Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1537: Our Hall of Fame Fives

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about fear of criticism, Eddie Murphy vs. Eddie Murray, and dreams, then take turns building the best imaginary Hall of Fame exhibits they can by picking five baseball items from their lifetimes for Cooperstown preservation, drafting one artifact apiece from each of five categories. Audio intro: Death Cab […]

I'm definitely shaking, the silence isn't breaking, backwashed and stranded memories of something I thought could be. Good morning and welcome to episode 1537 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast of Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN along with Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello! Hello! Hi!

We're all here today because we're all going to be picking things. But first, Meg's got a bone to pick. She didn't say it was a bone to pick. It's not a bone. I'm assuming it. I have been on edge all day. Oh no. Anytime I write an article, I'm expecting, for like two or three hours, I'm just holding my breath after it goes public afraid that i have made some like uh ghastly mistake and so i just have been walking around with nerves all day so anytime someone says hey i wanted to mention something that you did then i immediately think well this is this is career ending must be bad yeah exactly so meg told us right before this started that she wanted to address something.

She wanted to clear the air. She wanted to resolve something from a previous episode. And I am assuming... Settle some scores. I'm assuming that this is it, folks. This is the Fleetwood Mac episode. We are maybe never going to make it out of here alive. Well, I'm really glad I didn't say anything before now to make you stress. No, I was going to admit

to a bit of personal failure and goofiness. It has nothing to do with you. I'm going to take issue with myself. So I was catching on on episodes that the two of you had recorded because I was a little bit behind yeah doing stuff and being busy and you know how sometimes when you're listening to something while you're needing a soundtrack for an activity in this case it for me was cleaning the kitchen and I was like listening to episode 1534, which had a really just excellent stat blast cover. And I was listening to the stat blast, but I was only half listening because I was busy, you know, futzing in the kitchen. Yeah. And you did a good stat blast on championship leverage index and the highest championship leverage indexed plays by that measure.

And you talked quite a bit about Eddie Murray. And in my head, I heard you say Eddie Murphy. And it took until the end of that segment for me to not realize how silly this question was, which was, gosh, why don't we talk more about Eddie Murphy having a major league career? why don't we talk more about Eddie Murphy having a major league career? And I realized my error before I said anything to anybody or fired off a tweet. That would have been the worst. That would have been maximally embarrassing.

But I probably sat with that question in my brain sort of unconsidered for a good 10 minutes. And then I was like, wait a minute, I think I heard that wrong. Eddie Murphy, did we mention, I feel like we might've mentioned Eddie Murphy in the Michael Jordan baseball episode as, or maybe I just thought it as an example of a person who was like at the very, very, very top of a field

and then midway through went to a field where it was fairly embarrassing for him to be in it and in this case eddie murphy's uh foray into pop music which was yeah roundly i think it has survived largely remembered as as a failure but i guess we probably didn't mention that in the michael jordan episode eddie murphy the ball player led the majors in cot stealing in 1914 with 32, while also leading the majors with 12 hit-by-pitches. Huh. So he tried to branch out into a different area of the game, and he failed miserably, too.

He was good at getting hit by stuff, but not so good at stealing. I do also love that my brain's reaction to mishearing was not to assume that there was another ball player named Eddie Murphy, but that Eddie Murphy, the comedian, had had a major league career. I think it was because I finally watched his big screen debut, 48 Hours, which I just missed. I just missed it. And I was sitting there thinking as I was watching 48 Hours, wow, why isn't this on cable more? And then you hear some of the language and you're like, oh, that's why. So it might've been that sticking up there in my brain. But yeah, it was just a really great moment. And then I realized I was a big doof.

That was all I had. That was it. All right. Okay. I dreamed last night. I had a very long dream last night. And then I woke up and then I went back to sleep and I dreamed that I told the story of the very long dream in detail in banter as banter and now I'm telling the story of the

banter but I'm making it progressively shorter done done I very rarely remember my dreams and so I feel very left out when people share their dreams except they're probably grateful that I don't share my dreams because no one cares about anyone else's dreams. So I'm doing you all a service by forgetting all of my dreams. My wife, Ben, my wife cares about all dreams. So if you ever have one, she would actually like to hear it. If I ever do remember one, it'll probably be really momentous and it'll definitely signify something. So I will let her know.

Ben, what do you think, I guess both of you, what do you think about dream episodes of like, of television? Like, you know, like there's the Sopranos dream episode and there was the Mad Men dream episode and there was an X-Files drug hallucination episode. And, you know, a lot of times books will have dream sequences, parts of where they're recounting dreams. What's your, what's your take? Hate it.

Yeah, I do too. Hate a drug hallucination episode yeah my experience with drug hallucinations is fairly limited but i imagine that it's much more fun to be the one experiencing that unless it's terrible sometimes it's terrible perhaps but i imagine it's much more fun to experience than to watch someone else experience in fictionalized form so i always want that to be over as soon as possible. Yeah, I tend to be a fairly lucid dreamer, and I remember a great many of my dreams. And even saying that, I find that dreams as portrayed on TV are never strange enough.

They're always too coherent. And then when you make them incoherent to the point of being actually dreamlike, they're often very bad television. So I think it's just a really tricky thing to get right, and very rarely does it happen. It's better for things to just be sort of dreamlike in an unintentional way, or at least not structured or presented as a dream. Like, I'd prefer just like, you know, I like something more Twin Peaks-y, where you're like, this is sort of dreamlike, but not in a, hey, here's a dream. Although there are dream sequences in that. But anyway, you know what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, it's weird because, I mean, obviously, obviously all fiction is fiction. It's created. It's made up. And there's, you know, if you're, you know, watching a TV show and it says that Tony Soprano, you know, whacked a rival. I mean, you know that he didn't because he's not real and neither is the rival. But a dream is not even real within the thing. And so you're not even supposed to put aside, you're not even supposed to suspend your disbelief because it's not even real in the fiction. So it's just too subtextual subtextual i mean i feel like it's like what i think dream sequences tend

to be is the uh the writer wants to really bring the subtext to the surface because the writer does not think that we are getting it but can't just say okay folks here's the subtext i'm gonna put it in prose for you so they're trying to find a more artistic and kind of oblique way of bringing the subtext right in front of you. And it just feels like a lecture. Yeah. You're sympathetic because it's like how many more ways are there to talk about men and their fathers? But it's ultimately not the best storytelling device in my opinion. The best storytelling device, in my opinion, is a three-person podcast draft.

Yeah, let's do it. It's been a while since we've had the whole crew together here. I know, this is nice. We're going to, today, it's not exactly a draft, it's uncompetitive, but we're going to be, each of us, picking five items from our lifetime that we would preserve in the Baseball Hall of Fame, if we could only preserve five items. So like the first five things that we would pick to preserve in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Is that accurate? Yes. Okay. We have loosely decided on some categories. Those categories are what? One is a paper artifact. One is an equipment artifact. The other is up here where I'm scrolling.

Where are we? Clothing. Clothing. A clothing artifact. And what's the other one? A wild card. A wild card. Not related to the wild card.

Could be anything. Exactly. Can be anything. And then a Mike Trout artifact or a Mike Trout whatever. So that's what we're going to do. All right? Yeah. Could be competitive.

Who's to say it won't be competitive? What is the rule? I want to pick the best ones. If you say something that I also have, is there a rule? I can just say I had that as well and we'll talk about it together or are we going to say you got to come up with one? Yeah, I think that's fine. But maybe we can offer some alternatives that we considered yeah okay all right sounds fantastic i have to figure out

which of mine actually can fit in these categories so meg why don't you start okay i'm gonna take can i just pick a category we'll just i just get to pick whichever one. So I'm taking equipment as the first category. And with that, I am taking a pitch effects unit. That's a good one. I interpreted equipment broadly. And I picked that because of the effect that pitch effects had not only in the way that we understand, that teams understand and sort of think about pitching and pitch design, and, you know, how they're going to sort of impart that into player development, but also the way that we as the baseball viewing public and as baseball writers, think about and analyze baseball,

because we suddenly knew quite a bit more about individual pitches. And, you know, by virtue of some data feeds being sort of accidentally revealed to all of us, we're able to incorporate that into our analysis. And so I think that I and many others, including I think both of you, tend to think of pitching and pitching data as pre and post PitchFX. And so I took PitchFX, the PitchFX unit. It's a unit, right? It's sort of like TrackMan. There's a box. So that's a unit right it's sort of like track man there's a there's a box so that's a piece of equipment so what i my recollection is that it was a hard drive connected to yeah the cameras around the field are you going to set it up in the room so that you have a couple of them are up high yeah like like they would be on light posts one is out in center field and all that yeah sure and do you have a particular one in mind

i do not i interpreted it broadly as sort of the typical or maybe we want the first one it's the hall of fame so the first the very first one installed in a major league ballpark i don't know which one that was but the first one that feels museum-y may have been out in San Francisco possibly because Sport Vision was out there and they used to have PitchFX conferences out there could be that's a good one I wasn't going to take it

but I'm sort of surprised that I wasn't going to take it because I believe that on episode 500 the first time we did our things we like about baseball draft with Jeff and Grant, I think my first pick was PitchFX in that draft because it really has given us a lot of knowledge and content, definitely created a lot of content for all of us and has improved our understanding of baseball and changed the game in a lot of ways.

So if you're going for items that are emblematic of the era or artifacts that had some really significant effect and changed the game, you can't go wrong with that. I mean, I guess you could say that like Quest Tech is a precursor or there are some even more primitive versions that came before PitchFX, but in terms of being installed everywhere and everyone having access to it out on the internet, PitchFX is probably the big one. I was just going to say, you know, I feel a sense of relief when I look at a pitcher's player page at Fangraphs and they have pitched entirely within the PitchFX era. I feel like I know more stuff about them. I love so much that Clayton Kershaw's entire career has taken place in front of some sort of pitch tracking instrument. And obviously, they change over time. And now we use TrackMan and Hawkeye and a feeling of greater certainty, perhaps a false sense of greater certainty, but a feeling of greater certainty that we know more.

We just know more stuff more precisely about guys whose entirety of their careers took place over the span of the PitchFX era. So, yeah. It is really annoying when you have pitchers who, like Greg maddox tom glavin who have like one line of pitch fx at the very end and you're trying desperately to form a cohesive article about their career using that data but you don't know like what what it means like does any of that reflect what they were doing when they were at their prime at their peak. Does the pitch type have anything to do with it? Does the movement have anything to do with it?

And so you end up having data that is just very, very frustrating. It'd be like if you were trying to, you know, draw a portrait of Willie Mays and all you had was like two stills from the 1973 world series and you're like, make it look like Willie Mays. And you could, but it's Willie Mays in decline rather than Willie Mays in his full glory. Yeah, PitchFX is great. I agree.

A lot of these, without thinking about it, I was landing on items that I felt like either ended an era or began an era. And PitchFX, in a way, was both because PitchFX was the last time that we had access to the whole data, like to everything that teams had essentially, we also had. We were right there with them thanks to the ability to scrape all that data.

So in that sense, it's the end of the era where we, as people on the internet, could realistically compete with teams using the same information. And also, in a lot of ways, it's the beginning of an era because it created the big data era in baseball. It's an obvious precursor to stat cast, and it marks the modern moment where we could see all of Clayton Kershaw, where there's a big difference between Clayton Kershaw's record in our minds and somebody like Pedro, only had, you know, one or two years at the end of his career or, you know, anybody before who had none.

Would you consider the camera, the Quest Tech camera that Curt Schilling punched to be close enough to pitch FX to be one? If you were looking for a specific camera sure that would bring in kurt schilling into the story and punching do we want to bring kurt schilling to the story well you're just a museum this is a better story this is this is like i i there are a couple of my items that i'm somewhat ambivalent about so you're bringing in kurt schilling you're bringing in the the robo ump aspect of it as well you have a a specific smashed camera. It's visual. On the other hand, though, it is not PitchFX. It's only

a precursor to PitchFX. So I don't know if it counts. I don't know if it would be good. It might be better if you just stuck with one of the actual PitchFX units. That was the first milestone on the road toward robot umps, though,

and presumably we'll get there, right? And people will look back at Quest Tech as kind of the mile marker there, right? Because that was the thing that revealed that umpires could be a lot better, that actually tried to quantify how good or bad they were and to try to correct their behavior. And it's a pretty direct line from quantifying how bad they are and trying to make them better to just saying, well, let's have the machine do it. So ultimately, I think that will be pretty significant. Okay. Picture effects is a good one. All right.

We're one-fifteenth of the way to having a pretty comprehensive museum, I think. All right. Ben, why don't you go? Okay. All right, Ben, why don't you go? Okay. So for my piece of equipment, I am taking the ball that Barry Bonds hit off of Eric Gagne in April 2004. So good. Yeah, well, I'm trying to epitomize eras here and some of the biggest stories of my lifetime.

And PD is not necessarily one of my favorite stories of my lifetime, but certainly one of the most significant, one of the most dominant. And I tried to think of all the different things that I could get to represent the PED era here. And, you know, you could just take like the ball or the bat that McGuire hit 62 or 70 with, or that Bonds broke 70 with, or, you know, the 756 or whatever milestone ball or bat that you want, or even the Andro bottle that was spotted in Mark McGuire's locker in 1998 and briefly caused a kerfuffle. But to me, I think I want my items to tell a story. I want them to be kind of fun to talk about

because you look at a milestone ball or a bat and you say, that's nice, that was the ball he hit out, but does it really tell you a story? The story is about everything that led up to that was the ball he hit out, but does it really tell you a story? The story is about everything that led up to that point, really, that got that player to the milestone, except with this ball, the story is really the confrontation between those two guys at more or less the peak of their powers. Bonds, the reigning MVP, Gagne, the reigning Cy Young winner, both juice to the gills, just power versus power. And Bonds won because Bonds couldn't be beaten. And I kind of wanted something.

I don't have a lot of player-specific items on my list here because it's pretty rare other than trout items, which we've mandated. It's pretty rare for a player to define, like, my whole lifetime. It's pretty rare for a player to define like my whole lifetime. No player spans that whole time and individual players have a hard time changing baseball or breaking baseball. But Barry Bonds did break baseball, I think, more than any other player in my lifetime. when he was walked with the bases loaded, because I thought maybe that would be emblematic of the way that he just was like a cheat code and literally cheated. And so no one wanted to face him and you would put him on even if it meant an automatic run. But that was 98, which I kind of forgot. That was before Barry Bunz started taking

whatever Barry Bunz started taking as far as we can determine, which in a way makes Barry Bunz more impressive because he was getting walk with the bases loaded even before that point. But on the other hand, there are other players who've been walked with the bases loaded, like Josh Hamilton was walked with the bases loaded in not even his best year. So it's not necessarily something that only the best player ever has happened to them. It says something about the manager, maybe as much as the player. And Bonds, like the intentional walks are almost more interesting or more emblematic of Bonds than the dingers.

Because he hit more dingers than everyone else, but he blew away everyone with the intentional walks. And that just goes to show how feared he was. But the 2004 Bonds Gagne at bat I just went back and watched it for like the dozenth time and it really is watching like two superhuman people just compete at this game that no one else was really playing or that no one else would be able to play naturally and one of the broadcasters in the clip I was watching after the home run says, I'm not sure which guys from the other planet, but that was incredible because you can't even tell which one of them is more improbable because Gagne is throwing triple

digits and then Bonds is in that same at bat. He's taking impossible pitches to take. And he's also yanking a supposedly 101 mile per hour pitch foul. His bat was too quick and he hit it a mile and then he straightened it out and hit the home run on what was supposedly a hundred mile per hour pitch. And I know there's some controversy about whether the stadium gun was also a little bit juiced that day, but there's also a fun backstory about how Gagne and Banz were on the same exhibition team in Japan, and they had this whole thing about if they ever faced each other, Gagne promised to pump all fastballs except for one non-fastball, and so it really was just power versus power, might versus might, and Bonds won the battle. And I think watching those two guys do what they did just to me kind of encapsulates that entire era.

Yeah, I'm really glad that you picked that home run rather than any of the Bonds home runs that were either historic or that mattered. I think that there's something in retrospect I've really come to feel that the good parts about watching Bonds play were the stuff that didn't actually matter like this one where he could just get challenged by eric gagne because he didn't represent a run that he wasn't the tying run or better and so you could just see two like you say two baseball players who had you know like ruined their bodies in order to become something barely, barely still human. Uh, and just to see this kind of aesthetic, uh, maximum maximization of baseball skills,

uh, without it tarnishing anything, because ultimately that plate appearance didn't, didn't really matter. And so it's the very fact that he bonds couldn't even tie the game. No one cares about that home run as a, as a pollutant in the sport, the way that they care about home run number 73 or number 756. And so it does feel like the appropriate way to put Barry Bonds' career in perspective is that it was ultimately cheap and meaningless. Yeah. I can probably swab the ball if it's still intact and i can get all kinds of

cream and clear off that thing to see what they both had in their bloodstreams at that point that the uh intentional walk one you you're right that it makes it more it's a testament to bonds that he was also being intentionally walked to the bases loaded before he was known juicing or known to be juicing and it would be a fitting pick because i think because it was the the true bonds the pure bonds like that it does feel like everybody who won't you know who who who won't vote for barry bonds for the hall of fame not everybody because there's also the the personal issues as well and the domestic violence uh accusations as well but at least as regards to the steroid part of it,

you know, most people who won't vote for him for steroids reasons acknowledge that they would have voted for him as of 1999. And there's a sort of a longing that his career could have ended then so that they did not have to not vote for Barry Bonds. And that 98 Bonds was also a good Bonds and a little bit, I don't know.

He should have become a cobbler. He should have. He should have. Daniel Day-Lewis did. That's absolutely right. He should have become a cobbler. Also, I think the cream in the clear, like if Jonathan Franzen ever writes a baseball novel, isn't that what he calls it? And I want to say, I'm not putting this in the hall because I think this is the best version of baseball or that everyone should do what they were doing. I'm not even necessarily celebrating it. I'm just saying if I want my hall to be representative of that era, if it's a museum of baseball, if we're going to be honest about what the history of baseball was, then I think you have to acknowledge it. And I can't think of a better way to do that or a more interesting way to do that. All right. My pick for equipment is, it is going to be really boring. I think this is my most boring pick, but I'm picking the baseball that Chris Bryant threw to Anthony Rizzo to end the 2016 World Series because for one reason, one reason only. I may have said it here before, but I feel like that is the last storyline

from the previous century of baseball that hadn't been resolved or from deep into the previous century. You could have gone to a baseball fan in the 1930s and been like, what do you want to know about the future? Of all the storylines in baseball, what do you want to know?

And every single question that they could have asked that was tied to the baseball fandom that they had has been addressed had been addressed by you know by 2016 and the last thing that that hypothetical fan might have asked is when would when when will the cubs ever win a game you know world series and it took until 2016 but, but it was finally resolved. And I feel like that is one of the places where I now mark a era shift in baseball history because the 20th century of baseball was finally over. We are now in the 21st century.

All the stories that we're rooting for are 21st century stories. The 20th century is finally put to bed with the Cubs winning that. And as the Cubs, Red Sox and White Sox droughts were all really substantial parts of baseball lore throughout my lifetime. So to have them finally resolved really was cathartic. It was emotional for everybody, not just Cubs fans. The other one I thought of for this was very much in the same vein. And if I'm stealing one of yours, sorry, we'll Cubs fans. The other one I thought of for this was very much in the same vein. And if I'm stealing one of yours, sorry, we'll edit this out.

But it was a couple of weeks earlier, Vin Scully did his last broadcast. So I thought about doing for equipment, Vin Scully's microphone, because he's the other part of the 20th century that was still going strong into the year 2016. And once he retired retired it also felt like 20th century baseball was now history rather than present in any way yeah i had i had two and now

i'm nervous because the other the other version category version of this draft which we all realized ours would fit into was more wedding themed something old something new something borrowed and something blue and if that were our construct i would feel confident that i am not treading on the wild card artifact category but now i am less confident but i i'm worried that if i don't mention them now then we won't have occasion to later should i should i mention them now should i just they can be wild cards too i suppose if they don't come up in the wild card category. You're saying you have backups that you're thinking of saying your backups for the category?

Yeah. I think I really struggled with the decision of whether to bring up Vin Scully right there. And the only reason I did is because it was 2016 and it was the same month. So I think generally speaking... Okay, I'm going to save it. Save it.

I'm going to save it. we can get anything we haven't mentioned off our chest yeah i think i might have erred by bringing it up no i think you did fine because that's i wasn't gonna take it yeah it's very clearly equipment too these are mine are more amorphous all right uh okay mine don't even fit the i don't even think one of mine fits we're doing great all right okay uh all right should i should we keep going uh in the same order you want to pick a new category for us meg uh sure sure we can go in the same order i will go to paper let's go to paper all right so in the paper category i am putting in a rod's contract with the the Rangers his 10 year stop it. I also picked the A-Rod's

contract for the Rangers so that's great you sell it and then when it's my turn I'll sell it. This is like the beer guy all over again Sam it's good I'm glad if we we're I mean what's wrong with Ben over there with the wrong answer

get with it Ben. So I picked A-Rod's 10 year $252 million contract with the wrong answer. Get with it, Ben. So I picked A-Rod's 10-year, $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. My thinking was that this sort of typifies a couple of things. One, his contract with them is still, depending on how exactly you measure it, very much in the conversation for one of the biggest contracts ever, at least on an inflation-adjusted basis. I think that it accomplished a couple of things. It established the era of the mega deal, the mega deal era. Go back and read some of the quotes on A-Rod's deal.

There were a lot of people who just thought that baseball was in jeopardy, right? That baseball was ending as a result of this deal getting signed. When do people not think that about baseball? Yeah. And I should say a lot of those folks who were the most concerned were baseball executives who were suddenly realizing, oh, good, we're going to have to pay some of these guys. We might have to pay some of these guys. But so I think that it typifies an era of baseball. It typifies another era of baseball if we think about the way that free agent contracts have sort of become strongly stratified in our current moment between sort of big mega deal guys like, you know, like the Bryce Harpers and the Mike Trouts and then the sort of dying middle class of baseball. So there's that. It brought Scott Boris really to the fore of the agent conversation.

And where would this podcast be without his quotes? We'd be nowhere. We'd be nowhere at all. And I think that it also, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but I will speak for myself, which is that at the time that this deal was signed, you know, I'm a Mariners fan, or I was at one point in my life, so some of this felt more personal than it might have for other people because there was the decision to go. But I think that for me, this marked an era of my fandom where I was just kind of a, I will admit to just being kind of a dummy about this stuff. I was mad that A-Rod would sign a deal for this much money that the money would dictate where A-Rod went rather than wanting to stay with my team for less. now and think that that's kind of wrongheaded because I just didn't appreciate where this money stacked up relative to the other money that was in the system that didn't belong to players

and instead belong to owners. So I think that it also personally marked an important moment in my evolution as a person thinking about baseball. I would think about this kind of deal very differently now and did think about deals signed by Harper and Rendon and Machado and Trout and Garrett Cole. And remember how Garrett Cole's a Yankee, you guys? That is wild. That's really wild. We'll come back to that.

So I think that it kicked off a new era of baseball, the kind of era it kicked off has changed over time. But I think this is really a sort of a turning point in the way that we think about modern contracts. And so I picked A-Rod's contract with the Texas Rangers. Yeah, that's a good one. It is very significant. It is a great one. I will just, I'll go ahead with my turn now since we're on the topic. Yeah, if Scott Boris hadn't negotiated it, I'm not sure I would have picked it. I might have. It's a great contract all on its own for history but the fact that you you get to bring Scott Boris into the hall of fame yeah is really powerful because I mean has there been anybody in the last 40 years of baseball who was

kind of a more significant presence I mean it's it's like it's him and Bud Selig and maybe I don't know maybe Billy Bean and like a very small number of people. And so you got to figure out a way to get Scott Boris in there. And this is really his crowning accomplishment, not just because it was the highest contract ever, but because it doubled the previous high, I believe. And in a way, there was, like you both said, there was this process ever since the beginning of free agency where someone would sign a contract that was a new record. It was like, you know, 10 cents more than the previous record. And then everybody would say, ah, baseball's dying. Can you believe it's a new record? And there just would be new record after new record after new record after new record. And the whole time the owners were claiming that they could never keep up with this inflation. And then A-Rod comes along and just doubles the previous one. And in a way, it was kind of, it ended that conversation, I think.

I might be wrong about this. Maybe someone else remembers this exactly the opposite. But at the time, it was shocking. We all got sticker shock, but then it was almost, well, it was like something like 15 years before any contract topped it in unadjusted for inflation dollars. I don't think anybody topped it until Giancarlo Stanton. And then it, and no one as a free agent topped it until Machado and Harper in 2019, which is crazy, right? 2019, they even signed, yeah, 2019. And so for, it was so far ahead of the game that the fact that baseball had obviously not died

when A-Rod signed his deal made it very obvious that it was not going to, as long as other free agents were signing big contracts, which were not even at the height of A-Rod's contract. And it is, yeah, I think that we can all have different ideas about how to handle the inflation question, whether you use the world's inflation level or baseball's inflation level. But I mean, it doesn't seem like any inflation adjusted contract by any inflation standard is close to where A-Rod's was. It remains the biggest contract in history in my mind.

And it is kind of the last famous contract, I think, at least so far. There might be more famous contracts, but the last one where every baseball fan can tell you the years and the numbers for decades probably to come. fan can tell you the years and the numbers for decades probably to come. So in re-familiarizing myself with some of the specifics of this, Thomas Newman wrote a piece about this deal for ESPN. And there are two things that I want to pull out of that piece that really struck me. And I just did not remember. I did not remember, for instance, that two days prior to this deal the rockies had given mike hampton his deal which at the time was the richest in baseball history for 121 million and eight years

and then two days later a rod does this deal with the rangers so there's that part and also i want to to pull out some of these quotes so newman remarks that after the deal was announced, apocalyptic forecasts about the sport's future abounded a sampling of opinions from Scott Boris. We don't need revenue sharing. We need intellect sharing. That's not, you know, if you were to stack up a Boris, that quote with all the other Boris quotes, you'd be like, nah, that's not much of a quote. But you can, it's such a clear on-ramp to the treasures, the diamonds that we were to get later. Yeah.

So it even has a good little Boris nugget. So that's nice. Yeah. And I'll also say that if you want some sort of PD aspect to your Hall of Fame exhibit, A-Rod has claimed that it was the pressure of that contract

that impelled him to start taking steroids. And you can believe that or not, but that's his story that I think he has stuck to. And so A-Rod, obviously one of the more notorious PED users and offenders, and that was a huge story in its own right. And the contract is at least connected to that directly by him. Yeah, like Albert Poools signed a big contract, and then that was the end of that story. He went to Anaheim.

He played there for a long time. He's still technically playing there. And, you know, like there's a story to the 10 years that Albert Pujols spent in Anaheim, but it's kind of the end of it. It was like he signed there, and then he played it out, whereas with A-Rod, he got the contract, and then the story went in so many different directions right it led to the yankees only world series

title since 2000 it led to it may have led to the peds it led to the renegotiation and him topping his own record when he opted out it led to the trade that sent alfonso soriano to texas it led to the trade that could have sent robinson cano to texas but didn't send cano it led to the jeter a-rod years it led to so many it led to a-rod as a centaur i mean like the the a-rod contract alone has like like 17 chapters worth of stuff i'm just the contract like you could write a whole book about just the contract and what happened after the contract was signed. At the time of the deal, the value of that contract per the Forbes franchise valuations

equaled or exceeded the value of 18 major league franchises, 25 NBA franchises, and 27 NHL franchises. Wow. Whoa! Now it exceeds the value of all 30 NHL franchises. Wow. Now it exceeds the value of all 30 NHL franchises. I actually don't know if that's true and I don't know how many NHL teams there are. I'm sure the NHL is thriving.

I'm sure. They had the work stoppage and probably everything's been great since then. Sorry, NHL. I didn't mean it. You always pick on hockey when you do that line when you say, do a hockey thing. Do a hockey. Do a hockey thing. That's one of your go-tos. All right. Okay. So that's our paper. Yeah. All right. So that's not my paper. So there are only so many ways you can go with paper, really. You can go with contract. You can go with lineup card.

You might say maybe Cal Ripken's record-breaking lineup card would be a pretty obvious one or you could that's actually a good one maybe yeah it's too obvious maybe it's not but you know it's already in the hall i'm sure so a baseball card maybe if there's a super famous one or i guess you could print out a scott boris analogy and put it in the hall of fame but i didn't do any of those i tried to get creative here and I'm going with Sonia Sotomayor's ruling when she issued an injunction, upheld the petition from the NLRB that didn't exactly stop the strike but sort of stopped the strike, definitely put baseball back on the road to being played. And this is something that, I don't know, maybe it's been blown out of proportion, like when Barack Obama introduced her as his nominee to the Supreme Court. I think that ruling was the one ruling in her history that he mentioned. And he said that she saved baseball, or actually, technically, he said

some say that she saved baseball. And really, she, he said some say that she saved baseball. And really, she just kind of got everyone back to the table and sent the owners a message that, no, they could not unilaterally roll back the past 30 years or so of labor relations in baseball. And once they sort of got slapped down there, I think they got a little bit more realistic. Everyone got back to bargaining and baseball came back. And she really brooked no nonsense here in this discussion. I think she even passed up hearing oral arguments or witnesses or written support. It was so obvious to her what the right thing to do was here. And she wanted

to really rush it because she wanted this to be done before opening day or what would have been opening day in 1995 as sort of a symbolic gesture. And it really did have a big effect. I don't know. We can't go back and see when baseball would have come back if she had not issued this ruling, but I'm glad that we didn't find out. And I felt like I had to have something about the strike. Again, much like PD is, it's not one of the happiest stories of my lifetime, but it's certainly one of the most significant. And this is at least a happy aspect of it.

This is something that helped bring an end to it. So that would be my pick for paper. That's a good one. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the, as long as we're talking about New York-born baseball fans who use the power of government to start baseball up again after a long absence, I'm looking forward to the Anthony Fauci memo saying,

you're all good, guys. I'm ready to play today. Look at me. saying, you're all good, guys. I'm ready to play today. Look at me. I can be sitting behind the dugout. It's the song by Eddie Murphy, right? Yeah. Anthony Fauci, there was a profile of him in the New York Times today that our friend James Wagner wrote about his love of baseball.

I was also reading a profile of him in The New Yorker in which it also talks about his love of baseball. And I was also reading a profile of him in the New Yorker in which it also talks about his love of baseball. And he grew up in Brooklyn, I believe Brooklyn, and but was not to my high school. No, to his but but not a Dodgers fan. He was a Yankees fan. And I, I am I jotted down this on my tickler file, because I feel like this is a common detail in many profiles of sort of famous people is that they grow up in an area, but for some unknown reason are actually fans growing up of a team that's not in the era. And that's presented somehow as significant. And I could only think of Fauci because I just read it like this morning, but I'm going to keep my ears open because I feel like

I've come across that trope like a lot, like grew up on South side, but you're a Cubs fan or you grew up in, you know, whatever you grew up in LA, but you were a Giants fan, all those sorts of examples. So Fauci is the lead of the article to come in 2027. Once you get two more examples. Yeah. Okay. All right. Mink? Yes. Why don't you pick a third category? We've done paper.

We've done equipment. I guess we should do clothing. Okay. Yep. I feel the least good about this. I want to acknowledge that because I'm kind of cheating. I am engaged in a bit of category fraud here. Mine too.

I want to acknowledge that because this could very easily have been a paper thing, but I decided to pick a picture of a piece of clothing. Uh-huh. Kind of. I mean, I guess we're all... Anyway, I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole that my brain just opened up. So far, everything you have described could apply to mine. Apply to any of this stuff. rabbit hole that my brain just so far everything you have described could apply to any of you there's no way that we pick the same thing here but you have every detail has applied perfectly

to mine and i'm nervous i'm picking the hat okay that ken griffey jr is wearing on his you're kidding me that is mine i thought about that. Okay, so Sam here. Wait, why were you relieved when she said hat? Because I, because there was, okay, because it's Photoshopped. And so I was going to pick the Polaroid that they doctored. So she took the hat in the picture. I was going with the Polaroid. And so when she didn't say the polaroid and so when she

didn't say the polaroid i thought yes all right should we tell the story for people who don't know it i think you should why don't you do it because i think you all right i'm gonna let luke win of sports illustrated do it he wrote about this card so of course this is the 1989 upper deck of ken griffey jr which we'll talk about the card's significance as well. But the image of Griffey that became part of collecting lore with his blue turtleneck and fro mullet tucked beneath his cap was doctored. In his home office in Corona, California, 75 miles north of Upper Deck's headquarters, Tom Guideman hands me a Polaroid

that had been sitting atop a binder of Griffey cards and says, this, it's cut off a little bit, but this is the original photo photo Griffey's wearing the navy blue hat of Seattle's class a affiliate the San Bernardino spirit whose logo is a silver s over a red star the picture was taken by the late VJ Levero an angels team photographer who shot Griffey and his father for a sports illustrated feature in 1988 Levero sold one of his extras to upper Deck, which airbrushed that hat royal blue, erased the star, made the S yellow, and ta-da, completed the makeover. Guideman had the Polaroid because he was the one who, at age 18, put Kid Griffey on the card. In June 1988, when Bill Hemrick, et cetera, et cetera, founded the Upper Deck Company, they made Guideman a rabid card

collector, their first employee. They paid him $15 an hour, gave him business cards that said product analyst and entrusted him with choosing players for the 700 cards in that first edition. The story goes on that Guideman was a kind of a prospect hound and put a lot of thought into it, considered Gary Sheffield there, considered some others there, went with Griffey and did the photo doctoring. And there was card number one the first card in the the first set by the kind of first premium card brand and that card shot to the top of the charts yep so spell out why this was was your pick and then i'll spell out why this was my pick i think and then ben can apologize yet again for being wrong i mean there there are any

number of so there there were two thoughts that i had when it came to griffey and having an artifact of his and the other was the backwards baseball cap so we could have just as easily have done that i could pick that if you'd like and you can have have the hat in the rookie card if we want to do different stuff. No, this is the good stuff here. But the reason that I picked this is that I think that a lot of the consternation and hand-wringing and fretting about baseball in our lifetime can be divided into two eras. There's the Griffey era, and there's now, right? And when Griffey was Griffey, he was culturally ascendant. He transcended baseball.

He was everywhere. He was in video games. He was in movies. He was on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He was a cultural icon, the likes of which the sport does not currently have. And I think that we do a lot of fretting about the void, the Griffey void. And some people will say Jeter, but no, it's not the same thing. Griffey was a part of Americana in a way that had nothing to do with baseball and that non-baseball fans heavily identified with. And there are going to be plenty of New York fans who sit there and

say that Jeter did the same thing, but I don't think that he did and so we find ourselves in a Griffey-less time right now and I think that you know people worry about that and I tend to be of the mind that worrying about that is sort of silly because it it misses one of the really incredible things about baseball which is that you can have 30 Griffey, right? You can have 30 guys who are hugely important in their local markets, and they can look a lot of different ways and be from a lot of different places and typify the game in their own special way, right? They can be a bunch of different kinds of players. And I think that that is part of what makes baseball so strong. But I think that thinking that has to acknowledge that there was this time. There was this time very recently in our lifetimes when there was a guy. There was

the guy. And it was Griffey. And it starts with that rookie card and then proceeded throughout his career. So that is why I picked it because I think it both embodies a moment in baseball that is past that I imagine we will see again. I'm sure we will see again probably. It might be a guy who ends up playing baseball during this otherwise sportless time that we find ourselves in and comes to sort of transcend his moment and come to the attention of non-baseball fans who are just like, hey, there's baseball on sometime this summer when there's nothing else. And so I am now a baseball baseball fan but i think that people who did not grow up in that specific era of baseball have a hard time understanding just how big a deal just how

big a deal he was he was on tv all the time it felt like yeah which when you consider the market he came out of is remarkable you know it's's just this little city in the corner of the country that played baseball after a lot of the country had gone to bed. So that is why I have picked Griffey, but I will acknowledge the little bit of category fraud that's involved in me picking that. That's great. It's a great description of Ken Griffey Jr.'s,

how different it was to follow him than it is to follow baseball players today I agree wholeheartedly with all that you just you just almost have to get a Griffey in there if you're gonna if you're gonna capture the 1990s you gotta have something Griffey in there I love that it's the card for a couple of other reasons one is that if you're gonna capture the 90s you also have to capture the fact that baseball cards totally, well, they exploded, but they also, in a way, became bigger than the sport to a lot of people. They were a bubble fad where they were worth so much to people who did not particularly care about baseball at all. Dave Jameson in his book, Minkondition, which I've been mentioning a lot

lately because I wrote about baseball card and because I read that book recently, but he says, he describes it as baseball cards were no longer souvenirs of your favorite players. They were elaborate doubloons that happened to have baseball players on them. And there was that period where for about 10 years, baseball was kind of like the second most important aspect of the baseball card. It was an odd time period. And what's significant about that is, and this is, I don't know, I don't know if this is totally true or if this is just sort of the legend that I've picked up, in reading Lords of the Realm, you get the sense that the players union partly propped up the boom so that they could have a lot of money for their strike fund.

And because the boom was so successful for the Players Union, it helped fund the strike and made it so that they could afford to strike. That if, you know, Upper Deck had never started, if Fleer and Donruss had never broken the monopoly, if the Players Union was still getting, you know, 10% of the baseball card revenue that they were getting by, by the early nineties. I don't know if they would have been able to afford to go on strike into, uh, in a lot of ways, reshape the relationship between players and owners and between the different sides in the collective bargaining agreement. So, uh, the baseball card boom had a huge effect on the business and the game as well in that decade. And then finally, Griffey, besides being so omnipresent, one of the reasons that I think of that as being a paper-ish editions were in 1990.

And I've written about how the draft was much less efficient before Griffey than the top of the draft in particular. It just feels like they were just really bad at drafting until Griffey. And then after the Griffey era, teams got quite a bit better at drafting at the very top. And there was a feeling that prospects were, were not like, you know, part of your organization, but that they were really the lifeblood of your organization. And there was a lot more work put into professionalizing how we thought about prospects, both at a team level and also at a public level. And Griffey was, you know, the greatest prospect for, you know, up to, up to that point maybe in history and one of the most famous prospects before he debuted

and in part because of that card. So yeah, just a really significant moment in baseball history. That's a great one. Thought about it. Glad I didn't take it for the sake of saying something different. But this is a tough category because with clothing, I mean, you're somewhat limited and obviously there are a lot of uniforms that get preserved in Hall of Fames, but how much fun is it to see a uniform really? I guess it's kind

of cool that this thing was on this person's body at a time that they did something significant, but it doesn't really tell the story on its own. I'm looking for something that tells the story as the artifact itself. And there aren't that many articles of clothing that do that the way that Griffey's cap did. And I don't know. I thought about like Curt Schilling's bloody sock or something. But again, do I want to use one of my five picks on a Curt Schilling artifact? I don't know. And I thought about Chris Sale cutting up the throwback jersey. That'd be a

first ballot pick in the weird Hall of Fame, but I don't think I can plausibly put it in the actual Hall of Fame as the symbol of an era. But there is one piece of clothing that I think could plausibly be picked to be in the weird and interesting clothing Hall of Fame and also the significant clothing Hall of Fame, and that is Theo Epstein's gorilla suit. So that will be my pick. Wow. That's a great use of clothing. Yeah.

Sam, we got it wrong. You wear it. That's like how people are going out using a gorilla suit as like a COVID mask. That's like Ben using a gorilla suit for clothing. That's fantastic. It's less of a stretch than a baseball card in clothing good answer yeah so for those who don't recall the Theo Epstein gorilla suit story which I can't believe is real but it is Theo Epstein was this was what after the 2005 season I think

was having a contract dispute with the Red Sox, didn't feel that their offer was good enough, felt disrespected, and decided to leave, temporarily sort of resigned, walked away from the Red Sox, except he really lumbered away in a gorilla suit. That is how he left Fenway Park, because it happened to be Halloween when this dispute went down. And in order to sneak past reporters so that they would not see him and call him on whether he had a contract, he donned a gorilla suit. I don't even really recall why he had access to a gorilla suit, but I don't know, Halloween? I guess gorilla suits are around. And he used it to walk out of the stadium, got into his car, drove away in the gorilla suit, which is a really ridiculous image.

And I think this only came to light. I don't know if he ever volunteered this information. I think it came to light because someone recognized that the Volvo being driven by the person in the gorilla suit was Theo Epstein's car. And he later auctioned it off for charity. was Theo Epstein's car. And he later auctioned it off for charity. And of course, he came back to the Red Sox and stayed there for a few more years, won another World Series, helped maybe put together an additional World Series team. But the fact that Theo Epstein did this, I guess, partly as a joke, but partly somewhat serious. He didn't want to talk to reporters at that particular time. And I know he has a history of this. He didn't want to talk to reporters at that particular time.

And I know he has a history of this. He's also been photographed going to games and concerts with a Bobby Valentine style fake mustache. So on top of everything else, he's a master of disguise, but that's just an unbelievable story. I mean, when you see the gorilla suit hanging or standing or however you would display a gorilla suit in the Hall of Fame, that stands out from the typical item of clothing that you would see there. And as you were sort of saying with the Chris Bryant ball, Theo Epstein is at the center of two of the most significant baseball stories of my lifetime, the Red Sox winning the World Series and the Cubs winning the World Series. And this isn't quite connected. It might be a little bit better if he had won the gorilla suit when he actually left Red Sox and went to the Cubs, because then it would be kind of the connection between those two jobs. But I guess you could say that if he had actually stayed away once he walked out with the gorilla suit, then, you know, probably things don't work out the same way. And he probably isn't the World Series winning GM with the Cubs.

Maybe he doesn't get that job. work out the same way and he probably isn't the world series winning gm with the cubs maybe he doesn't get that job the circumstances don't line up that he becomes the person who breaks both of the most storied curses in baseball but i think that even if he wasn't necessarily the most influential executive like if you wanted just someone in there to represent sabermetrics you might have bill james you might have billy. But if you want someone who was part of that movement, but then also won the rings and really the most famous and significant rings of the past half century or so, you would have to have Theo Epstein represented. And Gorilla Suit is a great conversation piece. Great answer. I agree it would have been better if he

had gone straight to the cubs from there but you're right he he had to come back he had to win another one with boston and then he had to you know feel like his he had accomplished what he needed to in boston and he might not have felt the need to go to a place like chicago if he had not really resolved things with Boston by that point. I don't think I knew, I don't think I realized, and I'm not totally sure I believe, that he drove away in the gorilla suit. That can't be- Did they just see the gorilla suit in the car?

In the car, maybe, or saw him getting into the car, but then he took it off. I mean, it seems- I have not followed the citation, but Wikipedia says, a witness reported spotting a person wearing a gorilla suit driving a Volvo similar to Epstein's that night. Witnesses can be unreliable. They can be. And maybe it was,

it could have been a coincidence. It could have been someone else. Yes, it could have been someone else. It was Halloween after all, but- I can't imagine that you have good peripheral vision. No, it doesn't seem safe. And you don't drive a Volvo if you're not very concerned about vehicular safety.

True. All right. That's a good one. Wild card? A wild card before Trout or Trout before wild card? We leave it to Meg. Yeah, to Meg. Wild card.

Sorry, my mic is muted. I said several times that I thought it was a really good pick, Ben, so I want you to know that on the record. Thank you. Even though I didn't realize that my mic was muted. I guess the real thing is, and this is not wildcard, so I'm going to say a clothing thing because I don't imagine it'll come up in wildcard. My other clothing thing was Ichiro's batting helmet because of Ichiro.

So here's the real question for all of us. Let's not talk about Ichiro, who is a future Hall of Famer, but instead my own weirdness, which is why didn't I just say the hat Griffey was wearing? Then I didn't have to worry about category fraud at all. I could have just picked the hat. Yeah. Wait, what did you pick? I kind of...

I thought you'd... I did, but I brought the card into it like I was cheating. And I was... It's fine. It was in relation to the card that the hat right but i could have just picked the hat anyway ichiro's batting helmet will go in the hall of fame when he goes into the hall of fame i mean not him personally but like his you know bust so anyway personally he's always there yeah he's touring that place every other

week it seems like he'll go hang out but anyway wild card artifact here's my wild card artifact which also was going to be my something borrowed artifact uh which feels clever which is the wwe style championship belt that the league was apparently giving out to teams that kept player salaries low in arbitration because if one because i i think that if if the strikes typified the early part of what we are understanding as our lifetimes and the labor relations that were sort of present there, that this typifies the new era of labor relations we find ourselves in, which of favorably of a strike, we now find ourselves in a position where the system has been architected such that the conflict is much quieter, but it results in many of the same things, which is that players' salaries are not in line with their values, certainly not in line with when they're most valuable in their careers. And that there is sort of a lawyerly behind the scenes, precise, but also sort of

petty and excited and icky part of that achievement. And I think that the belt represents all of those things. It manages to sum up all of those and if we were doing um the the wedding categories would be something borrowed because it comes from wwe so i picked that as my wild card artifact so yeah you could have used that as the clothing artifact i could have but i wanted to talk about Griffey. And then I decided to just talk about a baseball card when I could have talked about any piece of clothing that Ken Griffey Jr. wore. So sometimes the old brain doesn't work quite the way you want it to,

but here we are. That's a great one too, because it really captures the idea that these are, this is simultaneously like jocks and billionaires. And in the WWE belt, it is, I don't know, it is like business people doing business in the wwe belt it is i don't know it is like business people doing business in the manner of a jock yeah it is very it is it is the two the two halves of the baseball exec brain right in one piece of gaudy clothing it reminds me of something that you know would not be out of place on a trading floor at Goldman when you've done a trade.

I could put more specific finance language around that, but it'll bore people. So I want. Thank you for not doing that. So, yeah, it sort of is evocative of that hyper masculine bravado that is involved with doing a thing that is ultimately done on paper and screens and so there is a yeah i think that it just it wraps all of that up into one yucky package that i can't believe we had confirmed on the record that remains wild and spectacular that that was just a thing we know happened for real they have retired the championship belt yeah in shame yes they have yes do you think do you think that the last the last person who won it gets to keep it or do you think that by retiring it they had to like forfeit it

to to the authorities for uh you know burial uh yeah i have a vision of it being melted down like the terminator at the end of terminator would you would let's say that whoever won it last owned it and put it up for sale as a collectible would you feel like it would be fun to own? Because you could own it and it represents a part of baseball that you are staunchly opposed to. On the other hand, it is funny. Yeah. I think it would feel icky. I think it would feel icky to have at home. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, that's a great one. And I'm relieved that you took it because I thought i was gonna have to fight you for mine i am taking the trash can taking the trash can i am now very glad i didn't even think about it yeah i'm very i'm now very glad that i did not bring some of my backups for equipment because that was on my backup equipment yeah i figured it had to be on your mind if only to be able to say banging scheme once more. Banging scheme!

It's been a while. Yeah, I considered it as equipment. I guess it's equipment. The Astro certainly treated it as equipment. But I like it, A, because it's one of the biggest stories we've seen, and yet it's also a story that repeats over and over and over and over. And so if you want a museum of baseball, some implement of sign stealing is a great thing to have in there because it goes back to the

beginning of baseball and it never stops. And usually you don't really have an item that you can point to and say, this is it. This is the sign stealing thing. I guess binoculars maybe, or I don't know what else he would use, the buzzers that they've used at times. But the banging scheme, the trash can, that's what made that story so sensational. I think if they had used something else, even if they had used just some other item that was not a trash can, I don't know if it would have been as big a story. I don't know if it would have been as big a story. And if there hadn't been that auditory element to it, I don't know if it would have been as huge a story or if we ever would have found out about it. And the other thing I like about it is that I guess there's some danger that someone might see it in the hall and just start throwing their garbage in there, which would not be a great way to treat your artifact. But on the other hand, you could maybe have an interactive exhibit, right, where you could have people come up and bang the trash can and see it for themselves. And you would want to protect it. You wouldn't want the trash can to be worn down over time, but it's probably pretty durable and you could give them something soft to whack it

with. And then you too could follow in the footsteps of Jake Marisnyk or whoever and hear the bang yourself and maybe they could even set up a video screen so that you could test yourself and you could try to crack the the code and send the signal to someone who's standing in a batter's box or something it could be a whole fun day at the museum for all ages. So I like that aspect of it too. If that were for sale as memorabilia, would you own that? Would you buy that and keep it in your house without any guilt? I mean, I have a garbage can already, so it wouldn't even take up extra space. And I think I would, because there is something yucky about it also, but unlike the championship belt, yeah, I mean, there's a little bit more silliness to it and absurdity to it. I guess the championship

belt is absurd in its own way, but sort of in a sad way, whereas the trash can is just frankly kind of funny, even though there are aspects of it that are not funny and so i would feel comfortable owning that or or one of the many trash can giveaways that were likely to find their way to yeah to teams as the astros gotta be the original yeah yeah those are probably quite available right now yes yeah i would imagine so could replace the the mike zanino compost bin that i have which was a mariners giveaway i just were like hey uh you know this guy who can't hit a I would imagine so. Could replace the Mike Zanino compost bin that I have, which was a Mariners giveaway. They just were like, hey, you know this guy who can't hit a lick? Let's put his face on a thing where trash goes.

That feels nice. Wow. Was there a pun? No, it was just a Mike Zanino compost bin. It's a green ballpark. I don't know. No one knew it would be as bad as it was, I think, is what we can take away from that.

So Ben's four picks so far have been the all-time clash between two steroids players, the trash can at the center of the biggest cheating scandal in decades, and the chastising legal order that told baseball to start playing games again. Yeah. A bunch of feel-good stories in my Hall of Fame. And the gorilla.

And the gorilla. All right. Is it me? It is you. Yes. Okay. My wild card is Hideo Nomo's Rookie of the Year Award in 1995. I thought about Hideo Nomo's contract for my paper.

You thought about Hideo Nomo's contract for your paper You thought about Hideo Nomo's contract for your paper I thought about Ichiro's helmet Well, I thought about Ichiro's something Yeah, I thought about Ichiro's ball that he threw on the throw Or something to represent his arm Or his actual arm I wondered whether we could have body parts Like if this is a bodies exhibit

But I thought that might be morbid So I stayed away from that. Yeah. This was when Hideo Nomo played in the National League in 1995. Nomo was an incredible story that year coming out of the strike and absolutely dominating and creating a mania in a season when supposedly fans were boycotting the game after the strike. But beyond that, his pitching in the National League was a really significant moment in the story of Major League Baseball. At the start of the 20th century, Major League Baseball

really represented a small part of the world and a small part of the sport. It was just a league for white people. And then it desegregated and then it became bi-hemispheric and then once snowmo signed major league baseball had essentially incorporated all of the world's different baseball leagues into its broader universe so i mean it didn't incorporate them in the same way that like a minor league team was affiliated by any means the leagues still are thriving around the world as major leagues, but there's now communication with the major leagues. There are no islands left that are kind of completely separate

from major league baseball's world. There's a part of how that played out that I'm slightly ambivalent about. I don't love how major league baseball imposes so much gravity that it's just assumed that every good player will be on one of those 30 teams. leagues that are seen as kind of more, I don't know, equal around the world instead of having this one league in America that kind of treats all of the sport as a feeder system. But it is amazing that the best players in the world now do get to play against each other and that the different leagues do communicate with each other and that they have this shared universal history together now. So, you know, like I said,

a little bit ambivalent and waiting to see how it plays out in future decades and to just see whether the professional major leagues around the world continue to thrive or if they end up getting sucked entirely into the MLB business framework. But, you know, Nomo that year was absolutely amazing. And I'll think about his pitching windup forever. And I also think that decades from now, that 1995 season will be seen as a pretty momentous milestone of Major League Baseball being finally, you know, universal. So I don't know if I sold that one well enough, but I hope so. Yep. I don't know. I don't know if i sold that one well enough but i hope so yep i don't

know i don't know if i don't know how if i know it's great well i like that one yeah i think you sold it can i say what my other wild card one was which is really equipment hd broadcasts hd broadcasts yeah because you know i've I've had occasion over the last couple weeks years since we've been doing this that to watch

a lot of old baseball and then you watch recent baseball and you're like wow I can see this baseball a lot better yeah

and I think to myself Sam what kind of careers would we have were it not for the ability to see very minute detail

on a broadcast so i think that it should go in the hall of fame yeah yeah xmo is to me is an amazing thing as well yeah oh yeah tronic cameras yeah yeah so all right do we want to do try out now yeah sure okay so i'm going to offer two versions of this selection because i worried that one of them i mean i guess it could take up a room in the hall of fame but it might be too many objects for to be really one object so you can tell me and if it is then i have a smaller version of this the first is the draft boards of the 21 teams because we should remember that the nationals and the diamondbacks each pick twice before the angels drafted trout we will remember that they picked twice in a row and that trout was not their first

selection they took gritchick first but there there were some signability questions with trout so that was why they did it that way so we can either take the 21 boards because there have been so many stories over the years of oh we were we were going to take Mike Trout and then a dog distracted us or whatever. And so every year, in fact, more and more every year. And so if we could get our hands on the real boards, I just want to see I just want to see where where he really landed for teams. I love that one.

So that's one version of this. If we think that that is too many things, which I would I would allow, we could alternatively I love that one. And I don't know this for a fact, but I would imagine that the same area scout was responsible for both of those guys and probably saw Sanchez as like the earlier sign, easier sign, I should say. But I would like to see their reports for Sanchez and for Trout. So that could be the alternative if, I don't know, like we're just worried about space. But I want to grapple with the myth of the Trout draft because it grows every year. And I think that it is just one of the more compelling aspects of his in a career that is incredibly compelling and that we will look back on and just feel incredibly fortunate to have seen in its entirety because of all the people who have watched so much baseball before who just never got to see Mike Trout, I think that the draft part of his story is going to live in legend for a very, very long time. The confluence of events that had to occur for him to fall to the Angels. So that's my Mike Trout pick.

Yeah, I found this to be the toughest category because, frankly, Mike Trout doesn't have a whole lot of signature moments on the field, which is partly or largely a product of the fact that he's played for a lot of lousy teams, hasn't had many games that really mattered towards the postseason, has barely played in the postseason. And one of my hopes for, let's say, the second half of Trout's career is not only that he continues to be great, but that he has some signature moments. So I tried to think of some things he's actually done on the field that would be worthy, and I really kind of came up empty. I had one which I'll mention, but I didn't quite want to take it. And I did think of something surrounding the draft and I love the Mike Trout draft stories

and I'll read anything about it and we've talked about it on the podcast, but I've started to wonder whether we're making too much of that or whether if that's the whole story about Mike Trout, aren't there guys who are also great, who had even more improbable origins, who baseball collectively missed on by an even wider margin. I mean, within my lifetime, Mike Piazza was drafted with the 1,390th pick in the very last round. As a favor to a friend. In the 62nd round. So Mike Piazza was a first rounder.

I know he's like the best player ever possibly, but they didn't miss by that many guys. It's not like they thought he was bad. It's not like they thought every other baseball player available that year was better. They didn't recognize that he was as great as he was, but there were mitigating factors and he was never in any danger of not getting a shot, whereas Mike Piazza, one of the greatest catchers of all time, was very much in danger of not even getting to play professional baseball. And he was older when that draft took place than Trout was. So to me, I don't know. It's one of the things you talk about with Trout, and it absolutely deserves to be. But I kind of balked at making it my pick because I wonder whether there are a bunch of Hall of Famers who were drafted in late rounds or later rounds and know they weren't quite as good as Mike Trout, but still. So I opted against that, although it's totally a worthy pick and was one of my first thoughts. And I hate what I'm taking. I'm not happy with what I'm picking. because it makes me sound like a total stat head stereotype. But I'm taking, I guess, I don't know what form it would take, but maybe a video display board where I list his war through. You're going to make a PowerPoint.

And then you're going to play the PowerPoint. So we'll get some fangrass promotion here. Yeah, there you go. It has to be a living document. I can't just print it out and count it in my paper because war is changing all the time. So it has to be a live, constantly updating video board, and it will have Mike Trout at the top of the leaderboard of war all time through age 27 or whatever. And Ty Cobb will be next, and Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout will be at the top. And Ty Cobb will be next and Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout will be at the top. And the reason I don't feel as bad about taking this is because Mike Trout, as we've discussed, he is, I think, almost synonymous with war. He and Trout and Trout made us appreciate war.

And war is one of the most significant developments, I think, in my lifetime as a baseball fan. And I don't have anything of a sort of sabermetric nature thus far, which I felt bad about, both because it's personally significant to me, but also because it's had a huge impact in the game. And so this allows me to get some sabermetrics in there. And I had a hard time thinking of one thing that would sort of sum up how great Trout is, because as we often talk about, he's just good at everything, and he's so consistent,

and he has no flaws. And so that's kind of why war has emerged as the dominant way of talking about Trout, that and the fact that he doesn't have so many signature moments. And so I feel bad because it's like I'm putting some numbers on a video board instead of like something that Trout, you know, did physically or something that would allow us to appreciate his prowess in sort of an aesthetic way. But when I think about Trout, I think about

war and vice versa. And that's my pick. Going back to what you were saying about how other players have missed, teams have missed by more. I think maybe one of the things that's interesting about Mike Trout, that's not interesting about, I mean, obviously Albert Pujols going in the 13th round and Piazza going in the 62nd round. Those are also extremely interesting, probably more interesting, but different because the Cardinals also missed on Albert Pujols. They didn't draft him anywhere near when he should have.

Obviously, the Dodgers didn't draft Mike Piazza anywhere near where they should have. The Angels, on the other hand, actually did draft him when they should have, which was essentially the first chance they have. Not literally so, but they would have. They have said, and I believe, that he was actually number two on their draft board and so they would have drafted him second overall

if they could have up behind Strasburg I think the Yankees maybe said they had him in their top three if I remember right I might be remembering wrong but the Angels actually believed in him wholeheartedly so he wasn't like a thing that a team lucked into, but a thing that a team actually saw. And so maybe the compromise is that it's the Angels scouting report for him, which was presumably over the moon and has all sorts of great things in it. Well, and it's one of those strange ones where, you know, in hindsight, like Mike Trout's the best, might be the best baseball player ever. And so you think he should have gone 1-1.

But Steven Strasburg at 1-1 is a perfectly defensible first overall pick. So I'm not unsympathetic to your argument, Ben. I think it's a good argument, but I also know that by engaging with Mike Trout from a draft perspective, I get to forever, in my version of the Hall of Fame, wonder if the Mariners would have messed him up. So that's a fun little bit of self-loathing for me to get to engage with forever.

I thought it'd taken the jersey that he wore to the draft because he was there. I think it's cute that he was actually there and no one else was there, partly for geographic reasons, but also because he's Mike Trout and he loves baseball and, of course, he's going to be there. Well, he doesn't do that many public appearances maybe, but that one he did. Man, this 2009 draft. I know we talk about it, but we should talk about it more. Anyway, that's not the purpose of this exercise, But what a what a draft you guys what a draft.

be winning the MVP award, but doesn't that year. And so I thought, well, I could take the, you know, his actual MVP award when he did win, except those are kind of actually in his slightly lesser years, just by chance. They don't give you a plaque for second place in 2012, which is what I would really want. I'm picking one. Here's what I'm picking. I am picking the jersey, the opening day jersey that he would have worn for the first game of the 2020 season. And it is, I think, a way of recognizing the greatness of Mike Trout's career right now, up to now, by noting that because of the coronavirus, because of what is going to be certainly a significant portion of the season lost, maybe the entire season lost, maybe the entire season, maybe part of next year. We just have no idea.

But the era of saying Mike Trout is the greatest of all time through this age ended that day that he didn't play. He started losing games on Ty Cobb, on Mickey Mantle, on Alex Rodriguez, on other players who were similarly precocious, but never as good as him. He now has this lost period in the middle of his prime. I mean, it doesn't speak at all to how great Mike Trout is or that he is a entirely historic figure and that he is the greatest that we have seen in decades. But it means that probably the outside chance, although not that outside chance, of him getting the all-time home run record

becomes much more of a long shot. The chances of him getting 4,000 hits, the outside chance of that, more of a long shot. The chances of him getting 160 whatever war, more of a long shot, because this isn't just time that he's missed, but it might be a significant time, amount of time, it might be a whole year, and it's right in the middle of his peak. And it

has the benefit of, as far as historical documents go, it both, you know, is a Mike Trout document, but also, you know, something about a pretty significant year in the history of baseball. You wonder whether we will end up looking at this as a year where a lot of things change when we come back. Maybe we don't even see how big the changes are immediately, but over the course of decades, we see that 2021 was a real pivot point for certain styles of play or ways to play. I mean, you just think about if they don't, we don't know yet what will happen with this year, but let's just hypothetically say that there's no 2020 season. Then 2021, you have a really weird situation where there's twice as many rookies and the great rookies are half of them are a year older. And so you have a bunch of like the top prospects are going to be debuting a year later. Are you going to end up having a real youth movement? Are you going to have twice as many retirements? Are you going to have like, I don't know, you it is going to be kind of an odd year for just for personnel. And then you add on to that the effects of inactivity,

the effects of different rules changes that might need to be put into place to to acknowledge the risk of illness and all that. And so you just, I don't know, I feel like something from the COVID era is probably going to be seen as necessary for this era as well. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, my only other option for him really, and there were a few plays that came to mind, like his catch at Camden Yards off, who is it, J.J. Hardy, I think, and the one that he robbed off of Yelich last year

so a glove from one of those maybe but I don't know he's not necessarily the best ever at robbing homers he's pretty good at it but maybe like one of the pitches he hit out in some improbable location like when he hits a ball that's you know six inches off the ground and he hits it out, or maybe like the home run he hit on the first day back at Angel Stadium after Tyler Skaggs died. That was a monster home run and obviously emotionally significant. But the only one that I really considered seriously, and I opted against it because it just seemed like sort of a stretch, but to me it sort of does typify Trout, is the ball that he threw last year from the out a single play on a baseball field, as opposed to just steady excellence, a single play where I thought, wow. And there were times earlier in his career where he just didn't look like he should be able to run as fast as he did. But

that play, I think, was so impressive and so emblematic of Trout because his whole thing has been that he's good at everything and whatever he's least good at he becomes good at he just sets his mind to and says this is my weakness or my relative weakness i'm going to practice that thing and i'll be great at it and that was like the only knock the only slight you could make against him was that he had a below average arm probably and you couldn't quite call him a 5-2 player because he didn't really have the arm. And he really worked on the arm and the throwing and strengthened the shoulder. And that's not one of those skills that you're usually believed to be able to improve by that much. But he uncorked this throw that was just like a laser, and it's clearly something he's worked on for years.

And I don't know if you can call his arm a tool now, but I think it's at least an average arm. And so he identified whatever weakness he had and eliminated it. And that ball sort of symbolizes that almost like machine learning aspect to him, where he just gets great at everything, even if he's not great at it to begin with. And I also like that because it was last year, and that would have allowed me to preserve a 2019 baseball in my exhibit, which I considered just taking a 2019 baseball. The only reason I didn't was that we can't be sure yet that that actually is the peak of the home run rate era. And so if we had done this two years ago, I might have saved a 2017 baseball. And now who cares about a 2017 baseball? No historical significance to that.

So I think we have to wait just to make sure that 2019 is as high as the homer rate is ever going to get before I could feel comfortable. But I liked having that as a backup. Yeah, I would have gone with the catch in his rookie year on the JJ Hardy ball because it was his rookie year. And that year, more than any other point in Mike Trout's career, that's the year that I will always remember. And if I could only save one year of any player of any player in the 40 years I've been alive

almost, I would pick Mike Trout's rookie year. All right. Well, I guess we got through this. This was fun. Apologies to, I don't know, what have we left out? Kirk Gibson's bad and Joe Carter's bad. And I it's in the pbs hall of fame for sure but i don't know what else i thought about like something with eric greg's notorious game i don't know is there anything else that you you almost took i had no i have no other i have no list of of honorable mentions okay yeah i've brought up all my honorable mentions.

I mean, yeah, there are like landmark things that we are missing, but I think that we went, good job team, we all were inclined to the same thing, which is stuff that typified an era rather than like an individual player's accomplishments necessarily apart from Trout

because he's Mike Trout. draft you guys you know it's like you know when you know a thing is good and then you re-engage with it briefly and you're like wowsers that's that's the way i feel every time i look at the 2009 draft we're just like wow what a draft yeah yeah yeah there's some good names on there maybe the 2009 draft should be in our hall of fame anyway we should go all right that was fun thank you for listening feel free to share your hall of fame fives via email or in the facebook group and enjoy baseball being back on tv kbo is on espn and if you're interested in getting up to speed on Korean baseball, check out the primer we did on the KBO and the CPBL just recently, episode 1533. You could also go back to last year's episode 1323 when Jeff and I did an interview with Sungmin Kim about the KBO.

Lots of KBO content on the podcast and on your screen. You can support Effectively Wild 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. Patrick Houlihan, Sam Cunningham, Eric Peters, Dino Champlone, and Randall Woodford. Thanks to all of you. You can join the aforementioned Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Your reviews and ratings are appreciated.

Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam entering our inbox at podcast.fangraphs.com. You can also message us via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can pick up a paperback copy of my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It includes a new afterword, as does the digital edition of the book. We will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you a little later this week. What do we do with this history now? Do we go in like a surgeon? Do we go in with boots on the ground? What do we do with this history now?

Do we go in like a surgeon? Do we go in like a bomb?