Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1539: It’s Not the Destination, it’s the Journeyman

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about an aggressive umpiring demotion in the KBO, FanGraphs adding KBO stats, and the pleasures of falling asleep with baseball on in the background. Then (16:30) they talk to former lefty pitcher Andy Van Hekken, who pitched professionally for 21 seasons across nine countries, about being one of the […]

🎵 Music 🎵 It's nothing to cry about Cause baby, baby you're out Hello and welcome to episode 1539 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am doing well, how are you? Doing alright. Cool. Did you see the news about the KBO umpiring crew that was demoted for being bad at umpiring? No.

So this is something that happened just after the first few games here, and I'm reading from tweets by Daniel Kim, who reports on the KBO, and he says, KBO demotion alert. After the Hanwha Eagles veteran, Yong-Kyu Lee, complained about inconsistent strike calling by the umps in first three games of the season, KBO announced that the entire crew for the series will be sent down to minors. And then it continues,

KBO brought a new director of umpires to oversee the entire umpire operations prior to the start of the season. New director is clearly sending new message to all the umps in the league. Get the call right or you will be sent down. This process was long overdue, if you ask me, Daniel says. And then there's another tweet where he says, I spoke to a couple of players not on the Eagles about the home plate umpire that was demoted to the minors today. Terrible and arrogant were two words players used in describing the crew so sam was talking on our last episode about how he was

sort of surprised by some of the strike calling in the game that he saw and i don't know if that was this game or not but evidently harsh consequences if you get the calls wrong in the KBO these days. Wow. You know, that's so few games. That's just so few games to make a decision like that. I mean, it sounds like perhaps this home plate umpire maybe has a bit of a reputation. If we encountered the Joe West of the KBO. It sounds like it. Yeah.

Except that the Joe West of the majors, the actual Joe West does not get demoted when he does something that is not great. But that is probably why this sort of thing is possible and why you do get some arrogant umpires on occasion in majors. And the consequences there tend not to be quite as immediate or strict. But, yeah, that's pretty striking. Wow. That's speedy. They are speedy. Wow.

Yeah. They act quickly. And the whole crew, not just the home plate ump, the whole crew got sent down. Right. My goodness, what a collective action problem. Wow, that's... I know. That's high pressure if you're the ump in these games now. It's like you better not blow a call or you're gone.

So, yeah. Wow. We're going to have to litigate a whole robo ump thing in the KBO. And Ben, I don't know if I have the energy for that, but I guess that's what we're in for, perhaps. Yeah, could be. Yeah, I don't know if they have a grading system over there like we do in MLB with the review based on PitchFX or TrackMan or StackCast now, where umpires get graded on their performance and how closely they called pitches in the strike zone and they get a printout after games and over a long enough period if

you're consistently not great at that you definitely get feedback and pointers and i think the assignments for certain marquee games and all-star assignments and postseason assignments at least supposedly are based in part on your accuracy in those systems so i don't know if they were able to confirm that these umpires were actually as terrible as they were right used to being i mean i know that they have track men there and presumably they could check that so maybe that was part of this and it wasn't just the players because i guess you wouldn't want it just to be players complain, and then the umpires get sent down because players always complain about umpires, and they are not always right.

So I hope it's based on more than that. I assume so. Yeah, they are famously unreliable narrators when it comes to the strike zone. And you would imagine that there just has to have been some pre-existing issue with this particular umpire or crew because it's just not enough even if you have like you i'm not quite sure exactly what their setup is for providing feedback but even if you had a pretty robust setup you you wouldn't think that it would be a sufficient sample of games to feel confident that you were taking you were justified in taking such a strident action. I mean, I realized that it's it's a little bit larger of a sample than you might think, because it's not really how many games, it's how many pitches you've seen within the course of that game, right? So you have something of a better idea. But I still wouldn't think that that's sufficient to say, oh, that, you know,, oh, you need a refresher on the strike zone down in the minor leagues.

That seems very draconian. So I wonder if we're about to learn that there have been other issues with this particular crew or this particular ump, because otherwise, my goodness, seems like a very strong reaction in such a short span of time. Yeah. I saw something that says that they were sent down for quote-unquote retraining which oh my gosh yeah sounds sinister it sounds like some kind of clockwork orange scenario where they're just like watching pitches over and over

again until they're conditioned to call them right but goodness yeah it must be based on more than just this sample of games or maybe it it was like Eric Gregg level, truly terrible. And, you know, I don't know if like the fact that the KBO is getting all of this international exposure right now and is on ESPN. I don't know whether there's extra pressure. Like we have to, you know, look like we are a competent league here. We can't have shoddy umpires when yeah all of these foreign viewers are getting introduced to us for the first time i don't know but yeah that's uh it's definitely different there are some things that are very similar about the kpo and mlp but some things that are different

and this is one of them oh my goodness wow wow how's your international baseball viewing experience been going? Ben, it feels so good. You know, I and I think it is important for us when we're talking about how good it feels to, of course, be mindful that the broader circumstances that allowed for the KBO to return are very different than the circumstances we find ourselves in here. return are very different than the circumstances we find ourselves in here because it's gosh it's really tempting to give in to how good it feels to have live baseball with stakes on again the first night and you know i'm at something of an advantage or i was that first evening being in the pacific time zone because while it was still quite a late start here even and of course one that was delayed further by a rain delay, it was a reasonable time to be awake. You know, it was like a normal person awake time instead of Ben Lindbergh awake time.

And so I, you know, I watched for a while, but then I started to doze off on the couch because it had been a busy day and I was up later than I normally am. And so around 1230, I, you know, I had that falling asleep to the sound of baseball thing. And I, I perked up and took myself to bed so that I wouldn't, you know, end up spending the evening on the couch, but it felt so good to fall asleep to baseball and be like, Oh, I gotta, I gotta get up. You know, I wasn't about to see the MLB TV, this event is over. Thank you for watching screen, but it wouldn't have been so far off of that. So that was nice. And I have appreciated the opportunity to kind of get to know a whole new set of players and to get to know a set of players that I'm familiar with in a different context, right? Like I'm amped for Dixon Machado, like let's go. So, so that's been, that's been great fun.

We lamented on our last episode that featured just you and I, how we had been missing baseball. And it is, it is not quite the same as having players that I know better and can recognize in quarter profile when they, you know, trudge out of the dugout, which I don't know if that's a skill, but it's a something I have. And I can't do that with the KBO just yet because I don't know the player pool as well. But it feels very good to have baseball back. It's a good sport, you know, Ben, like baseball. It's good.

Yeah, we're on the same page there yeah i have also just very lately and now it's something that everyone can enjoy had that viewing experience enhanced by the fact that fangraphs now has kbo stats yeah yeah awesome that's a great addition i gotta say i'm not involved in any editorial capacity with fangraphs obviously but you all have really been kind of killing it, I think, when it comes to KBO coverage. I mean, even going back to when Sungmin Kim was writing for the site way before,

it was cool for everyone here to be watching KBO, but especially in the last couple of weeks with all the primers and now stats, WRC Plus for KBO players. Yeah, we have player pages up right now. They are searchable both by Roman characters and then also Korean characters. So hopefully we can, you know, share some fan graphs love with folks abroad who might be searching in Korean. And we will have additional stats, sort of a more robust stat package in the next couple of days.

So definitely keep your eyes peeled for that. And of course, one of the ways that people like to interact with stats for any baseball season is in leaderboards. Leaderboards. So we'll have leaderboards soon too. Those should go live next week. So big tip of the hat to David Appelman and Sean Dolinar who were able to get all of this stuff live in like a week and a half. Just really spectacular. So I hope that that helps to sort of not only enhance people's enjoyment of the KBO experience because they'll be able to navigate it using something that they're used to, but also get to know players a bit better. And the names will hopefully start to become more familiar, and they'll be easier to reference.

So we're really excited about that, and we hope it's something that folks enjoy. Yep. One of the many reasons to support fan crafts. An excellent reason. Yeah, really good reason to become a member or to gift a membership if you already have one. We're not sitting idly by waiting for MLB to come back. We're going to keep plugging away at baseball, whatever form and whatever league it's in. you already have one we're not sitting idly by waiting for mlb to come back we're gonna keep plugging away at baseball whatever form and whatever league it's in so hopefully this helps folks to enjoy the kbo a little bit more well we just got to know another new player player we weren't that familiar with and like dixon machado he is a former detroit tiger but we are about to

bring you an interview with andy Hecken, who is kind of the quintessential crafty lefty, and he plied his trade for more than 20 years as a professional pitcher, retired pretty recently after the 2018 season, and he did it in nine different countries and in many different leagues, and he is one of the fairly limited sample of players to have played professionally in Taiwan and in South Korea and also in Japan and also in other countries, as we will talk to him about. So he was in the big leagues in 2002 with the Tigers. He spent some time in the organizations of the Mariners and the Reds and the Braves and

the Royals and the Astros as well. And then he went overseas and he had quite an interesting career and really put the journey in journeyman. We figured since he was a member of the leagues that we're all getting to know right now, he'd be a great person to introduce them to us. And I got a little bit of data here because I was curious about whether he is actually the most traveled pitcher in history or at least on record. And I asked Baseball Reference and Kenny Jacklin, who is one of the data people over there, if he could send me a list of the players who had played in the most countries, at least with data in Baseball Reference's database. And Andy Van Hecken has seven countries played in according to baseball

reference. So he did pitch a game in Toronto when he was with the Tigers. So technically, he pitched in Canada, and he was on the US World Cup team and pitched in Panama. So those are a couple countries that are not counted in this search. But he pitched in the Dominican Republic and Japan and Korea and Mexico and Taiwan and the U.S. and Venezuela. And that puts him in like a 14-way tie for the second most countries of anyone in the baseball reference database. There is only one man in that database who has pitched in more countries, and it is Darwin Kubian who pitched in eight. And it is Darwin Kubian who pitched in eight. And he has the edge on Andy because he pitched in San Marino, which I was not aware that there was San Marino baseball reference data. But there is. San Marino has a team in the Italian League and Darwin Kubian pitched there.

So he is on top. But Andy Van Hecken appears to be the most well-traveled U.S.-born player. There's only one other U.S.-born player on this list, Gary Burnham, and he never made the majors. And so among U.S.-born players, and certainly among U.S.-born players who made the majors, he appears to have played professionally in the most countries that Baseball Reference has records for. So maybe he can un-retire and play in Italy or Australia

or somewhere to equal Kubian. But even as it is, he really is one of the most well-traveled players ever. And he's going to tell us about his long career. And it was a fun conversation, I think. Yeah, for sure. And then we will be bringing you a second interview. So this interview... I feel like doing the Jaws theme. I know. So we will

prepare you for this one. So there is an article that came out this week in Slate that was called Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball? And it's by Leander Sherlockens. And he did a deep dive into some of the claims that President Trump has made about his own amateur baseball career. And he kind of did a pull-it-a-fact check on those baseball claims. And he came up with a pretty good picture, I think, of Donald Trump's career as a high school baseball player. He looked up some records. He talked to some of his teammates. And we weren't sure whether to talk about this on the podcast, even though we both enjoyed

the article and were interested in the investigation, just because we tend to keep this not a politics-free zone, but we talk about politics as it relates to baseball. And it often does in many ways. There is a fair amount of overlap there, but we know that some of you want to tune out the president or politics in general and want to use this podcast as sort of an oasis from all of that. And so we had some discussions about it, but this is very much about baseball. It's relevant to baseball. It is entirely focused on baseball. And if you just don't want to hear anything that could even border on national affairs and current events on Effectively Wild, then we stuck it at the end of the episode. So you can listen to Andy and then you can cut out if you feel like it. But

it's a fun conversation, I think, and an illuminating one also. So we will be back in just a moment with Andy Van Hecken to talk about his incredible career. I take it as it comes, I don't look, I don't find I take it as it comes, I don't look, I don't find All right, we are joined now by former left-handed pitcher Andy Van Hecken, who began his life and career in West Michigan and is now back in West Michigan. But in between the beginning and the end of his playing career, he managed to pitch professionally in nine countries, the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Dominican, Venezuela, Panama, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. He also pitched for six major league organizations, including the Tigers

in the big leagues, and relevant to what we're all paying attention to today. He pitched in the KBO. He also pitched in the CPBL and the NPP. So we thought he'd be a great person to talk to about some of these leagues that U.S. fans are familiarizing themselves with. So Andy, hi, and you must be exhausted. No, I'm feeling good. Thanks for having me on. It's good to talk to you guys.

Yeah, well, we're excited too because you must be one of the most well-traveled players out there. I wonder whether you are aware of anyone or have played with anyone else who you think rivals your travels in professional baseball. Yeah, I'm not sure. I was curious, you know, once I finished up, I did hear there was a small list of guys

that hit all three Asian countries, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. I think there was 13 or 14 of us. But yeah, I was curious if any of those guys had hit Mexico at all to see if there was an even smaller list. But yeah, it's obviously a unique route that I took, but I wouldn't have changed it for the world. It was all great experiences, and I had a lot of fun. it for the world. It was all great experiences and I had a lot of fun. A lot of different things, whether it's money or increased playing time or just a desire for a new experience in a different place can lead players to seek opportunities in foreign

professional leagues. And I'm curious if you can tell our listeners what motivated you to make that initial leap and then kept you going back as you traveled through different leagues over the years? Right. Yeah, that's always kind of a question with people who are friends or family and, you know, you tell them you're going to go overseas to play and they don't quite understand why or, you know, I was kind of in AAA for a couple of years and pitching pretty well. And I thought I had been pretty close to being called up, but it never happened with the Astros. And yeah, so the opportunity came along in the off season in Korea,

made an offer and it was not a very easy decision because like I said, I had pitched pretty well and I was obviously trying to get back to the big leagues and I thought I was very close. But at that time I was, I think 32 years old and, you know, I'd had ups and I thought I was very close but at that time I was I think 32 years old and you know I'd had ups and downs I'd been an independent ball for a couple years kind of struggling to get by and you know just trying to get back into a major league system with a team and thankfully I got hooked back up with Astros and started pitching better. And, you know, like I said, kind of got in the conversation of maybe getting a call up at some point, but it didn't happen. So yeah, like I said, it was a tough decision, but being my age and that it hadn't happened yet with the

Astros, I thought that the best decision for me in my life was to go to Korea and try and make some money. The other thing with going over there at that time was when you sign the contract, it's guaranteed for the whole season. So you're going to get paid for the whole season, no matter if you get hurt or have a bad year and get released, which if you sign a minor league deal and you get released, you know, that's it. You're, you know, you're not getting paid anymore. So that was kind of a big

factor as well. So I wanted to go back to the beginning of your pro career. I mean, you were drafted in the third round by the Mariners and then they traded you about a year later to the Tigers. And you were a top 10 prospect in the Tiger system in 2001 and 2002. And you won the most minor league games of any pitcher in those two seasons combined, according to Baseball America. And then you come up in September 2002 and rosters expand. You start off with a bang with the complete game shutout, and you finish off that month with a three ERA. So at that point, I imagine you weren't imagining the trajectory that your career would take. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm sure it's been more interesting and more positive than it might have been if it had been kind of a conventional career.

But what happened, I guess, in the years after that, that what you were probably envisioning at that point, well, I made the team, I did well, I'll be back next year and I'm a young guy and I'm just getting started in the majors. I guess what kind of took you all over the place in the years after that yeah yeah obviously I think I was 23 made it to the big leagues and had success right away but yeah I had every intention to make the team out of spring training that season I did get called up. I had pitched probably 60 more innings maybe than my previous high. So I was just, even when I was in the big leagues, my arm felt pretty terrible, but you know, I had pitched well in AAA and got called up. And of course, you know, I'm not going to miss the opportunity to pitch in the big leagues.

And I was able to pitch well through it despite not having my best stuff and not feeling my greatest. So I kind of gutted through the rest of the year and ended up pitching well. And yeah, figured on coming back strong next year and earning a spot in the rotation. But I came back to spring training and just my arm didn't feel very well I didn't really have any life on the ball and I was getting hit around really bad I mean I had a terrible spring training and just you know got sent down to triple a and continued to struggle down through the spring and ended up getting sent even down to double a that year and started to pitch a little bit better but so yeah, yeah, I just kind of,

I was never able to get my velocity back up and just kind of struggled with, you know, what to do physically and just kind of had, you know, questioned my ability and had questions of what I should do, what I shouldn't do, and just kind of struggled around for a couple of years and ended up getting into independent ball for a couple of years. ended up getting into independent ball for a couple of years. And yeah, I ended up, that's when the Astros kind of came and they had some, some old Tiger personnel that were now in the Astros organization that knew who I was. And they kind of knew I was at that point, I was kind of on the veteran side of things, and they brought me in to kind of be a veteran around some of the younger pitchers they had in their system

to try and lead by example, I guess, and do the best they could to help them out. And then I kind of hooked up with one of my old coaches from high school who had been developing some workouts workouts and some pitching specific things that I had never really done before and in the off season really got after it and worked hard and increased my velocity by like five or six miles an hour and you know kind of put myself back on the radar with the Astros and got up to AAA. And like I said earlier, started to pitch well, and that's kind of where I got the interest of Korea and some other foreign leagues. And it's kind of a short version of a very long path I had for a while.

And what was that scouting and recruiting process like for you? I think that that's something that American audiences just have a poor sense of. I assume you were approached by the team. What were your conversations like with them in terms of not only what your role would be on the field, but what the adjustment might be like for you off the field moving to a new country? Yeah. So I think I was down in Venezuela when my agent called me and said, there might be an opportunity in Korea. And if I was interested, agent called me and said there might be an opportunity in Korea and if I was interested and I said definitely yes and you know I hadn't really talked to them you know they had come and scouted me during the season during the summer and see me pitch one of my best games thankfully and so they contacted my agent and made an offer and you know ultimately decided to do that but

yeah we didn't I didn't get a chance to talk to him until I signed my contract. And yeah, I was able to, at that time there was only two foreign players on a team. Now they've upped it to three. So the other foreign player that was signing back with the team I signed with was Brandon Knight, who I actually had played with before.

So I was able to talk to him during the offseason, and he gave me kind of an idea of what to expect and what they expect of me. And it was key for my success in the KBO to have Brandon there to kind of show me the way. And, you know, the coaches would tell you, you know, what they expect, and then he would come in and tell me some things or just kind of how to handle it. You know, there's some, sometimes there's some problems between coaches and foreign

players and a lot of foreign players don't exactly know how to take to some of the coaching over there can get a little, little intense sometimes. I think it's gotten much better recently. But Brandon was always good at telling me just how I should conduct myself. And it's normal to hear some of that stuff. So he was vital in my success over there. And at various points in your career in Korea, it was a pretty high offense league. I guess maybe not quite when you first got there, but certainly in subsequent seasons. And I know that's kind of come back a bit in the last little bit here because the ball has changed, but what was it like to pitch in that extremely high

scoring environment? Yeah, it was, it was a little crazy for a while there. Yeah. I think my first year was pretty normal. The. Our home stadium was the smallest stadium in the league. So that was fun some nights when the wind was blowing a certain way. But at the same time, we had a very, very good lineup, especially in 2014. I think we had four, maybe even five guys with 20 plus home runs. So I definitely had the help from my offense but yeah just kind of learning to keep the ball down more than I ever had and yeah like like you said the some of the the balls were a little jumped a little bit more than the others and back then they had different balls for different stadiums so our ball was used in I think three, three different stadiums. And then there are a couple different more stadiums that you could actually, the teams could choose from about five different brands which ball they wanted to use.

So thankfully, I think four or five years ago, they got rid of that and they went to one uniform ball. So I think that's helped out quite a bit. uniform ball. So I think that's helped out quite a bit. So American baseball fans who are watching KBO baseball now aren't getting to enjoy this because of the pandemic related precautions they're taking in ballparks, but the KBO is famous for its atmosphere and the sort of excitement and enthusiasm of its fans. I'm curious what it was like pitching in front of fans like that, both when you got to enjoy your home park, but then also when you were on the road and how much time it took for you to adjust. I imagine after playing in the U.S., it was quite an adjustment. Yeah, obviously it's a huge difference, especially coming from the minor leagues where it's even quieter in a lot of parks.

But yeah, you get there and it's just nonstop music and singing and cheering, especially our team. We were one of the smaller crowds, so we would go on the road and it would just be, you know, everybody was for the other team most of the time. But yeah, at first it was definitely a little jarring being out there and just having speakers blasting music at you. And they are just, they're nonstop. Even if it's 11 to 1 in the ninth inning, they're still going. If they're behind, like, they just keep going. They came to the game to have fun and sing and be with their friends.

And that's what they're going to do until the very end. So, you know, at first, you're you know kind of like are these people crazy what are they you know they're down by 10 runs there's two outs in the ninth like just go home you know be quiet whatever but you know you learn to appreciate it you're like wow these are very dedicated fans and they're enjoying the time so with a lot of things I just came to appreciate every all the differences between America and Korea but yeah yeah, it was a huge difference. I got very used to it to a point where there's actually a tragedy over there. I forgot what year it was, but they actually, out of respect, stopped all the music and cheering for a couple months

to kind of mourn the, it was a ferry crash with a lot of school children and a lot of people ended up losing their lives it's a lot of respect they they cut all the music out for a few months and it was actually it was that was actually more of adjustment because it was so quiet I was like man this is really weird sure but yeah it was I got used to it I learned to love it it's a shame that um that part of the game can't be shown now on TV in Korea because that is a huge part of it. It's a very fun atmosphere to play in and be a part of. Yeah, I was going to ask if you've had a chance to watch any of this season

and what it's been like for you to see these stadiums empty and still have the cheerleaders and some of the mascots, but have them devoid of fans? Yeah, it's odd. I've gotten a chance to watch a couple games for a little while here on ESPN. First of all, it's fantastic to see games on ESPN over here. Yeah. Yeah. I wish it was under different circumstances, but yeah, it's a little odd having the stadiums empty, you know, and see some of the umpires and coaches have masks on and all that. But I'm thankful they get to play. You know, I know some of the foreign players over there still,

and they had to go through some quarantining stuff. And, you know, it's difficult for their families to get over there and and figure all that out but i'm glad they at least uh get to play the games and and have that sense of normalcy in their lives but yeah hopefully hopefully the fans can can slowly get back i don't know what their plan is for that but hopefully at some point they can start getting some fans in and can get back to normal But like I said I'm glad they're playing At least. I was watching a video

Some KBO highlights from a few years ago And one of the other American pitchers Who has pitched in NPB And CPBL and KBO Chris Seddon was pitching And he gave up a homer And there was a big bat flip against him And he looked very displeased Maybe about a homer, and there was a big bat flip against him, and he looked very displeased, maybe about the homer,

but also about the bat flip perhaps. And I don't know, maybe he was just having a bad day, or maybe that bothered him all the time. But I am curious about your reaction to that when you got over there and saw that celebration that certainly at that time, at least in the U.S., was not quite as common. Right, yeah, that's one of the things, you know, again, that my teammate helped me out with because, yeah, most Americans come over to Korea and, you know, they see that

and it's just a huge disrespect to them and to the other team. And, you know, they can't why why they do it or why they get away with it you know it's you know you do that over here the next guy's gonna hit get hit or or the guy who hit the home run is gonna get hit the next time around but yeah it's just kind of like shrugged off and that's part of the game and it takes a lot of guys a long time to get over that and uh yeah i i typically didn't care too much you know i was always mad about the pitch or whatever and i it you know you just kind of have to and it's hard too when your teammates are doing the same thing so it's like you know you may not like it but it's hard to like get mad at the at the guys when your your teammates are doing the

same thing so i mean it's kind of have to kind of overlook it. It's hard sometimes, but yeah, it's just, it's part of their game and it's what they do and you just kind of have to deal with it. I'm curious, you know, you had a long and successful career overseas. Obviously we see players go from MLB over to the leagues in Asia every year. Were there any traits that you noticed among other foreign-born players and yourself that you all had in common that sort of helped you to both acclimate to a new living situation and also to a new league? If you were giving advice to players in AAA right now who might be looking to extend their careers overseas, what advice

would you give them in terms of the right approach to both the league and sort of adjusting to living in a new country? Yeah, that's a good question. I've been asked that by, you know, front office people in Korea, you know, what should we look for for guys, like you said, to come over and just be successful because that's such a big part of, you know, being over there is not only being successful on the field, but adapting to culture and just adapting to living in a new place, you know, and having your family there. If that's if that's a if you have a family, if they're coming over there, you know, I we didn't have kids. And I know a lot of guys have kids over there so figuring all that out is such a big part of it I think for me it was helpful I went to Dominican and played some winter ball

I went to Mexico before going to Korea and played a little bit over there so I had some experience while it wasn't very long you know it's like I think I was in Dominican for a month and a half. It helped just tremendously to see, to kind of adapt to the way they do things. It's easy to be in America. That's what we're used to, but to be in a different country and see how the players and coaches handle themselves

and what they expect of you. And then, like I said, living in a different place and just figuring out on your own how to cook and get food and just get around can be challenging at times. So having that little bit of experience and just be open to it. A lot of guys that do struggle over there with all that are little maybe closed-minded I would say and aren't very open to trying new things and you know giving a different approach or a different way to do things. I think those guys typically struggle and don't last very long. So having a little bit of experience somewhere else if you can with winter ball and just being having an open mind and be willing to try something and you and your wife have been together since you were with the tigers and i wonder how often she was able to accompany you to all these countries and what sort

of adjustment that was for her and i guess how important it was for you to have her with you. Yeah. So Korea, we were able to work in the contract that she could get. I think first year we got like three round trip tickets for her. So, so she came after spring training at some point and she would stay anywhere from a month to six weeks and then go back home for a month or so. And then she would come back and join me for another six weeks. So yeah, it's, it can be tough for families. Like I said, we get to go to the field and do what we love every day. And sometimes, you know, they kind of have to stick back at the apartment or do whatever, kind of keep themselves busy. So for us, that worked the best for her to be there, you know, like I said, for a month or six weeks.

And it was, you know, she was ready to go home and see her family and, you know, be in America for a little while. And then it was good to have her come back. And obviously that always helped me when she came back and just kind of, you know, boost my spirits and, you know, have somebody in my corner again and have somebody to do somebody to go out to dinner with and all that little stuff. That's pretty much the way we handled it with Japan as well when I was in Taiwan. She's been great. She's followed me all over the world, and it's worked out well for us. I know you learned a forkball at some point, and that's a pitch that's become pretty rare in the big leagues,

but seems to be a bit more common in Asian baseball. Did you learn it here or there? And what did it do for you? And why do you think it's not more common here in the States? I actually learned my forkball when I was in Toledo with Jeff Jones, was our pitching coach who later on went to the Tigers and was their pitching coach for a long time but yeah I was messing around with a split finger and forkball different grips and I was you know like I told you earlier my velocity kind of dropped so I

my strikeouts went way down and so I you know we were kind of messing around the bullpen and I kind of showed him or something, and he showed me the grip that I ended up using. And yeah, so it ended up being a really good pitch for me back then, and then I kept throwing it and was able to make it a pretty decent strikeout pitch. Korea made me really perfect it because I was, you know, it was hard to control, but sometimes I'd leave it up and the hitters over there,

such great contact hitters, you know, they'll just follow off pitches nonstop and it just heats up your pitch count. So I was really able to learn how to bury it and dislocate it much better. And I really worked on that a lot and it ended up being a really good pitch for me there. I'm thankful I learned it. It saved my career in the States here, and then ended up being a very good pitch for me overseas.

As we've discussed, you have experience in both of the professional leagues that are currently up and running now, but my understanding is that your first tour through the CPBL in Taiwan was pretty unusual and that you were there when the league was in the midst of a game fixing scandal. So I'm curious if you can talk to us about what it was like playing there and how you saw that scandal sort of manifesting in real time has to be a pretty unusual experience. Yeah, it was very unfortunate. Yeah, I got there. I didn't ever, I never heard about it until after I had gotten there. And, you know, I guess there had been some, some issues in the past and then, you know, I didn't think too much of it. It sounded like it

was over with for the most part. And, and then I think we had made it to the playoffs and something had come out in the newspaper about possibly our team that had some players who were involved still. And yeah, that was just super tense. You start playing and then you see guys make errors and you just kind of question everything. And you're pitching and you're like, is this my catcher giving signs somehow? You know, it's just very uncomfortable and not an environment you want to try and perform in. And there's actually an incident with one of our other foreign players

where he had a bad game. I think he struck out a couple of times and made an error. And one of our Taiwanese coaches came over to him and started yelling at him because he thought he was like throwing a game or whatever you know game oh my gosh so yeah we had like three of i think three of us foreign players all trying to like hold our guy back and the taiwanese guys all you know kind of holding the coach back and it was like I it was just a horrible feeling I'm like I gotta get I gotta get out of here you know um but that was you know a crazy

experience and yeah I think the league after that season cut a few teams and yeah it just kind of really took a big toll on them and I think they, I think they still are paying for it a little bit. I know the league has gotten better. I haven't heard of any problems since then. So hopefully it's behind them because there are a lot of, there are a lot of really good players over there and it's a, it's a fun league to play in. But yeah, that was, that was crazy, but yeah, really unfortunate. And when you went back there more than 10 years later and you pitched in the

CPPL again in 2018, one of your last stops, did you find it to be much improved and did you enjoy that experience? Yeah, I did enjoy it. You know, it was a little crazy because there are only four teams. So you're playing against the same guys over and over. I mean, even the KBL only has 10 teams. So that's a little repetitive sometimes but yeah this is four teams but yeah like i said they have some some really good talent and we ended up making it to the final series and yeah it was it was a fun fun series they didn't give us much hope the team we played was was stacked and they had a really good lineup we ended up making it a decent series but yeah we ended up losing and but yeah, it was a fun experience. I had some good teammates and

had fun. Yeah, that was where I ended my career and wish we had won and gone out a winner, but unfortunately it didn't happen. But yeah, it was a fun way to end up my career. And how much did you adjust your pitching approach from place to place, either depending on the quality of the competition or maybe the strike zones differed in certain leagues? So did you try to get a scouting report on the players in that league or the umpires in that league? And did you do anything differently in terms of location or pitch selection or just overall strategy? Yeah, first learning the strike zone in Korea was, I would say the high strike was not called, especially on off-speed pitches.

So with my forkball was pretty, I guess, kind of loopy, you would say. So if I left it up in the zone, which I usually didn't try and do, and then they didn't end up calling it for a strike, I would get frustrated. But so learning that part of it was kind of a big deal. I mean, it's pretty similar, I guess, to the States besides that fact of the high strike.

But everywhere else was pretty similar. And then as far as learning hitters, that was something that helped me have success in Korea, I think. They have so much information available if you want it, as far as scouting, because they, they have notes on, you know, where, where every pitch was hit or where, you know, what pitch was taken, you know, where they hit it, you know, every, anything you need. So I started doing my own research and stuff like that on hitters. We had team meetings before every series, and they'd give us packets of all the information we wanted, and they had video on everybody we wanted.

So I really started doing that all on my own and really learning as much as I could about the hitters. And then that obviously helped me out a lot as far as game planning for guys. helped me out a lot as far as game planning for guys and so I had a pretty uh pretty thick notebook of how to how to approach guys and it helped me out when I was in Korea so unfortunately I wasn't in the other leagues as long so I wasn't able to do as much I tried to do as much as I could and get as much information on hitters because that always helped a ton as a pitcher like having a plan against the guy helped me out tremendously as as far as where I wanted to locate my pitches and if I had a if I had an idea of what I wanted to do I I executed my pitches so much better if I if a rookie or somebody I didn't know got up to the plate and I didn't know quite

know how to attack them I just I don't know, I never executed my pitches as well. So having an idea against the guys was was huge for me. move through them over the years? Were there some where they were sort of taking a similar approach to major league teams now and others where it was a more traditional sort of understanding of baseball? How did that vary league to league? Yeah. So when I was in the States, at least at the AAA level, they weren't quite getting into that yet. And then when I was in Korea, our team, I played with the heroes and they were one of the first teams to really get into the analytics. They hired somebody to do that. They were collecting a lot of that kind of information, but they hadn't really put it into practice. I think as soon as after my last year there, they started using a lot more shifts and a lot more matchups from the bullpen as far as lefty righty and just

based on all the information they had they had collected so they got a little more into that after I'd left but yeah my team the heroes are pretty advanced I would say and trying to keep up with what the U.S. is doing you know they they were called kind of the Oakland A's of Korea because they had kind of a smaller budget, but they would use as much information as they could, and they just tried to use every advantage they could to get wins, and they did a very good job of signing guys and using that sort of information during the game.

So, yeah, I think it's gotten a lot more prevalent over there. It was always kind of right after I was leaving that that kind of stuff was showing up. But it definitely would have been nice to get as much information as possible. So we came across kind of a hype video or a highlight reel about your time with Nexen, and it calls you the superhero and the all-time ace of Nexen heroes and I know that you set some records while you were there and I'm just kind of curious about what it meant to you to have that sort of reception or that standing with that franchise I mean I assume you didn't grow up dreaming of being an ace with the

Nexen heroes probably what you were dreaming of was what happened with the Tigers in 2002. But then life takes you down this other road and you end up excelling for this other team and this other community that really embraces you. So I wonder what that meant to you and if it was in its own way just as satisfying as sort of, you know, being the big league ace that you had maybe dreamed about being. Yeah, it's, you know, like you said, it's not what I necessarily set out to do when I was a young kid or even starting my career. But yeah, it was, it was a very, very special place to be and meant a lot, especially I think, you know, you go and play in the minor leagues for a long

time, like I did. Winning games is important, but when you get to the end of the season in the minor leagues, you've got half the guys who just want to go home, and half the guys are like, oh, let's go to the playoffs and see what happens. It's not ever a big thing, but in Korea, that's their major leagues, and you want to win a championship. In Korea, that's their major leagues, and you want to win a championship. I was lucky to be part of that team. When I got there, I think the year before, they were close to last place.

My first year, we were kind of middle of the pack. Then my next year, we made the playoffs. Then the year after that, we made the finals. then the after that we made the finals so we kind of gradually got better and better so that was really exciting and and just exciting to walk around town and all of a sudden you start seeing nexon hats and nexon jerseys and you could from year to year see the popularity of the team growing so that was really exciting to be a part of that we had some really good players um guys that came over here to the major leagues. Kang Jung-ho with the Pirates.

And Park Byung-ho ended up signing with the Twins and played a little bit in the big leagues with them. So they were kind of young superstars kind of building themselves up. And, you know, so I was able to be a part of that. And so, yeah, it was really cool to see the fans really start to gravitate towards our team. And, you know, obviously I had some success. I had some popularity over there, which was nice. But, you know, it was just weird walking down the street sometimes getting recognized in a huge city like Seoul.

And then coming home to how Michigan and nobody really knows who you are. It was totally fine with me, but it's just odd sometimes, um, being over there and getting recognized, you know, it's kind of neat, I guess, but, um, yeah, it was, it was, it was fun. I love their fans are tremendous and they, they will do anything for you. They love giving little gifts, whether it's just a coffee or any little thing they can think of. They just love giving gifts and showing their appreciation that way.

They have some great fans, and it was fun to get to know some of them through the years. Yeah, it was fun. Fun place to play. So I did want to ask about the language barrier, if it was a barrier. I mean, you sometimes hear that baseball is sort of a universal language, and I'm sure that's true to an extent. Baseball players have certain things in common, and maybe there are certain terms that are just generally understood and everyone understands how to play the game but you were still going to many different countries that speak many different languages and not just trying to communicate with your teammates but also just settle at home and get through life that way so did you pick up any languages on your

way were there any resources available to you in terms of translation or other teammates who could help out? How did you navigate that? Yeah, so I think every place had a translator for us. So, yeah, Korea, we had a translator that would be with us at the field. You know, as soon as we left the field, we were kind of on our own. as we left the field we were kind of on our own and we could call him if we needed to um or if we needed anything if we were in a taxi and we couldn't couldn't tell him which way to go or whatever he could help us out but um yeah most of most of the people in korea speak a little bit of english where you can kind of get by especially like at the restaurants you know you could either

just point at the menu or figure out some way to get your point across. Um, but they, most, most Koreans knew, um, some English. And yeah, I was unfortunately not able to learn to speak. I was able to learn how to read it, which did kind of come in handy because a lot of the words they've written on signs are, are in English, like an English word written in Korean. A lot of the times, especially like restaurants and stuff like that. So that was helpful. But yeah,

the translators were a huge help with coaches and, and, and the players and developing relationships with the players through your translator was, was good. But as far as, you know, the language of baseball, it is very similar. They get excited when you do well and you show that you're putting in effort and you're doing your best. They're very eager to be friends and be friendly with you as long as you're showing effort. So yeah, that was kind of an easy part.

It was pretty good. I haven't run through too many instances where the language barrier was that big of a problem, thankfully. And after your long and successful playing career, what are you up to now? Have you stayed connected to baseball? Are you pursuing professional opportunities there? Yeah, I've been kind of, you know, after I was done in 18, I kind of decided to stay around home most of the summer. I hadn't really been home since high school.

So it was nice to spend a summer in West Michigan here. But yeah, I've been kind of interested in possibly scouting, or that would probably be my number one choice, get into scouting. Coaching would be a possibility for me as well. But I've been mostly teaching lessons in Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids, Michigan. So we ended up getting some pretty cool equipment. We bought a Rapsodo machine and an Edgertronic camera this offseason. So we've been implementing that and helping kids out with that.

And we had a couple guys in the minor leagues from the area that we worked with all winter. And so that's been really cool to work with with that new equipment i know the big leagues and the minor league guys have been working with that um the last couple years it's been been kind of a big deal to use all that stuff and they're getting into all that information and slow-mo video so it's been fun to work with that and um so that's pretty much what i've been doing is a lot of a lot of lessons and trying to help kids out. Hopefully in the future, I would be very interested in scouting or doing something like that. So I guess just to finish up, when you look back at this 20-year odyssey that you had all over the planet playing baseball,

what are some of the moments that stand out the most to you other than the debut in Detroit? I guess just how much of your personal mental highlight reel is in overseas leagues and places that you never thought you would play. And I guess just how satisfied are you with the way it all worked out? Yeah, obviously the debut would be one of my highlights. It's funny. I look back and my career seems like two different careers. You know, when I was younger and made it up to the big leagues, and then it's almost like I mentally erased a couple of years there. But then when I was able to get back with Astros and then get over to Korea,

it was kind of my second half of my career. But yeah yeah the highlights would be like 2014 we we had a tremendous season as a team and we made it to the Korean series we should have should have won with all the talent we had we kind of we kind of you know blew it in a way but we had a great season I had a good good season personally. So pitching in the Korean series was a highlight of my career. It was so much fun and the crowd was just amazing. And that's what you want to do as a baseball player, pitching those games in that environment. And it was just very special. There's just kind of a collage of all the teams and all the places I was that just,

I can't really pick out another special moment. But just everything together was tremendous. And yeah, playing for 21 years is way beyond what I could have expected. And I'm very lucky and I'm very thankful for the length of time I got to do what I love and for all the experiences in different places. That's kind of, yeah, it's just a crazy experience. And I love getting to be in different countries and experience different cultures and something that I'll have forever. And I'm very thankful for.

All right. Well, we are thankful for you coming on and sharing these memories with us. And we wish you the best of luck with whatever your next step turns out to be. Thanks, Andy. All right. Yeah, thank you guys very to be. Thanks, Andy. All right. Yeah, thank you guys very much. Good talking to you. All right.

We'll be back in just a moment to now by Leander Sherlock. But we'll find out if it's true Alright, we are joined now by Leander Sherlockens. He attempted to answer the question, and I think did answer the question, was Donald Trump good at baseball? Hey, Leander. Hey, guys. How are you? We are doing well. So I want to ask you to summarize the claims that Donald Trump has made about his baseball career

for those who have maybe tried to tune out things that Donald Trump has made about his baseball career for those who have maybe tried to tune out things that Donald Trump says or have just been distracted by many of the other things that Donald Trump has said or just the pandemic in general. But also, I think we are curious about what motivated you to look into this and why you thought it was important to fact check this particular claim when so many other claims, many of them more consequential than this, have been fact checked and have turned out to be untrue? Well, I mean, there were several claims and it seemed like every time he made them, they got a little bit more outlandish. He said he was a great athlete in high school,

then it was the greatest athlete in his high school. This was the New York military Academy where he spent, uh, five years from five or six from 1958 to 1964 is the year he graduated. He got sent there as an unruly 13 year old to be straightened out, which was a very unconventional move for a rich New York city family to send their kid to NEMA, as it's pronounced. But he got sent there all the same. And as the years went by, the claims about what he'd been as an athlete seemed to get dialed up a little bit. Then at one point, he tweeted that he'd been the best baseball player in the state. In a essay he wrote for a book edited by Brian Kilmeade,

who was then and now a co-anchor of Fox & Friends, he said that he decided that he wasn't going to be a pro after all because he'd been to a tryout with Willie McCovey. Only problem there is Willie McCovey is eight years older than Trump and was an all-star the year that in Major League Baseball, the year that Trump was a senior in high school. So not so sure about that one. The White House never responded to a request for comment on that particular complication.

So he said that he was the greatest high school player in the state. he was the greatest high school player in the state. And so that's all kind of boilerplate, in a sense, and kind of part and parcel of the cult of personality that Trump created around himself. But what I think sets this apart from sort of the quotidian lies that he tells, right, just the political daily deluge of misinformation that we get, is that I think this is quite structural and foundational to the story that he tells about himself, about having been a success his entire life and having always been a winner and having always been great and better than everybody else. And the way that I got into reporting this story was I live about 20 minutes from Nima or what's

left of it. When Trump went there, it was sort of at its height. It had about 400 students between grades 6 and 12. So it was never a big school. It was never a particularly relevant or prestigious school, which again makes it weird that he went there in the first place. But now it's down to less than 100 students, and we'll have to see how they come out of the pandemic. But it's sort of been on life support for a long time. Ironically, it's now owned by a

Chinese billionaire who bought it at auction, which is funny when you consider Trump's history with China. But so it's not far from my house. And my wife's uncle, my wife's family's from the area here in the Hudson Valley. I'm from the Netherlands. But my wife's uncle went to a rival school nearby. And he was a star baseball player there, an actual star baseball player. He had like 580 or something his senior year. But so my father-in-law, my wife's uncle's brother said, you know, if you go to the local library, there's all this microfilm of all these old games. And I've been meaning to go down there and dig up all these stories about my brother. And then he says, you know, I bet you that you'd find some of Donald

Trump's old high school games because you had lots of local papers back then. And they'd cover the local schools, no matter how small. NEMA, again, was so small that it wasn't even in a conference. It just played a non-conference 10-game schedule. And then it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually follow up on that tip, which turned out to be a pretty good tip. But then one afternoon, I went down there and I found the microfilm, and it took me a little while to get to the right role. But there were all these games just sitting there, all these stories of Trump's high school glory or lack thereof. And for those who haven't had a chance to read your article yet, what evidence were you able to uncover concerning his baseball performance?

I imagine that not much of a comprehensive statistical record really exists, but what were you able to find about how he was as a baseball player? So I found 11 stories between two local papers, the Cornwall Local and the Newburgh Evening News, and then on newspapers.com, which is this comprehensive subscription website. I think it's run by the people who own Ancestry. I found a few more stories in neighboring papers when Nima had played away games and had been on the road

and played against the local teams there. So between those, I found 11 stories. Nine of those had box scores. And in those nine box scores, he hit a cumulative 138. It was four for 29, I believe. He had, I want to say, three runs scored and a run batted in or one RBI or three RBI in one run or something like that. Not great. And then from those box scores, I found enough names that I was able to, I started tracking down all the team, all the, the teammates from those three years that he was on the varsity. He did play 62, 63, 64 on the varsity team. It was a starter pretty much as, as a first baseman from the time he made the team as a sophomore.

So there's that. Then again, very small school where if you look in the yearbook, it's like everybody lettered in at least two sports. That was a very big part of NEMA at the time too. So Trump had a well-stocked sports section in his yearbook, but then so did everybody else. So he hit 138.

And so I started tracking down these teammates and it turned out that, you know, they are not all that different from any old man reminiscing about his, about his youth and about sports in that it seemed like the older they got, the better they were. They all remembered him as a, as a pretty good athlete, as a pretty good baseball player. Mostly they agreed that he was a better fielder than he was a hitter. Again, he was a first baseman, so make of that what you will. But so then when you compared that with the stats, and I'd sort of say, well, look, I found all these box scores and he hit 138. And they were like,

yeah, I guess maybe he wasn't that great. They seem to think he was like a good athlete at a small school in the middle of nowhere. And that was pretty much the extent of it, which of course does not square with the claim that he was the best high school player in the state. Oh, and I forgot the, the, the cherry on top is that he said on several occasions that he could have gone pro. And while he never said it himself, Donald Trump, that is, a former coach of his said that he was scouted by the Red Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies. I reached out to both teams. They said their scouting records don't go back that far. That does seem to be true. I don't think they were just trying to get out of answering the question because everything was done on paper

back then. And why would you keep your scouting reports from the mid-1960s? But I found no evidence of that. And I talked to the teammates. And out of the seven that I spoke to, six said, I don't remember ever seeing scouts. One said he might have. And so what was funny there is that this coach was never actually the varsity coach. And if you read the story, you'll see just the whole claim is just littered with so many inconsistencies as to kind of be hilarious. Yeah. So as you're trying to talk to people who were there, who saw this firsthand in an attempt to corroborate or refute these claims, I imagine that you have to be mindful of maybe the political positions of these people or their relationships to Trump. You're talking about a powerful person here. And some of these people may either have a bone to pick with him and have an interest in making him look bad. Others may be trying to curry favor with him and trying to

boost his accomplishments. So how did you sort of vet your sources? So that part of it was delicate, right? Because I didn't know where they stood, obviously, on the political spectrum. And the way I pitched it to them is very much the way I approached it, I think, honestly, is that I had no sort of partisan inclination. I have my own beliefs and my own political views, obviously. But I really did set those aside and said, OK, let's find out if this guy was good at baseball. And if he turned out that he hit 400 and that he really did turn down a pro career, that

would have been fine. And that's the story I would have written and good for him. But so they really ran the gamut. There were some former teammates who were clearly very protective of him and sort of considered themselves connected to him and are obviously political supporters too. There are others that were decidedly not that way, but I don't think that got in the way of anybody saying what they wanted to say because I won't out them directly, but there were some who clearly politically supported him who sort of admitted, yeah, you know, maybe he wasn't all that good,

whereas others were on the other side of the political spectrum and said, yeah, you know, he was a pretty good ballplayer. I also think that their recollections of how he played anecdotally are also a bit skewed by the fact that they all seem to think that their school, as anybody does, I suppose, was a little bit better and their program a little bit more relevant than it really was. You know, it seems like two or three players... People exaggerating their high school athletic careers. Can't believe it. Yeah, amazing. It seems like two or three people on that team did go on to play college ball, none of them very significantly, because NEMA also had a lot of sort of 13th year players. They may have been a bit of a pioneer in that sense

where they had guys who were sort of just trying to brush up their GPAs and their baseball credentials so that they could go play in college. So it seems like a decent player came through every now and again, but on the whole, he may have looked good to them by sort of the context of the competition they were facing

because again, the Hudson Valley was not a baseball hotbed. They didn't play anybody outside of a radius of like, you know, 30 or 40 miles. And even the big schools around here were never all that good. Yeah. And could you talk about Ted Tobias, the former baseball coach who has since died, but Trump used him as sort of a reference? You know. He said, talk to Ted Tobias and he'll back me up. And he sort of did. But as you explained, he may have had other motivations too. Yeah. So Tobias is a fascinating character. So he's an immigrant. He arrives in the US when he's 16. For some reason that never became entirely clear, it seemed like he was left here

alone, that his parents came along but went back. Or at any rate, he winds up at Nima when he's 16. When he's 19, he enlists, 18 or 19, he enlists and goes off to fight in World War II in the Italian theater. When he comes back, he says that he'd seen the executed Mussolini's body. But so he returns from serving in World War II.

He's not a major, to be clear, even though that's the rank that they give him at NEMA as a kind of honorific. So he's sort of persuaded to return to NEMA and finish his education, finish his high school. And then he sticks around and he just never leaves. The rest of his life, and he lives to be somewhere in his 80s, he just stays at leaves. The rest of his life, and he lives to be somewhere

in his 80s, he just stays at Nima the rest of his life. They call him a major and he essentially just becomes part of the faculty there. He lives on campus. He marries on campus. He raises his kids on campus. And best I can tell, he was still living on campus when he died because Nima has this huge sprawling campus with lots of houses. And so he just kind of stays there forever. And he kind of seems to turn himself into the school's de facto pitch man. It's sort of one man PR department. And he styles himself after Donald Trump becomes famous as a mentor figure to him, although it's not clear that they had very much to do with each other after Trump graduated at all, just as Trump's not really been involved with any of the schools that he went to. But so all his life, he sort of portrays himself as this mentor.

And the last picture of him that I could find when he gave an interview to NPR, he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. And so they become close, it seems, pretty early on when Trump gets to NEMA. Tobias was in charge of the middle school. He was never the varsity coach. He was the freshman team coach at one point. Or at any rate, he wasn't a varsity coach when Trump was there. But so he and Trump become close. Trump isn't terribly close to much of the student body, if anybody at all.

He seemed like he was liked and he was respected. And he rose to like maybe the fourth highest ranked cadet, which is an accomplishment, you know, in a school of 400. He led a Memorial Day parade down Fifth Avenue at one point when Nima was sort of at the front of the entire parade. But so he and Tobias were tight. So it seems like Tobias was never the, you know, the varsity coach, but was always a guy who's willing to vouch for him and willing to say, Donald Trump, he was the guy, he was great. And in one Trump biography, Tobias claims that he made Trump an honorary assistant

coach to the varsity baseball team. But of course, since Tobias himself was never the varsity head coach, he couldn't have given such a title to him. So it was Tobias who said that Trump had been scouted by the Phillies and by the Red Sox in interviews with Rolling Stone and the Daily Mail. But again, I wasn't able to verify that, and neither was anybody else. Was there anyone else who, I mean, he obviously had passed away before you reported this piece, but was there anyone else either because they were uncomfortable talking about the president or because they had also passed who you were hoping to speak with for this that you weren't able to? More teammates, honestly. I mean, I made a list

of everybody who played on that team, which wound up being a list of 20 or 30 people over those three years. It seemed like there was quite a lot of turnover in that school or certainly on the baseball team. I tracked down maybe 12 of them. It's not easy. I mean, luckily they're baby boomers, so they still all have landlines, which are listed in phone books. But a few of them had passed away. There's a bunch of them that I left messages for that I never heard back from. So it would have been nice to talk to more of them. But on the whole, I thought seven was a pretty solid yield, especially because they kind of covered the spectrum from sophomore year through his senior years. So that was helpful. And did you read about at all, or did you at least think about

Trump's pattern of claims about other sports or the things that have been said about Trump's involvement in other sports, whether it's golf and his willingness to, let's say, take some liberties with his scorecard, or maybe his claims about trying to purchase an NFL team and how realistic that ever was. I mean, do you see some similarities here? Yeah, I mean, clearly he's been a sports fan his whole life. I mean, that's one of the things that came upon that he started playing baseball and was sort of obsessed with the Brooklyn Dodgers very early on, even though he later switched his allegiance to the Yankees when obviously the Dodgers left town. But also when he became close with George Steinbrenner, he apparently was at Yankee Stadium all the time in the 90s and early 2000s and became so enmeshed with the Yankees that he considered making Randy

Levine his chief of staff in the White House. But so I did look into the other sports that he played at NEMA a little bit. He played on the football team his sophomore year and he was a tight end. That team, if memory serves, went 0-7 his junior year and was shut out four times. So really a terrible football team. They only had 33 players and his senior year, he made the team, but then apparently fell out with the coach, which kind of jives with what I found that he'd had this sort of big conflict with his, his baseball coach as well over playing third base, which we can get into. But so he fell out with the coach and apparently his senior year quit the football team and joined the soccer team, which was mostly Hispanic, which again,

is a funny historical wrinkle. So, you know, at the end of your piece, nonetheless, Trump is the first president since Teddy Roosevelt not to throw out a first pitch at a professional game while in office, upending 110 years of tradition. In that respect, at least he's made baseball history. You've noted his close relationship with the Yankees, and you note in your piece that he has thrown out first pitches before, but never as president. But I'm curious why you think he's never done so considering his self-proclaimed skill. Yeah. I mean, that's what's weird. I mean, he's thrown out first pitches for the yankees and for the uh what's the red sox triple a team whatever that team is called where he when he landed his helicopter

in center field and then sort of marched over to the mound and and threw out the first pitch which is about as trumpian as it gets yeah not known for subtlety no but i'm guessing that he's maybe not physically capable of throwing a first pitch the way he would like to, is my best guess. He may be worried about turning into a meme like Chris Christie, but it's hard to explain in any other way that he's probably just not capable of it anymore and is worried about appearances. And you alluded earlier to that potential dispute with the coach. What did you hear about what he was like as a teammate? Yeah, so these teammates, they tell lots of stories. They have this brush in their youth with this man who becomes impossibly famous, who becomes the president, and he's sort of their claim to fame. So of course they tell stories. They told me lots of them. I was able to verify only one of them, even though I did have seven people to talk to. I mean, all these stories are sort of warped by time and apocryphal and all the rest. But the one that I was able to verify was that Trump's senior year, he was again, the regular first baseman,

even though by the way, growing up, he was a catcher and that was his favorite position. So it's also worth noting that not only did he hit sixth in high school, but he wasn't even playing the position he most preferred playing, which again, doesn't really support this notion that he was a star. But so there was the regular third baseman had to leave campus because or he wasn't available for a game because his sister was getting married and so a left-hander who usually played one of the corner outfield slots was gonna this was the coach's idea mike mccann he was gonna put him at first base and trump would play third for that game it was a big big game against a strong opponent and trump just flat out in front of a bunch of teammates told his coach, no, he wasn't

going to do that. He said, I'm the first baseman. I'm a senior, Barry Chasen, who's going to play first. He's a junior. If you want to put him on first after I graduate, be my guest. I don't care. But right now, I'm the first baseman. I am not playing third.

And so the left-handed Chasen had to play third base that day, which as your listeners will certainly know is not where you put a left-hander. He said that he was enormously relieved that the only play he had to deal with all day was a pop-up. He never had to make a play to first. But so that was kind of Trump on his high school baseball team. He was, again, he was respected and he was liked and he was sort of appreciated by his

teammates for how badly he wanted to win. It was all about winning. But he was also inflexible and not above telling his coach no and kind of overruling him. And he apparently told the coach, I've been on this team longer than you've been the head coach, which was true. And he just flat out refused. Yeah. And I guess he had a good glove, at least as you were able to sort of determine that part seems to maybe be more true than the idea that he was a hitter. No fielding stats though.

Yes, exactly. Right. That's very convenient. Yeah. And I like that you talked to Keith Law about Trump's draft prospects or what a draft prospect would have looked like, because that's the thing. Like you only uncovered a portion of his games, you know, not an insubstantial percentage. But still, if he were the huge prospect that he claimed to be, you would have found more evidence of that. I would think if he were the best player in the state, let's say, that would have been something that would have been covered. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, like I said, I found nine box scores, but his entire high school career would have spanned no more than 30 or 40 games. So I'd like to think that I had about a third to a quarter of them, which still is nine is a small number, but out of that data set is not a terrible sample size. All right. So when they make the movie about your investigation,

All the President's Men 2, All the President's Men on Base or something, who would you want to play you? I don't know. Maybe Danny DeVito? I mean, Robert Redford's still available, I guess. So maybe not an age match, but he has experience. All right. Well, we enjoyed the investigation. And I wouldn't have been shocked if you had found anything.

I mean, if you had found that he never played baseball a day in his life, that wouldn't have totally surprised me. And I guess if you're grading on a curve here when it comes to claims that the president has made, maybe the fact that he had a high school baseball career at all is closer to what he is saying than he has been about other issues. But still quite a distance between the myth and the fact, it seems. And I don't know, did you learn anything about Trump or did you gain any insight into him or did this just kind of mirror a lot of other things that you had already understood about him? Well, I think it was instructive in the sense that this kind of behavior, this kind of brashness, this kind of sense of entitlement and feeling aggrieved,

you know, over having to move positions for one game in a position that surely he was capable of playing. That was there from the time that he was 17 or 18 years old. I mean, there's an anecdote that was relayed by a teammate through the Daily News about Trump sort of urging his teammate to exaggerate a hit he'd gotten in some kind of game, saying he'd hit it out of the park when there was no park. They didn't have fences. I mean, I saw the field that they played on, which has been filled in now, which is, again, a funny little irony.

But there was never an outfield fence or anything like that. But so that kind of personality trait of exaggeration and boasting and feeling that the world owed him something, that seems to have been there from the time that he was a teenager. That anecdote was striking to me too, that that sort of self-mythologizing, the impulse to do that was present so early and over something so innocuous, relatively inconsequential, even in the course of his academic athletic career, but still that that instinct seems to have been present.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's, that's, that's what really struck me is that, you know, 17 year old Trump doesn't seem all that different from 73, whatever he is now, 73 year old Trump. Yeah. And you went to the school and what did you find about sort of how his legacy is presented there? I mean, are they at all uneasy about kind of claiming him as their alum and what evidence is there of his athletic career? Well, so what's worth noting here is that Nima kind of buried his academic records. It seems that as Trump is getting ready to run

for president, he had Michael Cohen, then still his personal lawyer, go around to any place he'd gone to school and basically either claim his academic records or sign some kind of NDA that they would never be released or just make sure they'd never get out. And at NEMA, it seems that the board members who were sort of Trump loyalists made sure that it would never be seen. So he has sort of an uneasy relationship with the school. He spoke at their commencement in the early 2000s, 2001 or 2002, again, landing with a helicopter, claiming that he'd bought the Empire State Building, which he hadn't. And so the school has kind of a funny relationship with him. There is a hall of fame in sort of the main corridor

where there's a picture of him up. There's a fair amount of famous alumni who passed through there. Stephen Sondheim went to NEMA, didn't graduate there. John Gotti Jr. and Francis Ford Coppola went there, didn't graduate either. But so his plaque is on the wall and in the gym, which is interesting in its own right, because you used to have major, major high school summer basketball camps there with Mike Krzyzewski and Bobby Knight held camps there and really interesting place. But at any rate, so they've got plaques on the

wall in the high school gym. So his name is up on there. And then there's a room on the second floor, kind of a small classroom that he apparently paid to have refurbished and dedicated to his parents. But that's kind of it. Like, it's not like you drive by the school as you might see with other private schools and see some kind of sign that a future president went there. You really have to kind of look for evidence that Donald Trump was ever at NEMA. You have to go inside and really find the signs and the plaques. And lastly, what was the reception to the piece like? Because I saw varying responses.

I saw some people who said essentially, who cares about his baseball career amid everything else that's super important. Why are we even thinking about this? And then I saw other people who said, oh, you know, Trump exaggerated his baseball record. Who knew, you know, what a revelation. And I saw others who were very impressed by the thoroughness and very happy to read it and clearly enjoyed the investigation. So what was your reaction to the reaction? Well, I was pleased that there wasn't some, or relieved at any rate, that there wasn't some massive sort of MAGA backlash because it seems to have not really made a blip. No Trump tweet about you yet?

No Trump tweet about me, nothing in a daily press briefing or anything like that. So that's certainly made my life easier. Yeah, there was a lot of, you know, sure. Great. But who cares? It's just another lie. And like I said, at the top, I think this story does matter because it's instructive to, to that cult of personality that he created about himself and how early on he set about making it and kind of, you know, obfuscating a little bit about what he'd achieved and what he hadn't. There was a lot of, well, okay, now go out and investigate Joe Biden in the same way about, you know, insert conspiracy theory here. And yeah, there was appreciation, I think, to some extent that this kind of part of his life had been filled in a little bit, because that's what's interesting about his time at NEMA. You know, for all of the things that we know about Trump's life, this incredibly well-documented

life, there are lots of biographies and all the rest. His time at the academy is largely a mystery. There's just not all that much that's known about it. And when I spoke to his teammates, I could tell that almost all of them had been contacted by reporters at some point and were sort of wary of them when Trump started running for president. You know, a lot of these guys had heard from the media, but it was always, you know, what was he like at school? It was never specific to the baseball team. I think the reason that they were happy to talk to me was because it was about baseball and it was sort of about them a little bit as well to an extent. But the overall reaction, I think, has been positive and glad that there's something that we learned

and that we filled in this little gray area of the president's past. All right. Well, this is not your normal beat. You are regularly a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports, your sports communication lecturer at Marist, but you took a little detour and wrote about Donald Trump, and I'm glad you did and that we got a chance to talk to you. So you can all find Leander on Twitter at LeanderAlphabet. Thank you very much for coming on. It was my pleasure. Okay, that will do it for today. I was trying to come up with a comp among major league players for Donald Trump's high school stats, or at least the ones that we have. That 138 batting average kind of limits us when we're looking at non-pitchers.

Closest comp I can come up with for an actual first baseman is a player named Bill Jackson, who played for the Federal League in 1914 and 1915, spent most of his time at first base, and amassed a 138 batting average in 76 games and 143 plate appearances. If we want to go with a single season, there is only one major league player who has ever compiled a 138 batting average in a single season while playing all of his games at first base, and that is Mike Laga, who did it for the 1987 Cardinals. Mike Laga was nicknamed Laga Beer by ESPN's Chris Berman, but I propose that we give him a new nickname, Mara, so that we can call him Mike Mara Laga. Yuck, yuck, yuck. One quick follow-up on our last episode, Sam did a stat blast about how the home

field advantage in errors has really been reduced since MLB started making an effort to crack down on home cooking among official scores. So in the past, there was a tendency for home hitters to be credited with hits more often than visiting hitters. That tendency has sort of gone away. And my pal and colleague at the ringer, Zach Cram, reminded me that he wrote earlier this year about a similar trend in the NBA, where for years assists had sort of the same thing as errors going on, because assists are kind of a vaguely defined stat, judgment call the scorekeeper but there were some behind the scenes changes at the leagues in how those assists were awarded and the home court advantage in assists has also

disappeared so i'll link to zach's article on the show page if you're interested in seeing a similar development in another sport that will do it for today and for this week you can support effectively wild on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. 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. Sean Hower, Zach Zimbler, Dan Hirsch, Cameron Mosley, and Andrew Cordellini. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam

coming via email at podcastofvangraphs.com or via the Patreon listing system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can find the paperback edition of my book now. It is called The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. And the all new Afterword is included in the paperback edition and also in the digital Kindle edition. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Cascade Island shore Traveled out west A future's blessed Only to accept A time

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