributes as a player. But for those who have maybe tried to reinvent their swing and have failed or haven't tried when they should, what do you think is the biggest

obstacle? Is it a mental thing? Is it that they just don't have the mindset that they are really willing to invest in the change? Is it that they don't click with a specific coach? What are the real hurdles that have to be cleared? A few have come up or had come up in my reporting and talking to people. One big one is just trying to make a change but not fully committing to it or having this sort of doubt in the back of your mind or fear that it's not going to work. Not truly, truly, truly committing to it. That is certainly something that happens. But the other thing that I've seen happen a lot when talking to people about it is people trying to go about changing their swings, but not necessarily quite knowing how to do it.

And I think some of the tools and technologies that we associate with this revolution, it's sort of a double-edged sword. Talk about launch angle specifically. I think to a lot of folks, this book is like the launch angle book. I don't personally think of it that way and i think launch angle the sort of advent of it and the the emphasis on it has worked against some players there's definitely some players out there major league players that have heard well i need to improve my launch angle so the way they go about doing that is basically just sort of swinging up

or making the goal to improve their launch angle. Well, no good hitting coach would ever teach that. In fact, the hitting coaches I write about in the book sort of are more or less against launch angle as a teaching tool at all. Their attitude is that launch angle is a measurement. It is the result. It's not what you're chasing after. It's not what you're seeking. the result. It's not what you're chasing after. It's not what you're seeking. If you swing right, if you are taught to swing the right way, it will result in hard hit balls with the right launch angle. That's what you should be chasing, that right swing. But if you're just going out there wanting to improve your launch angle, that's easy. Just swing straight up. And I think we could all think of some players perhaps that have tried to change their swings and it's failed. And I think

for many, that's a big part of it. Right. Yeah. We both had the experience of hitting with Doug Latta while we were working on our books. And we both also talked to more tech-oriented instructors who did have a bunch of data and gadgets and everything. But when I hit with Doug, there was nothing. There was no hit tracks machine. There was nothing measuring my exit velocity or anything. And I was kind of wondering, well, am I actually getting better? Don't you want to measure me to see if I'm getting better? But he could just kind of tell her, you know, he wasn't really aiming to up my exit velocity by X miles per hour or something. It was more about, well, let's go back to the first principles of what makes an effective swing and let's mold you in that direction. And the data, you know,

if you were to gather the data, the data would reflect that, but we're not really going to use it as a teaching tool necessarily. Whereas other coaches will, and you know, other batting cages will have that stuff in there so you can hit in real time and get that real time feedback. So even though I guess this new model of swing is more in line with the data, the swing kings themselves kind of differ in the extent to which they're actually relying on that or bringing it into the cage with them. Well, look, you need technology and the use of it is only as good as the person who's sort of utilizing it. You still need somebody who knows how to use this

technology in a way that's beneficial. And just hooking somebody up to a HITRAX machine and saying go, I mean, there's value to that. There's theories of education and teaching that says, okay, you put someone in a cage with HITRAX and say your goal is to hit 90 miles an hour on your exit velocity, organize your body to do that. That's sort of one sort of approach. But I think a better way is you use these tools to inform, but you still need someone to sort of point you in the right direction and show you how to achieve your goals while using the technology.

I don't think I could be hooked up to a HitTrack machine and I could then become a better hitter without more instruction from there. So it's impossible to talk about the home run revolution without talking about the ball. And there have been a couple of MLB commission scientific studies of the role that the ball has played in home run rates. And I think the first MLB commission study basically said, yeah, it's all the ball.

It's nothing else. And then the more recent study said, well, it's maybe about 60% the ball and everything else is maybe mechanics related. So how do you kind of balance those things or give weight to each when it comes to the home runs that we've seen? Well, I was thrilled in December when that report came out. That's for sure. The most recent one, because the book was pretty much done at that point. And the ball was a real issue, or not issue, but it was a real factor, this idea that we know the ball is behaving differently. And does that invalidate the work that some of these players have made with their swings? And is it truly just a product of the ball? And if the

ball were to change back, would they all just lose their ability so when those scientists came out and attributed 40 of the rise in home runs in 2019 to what they described as change in launch behavior was their fancy way of saying swinging differently that was encouraging to me but like i think they go hand in hand right the balls are cutting through the air sort of with like a hot knife through butter, the balls are flying if you get the ball in the air. That only incentivizes players to hit the ball in the air even more. So it doesn't surprise me that hitters say, okay, the ball is hot, the ball, we know if we get in the air, it's going to fly. Well, maybe we should be changing our swings to hit the ball in the air more. The reality is hitting the ball in the air

for almost all of baseball history, outside of those very early days, has always been a better approach than hitting the ball on the ground. I mean, I sort of cited this statistic a bunch, but since 2015, Major League hitters hit.247 with a.269 slugging percentage on balls on the ground. On balls in the air, it's.406 batting average and.787 slugging percentage on balls on the ground. On balls in the air, it's 406 batting average and 787 slugging percentage. Those are such enormous differences that I just don't buy that the only explanation for why hitting the ball in the air is better than the ground is the ball. Yeah, and it is helpful to have that data. I mean, again, it seems like it should be so intuitive.

I mean, it was to Ted Williams and the way he explained it, at least now to us, seems very intuitive. And you wonder why didn't anyone think this? But of course, they didn't have those numbers. They didn't have the, well, here's how batters hit if you break it down by stack cast launch angle or even by ground ball or fly ball or something. So just to have that, it's kind of an argument ender, you know, right there when you can just show those numbers that weren't available to a previous generation of players and coaches and say, well, this is just what leads to the best outcome. There's really no arguing with that. Exactly. It is inarguable that hitting the ball in the air leads to better results hitting the ball on the ground.

And Ted Williams knew it. And that's what's so amazing. In 1970, Ted Williams wrote The Science of Hitting, essentially the Bible by arguably the greatest hitter of all time, saying, you've probably always heard that the ideal swing was down or level, but I'm here to tell you the ideal swing is up. What he described as a 10-degree angle up. I have no idea how Ted Williams determined it was 10 degrees without any technology to back it up, but that's Ted Williams for you. And people strangely sort of dismissed it. And that was one

of the craziest things to me because in what other industry do people hear the greatest ever say something and go, well, that might work for you, but I'm going to model myself after this more average practitioner of this craft. It makes no sense, but I'm going to model myself after this more average practitioner of this craft. It makes no sense, but that was the attitude for a long time. Well, you're Ted Williams, you're a freak, you're superhuman, you have crazy vision and you have this and you have that. So that might work for you, but that would never work for John Smith over here as a more normal person. I think we now know that's a crazy way of thinking and it sounds crazy even to say it, but that really was the logic for a long time. embarked on their reinventions before the ball became what it is now. And they really transformed themselves as players before the home run rate really took off, which does lend some credence

to the idea that even if the ball does go back to normal, and even if it's a little less advantageous to hit the ball in the air, there's still something to be gained there. But I am curious, because you wrote about this for the Wall Street Journal last month, do you think that we will get an automated Pahala, a more tightly controlled baseball at some point in the future? Because we've had these incredible fluctuations from year to year. It's really undermined MLB's credibility in a lot of ways. And yet there is this weight of tradition behind the hand-stitch ball. I really don't think we're going to see it anytime soon. I don't from my from the people I talk to and being around Major League Baseball, their attitude is really against any sort of synthetic ball using anything but natural materials, the same leather and rubber and yarn that they've used forever. And I understand why I sort of really do see it both ways.

I'm sure there's going to be a group of fans out there that say, well, you have the ability with technology to make a synthetic ball that could behave exactly as you want it to. I mean, that's how it is in golf. Golf balls are made out of synthetic materials for the most part, and they have to fit within very sort of narrow specs, and they make the balls to do exactly what they want them to do. Baseball could do that, but it would be a different ball. It wouldn't feel the same. It would feel

similar probably, but it wouldn't feel exactly the same. It would look similar, but not exactly the same. And it certainly wouldn't have that sort of emotional attachment people have to the ball now, the way it smells, the way it sort of feels coming out of the box, that would be different. And I think Major League Baseball views that as valuable and valuable enough to sort of make it worth to have some fluctuation on the ball. I'm sure they would prefer to have it not be quite as insane as it's been the last few years. I know they're actively working to try to figure that out, but I don't really see anytime soon them going to like sort of machine made synthetic ball and they're just going to live with the fluctuations until then. Yeah. Well, as we've both covered, golf has kind of been ahead of baseball when it comes to

technology and some of the principles of the swing. So I suppose it's possible that golf is just ahead of baseball in that respect too, and that baseball will eventually catch up. But there's so much tradition behind the hand stitch ball that I just don't know how soon that could possibly happen. But I am curious about some of these really dramatic reinvention stories that kind of inevitably are part of both of our books because you can't tell the story of this era without touching on the J.D. Martinez's and the Marlon Byrd's and the Justin Turner's. But those are really helpful for storytellers like us, you know, from a narrative sense. They make very compelling tales.

But do you think that we will continue to see those dramatic mid-career or even late-career reinventions? Because as these principles become pervasive and widely adopted, maybe players won't even get to that point in their career with the bad mechanics, quote unquote, and they'll just have the good mechanics to begin with and we won't actually see anyone making these dramatic late career changes.

It's going to be harder, I think, but that's in part because teams have finally gotten smarter with A, mechanics, and two, who they're hiring to do these jobs. Look at how many people that I wrote about in my book, I'm sure you wrote about in your book as well, for sure, who were independent coaches three years ago or four years ago and are now working in major league baseball or minor league baseball. These sort of innovators who are on the fringes

of the industry are no longer on the fringes. They're increasingly becoming in the mainstream. That's why it seems like every day somebody else from driveline is getting hired by a big league team or that independent instructor that fix player x is now the hitting coordinator for team y that's and that's what it's going to be to the point where these sorts of hires which are still newsworthy because they're still somewhat unusual will cease to be that they'll just be the mainstream and there's going to be this all-around professional baseball coaches with seemingly unusual backgrounds,

those who didn't play, those that are sort of rooted in biomechanics and technology and things of that nature. It's good though. You don't necessarily, these stories are fun. They're made for great stories, but they're not optimal from a player development standpoint. Teams want to get to the point where they're getting the most out of their players before they get bad and need to be fixed. Look, there's always going to be players that rise from obscurity, I hope. There always will be. But I don't know if you're going to see as many like J.D. Martinez's

let's go to a warehouse in the middle of L.A. and remake your swing from scratch with some random guy that no one's ever heard of. I think that's going to be a lot more unusual. Yeah. Do you think there is a future for the independent facility, the unattached swing king? Because, you know, it is incredible, as you said, the pace at which these outsiders have become insiders. And every time we had a book deadline, it was like checking to make sure that all of our sources had not gotten hired by a team since we spoke to them because so many of them had. And yet I have talked to some of them who say, well, I want to be independent. I want to be able to work with anyone, not just one team's

hitters. And I want my ideas to be public to a certain extent, maybe. And I don't want to be in-house and you know maybe there are players who'd rather work with someone who's outside the team but we have seen so many brought into the fold and there's kind of been this independent brain drain going into organized baseball so you know right now we see like driveline for instance a lot of people have been hired by teams but then there are some people like O-Chart, like Bodhi, who have kind of found this middle ground, at least right now, where they kind of are still affiliated with driveline, but also working with a team, which is, you know, maybe presents some kind of odd issues from time to time. So what do you think the future is of the independent facility or instructor? I do think there's always going to be people that believe that it's somehow a conflict to work for teams or they don't want to be caught

up in the bureaucracy that comes with working for professional organization where there's so many layers of coaching and you really don't have the time or the opportunity to sort of work one-on-one with players the way you do as an independent coach. You really don't get that. When you go inside the system, suddenly you're responsible. Let's say you're a hitting coach. You're responsible for the whole team. You're talking about 13, 14 hitters. You have to sort of monitor all of them. And the job of a hitting coach in Major League Baseball or even Minor League Baseball is very different than independent coach. It's really not as much about mechanics as much as it is about sort of the mental side of hitting and cheerleading and making sure players are mentally

and physically prepared to go out and do their jobs. Because you're talking about a full season of five, six months. There really isn't time in the middle of that season to say, we're going to remake your swing. There just isn't. You're just trying to survive. You're just trying to play every single day. It's been the offseason where these guys could go to these independent coaches and say, it's just going to be you and me, and we're going to really focus on mechanics, nothing else. We're going to really focus on the swing. And I think there's always going to be people out there who say, that's what I do. I fix swings. I don't want to sort of get in the business of trying to monitor the sort of mental state of 13 hitters.

I just want guys that want to work with me and I want to work with them. We could just get really intensive. And I think there's increasingly going to be a symbiotic relationship between the inside and the outside where teams recognize with their limitations and that, hey, we might not really have the bandwidth or the resources to devote to say, okay, we're just going to work with you exclusively all offseason and fix your swing.

No, we're going to send you to sort of an approved outside guy that we have vetted and the side knows what he's talking about. And we're going to send you there in the offseason to work on your swing. And that's it. And I think you're starting to get there where teams are now referring hitters to Doug Latta or referring hitters to Craig Wallenbrock, as opposed to players having to sort of sneak off on their own and hope they don't get caught.

What did you learn about what kind of background leads one to become an innovative or effective teacher? Because that's something, you know, you talk about it with athletes themselves. Is it better to specialize in one sport or to play a bunch of sports and then pick one that you're well suited for? to specialize in one sport or to play a bunch of sports and then pick one that you're well suited for. And maybe it's sort of the same with coaches where not that you can't be a good coach if you've only ever been a baseball player or coach. But I think in both of our stories, there are some characters who really had unusual backgrounds and had non-baseball training and interests that led to sort of this multidisciplinary approach where they were able to synthesize things and somehow come up with some baseball insights out of it.

Yeah, many of them did. Many of the people that I write about in the book are those who, A, have varied interests that extend beyond baseball. Craig Wallenbrock is probably the main character of the book, or at least one of them. He has one of the most fascinating backstories of any person I've ever met in any field in my life the guy quits baseball before he plays a single game of college ball at San Diego State becomes a full-time surfer and self-described pot-smoking hippie and talking to him is just an exercise in trying to keep up because

he's talking about samurais and then he's talking about Chinese painters from the 1300s and then he's talking about folk music from the 60s and then he's talking about some book he read and then he's talking about this and that and somehow it all relates back to hitting and sometimes it's hard for me to even follow how it relates back to the swing but somehow it always does so I think that sort of creative sort of varied interest set helps a lot the other thing that these guys all seem to have in common is this curiosity to understand why they failed. Most people play baseball and almost all of them fail. And most of them just say, well, I wasn't good enough.

And they move on with their lives. That's what I did. I'm sure that's what you did. That's what almost everyone does. That wasn't enough for these people. People like Doug Latta, people like Craig Wallenbrock, they failed and they wanted to understand why. They became obsessed with knowing what they did wrong. That's a really powerful quest when you sort of devote your life to understanding why you didn't succeed to make sure others don't not succeed. You could really accomplish a lot.

I think that was a very common thread between all these guys that I need to know what didn't work for me. I don't have that. I never had that drive with baseball. I just stopped playing when I was 18, realized I wasn't all that good. And that was pretty much it. Not the case for guys like Doug Latta. Yeah. In a way that makes Ted Williams even more amazing to me because he didn't fail, right? And he didn't have to figure out why it wasn't working for him. It was working for him. He was the best. And, you know, maybe he was the best partly because he had this intellectual curiosity, but he probably didn't have to be quite as scientific about it as he was to be a great

baseball player. And yet he still had that drive. So that's sort of inspiring too. Another thing that I wanted to ask about is kind of the attitudes and the interpersonal skills that these different figures have. Because obviously in the MVP machine, there are guys like Trevor Bauer and Kyle Bode and in your book, Richard Schenck, who are very abrasive and really piss people off and kind of take this, you know, us versus them attitude to a certain extent. And we're

trying to tear down the traditions and we have to, you know, lob bombs at convention. But then there are other figures, whether it's Wallenbrock or Brian Bannister in my book or Doug Latta in both of our books who don't really seem to have that flame burning inside them that makes them really angry about being snubbed for years and want to sort of lash out. So why do you think there is that difference? And do you think one style or another has been more effective overall? They bring up Richard Schenck. He's, Richard Schenck's an interesting character to say the least. He is a independent hitting coach slash professional internet troll, I think would

be the best way to describe him. And through a very shocking turn of events in his life, had the opportunity to work with Aaron Judge in between 2016 and 2017. And at least in the mind of Aaron Judge, had an enormous effect on making him a better hitter. And Aaron Judge sort of attributes Richard's making him a better hitter. And in Aaron Judge, sort of attributes Richard's work to why he had that huge breakout in 2017. But Richard Schenck is also roundly despised in the baseball community. If anyone goes to find him on Twitter,

you will just see sort of a collection of sort of bullying and increasingly nasty things. He's very abrasive and he's hated. But Aaron Judge also thinks he helped him. So how do you reconcile that? It was one of the biggest struggles of writing the book was figuring out how to present this guy. Look, Richard Schenck does not work in professional baseball and he's never going to work in professional baseball because no team would ever have someone like that on their staff. I don't know why he is the way he is. So we're talking about what's a better approach. I'm never going to really believe that being like Richard Schenck

is sort of the right approach. Now, he says that his attitude online is just his filter, and it's how he determines which players are really serious about working with him. And I also should say about Richard Schenck that if you meet him in real life, which I have quite a few times, he's nothing like he is on the internet and that makes it all the more baffling. So I don't really advise being a professional internet troll. I don't really think it's the best way to teach anything, but who am I to judge? He taught Aaron Judge. I wonder how much you wrestled with the

structure of your story, because that was something that Travis and I spent so much time considering, how do you tell the story? Because it's not like Moneyball, for instance, the story of one team or one executive or even one season or something. It's really spread out. There are all these different figures who were sort of doing things maybe independently or related, but at different times and different seasons and different players. And that can be jarring potentially for a reader if you don't do it right. And then there's the history aspect too and jumping back and forth in time. So how did you figure out how to do that? And did you go through multiple structures before you settled on this one?

It was the hardest thing of writing the book was figuring that out. And I don't know if this was the right approach or not, but for me, what it was, was first, I just, for most of the process, I literally didn't even consider the structure actually. If we're going to get into the writing process, what I first did, once I narrowed down who I wanted to write about, I knew there was primarily four coaches, each of whom have one primary client that I wanted to work with. Once I figured that out, I said, okay, for now let's just take these as four separate stories. I'm gonna tell the stories of these four people and their and their pupils, so these eight human beings, and I'm gonna tell their stories separately. I had separate sort of documents where

I said this is my Craig Wallenbrock story and this is my Doug Latta story and this is my Richard Shank story and I wrote it like it was a big magazine story essentially however many thousands of words it took to write it. Once I had all four of them then it was okay now I had to find a way to massage these together and where do they flow. Fortunately, I had a very good editor, William Morrow, that was able to sort of help me a little bit with it and figuring out like where to splice it together. It felt a little bit at times like sort of building Frankenstein's monster where you're like taking like an eyeball from here and hair from here and a knee from here. But I hope it worked out in the end. I hope it's not too confusing. That was like my big fear. Like, will people be able to follow all of these different stories at the same time?

Yeah. Well, I think it worked for me, but I went through that same experience. So I was probably more sympathetic than the average person. But another thing that I think we both dealt with was trying to tell the stories of people or teams who have been kind of discredited for various reasons, whether fairly or not. So in our case, for instance, the Astros have been player development innovators when it comes to teams and adopting and implementing some of these ideas, not as an independent facility, but as an actual MLB organization. They are also cheaters, And we know that for sure. And in the case of your book, you wrote about Marlon Bird and Chris Colabello, and both of them were people who reinvented their swings and had much improved results, but then also tested positive for PEDs

and in Bird's case, multiple times. And the Astros we know cheated, the players we can never really know for sure, and they maintain their innocence. But a lot of people look, the Astros we know cheated, the players we can never really know for sure, and they maintain their innocence. But a lot of people look at the Astros and say, well, they're good because they cheated. And a lot of people look at Bird and Calabella and say they're good because they were taking PDs. And it can be both. You know, you can be innovative, you can be better, and also cheaters. But that's kind of a hard thing to relate or convince people of. So how

did you approach that? Yeah, it was tough. It was really tough to try to navigate that, recognizing that there's always going to be people that are not going to take, say, Chris Colabello's changes seriously because of the fact that he tested positive for PEDs. And there's no way around it. It's just a fact. He did. You kind of have to just own it and figure out how to handle it. So I sort of thought of it this way. There's a couple things. One, like anyone that's seen Chris Calabello hit with the Blue Jays and before the Blue Jays could say with their own naked eyes that clearly this guy did something different. His swing was different. He made big changes. There's absolutely no question that he made changes. So that is just a fact. So you could always sort of point that out and say, these are the changes that he made because you could see them. The other issue becomes the more

complicated one of, well, did he really take PEDs or not? And that's a question I can't answer. And I've spent a lot of time with Chris Colabello, and he has told me in great detail his story about that positive test and why it happened and everything that's associated with it. And I think all I could do as a writer writing this story is putting it all out there and leaving it to readers to decide what they think. Do they believe him or not? I don't think it really matters if i believe whether chris calabello took peds or not or whether modern bird took peds or not i could say they both have interesting stories when you talk to them about it you just try to present it as sympathetically as

you can and see if and let people decide what they want to believe about it and additionally there's also from a narrative perspective it does sort of add a little bit of drama to the story, where it does plant that seed of doubt in people's minds. What Chris Colabello, what happened to him is real. What happened to Merlin Bird is real. But then, you know, Justin Turner also worked with Doug Latta, and he hasn't tested positive for PEDs, and he had incredible success because of Merlin Bird. Like, these people, despite their sort of flaws or shortcomings or the things that they did or didn't do, they still are part of the story. They added to sort of the hitting conversation. I think that's valuable no matter what the truth is.

Right. So something else we both dealt with was the question of whether optimal baseball is better baseball from an entertainment perspective. And of course, a lot of people think that three true outcomes baseball is less entertaining, there's fewer balls in play, there's less defensive action, there's less base running, etc. And some people like homers and some people don't. But I think the question that I have, there is a perception that the quote unquote launch ankle swing is geared toward home runs, but also strikeouts that you can't have one without the other. And I wonder to what extent you think that's true, because clearly there are some players who maybe go toward more of an uppercut swing and there is a trade off there where it's's less contact but perhaps better contact when they do make contact but does that have to be the case because you know this upward swing is really just about meeting the ball on the trajectory that it's coming in and you're trying to keep the bat in the zone for a longer period of time which in theory could help you in contact as well as power

so is there a trade-off there? Does there have to be, or can you have both things? I completely disagree with this perception that the rise in strikeouts in baseball is a product of batters trying to swing for the fences or quote-unquote launch angle swings. There's a few reasons why sort of anecdotally, look, guys who change their swings don't all strike out a ton. Let's look at Justin Turner just as an example. He's made incredible changes to his swing.

He's had incredible success, hits for power, hits for average. In 2017, he had 543 plate appearances and struck out 56 times. In 2018, he struck out 54 times. Daniel Murphy comes to mind as well as a guy that made major changes to his swing. Hits for power has a ton of extra base hits. OPS is well over 900 for a couple of years, striking out in 2016, 57 times. In 2018, 40 times in limited action. It doesn't have to be one or the other. I think people like saying it does because they want to attribute something for the rise in strikeouts. I don't think people really want to attribute what I think is the real reason for the rise in strikeouts in

baseball, which to me has much more to do with pitching than it does with hitting. What I think people have to understand and don't quite appreciate enough is there is a reason why hitters across baseball view the home run as necessary for survival it's because pitching now is so ridiculously good guys throw so hard these sliders seem to defy the laws of physics you never face a tired pitcher because we have much better bullpen optimization now every pitcher that you face in a game today is essentially optimized to get you and you alone out. And then add in the fact that because of defensive positioning and advances in that realm,

it's even harder to sort of find grass when you put the ball in play. Therefore, the idea of stringing together three hits, four hits, or more in an inning to score runs, yeah, is it possible? Yeah, in theory. But it's really, really hard with pitching this good. The best way to score is to do it with one swing. And that's why you see batters trying to hit more home runs. But because of that quality of pitching, yeah, there's going to be strikeouts. It really goes both ways. Do I think that there's maybe too many strikeouts in the game right now for it to be as aesthetically pleasing as it could be? Yeah, maybe. I think there's a real valid argument there. But I also know that the old way of thinking, which is strikeouts were shameful and they were

to be avoided at all costs, that also was wrong. It was clearly wrong. I mean, you watch older games from the 70s or earlier. Yeah, the games moved faster in part because guys were swinging at everything because the goal was just to put the ball in play clearly a better offensive approach is that it's okay to take a strike or two or okay to strike out and wait for a pitch you could drive there's probably a middle ground here between let's just swing and everything and hit the ball and play and hit ground balls to shortstop every time and let's strike out 10 billion times a season. There's probably somewhere in between, but I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that hitters and their approach are responsible for what's happened with all the strikeouts in baseball. Yeah, I agree that it's definitely not the bulk of it that yes, maybe if you're

not trying to make contact at all costs, then you are occasionally accepting a strikeout where you wouldn't have otherwise because you are trying to hit the ball hard. But I agree that most of it is the pitching. It's just very hard to hit pitchers these days. And there has been some evidence, I've seen some people write about the fact that the correlation between strikeout rate and overall offensive production, which for years sort of supported the idea that more strikeouts tended to go hand-in-hand with better production. Now that seems to have gone away a little bit, maybe because putting the ball in play, now that the ball is traveling the way it is, is more advantageous.

So there doesn't seem to be as clear a relationship there. And maybe that puts a little more emphasis on contact for hitters, even though for pitchers there is still really a premium on avoiding contact and there's this case of misaligned incentives where players do what works for them and makes them more money and teams look for players and pay players who do the things that help them win more games and they're all acting rationally but neither of them may be acting in the best interest of baseball fans. So that will continue to drive this, which, you know, if the ball does go back to what it used to be and we see offense crater, I think it will be not really because of the mechanics or because of these new swing ideas, just more because it's really hard to hit. And so if the ball is not traveling anymore when you do hit it, then you're going to see a real suppression in offense. And that kind of leads into one of my last questions here,

which is something that I get asked a lot and maybe you've been asked a lot, which is who has the upper hand in the next five years or 10 years? Pick your time frame. Do hitters or pitchers have more to gain? Because pitching has kind of been ahead of hitting when it comes to data and technology and some of these new innovations. So does that mean that hitting now has a chance to catch up and equalize things a little, or will there just be another revolution in biomechanics or whatever that pitchers will be at the forefront of? We already see pitchers designing brand new pitches that never existed before and all this incredible technology designed to get batters out. The reality is pitching has had been

so far ahead of hitters for so long. It wasn't even close how far ahead pitching was. And yes, hitting has started to close that gap, but the gap is still enormous. Pitchers to me still have such an enormous advantage, and frankly, they should. I mean, pitching has always had an advantage over hitting, but I still think there's more room for that gap to close, perhaps. I don't think hitting has sort of peaked yet, but I am sure that very quickly,

pitching's gonna take another step forward. That's sort of what the history of baseball is, right? Pitching always has an advantage and sometimes that gap closes a little bit, but then inevitably it sort of widens again as pitching just gets better. I think that's just been the trajectory of baseball forever and I'm not sure that's ever really going to change. All right. So maybe my last question then is if there's a big league hitter or multiple big league hitters past or present who you wish had seen a swing king and never did or hasn't, but someone who maybe had the raw talent or power, but just never translated it or fully harnessed it because they had some suboptimal swing mechanic or they were hitting the ball into the ground that you just kind of wonder what if or what might have been or what might still be so this is going to surprise a lot of people i think because it

surprised me i asked this question to virtually every hitting coach i met the question i asked was if what hitter in major league baseball now do you believe that you could really help that you could help the most that if you got your hands on this guy we'd see major improvements and i expected to hear some pretty obscure names guys guys that would maybe not have even heard of or would have thought very low of. I was wrong. Justin Turner or JD Martinez, if they had never gone to see Wallenberger. Exactly. Not the answer I heard. I would say, I asked this question to a lot of people. No joke, about 90% of these people named the same player. And that was Jim Carl Stanton, which completely blew my mind because he had 59 home runs in the season in

2017. I asked, how could that be? He's so good. And they said, look at his swing. Does it look like a natural swing that he's getting the most out of his physical gifts?

And frankly, like I'm not qualified to write a hitting manual. I am not an expert on the swing by any means and how it works. But yeah, you watch Jim Carl Stanton, and frankly, it's a little awkward looking. He has that weird closed stance, and it never really looks smooth. He's strong and athletic, but I sort of started to see, well, what if this guy had a Craig Wallenbrock or a Doug Latta working with his swing, but that body and that physical presence, would we see a guy that hits 50 home runs, but instead of that lifetime 268 batting

average, have that be 320? I mean, that would be scary to think about. I don't know if it's true, but I just know that a lot of people said they wish they could get their hands on Giancarlo Stanton. I kind of wish it could happen because I would love to see the most optimized Giancarlo Stanton 6'6", 250-pound monster. Yeah, I know. That's a scary thought to think that Giancarlo Stanton, as good as he's been, has been sort of figuratively speaking swinging with one hand tied behind his back or one massive arm. But I'm sure Aaron Judge could give him Richard Schenck's number if he's interested. Oh, God, please. No, I can't handle any more of that.

So you can read the book. Again, it is called Swing Kings. You can read Jared in the Wall Street Journal and find him on Twitter at Jared Diamond. Do you have any recommended way for people to buy the book or any options people might not know about in these strange circumstances? Yes. So of course, these are weird times. This is not the book launch I imagined. I didn't quite imagine releasing a book into a global pandemic. And I understand that not everybody is in the position to go buy a book right now. And I'm totally respectful and

understand that. However, there's a lot of independent bookstores out there that really could use the help like any small business. So I've been telling people if they're in the position to buy from their local stores, a lot of independent bookstores are still fulfilling orders online, scrambling to do so. And it's tough. So if you're in the position to to I know these are businesses that could use the help And I could use the help too Alright well Congrats again and thanks for your time Thank you so much

Alright so Sam and I divided and conquered today There are so many good baseball books coming out That there's no way for any one person To get to them all and speaking of Baseball books coming out I wrote one Or at least co-wrote one the aforementioned Book that Travis Sochik and I published last year, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. If you're listening to this podcast on the day it went up, April 7th, then you're also listening on the day the paperback edition of The MVP Machine became available for purchase.

If you've already read The MVP Machine in hardcover or in some digital format, I thank you. If you've been waiting for the paperback edition, your wait is over. And if you want to dive back into the book, there is some incentive for you to do that. We fixed a few typos for one thing, but if that's not enough to get you in, we also wrote a new afterword to the book. It's basically another new chapter, which would be one of the longest chapters in the book. Travis and I worked hard on it over the offseason. It's really about reckoning with the prominence of the Astros in the player development revolution, as Jared and I just discussed. It's also about how the Baltimore Orioles are trying to essentially imitate the Astros player development model. It's about some of the player development success stories, both individual players and teams of the 2019 season.

And it's about whether this new player development revolution benefits players or teams more. It's not an easy question to answer, but we get into all of that in some depth and detail. And we also speculate about how long it will take for the late adopting teams to catch up and when we will have a relatively level playing field again, when teams will achieve player development parity. So I think it's an interesting afterward, good reason to buy the book if you haven't yet or give it another look if you have. And we hope you enjoy it. Thanks for supporting it. I think Swing Kings makes a good companion to the MVP machine if you're in the market

for both. I also want to follow up on last week's stat blast on episode 1523 with assistance from Effectively Wild listener Adam Ott. I reported the longest team streaks with a different player at a particular position on opening day and subsequently got a question from Patreon supporter Thomas who says, how about the opposite? What teams slash players have had the longest unbroken opening day streaks for the same team and position. So clearly, whereas that last list was mostly lousy teams and lousy players who couldn't keep their job for more than a year at a time, this is going to be great players on mostly good teams.

I went back to Adam. I asked him to edit his query to give me the answer to this new question. I will also put this link online as I did for the last list. And the answer is Brooks Robinson. Brooks Robinson started 20 consecutive opening days for the Baltimore Orioles at third base, 1957 to 1976. No one else has equaled that streak. Willie Mays came very close, 19 years in center field from the 1954 Giants to the 1972 Giants.

Then you have Lou Whitaker and Joe Judge, 17-year streaks. Whitaker, of course, for the 78 through 94 Tigers. And Joe Judge, maybe a lesser-known name but quite a good player for the 1916 through 1932 Senators. Then the only other guys with longer than 15-year streaks are Todd Helton, 16 years at first base for the 98-2013 Rockies, and Mike Schmidt, 16 years at third base for the 74-89 Phillies. Yadier Molina, by the way, has an active streak of 15 years at catcher for the Cardinals. No one else has more than an 11-year active streak. Joey Votto and Elvis Andrus have gone to 11. So again, check out the full list if you're interested.

And one name caught my eye on Monday. Al Kaline had a 13-year streak starting in right field for the Tigers from 1961 to 1973. Kaline, of course, passed away on Monday at age 85. And you know the number one guy on this list, Brooke Robinson, with his 20-year streak. In 1974, as Kaline was close to retirement, Robinson said, when you talk about all-around ballplayers, I'd say Kaline is the best I ever played against. And, you know, Kaline is a guy who probably a lot of our listeners, if they aren't Tigers fans, might check out his career having heard that he died and be very impressed by how great a player he was. He is, of course, Mr. Tiger. He never played a professional game for any team other

than the Tigers. They signed him out of high school. He never played in the minors. He spent 22 years with the Tigers and then another quarter century broadcasting Tigers games, but he's a little less of a nationally known household name. He was somewhat overshadowed by some of his contemporaries, Roberto Clemente and Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. He perhaps wasn't as great at his peak as those players, and yet when you factor in how great he was at his best and how long he lasted, he's really an all-time top 50 player. He's 42nd all-time by baseball reference war, and that's position players and pitchers, not just hitters. He hit for average. He walked a lot, so he got on base a ton. He hit for pretty good power by the standard

of his day. And in addition to starting in right field for 13 consecutive years with the Tigers, he also made 13 consecutive all-star teams from 1955 through 1967. Other than his batting title at age 20 in 1955, which made him the youngest player to win a batting title. He was, I think, one day younger than Ty Cobb was when he won his first batting title. His stats were a little less eye-catching than some of his contemporaries. He was an extremely well-rounded player. He won a lot of gold gloves. He had a great arm, good defensive right fielder. One interesting thing about Kaline, though, who did stick around long enough to get his 3,000th hit, he retired, of course, at 399 career homers. When he retired with 399 homers, I believe he was 16th on the all-time list. Now he's, I think, 58th. Obviously,

there's been quite a lot of home run inflation since he retired. But what's very noticeable when you scan his stat lines is that he never hit 30 homers, and yet he got to 399. I had a hunch that he must have the most career homers by any player who never hit 30 in a single season, and Jessica Brand, one of our listeners in the Facebook group, who is always quick with a stat check, she confirmed that that is indeed the case. She also noted that the most homers in a career without a 40 homer season is Eddie Murray's 504, and of course, most without 50 in a season, Hank Aaron. Then in response to another listener's question, she came out with a couple fun facts.

The most career homers without 20 in a single season, Ron Fairley, who hit 215 total with a high of 19, and the most career homers without ever hitting 10 in a single season, Brad Ausmus, who hit 80 in total but topped out at 9 in 1999. Kaline, of course, could have done it in the season when he hit 29. He only played 100 games. So although he played for decades, he did tend to miss a chunk of games each season. And also, he played much of his prime in the offense-deprived 1960s.

So in 1967, for instance, he had a Mike Trout-esque 176 OPS+, and yet at the time that translated to only a 308-411-541 line, which wouldn't look that eye-popping today. So Al Kaline, he will be missed by many a Tigers fan, and he should be appreciated by many a non-Tigers fan. 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 and get themselves access to some perks. Daniel Marcotti, Kilgore Trout, Adam Hopps, Richard Oxier, and Jeff Beeman. Thanks to all of you.

You can join that 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. Your reviews are much appreciated. You can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. So if you're walking down the street sometime Spot some hollow ancient eyes Please don't just pass them by and stare

As if you didn't care Say hello in there Hello