Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1527: The Only Rule Revisited

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about how runs, hits, and errors became baseball’s standard scoreboard stats and the piecemeal way in which baseball evolves, then reminisce about and reevaluate the 2015 experiment that led to their 2016 book about running the independent league Sonoma Stompers, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our […]

Yes, I got no one around to hold me to I just need someone to judge me as I do Doing my best just to change my yesterday. But I won't have no more errors on my way. Good morning and welcome to episode 1527 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast at Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hey, Ben.

Hi. Muster up any banter in the five days since you bemoaned the banter desert? No, not really. Okay. I wrote an article at ESPN about the runs, hits, and airs sequence that is so common in baseball, particularly in box scores, on scoreboards, that sort of a thing. And I, at some point long in the past, somebody asked me what would be better stats to have in that box. And that's what caused me to jot it down in the

article ideas folder file. And I looked and looked and looked and I could not find who did that. And I just would like to note that if you're listening and you sent me that question, I would like to thank you. I would have liked to have thanked you in the text, but I couldn't find it. So just know that I'm very grateful. Yeah. So your point in the article was that this runs hits errors summary that we have on scoreboards and in box scores and on TVs and everywhere is sort of an artifact of newspapers trying to squeeze things into a limited amount of space and also maybe outdated understandings of what actually is important in a baseball game.

And so you suggested that instead of runs, hits, and errors, A, we could just have runs like other sports, just have the scores. It is the scoreboard after all. But you also said, hits, and errors, A, we could just have runs like other sports, just have the scores. It is the scoreboard after all. But you also said, well, maybe we could have home runs or plate appearances, which would give you an idea of how many base runners there were or just actual base runner counts or strikeouts perhaps. What did you think of the comment that I saw a couple people make, which is that runs, hits, and errors is good for tracking no hitters in progress. And I guess to a lesser extent, perfect games,

even though walks and hit by pitches aren't on there. Yeah, well, it doesn't, the perfect game argument doesn't work at all because walks and hit by pitch aren't on there. So I don't accept the perfect game part, but it is true that for a no hitter, it's good. Of course, we generally, we have no hitter alerts. I would, you know, I would like to just first interrupt and say that I have no

problem with runs, hits, and airs. I think the point of the article was that since baseball is largely resistant to change, and you know, it's a traditional sport that really values the tradition, that tradition is in fact one of the things that it sells about itself. So it's largely resistant to change, but change does happen against its will sometimes or by choice sometimes, but because it's, it's otherwise largely and generally resistant to change, it doesn't make 12 changes to account for the one thing that it's actually trying to change or that changed organically. And so you end up having a thing change, but then none of the complementary changes that you would design if you were, you know, really like looking at this

from a whole system-wide standpoint. And so you end up with all sorts of things about baseball that are sort of awkwardly existing in the modern game. And I don't particularly mind that. I think the one of the reasons I liked writing about runs, hits, and airs for this story is that runs, hits, and airs is just such a low stakes part of the game. It's there all the time.

It's constant. But, you know, like, it's not like I look at the box score and see runs, hits, and air and feel angry or like I'm wildly misled or anything like that. And it's not like we have a shortage of newspaper space because we've been committing so many column inches to this cumulatively over the years. It's just sort of this like kind of awkward antique from an earlier time that speaks to the larger continuity of the game, even though many changes have happened in the world that have affected how baseball exists and how we consume it. We have kept the runs, hits and errors. And so I described it as awkward and endearing. And there are other things I think

about baseball that sometimes I look at and I feel like they're less endearing. And when they become less endearing, sometimes the sport does act and actually make changes. But I don't want people to think that I came at this from a point of view that runs, hits and errors need to be complained about. I kind of admire the quaintness of it as a sort of uh nonsensical sequence that you would the point that i was mainly making is that if you were to choose the box now you would not choose runs hits and errors right however given that we have runs and hits and errors right now you probably also wouldn't choose to change it and so much of baseball exists in exists in that space where it's not how you would do it if you would start it now, but also you would not want to necessarily create the friction

of change in a game that has been so steady and tradition bound. So there, obviously that is not to say that there shouldn't be changes, but in so many cases, you just, the best solution is to just accept the quaint kind of oddity and runs hits and errors to me is the perfect example of something where you accept it you wouldn't want to change it but you also would never start it that way if you were to do it now so yeah i will answer your question yes it's good for knowing when there's a no hitter but however also we have no hitter alerts now it is i mean what other than on a major league baseball scoreboard where you would see the runs hits and errors of an out of town game on some scoreboards i don't know when

you would ever come to see the runs hits and errors mid-game like normally you see it in a completed box score or you see it on the scoreboard or you hear the radio announcer or the tv announcer say it uh you know the the you have the tv graphic going into and out of commercials so you would see it then but for the most part the sequence is not a one that you come across in mid-game situations for games that you are not otherwise following so i don't know how many people would actually be alerted to that. Other than, I guess you would see it, you see it on the MLB app scoreboard or the, you know, an ESPN app scoreboard where you're scanning down the scores and you'll see the scores of all the games as well as the

runs, hits and errors, right? That is, that is definitely what they show, but they also, those apps now also have no hitter alerts. Right. And so I guess the no, now that said, a no hitter alert is probably premature if it starts before like the fifth or sixth inning. I think, I think we've maybe have discussed this when is a no hitter alert appropriate, probably not before the sixth, maybe, maybe not before the seventh, but certainly not, you wouldn't want it in the second. And yet, you know, as a fan, you might like to know that, that there is a no hitter in the second without having to see the affirmative alert go out. And so for those games that are two, three, four innings in, and as the, and as the person who is,

I'm in a no hitter league with Sarah Langs and Mark Simon. And if you're just trying to scan the scoreboard to see whether your pitcher's no-hitter is still intact, then I guess that's useful for three people in the world. So anyway, I saw those responses and I agreed with them. Yeah. Various people have tried to redesign the box score in recent years and have a more advanced stat-friendly box score or a box score that's less constrained by newspaper space restrictions. And I don't know how much that's actually caught on. Some of the fancier, more elaborate attempts haven't really caught on, I don't think, smart as they might be.

So it seems like with the box score, we've just sort of added information. Like I think if you go to MLB.com's box scores, for instance, they're just a bunch of new lines at the bottom, just sort of as text Whether it's batters faced by each Pitcher or ground balls and Fly balls allowed by each pitcher Things like that that just kind of tack On to the existing format

But it still sort of looks like a box score And you still have errors in there And you still have hits in there it's not Win probability necessarily Things like that. But it's also easy to look up that stuff at Baseball Reference or FanGraph. So it's easy to find everything. And most fans who are watching a game or following a game in any way

have access to an app or some website or something. I don't know about most. Most probably aren't watching the game that way. Our perspective is probably a bit skewed on that. But I think in general, when something is so ingrained that it's been in newspapers since 1900 or so, at least in some places, as you found in your article, then the value of changing it, if it's a very low stakes thing, like what are you going to show to summarize a game, is kind of lower, I guess, than the value of just

tradition and providing something that people are used to and something that ties together today's games and early baseball games. Yeah, the box score is a perfect example of a slightly higher stakes, but similar situation where I think we, I ran a piece at Baseball Perspectives on a person named Jesse who designed what he called the modern box score and thought it through very well and designed it in many, many drafts. And it was very smart and very, very cool. And if you were to invent a box score, his would probably be better, but it's just impossible to imagine it catching on.

We know how to read the old box score, which is imperfect, but far better for familiarity because of its familiarity. And a lot of baseball things are like that. Okay. All right. Do you remember where you were five years ago? What you were doing? Five years to the day. Five years, generally speaking.

Five years to the day. Five years to the week, five years generally speaking. Five years to the day, five years to the week. Five years, no more than to the week. I do not offhand. I could possibly find out. I know a little bit. Probably it was right where I am right now, but I'm not sure. I know a little bit of where you were. Let's see, five years ago. Oh, well, this would be when I was just showing up in sonoma not quite not quite the tryout in sonoma no no no you were you were still in new york but you were let's see you did a conference call with theo and i uh to go over the roster uh-huh you were engaging with christian gay day and his uh his coach his college coach and you had had signed Christian Gay Day to play for the Stompers.

I'm looking, there was a company called Ultimize. You remember Ultimize? Yes. Ultimize was a company that created an app that baseball players could use to test and develop their reflexes for pitch identification, right? Yep. And so Ultimize, we reached out to them about using them for the Stompers, using that app for the Stompers. Five years ago today, Ultimize sent me the app. I downloaded it, tested it, found it to be exhausting for my eyes. I wrote definite eye workout. I was laboring by the final five minutes, probably an hour before my face unclenched good times though so then that's what i was doing let's see what else did they were later fined right by

the ftc for distorting the effectiveness of the app or something like that i didn't know that let's see uh five years ago this week we got an email from a guy named jose sermo who had been just been released from affiliated vault he had briefly appeared in double a but had been in high a he was 24 25 years old and the email got forwarded to us but we were getting so many of these that nobody nobody acted on it he basically wanted a job and we just ignored the email and then he ended up going to the much higher american association later that year and and playing very well so we should have signed him but we had too many too many players let's see theo had emailed us or had put a note in our roster folder asking us to please get uh when we signed players to please get their pant sizes because he was getting too many point of

contact questions or something let's. There was a coach who emailed about his player. We were intrigued. So I replied to the email and the coach's email address bounced back. And so we never signed that player. So that's what we were doing. I was thinking about, I've been thinking about our book a little bit lately. Some people maybe don't know that we wrote a book together. Yep. Five years ago, Ben Lindbergh and I ran the Sonoma Stompers from the front office. We and another, we and the official GM Theo Fightmaster were the brain trust in the front office and we had free reign to do theoretically whatever we wanted. And we ran a team for a summer and wrote a book. All right. So if you're new to this podcast, that's what this is about. We wrote a book together. It's called the only rules that

has to work. The only rules that has to work. And so a couple, two months ago, I was at a friend's house when you could still do that. And I hadn't seen her for a while. And she asked like, uh, I hadn't seen her since I wrote the book in fact. And she said, so is the book like, what, how do you feel about it now? Five years later. And I thought about it and I said, is the book, like, how do you feel about it now, five years later? And I thought about it and I said, I think it was really good. And so one of our listeners has been reading it and has been giving us lots of in real time responses to the different chapters. This is David and he just finished it.

And so we've been engaging in a little bit of discussion with him about it. And I said something like, he got to one of the chapters where we had regrets about how things went. And I said something like the longer, the further back it is, the less I regret, the fewer regrets I have. And I thought that since this book is coming up on, or the season is coming up on five years old,

I wanted to just talk about our regrets and how our regrets have evolved or changed. And I haven't talked to you that much about the book in probably three years. There was a period in 2016 when it came out when we had to talk about it a lot. And we were doing Reddit AMAs and radio hits and podcasts. And we talked about it on this show. And I think at that point, I knew exactly what you thought about everything that had happened the previous summer but four years sort of changes some of those reflections and baseball has changed

since then and each of our careers has changed since then and you have written a totally different book since then and it seems very plausible to me that your memories would be different now and also that even if the memories were the same, your feelings about them would have changed somewhat by now. And so I thought it could be a five-year anniversary, five-year reunion, five-year whatever about the Stomper's Summer, which is still what we refer to it in my house when something will come up. Like, when did you get your car? And I'll say, well, it was, I think it was right before Stomper's Summer. Yeah. I don't know if you call it Stomper's Summer. I think we do. I think we've said that.

Yeah, we reminisce about that time a lot. So I'm going to ask you, I don't have a specific range of questions. I'm basically just going to ask you like what regrets still stand out and then we'll go from there. But I do want to start maybe with one very specific question, which is timely because you mentioned it a minute and a half ago. The title of the book is The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. And we can talk about some of the background of that, but I'm curious on a scale of one to 10, how much do you regret that? Where one is no regrets at all. You love it. It couldn't be better. Zero regrets. I don't know how the number one is zero regrets, but that's how one to 10 scales work. A one't be better. Zero regrets. I don't know how the number one is zero regrets,

but that's how one to 10 scales work. A one would be zero regrets. A 10 would be all the regrets. Where do you feel on that? Probably about a three, I guess. I'm pretty satisfied with it. At the time, I was not, and it was not our idea, right? It was suggested by our editor, Paul Golub. Oh, that's another reason I've been thinking about it. Our editor, Paul Golub, just left the publishing house and he sent us a very thoughtful email letting us know that he remembers Stomper Summer fondly and hopes we work together again. And I've been feeling a bit nostalgic and wishing the very best for Paul, who was a great editor on that book. Yeah. And I still have been thinking about it too, because I have been getting Google alerts about the books now and then. I have Google

alerts set up for both of my books just because when they came out, I wanted to see if someone reviewed it or complained about it or said anything relevant about it. And I still have them, although I get alerts less often. Although I think when you write an article, it sometimes triggers that alert because you must have it in a bio or something. So I get some bogus alerts, but I've been getting some real ones for the book lately because a lot of people in search of some kind of content have been making lists of here are the baseball books you should read while there's no baseball or 12 good baseball books that you might want to check out during this pandemic. And I've seen our book on a lot

of them, which has been nice because I have wondered how it would age and I haven't revisited it myself. And maybe it'll age differently after 20 years than it does after five years. But it seems like there is some appreciation of the book. I've seen it listed alongside some really great baseball books, and it's nice to see that. So the title itself, I don't really have many regrets because I have yet to think of the better title, the one that I think it should be named. So that was my thing. With the MVP Machine, that wasn't quite my title or Travis's title. That was something that the publisher sort of imposed, and neither of us was entirely happy with it. And maybe it was kind of eye-catching and I'm okay with it. But in that case, I at least have alternative titles that I can think about and envision on the cover.

Whereas with The Only Rule, I just never really thought of it. And that's kind of why Paul suggested it, I think, is that he asked us what we wanted. Yeah, he was asking for our ideas. And I definitely didn't have one that i was fully satisfied with and i kept saying like i'll think about it and you know when do we need to have this done and finally it got to the point where we really needed a title and i at least didn't have one that i was fully behind and paul suggested the only rules it has to work and i remember doing a little mini study on book titles.

Yeah, you had a graph. Yeah, of course I had a graph. I always have a graph. But my fear was that it was too long. And I think this was partly like a lot of my misgivings about myself, probably implanted by my mother, who always is very quick to suggest why something might not work. And she thought, isn't that long? She said something sort of innocuous, like she didn't want to slam it, but clearly she thought it was long and unwieldy, especially when you consider

the subtitle. And she said something about how many great books or best-selling books have titles that long and I tried to look that up and it was not a lot obviously a lot of best-selling books and probably all books just have you know two or three word titles even one word titles and so the only rule is it has to work that is a mouthful and I was sort of scared that well it'll get cut off when people are listing books online you won't even be able to see the full title or no one will be able to remember that whole thing or say that whole thing. And so I looked up like the typical number of words in successful books over a certain period of time, and there were very few that had titles that long. And I thought we are shooting ourselves

in the feet here, and yet I couldn't come up with anything better so ultimately I was just like well all right I like aspects of it so it's fine this might end up being the whole episode I do feel like I could talk about this title for about 50 minutes I will say first off that I am surprised to hear that you said three I think that I will put my cards I would probably say like eight. And that's ironic. You regret it. Eight. Eight. Yeah. That's ironic because as we'll get into, I was the one who was really defending it when you were raising concerns throughout the summer. And it was a source of tension. It was one of the sources tension uh between us and you were on the uh we should

keep pushing for a different one so i can't remember what the book proposal went as but was it was it indie i think it was or was it was something we mentioned but i think it was the baseball sandbox right the baseball sandbox and indie were like the two i think indie is what we we wrote to our agent pitching it as and then the baseball sandbox was what we wrote to our agent pitching it as. And then the baseball sandbox was what we wrote pitching publishers as. And I didn't really, I don't know. Indie was, nobody liked Indie. I liked Indie, but nobody else liked it.

Nobody knows it as a baseball term. Right, that's the thing. When we were going back and forth on MVP machine titles, so many of the things we suggested we thought were very clever and maybe would signal baseball to someone who was very well versed in baseball. But so many times the response from the publisher was, that doesn't sound like a baseball book and no one will know it's a baseball book. And we thought, well, yeah, we don't want to be that obvious about it. We don't want to say this is a baseball book as our title. And yet that is basically what publishers want, which maybe is smart. They

probably know more about these things than I do. But the thing that frustrated me, I think, was that there's just no empirical aspect to this that I can tell. And I talked a little bit about this on the recent episode with the University of Nebraska Press editor, that there's no data on this. It doesn't seem like anyone's trying to moneyball book titles or covers. Maybe they have certain ideas, but it seems like it's just kind of a wisdom of a very small crowd within the publisher that evaluates these things. And granted, people who have been in this business and have experience and probably have some insights, but I always felt like, shouldn't we survey people or do a poll, do a focus group, something to get some data here?

That's always my inclination, which maybe I'm overthinking it. So Paul and Siddal, our agent, suggested the only rule is that it has to work. And Jesse, your wife, replied, I love that title. Oh, I forgot about that. She did not like their proposed subtitle, which we ended up using almost exactly that way. But she loved the title. Ben first replied to this, we really like the title. It works in a couple ways. It captures

the principle we're operating under, that we're not beholden to tradition, as well as the reality of the situation, that things have to work quickly in order for us to convince people to keep doing them. Our only concern is that it's sort of a mouthful, and there isn't really a great way to refer to it by a word or two. Maybe people would call it the only rule. And then I wrote a, although I can't find this email, but I wrote a long email about how much I liked it because I felt like it gave the book more of a sense of scope and that it had all sorts of like, you know, emotional subtext to it or something. I don't really exactly remember. And so then we ran a couple other things past the publisher but ultimately that was the one that everybody really liked the one book title that i really wanted that nobody else nobody

including you liked was baseball galapagos which uh which was based on the idea that this was this island out in the middle of the world kind of the baseball world that it wasn't connected really to the rest of baseball and because of that all these sort of funky species could exist in a strange ecosystem where they would evolve in unexpected ways and so and i also yeah so i really liked the idea of of it as being like separate from the rest of the world and evolution occurring. But no one liked that one. Everybody's like, I don't, what are you? Anyway, so.

Was it me who said, let's take the that out? I think it was you that took the, move one, because it would have cut one word from the count. Yeah. would have cut one word from the count yeah one of the reasons so the first time i realized though that i was nervous about this title was when i told theo that day what the title was and he just didn't reply at all this was just sort of like raised his eyebrows like okay and then when i started telling people what the title was and even today when i tell people what the title was when they find out i wrote a book and they say what's it called and i say the title nobody ever goes that's a good title everybody's like everybody seems to think there's something wrong with that title and i have always felt a

little bit embarrassed by it i also even i even today still have to pause for a minute to remember whether that is in it or not is it that the only rule is that it has to work or is it the only rule is it has to work my mom suggested way back then that there should be a colon instead of that it should be the only rule is i think she wanted no i think she wanted the only rule colon it has to work the only rule that has to work maybe i don't know i think that maybe there was something about this whole discussion that you were right about with the graph too many words i think we probably should have just called it the only rule yeah might have been too vague i don't know that is what people call it generally at least as i've seen when

people talk about it online and that's what I call it often as a shorthand. So yeah, I still don't feel like it's the right title quite. I feel like there's a better title out there, but I still haven't thought of what it should have been. And so I'm less bothered by it. By the end of the season, within a few weeks, you hated it. And you kept on saying like, we need to think of something better. And then I would say you are incapable of thinking of something better when you, therefore

we have what we have. Now, when you name something, I think I remember saying, I am open to a new title, but you are not offering new titles. You are merely making me feel bad about the one we have, which in retrospect, as a motivator was maybe that was the right thing to do. Maybe raising the flag before we had a solution is fine because it sort of calls attention to the problem. I thought don't call attention to the problem until you have a solution. And I think I wish we had a different title for the book.

Yeah, I'm okay with it, I guess, mostly because I'm okay with how the book was received. That's true. And so I think there's like a risk aversion to it with me where I think, well, could have been worse somehow if we had had a somehow inferior title, then maybe I wouldn't have been happy with how it sold and even more important how it's been regarded by people and so it's entirely possible that if we had a better title it would be a great movie or something or it would have been an even more successful book and more people would have read it and so that's possible but i guess i'm content with how it is perceived and how it was received and so that sort of reduces my level of dissatisfaction with all aspects of it,

because on the whole, I feel like it worked out okay. Could have worked out better, but it worked out okay, and I'm happy with it, and I wouldn't want to do anything, I guess, that in retrospect made it work out worse. So I was dissatisfied with the whole project. Baseball Galapagos was rejected in part because every reviewer, writer, and interviewer will have to spend time explaining the title. Time that could be better spent talking about you and Ben and the book itself. The publisher wanted to go with Playing by the Numbers. Very glad we did not do that. Did they?

I bet you a dollar that your publisher also suggested playing by the numbers for the mvp machine at some probably yeah i'm gonna check i'm gonna do a lot like that i'm gonna see if if it's in my email uh no it does not appear that they did all right at least if they did you did not tell me all right, so we've done the title. And so now I will ask you the question, big or small, detailed or 10,000 feet up? What regret still gnaws at you? I had a lot of regrets in the moment, obviously, and fewer regrets once we finished the book, I think, because I was pretty happy with how it turned out. But my main source of dissatisfaction at the time, at least, was that I felt like it was different

from the book we had envisioned and sold, that this was all going to be about running a baseball team in this very sabermetrically approved fashion, and we would be the nerds, and we would actually be running the baseball team, which was sort of the whole pitch initially was that we would have control over every aspect of everything. And we anticipated some resistance and pushback. And I think we had that in our proposal as, well, maybe this will be part of the story that the old school baseball people won't like what we're doing. And that'll be a source of conflict. But ultimately, I think we assumed and presented it as we'll have the final say on everything. We'll be able to do whatever we want to do. And when we actually got there, in fact, before we got there, it sort of morphed into, well, we'll try to do what we can, but we are kind of intimidated by these old school baseball people. And we hired a manager who at least initially paid some lip service to the idea that he was open to the things we wanted to do, but really had no willingness to do anything we wanted to do. And so much of the

book became about us trying to persuade people to do what we wanted or to very slowly and piece by piece implement the things that we wanted to do. And that was a big source of frustration for me in, say, the first half of the season because I felt like we were blowing it. We had barely done anything that we wanted to do. We had these grand plans of how we're going to run a baseball team. And basically, it was more or less a regular baseball team. At times, we was more or less a regular baseball team at times. We were gathering data that was not typically available at that level of baseball. This is, by the way, the lowest or maybe second lowest at the time rung of professional baseball, the Pacific Association in independent leagues. And we were gathering data. We had a pitch FX system set up.

We had a scouting network of a bunch of Effectively Wild listeners who helped us out with getting video and charting games and scouting. And that was nice, but we weren't really applying that information much at first, and we weren't really doing anything that unorthodox at first. And I felt like we were totally blowing it and even brought up the idea of maybe we should just ask for a redo. Let's just push this book back a year and we'll try again next year when we can actually do the things we want to do. And you were much more confident that it would work out, that it would be fine. I thought it was a disaster. Jesse would ask me these pointed questions from time to time of like, are you guys doing anything?

And I'd be like, well, we're going to the games. We're gathering all this data. And she was like, yeah, but aren't you supposed to be running the team? And that would make me- No, Jesse, we got to come up with the title first. Right now we have very important title discussions. Yeah. So that was, I thought, a disaster at first because we were sort of sidelined

and we didn't really take a very assertive role early on. Granted, I was no more brave than you were, really. I was just as anxious about the whole thing, but I guess I was maybe at least, according to what I said, I didn't really get to put it into practice, but I wanted to kind of come in and lay down the law. And yes, it would be uncomfortable, but I felt like we had to do something. We had to say, this is how we're going to run this team and, you know, set the lineup on opening day and go into the clubhouse and just write the lineup on the board, which probably would have come to blows or something. I don't know what actually would have happened if we had tried to do that, but I felt like we needed to set that precedent of we have this authority, we're backed up by the GM, we're backed up by the owner,

you knew this coming in, at least the manager knew this coming in, and so this is what we're doing because otherwise, how are we going to actually test these ideas? And in retrospect, obviously, I'm a lot less concerned about that because it did lead to conflict that was compelling for the book. So I don't know whether it's the conflict between us about that matter that's in the pages here and there, but more so the conflict between us and the manager, player manager, Phelan Lentini, who was a very old school baseball guy and ultimately led to maybe the most memorable moment in the book. The whole blow up in the dugout about the closer is the closer because he's the closer. And we were trying to get him to use a closer in a more sabermetrically approved way. And that's kind of like the catchphrase from the book.

That's what everyone cites and remembers that wouldn't have happened probably if we had been making all the decisions from day one and then you had a narrative arc to it too where we were sort of sidelined for the first half of the season and then we traded fey sorry for the spoilers for anyone who hasn't read it and we installed our our own manager, at least promoted our coach, Yoshi, who's now a manager in the twin system. And he was more open, more receptive to what we wanted to do, not entirely, but that was kind of nice for us in the second half of the season because there was an arc to it. There was a growth. We were actually able to do these things and put them into practice. And so there was the whole old school versus new school dynamic that might not have been there beyond spring training if we had just come in and said, this is what we're doing. So ultimately, I think it worked out and made it a more compelling book, but there is still part of me that wonders what would have happened if we had come in and actually run it as we initially intended to and done everything we wanted to do.

I just, I don't know what the upside would have been there. Like maybe we would have, I don't know, would we have learned anything more about baseball? Maybe, but it's one three-month season, so there was a limit to what we could learn anyway. And other than, I guess, really one of the most important lessons of the book was that sort of interpersonal dynamic and how do you persuade people to do these things. And it's entirely possible that if we had come in and not really attempted to persuade them, but just dictated to them, they would have just left or walked off the field or not given their all given their their whole effort and that would have been a disaster in a different way so

it could have worked out even better where maybe we run this team in this very numbers-based way and all the players come around and they say oh ben and sim are geniuses and we win the championship and i don't know maybe that looks self-aggrandizing or something, but it could have been a more perfect implementation of the idea we initially had. I just don't know whether it actually would have been a better book. That moment that you mentioned

where we could have just gone in and handed him the lineup on opening day. I feel like that moment keeps coming up in, it comes up up it came up during that summer over and over like two months later we'd still be like we should have just told him the lineup right and then it comes up in the book and then it comes up in it came up between you and i a month ago like you and i had a disagreement about something and it came up you're like i mean you you were like we should have gone in with the lineup and you've even like you you said something like and you know i think you've

come to agree with that and like it that that moment in the dugout that day when we said well we'll let them do we'll let faye do the lineup today and we'll you know i don't remember exactly what we said but that feels in a lot of ways like the pivot moment but i have come to really feel my regrets center much more on what comes before that i think starting once the season began from really from that lineup decision on, to let him have the lineup on opening day. From that point on, I don't have any real regrets about our involvement, about our pace of dictating things, about the personnel choices that we made. I guess there are a couple, like, you know, we should have cut a couple of players more quickly,

and there are some things that just from like a front office standpoint i think would have worked out better but for the most part i think we played the interpersonal relationships with the club pretty well and i don't think that we had much more to offer at that point than we did offer like i think we could have we have, we could have said, yeah, we're going to take the lineup from you. But I mean, we didn't know the lineup. We didn't know the players better than he did at that point. Our lineup wouldn't have been better.

And I think that that comes up a lot when I go back over the first month in particular of the season where we just didn't have much to offer. I have a ton, a ton of regrets about what we spent January, February, March, and April doing, which was not, we didn't do much. We were lost. We didn't have really any data. We didn't have much information on how the league worked. We had to learn all of it by scratch. We didn't know where to get players. And we just didn't know what the culture was like. We were,

it was so unfamiliar to us that, that we couldn't do much. And we both still had jobs, full-time jobs. So, uh, and we, neither of us was in Sonoma and just were writers. We, you know, we do our best work on deadline and this was months away. And I think we both wasted a lot of time and just hit walls early on so that when the players actually showed up in spring training, we thought, okay, now the project starts.

And what we should have done, what I see in retrospect we should have done is we should have had so much already done, so much of a head start so and and that is i i will note that what we did have a lot of what we we did have was thanks to was it was you right like you had already set up the pitch fx cameras and you had the spreadsheet so that we could sign players from chris long and there were things that we had done that we knew we had done and that had given us the foundation of a plan for the club and for the book.

But we never, for instance, like we had those bat trackers that you put on the bottom of the knob of the bat. And we got those in spring training. And then we never used them ever because we never figured out how to use them in what we should have really had is by February, March, April, we should have been testing all of the equipment so that when they showed up, we could have said, look at how rich we have just made you in resources. We have all these gadgets and we know how to use them and we know where their, where their use is. And here's how you can look at the app, and it'll only take you two seconds

because you're not going to have to learn it instead of us learning it. We could have had a real clear vision for how we were going to assess the players and set the lineup rather than just is it going to be you doing the lineup or is it going to be us doing the lineup? We could have overwhelmed them with our planning. And because we showed up and we're basically like hey we're here too and we're going to be learning and we're going to go slow because we don't know what's going on we could have come in at least with the facade of

having put tons of work into it already prepped and learned and been in a position of authority so i think that was really the mistake. And I mean, I think we sensed that a little bit at the beginning, like we were nervous going in, like, have we done enough? And I think that we hadn't done enough, partly because it was just impossible. We didn't know what, four months was not enough time to get our feet on the ground. What we should have done is have spent a year and a half preparing for the one summer. Right. Yeah, I had regrets even before we showed up because, again, the conceit was we're going to be picking all the players. And we did not pick all the players.

We signed a handful of players and some of those players turned out to be good and among the best stories of the book. Others did not. But that was a real concern of mine because again, we had sold this as we're signing everyone and we didn't do that. We signed some guys from the spreadsheet, but majority of the team in spring training was holdovers or just guys who had been invited because they had tried out or they had some connection to the team or Faye or one of the other coaches just knew them from having managed with them or played with them before. And that was a problem, too, because we didn't have those relationships with those players.

And so that was another way that we would kind of get overruled. It was like, well, I played with this guy before. And who's this guy you're trying to give me? I've never seen him. He's some numbers on a spreadsheet. And we didn't even have enough of those guys to provide alternatives at a lot of positions. And so that was a problem too. I don't know exactly what we could have or should have done about that. It was difficult as it turned out to sign players, but that was a problem. And when we got to spring training, which was just a one week thing, that was another time when we didn't really insist on things like the opening day starter.

The presumed ace to begin the season was a guy named Matt Walker, who was one of the older players on the team. I think he was 27 or so. And Faye wanted him to be the opening day starter basically because Matt Walker wanted to be the opening day starter. He asked for it. He demanded that he be given the ball. And Faye liked his attitude. And we weren't impressed by him. We didn't even really want him to make the team, as I recall. And he ended up having a 6.4 ERA.

So he was not one of the better pitchers on the team. But we didn't really insist because we didn't really have that much data like what were we going to say like we didn't really like the two times he pitched this week or whatever we didn't have stats we didn't have projections on him and so at that point we kind of had to defer because we didn't have our data yet and we didn't really have actionable information until we had been scouting and collecting all this stuff for several weeks, which I think sort of took us by surprise. A, it was just difficult on a technical level to do all the things and gather

all the data that we wanted. But also you need a sample size, you need a track record, you need something to base your statistical insights on. And we didn't really have that at first. But yes, we definitely could have in an ideal world done more preparation to lay the groundwork. We did want one aspect of that summer to be about improving the players and player development. And as it happened, I ended up writing a whole separate book about that. So I guess I got it out of my system. But I am sort of sorry that we didn't make more of an effort to do that. Like I had been tentatively talking to Kyle Bode at Driveline at some point during that summer about, hey, would you want to come work with our pitchers? And you could use this team as kind of a testing ground, and we could maybe make some pitchers better, because I guess I was thinking about that kind of being the next area of innovation in baseball, maybe on some level. And so there's really none of that in the book. It's

sort of a first phase Moneyball book. It's about signing underappreciated players who are good, and it's about improving in-game tactics, but it's not really about improving skill levels. And we did have swing centers and we had pitch effects and there were various issues with those things, but I would have liked it if we could have really made at least one player much better. We did give chances to players who were good and who wouldn't have gotten chances otherwise. And that was one of the most gratifying parts of the book. But it would have been nice if we could have helped someone invent a new pitch or something

or remodel their swing or throw a good pitch more often. And that would have really helped them. I think that would have anticipated the next wave of baseball thinking in a way that we mentioned maybe in the book, but didn't really do anything about. Yeah. I mean, we just, again, we needed a lot more time and we needed to be a lot more prepared when they showed up because once they showed up, it was way too late to start learning. What we needed to do in retrospect was instead of, did you even take book leave? No. Okay. So I took book leave for three months from baseball prospectus and you did not. Yep. You just kept working. Yeah. And I had started at Grantland's less than a year before. I think I started full-time at Grantland, maybe July or August of 2014. And so I didn't feel like as a young,

fairly inexperienced guy at that point, who'd been in that job for less than a year that I could ask to take a significant amount of time off. So yeah. What we really needed to do was take book leave from January through September. We needed to spend five months full-time, both of us living in Sonoma, which I never moved to Sonoma either. I'd commuted an hour and 15 minutes each way every day. We needed to spend five months full time working on all this stuff before they ever showed up because the, you know, they were, when you're not there physically and you're just checking in into the office every couple of weeks, a lot is happening in those couple

weeks that is hard to undo. And you're not like you might have the final decision making authority by the permission of the GM and the owner who approved this and knows the deal. But a decisions are a week old before you have a chance to to veto them so like i remember fay had gone and watched uh john rand pitch in san francisco and a couple days later i went up there and checked in on things and went over some roster stuff and they mentioned that he'd seen john rand and i go oh well i'll take a look and, no, dude, it's already done. Like I saw him, he's legit. I signed him.

And like, there's not much you can do at that point realistically. And it's not like they did anything wrong. We weren't there for those months. We were working on it. We were doing spreadsheets. We were responding to emails of hundreds of people that we now in retrospect could have just ignored all of those emails. We were doing spreadsheets. We were responding to emails of hundreds of people that we now in retrospect could have

just ignored all of those emails. We were doing PitchFX. We were doing Ultimize. We were doing stuff. But since we weren't in the office, we were not building up A, the force of decision-making authority that we technically had, but hadn't convinced anybody of. And B, hadn't convinced ourselves of it. And we needed to have been doing that.

Like we needed those four or five months. We needed to treat the Stompers as a full-time job for four or five months before we could have even started, I think, to think about doing what we wanted to do. So that's probably realistically what we needed and we didn't do it. Yeah. I had sort of a sick feeling in my stomach when we hired Faye because I didn't know him at all.

Yeah. And I was not out there at the time. And you had met him once and talked to him over coffee or a meal or something. Yeah. And we're somewhat impressed with him, but it was hard to tell. And that was a big fear for me because it's like, this is make or break. We're hiring the manager. You know, this is the guy who has to be totally on board.

I have no regrets about that, by the way. I guess I don't either. But at the time, I was like, well, this hasn't even started. And already it's running off the rails because the person we're hiring to run this team with us or to kind of be the one who in theory is implementing our ideas i don't even know who he is and there's nothing in his background to suggest that he will be open to anything we want to do which was a problem but again there was nothing that we could do i mean i was out here and i went out there once for the tryout and i guess i could have or should have been out

there more but it was tough and then the problem was that we could sign some players based on stats from a spreadsheet using their college performance but you can't do that with a manager there's no spreadsheet with manager stats that will tell you who the most saprometrically advanced manager is and so that was the problem. We had no idea who to get as our manager. It's kind of like the title of the book thing. I knew we needed a better manager, or I thought at the time that we did, but I had no ideas. And since then, I've come to know a couple of college coaches who are very open-minded about things, or even high school coaches. And I thought, what if we had had that person and just had them come out for the summer,

and they could have been our manager, and they would have been totally on board with everything we wanted to do. And again, it would have been much closer to the experiment we had envisioned. But you take Faye out of that book, and you substitute in a totally willing partner. Is the book even interesting if we have no resistance or drama so yeah i don't totally regret it either but in retrospect it is just crazy that we actually we're just like well if we sold this whole book of we're gonna do everything and uh well we're just gonna accept this old school manager who won't want to do everything and uh well we're just gonna accept this old school manager who won't want to do anything we want to do because we have no other ideas yeah i yeah it is hard to write a

chapter about the sacrifice bunt that you don't call you know we we needed the drama and and so like i always was kind of happy when things would go worse than we planned. And so I don't know. I have a hard time envisioning the book that we pitched. And so I'm glad that we ended up writing a book that we wrote. But so here's the thing about Faye, besides the drama, I mean, removing the dramatic aspect of it, I have no regrets partly because, largely because he was such a beautiful ball player

to watch play for that summer. Like we got, part of the reason that we hired him is because he could be a beautiful ball player to watch play for that summer. Like we got part of the reason that we hired him is because he could be a player manager and we knew he would be a really good player. And I know that he didn't dominate the league. Like he wasn't Matt Chavez or anything like that, but he was a very good player and he was an absolutely gorgeous player to watch. I mean, I can envision him chasing down fly balls. I can envision his arm. I can envision him on first base in the batter's box. He was a great player for us. And in particular before he slumped at the very end. And I'm glad he was on the team for that reason. And for a lot of reasons, but what we miss, I think that the regret I have is not that we hired him.

It's that we again, seeded so much power way before the season began. So we hired a manager who lived in Sonoma when we were not in Sonoma. That was a bad idea because he's in the office. He's there making decisions. Again, he's scouting John Rand while we're out of the picture. And so that gave him the ability to seed the roster i've just used seed cede but now i just am using seed s-e-e-d to seed the roster with a bunch of loyalists yeah and that was a terrible idea in retrospect we should have made we shouldn't we should have

made we shouldn't we should have starved him of allies this sounds psychotic i know but we should have starved him of allies on the roster it became impossible to overrule because so many of the players were knew him really well were culturally supportive of his way of running a baseball game and we just were not going to have the, you know, the consent of the governed if we had too many players that were loyal to him. And so like, it didn't whether we believed that he was bringing in better players than we had or not, probably for the purposes of having decision making capabilities, we should have just kept him from signing anybody. And again, if we'd been, if we'd actually been in the office

when he was in the office, might've looked like we actually were his bosses instead of two guys literally on the internet because that's the only place he ever saw us was G-chatting. Yeah. Yeah, that was a big problem. But again, we didn't have a better idea.

I mean, we could have just had some no name. We could have had someone with no track record at all. And maybe that would have been better, at least in our perspective. But what do we do? Yeah, the one truly great thing that came out of this process out of this summer from the Stompers. Well, I guess a few truly great things happened. But one of them is that yoshi did end up making it to affiliated ball and is managing an affiliated ball and we said at the beginning

we told a lot of the players that that what we really hoped for our dream out of this was not that we would win a title or anything like that but that this process would help at least one of them fulfill their dream of making it to affiliated ball. And Yoshi dreamed more than any of them. Yoshi had the most defined dream and worked harder at that dream than probably any of them. And because we hired the manager, we did, it led to Yoshi getting to manage the second half and successfully. And I, his role in this book, this story that was publicized beyond Sonoma was not irrelevant to his getting noticed, I don't believe. And his exposure to you and I

and to PitchFX and to this way of thinking about managing, I think was also not irrelevant to him getting hired. And so from that sense, it doesn't really matter how disastrous the first half was. Our ultimate goal was to help someone advance. And that did. Yep. And not just him, but also a couple of guys who got signed. Santos Saldivar was one and Dylan Stoops. And that was great.

And of course, the Sean Conroy story and him, unbeknownst to us, being the player who would turn out to be the first openly gay player in professional baseball. That was obviously an element to the story that had far greater significance and that we had no hand in other than accidentally. But it really worked out incredibly well just from a societal standpoint. I mean, maybe that's making too much of it, but certainly from a storytelling perspective, it was Sean's story. But the fact that we got to tell that really through no actions of our own other than signing him because he had good college stats was amazing that that happened. So that was great. And of course, Sean was also at the center of the whole closer debate too. So yeah, I don't really regret Faye either, even though I was so eager to get

rid of him somehow, any way that would be possible, whether it was Theo managing or you managing or Yoshi managing. I just, because at a certain point, you know, yes, there was conflict and drama and that's good for the story. But if he had been the manager the entire season, I think that would have really sabotaged the book, right? I mean, if we hadn't had the trade and getting rid of him and then the new Don underoshi and actually getting to do some things differently and granted the team had far worse results when we had more direct control whether there was any correlation there i don't know but if we hadn't had that like that night and day difference like here's how it was in the old school here's how it is or could be in the new

school i just don't know that we would have really had a satisfying story because it would have just been all us being sidelined, which would have been pretty frustrating. And there are occasionally readers who will say that it's frustrating for them to read us stumble and not assert ourselves and not do things and that they wish we would have done more. But I think on the whole, it's probably pretty relatable that we were bad at this. And that became a big part of the story was about how this is all about these interpersonal relations.

And we thought it was going to be very antiseptic and scientific. And we'll just come in and tell them to do this and that. But ultimately, we weren't able to do that. We had to get everyone on our side. And we weren't very good at that. And we hadn't really had the training to do that. We had to get everyone on our side and we weren't very good at that. And we hadn't really had the training to do that. So the whole clubhouse dynamic became a big part of the book and I think an essential part of the book, but it's still good that we were able to do four man outfields and five men in fields and some weird stuff with pitcher usage and everything.

And I think what we did, not that we were the first ever to do it as we maybe thought we were at the time, but I think a lot of that has been borne out by what major league teams have done since. And, you know, it's pretty common to see four-man outfields now and even some other unorthodox layouts and positioning schemes. So probably reading it now, what we were able to do seems pretty tame because you're seeing it in Major League Baseball games all the time now. But when we did it, it felt a little pioneering or boundary pushing, at least, even though it wasn't necessarily unprecedented. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people who are frustrated that we didn't do more, it became a book about frustration. And so I think that when people read that, I feel great. I mean, I ultimately, it was an incredibly frustrating summer. And I would sort of rather end up what whether by design or not, I would end up rather writing a book about very strong human emotions as we ended up having to do rather than sort of a book about well-controlled experiments that go off without a hitch, which would have been fine too, but that just didn't happen. Yeah, I think it ended up sort of future-proofing the book.

Maybe it's too soon to say, but I hope that will be the case. The way that when you go back and read Moneyball, it's still a good book because it's the story of Billy Bede and the A's and certain players on that team. And yes, it's about on base percentage and what you should do in the draft. And some of that stuff seems kind of archaic now, but it's a story, not just, hey, pay attention to this stat instead of that stat. And so if the only rule had been nothing but we think you should use relievers this way or position fielders that way, then once that stuff became old hat or was disproven, then there wouldn't be much in the book really for future readers. Whereas this way, that stuff is sort of the background to the human interactions, which will hopefully stand the test of time.

Can I do just rapid fire a couple of things that we can go over? Yep. All right. We didn't read the audio book. over yep all right we didn't read the audiobook do you regret that we didn't read the audiobook uh i wish that the audiobook had been read by us but i don't regret not reading it i i regret that another two people's voices are reading it yeah given that we are uh the hosts of a podcast our voices are reading it. Yeah. Given that we are the hosts of a podcast, our voices are part of our career.

And so it seems like we owe it to people who both listen to the podcast and read the book to have done it. I also don't think that that many people probably got the audio book and of the people who did probably, I mean of the podcast listeners who read the book, I bet most of them read the book and didn't listen to it. I ultimately just could not imagine doing dialogue that other, that the people that are, that our team said, I couldn't imagine doing that dialogue because

either it would be, I just was so worried I would imitate them. And it felt so disrespectful to imitate them. And I didn't know how I would be able to read any of the dialogue without at least subtly imitating them. It's so different when you hear, you know, the reader of the Harry Potter books doing all the voices. Those are fictional characters. There's no, like, you have no no you can't condescend to a fictional character they're fictional but it really felt like there was no way that we were going to respectfully do faye's part in a conversation where we are yelling at faye and he is yelling at us how do i not put my thumb yeah on the scale in that recitation. Yeah. Yeah.

I was in favor of reading it at the time because I just felt like, well, who knows how many books we'll ever read. And this is a cool thing. And I've never been asked to read an audio book before. And it's our story and it's a first person narration. So it should be us. And I kind of wish it were. I kind of wish it were, but also when I had the opportunity to do it or when Travis and I did for the MVP machine, we passed basically because it's a real hassle to read an audiobook. It's very unpleasant. I mean, it's sitting in a room reading, so it's not hard labor, but I read one chapter. I read the chapter that I wrote for Mike Peska's book, the audiobook version of Upon Further Review, I did.

And it's tough. You have to pronounce everything right. You have to not stumble over any words. So you have to do a bunch of retakes and you have to read at a certain pace. And to read an entire book would have been days and days of recording. And you have to record like during business hours so you have to do it when you might otherwise be working on your regular work and you don't really get paid much so financially speaking it's not really worth it so it's ultimately unless you are planning to have a huge blockbuster and you are a world famous author who everyone knows what they sound like already, then the upside isn't really there. But I do wish, I guess, that there were a version of it that existed that we had read. It's just such a pain to do that I don't really regret it in that sense.

All right. Do you regret that we did not do... So we were invited to do a sequel in the Atlantic League, which is the highest independent league. Yeah. What, a year later or two years later. And we did not do that. I don't remember taking it that seriously at the request because it just felt like way too much work and because I don't live there. Yeah. And I couldn't envision leaving California for a summer with a daughter and all that. But, you know, we could have done it and we did fantasize about it a little bit.

Do you have any regrets that we did not do a sequel? Not really, because I just felt like I've already done this, you know, and doing it a second time, it would be better. We would be better at it. And so that would be interesting to have this first attempt under our belts and have this be the actual attempt when we know what we're doing and we can correct the mistakes of our first time around. But ultimately, I felt like, well, this is a reboot. The reboot usually isn't as good as the original and that even if we were competent and it was a higher level league and all of that, would it actually be significantly different enough and new enough to really give me the passion that I had for the first project the first time around?

So I don't really regret that. And we've actually been approached by that same team twice in different years to talk about doing that. And for all I know, the option is still out there. For all I know, the option is still out there, but it just felt like I should be doing something different if I'm going to invest a whole summer or a whole year in a project and a book that it should be something that I haven't done before. However, I do sort of regret something that we tentatively talked about. I don't really remember exactly what the context was, but there was an idea that maybe the stompers this would just be a franchise you know there would be like the only rule two and it would be 2016 summer and the only rule three and it would be the 2017 summer and it would be different writers every time taking it over and putting their own spin on it and that would have been cool i think if we had figured out a way to

do that where maybe people would have had totally different styles and they would have gotten better over time and you would have had some summers that were complete disasters and some that were successes. And it would have been like a reality show sort of with seasons, actual seasons. cool thing if we had started like the the sonoma stompers baseball experiment and every summer some new internet person or who knows what would get their shot to run this team and and write about it i think that would have been pretty cool yeah no i i think that would have been cool especially because the vision you i think i don't know it goes one of two ways either every different type of personality trait gets there and gets sucked into the same basic spiral. And you find out that the obstacles we faced due to every, there's just a black hole on it. And it does to everybody who attempts it,

it does the same thing. Or you realize that the different personalities go in wildly, wildly different ways. And early reader of the book said this one of his comments about reading it he said like i said this morning the only thing that has felt slow is that maybe there are one too many references to we're scared and unqualified you know what strikes me about that if someone like and i'm going to leave out the name but he names another writer if someone like blank had written the book there would be a whole chapter about how like king arthur drawing the sword from the stone he was born to do this and ever since i got that feedback i have wanted to see blank write this book like i would love to see blank run the team and write the book just to see what

happens if they like i said if they get sucked into the exact same quagmires that we do or if it goes in a wholly 100 different direction yeah but that didn't happen unfortunately do you regret that the song we used for the every day everybody uses the same walk-up music day was r kelly yeah i mean that that hasn't aged well, I guess. So yes, I mean, we like the song. Everyone liked the song. So we can't pretend that we didn't enjoy the song at the time. But as someone who was going to represent this experiment, we certainly could have chosen a far better spokesman. So yes. Yes. I do too. I regret it all the time. It is not, do you have a song in mind? Cause you need, there are very few songs that I think would,

would have the right effect, uh, that are sort of universally or, or as you know, close to universally get people to react positively when they hear it. And so I sort of, uh, have a very, very limited number of songs I think would work, although maybe any song would work. And maybe you could have a terrible song and it would work just as well. Or maybe you could have a novelty song and it would work just as well. Maybe anything works if you have the repetition. The only, I think if I had done it over again, I would probably go with Pony, Ginuwine's

Pony. I think that's probably the closest thing to a perfect universally beloved song from the 90s Which I guess is sort of a good place to go with that But do you have one in mind? No, I haven't thought about it The reason Ignition Remix worked was that yes, everyone knows it Everyone likes it or liked it You can tell what it is in the first second of the song

So it works as a a bit that you know when you're hearing this song repeated over and over again you know instantly oh what is this this is weird why are they playing the same walk-up song for every batter and it's also a song that you can listen to over and over again as i have done at times and it doesn't really get old. And so it was weird, but it didn't totally drive you crazy or get under your skin. So it worked well. I haven't actually thought of what might have worked, but I didn't have a great suggestion at the time either, I don't think. Okay, last one.

One of the main characters from like the first quarter of the book is Will Price, this guy from, I think, from Georgia who had come out. I don't remember. He was younger than everybody else on the team, and he had come recommended by somebody, an affiliated ball, but he had some personal baggage and so was looking to get a start back in the game. All right, and so he comes to spring training. He's very brash, does some some good baseball clashes very badly with almost everybody on the team including mostly fey he and fey hate each other and it becomes impossible to

imagine no matter how good will does in spring training that he's going to make the team given the mistakes he's making and how ungenerous everybody is toward him on account of you know his personality clashes all right so then he's gone no more will and then you know obviously a big character the first half of the book is fey and then he's gone and in the second half of the book all of our good players leave we're desperate for players we're signing players from everywhere and they're all failing badly and it just has since then occurred to me we should have brought back will we should have fired fey but then brought back will should we have brought back will did we talk about that at the time did it come up i don't think so i don't think we ever met said his name again but we could have could

have sworn there was an email or something at some point. But yeah, this hadn't really occurred to me, or at least not since then. But I guess we were so desperate at that point. It's hard to imagine that he would have come in after a few months of not playing and actually been good right off the bat when we needed him. So I don't know that it actually would have helped the team, but I guess narratively speaking, it might have been good. And we did want him on the team, right? I mean, we weren't totally behind it because again, we couldn't evaluate anything based on the tiny sample that we had, but it seemed to us that he was pretty good. He looked pretty good to us, better than some players who ended up on the opening day roster. And we kind of deferred again because of lack of information and because he was sort of a jerk. And that would have been bad for clubhouse morale, which, you know, if we thought he was amazing, we probably would have been fine with that. But ultimately, we had some clubhouse issues as it was, and maybe it was better that Will wasn't there. But yeah, I guess that would have been a narratively satisfying twist to have this early antagonist come back in the end. All right, that's all I got for this book. We'll do it again in five years. Okay. I will say that one of the things I think about most often about that summer is not the book or the baseball, but just the house that I had and that Jesse had. We think about and reminisce about that town and that house very often because that was an experience I've never had, like living having a backyard and a little bit of a front

yard and being able to walk to and from the ballpark and have a little house of my own with a kitchen and everything it was yeah and a hammock in the backyard that was great that was nice and jesse was good enough to come out and work remotely for that whole summer and drive me all over the place i'm glad you mentioned that because, all right, so I'm going to ask you one last regret. You planned to learn to drive and get your license, and you never did. And to me, that was always your great failing of the summer

because it really limited what you could do. Like I had to do all the scouting because you couldn't drive. You had to get Jesse to drive you an hour and a half across the Bay Area if you wanted to go to a game. And I really thought like, I don't know what I thought. I remember feeling bitter about it, though, that it was that like this one way where you weren't, you know, like pulling your weight. I don't have I don't remember. I remember maybe having that thought like twice. But do you have any regrets that you didn't learn to drive? Sort of, I guess, in that it's a useful life skill that most adults

have. But in the years since then, I haven't really had that many opportunities to use it, which is why I've never learned. I've lived in Manhattan my whole life. I don't own a car, and a car would be a hassle to have. So there are occasional trips when it would be nice and whoever I'm with has to do all the driving and I feel kind of guilty about that. But ultimately, the reason I haven't learned is that I just don't have much need to drive with my current lifestyle. So it's kind of like we were saying earlier about how much more preparation we should have done before we went out to Sonoma. I took the written driver's test and I got my learner's permit. I did drive a couple times around town,

but I hadn't had any way to practice. I guess I could have taken driver's ed or something, but I didn't. And so even if I had made more of an effort while I was out there, which again, there was hardly any time to do anything, I still wouldn't have felt comfortable just jumping on the highway and going to a game. So really, I would have had to learn before I got there. And who knows, maybe someday I will. There may be a time when I don't live in a city and I move to the suburbs or something when suddenly it becomes a necessity and then I'll regret not having learned at the time. And I kind of regret in the sense that I had to make Jessie drive me all over the place and she was very accommodating, but she certainly didn't want to drive to Pittsburgh, California to watch the Diamonds play the Stompers yet again.

And yet we made many of those trips. So I felt kind of bad about that. But who knows? Maybe it brought us closer together, those long car rides. And she did like certain aspects of the Sonoma lifestyle. And she still reminisces about that, you know, because she was on West Coast time working for an East Coast company. So she would get up at six to work and then she'd be done with the day at two in the afternoon or something. And yes, she might have to drive me to a baseball game later in the day.

But she had like time to have a siesta or something outdoors and sit on the porch and in the hammock, which is just something that we don't have and think about a lot now as we are confined indoors almost 24 hours a day. All right. Okay. All right. Good book, I think. It is a good book. I'm proud of it. Okay. All right. That will do it for today. By the way, there is a book website that is still up. It's theonlyruleisithast to work.com and even as i was just typing that url i was thinking boy there are a lot of words in this url but we are very proud of that website because we put a lot of supplementary materials on it it has videos and spreadsheets and interviews and reviews and everything is collected on there and it's still

there hopefully in perpetuity so i will link to that. We also did three episodes of Effectively Wild about the book or book characters back in 2016, one with Stomper's GM Theo Fightmaster, another with Santos Saldivar when he was signed by the Brewers, and another with Santos and Dylan Stoops to review their first minor league seasons. Those were episodes 888, 951, and 954. I will link to them on the show page. I will also link to where you can buy the book if you haven't yet. You can get it in paperback with a new afterword. You can also get my second book, The MVP Machine,

How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Baseball Teams, something that would have been helpful to us in 2015. That is now out in paperback with a new afterword too. You can also support Effectively Wild, which has kept on chugging since that stomper-stomper when we continued to record, albeit on a less frequent schedule, by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild, signing up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners have already signed up. Thanks to all of you. on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.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. I thought you'd ever leave me But things just happen that way After all this time After five years

After five years After five years Ah, I forgot the vest again. Hang on. All right, three, two, one.