Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1607: Goad Glovers

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the groundswell of support for Mookie Betts as the best player in baseball, stand up for Mike Trout, and explain why Betts and Trout make an ideal duo as faces of the sport, then examine Yadier Molina’s frustration with Gold Glove voting, the sabermetric reappraisal of Yadi’s Hall […]

Let's take hands and crawl down the crackling wireless harness, man, I, I wanna watch you To parade from the gold-gone days To the final place where the last train fades Hello and welcome to episode 1607 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing okay. How are you? Doing okay. Good. Yeah. So can I say a word in defense of Mike Trout? How dare you? Yeah, not that he needs me to stand up for him here and not that anyone listening to this podcast at this point is going, Mike Trout, is that guy good? Is he the best player in baseball? If you're still on the fence about that, let me try to coax you onto one side. So I saw a bad tweet a couple of days ago about Mookie Betts and Mike Trout, and it was something

about how Mookie has proved he's a winner or something, and he's the best player in baseball because he's on winning teams and Mike Trout isn't. And I don't think anyone really took that argument very seriously, and I didn't bring it up on the podcast here. But I think now some credible sources are starting to bring up the Trout versus Betts debate. And it's a fine debate to have. It's healthy to have debate. Well, some debates.

But I think this is one of the more benign debates that the country is having this week. And Joe Posnanski wrote an article in which he claimed that Mookie Betts is now the best player in baseball. And Joe Posnanski is great. The article is fine. I think we're all on the same page, probably. He just chose to write this article and kind of frame it that way, I think mostly for the fun of the argument. And he acknowledged that it's a shameless hot take. He said so in the article. And he acknowledged that lots of challengers to the crown of best player in baseball have come and gone and that Mike Trout has reigned supreme throughout his career. But a few things come to mind. One, it's a fun debate to have or it can be to, you know, talk about

Is this guy the best or is that guy the best But I do think that in Trout's case A large part of what makes him so much fun for me Is that he ends the conversation He ends the debate He is so much better than everyone else That you just have to marvel at his superiority No one else really comes close.

And so if you take that away, I mean, I guess if there is a legitimate challenger to Trout who's as good as Trout, that's fun. If it's that Trout is declining, that's not as fun. But, you know, if there's a legitimate challenger, fine, I will entertain that. But I think a big part of what has made Trout so entertaining to me is that you can look at how he compares to everyone else and no one really compares to him. He is just the best. So taking that away, I think, would rob Trout of a little bit of what makes him so special. But if someone deserves it, fine. I think I feel sort of sorry for him that he is not on this stage because I think that's why this conversation is coming up because we're all watching Mookie Betts and marveling at Mookie Betts as we should be.

He is incredible. He does everything really well. He is so much fun to watch. He has seemingly single-handedly turned games around for the Dodgers at times. And so we're all just appreciating Mookie Betts as we should be. That's great. And I think I said it earlier this month, but we're getting to watch Mookie. We're getting to watch Fernando Tatis. We're getting to watch all these really exciting, great players. And Trout is absent as he is every year. And it's a

bummer because if Trout were making deep postseason runs every year, he'd be having these heroics. He'd be doing these things and he'd be impressing us. And so the fact that he is never there, I think it leaves an opening for us to talk about the player who is excelling on that stage. And I can't imagine how he feels. I mean, granted, he didn't have to sign with the Angels to stay there forever. really was winning, which it sort of seemed to be. Maybe he could have made a better choice if he had gone somewhere else, because I don't think the Angels have really demonstrated that they are a well-run organization that is going to get him back to the promised land there. But he is locked in there, and I think that's a shame for baseball that we don't get to see him. And if he's sitting at home watching baseball, which he very well might not be, he's probably hunting or fishing or watching weather reports or football games or something.

But on his behalf, I'm sorry that he does not get to play in these games and impress everyone with his skills. All of that said, Mike Trout is still better than Mookie Betts. And if you look at like single season wars, then there are definitely players who have even exceeded Mike Trout. And Mookie Betts is one of them this year. And he has been one of them before. So Mookie has the best case for sure of anyone. And if you go back to the beginning of Mookie's first season, 2015, he is by far the second

best player in baseball behind Trout. And it's really Trout and then Mookie and then everyone else. There's a separation of like eight and a half wins of Van Graaff's war between Trout and Mookie. And then there's a separation of like nine and a half wins between Mookie and the next best position player. So it's kind of like, you know, one, two, and then the field. So if you want to make the case that Mookie's the closest challenger, he certainly is. And this year in the abbreviated season, he had a higher war depending on which war you had. It was either a tiny bit higher or a lot higher.

I think Baseball Reference had him like two wins higher. Fangraphs had him a fraction of a win higher, like 0.4 or something. So yeah, basically indistinguishable. But we're like three months removed from there being an ESPN article about how Christian Jelic is now the best player in baseball. And now after the mini season Jelic had, I don't think anyone's making that case. Not that Jelich is bad now or something, but it's just like, if you cherry pick, if you look over any 12-month span or one season, yeah, you can find someone with a higher war, but it's just that everyone comes and goes. It's Josh Donaldson one year, or it's Mookie one year, or it's Yelich one year, and Trout is always there. And I think that's what sort of sets him apart. So if you want to make the case

or prove the case that Betts is better than Trout, I think that has to be true over a period of, I don't know, two years at least. I mean, it can't just be a three-month season and then the playoffs that Trout doesn't even get to participate in. So, you know, not that anyone is really denigrating Mike Trout here. It's really just boosting Mookie. And for some reason, when we have these conversations, it always has to be, is this guy better than that guy? It can't just be, is this guy great? Yes, he is. There has to be some debate or it's not very interesting. And so Trout is the foil for Mookie here. And I get it. But no, I can't get on board with even entertaining this take seriously. both Trout and Betts in terms of the value they've recruited,

is stark in the same way that the difference between those two guys in the field is stark. So I don't think that there's much in the way of controversy, at least not at this stage. Like you said, there have been individual seasons where Betts has been a more valuable player than Trout has been. But when you take their resumes in total, there is not a ton of conversation to be had there. And I think that, you know, they are kind of interesting to have in conversation with one another, because one of the things that we often say about Trout is that he, you know,

he's a very complete player, right? And the value he brings to his team comes from a lot of different places. And so it is sometimes, you know, if you are not a sort of trained baseball sort, a close observer, you might miss some of it, right? It might not jump out at you in the same way that I think that Betts' game can at times when you bring the defense and the base running into the mix. You know, there is some flash there that I think is really, that is part of what makes him so fun to watch.

I think the reason that I am marginally sympathetic to this, especially in times of year like this when the advantage because of the postseason kind of goes to bets is that he is so often put in conversation with Trout to his detriment. I don't think that anyone is particularly keen to bring low either of these guys. Everyone loves both of them. Yeah, and we are so fortunate to get to watch them. And I think that you're right, that the fact that the gaps are what they are is liberating in some ways because you know i think most people who

look at baseball the way we do are not so fussy to to deny that if there's a half a win difference between two players in a given season that like you know the the stat isn't so fine that they that they might not just be the same right um you, we understand what the error bars are on war. So particularly on the defensive side of things. So I think that, you know, the contrast can be somewhat liberating because we don't have to get into this like grubby half a win here, a third of a win there. We can just appreciate them, right? Because they are different.

They are the same in many ways. But they are, I think the thing in many ways but they are i think the thing that unifies both trout and bets is that like we are clearly watching two future hall of fame players play on the field in real time and what a treat that is what a delight as we talked about on the last episode we now get to watch bets just like firmly ensconced in an organization that is going to be playoff relevant for a long, long, long time.

And we hope that the angels can kind of write the ship and find some starting pitching and put trout in a similar position. But I, I am, I'm going to grant Mookie his moment because so often during the regular season, he is the, you know, the second fiddle in a way,

at least for a certain slice of the baseball community. And so I'm okay with him having some shine in a moment where he is just the undisputed most fun player to watch in the World Series. But yes, I think that the whole thing can get can get a little silly and i wish that we were better culturally but certainly within baseball at finding a way to put a player's accomplishments in context without them needing a foil or a heel to sort of be juxtaposed against so i share your frustration there but i think it's okay for moookie to have his moment. Yeah, he has the stage to himself right now. Trout is not present.

And so Mookie gets to show off and we're all really bowled over. I'm not trying to make a bowling pun, but I guess I did unintentionally. But we're, you know, bowled over by his skills and he's demonstrated every one of them. demonstrated every one of them. And I think that's an interesting point that Joe makes, that the argument for Mookie over Trout is now sort of an echo of the argument for Trout over Miguel Cabrera. Seven or eight years ago, it's not as extreme, but you are making the case now that Mookie is the better all-around player and that Trout is the better offensive player. And I think that's true. Trout is definitely, I think by far a better hitter, even in Mookie's good seasons, I guess not in his MVP

year, but other than that, even in his MVP year by WRC plus Trout was still better. So Trout just, you know, he walks more, he hits for more power, even when Mookie is hitting for more power. So he has the edge there. But I think you can make a very good case that Mookie has the edge everywhere else, that he has been a better base runner. We've certainly seen that on display this month. And I think fielding wise, Trout gets extra points, I guess, for being a center fielder. But Mookie could and probably should be a center fielder and would be if he had come up in a different place at a different time. If he hadn't been playing next to Jackie Bradley all those years, if he didn't then move to a team that had Gold Glover Cody Bellinger on it, he would probably be playing center. And as it is, he's like an all-time great right fielder. So he's still offering a ton of defensive value. And, you know, he's been fairly durable for the most part, maybe a little bit more so than Trout even in recent years. So yeah, Mookie is, he's great. He's wonderful. And I think the personality enters into it a little bit

and just how his skills leap off the screen at you. And we've talked over the years about how Trout doesn't really impress you at first glance as often, that he is just this perfect baseball-playing machine. He never really makes mistakes. He does everything well. But on individual plays, unless he's, say, robbing a home run, which Mookie can do too, clearly, say robbing a home run, which Mookie can do too, clearly. He doesn't necessarily leap off the screen the way that Tatis does or someone who has these skills that are just immediately apparent, like Trout's plate discipline is an incredible skill, but it's not quite as visually compelling, perhaps. But I think Mookie is very visually compelling and maybe even more so because he's a compact person by Major League Baseball player standards. And yet he is so great and he

does these incredibly athletic things. And just personality-wise, I think he is a little more engaging than Trout, perhaps. He's just, he's adorable. I mean, Trout is uh he's a very likable guy seems like a very wholesome polite nice guy it's like he's transplanted from the 50s or something except like he doesn't even go to nightclubs or anything that like newspaper reporters in the 50s didn't report I mean I don't know what Trout does in his spare time but it seems like he just uh hits golf balls or watches eagles games or something like i'm not getting the sense that there's a like scandal there that's hidden although you never know with anyone but i think between that and the fact that mookie is just uh you know

he just seems like such a fun person to be around and kind of has that infectious nature to him and is maybe a little more outspoken in some respects. I mean, like the number one personality characteristic of Mike Trout that we all know is that he likes the weather, which is like the thing that people cite as if you have nothing to talk about, you talk about the weather. It's like the most boring topic imaginable, and it's the most entertaining thing about trout that he likes the weather so i have come to really appreciate the fact that he has that sort of personality where

he is just like this captain america like doesn't do anything wrong doesn't really say all that much most of the time i've come to value that in a way but he's definitely not quotable most of the time in the same way so if uh like if you want to make the case that Mookie is, I don't know, like a different word than best player, if he is like the signature player of this time or something like that because he's been in two World Series in three years and because he's been on these great teams and he's stood out in some ways that Trout

doesn't. So I can go along with you on that, I suppose. But when it comes to pure who is better at baseball, I think Mookie still has a bit of work to do to get me to really entertain that idea. Well, and I think that this is part of where we lose out on something by always having these value discussions as a conversation between two players because, you know, I find Trout's personality to be endearing. I find, you know, and we should be clear, I'm going to speak for you, like, Mookie Butts seems to be pretty Captain America-y in his own respect, right? We are fortunate that both of these guys who are so good and have really led the way in terms of position player performance over their careers are, they just seem like good dudes who their teammates really love playing with. I think that, you know, Betts occupied a really important place in the conversation around Black Lives Matter and social justice this summer. And so like his willingness to do that and also to talk about sort of his own personal evolution on those questions, I think is really valuable. And we just lose some of that

when it becomes this like, you know, push your glasses up your nose, get out the calculator kind of a thing. So, yeah, I share your frustration at the sort of form that this discourse always takes because then it becomes about these really uninteresting to most people sort of niche. Add up the wars. And then we're losing so much we're losing the ability to marvel at what these guys do on the field we're losing sight of who they are as people and and sort of the very real impact they have on sort of popularizing the sport and giving multiple good faces to baseball you know i think we've talked before about how that always seems to be the thing that we forget when we have these who's the face of baseball conversations.

It's like, no, the powerful thing here is that there are multiple players who can fit that depending on what you find interesting and compelling as a fan. And that's so wonderful that that's the way that the sport could be thought of if we could just talk about this a little bit differently. yeah it's like let's you know and it's probably good for baseball if there can be a debate probably like people like these sorts of debates so if uh if all you say is look at the war leaderboard like it might be right but it's not very fun so if you can have this debate and it's like a credible debate to have and either answer is like an all time great player who is a great ambassador for the game, then that's not a bad thing. I mean, you know, the more we't imagine really two better role models than these two.

So it's pretty cool that we have both of them. And, you know, like I guess maybe people tend to think of Mookie as younger than Trout. I mean, he is younger than Trout and he came along a few years later. He didn't debut as young. He's really only like a year younger than Trout. I mean, he is younger than Trout, and he came along a few years later. He didn't debut as young. He's really only like a year younger than Trout. He's, you know, a year and a few months. So if you wanted to make the case that like, well, Trout has been better,

but Mookie is overtaking him or something, you know, they're at basically the same point in their career aging curve wise. So I don't know that you can make that case about muki i mean you could make it about akunya or soto or one of the even younger guys who is theoretically not even in his prime yet but just pointing out that the age difference there is not as big as the seasons played difference would suggest so right anyway they're both wonderful and i guess that should probably be the takeaway from this segment yeah so do you want to bring up uh some some yadi controversy

from his instagram this week yeah so i don't want to like belabor this because i think there was just sort of a seems to have been a misunderstanding on his part, and then a controversy that I just will continue to find very silly generally. But Yadier Molina was disappointed he was not a finalist for the Gold Glove Award this year, the Rawlings Gold Glove Award, which he attributed to some desire on the part of shadowy figures to keep him from tying Johnny Bench for the NL record. And so that would be quite an allegation, except that this year, the process for determining the glove was different than it has been in prior years. Generally, what they will do is combine

Sabre's defensive index with votes from managers and coaches. And this year, the decision was made to simply opt for a statistical assessment of players. And so unless the numbers have it out for Yadi, there was no shadowy conspiracy here. But it has led to a conversation about the nature of this award in a season where we only have a 60-game sample. I think that every analytics sort will tell you that even one-year defensive metrics have a great deal of noise in them. And that you really need a couple of seasons of a guy's performance to have a good statistical understanding of his defense.

And I think that most public facing analysts will tell you that the gap in understanding between public metrics and team side stuff when it comes to defense is probably the widest of anywhere else in baseball. And so there's just, you know, I think that they give you a good indicator. And I think that some of them are better at assessing particular kinds of things than others. But I think we'll all acknowledge the limitations here. And so I think that that's just a bummer that there was a lack of understanding here because, you know, like nobody's out to get, no one's out to get Yachty. No, I don't think so. And, you know, I guess I don't really expect Yachty or Melina to know exactly how the gold gloves are awarded this year, which is different.

You know, I don't expect him to be looking at the stats or up on top of that. I mean, he has won, how many, nine of them? So he probably thinks, well, I won them before. It's the same sort of process i'm just as good as i ever was i'm sure he thinks that i don't know if he is at 38 but he probably thinks that and so he thinks he's probably as deserving as ever and uh i think he's still good he's still a capable catcher clearly you know implying that people were not voting for him because they wanted Johnny Bench to retain this NL record, the NL Gold Gloves Awards record, which I

don't know, it's not really a sacred record, I don't think. And suggesting that people didn't want a Puerto Rican player to win it. I mean, I wouldn't discount that there is some prejudice in baseball, certainly, but it is maybe relevant that Ivan Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican player and has the most gold gloves ever. Maybe this is just a manifestation of Yadi's attitude and competitiveness and drive and what makes him so good. I think he rankles people sometimes with his comments, but maybe this is just a reflection of the fact that he wants to be the best and prides himself on being the best.

And so players are not always that honest about whether their skills have slipped or not and maybe don't always agree with the stats, but that can be an advantage for them to believe in themselves, I guess, and to have maybe even a too great self-confidence because it helps them do this incredibly competitive job with all the pressures that come with it. They have to be armored with this belief that they're the best. And if you've been as good for as long as yadi has then

i guess you're entitled to maybe have a slightly inflated sense of how good you still are i don't know you know there are some great players who have difficulty accepting that their skills have slipped and others do not they very gracefully age into that latter portion of their career but Yachty is still I think good defensively and still certainly has the respect of his pitchers and everyone around baseball so it's not as if you watch him and he can't hack it anymore right and I think some of the concern this year my understanding I'm not suggesting this was necessarily a good or a bad decision but I think that part of the concern this year was that given the shortened slate This year, my understanding, I'm not suggesting this was necessarily a good or a bad decision, but I think that part of the concern this year was that given the shortened slate and

the fact that there was going to be artificially fewer teams that managers and coaches saw because of how the divisions were geographically constituted this year, that that reputation, not of Molina specifically, of players generally would sort of color manager and coach votes because they won't have seen as many guys as they typically would and so there was a desire to try to hew to something that is a bit more objective now I think that the folks at Sabre would tell you and that every stat site would tell you that there is, in a 60-game sample, just going to be a tremendous amount of noise. But I think that the idea behind trying to reach out for some sort of objective standard is a reasonable one. Can I use this just

as an opportunity to voice a small pet peeve and ask for us to all have a better conversation? So folks, I think it's really important to remember when citing first base defensive metrics, specifically first base defensive war, that there is a positional adjustment applied to first base. There's a positional adjustment to all of the positions, but one should remember that, you know, first base pretty low on the defensive spectrum has a positional adjustment applied to it. There are metrics that you can look at specific to defense that do not have that positional adjustment applied to them. So if one is wanting to get a sense of a first baseman's defense without that positional adjustment, which is necessary

for understanding their place on sort of a value spectrum, you can look at things like DRS or UZR or UZR 150. And so I would just, you know, if you are a writing person, a person who writes about baseball for a living, I think it's helpful to remind your readers of the positional adjustment because I think it can be very confusing for folks who are not super familiar with war as a metric. And then they have a kind of warped sense of what's at play there and sort of the relative scale and how these guys might stack up near one another

if you're only looking at first baseman. And I would also just really invite everyone to not be super fussy about 60 games worth of defensive metrics anyhow because we have so much else to be fussy about Ben right yeah and uh you know Jackie Bradley quote tweeted something about someone else tweeted that he was tied with Lewis Robert for the most outs above average according to stat cast among MLB center fielders and he didn't win a gold glover I don't think he was a finalist so it depends what stats you use in theory the stat cast based stats should be maybe a little more telling in small samples but they also depend

somewhat on your opportunities and what staff you're working behind and did you happen to have some balls hit to you that you could catch that most other people wouldn't have caught so it's a small sample season and we both struggled with that i think because we both voted for the fielding bible awards yes two or three weeks ago and that was tough too and there were some adjustments to those awards like we only voted for five players at each position instead of 10 which thank the lord yeah because it takes forever but also in this year yeah there there weren't big statistical separations between those players so yeah my my concern was the lack of statistical

separation and not the time like to be clear of course that was it. Yeah. Kevin Kiermaier also complained, by the way. Jason Stark tweeted that Kiermaier said he was upset and disappointed about not being a Gold Glove finalist. He said, if it's solely based on computers and numbers, I don't know what numbers that computer was looking at, but I believe they got it wrong. Again, as you said, not surprising that an entirely stat-based system would fail to satisfy everyone after a 60-game season. I do think the addition of the stats to the Gold Club voting has helped in recent years. You don't usually get the really ridiculous ones anymore and the ones that are just entirely reputation-based. And the Gold Club voting definitely matches up with the numbers much better than it used to, which I suppose doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurate. But if you believe that the defensive stats have some validity, as I do, then it should mean that. So I think Gold Glove Voting has improved on the whole.

It's just that it was sort of set up to fail or at least to piss people off this season. Also, while we're talking about Yachty, like in the early playoff games when Yachty was playing, I forget which channel it was and which broadcaster it was and maybe it was more than one. But people were going on and on about how like stat heads don't respect Molina or like advocating for him as a Hall of Fame player and suggesting that, you know, Sabermetrics doesn't say he's a Hall of Fame player. And like, yeah, according to some stats and some past value metrics, that's true. But since they have taken into account framing and more aspects of catcher defense, now he stacks up as a very deserving Hall of Famer, at least according to baseball prospectus, fan graphs. If you go to baseball reference, which still doesn't include framing, then he would be lower. reference which still doesn't include framing then he would be lower but right now i mean he's like basically on the border of being a top 10 catcher of all time according to fangraphs war he will

probably retire as a top 10 catcher of all time so i will have a hall of fame vote in theory when he comes up for induction and i i will think about it more than i have to this point, but I don't think I would have any qualms about voting for him because if by the best stats we have, he is seemingly a pretty deserving catcher. And, you know, like having about 55 wins above replacement as he has right now for a catcher, that's really good because, you know, you think of 60 as maybe like the standard for some positions. But for catchers, they don't play as many games they don't have as much opportunity to accumulate war so that's a really great figure for catchers now there will be some other interesting conversations to be had and i've written about this but like right in the vicinity of yachty you have brian mccann and russell martin who are also right there as like you know close to top 10 catchers of all time.

Most people would not think of them as that. And that is largely because of framing. And so you have to decide what to do with that because we don't have those sensitive framing stats for most of baseball history. We have some that are based not on the pitch tracking technologies, but just on like pitch by pitch stats. And that goes back to 1988. And before that, I've seen, you know, some estimates of historical framing just based on like walks and strikeouts and that sort of thing. But it gets a lot less precise. a great framer in those days probably you would not receive the credit for it via war that you can today and so you could argue that martin mccann melina those guys are somewhat inflated by that in a way that maybe earlier catchers should have been and don't get the benefit of that so it's it's kind of tough when you compare across eras but i think the fact that yadi is right there and i do take into account the fact that everyone thinks that he is doing something that doesn't show up in the numbers i've tried to look into that before i've tried to quantify like okay what does he actually do

differently when it comes to calling pitches compared to his backups you know when his backups ever get to play. And it's hard to tell, but when pitcher after pitcher after pitcher says, you know, he's the greatest and he makes me better, I take that into account. You know, I'm not going to discount that. I think it's possible because we saw with framing that that was something that was not quantified until fairly recently, and it turns out it had a huge effect so i would not discount the possibility that there is a similar effect for pitch calling or working with pitchers in in some less tangible way and so if you compare you know how pitchers performed with yadi to how they performed with his backups or with catchers and other teams i would not be surprised to see that there is a bigger difference there than the stats are giving

him credit for like you know there are some examples where people say oh you had to see him play and you can't appreciate him if you didn't see him play or you have to take into account what players said about them and I'm skeptical of that but I think Yachty probably has the best case among contemporary players for like everyone in the game seems to think that he is doing things that the stats don't fully capture. And I'm not going to say he's like, you know, 30 wins or 40 wins better or something than Moore says, but like if you want to bump him up a little bit, absolutely. And you don't even have to really bump him up to get him into hall of fame territory yeah i i think that particularly when it comes to catcher as a position where there is so much that we want to be able to quantify in terms of value and we can't yet that we all just well i

don't know that we all do this but i think that it's a position to approach with a good bit of analytical humility yeah and i think that we're hopefully getting better at that as a collective. And so I think that you're absolutely right that there's a lot more to consider here. And while reputations can sometimes be unearned or inflated, I think that his is so sterling among his peers. And, you know, I'm reticent to say that like baseball people don't know what they're seeing. I don't know if they are always good at translating what they see to like the war scale. But, you know, I don't want to tell a person whose

job it is to do baseball really well at a professional level all day that they're like totally off base with something like that. So I think that there's a lot to be said for just acknowledging what we don't know. And this is a position where that is particularly true, given what we'd like to be able to say definitively about game calling and just can't. So there's that part of it and his frustration, like I don't want to give Yachty a hard time. I think that his frustration with this particular award denotes some misunderstanding of the process at play this year, but I think also probably speaks to a larger concern among players that I think that we're pretty good say helping. I think that analysts have gotten a lot better about how they communicate with players around advanced stats and the value that looking at baseball a particular way can bring. And it would not surprise me given how divergent some of the public facing metrics are and how much work there is to do on that side of things if there is a lot of frustration among players around defensive metrics

in a way that is I think probably a little harder to break through on than it is with a player's contribution either at the plate or on the mound just because so much is determined by your opportunities and your positioning and you know that's the positioning obviously not being completely relevant for a catcher but just in general general, right? Like it's, I think it is a, an area where I would not be surprised if there is work still to be done at sort of bridging that gap in terms of, of communication. So I hope that this stops bothering Yadi. Although to your point, I think the competitive drive necessary to do what he does year after year you know if I had to crouch for three and a half hours during most of my work day at 38 I'd just

be dead so uh right I just would be dust I'd be a pile of dust with a mouth talking on top so um you know it takes a special kind of breed. And I'm glad that we found a way to have a productive conversation about this so that it was not just a sneaky opportunity for me to implore people to read about positional adjustments and then tell your friends and readers all about them. And I think there have been sabermetric sorts who have sort of slighted Yadi in the past. For all I know, I have. I don't really recall.

But when the stats didn't give him the credit that they currently do, you could point to his offense, which is not fantastic, and say that he's been a below average hitter for his career, which barely. He has a 99 career WRC plus and you know if you have a if you're basically a league average hitter and you're maybe the best defensive catcher in baseball over the course of your career and you play a million games I think that is uh that's pretty much a hall of fame career right there it's not like he's Omar Vizquel offensively or something like he's had a lot of really excellent offensive seasons not even just great for a gold glove catcher but just really good period so i think there's like kind of that that culture clash where it comes to like sabermetrics discounting yadi versus old school baseball type saying the numbers aren't capturing

what he's doing i think the numbers have gotten closer and so now the gap is not as great to bridge. But I think because people attribute such almost mystical powers of leadership and pitcher whispering to Yachty, I think there's some natural skepticism. But if you just say, well, it's not on the stat page, so it doesn't exist, I think that is taking it too far in the other direction. it doesn't exist, I think that is taking it too far in the other direction. So there has to be some middle ground. And, you know, I think where war stands right now, at least at Fangraphs, is probably a pretty good middle ground where everyone can agree this is a Hall of Famer. And maybe you can differ on whether he is the greatest of the great Hall of Famers or whether he is just a qualifying Hall of Famer. But he's great either way.

And I think we can all probably agree on that now. Yeah. I will say, though, that in that Jackie Bradley tweet, he tweeted, I just don't understand and I have yet to have anyone from any analytics department explain to me how they calculate the numbers or better yet, how can you physically improve on them as a player? And if that's true, if no one has ever had that conversation with Jackie Bradley, that seems like something maybe the Red Sox should address. I don't know if Jackie Bradley has a whole lot of room for improvement defensively, because he's really good at that already. So I can understand why that wouldn't have been the top priority for the Red Sox front office to say, hey, let's talk to Jackie Bradley about being good at defense. He's already great. But hopefully that team and all teams have some sort of intermediary there. And most of them do, I think now, where if a player wants that information or can benefit from that information in some way, there is someone who can communicate it to them.

So maybe the Red Sox do and and it just hasn't been passed on to bradley because he hasn't really needed that particular advice i mean they've had brian bannister and and they've had other people who are passing along those insights at least on the pitching side so but that's something that if a player feels like they don't understand the numbers or they don't have someone on their team who can help support them with the numbers that would be something to address i would yeah i agreed all right so i did want to just briefly bring up jeff lunao which i'm almost reluctant to do because who wants to talk about jeff lunao it's the world series but jeff lunao sort of thrust himself back into the conversation this week almost immediately as soon as the astros were eliminated he uh sort of started i guess what he hoped would be a campaign to rehabilitate himself

in baseball and maybe get a job back i don't know maybe his motivation is just uh he he's you know firing some shots at the people who kick him out or something. But I would think that he was trying to make himself more presentable as a job candidate now that his suspension is about to be over. And if so, I think it backfired pretty terribly because he came out on this Houston TV interview, KPRCC and he essentially said and reiterated that he had no knowledge of the sign stealing scheme he implied

that MLB was just kind of looking for a fall guy and he said the investigation interviewed dozens and dozens of people players video staff members coaches etc none of them said that I knew. The absence of any facts regarding me speak very loudly.

I mean, they went through years and years of emails and text, voicemails, messages, and documents, and there's nothing in there that suggests that I knew, and if I were involved, there would be something somewhere, and it just didn't exist. So he suggested that they were kind of looking for a scapegoat, that they almost framed him or made him the public face of this in a way that he didn't deserve, that he didn't know about it. And he sort of pointed the finger at unnamed members of the Astros organization who were more responsible, he says, who are still employed, which seems to be true. Which seems to be true. We talked about that last year or early this year, it seems like many years ago, that not all of the Astros employees who were implicated in MLB's report lost their jobs. So it's true that some of them have continued to be employed by the Astros. We've seen now that people from the league have fired back at Lunau.

Clearly, they are not happy with this suggestion. They don't seem to like Lunau. And so all of these anonymous sources are coming out of the woodwork to say, no, this guy's full of it and are making him look, I think, even worse and more guilty than he did before. So Evan Drellick at The Athletic wrote this article, Sources, MLB's Astros Investigation Showed Lunau's Awareness of Sign Stealing. And no one from the league goes on record here, but I will quote from Evan here, people with knowledge of the investigation said that, quote, there was direct testimony that Lunau was aware of the sign stealing scheme. The league's Department of Investigations, headed by former federal prosecutors,

gathered a combination of direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, and testimony that a source said would hold up in a legal forum, despite Lunau's suggestion to the contrary. This is a quote, Lunau received emails that put him on notice of the activity, but claims he only read parts of the emails, even though he responded to the emails. The person said one witness clearly stated and provided evidence that Lunau knew, and others identified facts indicating that Lunau knew. The best interpretation of the evidence is that Lunau either knew exactly what the video room was doing or knew generally what they were doing and willfully chose to keep himself in the dark.

doing and willfully chose to keep himself in the dark. And Lunau said he got access to these 22,000 text messages from an employee in the Astros video room, and it doesn't seem like anyone is entirely clear on how he got access to those. And he is claiming that there's nothing in there that implicates him. But I think we haven't seen that evidence in that correspondence. So it's a he said, they said in that sense. But I think it's almost irrelevant because whether he knew or not, he's responsible. I think Rob Manfred made that clear in his sign stealing memo that predated this scandal, that he was going to hold GMs or top baseball operations executives accountable for this. hold GMs or top baseball operations executives accountable for this. And so Lunau, it seems like, did not communicate those new rules adequately or didn't have adequate oversight. So even if he didn't know, then he is still ultimately the person who I think is responsible for that.

I guess you could say Jim Crane maybe should have been too and wasn't really held responsible, although he at least owns the team and suffered some slight penalties because of that. But I think because of that and because of this supposed evidence that exists, I got to say Lunau didn't really make himself look better here. Not that he was a sympathetic figure to begin with. better here not that he was a sympathetic figure to begin with but rob manfred responded to these comments on an espn radio interview on tuesday and for once i gotta say i think uh rob manfred is is maybe the person people would side with here which is it's tough to do that's a reflection on just how unsympathetic lunao is that you read rob manfred's comments about this and you're like yeah you're right, Rob. How often does that happen?

But Manfred said in this interview, the 23,000 electronic messages that Jeff talked about over and over again were a fraction of the evidence in the case. There was a lot of other evidence, electronic testimonial, which indicated Jeff's culpability in this matter. And then Manfred went on to say whether he knew exactly what was going on or not is really beside the point. I wrote to all the GMs I put them on notice that it was their obligation to make sure that their organizations were not violating any of the science doing rules I think it's pretty clear from the facts that Mr. Lunau failed to discharge the obligation he damaged the game and as a result

he was disciplined and some other people who worked under lunau said to trellick he should just be quiet lunau that is like what i said in the interview why is it all on me yeah i said yeah because you were the gm buddy right yeah i mean you know to what extent he was like directly responsible or like the culture he created enabled this i don't know it's hard to say like clearly players were responsible coaches were responsible a gm doesn't know about all of those things typically but it was uh his show ultimately so you know if he wants to come out and say like there's a version of this interview where he accepts that responsibility and says, you know, like seems like he's more interested in kind of saying, why me? And why am I the person who gets held responsible here? And look at what MLB is doing,

and look at these other people who are still employed there. Not that MLB handled this situation perfectly or anything. There's blame to go around here. But if his goal was to come out and you know make himself hireable again i don't think this helped he might be hired anyway but i don't think this helped i have a couple of things to say about this ben yes here's my first thing because we'll focus on the sign stealing part of that because i think it's the most germane to the moment and i think will end up dictating his employability but i would like to have a world series where i don't have to revisit the the brandon taubman incident yeah stop it jeff yeah it's like the astros just lost we were spared seeing the astros in the world series but you know we're we're talking about them which uh i guess it's it's my choice here to bring this up

but you know it became news because Lunau inserted himself into the conversation at a time when we just want to watch like the race and the Dodgers really. Yeah, and almost certainly, I don't know Jeff Lunau. I don't know Jeff Lunau, so I can't say this for sure, but my strong suspicion is that he was like, what's the most inconvenient moment for Rob Manfred for me to talk about this? Is it the day before the World Series starts?

Great, book it. So that's my suspicion there. I think that I'm not actually totally sure if Jeff Luna wants to work in baseball again. The most chilling part of this entire interview, candidly, was when he said, what I realized is that the opportunity to apply business practices and analytics and technology and to really modernize a sports organization the way I helped modernize the Cardinals and the Astros, that exists in every sport. That's the most chilling part of this interview. He's metastasizing. He's going to go from one sport to the next.

Yeah. So that's the most concerning part of this i now shudder for seahawks will hire him oh god oh ben what an evil thought sorry sorry to put that out there in the universe wow no they they'll never do that they're committed to being anti analytics and for once that's that's protecting me and my feelings no i think that it's not clear to me that he wants to work in baseball think that it's not clear to me that he wants to work in baseball again, but let's assume for a moment that he does because I think that that lens is useful when analyzing this. I don't understand why he thinks the argument that he

advanced here for his own employability is a compelling one because I agree with you. I find it wildly unlikely that Luna was not only briefed, but well aware of what was going on. But if I were a baseball team owner and I were sitting there going, who should my next smart GM be? I would not find the argument that there was such wild disregard for my own authority that not only were players and coaches on my team, but also direct reports within baseball operations so indifferent to my directives that they orchestrated one of the largest scandals in baseball history without my knowledge,

a compelling argument to bring that person into a leadership position. And this, to your point, has always been the problem with what Lunau says. The buck has to stop somewhere, and you have to take responsibility for failures of this kind. And there is an element of that that is a bummer if you are truly an ignorant and innocent party, but it is part of the job. And I will say for Lunau, he does not appear to have a particularly robust model in Jim Crane for taking organizational responsibility. So he is hardly alone within the Houston Astros for deflecting where possible. But if I owned a team and was on the market for a new GM, I would not pick the person who either couldn't control my subordinates or had good control of them, but such disregard for the rules of the game and those individuals own reputations that i would want to bring him into to the org

it's a very bad look to only manage up and to disregard the long-term well-being of the people below you and yes i think we all wish that some more junior people within the astros organization had said hey this is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. And had called up the league and said, I have a very awkward confession to make. But they didn't do that. And ultimately, that's Lunau's responsibility, whether he knew or didn't. So yeah, I don't think that this helped his cause in any kind of appreciable way. I don't know that if he had gone on TV and said, you know, I made a terrible mistake in not creating a culture of accountability and

rule following. And, you know, I hope to one day work in baseball again. But this taught me some really valuable and painful lessons. I don't know if that shifts shifts like moves the needle on his ability to get a senior position with an org again but i think it probably does more than this i say that and the worst case scenario ben is not that he ends up being involved in the seattle seahawks in some way although that would be personally painful for me what if jeff Lunau ends up in the Angels' orbit? That's the worst case scenario. I don't say that like I have any special insider knowledge, but I'm just thinking of openings.

Yes, right. But yeah, I think that this interview further underscores the difference in how Lunau was individually perceived within baseball circles versus how A.J. Hinch was personally perceived within baseball circles, because he is exhibiting much of the behavior, you know, sort of a willingness to throw others under the bus or cast them off entirely in order to advance goals that are personal to him that I think helped to inform some of the decisions he made around scouting personnel. And I don't think that this helps to endear him to anyone in baseball, especially junior people

who just spent the entire summer terrified for their jobs and often on the wrong end of ownership decisions. So I wouldn't want to work for Jeff Lunau. And I would be surprised if there were a ton of people who work on the team side who came away from this interview being like that Jeff, he's our guy. Yeah, right. All right. Well, probably enough said about Mr. Lunau as Rob Manfred calls him. So maybe we can end on a kind of a weird, fun question about the World Series. This is from Webb, a Patreon supporter of ours,

who emailed this question. I was talking about the playoffs with my non-baseball fan wife. I said that they're playing the series without any breaks, seven games in a row. This was one of the earlier series. She took this to mean that they were literally playing all of the games in a row. This was one of the earlier series. She took this to mean that they were literally playing all of the games in a row. Like you finish game one, maybe take an hour break,

and then start game two. If this were the way it was done, how would things be different? My prediction, more two-way players, no offense in game six and seven if the series gets there because everyone is so tired, lots of players pitching and hong kong airport style nap pods in the dugout so if you were to do this if you were to play a best of seven series non-stop you could cram a whole world series into one day if you wanted to i guess uh if the series went seven and all the games were long maybe it it would slightly creep over 24 hours if you had some breaks between games. But you could basically get a whole series in one day. There's no reason to want to do this. I don't think there's any upside to doing this. It would be terrible. However, if you were to do it, if it were just a slog to the end of the series,

just a test of endurance, the Rays and the Dodgers would be two of the teams best equipped to do this because they do have pitching depth. And because you have 28-man rosters right now, the Dodgers have 15 pitchers on their World Series roster, so they could conceivably do it. Like if you had, I guess you would have to designate seven different starters. I mean, the series may not go seven games, but that part wouldn't be all that weird or that different. Like if the series only went four or five games, you might not notice that much of a difference because you just have a different rested starter to start each of those games. And bullpen would be an issue.

You definitely have to have your starters go deep into games. I guess it would be possible, like, if you had a reliever pitch in game one, could you bring back that reliever in game seven? Which would be, like, roughly a day later. Like, you could send them off to take a nap during games uh three and four or something might be tough to nap while your team is playing world series games but if you could do that somehow then they could come back refreshed for game seven like i guess it wouldn't be all that different from a reliever who pitches like in a night game and then comes back to pitch in a day game the next day the the total time elapsed would not be that different so it's conceivable that pitchers could come back on extremely short rest no rest really i don't know it would be like zero days rest but six games rest somehow but i think I think you could do that. But if you had like the Braves and Dodgers,

you just keep trotting out different levers in each game. And as Webb mentions, everyone would be exhausted by the end of it. I think if you got to game six and seven, that would be where you'd have issues because like you'd have to have the same starters come back and they wouldn't be able to go. So I don't know how you get through game six and seven unless you just really ration your innings in those early games. And just there's no good way to do that. I don't think even with expanded rosters.

So you'd end up with like dead tired pitchers, dead tired everyone. like dead tired pitchers, dead tired everyone. I think probably there would be scoring because the pitchers would be so exhausted or you'd have to have position player pitchers or something. This would be terrible baseball, but you could do it, I think. But Ben, think of how many catchers you'd have to carry. Oh, catchers. You'd have to carry a bushel, a peck of catchers.

Because by game, I think you would start to see shifting around and legs falling off by the fourth game. You'd find guys just like who suddenly don't have legs back there by the fourth game. And I think that we are under, I mean, yes, everyone would be fatigued. That would be a thing that would exist for everybody. But I think we're perhaps discounting the effect and maybe the immediacy of that effect on position players because I think that the technical term for this is phonetic paraphasia.

Do you ever have the experience, experience ben when you are very tired which you never are because you don't sleep that is a different conversation and a different concern always tired it's one of those two yeah do you ever have the experience when you're very very tired and you're writing and you will write the word right as in right and wrong instead of right as in to write down a fact uh-huh yeah do you ever experience that yeah i've had that sort of thing yeah that is a phenomenon called phonetic paraphasia i learned what this word was because um amanda mull of the atlantic was tweeting about this being a thing that happens to her and has happened to me. And I was so happy to know what it is called because as she noted in her initial tweet on

this, it is impossible to Google what this is. And some, some lovely person told her what the term is for this phenomenon. I don't know what the baseball equivalent of that is, but i find that that happens to me when i have had maybe two bad nights of sleep in a row and so i think we would see mental mistakes in the field i think it would happen much more quickly than you're anticipating because of how bone tired these guys would be after playing four baseball games in a row the game four would be a nightmare show, just an absolute disaster. That would be where we would start to see it. And I don't think it would be limited to fielding mistakes.

I think that your eyes would start to droop. You wouldn't see the ball as well out of the hand. Your hand-eye coordination would deteriorate because I think your reaction times would slow at the plate because you're tired. I think this would be, it would end baseball. I think that people would watch the back half of that World Series and say, I don't need to ever engage with this sport ever again because what I watched was so horrifying that I never want to see it again.

I think it would be the end of baseball. It's like Sam's article about the 50 inning game and what would happen. Yeah, I hadn't considered the catchers like there are three catchers on some of these rosters so if you did space them out you you have one guy catch games one and and four and seven if necessary and and then he gets a little bit of a breather in between games. So get some treatment, get some massage. I don't know, whatever new age therapies teams are trying these days. But yeah, everyone would just be let in by the end of it. It wouldn't be a problem.

And it would affect everyone. It might affect pitchers too. But if you did have some pitchers held in reserve, so you said hey you guys nap you know stay at the hotel until game three and we'll call you if we need you or something then maybe they wouldn't be quite as worn out and they wouldn't be standing in the field for all of those things so that would be an issue and it wouldn't be that fun for fans and spectators either. I guess it's less baseball than that day when we had eight playoff games and we were all overwhelmed by that. But because those overwhelmed, it did not take a full 24 hours as this might if you went seven games. So, yeah, the only reason I can think of why you'd need to do this is like, I don't know, some sort of the pandemic delays the start of the series or something and you need to get it all in before election day or something.

It's like, let's play it all in one day. I don't know. At that point, the world is in such dire shape that maybe you shouldn't be playing baseball anyway. So, yeah, this would be bad. You could do it. You could conceivably keep enough players fresh, relatively speaking, to do it. How many would you have to roster, do you think? Just to get it done, not to do it well.

That's off the table. That isn't an option in this scenario. This is bad baseball. We've entered that realm but how many do you think that a team would have to roster in order to complete potentially seven games let's assume it goes a full seven in the space of 24 36 hours yeah i mean i think you could conceivably do it with 28. It would be like cruel. No, you couldn't. I don't think you could. So you wouldn't, you'd have to just have each of the starters go deep into games. Like you just have to leave them out there and accept that we're not doing the pull people after the third time through the order or after the second time through the order thing. You're just out there to wear it however you're doing because these are extreme circumstances. So like, look, if you give five starts to five different pitchers and you say you're all going at least seven innings and I don't care how poorly

you're pitching, we're all playing under these rules. So each of these five guys goes seven innings and then you use, you know, one or two different relievers to finish each of those games. So you get through game five, let's say, and you haven't had to repeat a pitcher. And the position players are all exhausted by this point. They'll be slow and they probably won't be hitting very well. But, you know, they'll live, probably. Like, they won't keel over i don't think if they are appropriately nourished and hydrated these are athletes who are probably capable of playing a full day of baseball it's baseball like you know you're not running constantly it's still baseball you get to sit in the dugout and stand around a lot so i think a catcher would retire. Catchers, that's the issue. That's like the bottleneck here is catchers. But if you have three of them and you're okay with playing your third string guy

and starting him in a game, I'm just saying I think it could be done. I'm not saying it should be done, but I think it could be done without seriously injuring anyone except us because it would be such bad, boring baseball. And like, I wouldn't be able to staff that. This is not...

Oh, yeah. Like I couldn't, I couldn't, you know. You wouldn't have to have like reaction blogs to game one or whatever because it's like, all right, well, that's over, time for game two. couldn't no you wouldn't have to have like reaction blogs to game one or whatever because it's like all right well that's over time for game two wouldn't have to write gamers so you could just save your recaps for after it's all over oh i i don't care for this at all i you know the fan graph staff is generally like aware of the ebbs and flows of the season and And we all know that there are times a year where we're just going to be tired.

We're just going to be tired because of what the baseball schedule demands. And I think we do an okay job of figuring that out in a way that doesn't make anybody hate themselves or fan graphs or their lives. But no, I don't want to tell someone, hey, you know got the 4 a.m shift no no this would nonsense hard on everyone there's no way the union would agree to this as an aside no absolutely not I mean I know that that's not the the question presupposes nonsense so I I understand what we're doing here I get the exercise but I think i think at least one catcher would retire uh i think someone would be badly injured could be yeah i think that people would stop watching baseball they definitely stop watching this series at a certain point could you even lift the trophy

at the end you'd be like uh yeah that's i mean that's the most exciting part of the season too when rob minford gets to hand that trophy to some lucky owner and that piece of metal eventually it does make its way to a player or the the coach and then you're like yeah look at you you're holding it up and i think you'd hand it off to a player and he would just fall over onto his side. The MVP would be awarded his convertible or monster truck or whatever it is that they give to the MVP. He would just curl up inside and take a nap. The end of the sport. Well, Webb, I don't know why you concocted this torture scenario,

but hopefully no one puts you in charge of scheduling. But thank you for the question. Yes. scheduling. But thank you for the question. Yes. Yes. Oh, we thank you for the question. Yes. We hate this. And the Patreon support.

Yes. Yes. That too. All right. While we were doing our Patreon live stream last week, which we will be reprising on Saturday, someone asked us, I think, if like the Razor, the team you would take

if you were starting a franchise now, or if you want to like have the best future of any baseball team quickly is there any argument for Rays versus Dodgers if we did uh Betts versus Trout is there any scenario where you would take Rays basically based on the fact that they have a really good team now and they have the best farm system according to fan grass rankings it's like the raised farm system is head and shoulders above any other organizations according to eric long and hagan and co and yes and the dodgers are pretty far down there like uh they look like they're maybe in the the bottom third or so you know know, not terrible. And obviously that is in large part

because they have graduated a lot of great young players and they clearly have an ability to keep developing players. But currently, at least, the Rays seem to have a better stock to farm. They do, although I think it's important to acknowledge that a very significant portion of the Rays' value is locked up in wonder franco that's true too so part of why the raise you know we have our farm system rankings they update in

real time so they reflect you know future value grade changes they also reflect graduations and one of the nice things about that tab is that we break down where the value is coming from and like 180 million dollars of the raise farm system value is coming from. And like $180 million of the Rays farm system value is coming in the fact that they have an 80 prospect in Wander Franco. But I take your point, which is that they are still very good. I have answered this question a couple of times

in the last few days, and I don't really see a reason to change it now. I would still take LA because while I think that the Rays are smart and innovative, I think they scout well, I think that they develop players well, I think they do a really great job of making do with much less in terms of financial resources. I think your margin for error is just a lot larger when you're willing to run a meaningful major league payroll.

Right. Because if there is a breakdown in the player development pipeline, if a guy doesn't pan out the way that you expect him to, if somebody gets hurt, it really helps to be able to say, wow, that star young pitcher who we expected to help lead our rotation next year needs Tommy John. So I guess we'll just go out and spend $40 million

on the free agent market and bring someone in and be not that much worse for wear. So I don't think that when we look at organizations, the ones that get one track in terms of the way they construct their rosters so become overly reliant on any one mode of player acquisition or talent development tend to not be able to sustain their success for as long as the organizations that are keen on multiple modes

of talent acquisition, free agency being one of them. So I would take LA. Yeah, I'm totally with you on all of that. I think all of the smart things that the Rays do, the Dodgers are probably also doing all or most of those. And also they can spend on players and they do spend on players. And so when they get a great homegrown franchise type player, they can keep them. They can keep them around for as long as they want. And the Rays just repeatedly trade those guys, which is how they operate within those ownership-imposed constraints. And they've done a great job of it, the baseball operations people, but you have to keep winning those trades over and over and over again. And that's tough to do. It's tough to keep outsmarting other teams. And that's kind of their only route to victory because they don't have the outspending route. So if you have both of those things and all of the resources that the Dodgers have and their history and their stadium and all the things that the Rays lack, I just don't really see a strong case for Tampa Bay over the Dodgers.

really see a strong case for Tampa Bay over the Dodgers. And I think it's just like you can look at how successful the Rays have been, but they just won their third division title and their first since 2010. And the Dodgers just won their eighth in a row. It's a different level of consistency in success, which I think is what the dodgers payroll buys them like some margin for error as you were saying like the rays just don't have that and the dodgers do so i think that makes them the better long-term prospect and i guess if you look in terms of like competition in the division like the rays are always going up against the Yankees too. So they're always fighting a financial powerhouse and the Red Sox too. And now the Red Sox are run by a former Rays person. So that kind of eats away at whatever intellectual advantage they had there. And then the Blue Jays are an up and coming team too. The Orioles, they have a long way to go, but you know but they've adopted these new practices too. And meanwhile, in the NL West, you do have the Padres set up to be the rival to the Dodgers for years to come, seemingly. But I don't think there's quite as much competition in the NL West year in and year out that there has been historically in the AL East. So that's just another obstacle.

Yeah, I think that that's all right. It's such an interesting—we've talked a lot about some of the ethical considerations for rooting for one franchise over the other, and I think did a good job of making clear that there are very few ethical means of consuming, totally ethical means of consuming baseball in this sort of existing labor market. ethical means of consuming baseball in this sort of existing labor market. I do want to say, though, that I think it's really great that the two teams that two of the teams that we look at when we're like, hey, those baseball teams, they sure do have some smarties working for them, are also two of the teams that have just committed to maintaining

relatively large scouting staffs. So we should focus on that part sometimes because that part is good. That is true. All right. Yeah. So maybe sort of a long-term mismatch in terms of resources and outlook. But for the next four or five days, it's anyone's game and anyone's series. And fortunately, they will not be playing all of those games on the same day.

So we can enjoy them at our leisure and we'll be back to talk about how those games went next time okay that will do it for today and for this week thank you as always for listening as noted meg and sam and i will be doing a patreon live stream for those at the ten dollar level a month and up on saturday during world series game four you can still get in on that. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going while getting themselves access to some perks, such as the aforementioned live stream,

Daniel Brennan, James Rosenheim, Eddie Dudek, David Dudley, and Evan Davies. 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. You can contact

us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or by messaging us via the Patreon site if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins as always for his editing assistance and hope you have a wonderful last weekend of baseball in the 2020 season and we will be back to talk to you early next

week. I'll go I know it's there I know it's where It can't be found It's a mountain down It's meant for me I've worked so hard I deserve it more Invisible gold