Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1620: Jeff Sullivan Partakes in a Pennant

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley are joined by former co-host and current Tampa Bay Rays analyst Jeff Sullivan to discuss the experience of working for a team that almost won the World Series, touching on what exactly Jeff’s job is, what he learned in his second year with the Rays, what he did […]

🎵 Now I've solved it all, in my lesson couldn't drop the ball away 🎵 🎵 Now it's rolled out of my hands, where it stays, in second place, yeah! 🎵 Yeah! Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are also joined by Jeff Sullivan, former Effectively Wild co-host and current job haver for the pennant-winning Tampa Bay Rays. Jeff, I never know how to say your job title because it's just analyst comma baseball development, which probably looks fine on a business card, but it's sort of tough to say. Like, is it analyst of baseball development, analyst for baseball development, analyst in baseball development analyst for baseball development analyst in baseball development i just tried a few different permutations and i'm not sure what do you say if you ever say it i have no one to say it to everyone either already knows where i work with

them and so i really don't have to do much explaining at all but the general joke has been that i develop baseballs which is not true but i guess guess effectively not untrue. We do study baseball. If that were true, I'd have a lot of questions for you. You're right. We have juiced them. Well, the hosts are all here, so we can catch up with Jeff, who was last on the podcast, I believe, in mid-February when pitchers and catchers were reporting, and opening day was right around the corner corner and little did we

know what would happen or not happen after that so how was your year has it really been that long have i not talked so recorded we're on fangraphs audio in april maybe with meg but i don't think you've been on effect that that is what probably threw me off okay so then i don't have to just sit here and repeat stories but what i do remember because if i must have talked to meg about this on on the fangraphs audio but what i remember most vividly from spring training besides having been there and uh you know it all seemed to escalate there's no reason to really go into detail about this it all seemed to escalate very very quickly but what i remember the day that i had to scramble like rebook a sooner flight home because we were all sent home and dispatched.

I had to fly from Florida back to Oregon. Because I remember we were the last game going, the last live game going, spring training. And so I kind of was on the phone waiting to book a new flight. And the game, I think it was Rays-Phillies or whatever it was on the field, was ending. And you know how the PA announcer at the end is always like, for coming out to the ball game and the rays whatever win or lose and we'll see you at the park tomorrow the pa announcement this is paraphrasing unfortunately i didn't think quickly enough to get a video but it was like and the rays something the phillies and thanks for coming to the ballpark the rest of spring training has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic stay safe and drive

whatever and it was it becomes more surreal as I think about it in the moment it's just like yeah that's what's happening uh but that was definitely seen that if I had recorded it it would just feel uh I don't know iconic yeah what did you do from like March to June or July? I mean, what do baseball people do when there's no baseball going on and it's not clear when baseball will be going on, if ever? with every intimate corner of the green space. I now know the duck seasons and the goose seasons and the squirrel seasons and the nutrient, the muskrat and the beaver seasons. And saw a mink the other day. That was a first.

There's some owls in there who I kind of root for, but kind of don't because I like the squirrels. But realistically, like one of the good things about being an analyst for a baseball team is something like a massive global disruption is maybe you are the people who are disrupted the least because there's still numbers to play with right even if they're not like new numbers they're still numbers either from spring training or from the year before but there was definitely a stretch where i was looking at a bunch of like spring

training 1.0 pitcher data and being like oh this thing's different or this thing is different and then thinking well well that doesn't matter anymore because no one's playing and who knows what they're going to look like yeah next time they come out so it was a lot of uh i don't know what's the expression whistling past the graveyard but keeping busy yeah i was wondering if there were like things that were on the back burner maybe like non-time sensitive research projects or like models to build or something that just wouldn't be done if the season had started on schedule. But because it didn't and because no one knew when it would, it was just like, well, I guess we'll get to this thing that was on our

list. So you had things to do, even if it was not the things that you would have been doing in a normal year. Yeah. And I don't want to like convey that I'm one of the expert model builders. I'm one of the dumbest people who works for the team. And so that was definitely just a chance for me to do a little like smaller style analysis or whatever I was pursuing while other people did the hard work. But I do think obviously the pandemic shutdown was not a blessing, but I do think it definitely did allow us to get the stuff that maybe we wouldn't have the bandwidth for otherwise. I think that if you really wanted to argue there, you could present the argument that if you want to talk in competitive advantage terms that us having such a big group allowed us to maybe do more and get more ahead of competitors. I have no idea what other people

were doing, but there was definitely a lot that was accomplished during that time that I think if there was a season going on, it would have been a lot more difficult to get to in the near term future. One of the things that lots of people who I've talked to who are in offices, various industries, various jobs, and so on, have mentioned is that it just feels like one of the things, particularly in the first several months of the pandemic, that we noticed was that like the there was a sense that everybody had lower expectations for themselves and others and in some ways that was a relief that like all these ambitions that you had for you know your year or you were going to do some big project or you were going to accomplish some big sales record or whatever it was just like well no you're not

like we're not doing anything this year and so you could kind of like exist in a world where there was just a lot less ambition and a lot less of sort of like the type a pressure that work often brings in. And we hear a lot of times that a baseball front office is like super duper that way that like you're expected to work tons and tons of hours and basically work from sunup to sundown every every day for, you know, not that much money because like there are a lot of people who want your job and so they can demand a lot from you. So did you notice like any of that scaling back of ambition? Like, was there any sense that the competitive obsession of professional baseball was like

eased up on at all this year, either during the inactive months or during the season itself, or were you guys all just like 88 hours a week with nothing to nothing to do, but you had to do it anyway. Yeah, I guess I'll say that the first thing is, uh, it's certainly now in the winter, I'm probably working beyond the sun up to sundown because the sun goes down at three 30 now in, uh, in Oregon. So that's very early and you have to work in the dark. But I would think, I mean, the obvious point is people who have kids, their work days were a little more disrupted.

I don't know how, like, Eric Neander does what he does in a shutdown situation given that he has a large family and pets and everything else, so he can't really escape to an office. So I don't know how that works. Like, pretty much everyone in a senior or associate senior position of the organization has family and young kids. That's where their age windows are. So that would be very, very disruptive. Many of those of us who do analysis don't have kids or just don't have as much at home. And so there are actually fewer distractions. I don't think that, just speaking for myself, I don't think my own work was really affected outside of not having new information to

play with, which I guess is me kind of a big detriment. But one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot this year is my wife works for, let's say, a more toxic workplace than I do. On Sunday evenings, I go to bed and I don't hate that the next day is Monday. We all, I guess I shouldn't speak for every single person, but generally my sense is that we all do want to be doing what we're doing. So it's not like it's just this competitive drive and we are afraid for our jobs and so we're working all the time and 80 hours a week, whatever. I think it's that people want to be doing what they're doing. That's one of the benefits of working in baseball. And certainly one of the benefits of working in our front office in particular is the sense

of community is there and it is like a good group. So I don't, my sense is aside from like even more being done in Slack or like Zoom meetings than being in an office setting. I don't think things really slow down that much in the departments to which I have most ready and visible access. I'm not quite sure if I'm going to phrase this question sensically, so bear with me. But I had the experience in year, going into year two of being the managing editor of Fangraphs of feeling like competent by way of having done things before in a way that was really nice, right?

It's like, I can do positional power rankings. Like I've orchestrated that exercise before. I know that it will not literally kill me even though it feels like it will. And so I can do it because I've done it before. And I won't speak for you, but I'm curious, one, if you sort of had that sense going into year two with the raise and like how that manifested. And then, you know know we can acknowledge that that

sense of competence or knowing you know how the phones work in a metaphorical way may have been disrupted by the fact that we were then thrust into a work challenge none of us knew how to totally grapple with but like what in year two felt more just easy out of the hand because you had done it before and knew what to expect and like knew who to call for a thing right like half of learning how to work in a place is knowing who to call when that thing you have to get done needs to get done right away so I'm curious how that how year two kind of hit you going in yeah certainly especially being remote it just took longer to figure out exactly like who was in what positions or like who are all of these coaches? What are they like? Who are these coordinators? What are they like? And getting to talk to a lot of them

year two is certainly a chance for me to like more develop relationships. I remember when I was first taking the job, my direct boss, Peter Bendix, he told I had signed like a two year contract when I took this job. And he had told me like, well, we're probably expecting your onboard process to be about two years. And I felt like, what in the hell are you talking about? That's a very long time to get used to your job. And why would you sign someone who you just have to train for that long? But I definitely understand what he meant just in that year two has felt like a lot more like I kind of know what I'm doing. And don't get me wrong. I know what I'm doing the least out of anyone who works for us, but I still do know a lot more just being familiar with our data. And

like, if I reflect on some of the ideas I was thinking, ideas I raised or ideas I didn't necessarily raise a year ago, like going into the off season, or even before that, the previous tread deadline being like, these are very bad ideas. These are just not realistic ideas. And I would have, on the one hand, thought that it would have been easier to transition to a baseball team in that regard from the public, since this is stuff that I dealt with outside for so many years. But there is just a different level of complexity and I guess like reality that you have to internalize when you go work for a team. And so I'm sure the ideas that I have now remain bad, but hopefully they are less bad, less like conspicuously bad.

But, you know, we'll see what I see, what I think in year three, God willing, if we get that far. And part of your job involves sort of like system-wide communication, right? Like talking to coaches at different affiliates or, you know, just talking to people from top to bottom. How does that work when everyone is dispersed all over the country, when no minor league season is happening? I don't know how much baseball development overlaps with player development, but to the extent that that affected you, how did you deal with that? that i mean one could argue it's a lot easier right because if people aren't out at the field and they're just like looking for things

to do then they're more than happy to make a lot of time to have a conversation so in that regard the uh the logistics of it have been uh remarkably simple people have been very available this year outside of uh of short windows of time so yeah that hasn't actually been so bad. And does skill development and player development have anything to do with what you do? And do you have any input in sort of trying to figure out how to not have players set back by missing a lot of playing time at any level, really? I mean, good luck to...

I'm not a player who's trying to improve right now. So I can't imagine like obviously none of us really know what this year will have done the young players development right like there's basically no way of knowing until we all go through it and then we figure out how it compares to the past but i'm obviously because i'm in oregon and i'm almost always in oregon i'm not like hands-on with the player i'm not trying to like tweak someone's swing or mechanics or whatever that goes to the experts i am among the things that i get to do is i get to play with the numbers that we have and if we have data on something then if i have occasion to look at that data for a

player and be like well this looks good or this looks bad then then there are ways that i can issue that feedback but certainly one of the things that has been easier to understand in in year two is just like the i don't know if hierarchy or chain of command or what but just like the the order of things if you know you don't just go like for example kyle snyder a pigeon coach you don't just fire off an email to kyle snyder if you find something you're like this looks like this is interesting we should do this like there's there's a whole like editing process i i probably get edited more now than i did when i was writing for a publication, which is weird.

I wondered about because when we when you left, I think one of the questions that we asked you or that you talked about was going from writing for like a mass audience of, you know, strangers to like a single organization, a much smaller audience in a single organization. But I will preface this by saying, I still don't really know what you do. So if you could just tell us so that I finally actually understand, because I can't figure out, I still can't figure out how you fill your days. But beyond that, it's not the organization who's your audience. It's not even like, it's not even, I imagine a very large sliver of the organization. I mean, how many people are your frontline audience? Is it like, is it basically, are you writing for one person who then decides how to like manage the communication broadcast outward from there? I mean, I don't even necessarily want to say that I'm in a position where I have an audience because that makes it sound like I'm more important or like some sort of internal performer, which isn't necessarily the idea. I'm not just like a analytical jester that

they have over in the corner for people's entertainment. It's more like it's just part of the group, right? Every team has a group of people who collaborate on things that are happening at the front office. And some groups are, I think, a lot smaller and some groups are a lot larger. We have, I would argue, a very large group having only worked for this one team. I guess I don't really know how big other groups are. But one of the things that I do appreciate about this organization is that like people are free to weigh in almost no matter what their job title is, no matter what their background is and opinion is an opinion and then it'll be evaluated on its merits. So like, you know know i'll write a bunch of stuff and

it'll go on slack but it's not like there's a group that's just waiting for me to publish things every day it's just like as things come up that are analytically interesting then they will be shared with a certain number of people who might or might not be interested in uh in that fact i learned definitely in year one i was able to learn what kind of stuff I found interesting that just wasn't relevant to us. Like, look, I can spend a month just analyzing Mike Trout, but it's not really going to do anything for us. I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school here when I say we're not going to

trade for Mike Trout or claim him on waivers should he ever arrive there so you know that's kind of stuff that maybe I'm doing less than I did at Fangraphs because Mike Trout is not relevant to my current I'm going to say audience game that's not what I mean uh and in more let's say practical players or themes to analyze okay so if let's say that you had something about, I don't know, like I don't even know if you do this, but like let's say that you had some insight into something about some player. All right, how many people...

Imagine you know about baseball, Jeff. Imagine I know something... About someone. Someone. How many stages of persuasion are required to get it from you to that player because you can't go straight to kyle snyder and you certainly then you can't go straight to to the player so you have someone has to convince kyle snyder how many people have to be convinced between you and kyle snyder how how interesting or actionable is this thing that i

know about this player just just you know give me an example of a thing what's something that i might know it doesn't have to be a real example but like what's the thing someone's shoes are too big for them someone's shoes are too big i wouldn't notice that uh you know i don't i won't tell you what's in our database but that is not not in our database. I don't know. Hypothetically, you know, arm slot, you know, if he raised his arm a little bit on the slider, he'd get more spin efficiency. Okay. Something like that. And then that is probably something that I would raise with one or two people. And then we would collaborate on how to distill that into basically like six words that we can send along.

One of the things, like, you have to be so conscious of it's basically like email fatigue right like you don't want to just overload the people who are handling the players because they already have so much on the table so you're just trying to get the i mean i've spent like an entire friday some weeks ago whittling what i think was like four paragraphs of information down to about three sentences which is it's basically just trying to convert articles into tweets right but like tweets with tables uh or heat maps so usually I would say it's all talk with between one and three people and then we will uh all edit that into something appropriate that fits with the pattern of what messages have been sent to the coaches before. And then we'll just fire off an email at that point. And you used to write a lot of like league-wide looks at various trends.

You know, you might write a post about, I don't know, like the increasing percentage of runs scored on home runs or something. Catcher interference, Ben. Catcher interference continues to be on the rise. Yeah, that sort of thing. And that was interesting to Fangraph's readers, and maybe it was interesting to you, hopefully at times. But how do you decide whether that is interesting to the Rays? Because unless there's some insight that comes from that that says,

therefore, we should do this, we should acquire this type of player, or we should try this in-game tactic or something, it's ultimately maybe wasted time or not directly related to what you're supposed to be doing yeah ultimately one of the things i'm supposed to do is kind of keep aggressive league trends and like market trends and just broader things because everyone is what's the word i guess necessarily myopic or whatever like so focused on what this organization is doing and trying to get these trains running on time that one of the things that I am supposed to do is just be aware of what's going on broadly. So if I'm going to,

it makes more sense for me to put two hours into examining some league-wide trend than put two hours into examining UDarvish because we're not going to get UDarvish. Let's just be real. Last year, I did some work on something I noticed about UDarvish and it didn't matter

why did i do that it was irrelevant to us we weren't even going to play him so something like like league trend especially like at a time like now or i don't know during the pandemic shutdown that would have been a great time or right now just because you know it's the off season but that stuff is very interesting even if it's something dumb like catcher's interference because like catcher's interference is on the, but you can still think about why that is and what other reasons might be driving that. So it's not just about guys are hitting catcher's gloves. There's reasons for why that might be happening. I don't know why I'm lingering on this example, but I feel like this hasn't been enough attention paid to catcher's interference.

I reassigned the beat. Clemens has the beat covered. I would say that the beat, well, I'm not going to. You know what? You are the managing editor, and you are free to edit as you choose. I'll say the following, Jeff, which is that if you find yourself in possession of an insight that just tickles your fancy that you don't think the Rays would be interested in,

we can create a new username for you, and you can always just run it at FanGraphs. No one would know except for me. Actually, I wasn't sure how best to bring this up, but one thing that is definitely interesting about being with the Rays is all of our players are better than they look in the public, so you should probably write about that. Add about three war to most of our players. Some of them are plus four war but for most of

them it's plus three you should definitely write about that and the sooner the better i'll let i'll let uh dan and jared know jeff i want to if it's okay i want to talk about your feelings for a moment because this was a very strange season for any number of reasons and i think that one of them for a team in the raised positions was that you you know, there was a global pandemic and we didn't know how how much baseball we were going to be able to play. And I think everyone related to this industry probably had some amount of anxiety about their continued employment prospects, even as some of that stuff got sorted out. And so you have this big ball of stress and anxiety and worry. And then on the other side, you have the fact that you happen to work for a team that was expected to be and proved to be very good at baseball. And so I'm curious, first I'm curious sort of when you started to get the sense in the season that like this, this team was going to do

exciting stuff because, you know, it's not like the Rays were an underdog. If you look at our preseason projections, I think we had you guys having like an 86% chance of making the playoffs. And so, you know, you were expected to be good. I don't know that we necessarily expected you to sort of knock off the Yankees, but you were expected to be good. So when in the course of your season were you like, huh, I'm going to be watching my preferred baseball team

play baseball in a weird gauntlet that starts in September? When did that realization start to dawn on you, Jeff? Yeah, I mean, the playoff odds are good, but this year only the Mariners and the Pirates didn't make the playoffs. So the odds didn't really make that much of a difference. Like, we knew going in, you know, short season, whatever, but we figured the team was very good. We expected to be a good team, expected to go to the playoffs. And then you get to the playoffs and, like, obviously things got down to the wire.

Like, the Yankees series was effectively, if we're going to, I don't think I'm giving anything away here. When I say that going into the Yankee series, our odds more or less had it as a coin flip and the Astros series, more or less as coin flip. The Dodgers series was a different hill of beans, but just, it's not like any point during the season did a sense. This team is going to the world series because you know,

there's other good teams in the league, even, even with the Astros being hurt and diminished and the Yankees being hurt and diminished and the Rays being hurt and and diminished you never like assume that you're going to go deep in the playoffs but certainly you could see that the potential was there and I know that there was a lot of concern is the wrong word but thought before the season started that this year would have some sort of like asterisk around it because it was just a short year but I know it's easy to say this is someone who works for a team that literally won the pennant but like i don't think when this got going i don't think anyone really

at least in the game i don't think anyone thinks of this as like an asterisk season just because of how much work went into making it happen in the first place i think it was like four days or something into the season when the marlins were having their outbreak and i think it was like a monday morning i saw a tweet from like the sports center account that said that rob manfred had canceled the season and i saw it and i was like oh my god i got my wife and i was like babe they actually canceled the season i don't know what this is gonna mean and that was the first time that i actually got effectively trolled by one of those fake accounts that somebody tweeted into my timeline but it owned me it was like ken rosemathai or whatever i hope you didn't put it in race slack and tell everyone you work with season's over guys everybody log off uh no so like when things got going obviously obviously it was a very, very good feeling.

And the team was very, very good. Aside from all the injuries happening, which is very, very bad. I think some of you have written about that. The league-wide trend that seemed a little dark cloud seemed to hover over our roster for a while. But when that got going, I mean, obviously there I had in the back of my mind some level of concern that, well, I signed a two-year contract. And there are no guarantees here. But thankfully, I cost a lot less than a major league baseball player. And thankfully, we were able to come to an agreement.

So that was a huge relief because I have definitely forgotten how to write full-length articles. The playoff structure was changed like minutes before the season began. I don't know if you sort of knew that was coming with some certainty or not, but what was it like to be told suddenly that, you know, like the playoff structure that you were expecting was not going to be the one, like the rules were going to be totally different,

that you had like eight seconds to prepare or to adjust for that if you needed to. And particularly given the likelihood that you might have kind of priced in that you would would or wouldn't make the playoffs did was it seen as like uh like exciting good news or like oh wow this just got a lot harder i can tell you we did not know we did not have a sense i mean we had all talked about like the possibility right but no one actually knew much before the announcement that the playoffs were going to be

bigger. And thankfully, that doesn't really do anything to change our behavior, because our behavior had already been done. But I would say it was neither received as a good thing nor a bad thing. It was more, when something like that happens, you think, well, we're not going to be able to change it, so now this is just something to think about. It becomes a thought experiment. What does this mean for us?

And you can think, well, if playoffs are going to be expanded longer term, that probably works to our advantage because we are in a division with two big spending teams, maybe soon to be three big spending teams, which makes it more difficult for the Rays to make the playoffs in any given year just on paper. So expanded playoffs would be good for us. In this particular year we felt like well maybe this isn't so good because it penalizes the best teams at least we believe that it penalizes the best teams because you just have more rounds to go through to make the world

series right so like the best teams get hurt in terms of their world series odds and and the the medium teams get a boost so So it was definitely short term. This seems like it's not great, but whatever. And long term, seems like it's probably better for us, but whatever. I wouldn't say that there's been much spilled milk. I'm just curious, given that the Astros, for instance, were seen as one of the best teams and the expanded playoffs were necessary to get them into the playoffs. It turned out that like, like i mean there's just so

much more variance from season to season even if talent is uh steady then we then we even can like kind of rationally convince ourselves exist so having seen the astros basically get bailed out by it does does that change your mind at all about whether it was good or bad for the for the best teams no i mean i think the i know the Astros got sort of bailed out because they were the last seed. I think they were the last seed under 500. But we still thought they were a good team. They deserve to be a playoff team, probably.

I don't know. I honestly haven't thought about that in any great detail. And certainly if we had expanded playoffs in like 162 game season, then it would be different. But my personal hope is that if we do have expanded playoffs, and I assume that we're going to, that they are not this expanded. This was a little too big. I understand why it happened this year. But I do sort of assume that playoff expansion is all but inevitable at this point. And I'm just hoping for less more than more, even if that works against our own organization's best interest, I guess. even if that works against our own organization's best interest, I guess. Yeah, what about when you found out that there weren't going to be off days, at least for most of the rounds of the playoffs,

which is something that maybe you could have guessed or anticipated, but maybe not. And that's something that seemed like, if anything, it might actually help the Rays a bit with the pitching depth that you had. So was that sort of celebrated, or was it it would have been nice to know about this before the trade deadline or that was kind of out of nowhere also yeah there was a lot of kind of fly by the seat of your pants this season on a league scale and a team scale i wouldn't say it was celebrated it was again it was kind of like met with well i guess we'll make the best of it but like realistically by we'd had so many injuries to the staff i think it's safe to

say we remain like a deep staff toward the end but clearly that depth was it was diminished and you know you have someone like oliver drake going down for example and you're like well this is someone who's like really important to the to the bullpen and now we're without him to say nothing of of all the other guys who who went down over the course of the year so it was a damn struggle to get through i mean obviously you saw guys push to their limit i don't think that's any secret that there were guys who were just not really at 100 by the end of the season certainly by the last game of the season it took its toll but i mean god you you reflect back in what 2016 with the indians and the cubs going so far and you think like you know by the end

all this chapman seemed to be running on fumes and like andrew miller seemed to be running on fumes even in the old arrangement like you lean on guys and they're just kind of gassed by the world series the playoffs are so much about adrenaline and then that competing against just the time pain of having to pitch a lot when it's the pitches are really important and yeah i don't envy anyone who's thrown in the World Series. I have one last quick thing about unpredictable things that you didn't foresee coming. In late September, Grant Brisby asked you

why you, the Rays, didn't keep Jake Cronenworth. And you replied to him in a tweet. We have him at the alt site, the alternative site, where he plays for the pod Rays, which is a very funny, that's a great tweet. But then three weeks later, you were playing in San Diego. The Raze were in San Diego in the playoffs playing in Petco Park. And I wondered if at that point you regretted that you had already used that. I gave it no thought and I will continue to give it no thought.

I'm not a planner in any sense of the word. So I don't, you know, the whole marshmallow test thing, I would fail immediately, even though I don't really like marshmallows. But no, I didn't regret. I have a very different relationship with Twitter now than I used to, which is not a surprise. Many people do still a better relationship than i don't know 99.9 of team employees who either stop tweeting or solely tweet job openings or something okay but there's some fun tweets at times here's the thing i enjoy jeff's fun tweets but anyone who's just not on twitter is winning at twitter i reject the premise of your statement that's true i have no follow-up i'm curious jeff because and i don't

think i'm speaking out of turn when i say this because i think you you tweeted some pictures from there so if if i if i goof this you can say don't want to talk about it and then we'll just cut it out but you you saw live baseball with fans in the stands because you got to go to some some world series games yes i want to ask you about that experience sort of generally because i imagine that after being in your apartment in in portland for a long long time being in a ballpark with other human beings is probably pretty strange so like talk about that but also does does that ballpark look better in person than it does on tv you are one of you are one of the only people we can ask this

question to, Jeff. The inside of it is clearly beautiful. I enjoyed that part of it. The old ballpark is like right across the parking lot or whatever. At least I've never been inside that old ballpark, but like the facade is just so much more beautiful. I love the brick. I love the way that the old ballpark looks

from the outside. The inside of this one was great. Made all the better by the World Series logo and the little Rays logo on the field. The exterior of it, whatever, it's a fucking giant park. And we arrived when it was dark anyway, so I don't really care how the outside looked. And to be completely honest, going in there, I mean, there were what, 11,000 people or something in the ballpark? And it's not like they were hidden. I could see the 11,000 people. It felt like they were all in the corridors or whatever, the walkways before the game started.

It wasn't as jarring as I was expecting it to be. Maybe just because I so infrequently would go to big crowded events during non-pandemic times anyway. I don't know. Because it had been, what what so seven months or so since i left spring training which also would have been a crowded event and so for seven months i was pretty much never around more than i don't know four people but then being there it wasn't like oh my god look at all this covet risk or oh my god look at all this humanity it just felt totally normal.

And I don't know why that is. It might just be that my brain wasn't thinking about the people as much as it was thinking about the World Series game ahead. But, I don't know. It's also possible, even though COVID feels like it's been going on forever, it's possible it just hasn't been going on long enough for my brain to adjust to a new reality where we're never around that many people. Because it just felt like going to ballpark. Like, when I wrote about the Mariners, I almost never went to a Mariners game, but then I did a couple times a year and it wasn't like, oh my God, look at the,

well, let's be honest, like 5,000 people at the ballpark because they were a really bad team. But still being there, I mean, I can't, I have not developed COVID since flying to Texas or since coming back. And, you know, we had like strict rules on what we could or couldn't do outside of game time. I thought it was cute.

We got a little itinerary because I went to game three and four. The four was a lot better than game three from my perspective. And game three was Friday night and game four was Saturday night. And we had a little detailed itinerary where you're emailed. And on Saturday, it said from 8 a.m to 4 p.m we were entitled to free time in our hotel room so that was my own little glimpse into i guess the life of a player for the last four months or whatever it was of the year but it did make me feel a little better about flying not that i'll just go do it all willy-nilly but like it wasn't as

horrible an experience as i was thinking it could be being an airport and he was able to easy enough to be like away from people in in other settings but i mean i honestly i can't speak to how safe it was or it wasn't if you're like in one of the stadium walkways because there's hundreds of people thousands of people milling through i don't know how like virus gets dispersed in a walkway like that because it's open but it's like effectively closed right with the low ceiling and all that stuff but you know there were the mask mandates that people had in the ballpark you try to hew to it people are eating and drinking they're having popcorn they're doing so for a reason nobody buys stadium popcorn unless they're just trying not to wear a mask so there's that going on but I don't know I mean all I can say is no one I know got COVID from that experience so here's hoping that not too many other people did were you able to enjoy the experience of watching the playoffs whether in person or from afar just given the stakes like I know the

Rays were in the playoffs last year so this was not your first time but that was your first year you hadn't even been there the entire year maybe Maybe you didn't feel, I don't know, quite as connected. And also they didn't make as deep a run into the playoffs. And this time you go all the way to game six of the World Series. And there were moments during that run where I, with no real rooting interest, was just like, you know, on the edge of my seat and totally stressed and you who have this deep connection to that team like was it just misery you know alleviated by some moments of like blinding happiness like on the whole was it at all a pleasurable experience no uh i mean i've i've i can't think of like the last sports thing i that i cared about more than this run. And like the whole thing was fucking agony. Like obviously like game four of the world series is one of the greatest things that I've ever experienced. And being there,

like I'm not our little like section of, of pods of race fans. There was probably some COVID violations and celebration of that. Cause we all kind of like blacked out. But before that, certainly like watching in my room or watching like the blue J series, whatever, but barely even felt like the playoffs. Cause it still september and the games are so early and and

whatever it was an extra round but like the the yankees even like what was it our our first win i think it was game two against the yankees and then what fairbanks had came out and had like a a shaky inning and then was able to nail down the save whatever game that was that i mean it was all just miserable to watch. And like, I couldn't even for a long time, I couldn't even watch with my wife. It would be paying attention downstairs,

but I'd be upstairs because I just didn't feel like it was the best thing for her to see. I was doing developed some new habits. Definitely. We all became, I think a little more superstitious superstition. I think it's obviously not a new thing in baseball but I was trying to figure out why it can be so pervasive among people who

In theory know better and I think it's because it has no cost. So we all became deeply superstitious but yeah, I'm a pacer it turns out I'm a pacer and like a a ball tosser just tossing a ball to myself and And trying not to throw it at the things in the room when things weren't going so well. But I can definitely say that like in all sincerity, when they recorded the last out against the Astros, like I just kind of like broke down in elated tears, which I wasn't expecting.

And sports has caused me to cry a lot before, but not like this. And that was, I mean, obviously that was a sensational moment. Being in the Yankees was a sensational moment, but it's quite different to actually win a pennant. I've learned recently that there is such a thing as pennant rings, not just World Series rings, which is pretty cool. Loser rings, first loser. So that'll be something to celebrate.

But it's easy to say it was all worth it and all fun now because I'm now a month removed from how horrible it was. But at least, I guess, I don't know. It set us back in our off-season prep, I can say that. It was a strange thing to know how to time saying, Hey, how are you? And congrats on a really good season, even though it didn't work out. It's a funny thing to be friends with team people

because you're like, Jeff doesn't want to hear from me first thing after that amazing game. Like, I'm not on the top of the call sheet. But you don't want to let the moment pass completely unacknowledged either. So, you know, it's a funny thing, albeit, I think, a lot less stressful for us than it was for you.

I can't imagine what it's like to be, like, a player. Oh, my God. Or even someone who's, like, way more important than I am. But, like, you know, you hear that, like, the player has a big moment, then he goes back to the locker room and he has, like, 500 text messages. And, like, think about that. Right. Like, actually think about that. Like, 500 messages from people on your phone.

What do you do? Because all of a sudden now the onus is on you to react to them. Otherwise, you look like an asshole. So, like, how many – how do you even sort sort i can't think of the last time i scrolled through 500 anything on my phone you just throw you throw your phone into the sea or you don't have to comment on this because i realize it might be professionally um problematic for you or you just look like pete fairbanks and and have a an expression of continuous anxiety that inspires anxiety and others so all of your text messages are are you okay it is it is i can't speak for

he looks so nervous jeff yeah i can't speak for what happens in his heart or like his brain but obviously it's all it's kind of weirdly comforting to see a player on the field yes looks like how you feel yeah he doesn't blink ever when he's on the mound, at least. I've seen him blink when he is not pitching, but he does not blink when he's pitching. Dave Cameron Fairbanks. Yeah, right. It's funny that you mentioned superstition because I was going to ask you about that. You said there's no cost to it, but of course there could be a cost if you are someone who is deciding which players to start or sit.

If you're the manager and you say oh this guy had a bad day so i'm taking him out or vice versa you stick with someone too long and i was wondering whether any of that kind of crept up on you because the race had good players who were slumping in october and other players who were perhaps playing a bit over their heads and were just unbelievable and you have projections and you know about small samples, but was there some part of you that was thinking like, oh, you know, like this guy again, like not that you have to name any names or should,

but just, you know, was there some sort of primitive, you know, mainstream fan part of you, like the part of a fan that decides I'm just going to sit on this part of the couch instead of that part of the couch because something could happen to my team while I was sitting over there. Like, you know, I guess the Rays are sort of famous for sticking to their plan, right? For better or worse.

Like this is the player that we use and we're going to stick with him even if he's slumping and this is how we manage pitchers and we're going to continue to do that even though it's October now. But I think it's easy for fans to think, oh, this can't make it out he's on fire he's the best player in baseball right now or this guy is helpless and he's never going to get a hit again when you know that's not true intellectually but when you have as much riding on it as you did and other people with the Rays did it must be hard to maintain that sort of you know clinical stance yeah I mean obviously I'm not

going to like talk about the big cash decision in game six but like i think it's pretty evident from what happened there like what the organization's philosophy is in the playoffs is like it's not overreacting to what you see in a in a small sample we have our numbers for a reason and and we are able to be successful because we we trust in them a lot of work goes into generating those numbers and not just like pulled out of a computer yeah but like the the process of of who to play and when to play them that is all handled in i think the best way possible but obviously it's not a secret that when you're watching a game and you're not in a decision making capacity like your own emotions take over like you you become a fan right so like and now it was with our particular

team you know you get deeper in the playoffs and then let's say the Rays are coming up to hit and then you're like oh this guy again so the next guy comes up and you're like oh this guy again then the next guy comes up and you're like oh thank god it's him then the next guy comes up and you're like oh this guy again and they have the same projection probably no no not a whole lot of hitting was was being done but i mean there were so many people who were like why is brandon lausdell in the lab he's unplayable right now and then he hits home runs in the world series so like you know mike cenino hit some big home runs michael perez hit a big home run hunter renfro hit a grand slam like these things i think we scored

all of our runs i think was on home runs and one series of comic errors that the Dodgers defense made I think that accounted for two of all the runs we scored in the playoffs yeah but you know those those things happen fast but you definitely don't like watch the game and have your brain only think about a player's projection you're definitely biased by whatever you've seen recently yeah and you've been on both sides of it where you've had to write about these things as a baseball media person, decisions that are made or not made in the postseason. And now you've been on the other side of it. And the Rays were sometimes criticized for things that they did or didn't do. And other times were the beneficiaries of decisions that were criticized, whether it was like the Yankees ALDS game two situation where they were criticized for basically using, you know, an opener piggyback starters or whatever

you want to call it. And that was just, in my opinion, blown out of proportion. But I just wonder whether having seen both sides, like, is there anything that an outsider can know or should feel qualified to weigh in on when it comes to these decisions of like, you know, pulling a starter or starting this guy over that guy, given how much information is available to teams and the sophistication of the projections that are available to managers and GMs and all the people making those decisions. Like if your average media person is just saying, those decisions. Like if your average media person is just saying, oh, this was a mistake without really doing any analysis other than just it didn't work out or I don't like this for some kind of gut reason. Like are there times when the information steers you wrong and maybe it's better

not to have all that information or are people on the outside just sort of unaware of how much they don't know when it comes to how these decisions are made i'm not even convinced that some of the people who write those critical articles don't realize how much they don't know i think that's just like well your job is to write about the playoffs and so you're going to write about it some decision that somebody made because that's the easy thing to do and you know that's going to get attention because everybody loves saying that this team made a great call or this team made a really bad call yeah And one of the advantages of being team side is not only because you're so busy, but also because you know a little bit better.

You're like, well, I'm just not going to read any of these things. And so, for example, I haven't read a single article about Kevin Cash pulling Blake Snell in Game 6, and I'd have no plans to do so. It means absolutely nothing to me, and I'm sure that everyone else who works for the organization would say the same thing. So certainly in a format like this year, and I understand that not every playoffs is going to have a format like this year but i'm guessing one of the big hurdles would have been like relievers and all pitchers but

relievers in particular get tired and relievers are not available for all of the situations when you think that they're supposed to be available like if it gets to the eighth inning and you think of the setup guy why isn't the manager going to the setup guy? Why is he going to that guy from the end of the bullpen? Well, there were no off days in these playoffs. And so you just have to dig deep. Some pitchers come to the park and they're like, look, I can't go today. Or sometimes you tell a pitcher, look, you can't go today.

Obviously, you've thrown too many pitches. And sometimes you'll see a manager say after the game, you know, this guy wasn't going to pitch. This other guy wasn't going to pitch. Sometimes managers won't say that. You don't want to tip your hand or whatever. You don't want to convey that somebody might be down for it for multiple days. But as a writer, you can't know that.

Unless the manager says it, you just can't know it. And so you have to think like, well, why did he go to his sixth reliever instead of his second reliever? Well, have you checked maybe the top four relievers or whatever, like all pitched the last last two or three games or maybe one of them threw 40 pitches in the last game because he couldn't find his command so that's a big problem obviously it's not like there's a bunch of pinch hitting in the playoffs this year right it's basically just pitching staff decisions what else was there i guess there was a steal home attempt but outside of that which was awesome by the way yes yeah you mentioned how being in the World Series set you behind a bit

in terms of your off-season prep looking ahead to 2021. And I imagine that you guys have a few more tools and sources of data at your disposal to try to use what happened in 2020 to project and look ahead to 2021. But I am curious sort of how you're thinking even just philosophically about the data and information that was generated in this short season as you

look ahead to trying to address team needs in 2021 or understand who on your team is actually good versus, you know, was fortunate or unfortunate and whether you've started to sort of sort out that challenge or are you already there, Jeff? You know all of your wants and needs and there's no more off-season work to be done. No, it's done. Actually, our off-season is run by an algorithm. So we just kind of plug and play.

Everyone loves vacation. There's like five teams that still have a human, but most of it actually is algorithm. It's effectively like an automated Tinder. So when there's a match, then you see a trade or a waiver claim. I mean, I don't, I don't think, certainly from our perspective, I don't think that the baseball that we saw in 2020 was effectively baseball. It was recognizable baseball by all indications. I'm sure there were some guys who were like more uncomfortable than, than other guys or like some guys who just couldn't stand being on the road or whatever

but certainly at the major league level i think that the operating philosophy is unless we have like a really good reason to believe otherwise like we're just going to treat this like it was regular baseball because it basically was obviously things get a little more difficult on the minor league side and even with like the ats data that we do have there, I would say that maybe there are questions of like, how, how meaningful is it? If, for example, if a guy is like throwing a lot slower at the ATS than maybe he did in affiliated ball or like major league ball in 2019, what does that mean? Because the motivation to perform at the ATS is a lot lower than it would be in like a

real competitive environment. So there are those open questions. And certainly there's going to be a lot more that's gleaned from Instructs or Winter Ball just because there wasn't so much this year. But, you know, it's not like we're in a boat that's any worse than every other boat. So hold on. I don't want to get too nautical here. Nautical now?

No, I'm trying to literally steer around this way. You don't need to be in a boat. You're literally stingrays, Jeff. You can just swim without a boat at all. You know, the devil ray is technically referred to as the lesser devil ray.

It's like, what, the Atlantic lesser devil ray or whatever, which I'm glad that they didn't use the full name for the team, but I guess the opportunity was there. Is there a greater Devil Ray?

I can answer your question within about eight seconds. No. It just seems like an unnecessary inferiority complex. Life is already hard enough without calling something a permanent lesser ray. Well, this is why the Devil Ray is usually getting so many brawls with the Red Sox. It was all that just inferiority complex. I'm kind of, I'm sort of hung up on, on how emotional you were watching. And I don't want to get, I don't want to like get too deep into this.

I just really want to think about it for a while. It really is surprising to me and a little interesting to me that, that you, someone who I think of as, you you know a former baseball fan who you know who i sort of saw become quite rational uh toward toward the sport and and in some ways aloof uh toward the uh the winning would get into this like such a romantic and emotional state and again i don't want to like i'm not i don't want to force you to speak profoundly about it i just want to ask you a quick question though which is let's say right before the postseason began, somebody else offered you a job that you considered a dream job, like say the World Organization of Volcano Observatories offered

you the executive director position. Exactly, the WOBO. Offered you the executive director position, and it was too good a job to turn down, and you took it. So you quit the raise right before the postseason begins on great terms. You weren't fired. You weren't rejected. They still represented your work. But you no longer had any self-interest in their success whatsoever. It did not matter to your career.

Your boss was not going to file an assessment of you in any way based on this because you no longer work for them. You don't have a boss-employee relationship with them anymore. How much do you think it would have been agony or joy to watch them in that postseason, in that scenario? Oh, way less. So, like, this is just, like, your career. Like, you were just having a career.

The same way that we all have, like, extreme stress and emotion about things at work going well or going poorly that was just you but it happened to be enacted by players in pajamas on a field yeah i i wouldn't agree i don't think that they wouldn't sleep in their uniforms i mean there's a lot to a uniform they wouldn't that's not really pajamas it's leisure wear i guess i mean i'm taking the pajama construct straight from you so don't start throwing me over the years it's no longer pajamas

I would argue that most of them probably sleep in very little so I don't have a perfect explanation I haven't examined my own I guess emotional depth in such a nature to come up with a good answer for why I got so invested. But I mean, it's the first chance of the World Series. The World Series is a very rare

opportunity. And this is a dumb comparison, but I'm going to make it anyway. A few years ago, near the college campus where we live, an email went around from someone who manages the grounds. He's like, there's otters. There's river otters that made it to the lake. This happens sometimes in November. And I remember being very excited because I have cute aggression and I want to see these animals. And I went out there by the lake on a daily basis, looking for otters, never saw otters, never saw otters last year. And the other day I went to pick up some mail and meet my wife or something. And then when I was walking back home, I walked by the little lake and there were ripples in the water and

there were otters, and it was very exciting, because I recognized this was a rare opportunity to actually get to see them for myself, they got very close, very cute, I like otters, although apparently they have mauled a woman in Florida before, that's sad, but the reason I brought that up is just, I think it was mostly in recognition of how rare an opportunity it is to make the World Series, and you know full well when you go that far, like there's a lot of luck that got us here. Obviously, we easily could have lost to the Astros.

We easily could have lost to the Yankees. We easily could have lost to the Blue Jays. So it's not like it's all, you know, it's not all signal. There's some noise there. But getting that far, you realize like Billy Bean has never won a World Series, has been in baseball forever, might be leaving baseball. I don't really know the current trajectory of that story. But to be there, to be that far into it,

it almost felt like cheating to make it that early in my time with the Rays. Like, you know, I haven't paid my dues or whatever. We've been really good the two years I joined. I don't know. It felt, I love the environment, paid my dues or whatever we've been really good the two years i joined i don't know it felt i i love the environment the working environment that we have so much that i i don't know i guess i was just kind of emotionally craving that validation that everything was working well and that the good guys could win it and certainly by the world series you're like well now we're just like pulling

for the underdog this becomes like a great story for everyone to uh to pull for at least from my perspective i don't know about for dodgers fans they mauled her like collectively like there's a group of otters that got together and mauled a woman in florida i think there's one i didn't read the article i just saw a picture and i was like i don't want to deal with and by mall i mean like some scratches and bites she wasn't like mutilated like a mountain lion but like it got her i promised that i promised that the like nice story that you told about your emotional experience of work was permeated the surface there but but i had to circle back on got her i promise that i promise that the like nice story that you told about your emotional experience of work was permeated the surface there but but i had to circle back on the otter question because i'd be happy to talk about ours for a while if you'd like to i have a lot more

up close personal experience with him than i used to were you doing much advanced scouting or or self-scouting you know looking at your own players to see if they were suffering from fatigue or whatever. Were you sort of transitioning into that role for October? Playoffs are weird. You go into it and obviously, like if you're a manager, like your job is your job. During the playoffs, you're like, I'm just going to like wake up every day and try to do something helpful that's indeterminate today. And we'll see where that goes so like there's so much like attempted there's like a real advanced team that we have right and they

have their usual process and it turns out all the like dozens of pages or whatever of information before a series but outside of that if you are doing like peripheral advanced work because i'm not sitting there like thinking about trades or whatever to make in the off season in october you're thinking about the games or the series there's so much attempted advance work that goes nowhere so you wake up and then you start working on oh eight o'clock and you just like plug away on i don't know like stolen base strategy or whatever and then you get to like 3 30 in the afternoon you're like well i have nothing to show for my day but the game starts in 30 minutes so great and that's fine and i know this isn't unique to me because i've talked to a bunch of co-workers who have expressed something very similar just like well

we try to do something and then the game's on and who cares so it's definitely an odd time but it feels a little like a blessing i guess in that it's not like it's a month off at all, like by any means, but it's definitely like a month vacation from the normal work. You get to kind of end the day on an emotional note, hopefully a high note, instead of just ending the day and then going about more rote work the next day. It feels like it's something that's actually worthwhile. Yeah. Did you and your colleagues do much analysis of the new rules for 2020? I mean, roster construction and three batter minimum and automatic runner rule and seven inning double headers and all these things. Like, did you produce memos about each of those things? Like, here's why this matters or

here's how we should take advantage of this. Or is all of that more relevant to people who talk about like the aesthetics of baseball than it was to a team but it's certainly still relevant i'm i actually don't know if we ever did anything on like seven inning double headers but certainly the other stuff that was that was addressed not like i was central to necessarily like the analysis or whatever but it was definitely all done because that's very relevant to what we're going to do in a game or how we're going to build the roster certainly have like in the playoffs having no off days for a couple rounds it affects how many position players you want to carry versus how many pitchers yeah and i guess

my last question is uh have you been there long enough now and are you in a position where you've had some level of input into the acquisition of certain players like not that you're the person making the call or conducting the trade talks but but just that, you know, maybe you're one of many people who were surveyed about a certain player or a certain move to continue to succeed, right? Or else like your post would have been wasted or it'll look sort of silly in retrospect. So we all have those sort of stakes in players or when Sam and I were with the Stompers, I sort of had a different level of investment in the players that we had had a hand in signing just because, you know, I maybe got to know them a little or just was really rooting for them, not just because I wanted them to succeed, but also because it would be a reflection on me to a certain extent, like if they failed or if they succeeded.

So I wonder whether that comes into play when you're with a team too. And, you know, you want anyone who's playing for your team to do well. But if you had some input or say into that player joining your team, then I wonder whether there's like some little extra layer that you're thinking, I really want this guy to do well, or I'm especially happy when he does well. One of the really neat things about talking to any like longtime scout or even any short time scout, but certainly any longtime scout is you can talk to them about the guys they just completely whiffed on or like someone that they didn't put in a good report on who turned out to be a great player in the draft like i don't know mike trout for example or or vice versa and if you talk to someone who's been doing it for long enough obviously every single scout has been doing it for more than like three days has like whiffed on a guy either really well or like really above or really below

and you realize how much of their job is just like getting accustomed to the fact that you're going to be wrong a lot and you just deal with it and you try to learn something from every mistake and whatever. And one of the things about being in this position, and again, I'm certainly not pulling the trigger

on any moves. There are a lot of layers between something stupid that I think up and what actually happens in terms of like the transaction wire. But simultaneously, you don't just treat players like they're a bunch of numbers, but you also don't want to get too emotionally connected to the idea of a particular player. Like if you're trying to fit a roster hole and you're like, well, I think player X would be a really good candidate to fill that hole, then there's the danger that you get really connected to the idea of player X specifically

instead of being like, well, player X is only one of countless players who might be able to fill that hole. What about player Y, player Z, player alpha? Shouldn't start at the end of the alphabet. And so you, I don't know if this is actually really addressing your question, but it's something that's been in my mind the last few days anyway. But certainly if there's a lot of the players who were on the team this year were pre-existing with the organization, and certainly, again, it's not like...

It's a very large group that operates with the Rays, and I get to weigh in, but a lot of people get to weigh in so like every single player i think this is i haven't thought this all the way through but like every single player that we go to get from the wire or free agency or from another team maybe there's been like one person who's pushed really hard for that player but but that player goes through a lot of different layers or levels of, I don't know what you call it, vetting, I guess, such that it becomes

a collective process. And of course, once he's on the team, then everybody's rooting for him just the same because you want the team to do well, because that's what ultimately is most important. But yeah, you could have one person who's like, we gotta go get player... Well, I'm gonna use X again. We gotta go get's like, we got to go get player. Well, I'm going to use X again. We got to go get player X.

And maybe the Rays get player X. But by the time that player X is on the Rays, then you've had anywhere between like 5 and 20 people who are all like looking at him and trying to figure out if this is a good idea or not. So in that way, the credit or blame gets evenly dispersed. And then Eric has to wear it all. And I thought of one more thing. You mentioned you made some self-deprecating comment earlier about how everyone else is smarter than you or something along those lines. But when you wrote, when you were a writer, I think maybe the most analytically advanced thing you did was what, like a linear regression in Excel, probably. And now, you know, even though you're not like the computer scientist type and weren't hired for that exactly, I know that you've probably picked up some new skills and abilities. So what do you know now?

abilities so what do you know now i mean in terms of uh your ability to manipulate data that you didn't used to and how did you pick that up i don't know like 11 years ago matthew crew is someone i used to write with and look at landing he told me when he was doing like some catcher framing stuff initial catcher framing stuff he was likeer framing stuff. He was like, you should learn SQL. And I saw that and I was like, meh. And I never learned SQL. Never even knew what it stood for. And I don't know how I never learned. Like, I think it was seven or eight years ago, Dave Cameron taught me the VLOOKUP function in Excel.

I didn't know the VLOOKUP function. Before, I was just, like, manually arranging rows. It was terrible. And I don't know how he did it for so long. And then, yeah, I don't know. I am not, like like an expert modeler there are expert modelers who work for this team i'm not one of them i'm never going to become one of them i'm able to get the numbers that i need and i'm able to do it quickly and if there's some like massive project or it's something to be outsourced then it'll be

outsourced to someone who actually knows what they're doing that person's not me but i don't know how and why i never used sql on the outside it makes things so much easier but so does baseball savant which is just like a real blessing i can't believe baseball savant is a free service all right well we miss you and uh we're glad that your team had a successful season and i guess the one silver lining of not winning the world series is that you did not have to record this podcast naked, as you suggested that you might if the Rays won the World Series. Although, for all I know you did, I did not ask whether you were wearing things or not. You're asking now, Ben. I'm bringing it up.

I'm not going to ask if Jeff wants to volunteer. He's welcome to. But Meg and I discussed whether we should even force you to do that or what even the point of that would be in an audio medium, but we never had to figure that out. So I guess that's probably a good thing. For all you know, Ben. Yeah, I'd like to reiterate that I tried very hard

to avoid the subject entirely. I was just keen to let you... I repeatedly brought it up. Pod as you wanted to as i said at the time that is between you your god and your office chair there's some like weird romanticization of like oh you work from home i bet you don't even have to like wear pants and that's the first thing people always say it's like oh yeah i wouldn't i'd never wear pants if i got to work from home first of all sometimes it's cold then you want pants on and like people if you have pants and they're not comfortable you shouldn't own those pants you should own other pants they make pants really comfortable now like fabrics are

good i like wearing i'm wearing pants right now i can assure you i'm currently wearing pants and more but the pants i'm having right now i don't feel them they're just on me i don't hate it they're keeping me warm keeping me comfortable comfortable, keeping me clothed. When I go downstairs, make some lunch. Not that I think I'm not allowed to make lunch, not in pants, but I'm going to, I'm going to have the pants on. They're also stain resistant. So I don't need to worry about them. So I don't know who are these people who are just like, I hate my pants. Buy some pants. If you hate pants because you go to work and you don't like the pants that you have to wear to work, you have a job. use that money from work to buy better pants. They don't have to be expensive.

I agree. All right. Well, we hope you have a happy off-season or as happy as it can be under the circumstances, I guess. I mean, you're someone who enjoys being outside, and this hasn't been a great year for being outside in some contexts, but you like being outside not necessarily with other people or with many other people. So I guess hiking and camping would be good hobbies to have during a pandemic, except for the fact that you can't travel as much.

So maybe you're sick of seeing the same mountains over and over. I can never be sick of seeing the same mountains over and over. But one of the weird things about the start of the pandemic is they like at least in Oregon, they shut down all the wilderness areas, which I kind of get because no one knew what was going on. But I also kind of didn't get because you're outside on trails and like the open wilderness. So that was really odd and kind of frustrating. But yeah, once that got open, then that was a really good use of time in May and June when nothing was going on. Not so much in November.

All right. Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you. And when this interview gets aggregated at MLP Trade Rumors, the headline will be Ray's reportedly not trading for Mike Trout, I think. Or interested in you, Darvish. Yeah, right. That'll do it for today. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Olaf Hong, Ryan Fitzgerald, Jeffrey A. Friedman, Chris Ruppar, and Michael Sweeney. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. It is not too late to join the Effectively Wild Secret Santa. You have until December 1st to do so. Check out the link on the show page at Fangraphs or in the Facebook group if you're interested

in participating. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before Thanksgiving. Talk to you then. stuck around so long. I kept trying anyhow, and I'm still trying now, just to keep working, just to keep working. The English word for nutria is nutria, and the Spanish word nutria means otter, which is a different aquatic animal, which is weird.

And a nutria, which is effectively a smaller beaver with a rat tail, the Latin word for nutria translates to beaver rat, which is very accurate. What are we talking about here? What's going on?