Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1569: Take Me Out With the Cardboard Crowd

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Sam Miller banter about Sam’s cricket home invasion, then discuss Opening Day, the experience of spectating games without fans, the merits and drawbacks of MLB’s last-second expanded playoff format, Mookie Betts’ surprise contract extension and how and why the Dodgers (and not the Red Sox) made the deal, the new […]

The amount of love that goes into the sets is very obvious In the scale model, shipping bottles swinging from the scaffolding As the bottles break in on the bow, the shatter of the christening It's one hell of an opening ceremony It's one hell of an opening ceremony It's one hell of an opening ceremony Just sell it and sell it at ceremony Just sell it and sell it at ceremony Hello and welcome to episode 1569 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are very pleased to be joined today by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello. How you been?

Well, so you remember the crickets? Yeah, the ones you slaughtered. Long ago. I was hosing down a concrete patio a couple weeks ago a few weeks ago and i stumbled accidentally uh into the crickets lair basically the crickets all like i i knew i had you know hundreds of crickets in my yard you could see them at night but when water started going down this this crack the concrete, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of crickets started pouring out.

And they basically, when crickets get confused, they just go in any direction. And so they spread out in this perfect circle, you know, like they all spread out into the earth across the planet in every direction equally. And, you know, many of them then, you know, they bumped into my house. And so they would just sort of like hop away until they got to my house. And so then they were up and down my walls, the outside of the walls. But I knew that that was going to be a problem. I knew that those crickets had gotten a taste of house. And so sure enough, for the last few weeks, rather than like the couple of crickets that get into the house per summer i have had a couple of crickets per night and when a cricket is is in

your property in your in your in your dwelling uh it is so loud so loud and they find the little narrow nooks in cabinets that you can't get into, that you can't reach. And you just live with cricket. Well, that was not what I was expecting you to say when I said how you've been. But that's an answer. That's how you've been. All right. Well, we have a lot to talk about today.

A lot has happened in the last couple of days. Most notably, baseball season started, so MLB is back. So that's fun, mostly. Although there's also been COVID news. There's been playoff format news. There's been Mookie Betts extension news. There's been where the Blue Jays playing this season news. So I think we're going to talk a little bit about all of that to some extent but

I guess we could start with our opening day experiences perhaps maybe if we were all watching and what we thought of those two games we had a rain shortened Yankees Nationals game that went five innings before there was like a biblical thunder and lightning storm that canceled the rest of that game, but it's official. And then there was the late Giants-Dodgers game. Ben, I'm going to say this. I am worried about how rude a house guest Major League Baseball would be. If Major League Baseball were a house guest, I'm nervous about how rude a one it would be.

Because my dominant experience of opening day i mean there are some game related things i will cover but mostly was redoing hours worth of data work yeah staff predictions come out so that was amazing like if you really just step back and think about the fact that a few innings into the season, they doubled the number of playoff teams, basically. They're just making it up on the fly. It is really an incredible thing. I'm not saying good or bad, but wow.

In the middle of the season, the season began before the owners had... Did it technically? I think the players agreed to it before the season began before the owners had right they did it technically i guess i think the players agreed to it before the season began but the owners i i believe the scroll came a few innings into the yankee game that the owners had approved it so i don't think it was official until the season had begun which if you want to if like if the message that you're sending is this season doesn't count like this don't take it seriously we're not taking it seriously we're like we are really sending a signal that you should not take this seriously that there are more important things than whatever we're doing out here that is how you would do it like you would calvin ball on opening day and and i think that's a good message

to send i don't know for sure that that's the the what they were trying to do but there is there is really something i think like kind of admirable about sending a very clear message to everyone to just like chill out and like if you know like don't don't treat this like it matters because we all know that it doesn't. And just to prove it, now there's 24 playoff teams. Like, who knows what we'll do tomorrow? Yeah, I doubt that was Rob Manfred's intent. I don't think that was what he wanted you to take away from that. But that was kind of what I took away from that, too.

Yeah, I mean, it happened just, you know, I guess it doesn't really matter that it happened at the last minute because the playoffs are still a couple months away and it doesn't change anything really it's not like it would affect how the teams were put together or something everyone was trying to win anyway but for that to happen at that point and then you have to have the commissioner on tv during the first game to say well here's how the season works now. That was not the greatest for the legitimacy or perceived legitimacy of the season. And yeah, for you, Meg, at The Ringer, we published our preseason staff picks very early on Thursday morning, which maybe was smart because we just got it out there before they could change the rules on us.

And so now I guess all our predictions are invalid but who cares about that but you actually had to just like edit everything at the last minute and like change the playoff odds i imagine too oh yeah i mean i i will say that as taxing as i found this and again like i never know how much our listeners want to hear about the picky union like burdens of my job that I like very much. So I apologize. But, you know, as as fretful and sort of frantic as that made me like, you know, David Appelman and Sean Dolinar remain undefeated in their tech wizardry. Like they were able to get our playoff odds updated soon enough that the ESPN broadcast of the late game was able to talk about them. Yeah, that's true. I heard that. Like Ravage shouted them out. So mostly,

I remain very impressed by just how good at their jobs my coworkers and boss are. But it's a strange thing when you're doing predictions. Predictions are just an awful exercise that we've all collectively decided we have to muscle our way through, but don't, I think, ever enjoy doing. And an expanded pool takes some of the pressure off because like the odds that you're going to get most of it right or a good deal of it right are like pretty high because it's just so many teams. It's a ridiculous number of teams. Oh, Lord.

So in that respect, it's good. But other respects, what happened? What happened, guys? It's like the beer guy in the piece that Sam and I basically wrote the same of in his went first, and I had to scrap mine because I had been up for several nights quite late. And so the night before opening day, I had done all the data work for the prediction post.

And I was like, this really just needs to go up before first pitch. And if it's a little later in the day, that's fine. Go to sleep, Meg. You've earned it. Now. That's what happens. Evil. Yeah.

So there are things that I like about this and things that I don't like about this. And things that really the future of this affects what I think of it. Because I think it's very different if we're just talking about this as a 2020 thing as opposed to a permanent future thing. So I like it in the sense that, and I guess we should explain as best we can what the format actually is and how it works now. And I'm kind of cribbing from Craig Edwards' post at Fangraphs about this now, but we have 16 playoff teams now. So the majority of teams make the playoffs. The division winners get the top three seeds in each league. And then the second place division finishers get the fourth through sixth seeds in each league. Then the two

teams in each league with the best records aside from those six get the seventh and eighth seeds and then the top four seeds in each league host every game in a new like best of three wild card series that decides who advances to the division series and i think separately they also announced that the tiebreakers if there are tiebreakers required they will not play tiebreaker games because of the the pressures of the schedule and all that. Instead, there will be various tiebreakers, you know, head-to-head or last 20 games record or various other ways that they can decide who wins those things automatically. So sort of a bummer to miss out on tiebreaker games because those are one of the best things about baseball's playoff format. But I understand why we don't get those so I think it's good in that you get more teams in the mix and so you get less chance of a team that we all know is really good just missing out like

if the Dodgers or the Yankees or whichever other good team missed out because of the 60-game season. I think that would be a bummer. On the other hand, it does decrease the division odds and the World Series odds of those best teams. So everyone's odds of making the playoffs go up, obviously, and some teams go up more than others. Some went up like 30 percentage points. Others went up, I guess the Orioles' odds went up infinitely because they went from 0% to 1%. So even the Orioles have a chance now. I think they were 0% to win the World Series. But when I checked yesterday,

they had actually climbed up to 0.1% playoff odds before the expansion. Okay. Yeah. So everyone's odds went up and it's kind of like the teams on the bubble benefited from that the most. But then in terms of division series odds, and Craig has those in a table too, like the Dodgers' odds of making the division series go down like 20 percentage points. And then the Astros and the Twins go down double digits. And then odds of winning the World Series, the Dodgers' odds go down like 5 percentage points. So that's significant, too. So you get less chance of teams just flukily missing out, but then you also get more chance of the best teams flukily not advancing or not winning the World Series.

So kind of a double-edged sword there. And also, as you said, Sam, like there's just kind of this cartoonish element to everything now where I was sort of selling myself on, OK, well, it's a season. We'll try to treat it like a real season, sort of. And, you know, we've had the asterisk conversation and all of that. And I know that you thought that if a good team won or good teams made the playoffs, then we'd probably treat that pretty legitimately. And I saw a poll from Morning Consult earlier this week. They surveyed fans on whether winning the World Series after the 60-game season would be less meaningful than doing so after a 162-game season, and 44% said less meaningful, 35% said as meaningful. So already a majority of fans who had an opinion

said it would be less meaningful, and that was with the regular playoff format. But now, when you have this just wacky playoff format that was instituted at the last second, I don't know whether you can do that or whether you just have to treat it as this is a weird one-off tournament year, which I would have also been fine with if that was the plan from the start. But now it's kind of a mixture of the two and I don't know which way to go. Yeah, it's not, I think it has become less of a mixture of the two. I mean, it's, it feels to me, I mean, I probably, it's probably crazy to think of any motivation here, except like they saw a way to get some more money. And so they did it. But if you wanted to think of another motivation, it seems like maybe part of it is that they realized that the season is beginning before anybody is really ready um you know rosters are kind of weird and

they're jumbled and there's like good players in quarantine and there's players who aren't stretched out and everything is really uncertain and you know there's like i think there's maybe people are expecting the first couple weeks are going to be potentially like really crazy offensive levels because the hitters are much readier than the pitchers after this short camp and all of that. And so like maybe it was just sort of an acknowledgement that we can't really we the league, sorry, can't treat the first couple of weeks. sorry, can't treat the first couple weeks. I mean, if the first couple weeks are a quarter of the season, and they're like sort of chaotic and unrepresentative, then maybe you have more of a legitimacy problem. And so instead of trying to power through that, they just accepted it and said, okay, yeah, this regular season is going to have a legitimacy problem all the way through, or at least at the beginning. And so we're going to just really lean into the tournament aspect of it. And I think

that in a lot of ways, again, like, again, assuming that a good team wins part one, and assuming that we care and have this conversation and feel like talking about the winner and all that at all. Afterward, part two, I think this probably gives more legitimacy to the eventual champion. If you really want to get deep into thinking about like, well, what would it mean for the Dodgers to win the World Series? Or if the Braves won the World Series, what would it mean? Would it be seen as real? Your fear in that case, if you're the Dodgers, is that you would go into the post

season and because it was such a weird year, you'd end up facing the Rockies in the first round and the Pirates in the second round and the Angels in the World Series and Trouts quarantined. And so your path has been completely devalued. By adding another round, by basically letting all the good teams in, you're pretty much guaranteeing that whoever wins the World Series can say they won a really difficult tournament. It is an anomalous tournament. It doesn't fit into the traditions of how we choose our champions in this sport. But it will undeniably be difficult to outlast 15 other teams in a four round tournament.

And so you get legitimacy for it. The cost is pretty obvious, which before the first pitch yesterday, there was this like very solemn voice over opening day voice you know the opening day voice says in reference to this this anonymous season says more at stake on every pitch right a playoff feel from beginning to end and you're like well that was that was very true three hours ago and it is extremely not true now. There is no chance anymore that the Astros or Dodgers are playing for their lives on day one, which it did kind of feel that way. It was not hard to imagine the Dodgers or the Astros going 31-29 and missing the playoffs.

And so they really did have to play super-duper-duper, duper hard all the way through. But now that's not true. And now also, it's not really true that the final week of the season is going to be all that stressful because 13 of the teams are probably going to be locked up. There's not that much value to the seating. And so so they lose that. But I think that that's fine to lose that because the i don't think that was necessarily gonna be there anyway because like i said this season is starting clearly not ready like it doesn't look like they finished painting everything yet well and i i think that it's maybe the part of it that i've come around to liking the most, which is that if we, if we say that a thing we are looking for in a 2020 season is some semblance of the before time, um, so that

we have a, like a North star to point to the frenzied high stakes nature of the season was always going to feel very aberrant because it's not our experience of regular season baseball. And so opening up the playoff field really does sort of turn things back down to a simmer. I mean, not a total simmer. And obviously we aren't going to come. I don't think anyone's going to come away from 2020 being like i know a lot more about individual players like true talent levels than we did at the start of the season i don't think that there are going to be a lot of guys for whom we say that but this this will feel i think more normal you know ben when we had craig on to draft stuff like there will be more vacuum games right there will just be more games you can have on in the background while you're doing other stuff and you don't feel like you have to be

glued to the screen every second of the day uh like you would with an nfl game because you know it reaching sort of that level of of importance and those stakes was was pretty unlikely but it was going to feel very different than normal baseball. So it is sort of funny that this thing that is completely unlike anything we've seen in major league baseball is going to be the thing that makes me feel like, oh, this is kind of normal. Yeah. And then the question is, does this set a precedent so that this becomes permanent or at least something closer to this becomes permanent? Because as Sam said, there's a lot of money at stake here. There's

incentive to do this. The players get a playoff pool that totals $50 million. And then of course, the networks that would broadcast these games are happy to have them. And some of them missed out on regular season games this year. So it's sort of a makeup for them. So if it's just one year and it's weird, then fine. But if it's something that gets sort of normalized because it happened once and everyone decided, hey, we liked that money. It's nice to have extra money. And then we're sort of stuck with this. I wouldn't want that because that's just way too many playoff teams, even if it encourages some halfway point between those. Like, you know, if we get 32 teams at some point and you want to talk about

adding another couple of playoff teams, I mean, maybe bit by bit, but to sort of have a new anchoring point here, it like moves the playoffs Overton window sort of from 10 to 16. That's a pretty big jump. And at least personally, I would not want to see anything close to that in a normal season because to have 162 game season, which again, maybe you end up shortening that if you massively expand the playoffs, but to have a six-month season with that many games and as low as the stakes would be if you had this many playoff teams, that would just be a pretty unpleasant combination, I think. So I like the fact that baseball is somewhat exclusive when it comes to its playoffs compared to some other sports. And I do not want to see the majority of teams making the playoffs, at least not after I've watched a whole really long regular season to try to figure out which are the best teams, because what's even the point of doing that if you're just going to put this many of them in? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'll decide

when we get back to normal what I need from my sport. At this point, I am actually, I think, open to anything at this point. I'm not saying that it would be good or bad, but the process of having a season start in late July for a 60-game season in which they play before no fans and have a four-round playoff tournament. The fact that all of that just feels like it didn't cause any rupture in the earth or anything like that. I went through, I mean, what am I trying to say? What I'm trying to say is that the process of going through no baseball at all in April, May, June, and July, and seeing how really how my, my lifestyle and my brain and my body even got accustomed to that, to like the most extreme change you can possibly have to baseball of there not actually being any

at all, has made me feel like anything that changes, I will adapt to. Like, I feel very resilient right now about changes to baseball. And so I'm not really ready to talk about the 2021 postseason, but I feel like I could take anything at this point. Any change could potentially, I'm open to it. I am willing to consider the most radical thing you want to do to baseball in a way that i wasn't a year ago it used to just be that we would just talk about it and it'd be funny to talk about but now just just do it i don't care we'll be fine i wonder if that

would be scary for mlb to hear that or whether they would want to hear their fans saying that like if their most committed fans are are saying, well, you know, I did okay. Like we survived without baseball. Is that bad? Because now we realize that we don't need baseball to live our lives during the summer or something. Is that part of what you're saying? Or are you just saying, well, I'm open to whatever baseball looks like in the future

because it's better than no baseball, at least? I guess what I'm saying is that I have realized that a lot of things that maybe I had categorized as needs were actually wants all along. And for that reason, I just feel a lot less pressure for things to stay the same. The things that I need are probably not playoff format dependent. Yeah, I think that part is true. But I feel very tired right now. And I wish that I had felt this tired like four months ago.

So I think I don't disagree that the last couple of months have sort of shifted the perspective on what's what's really a want versus a need but having gone through this gauntlet I think I need there to be more baseball if only so that I can feel less anxiety day to day well baseball came back but there was still some anxiety associated with it on Thursday so that was I mean that was kind of like the season in microcosm right that first game it was like a it was shortened so it was a five inning game and b there was question of whether it was going to happen at all or whether it could really proceed because we learned shortly before that game started that

Juan Soto would be unavailable because he tested positive for COVID-19. And then there was just a lot of uncertainty and confusion about what does this mean? Can they actually play this game? How long is he unavailable? He is asymptomatic so far, it seems, and he has taken some rapid response tests subsequently that came back negative. So there's question about whether it was potentially a false positive, but then also about what you have to do and the contact tracing and do other people have to be isolated? And at least the nationals are saying that no one, I guess, was close enough to him for a long enough time to qualify for having to be quarantined. And I know that I think the nationals have

what successfully lobbied the city of DC to change their protocols in some way, right? Because if they had not changed those rules, then the positive test for Soto would have put others into a mandatory 14-day quarantine. And so all of this is kind of just changing from week to week, it seems like, and no one was totally sure what to do about it. And this was something we talked about during summer camp too, when players tested positive and the question was like, what if this happens during the regular season? And no one seemed to know. And then it happened on the very first day of the regular season. But then they played baseball without Soto and some of the baseball was good, at least as long as it lasted. But it was one of those things where you can't really have one

without the other. You're just going to get these two things constantly competing for positive and negative attention. How much did the two of you notice the lack of a crowd? Let me rephrase that question. Well, I'm me rephrase that question. Well, I'm curious the answer to that question. And then I'm also curious how much you think you would have noticed the absence of the crowd if the booth hadn't commented on it so frequently, which I don't say as a criticism. It would be very odd to not remark upon the absence of fans for the very first game of the real regular season.

upon the absence of fans for the very first game of the real regular season. But I don't know that I would have been all that flummoxed by it, even though Nationals Park is not doing the cutouts or anything like that. I was struck by how much I wasn't struck by the absence of people there. And I don't know if that's because the balance of the crowd sound was better than maybe some of the intro squads or exhibition games have been, or if it was because I was distracted by rejiggering our playoff odds and staff predictions. But I expected to find it more discomforting and sort of obvious than I ended up finding it. And I was surprised by that.

Yeah, I didn't mind it and didn't notice it all that much. There were times where it really stuck out to me, like especially in the late game, because when they would show that shot from behind home plate and the backs of all the cardboard cutouts are just white blankness. So you just had all these white blank cardboard things just arrayed around the infield in the stands and that just you know every time i saw that it was sort of jarring or like you know if someone hit a home run and the ball just sat there for a while that was weird but like the the crowd noise didn't bother me it was weird at times when you would hear the crowd noise and then they would pan to a shot of empty stands. And it was kind of like that jarring feeling that I was expecting

of just getting these two sort of contradictory stimuli at the same time. But mostly like pitch to pitch, swing to swing, it more or less looked and felt like baseball to me. which swing to swing, it more or less looked and felt like baseball to me. Yeah, I did not notice any bad aspects of it. There were no aspects of there being no fans in the stadium where I thought this is making me uncomfortable. I think that I, I don't know if I even noticed it, but I identified it because I am a content producer and I have to be watching myself

watching. So I identified that I missed the good parts of a crowd. Like the fact that there is no crowd means that you don't get crowd shots. And when you don't get crowd shots, it's not that crowd shots are great or anything, although they are, they're, they're really great. But beyond them, the value of those shots, it's just the variety, like to have more things for the camera to go to gives you a little bit more of a production. And the experience of the game was like, you know, generally a good energy game, a good energy feeling even without the without the cheering or without the crowd shots. But I just, I missed those shots. I missed the cutaways. I missed the color, I guess.

And I found that the, like you do sort of, you are affected by the energy that is in a stadium. Even if you're comparing, you know, the trop on a, you know, with a 6,000 person crowd versus, you know, a sellout at Dodger stadium, you're affected somewhat by the energy. And the, there was a bit of a life lifelessness to it that I think made me crave more baseball action. So this is the, this was the first time I think that I really noticed that I was bored by strikeouts. I was really alert, more coming alert when the ball would be put in play. And when in that first game, I was kind of like,

like pretty dull about the first couple innings. There were a couple home runs, there were a bunch of strikeouts, it wasn't really moving me. And then Aaron judge, I think it was doubled into the left field corner. And that cut to that shot of the runner coming around third. And then it cut to the throw coming into the cutoff man. And maybe there's going to be a play at the plate. And that whole sequence of like ball in play, ball lands, player chases ball, runner comes around, everything converges.

I got a lot out of that moment and i realized that just in a very subtle way the quieter less colorful setting means that i need more action to stay engaged in the play if that makes sense yeah i also think that in a very very subtle way you notice just a little bit of the pause in the broadcasters not being there that you you just you notice that it's not a bad thing it's just it like our brains are very sophisticated and they can notice just a little chemical difference um and just that little pause when they'd be describing something or interviewing a player in the dugout i noticed that maybe a little bit more than i noticed the lack of fans yeah i also think the cutouts are the cutout the fan cutouts are a little too big and i feel i

don't know that i think that might be the right choice because you want people to be able to see themselves if they paid for that right it is kind of funny like it's goofier that they're too big but there's kid cutouts that if you scaled them up they'd be like eight foot humans and there were some kind of like big faces yeah yeah we just we talked about this recently with craig it's um you, you'd have some truly giant babies and also massive dogs, like, you know, like Wolfman, hellhound dogs. It would be very alarming to see them as they entered the ballpark if they were truly that size. So yeah, it was fun, though. They were not like the best games I've ever seen. And the first one didn't last as long as we would have liked it to but yeah like you're you're mentioning the action like seeing Mookie Betts's base running in the

late game and having him slide in ahead of a play at the plate and on a ball on the infield that was really exciting to see it was fun to see that team kind of firing on all cylinders that lineup that we've been looking forward to seeing, there it was. It was there. And I thought, yeah, I could watch a season of this. There was nothing that made me think I wouldn't enjoy this thing that I normally enjoy roughly as much as I normally enjoy it, at least like on a pitch-to-pitch level, the season itself and all the other competing concerns in the playoff format, that might get in the way of my enjoyment to a certain extent. But aesthetically speaking, I thought it was pretty good. A little low energy, it's true. There were moments where I maybe found

myself zoning out a little bit more than I would have if there had been like a packed opening day cheering crowd. But on the whole, it didn't greatly interfere with my enjoyment yeah there are a lot of shots in the background of a lot of baseball games where entire sections are empty yeah so you don't see that and immediately think we're in a pandemic you just it just that's a normal enough shot and then there are also stadiums where you can't really see any of the fans behind home plate so you're not necessarily dependent on that either you you it you can kind of ignore it i think yeah like when we watch a game you know broadcast from cleveland or whatever it's gonna it's not gonna feel as different i think as it will in some

places hey you guys remember how the dodgers signed mookie bets to a 13-year contract extension i guess technically 12 new years yeah that happens moogie bets forever dodger talk about that yeah i i wrote about that that was that was like almost as unexpected as the last second playoff format change i mean not so unexpected that he would stay with the dodgers but that it would happen then and that those would be the terms. I don't think anyone really saw that coming. In fact, I mentioned in my article on Wednesday morning, just a couple hours before that news broke or the rumor first surfaced, Ken Rosenthal included the Mookie Betts uncertainty in his list of the biggest storylines about the 2020 season. And he wrote,

the financial impact of teams playing most or all of the biggest storylines about the 2020 season. And he wrote, the financial impact of teams playing most or all of the season without fans almost certainly will prevent bets from getting $400 million on the open market or the $300 million the Red Sox reportedly offered him. And then he even went on to say maybe the best thing for him to do would be to take a qualifying offer and come back in the future. And I'm not picking on Ken. I think a lot of people would have said that. Peter Gammon said the same thing. We probably would have said something similar if we had talked about it. And when we did our Dodgers episode preview last week, it didn't even come up, the possibility that they might sign him imminently. So for that to happen before

the season started and in terms that if you had seen them six months ago wouldn't have shocked you, you know, maybe you would have thought, oh, he didn't get 400 million. That's a little light or something. But for him to sign an extension before the season started that takes him through what his age 40 season or at least up to that point, I think it looks pretty much like you would have expected to see in a more normal world. And so for that to happen was very surprising to me. In fact, in a sense, it may be exactly what you would have expected him to end up with because he was rumored to be seeking $420 million. And as the research that you have done in the past has indicated, Sam, when we hear that someone is seeking something, historically, they've gotten about 87.5% of what they are said

to be seeking. And that's almost exactly what Betts got, like 87.5% of 420 million would have been 367.5 or something, which is basically what he got. So that surprised me just how unsurprising that was in light of everything else that you would have thought, oh, well, revenues are down and teams will either not be able to spend or they'll use this as an excuse not to spend and the free agent market will be ruined. And maybe it's still well. Maybe it's just that Mookie was by far the best player available and one of the best players in baseball. And so he got this big deal and others wouldn't. But still did not see that coming this week. I'll be 47 when his contract is done. I will have.

Let's see. Let me do a little mental math. I will have. I'll be on my fifth Hall of Fame ballot when his deal is done. My fifth one, you guys. Yeah. In fact, it was exactly also like right in line with what Zips projected, right? Because Dan posted what Zips would have projected for his contract terms

or what Mookie would be worth war-wise. And it was like spot on this. It was like this is more or less what you would have expected him to have gotten if this were a normal season and if he were on the open market. So it's, I guess, heartening that that happened, but also pretty surprising. decision to try to make not all red sox fans should be clear try to say somehow that mookie got a less good deal than he would have gotten in boston because the average annual value was slightly lower than it was in boston even though the deal was also significantly shorter in boston it was like two million less a year but a hundred million more total i was like $2 million less a year, but $100 million more total. I was like, I think that he gets paid for those years, though. He gets paid for all of them.

It's $100 million more. It's like a good all-star plus his deal. He got a good all-stars deal in addition to his Boston money. Do you think this deal was basically agreed to months ago and they were just waiting to see whether a season would happen that would? Because if they play a game, then Mookie gets a year of service time. And if the season gets canceled entirely, then there's no service time. And I mean, I think that everybody involved in those negotiations would understand saying,

well, maybe, you know, let's wait understand saying well maybe you know let's wait and see whether whether you know you get that year like we're not trying to be mean we're not trying to be too cutthroat or anything but like as as you're you know as the team we want to see if that season gets played and because it it seems like conceivable that they would have wanted to do this in March when this sort of thing would normally be announced. Like Mike Trout's extension was announced on March 19th, which of 2019, March 19th of this year was one week, I think, to the day after the season got postponed, the start of the season got postponed.

So maybe they were working on this and they had this structure that they basically agreed on. And then they wanted to wait until like kind of it was clear that there was going to be a season this year before it got announced. I mean, totally speculative.

But does that like, does that make sense to you more than the idea that right now when things are much, I don't know, when things are much less certain they feel less certain than they ever have that they would have figured out a way to reach this agreement because it seems like a harder it seems like a hard agreement to reach right now like i honestly have no idea what the world is going to look like right ever again and i think that in particular 2021 like doesn't look

good for selling tickets does it no well looks it looks worse it looks worse now than it did in march yeah i think that well yeah i think in march we we thought there was some chance this would just be over and and honestly i'm like even we're four and a half months into this and we don't know whether you get whether you develop immunity once you've had the thing. Or how long it lasts. Or how long it lasts, which raises the possibility. I mean, it's not the most likely possibility. It's the darkest possibility that there is no vaccine coming that like we might not even get a vaccine. And so then we could be talking about a multi-year thing.

And so anyway, like those are all less likely than the kind of more, like we all have some vision of what 2021 and 22 are gonna look like, and they're much better than that. So hopefully we get those versions of it. But I guess what I'm saying is that this is such a typical extension, like you're saying, Ben,

this is the extension that you would have expected them to agree on in February. So I wonder whether they agreed on it in February. Yeah. I did see a tweet from Ken, I think, as this news was breaking. And he said that was the question everyone was wondering. Was this agreed to months earlier and they're just announcing it now because he suggested that if they had this framework in place, if they had talked terms, then they basically couldn't have cut them without ruining that relationship. So if they said in March, we'll give you 350, 60 something million,

and then the world changed and baseball shut down and they tried to renege on that or say well that was in the the pre-pandemic times and now we're offering you 200 million or something then maybe that would have just spoiled any chance of of them reaching some sort of agreement and Mookie would have been upset about that and so maybe they just had to honor what they had in place what I read subsequently I think in Ken's column and also maybe Pedro Mora's, was that they had made contact about this back then, that they had started discussing it, but that they hadn't really reached any terms or they hadn't talked numbers or hadn't agreed on numbers at that time. So based on that, it sounds like it was pretty nebulous and just kind of like an opening conversation, like, let's talk about this. But I don't think it's impossible that there was more to it than that. And they actually exchanged some numbers or ballpark estimates or something and that they just kind of had to stick to that if they wanted to get something done because yeah i mean you're right it just it seems like it would be hard even to figure all of this out right now when you even find time to talk about this with everything else

that's happening well and i would imagine that they whatever was agreed to in principle in the spring i imagine that they are were probably particularly mindful about the importance of sort of honoring that because of Betts' experience in Boston, which seems to, you know, the protracted nature of that negotiation and sort of the way he felt he was treated throughout it clearly soured his relationship with that front office and ownership group to some extent. So I would imagine that they were trying to be careful, I would imagine that they were trying to be careful knowing that that was probably him feeling as if he had not been appropriately respected, given the caliber of player he ists was probably going to get paid even with all of this, because you just don't if you want to sign him to a free agent deal next year, you have to back up the Brinks truck because he can just take the qualifying offer and then, I guess things are not we are not to such a uh if they did come out and sign a bunch of guys to big contracts over the winter which i hope they do but were they even planning to do that

when they were saying those things they were just figuring like well they'll forget that we set those things or how they would sort of square the idea that they could afford to do that with the argument that they can't afford to do anything and you know need the players to take pay cuts to make this season happen but maybe they were just fully prepared to sort of you know speak out of both sides of their mouth at different times in the year so does it wait will it will they look better if they sign a bunch if they spend money this winter like normal i mean yeah like in a way they a way. Or will they look worse? If they don't spend, it would almost like support their previous claims that they didn't have any money. So it might make them look less deceitful. And yet that would also be bad, of course. And we don't wish for that to

happen. But yeah, I mean, if they go from we have no money and owning sports teams is a terrible proposition and we need to be bailed out to, well, here's as much money as we would have offered you anyway, then I don't really who's coming available. So I think that it'll probably stay bad. I think it was likely to be bad. It might be worse as a result of all this stuff. I think that there will be, I wonder how the potential Mets sale will impact the public perception of that conversation. Because when you're signing new postseason deals i i don't mean the expanded playoffs i mean their their new tbs deal and then if you have the met sell for like three billion dollars i think the argument that baseball is not a profitable business is going to be harder to to make with a straight face although i'm sure that owners will try to make it anyhow but i don't know which is Yeah, it was like when that big announcement about the new TV deal came out,

like just in the middle of, you know, weekend word to play. Yeah, so I don't quite know what the reaction will be if they say that they are financially constrained. I mean, they will be somewhat because it's not like anyone's making a ton of money, although with this new playoff format they're not going to be they're sort of making their broadcast partners whole so i imagine that uh i don't know it's all very complicated yeah hey i have a quick quick prediction i want to ask each of you which is the part of the conversation about like bringing back sports was, was that, uh, wow,

the ratings, you know, the ratings could be huge. Like this could be a time when people are, are at home, they have nothing to do. And especially if a sport had, you know,

some period of time to itself, it could be like the Jordan documentary, but for a sport. And I am curious to know, having watched two games yesterday, having kind of followed the conversation, you know, not the conversation, but like when we watch, we see lots of other people watching. So we see how they're watching and how they're exuberating and so on. And also seeing the run up to the opening day and seeing the anticipation that wasn't wasn't

there. Do you get the feeling that this is going to be a smash on TV? Or do you get the feeling that it's going to be a big kind of ratings sort of like non-event? And in fact, I don't want to tilt the scales by making one option much longer than the other. So I'll just say big ratings or small ratings? I think we will likely see big ratings. I think that nationally broadcast games are sort of hard to hard ones to use to arrive at

an answer to that question. They have the benefit of everyone watching the same game. But I think the strength of baseball ratings tends to come in the aggregate. And I think that people react really differently to, first of all, to games that don't involve their team just generally and also ones that don't involve their crew. I think that if part of what people are looking for in a year like this is something more familiar that, you know, it's going to feel really different to Dodger fans to hear Joe Davis on the call, you know than than it did to hear the crew last night which i don't say as a knock on the crew last night i just you know you get used to you get used to particular voices and i think the likelihood that you seek them out is higher when you're already familiar with them so uh i don't know i think people will watch so okay slightly different but related question do you think that there are going to be a bunch of new baseball fans coming out of this?

I would not have probably watched the Jordan documentary in normal times, but I watched all of it this time. Is there going to be that equivalent for baseball or for any sports? That I don't know. I would say I think it's less likely now than it would have been a couple of months ago because baseball isn't going to be operating in a sports vacuum so the kind of sport fan who's like i just love sports give me give me all ball-based games now doesn't have to resort to baseball if they're not already a baseball fan

you know they can go watch the nba or the wmba and soon football will be back question mark so i think that it's probably less of an opportunity now than it was but you never know you know there's just less at some point we're gonna run out of new stuff we're gonna run out of new stuff to watch. Like Netflix is going to release all their stuff. Then what do we do? I honestly feel like I would never run out of stuff. I don't know.

I have heard people say that. I know there will be less new stuff. There already is less new stuff in some ways. But I feel like just the backlog could keep me going for most of the rest of my life. In a way, I kind of actually like being caught up to more things than I usually am. I feel a little less pressure to like, oh, I'm missing out on this show or that show. I'm actually able to go back and catch up on things I missed. So I don't think I would run out. But I agree with pretty much everything Meg said.

I think that if anything, if it is different in either direction, I think the ratings, at least the local ratings, would be up a bit. Just kind of looking at what we've seen with streaming and web traffic and video games and the entertainment options that have been available, they've all been up pretty much. But not podcasts? No, not podcasts, but podcasts are something people usually incorporate into working in an office or commuting or outside the house activities, which is not the case for watching baseball mostly. So yeah, I think they would be up a bit, but I don't think it'll be a massive phenomenon where we'll see a huge spike in baseball's popularity because as Meg said it's just you know season's not that long and there will be the usual other

competing forms of entertainment pretty soon I mean I have to watch hot stove league so I guess I'm not gonna run out of stuff I think if they quit making stuff right now if the whole world quit making stuff right now I would probably be able to finish maybe four percent of the stuff i would like to that i would be that my supply of stuff would be maybe four percent depleted by the time i die like and that's if they quit making any of it i think maybe one twenty-fifth would be depleted the amount of stuff stuff that could entertain me that meets the bar for entertainment for me is so big. I'm not even aware of 85% of it. I mean, truly, the consumption of content about stuff is more than I can consume. Just like reading critical analysis of

or recommendations of or detailed breakdowns of, previews of, postscripts of, oral histories of the making of stuff is way more than I can keep up with. And that's before I've watched any of the stuff. Yeah. Right.

And there's such a bias towards newness, towards newly released material. You put out five hours of this podcast a week, which is five hours, one tiny little channel of stuff about a league that produces, what, 8,000 hours of live baseball a year? what, 8,000 hours of live baseball a year? Yeah. And also, yeah, that's a good example. We focus so much on the new things. What's the new movie that's out this week? What's the new TV show that's out this week? What's the new video game? And I know why we do that. It's the only way we can all coalesce around the same thing that's happening at once, or else we'd all be having different conversations about everything. But there's no particular reason why we need to focus on the thing that came out this week as opposed to the thing that came out decades before we were born or 20, 30 years ago. I mean, some of that obviously is less relevant or less entertaining now than the new latest thing, but much of it is not. I mean,

it's like this podcast is a good example of that, because we have new listeners who are coming to us all the time, and we have listeners who say, well, I'm going to go back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing. And I don't know that I can actually recommend that, but I would certainly recommend certain episodes from the backlog that are just as relevant, just as entertaining as they were then or as anything we do now. And yet a lot of people won't do that because it's old. And I understand why they won't do that, obviously.

But it's there if they want to. And if we were to stop making new episodes, it would continue to be there, although maybe people wouldn't be as interested in it anymore if baseball were not a going concern. But that's just one small item among the many millions of entertainment options out there. I think, though, that live sports, assuming, and this might be a world that doesn't exist, so I'm open to that as a possibility also, but assuming that we both are on track to be in quarantine forever and can still play live sports, assuming that both of those conditions are true

simultaneously i think that the gravitational pull of live sports will only increase the longer we're in some version of a stay at home in a lot of places because and you know i've joked about this this was one of the things i drafted that i was most looking forward to in the season but i really do think that for a lot of people it is an important means by which they mark time and it being live does that in a very different way than you know going back and watching all of gilmore girls or whatever so i think that like as we continue to lose footholds in the real world. Like, I just bought a bathrobe and sleep shirts. Like, I just think I'm going to live in this house forever. Like, this is, you know, I'm never leaving again. So I think that as that reality continues to sink in for a lot of people,

granted not everyone is in a position to do that, to live a sleep-short bathrobe life, but for those who are, I think that having something that is happening simultaneously out in the world will mean more as time goes on, especially if we can't all go to the park so i'll be curious to see if that sense remains active as as time progresses and the quarantine stretches into infinite i've been i continue to mark the quarantine weeks in my my little planner i don't know if it's helping or hurting you guys i can't decide yeah it's like uh notching the cave wall when you're marooned on an island or something. You're going to be like the guy that gets out of prison in Shawshank.

Right. Oh, no. Oh, no. It was very strange to cross out All-Star Week and write Quarantine Week 18. Yeah. I didn't love it. It's weird how some things have changed and some things have not. Like in mid-March, when Rudy Gobert tested positive, it was like, oh, we got to shut down everything.

We can't continue. And now it's like, Guanzoto, test positive and first pitch is in a couple hours. We're going to play in literally hours. Like not that much changed in the interim in terms of like, you know, we don't have way better treatments than we have. We don't have a vaccine yet. It's like in many ways a similar sort of situation. And yet the way that we react to it has completely changed in some ways that don't totally make sense.

But I guess it's just like, well, we can't do that forever or we have agreed not to do that forever. In literally hours. And they didn't all wear masks. Yeah. I just wanted to make one more point about Mookie before we close, which is mostly what I wrote about. There was a statement from Red Sox president Sam Kennedy who said that it was hard to see Mookie Betts sign this deal. He said, I'd be less than honest if I didn't say a sense of disappointment and maybe

closure and finality to it. It's obviously very hard to see Mookie Betts sign a long-term deal somewhere else, and they didn't have to see that. They could have signed him to one. But that question of why did the Dodgers do that? How were the Dodgers able to do that when the Red Sox couldn't or didn't? Because on the surface, there are a lot of similarities between the Red Sox and the Dodgers, both big market, high revenue teams. Both have experienced some recent success. They were both in the World Series against each other in 2018. I think the highest payroll team in each of the last six seasons has been either the Dodgers or the Red Sox. And maybe it's just that the world has changed and maybe Mookie wouldn't have accepted these terms a few months

ago or the Red Sox didn't really offer him these terms anyway. But I think part of it is just that the Dodgers were in such easy position to offer a deal like this because of the way that they have constructed that team in contrast to the Red Sox, which is not to say that the Red Sox couldn't have done it, but the Dodgers had basically no long-term financial commitments like beyond 2022 like they were down there with like the pirates and like cleveland and oakland just like teams with low payrolls they just had no one really locked up and they've done such an incredible job at player development and working these young cost control guys into the lineup that they could just go and sign mookie bets forever when he was available.

And they've kind of waited for their moment. They bided their time. They didn't bid huge on some other guys, and they didn't necessarily need to because they win the division every year as it is. But they bid on Garrett Cole, and they lost out to him, to the Yankees, and then they made this major commitment to Mookie. It's like they did such a good job of plugging these players into their lineup and developing their own superstars that they could afford to be kind of picky and say, well, Bryce Harper, if you want to sign with us for like four years, we'll give you a high AAV, but we won't give you 12 years. But Mookie, we will because we can. we can't yeah i think that and when you look ahead you know the the next sort of really big and obvious free agent question for them is going to come in 2022 because that's when cory seger reaches free agency but then beyond that like cody belanger is not a free agent until 2024

walker bueller isn't one until 2025 so they're positioned to you know they're going to have so much good information about where the franchise is and then they can kind of pick their spots. Like if they make a decision to commit to Corey Seager, it probably tells us something about how some of their other infielders have developed. maybe some of the other pitching prospects haven't worked out, but they're going to be in a, I just can't imagine them not signing Cody Bellinger because he's amazing, but they will be in a position to sort of continue this perpetual motion machine because they seem to have a very good track record when it comes to deciding which prospects to retain and which ones to trade. They do terrific player development.

And then when it makes sense for them, they are willing to spend money. We've joked about it before it's like you can it's like your friends who are rich and smart and pretty all at the same time it's like well this feels unfair spread it out yeah it's really unbelievable i mean we did our dodgers season preview so we don't have to rehash all this but the fact that they have won seven consecutive division titles that they have probably the best team in baseball right now. Also one of the top three or so farm systems and the smart front office and all the money and Mookie Betts forever and Cody Pallinger and Corey Seeger and Walker Bueller. It's really just an embarrassment of riches. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Red Sox signed their

own raised GM who was a former freightman lieutenant because they looked at this and they're like, we want that. We want to be good every year. We don't want the Dave Dombrowski approach, which granted they won the World Series with the Dave Dombrowski approach, which the Dodgers have not done. But, you know, I think the Dodgers could have done that just as easily. They lost to the Red Sox in that series, but, you know, it's a short series. They could have won. It's not like they weren't in a position to win World Series because of their approach, but, you know, Dombrowski's was more just, you know, let's sign whoever's available right now. Let's trade for whoever. We'll trade all of our prospects. We want to win right now as opposed to we want to win right now, but we also want to be good forever,

which is a pretty tough balance to strike, but the Dodgers seem to have done it somehow. It is wild to consider. So if you look at our farm system rankings at Fangraphs, which are sorted by sort of the surplus value we see in the system, the Dodgers, the Rays come in at number one and the Padres are number two, but the Dodgers are basically a Wander Franco and change away from being tied with the Rays for the best farm system in baseball. And they're the Dodgers. It's just wild. It is a wild time. Goodness me. All right. Well, Sam had to step

away a few minutes ago, so we will wrap up, but we were very happy that he was able to make his return. And I guess we can just note in closing that it seems that the Blue Jays do have a home now. It is safe to say that because we've seen reports about this place or that place, but now this is announced by the Blue Jays themselves that they will play a majority of their home games this season in Buffalo in their AAA park. They will play a majority of their home games this season in Buffalo in their AAA park, and they are going to play the first series of their season, which was supposed to be in Toronto. They're going to play that in Washington to allow more time, presumably, for upgrades to that park and the clubhouse and the lighting and whatever else. But then that's what they will do.

So it is nice that they have a home because even if home field advantage is not as big or even non-existent this season, it can't be great to not know where you're going to be and where you're going to play and to have to live out of hotels and be constantly traveling, either psychologically or performance-wise. That would be suboptimal. So I'm glad that they have a solution here because, again, to have a baseball season, you have to actually have places for the teams to play, it turns out. When we did our initial round of staff predictions, you know, like back 24 hours ago, the Blue Jays only had they had one vote.

They had a lone vote, I think, for a playoff spot. And obviously the expanded format increased the number of votes that they received, none of which were to win the East. That would be wild. And so if they make it into the wild card series, you really can't call them the Buffalo Wild Wings because they're birds, Ben. They're birds. That's true. Yeah. My brain is mush.

It's just like a big old ball of mush. Well, the good news is you can zone out the rest of the day and watch baseball. So we're recording this Friday afternoon and there's about to be a full slate of baseball games, which we will watch and enjoy along with all of you. So have a nice weekend and we will reconvene next week. Sounds good. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thank you for listening.

One thing that sort of cheers me is the fact that we will hopefully never have an offseason as long as this one again. This was really long. Who knows what will happen in the future? But normally when a baseball season ends, it seems like forever until the next opening day. And having made it through this, maybe that won't be the case in the future. We can tell ourselves, yeah, opening day is a ways away, but it's not nearly as far

away as it was that one year. So that will be a source of some consolation, I think, when future seasons end and you get that post-World Series low of, oh boy, baseball won't be back for a while. Future off-seasons will be brief by comparison. And thanks to all of you who have been listening to us throughout this or even have just recently rejoined us now that the season is starting. We are grateful to have you back or to have had you all along. It was not always easy to do a thrice weekly podcast about baseball when no baseball was going on and often the news about baseball was negative. It wasn't the most fun time to talk about the sport, but I think it was pretty therapeutic for us to have this in our routines, to have the chance to talk to each other every

week and to talk to you. And we've heard from many of you who have said the same. So I'm really grateful for this community and that collective communication and encouragement and support. I'm also grateful to those of you who support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do 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 or get themselves access to some perks. Caleb Rakestraw-Morn, Nicholas Montgomery, Andrew Morris, W.P. Mulligan, and Ken Samuels. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group

slash effectively wild. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg and Sam via email at podcast thefangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we hope that you have a wonderful weekend of baseball watching as well. And we will be back to talk to you again early next week. Something better, something beautiful