Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1632: The New Scouting Scale

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about ballpark renaming, follow up on their discussion about managers getting fired for their actions in a single game, discuss how the history of baseball’s sabermetric movement predicts the trajectory and ramifications of analytics use in football and other sports, and reflect on the significance of the Phillies hiring […]

said your mind was full of mud mud and muscle and blood and it's only cause you took that leap that they're all talking in their sleep and your friends can't believe it's true can't believe what the night took from you. All those nights of fun and games. Well, now you're just in me. Hello and welcome to episode 1632 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. You know, I'm celebrating a birthday soon, and I think I have reached the age at which I will stop updating my mental index of corporate sponsorships for ballparks. I think I'm just going to stop remembering what the new names of ballparks are. I think I'm comfortable with that,

because I read recently that the Oakland Coliseum has another new name. And we already had so many to keep track of. And evidently, there's been one that it's been called in some places for a couple of years. There's been a contract dispute that has now been resolved. And so it is officially known by a new name now, the Ring Central Coliseum. I have made no effort to ascertain what Ring Central is, and I don't really plan to. And I think that I may just forget about this. And I feel some pressure as a professional cover of baseball to know what the names of the ballparks are. But I feel like once you get to a certain age, maybe your corporate sponsorship, it's just sort of frozen in your mind. Yeah.

Like, you know, unless it's the ballpark that you go to that your team plays for maybe. But like T-Mobile is pretty much going to be Safeco to me forever probably. It's kind of like at a certain age you stop listening to new music or whatever. And I think for me that is ballpark names like I'm just going to keep calling them whatever they were called at a certain point and not update that at all because the nice thing about the Coliseum is that you can just call it the Coliseum

and so you don't really have to know that it is the McAfee Coliseum or the OCO Coliseum or whatever it is currently called Network Associates. It was before McAfee. So now it's this new thing.

And I think I am probably never going to call it that. They're obviously entitled to sell the rights and Ring Central, whatever it is, is entitled to pay what the A's are asking to have their name on there. But I could just kind of call it the Coliseum and forget about the details. And I think I'm comfortable with that. So I will say this to you, Ben. The first thing is that RingCentral is an American publicly traded provider of cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for business. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There it is. The advertising worked. The sponsorship paid off. Can we have a, we shouldn't spend too long on this but i think we could have a brief

conversation about how mlb seems to very often both as a as a league office and then as individual teams seems to embrace um sponsors that the average person just will never interact with in the course of commerce yeah that's true now true. Now that I know what RingCentral is, I'm still not really in the market for RingCentral's products, I don't think. I mean, I think RingCentral has the benefit of sounding like it's a sports thing. It sounds like it could be a sports thing.

Like, we want to wing rings. We want to wing them. Win rings. That was harder to say than i meant it to be um leave it in guaranteed rate field yeah that one's a little that one doesn't really roll off the tongue and and it's so strange in a sport with rate stats like i don't so but like i'm not in the market for like a backhoe and yet doosan is is an important part of the MLB advertising landscape. So that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. But I think that you're well within your rights, Ben. And I

would offer that I think the people most resistant to name changes tend to be the folks that go to the park most often. Like my former roommate is from Illinois and her family, she and her family are all they're all White Sox fans. So they're just thrilled with stuff lately, which is nice because when we were actually roommates, they did not get to enjoy their team very much. And they're never going to call it anything but Kaminsky Park. Like they just aren't going to do that because that's what they grew up knowing it as. I doubt strongly that I will ever call, at least on the first attempt, T-Mobile, anything but Safeco, in much the same way that I only just got used to calling what is now, I don't even know what it is anymore,

but what was CenturyLink Field was Quest Field when I was a young person, and then it became CenturyLink Field, and that took 20 years for me to get used to, and now it's a different thing. So I think that your approach is the right one because we only, as we age, have so much room in our brains for new information, and we have to save it for stuff that matters, like science and new and expanding understandings of compassion and empathy. And I think that RingCentral can fall away. That's fine. Yeah.

I think there should have to be long-term contracts. I think if you're going to do the sponsorship, you should have to sign a 10-year deal just so we do not have to update what we call the ballparks every few years. And I think the Coliseum was unsponsored for a little while there. And you could just still call it the Coliseum. That's the thing. As long as it's the Coliseum, I don't get attached to them and nostalgic for them, even though they are still just company names. I mean, Safeco is an insurance company. It's not like a romantic name. It's just that we got used to Safeco. That's what it was for a long time. And that's what it was when we got to know that park and so we're gonna stick with it i guess like

it's probably more valuable i guess to have like the first sponsorship in a stadium's history because then everyone really associates your name with that stadium and all the subsequent ones seem less legitimate somehow even though they're not really yeah i think that um we we just kind of forget that they're you know it was like in the first 15 years of starbucks where i was like oh you you mean our our local coffee chain and then it's like no this is terrible they're killing the rainforest or something they're definitely abusing labor it's not it's not a thing you have to feel nostalgic about meg their coffee's not good and they're bad so anyway yeah i think that you're right that it's just whatever worms

its way in early is what you get used to the coliseum just sounds so nice and neutral i wish that there were more companies that would say we just like this team and we feel invested in our community and we have enough money so the the marginal like advertising benefit of this is going to be like i said marginal and so we get to call it something that is divorced from any kind of corporate branding or you can do what amazon did when they renamed what was key arena which again was named after a bank uh so i don't know why i care but they are now Climate Pledge Arena for the Seattle Kraken. Terrible.

Terrible. I guess they've done the math and they've decided that it's worth it because if you do just name it after your team then your team is getting the advertising so there must be some value to that like if I hear Ring Central Coliseum I don't even necessarily remember

who that is or where that is or who's playing or what sport we're talking about. Whereas if it were the Oakland Athletics Coliseum or something, then you would think about the Oakland Athletics and maybe you would think, oh, I want to go see an Oakland Athletics game. So there must be some value to that too, but I guess it is exceeded by the amounts that corporate entities will pay for these things. by the amounts that corporate entities will pay for these things. But anyway, update your priors or don't, but the Coliseum has a new name now. So as far as I'm concerned, the Coliseum should be guaranteed right field because that's where Chris Davis hit 247 every year.

So that would be appropriate. Oh my God, Ben. I know. He hasn't actually done it the last couple of years though, so no longer guaranteed Like it was for a while Yep it was Could set a really weird watch to it

So last time we did an email show and we answered one email about what a manager would have to do to get fired for a single game And we've gotten a bunch of responses to that and a few of them were about an omission we did not actually mention the name Grady Little when we were discussing that I was thinking it as we were talking about it maybe you were too because you cited an example of a hypothetical manager who made some egregious mistake in a game seven and reputation suffered so much that they had to let go of him so I sort of assumed you were talking about Grady Little, but we didn't actually mention him. And so a lot of people pointed out Grady Little.

And of course we should have acknowledged the name. Although I will say that looking into it further, I read in the New York Times a story from 2003 when the Red Sox parted ways with Little, which is how it was described. He was not actually fired. His contract was not renewed. They didn't pick up his option. And they insisted that it was not because he left Pedro Martinez in so long. And of course, it probably was to some extent. But I think it sort of proves what we were saying, which is that it has to be more than one game, even if it's a bad thing that you did.

In that case, like it's a game seven and it's the curse and it's Red Sox versus Yankees and all of that. There's a lot of baggage attached to that that would not be for a typical game. But even so, they, I'll just quote from the Times article here. I'll just quote from the Times article here. In a news conference filled with praise for Little's managerial skills, team officials strenuously denied that the decision to let Little go was directly related to his ill-fated choice not to remove a tiring Pedro Martinez in the eighth inning of Game 7 as the Yankees rallied. Theo Epstein said, All I can tell you is the truth, which is quite simply that the decision was made on a body of work after careful contemplation of the big picture. It did not depend on any one decision in any one postseason game. Grady Little issued a statement that said Grady Little is going to be fine.

Apparently Grady Little did the Ricky Henderson third person thing. But it sounds like from reading the background in this article that it was more of a philosophical thing. Like this was obviously the beginning of the Red Sox sort of embracing sabermetrics and John Henry and Theo and Grady was more of a go with your gut guy. And so maybe this was emblematic of that disconnect. But it was not as if this was the first sign of trouble or the only disagreement they had ever had. So I think they acknowledge in this article Larry Lucchino said that, well, if he had won that game or if they had won the World Series, it would have been difficult or impossible to let him go. But it sounds as if they were sort of looking for a reason to move on anyway.

Lucchino said this is not going to be a stat geek organization. But he also said this ownership group prefers an increased reliance on thorough and more comprehensive analysis and preparation so that the manager's decisions are more synchronous with our player acquisition and development decisions, which is technically English, I guess. We seek one unified organizational philosophy. Lucchino said said we did assure him that this decision was not made based on a single decision in a single game. Then he said,

let me make one thing perfectly clear. The next manager of the Boston Red Sox will have a lot of Grady Little in him. And Little, of course, got a job with the Dodgers a few years down the road. So it was not as if this disqualified him for consideration for a managerial job forever. But that's sort of what we were saying. Like, even if you make one egregious decision, that could always be something that you talk about and you learn from and you change. So if that's it, then probably it was building to that. Maybe you were looking for a reason to let go of the guy. And this was just an excuse, a good reason. And some people who know more about soccer than we do wrote in to say that

that was probably what was going on with the situation with Lucien Favre that we talked about that prompted that email that, yeah, there was one game that didn't go his way, but it was more of a bad fit, culturally speaking, that led to that decision. Yeah, I think that you are right to say, if only because we should have anticipated the very thoroughgoing memories of our listeners, we should have anticipated that and mentioned little explicitly. But I think that generally, if you look at a series of events in a manager's career and you are going to, or really anyone in an organization, and barring something criminal or particularly egregious, and we don't have to rehash all the things that we ran through on that episode, if one event is going to be sufficient to get that person fired, you were probably looking for a reason to part ways with them. And so there are definitely times, and less I think in the baseball context than in other aspects of professional life, but I think that you kind of have to be on the hunt for

it. And if that's the case, you probably have some amount of discord with that individual to begin with. So yeah. Yeah. We did get a couple suggestions that I don't think we really touched on because a lot of our answers were things that would get you fired from any job, basically like behaving inappropriately for a manager, but also just generally in the

workplace. But a couple of responses we did get from a listener named Ben. When I heard it, I immediately thought of the Patrick Waugh situation in Montreal. Patrick Waugh is one of the candidates for best hockey goalie of all time. He played for Montreal, and during a particularly bad game, the manager left him in to give up nine goals instead of pulling him for another goalie. He took offense and told the owner it was his last game for the team. In this case, the player got traded and ended up being a star somewhere else, but I think the baseball equivalent was if your staff ace came out and didn't have it one day and the manager left him in for 27 runs against and 120 pitches to teach a lesson. This would presumably anger the pitcher and maybe even result in injury. If the pitcher was important to the franchise and said the manager needed to go, I could definitely see this resulting in a one-day firing.

So we did talk about a situation where a manager just overworked a pitcher in a dangerous way, but this is sort of a variant on that where maybe if you have some star who's the face of the franchise and feels disrespected because he was embarrassed in some way in a game, maybe that player could speak up and say, I don't like this guy anymore. He showed me up and then you lose the clubhouse and he has to go if you have to choose between your star player and the manager. So that's one scenario that I could imagine. And then also got a response from George who said betting on baseball or trying to throw a game would be a fireable offense easily, which I think is pretty clear. That's not just a fireable offense easily, which I think is pretty clear. That's not just a fireable offense.

That's just a banning from baseball offense that we didn't touch on, but certainly is true. Yeah, I think that there is a whole list of really awful things, both related to baseball and away from the game, that a person could do to result in their firing. But it's harder to think of things in sort of the normal course of business that would be sufficient in isolation to result in it. But yeah, like if you're found to be throwing games, I'm pretty sure you're going to get banned from baseball for that.

Yeah, right. We're pretty stodgy about that. So I want to ask you about a tweet of yours about football. Maybe this should just be like a segment Ben asks Meg about football? Maybe this should just be like a segment Ben asks Meg about football. And I know that we probably want to have a longer conversation about this and maybe get a guest on and devote an episode to it. But you tweeted the other day as a baseball analytics sort, watching how football folks are deciding to talk about analytics, both as generally good and generally bad, is fascinating. And I think it is too, even though I'm not totally up

to speed on the analytics conversations in other sports, but there are so many parallels. And because baseball was a trailblazer in so many respects, it really is like a time capsule kind of thing where it's like, oh, we had this conversation in baseball years ago and here's how it was resolved or here's what happened next. We can spoil it for you. Here's what's coming. Be aware of it. And sometimes people are not in other sports. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to do the multi-sport sabermetrics exchange series that I did last year around this time where I had other analytics people on from different sports to talk about their analytics movements and how they

relate to baseball, there really are a lot of parallels. And it seems like if you were just to look at what happened in baseball, it could be either an encouraging thing or a cautionary tale in some ways. But I don't know that everyone has that expertise because I don't know that much about football and some football people don't know that much about baseball. So there's not a lot of conversation between the two. I meant a couple of different things by that. In the moment, I was actually most struck by, you know, I think that we would all admit, and I get to admit to thinking these things, even though I didn't commit them to the internet the way that some of our colleagues did. But I think there are a fair number of folks who were sort of early adopters of analytics and were online early who look back on their tone during that time and maybe would do it differently if

they had it to do again, because they were on the outside and they were snarky in response to that outsider status. And I still see some of that getting replicated in the football discourse. And then there's the same sort of backward, dig in your heels, those nerds don't look at tape folks on sort of the other side of it. And because it's football, there is like this weird patina of masculinity mixed in there. And I'm like, you don't have to do this part either. You can just move past it. It's fine. We don't have to talk about softness quite so much. So some of it is just the tone where I want to say like, you're going to feel so silly in a couple of years because you're going to look back and be like, eh. Yeah. Because I don't have the same

sort of inside information on the football side of things that I do to the extent I do when it comes to baseball. But I imagine that analytics in football will be the same as analytics in a lot of things where maybe it is resisted for a while. But after a while, if you find new and sort of more consistent ways to win, you're generally going to move toward that, right? Like the moral arc of the universe bends toward that in the long run. And so I think eventually, you know, smart analytic types in football will be sitting around realizing like we're in front offices now, we're general managers, we're heads of departments. And it would be nice if we found a more relatable way to talk about

this that was about buy-in rather than snark. And that's not to say that every person who does football analytics is falling into those traps, but I do see a fair amount of it. And then I think that the other part of it that I hope football types are smarter about than we necessarily were as an industry is that, you know, like having more efficient ways to play means that you are likely to fall into the same traps around undervaluing labor that baseball folks did, right? We see this discourse with running backs now where there is, I think rightly, a perception that a lot of running backs

are actually fairly interchangeable in terms of their value to their teams. And so they are a spot on the roster where teams are perhaps overpaying for the production that they're getting. And that's like, I think, an especially relevant consideration in a salary-capped league where you have to think about how you're allocating money on the roster.

But just, guys, be careful about this stuff. Because it can get away from you really fast. And you'll end up looking back and being like, oh, no, we found a new yucky way to talk about human beings. Right, yeah. So let's talk about them in a better way than this you know it's all fun and games when it's just like oh team should go for it more on fourth down or whatever it's like the equivalent of saying teams are sacrifice bunting too much and and that's fine like while that's a an issue and while there is still a lot of ground to be gained there but then eventually everyone gets on board with that. And then you find out that maybe it backfires in certain ways. I mean, maybe not the sacrifice bunting thing specifically. I don't miss sacrifice bunts, but certain things. talking about how much sabermetrics is culpable for certain developments over the past decade in baseball.

And to some extent, I excuse the early sabermetrics snarkiness or short-sightedness, because 25 years ago, it was just not at all apparent that all of that would be embraced the way that it was. And people were such outsiders that I don't think they anticipated that they would be insiders and in positions of power and so influential so soon. But now I think it's easy to project that for other sports because it happened in baseball. Like baseball was first and you didn't know that it was all going to happen. But having seen it happen in baseball and now start to spread to other sports, I think you can kind of figure where it's going to go. And so maybe baseball can be the example that you either emulate or try to differ from in some respects. But yeah, you do see history repeating itself over and over

when it comes to these conversations. And to some extent like if you're a football analyst and you can still rail against punting too much or whatever, like enjoy that while it lasts. Because pretty soon, like everything will be optimized within an inch of its life and you won't even have as much to contribute to the conversation. And possibly things will have happened that you don't actually want to have happened. And by then it will be too late so yeah it's almost like a ghost of christmas yet to come kind of thing where it's like you can see the future of your sport if you looked at the present of baseball and then you can either continue on that course or you can try to switch it up somehow yeah and like i the other thing i would say is like you know i think we talked about

this in our episode with dan and patrick also that like there was a hope that a move toward analytics because you were moving away from people who necessarily had to have played the game would put you in a position where you would just by virtue of that fact end up sort of accidentally with a more diverse front office core. And we have seen that that doesn't happen. It turns out that like you need to be purposeful in these things. And so I don't know the extent to which that dynamic is replicating itself in football. But I just think that there's always an opportunity to be sort of more purposeful and thoughtful in our hiring. So that's the other thing that I would say that has not been part of the discourse just yet, but we can short circuit it in advance.

Well, that is a perfect segue to the last thing I wanted to bring up before we get to an interview. So Sam Fold was hired as the new GM of the Phillies and sort of like Chris Young's hiring as the GM of the Rangers a couple weeks ago, which we talked about at the time, this was sort of a surprise. I don't think Fold had been mentioned often that I had seen in conversations about who would be the Phillies GM. Of course, he is not jumping from another organization. Young was coming from MLB. Fold was already with the Phillies, but he was not in a capacity that you necessarily thought he would jump right to GM, and he did. And this is fascinating to me because it seems like we are trending back toward players, former players, getting hired for these positions, but only certain sorts of former players so this is something that i wrote about in the mvp machine

and i talked to fold for that book and and the same goes for other analytically minded recent really retired players who have also assented in front offices this offseason like craig breslow who got promoted to assistant gm with the cubs John Baker, who went from the Cubs to take over as the farm director for the Pirates. There is this breed of player who was kind of the conduit, as we called them in the book, these people who would kind of be the go-betweens between the front office and the field because they were former players, they had been in that world, they know how to speak fluent front office, as well as have the credibility that comes with having been a big leaguer

and having walked in players' shoes and seen the game from that perspective too. It's like Breslow mentioned in this interview, Sahad of Sharma just did with him for The Athletic, I think we're at a time in this industry where there is value placed on the combination of playing experience and the mentality that embraces progressive and modern trends, technology, and data. And I've kind of gravitated toward some of these guys over the years for interviews and articles and the book and all of that because it was kind of cool to have a former player who was into all of the analytics and sabermetric stuff. Former player who was into all of the analytics and sabermetric stuff. And now those guys are getting these jobs, which I think is good in some respects because the former player GM or high ranking person in a front office was really all but extinct. I mean, in the 70s and 80s, it was very common to have former players become GMs like our guest last week, Eddie Robinson.

Here's what I wrote in the MVP machine. According to data provided by Baseball Prospectus writer Dustin Palmatier, 44.1% of GMs hired in the 1980s were former MLB players. Among GMs hired in the 2010s, only two, Dave Stewart and Jerry DiPoto, have been big leaguers. The percentage of new GMs who were once minor leaguers has fallen from 67.6% in the 80s to 20.6% in the 2010s. So again, two former big leaguers hired as GMs in the last decade, and one of those was an old school guy who had been an agent, Dave Stewart, who didn't last long. And now here we are in the first year of the new decade, and we've already equaled that total of two. So prior to the hirings of Young and Fold, it was just Jerry DePoto and Billy Bean, as long as Billy Bean still is with the A's, which seems like those days may be numbered. So really, we were potentially down to one and now have tripled that total with Young and Fold being hired. So it seems like we're swinging back in that direction

because, of course, the people who first embraced sabermetrics were the outsiders, the people without the playing background, aside from Billy Bean, of course, the former player who was right at the forefront of that movement. And so when it became clear that there was value in that and that became very influential, those people were getting these jobs and the players were sort of shut out. Now you have this new generation of players who are sort of steeped in sabermetrics and are interested in that too, and also have the playing background, so they've kind of got it all going for them. And now they're working their way back into these top positions. They're working their way back into these top positions. It's like DePoto told me for the book, quoting again here,

DePoto says that in contrast to a previous generation of players that was left behind by baseball statistical revolution, today's players are learning as they go. And as a result, I think you're going to see some players start to matriculate back toward front office or player acquisition type roles like they did 25, 35 years ago. So now you have the player getting hired to be the new school stat savvy compliment to a non-player executive who's known to be a little bit more old school. Dombrowski said it himself, quote, he's a good compliment to myself. It's a

situation where I am by no means averse to the analytical approach and anything that can make us better, but I think Sam is much more intelligent in those areas than I am. But, of course, it is still white Ivy Leaguers, basically, who are getting these jobs because... Oh, come now, Ben. Sam Feldman to Stanford. It's totally different. Yes, that is true. Not technically Ivy Leaguers,

but yeah, you know, Craig Breslow is a Yale guy and Chris Young, as we talked about, is a Princeton guy. And so you would think that this might be a route to some diversity in the front office if suddenly we're letting players get these jobs because the makeup of the player pool on the whole is more diverse racially than the tops of front offices these days. But if it's just going to be a very limited subset of those players with the resumes that kind of match, you know, the types who have been getting these GM jobs for a while, then we might see more players in the job, but we're not going to see much more diversity in other aspects. Although I will note that the Phillies also promoted another former player, Jorge Volandia, who is from Venezuela to assistant GM. He's been the special assistant to the GM for some time, and he's a little older

than Fold, but he has reportedly familiarized himself more with the sabermetric side over the past several years. He's actually the first Venezuelan person ever to be an assistant GM in MLB, according to The Athletic. And I'll quote one last time from the book here, almost 40% of GMs hired in the 2010s have been Ivy Leaguers. From the 70s to the 90s, that rate never rose above 3%. Although it's a sign of progress that non-players are no longer excluded from the team running ranks, front offices have swung so far in the other direction that they've merely traded one type of homogeneity for another morphing into a slightly younger and far nerdier brand of old boys club well i think the part of this that i find interesting and i want to be like very clear

that i am neither suggesting that there aren't players of color who occupy this space or that general managers are necessarily doing the sort of data intensive work that like an analyst would do but i guess what i guess what would be useful here is to really identify what what is the trait that is making players like fold former players like fold i should say appealing to front offices because i suspect that the thing that is that makes you know Sam Folt interview well and makes him well respected in an organization and sort of a desirable candidate for a position like this is his ability to blend an understanding of analytics which can be gained through means other than going to Stanford right with his experience as a player. Like he was also a finalist, I believe, for the Red Sox managerial position.

So I think that there is, you know, if this is a desirable skill set, and I can appreciate how it would be, right, because it suggests that you are sort of fluent in two languages and potentially know how to translate between them in a way that is useful, right? Where you are able to connect to and understand the workings of your front office and what they are doing to try to put your team in a better position to win and then talk about those things in a way that is going to inspire buy-in from your players. Well, that seems to be a more useful understanding of the skill set, if only because it is more broadly applicable, right? Because then you're looking at a player pool that includes a whole bunch of folks who probably

looked to analytics to help them solve a problem or refine their skill set or, you know, stay in the game longer. And then it's about the actual skill rather than the particulars of the resume. And again, I don't mean to say that there aren't players of color who don't have august educational backgrounds, but I do think that kind of honing in on what it is that's actually useful in that context

is probably important for folks who want to see a more diverse hiring pool, because I don't think there's anything about that skill set that requires you having been an economics major at Stanford or Harvard or anywhere else. And so I think that we want to spend some time on that. And I think this goes back to the sort of point that I was making, albeit in a less informed way about football, which is that you have to be intentional about this stuff. You can't just accidentally stumble into a more diverse employee pool when you haven't had one for a really long time, because the folks that are at the top now probably know folks who

look like them and went to the same schools and, know are in the same alumni networks and so i i think that it both does a disservice to the mission of having a baseball industry that is reflective of the people who play and care about baseball and it's probably missing a really important part about what makes candidates like fold who i don't mean to take anything away from because by all accounts, he is very well liked and highly respected. And I'm sure he'll do a great job in Philly, but that make candidates like him so appealing. So we should spend, we being the industry, should spend more time kind of picking apart what it is about that that is so compelling, because I suspect that there, you know, there

probably aren't a ton of people who can do that because I think that kind of translation back and forth between different segments of an organization is difficult and it isn't something that everyone can do. But I suspect that it is a more broadly held skill set than we're currently understanding it when we get all tied up in the particulars of a person's resume, which isn't to denigrate those credentials, but just to say that they aren't the sort of be all end all of the folks who might be really good at that. Yeah, right. Jalen Rose was talking about how the reliance on analytics in the NBA he thinks has hurt diversity hiring.

And I think he was mainly talking about the fact that it's non-players getting those jobs now. In baseball, I mean, we're talking about, well, maybe it will be players more often. And so hopefully it doesn't just have to be white players as it is in these cases. Now, I don't know if there are certain factors that are contributing toward making more white players who kind of fit this mold that Fold and Young and Baker and Breslow are in, you know, whether it's a socioeconomic thing, you know, you come up in a certain place in a certain way, and maybe you are better able to afford coaching with all kinds of technology and like the leading player development tactics and so you get

exposed to that at an early age or maybe if you're working with people in the front office and you're introduced to sabermetrics that way as a player well if all the people in the front office are white then who knows maybe they are more likely to talk to the white players or share those insights with them it's's like Jackie Bradley, right, who was tweeting about how no one has ever talked to him about defensive metrics or how to be better at that. And of course, he's already really good at that. And maybe he doesn't need the help. But you could imagine how that would be an issue at times in certain places, or maybe it's just sort of, you know, the history of sabermetrics. A lot of white dudes. So that

could have something to do with, you know, whether it is something that is valued more or less in your culture, whether you see examples of people who look like you who have been interested in that or have made inroads into that field. So all of those things could potentially be contributing to that. And I hope that this will be something that more and more people are exposed to and that it will be a broader segment of the player population that would be interested in jobs like this and hired for jobs like this. But it is interesting, I think, that things are swinging back this way. But it would be nice if they swung a little more even in that direction just to broaden the people who are getting these jobs. Yeah, I think that every time we see a demographic shift like this, even if it's small, it's an opportunity for us to hopefully get in early to mold how that shift ends up manifesting once it becomes

something that other teams start doing. And as you pointed out, the Phillies are not the first organization to do something like this. But I think that we want to get in on the ground floor before the copycats come in so that when they're making copies, the copies look different. This is not like a perfect way of describing this. I can already see where it's fallen down, Ben, but I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Like, this is the time to mold it so that it looks like something that better resembles the front offices we hope to see so that it doesn't become just another manifestation of the same trend, but with someone who's worn cleats before. Yeah, right. And there was a USA Today article about this last week that noted that there were eight president of baseball operations or GM jobs filled this winter. It's now up to nine with folds hiring. And only one of those positions was filled by a non-white man. That's, of course, the Marlins GM job that Kim Eng got, although Kim Eng, of course, replaced Michael Hill, who has not been rehired elsewhere. Michael Hill, Harvard guy,

by the way. So Ken Williams with the White Sox is now the only black person in charge of baseball operations for an MLB team. And of course, on a percentage basis, there are fewer and fewer black players in MLB now. So even if more players start to get promoted into these roles, there won't be as many black players around to begin with. And just another point, sort of separate from the diversity issue. It is interesting. It does tell you how the GM role has changed because there's been so much title inflation in front offices. You give someone a better title to stop them going to another team, which could be the case with the Phillies here too. They probably promoted Fold in part because they were worried about losing him. And so the GM

is often not the top ranking person in the baseball operations department, is not the decision maker. And so someone like Fold or Young getting hired to be a GM is sort of out of step, at least with recent history, because they are just recently removed from the game. They don't have a ton of front office experience. Young had zero front office experience, you know, with a team. He was with the league office for a couple of years. And Fold has been for the past few years, the director of integrative baseball performance for the Phillies, which is one of these hybrid conduit type roles. So he's been exposed to that at least, but probably hasn't been directly involved in like the minutiae of front office operations that say a baseball operations director or

an assistant GM would. Last year, he was running their new small sports science department. And yet he has sort of leapfrogged the interim GM, Ned Rice, who was Matt Klintak's right-hand man. And I think it's both illustrative of the difference in the role that a GM can have these days. And it can be kind of confusing because a lot of top-ranking baseball executives do still go by GM. Brian Cashman is a GM, but in other places that can mean something completely different. So now if you have a John Daniels in Texas or Dave Dombrowski in Philly, you can bring on an inexperienced GM and sort of groom that person in that role, which in the past you would not

have wanted that to be a place to do your learning and experience your growing pains. Although of course it was for some people, including Daniels who got the job very young. But I think that's a change. And also, in Folt's case, I remember talking to him for the book, and he said that from one day to the next, he didn't really know whether he was a front office person or a coach, essentially. He was sort of figuring that out as he went on. And some days his job would mirror one of those things, and other days it would be more like the other. And clearly, he was in the running for prestigious jobs in both of those tracks. He was a highly desired manager candidate. He turned down a lot of interview requests, but as you mentioned,

he was a finalist for that Red Sox job and did interview for it. So he was kind of keeping his options open and seemingly could have gone in either direction. And he chose to go in this direction, skip the managing and just go straight to general managing. Yeah, it's a really interesting trajectory. Again, I think that the fact that he was appealing for both of those roles should tell us something about what makes a good baseball sort in a leadership position and what between them is compatible, which might also tell us something about, say, how we could improve or how organizations could improve the relationship between on-field staff and the front office. But yeah, it's a, I wonder, I mean, I'm sure that he is thrilled to be the GM of the Phillies, don't get me wrong, but I wonder if like in his heart of hearts, if he would ever tell us like which thing would he prefer to do? Because in one instance, he's sitting at a remove from the field, at least somewhat, and in the other, he's like in uniform every day.

So I just would be curious what he would have preferred if he had gotten his druthers but yeah it's a he should he should walk into the front office every day in in a suit but also cleats no okay because yeah listen ben you have to dress for the role you have but also the role you want and he probably is on a different trajectory now but he wants to pay homage to his roots. So he should also wear cleats. Yeah. I caught a snippet of an interview with him earlier on MLB Network where he was saying this is something he's been interested in for a long time, even when he was a player. And I would think like the fact that he didn't jump at every managerial job, even though he was a highly touted candidate, maybe he felt like he would have his pick of positions, but there are

only so many managerial jobs and he didn't take the first one that came along or accept every interview opportunity. So maybe he was kind of angling for this. And I thought this sort of thing would come along for these players, but I didn't expect it to happen quite so quickly. So we will see where it goes from here. Not that I think whether you played the game at a high level is super predictive of whether you'll be a good GM, or that former players make more humane GMs in some way, or that they necessarily treat players better. And if you don't want Kim Eng to remain the lone woman GM, then you definitely don't want being a big leader to be a prerequisite for these jobs. But it's probably good that players like Fold and others are not totally barred from those roles and you're right the fact that he was in consideration for both of

those jobs just goes to show you i guess how more closely united the managerial job and the front office are than they were in the past because yeah that's partly a product of just his hybrid background and the fact that he was a player and he's also interested and well-versed in all of these analytics things. But also, like, there's just not a lot of separation between those jobs anymore. And to bring it full circle back to Grady Little, maybe at that time, that sort of thing was actually more acceptable just because, like, well, A, there wasn't this awareness of the times through the order effect. just because, well, A, there wasn't this awareness of the times-through-the-order effect, and I did write a couple years ago a revisiting the Grady-Whittle decision in light of those things article for The Ringer. But beyond that, the manager and the GM in the front office

weren't always expected to be on the same page and didn't always do the game planning together, whereas now they do. And so if you had a Grady-Whittle situation now, and now it's more likely to be the opposite situation where it's the Kevin Cash, right? The hook is arguably too quick, although I wasn't convinced that it was. But a lot of people thought it was. I think that's more likely to be the really divisive decision now. But even when that happens, well, it's kind of a joint decision. It's like a game plan that everyone came up with collectively, and the manager is just

sort of executing that blueprint. And that's what people criticized Cash for, that they had this plan and they didn't deviate from it, even though Snell was pitching so well. And we talked about all of the counter arguments to that at the time. But the point is, if you make a decision with a pitcher in a game, probably you're not going to get roasted for that because it's probably something that you developed in concert with everyone else. So you're all almost equally culpable, even if the manager is still the face of it. That said, like, if you do come up with that game plan together and then deviate from it totally, then I guess maybe that would be more likely to be something that you'd be let go for because it's like, we talked about this. You had one job, execute the thing that we came up with

together. So if you left this guy in too long, then it really is your fault and it's even more egregious from the front office's perspective. Yeah, for sure. I think that it is not a good era to go rogue. It's not a good time for rogue behavior. Right. One last thing about Fold that was pointed out to me by some people. He has what has to be one of the most exhaustive Wikipedia pages of anyone in baseball. I don't know if you've seen this thing, but it is voluminous. It is like 6,000 plus words and 196 citations as I look right now. It's like Carson Sestouli used to have a kind of comically long Wikipedia baseball. I just looked at a couple. Billy Bean's Wikipedia page is like 2,000 words. It's like a third of Sam Fold's page. And Brent Rickey's page is like 5,000 something. It's slightly shorter than Sam Fold's page. I don't know what the story is here.

I'll have to look at the talk page. It looks like there's a lot of talk about this, as one would imagine. I don't know if there's a a sam fold super fan who is doing this or like someone connected to fold or what is happening here but he is uh 39 years old and just embarking on his high level baseball operations career and he already has what has to be like if anyone out there can find a longer Wikipedia page for a baseball person, please send it to me. I haven't looked for like, you know, Babe Ruth or someone I'm hoping. I can quickly look and see if Babe Ruth at least has a or like Jackie Robinson or someone I would hope. OK, I think they have longer Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia pages, but like anyone with kind of an equivalent career and impact on society,

not to minimize Sam Fultz, who has this long a Wikipedia page, I would like to know about it. Yeah, this also, I had not looked at it prior to you mentioning it. And there is a terrible anecdote about his AA teammates giving him a hard time for needing insulin injections because he has diabetes. Right. This is awful. Sorry, this is not the point that you wanted to make, but this is the point that I am going to make. We dished it out pretty good about his insulin shots, said double A

manager Pat Listak. We always give him stuff about putting needles in the refrigerator and shooting up in the clubhouse. He takes it all in stride. He's good guy what the hell was that oh no clubhouses baseball yeah see this is what i mean like it's a it's a challenging culture to translate right yeah maybe that's why he's so successful he knows how to get hazed for having diabetes for some reason and get along with everyone regardless. But yeah, this page, it's so like fancily formatted. It's got all these like pull quotes in little beige boxes and it's got pictures here and there.

It's just a beautiful, well curated Wikipedia page. So hats off to whoever has done this. Yeah, yeah. titled The Data Revolution is Making Its Way to Women's Baseball. And it starts, The growth of analytics-based decision-making in baseball has impacted the game more than anyone could have imagined. We are seeing this utilization of data now more than ever before, and its influence on training, playing, and recovery practices is shaping the future of the sport. However, these methods don't exist for women's baseball. The lack of database training in the women's game is due to, well, the lack of data. The constant evolution of statistics like batting average numbers and

exit velocity speeds are much harder to track since there's very little to compare them to. While the men's game has been advancing in the data world for the past decade, women's baseball has embarked on a slower process and has yet to achieve the same success. So we are talking today to one of the main sources in Becca's article and one of the main people who is trying to change that and is trying to advance data capturing and data-driven development in women's baseball. And she is Louisa Gauci. She is a baseball player herself, and she is also a hitting intern at Driveline Baseball.

And she has had quite a journey to this point. So we will be back in just a moment with Louisa. It's different for girls. They're not expected to fight. They're expected to sit and take some lesser man shit. Though it don't feel right. No, don't be alright Alright, well we are joined now by Louisa Gauci. She is an infielder for the West LA College baseball team and a hitting intern at Driveline Baseball.

And she is working to bring data-driven development to girls and women's baseball. Louisa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me today. So as people may have been able to pick up on there, that is not a Los Angeles accent, so I guess we should go over your travels and your career to date. How did you get into baseball, and how did you end up playing for West LA and joining driveline? Yeah, it's a crazy, crazy story. Yeah. So I'm from Brisbane, Australia. It's a state in Queensland. It's not a little city, but it's smaller than a lot of the other ones around.

I started playing baseball because of a mishap with my mom who actually thought that baseball and softball were the same sport. So I actually got cut from my softball team back at my school. I went to an all girls school and we only had softball. So I got cut my first year and then I was like, what? Why did I get cut? This is so fun I just really enjoy this so I went home that night and I was like mom mom like I really want to play softball like it's really fun and she's like okay like yeah we'll find your softball team so you know we've been looking around we found a softball team 15 minutes away she found a baseball team 10 minutes away and she was like oh okay the one closest obviously like of course and so she signed me up for the baseball team showed up for my first session and then it was like oh I'm the I'm the only girl here

and it was like classic 12 year old mentality I was like oh my god all these boys are here this is great so yeah I would you know like going to an all-girls school was just like crazy to see like boys and it was like fantastic so you know like stuck around like for the first session but I after the first session like the novelty kind of wore off and it was just like I was scared all the time because again like I was I've never played before and I was extremely inexperienced and yeah I would leave every session 30 to 40 minutes early because I would just make excuses to leave because again like I was the only girl Australian to make friends and it was just boys that were just really good at baseball and it was like what like what what am I gonna do but again like after that like I

just kept showing up so I played that whole season I came back for the second season and you know the parents were like oh you came back and I was like oh was I not supposed to come back you know and it was you know like a 13 year old girl was just saying like oh okay but you know after that you know I went for every team I could I didn't make many teams until I was 14 so 14 was like kind of like the year when I I started to actually get it I just got it you know like you know I just showed up for so long for the last two years and then coaches were like oh okay she's not quitting she's yeah she's she's sticking around so I that was when I first started traveling by myself to like different cities around Australia I started playing in more women's tournaments I started playing in more men's tournaments I made

better teams we ended up winning like the state titles uh with my boys team that was just like when people just like started realizing like oh she's yeah she's she's serious she's gonna keep playing and then at 16 that was when I started like traveling overseas all by myself so I it was it's just like crazy circumstance where you just meet coaches and they're like oh you have a passport okay we're leaving in two weeks and you know and like that that happened to me I was at a tournament in Melbourne and um they yeah I was I was under a coach and I was the only outfielder on the team and like by circumstance one of the girls that they were gonna take to Hong Kong um for a tournament up there she just broke her leg and she pulled out and she was the outfielder and you know he was

just like Louisa like do you want to do you want to come to Hong Kong and I was like yeah yes yeah I do I do want to go to Hong Kong and he's like okay like do you have a passport I'm like yes and he's like okay like do you are you sure I'm like yeah and so I just took took three weeks off school and I went to Hong Kong and then from there I met a lady called Oz Sailors she like got my contact information from that tournament and then a couple weeks later I get this random email from her saying do you want to come to America to play summer ball and it was like a sick like this I'm a 16 year old girl have never like played baseball in America I still like scratching the surface of what baseball actually

is and then it was like oh you want to play summer ball like it's like college and I'm like oh my god college that's sick so again like I took that time I took five weeks off school and then I ended up traveling to America and I played summer ball in North Carolina and that was the time when I realized it was like this is it like this I'm all in on this uh like summer ball college baseball I am 100% making every decision I make from this point forward about baseball like playing college baseball you know like at that time I was going to that period of oh I should start looking at schools for softball so you know going on that trip completely just like threw the whole softball thing out the window it was gone it like my dreams of softball was like non-existent anymore

so ended up yeah going to America I met some like one of my best friends like her name's Beth she also plays baseball she still plays baseball now on her college team as well and I met some like one of my best friends like her name's Beth she also plays baseball she still plays baseball now on her college team as well and I met her on that trip we were the only ones on that trip like hardcore going out for every single day and there's still this one time I remember it was like the 5th of July it was pouring it was like there was a thunderstorm going on and we were just we're both like we should go to the gym and no one else wanted to go except for us two and so we ended up just like taking uh someone's truck in this like thunderstorm and driving down to the gym and we just like snuck

in and you know it was like that time where it's like, oh, she gets it. So, you know, again, like meeting people like that along the way has, it's crazy. Like it's amazing. Just some people, you know, they just get it too. And it's really cool to especially have like another female playing baseball that, you know, wants it as badly as you do. So, you know, I contact her all the time and we you know we just have this we have the same goals we have the same ideas like we both want to improve women's baseball especially so that's like super amazing um and then yeah so after that i ended up going to japan and korea two months later so again more time off school my mom was loving it she not she she it took a lot

of convincing to be completely honest with you but for sure like I worked so hard to save money for all these trips but these are the things that I say to other parents too when when they say oh you know like I don't want my daughter taking time off school. But it's like, you have to understand, if they really want to do this, then sometimes taking big chances and big opportunities like this is worth it, is worth taking, like, four or five weeks of school. At the time, like, it was my junior year. So, you know, it was kind of a poor year. So I kind of missed a lot. junior year so you know it was kind of important yeah so I kind of missed a lot but at the end at the end of the day like it was definitely worth it so yeah I ended up going in that tournament and just met like a whole bunch of other people and just had like an amazing time

um my friend Beth that I had met in America two months before that was actually there as well so you know it's just like crazy and like since then me and Beth have played in three countries together like it's insane I just I just love like that the baseball community is like that and then just like flash forward a year later you know still on that goal of like playing college baseball no teams wanted me emailing hundreds of coaches all saying no and then I just had an epiphany and I was like you know what I should do Olympic weightlifting I think if I do Olympic weightlifting I will get a lot stronger than the boys so that's what that's what I did I just started Olympic weightlifting I woke up 4 30 every morning got to the gym at 5, got really good Olympic weightlifting,

ended up coming third in my state for my age group. And then I ended up getting a weightlifting scholarship to a college in Northern California. So at that time, I was like, oh, well, if I'm going to like the only the only way I was going to take the scholarship was if I could play college baseball. So that's why I said to the coach, I was like, look, I didn't do weightlifting for like to do weightlifting. I did weightlifting to play college baseball. So I'm not going to come if I can't play. They end up saying like, yeah, like that's fine. That's fine. You can play college baseball. Two weeks before the season

started, they were like, before like I was meant to be in Northern California, they were like, oh, you know, play on the club team, and I'm like, no, I'm not playing on the club team, and just, like, before that even happened, I was coaching the under-18s Queensland, like, boys team to go to nationals, and they were actually versing a american touring team and on that american touring team the head coach was um the head coach at west la i didn't know that at the time obviously i was just being the assistant coach on our side one of the outfielders ended up getting injured for us and then the head coach came up to me and was like oh Louisa did you bring your stuff today and I'm like of course I brought my stuff so um he's like okay well like do you want to go play outfield I was like of course so I ended up playing a couple innings and then the coach approached me at the end of the um at end of the game and he was like

oh you play baseball and I'm like yeah like yeah I play baseball and I was telling him like yeah you know like this school in Northern California is kind of interested. Like they said I could play baseball there. And he's like, oh, you know, you should come to LA before you go to that school and play summer baseball with us. And I was like, you know, remembering my time in Virginia, like North Carolina. And I'm like, oh my God, I love summer ball. and I'm like oh my god I love summer ball so I was like 100% I'll be there so pestered him for six months so that was like in January I booked my like my flights to America by June and then I was in LA and I was playing on his team and then when the call came from the school in Northern California where it was like oh yeah club team

I was I was like no no way that's not happening so I ended up like talking to you know the coach and he he was like well have you thought of staying here in LA with us and I was like wait what like you guys want me and he's like yeah yeah like we'll give you we'll give you Ross a spot and I'm like no way so that's like that's kind of actually like how it happened it was just like this complete like wave of things that you know i just kept saying yes and yes to every opportunity and like it just got to where it was how i how i came to driveline now like that's because this is like 100 because of covid you know um obviously i knew what driveline was in australia where i live big with big driveline people so all about programming

that's all we do a lot of lot of ply balls lots of hitting pliers lots of weighted bats that kind of thing so i wasn't like unfamiliar to what it was and at the time obviously like I'm super into baseball super into analytics so I'm not like I was not never learning you know I was always trying to like just get ahead so I always knew what dry line was when COVID hit and I was I had to go back to Australia because of the lockdown and just know, uncertainty of like what was going to happen. Again, I had an epiphany and I was like, God, I suck at baseball. I was like, Jesus, you know, I come, I come from Australia and then like I come play college baseball. And it was like, I like didn't see the field as much as I wanted to. So, you know, it was kind of like, okay, we need to radically change everything I'm doing and I'm lost. I don't know what to do. So what I did was I did all the free programming that driveline had

and I did as much as I could. And then at the time, like I had so many questions about some of my analytics stuff. So I was DMing Alex Caravan. So like one of the directors of like R&D and he just, he just loved loved it like he was just absolutely loving it so you know it was just like I had such a positive relationship with driveline before you know I was even involved with them and then I kept getting like I bought like a motor sleeve to track my throws and then obviously I was just buying so much stuff from them to ship back to Australia you know I kept getting like these marketing emails to do online training and I was like the first couple times I got the marketing emails I

was like no I'm not doing online training like I know I'm not doing this and then I think by the third or fourth email I was like okay fine they've cracked me so I end up doing online training with my current coach Tanner my current coach slash boss now but yeah I end up doing online training with my current coach, Tanner, my current coach slash boss now. But yeah, I ended up doing online training with him. And then, you know, everything improved. It was just crazy. I ended up going back to LA to keep training at my facility down there. And then, you know, obviously still training with Tanner.

And then straight away, like I was, I was like messaging Alex and Alex was like, oh, you know, like, we're looking for interns. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is it. Like, I can intern. And he's like, oh, you know, like, we do want you, like, in the research side interning, but I think you'd be better as a hitting intern. And I was like, oh, but there is no hitting interns. And he's like, no, no, like they're going to be like putting it in the public next week, but here I'll send it to you early. So that was kind of sick.

I ended up like applying a week early than everybody else, of course, ended up like telling Tanner like, hey, like say good things about me. And then I ended up like messaging like Rachel Balkovec because again like she's she's one of my really close friends like mentors and she was like oh don't worry you'll be fine so it was just like I just had such a paused relationship before anything even happened and you know I just put myself in the best opportunity I could and at the like still like at the time like I just had just like a resume of just past experiences and just everything I'm working on right now and a resume of just like completed research and research I'm still doing

and so they were like well yeah like why why wouldn't we take you you know and my understanding is that when you started training with them that was sort of the impetus for you for the project that you would end up presenting at Sabre is that right that you were sort of dissatisfied with the amount of data there was specific to female baseball players and so that inspired you to start thinking about the scouting scale and sort of data more broadly in a way that would be more directly applicable to athletes like you. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. So last year I spoke at Sabre in Boston. And so that was the first time I was ever exposed to anything like that. And I didn't even know what

it was. The only thing that intrigued me was that they were giving out scholarship money for females. And I was like, what? Like, this is so random. Why are they giving out money for women to speak at a conference about baseball? And that was just hilarious. For me, I just thought it was hilarious because it was like, in Australia, no one gives a shit. Like, it's just crazy. And then you come here and it's like oh you're a woman in baseball like welcome and it's like here we'll give you money and it's like are you serious

so yeah I honestly I didn't even know what saver metrics was I had no idea I'm like I was 18 18 years old I was confused first year in college I had no idea but I was like you know what I'm just gonna give it a go and so I was just trying to solve the problem of like okay what do people want to hear from like a woman that plays baseball and I was like I was like you know what like that makes me really angry all the time is that I hate being compared to men constantly and I just hate that negativity that comes with that because again it's like I'm trying to make a team and they'll judge me based on the that. Because again, it's like, I'm trying to make a team and they'll judge me based on the men's grading scale.

And it's like, are you serious? I'm never going to throw 95. Like, this is ridiculous. And so again, like at the time, I just also had just really bad experiences with like teams and players and other coaches where they would not tell me how to improve and what my metrics were it was always just a secret and I'm like why does this have to be a secret you

know because you can just google everything from like for men and everything just comes up and I just thought it was completely unfair and yeah so I ended up speaking in Boston last year about the first draft of a scouting scale, and no one really understood what I was talking about. I don't even understand what I was talking about. But there was one person that told me, you know what, this is a good idea, you should keep going. And I was like, that's it.

This one person actually gets it. So I ended up just working on it a little bit longer and then presenting at the Women's Sabre this year. And that was just like, everyone was like, oh, oh, we get it now. And I'm like, yes, this is great. So, you know, second time around, it was really good. And then currently now I'm preparing for Sabre next year, where like hopefully it's dialed. It's completely like it makes sense it's good so like yeah that's kind of like the inside scoop of like okay that's kind of like

how it happened um and then yeah like just being a driveline having access to everything again I just instantly thought I'm like where are the women in this place there are none like why am I the only one training here? Like, this is ridiculous. And so again, like I put out that call. I was like, I want girls to train here. And so I ended up having a group of 10 girls come and train with me two times a week. And I was able to collect a lot of data from them.

And I was able to create like these two like like obviously small sample sizes of like blast metrics and hit track starter that I am now like obviously able to compare them with because I'm still coaching them online so which has been super amazing and super great I'm currently working on a blog post for that with driveline to like kind of showcase the data even on a small sample size but it's just like the possibilities now are insane and it's just now that i've done this i have so many people reaching out to me offering like their data for my like my like my like master set kind of thing and it's like this is going to be really good you know and it's going to only improve over time.

So yeah, for the folks that haven't had a chance to watch your presentation from Sabres women in baseball event, and we'll we'll link to that in the post for this. And we won't make you give anything away about sort of your scouting scale 3.0 that you'll present next year. But for the folks who haven't had a chance to watch that, can you walk us through kind of briefly what it is that you did with the 2080 scale and how you were able to adapt that to respond to a data set comprised of women baseball players? Yeah, so pretty much I just took like the exact same metrics they would be measuring for men. so obviously like velocity um pop time 60 yard dash exit below kind of just like your basic the basic metrics and I you know just put it made out like my own set and put it in the 2080 scale you know like we I just did the the exact same thing that we do for the men and I just made it

for women you know and it's like something that people can see that want to compete at a high level that they are able to do that and kind of I took my data from the Women's World Cup I took it from the USA national team I took it from Baseball Australia um I kind of took it to whoever would give it to me so again like I didn't take everybody's data because I can't be there to be like oh that's not 60 yards or like oh you know that's not that's not a fast ball so it was kind of just like sifting through that as well and like even now I'm still getting people sending me some some of the metrics and it's like I can't take half of this but thank you And it's like, I can't take half of this, but thank you.

So again, it's like, I want quality. But without giving away 3.0, there's going to be a youth woman and a open woman. So that's kind of the age groups I'm going to be working with right now. In my first like kind of proposal that I had writing it out, I had four subsections, kind of similar to how we would see it for men, kind of like, you know, under 13s, under 15s, under 18s, and then elite and then like major league level kind of thing. So with women, quote unquote,

major league level would be competing at the World Cup. So that's kind of like, it's crazy. It's like, it not like i'm not saying oh it's so sad but it's just like at the world cup the average fastball is 65 miles per hour and you know that's kind of like what i also wanted my scouting scale to highlight was the lack of development we have in women's baseball and when I was talking to JJ Cooper with Baseball America he was like do you really want to publish this and I'm like yes you know people need to see this it's something that like if people don't understand just the lack of like opportunities and quality coaching girls have like this this is what happens you know and it's like oh you know girls are going to play in the major leagues but it's kind of like

you need to look at this and you need to understand why girls aren't playing in the major leagues because they don't have the exact same like quality of coaching people don't know how to coach them and they're just not given the same opportunities. And this is why. So again, it's just like, you just need something. You need something there because there's nothing right now, you know? Yeah. I think one of the things I was struck by when watching your presentation was the way that it did center its usefulness for women. I think, you know, we would all like to see a woman play major league baseball. And I think that there are definitely applications of your project that would highlight women who sort of bust the scale, right, and might be highlighted

as having particular sort of preternatural talent. But I think that we often lose our appreciation for women's baseball as a worthwhile endeavor on its own. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what having something like this would have meant for you as a younger player. I won't say a young player because you're still a young player, but a younger player if you had been able to sort of gauge yourself toward a sample of your actual peers to understand sort of where your skills fell relative to other women your age yeah so my confidence just not like completely died but your mental health complete struggles a lot and like

you know as a 14 15 16 year old girl playing with men, even at a college level right now, it's just like constantly you're just put down all the time because you are competing against boys. Like twice your size, twice as big as you, just like they're men, like they're not boys anymore. You know, at 12, 13 years old, it's okay. And like, that's the thing it's like you are constantly the worst on the team you know as hard as you train as hard as you try as much as you do you're just always like not there and it's like you're always not as fast you're always not gonna hit the ball as hard and you know like you said there's of course girls that just break through and they're just absolute animals and they can beat that and like that's what we want to see and like we want to see more people like that

but for the majority of the population and that's especially like what I'm trying to highlight you know like the majority population of girls trying to play baseball might not ever reach that and that's why we're trying to keep them in the game so that one day they could reach that. So yeah, I mean, when I was growing up, I didn't have something like this. I didn't have something where I could look at it and be like, okay, it's okay. I can, I can work on this and then maybe I'll be the best woman at like running, or I can be the best, I can be the hardest throwing woman kind of thing. Not like, oh, I'm throwing 30 miles per hour under the boys that's great you know it's really overwhelming I can say that it's extremely overwhelming and like

you know still as a college baseball player again like I don't look to the women's scale I can't I play college baseball so like girls in college baseball like look look to the men's scale if you want to play you should do that but kind of the rest of the population that are just trying to like make a world cup team or just trying to stay in baseball or those girls who are on boys teams or like little league teams um and are just struggling to kind of find their place of you know should i keep playing am i even good you know that's like that's what this is for. It's for the like, okay, like, I just got to do this. You know, again, it's just like, it would help teams so much to understand like, where the development lacks as well.

Because I just think with women's baseball, it's always a guessing game. And no one really can pinpoint what's happening. And it's just like like they never really develop from anything it's just you always start at ground one but it's like how do you start at ground one when you never know what that was in the first place you know and is doing this data gathering and working on this project refining the scale working with women clients is that the majority of the work that you've been doing at driveline or is that just a piece of the hitting internship i guess you can yeah walk us through a day or you just got off work before we started talking to you so what did you do today if this is a representative day see like this is this is the funny part i was not hired at

driveline to do any of this at all i i do i do none of this for driveline i think right like literally everything i do with the women's stuff and like it's literally this is my passion project this is like this is like my why is like why i play baseball and kind of just like why i do the things i do and you know i love this and if i can get a girl a girl that loves baseball as much as I do to the same level that I am at and getting to experience just everything I have done you know I've had the best life and I want as many girls to experience that as possible so that's for me this is kind of like my passion project with driveline I am the classic hitting intern I am currently doing onboarding to be a trainer i'm currently an online trainer right now i coach four people online i'm also working with hit tracks i'm going to be helping out with some

abca stuff writing blog posts getting out new baseballs pretty much anything they don't want to do i will do it but like yeah i mean typical typical day in the life of working at driveline is kind of get here around seven uh do the usual work that I have. Sometimes I have to upload, like, 50 to 60 hitting videos of some of our athletes. I do a lot of the edutronic stuff, Rep Soto. Like, pretty much I set up for all the assessments. I have to sit in and everybody's hitting assessment.

I do all the KVEST stuff, got to download all the KVEST after it's done. I have to troubleshoot everything. If any of the tech goes wrong, it's all on me. I'm kind of like the, my first title was hitting analyst. Now it's the hitting intern because my analyst skills have like now just been like pushed to the side and it's like, okay, now just been, like, pushed to the side, and it's like, okay, now you're just doing everything we don't want. And then kind of, like, the passion project is just, like,

the thing I do when I go home. And, like, even the girls' hidden clinics I hosted, it was, like, days that driveline wasn't open. So, yeah, it's kind's kind of like they always made sure they're like are you sure you have time for this i'm like yes yes i have time for women's baseball all the time so yeah i think anyone who's had an internship in any walk of life probably can identify with what you're saying about how you just end up doing a little bit of everything and things that you didn't anticipate doing but But I'm curious about where you think things stand when it comes to

hitting versus pitching and the use of technology and training and development. Because of course, Driveline started years ago as a pitching facility and a lot of the tracking technologies were pitching centric at first, but you've talked about a lot of them that have now been applied to hitting. So I wonder whether you think we're getting closer to parity there or whether we will ever get to parity or whether there are just things about pitching, like the fact that it is kind of taking the initiative, whereas hitting is a reactive activity that will always lead to some imbalance there. Yeah. So I really love really love i love i love that because some of the stuff that we're doing right now in the hitting department we have this subsection that

it's called solve hitting and it's kind of just like a whole bunch of things that you know if we do this we may solve hitting and it's great and i love that it's it's just i just love that concept and so like yeah you know like working on hit ai it's just like they already have pitch ai you know the hitting department is yes it's behind and it's not far behind but it's maybe two to three years behind a lot of the tech that we have isn't as dialed as it is for the pitching side but that's again they're just ahead you know and you know the department the hitting department is a lot younger than our pitching department. So, you know, it's just like, it's a work in progress, you know,

it's getting there. A lot of the tech is getting a lot better. Everything's continuously updating. That's kind of like what I didn't realize before I even worked here. The pace of how everything changes is like weekly. It's like, there's something new coming out every other week and there's a new update every other week and then i also learned how technology fails you a lot of the time too and i didn't realize that and i now i i really understand like

you have to question everything because sometimes you know sometimes people sell you things that are wrong and you know I've seen that happen now and you're like wow here I was believing everything everybody says and now it's like oh tech could be wrong you know so yeah I think I think it's really cool definitely like the hitting department's moving in a really good direction. They're still behind the pitching, but not very far. And how is what you're working on there informing your research and your approach to baseball for women and girls? You know what? It is tough because we don't even have baseline levels, let alone, you know, some of the higher tech that we're using so it's where where do you start is the first thing and that's kind of what what i'm doing right now is it's like let's just

start here and then let's go from there because i have kvess data on some of the girls i train i train for like down here at driveline and can you just explain for people who might not know what that is and not be familiar with the sort of body tracking tech, maybe that would be good to know. Yeah. So KVS is like a whole bunch of senses, kind of like a motion capture lab. And it's kind of just like you put it at five different points of your body and it measures like the kinematic sequence and just how fast your body rotates and like at what speeds everything is moving um you kind of want that you kind of want the senses to be like in like in sequence so there's like a one two three four yeah it's a

four sequence and you want like different body parts moving at that at the same time but as fast as you can so that's just like kind of what it is it has a really cool fun graph of just like everything moving there's one like you know torso pelvis hand and arm yeah i got to test that out when i was working on the p machine and visited driveline and yeah yeah cool to see all that stuff it can also be humbling to actually see the data and see how you compare if there is a comparison because you can't pretend that you are better than you yeah that's that i love i love that about drivelines it's humbling to be here it's extremely humbling but yeah so it's like okay i have data

on you know a couple of girls maybe four or five girls i have eight or nine swings and then it's like okay well what what am going to do with it? Because no one else in the world has K-Vest data on women. Like, who cares? You know? So it's like, I could do as much as I want with all this tech that we have, but it's like, is it going to hold any weight in the real baseball, like women's baseball world?

No, not at all. So, again, it's like you've just got to start somewhere, world no not at all so again it's like you just got to start somewhere and i just think like this having a baseline scouting scale is the is a good place to start well and i would imagine that like everything else the pandemic has made collecting that data more challenging right because there are a lot of places in the world that aren't you know allowing amateur athletes to come together to play and you still have the you know the technology limitations or technology adoption limitations that you outlined so where do you sort of find yourself in the process and what is the the next step for you and sort of advancing that research yeah it is it is really tough because three of the biggest women's tournaments in the world were cancelled.

So it's like, great. Where do I find women playing baseball right now? Luckily, Australia. Luckily, luckily, Australia. So I've been really close in contact with them, obviously, because I'm from there. Again, like just my coaches there and all my friends. So I have been just like, I'm going to say quote-unquote, like, infiltrating. But, you know, I just, like, I have a really good relationship with them.

And I just ask them, like, can you please send me the data from, like, the trials that you guys just had? Or, like, hey, can you please go watch, like, seven or eight other games being played right now? And just record, like, only Fastball Velolo and they're like home to first times please you know and like luckily people have said yes we can and i'm like thank you god thank you so much because yeah it's like where am i gonna get all this data from that doesn't exist and is probably not gonna exist for a long time until we kind of get like tournaments up again so again like just reaching out to all my contacts and just trying to get like at least data from the last four years of women playing with the world cup

it's extremely hard because they only started tracking women's world cup data last year and the world cup's been going on for 10 years now so you know that's another that's another thick fight in itself it's like why haven't we been tracking women's data? It's like, well, it's a world cup. Like, why are we not doing this? You know, so it's like going through this process of finding data has again, just like, just made me extremely more motivated to get this out there and to just promote, like we should be collecting and saving women's data you know it's i feel like i'm gonna be saying this forever but we need to like i just i just

don't understand why people don't you know it's like we've been doing it for the for the men's side for so long now and it's like why hasn't this clicked with anybody else that it's like oh maybe we should we should do it for us too you know it's just like this is a great crazy battle and have you been able to apply some of this information that you've gathered either on others or yourself to your own game has it made you better as a player or helped you work out or anything well like i said i i'm playing college baseball right now. So I like I cannot look at I can't look at the women's startup because for me, it's like I don't care.

It's like I'm trying to I'm trying to hit like the ball over 100 miles per hour. So it's like internally, I'm just like I would just be the best at women's baseball like without looking at that. But I look at it when I'm done with the men's side of it so yeah I mean like plans right now is just like dominate men's baseball and then go back to women's baseball and just like win every one of the world cup that's kind of the goal but you know it gives me confidence it gives me confidence every time I see the um the scouting scale and but sometimes it's also like, okay, I just want to beat everybody by a lot.

So it is really cool. I've been in contact with a lot of other teams who are trying to adopt my scouting scale and testing it out for me. And I've been getting a lot of positive feedback. And it's helped out a lot of other girls. So me, whatever, I'm playing college baseball. But for other girls still in Australia girls still in America you know they look at it and they're like oh this is really good thank you for this like this is really great and it's like

cool I'm really glad this has helped someone else out you know I like I, I really just want it to be universal. And I really want it to keep like updating every year because once people see this and once people want to keep trying to beat it, then, you know, one day maybe we will see it similar to the men's scale. That's always going to be the goal. It's always going to be like one day, maybe it will be like that. But again, we just need somewhere to start. And there wasn't anything publicly available to start with. So that's kind of like, where it came from was like, okay, let's create something where we can start this.

Well, you may have anticipated my question with part of your answer to Ben, but I'm curious, what lies next for you or what you hope lies for you in the future. You've traveled the world and you've played baseball on several continents and you've interned at driveline. If you look 10 or 15 years down the road, what are you hoping to be doing in that version of your life? Yeah, it's crazy because I'm like, I have a five-year plan. You know, it's just like I've got one more year of junior college. I'm going to play baseball. And then I'm going to obviously try, not try,

I'm going to play Division I baseball straight after that. And then I'm just going to play there. And then probably be a grad assistant, like coaching-wise on the hitting side. And then I see myself in Pro Bowl. You know, I see myself, just like everybody else it's like why do you want to keep doing what you're doing like why do you want to keep playing and it's like well I want to go to pro bowl just like everybody else that's my goal so I kind of see that in the next like five years and then 10 10 15, I mean, who knows? Who knows at that point? But definitely, yeah, definitely improbable.

I don't have a 10 or 15-year plan, so your answer is much better than mine. So people can find Louisa on Twitter at her name, Louisa Gauci, and we will link to the story at Lookout Landing. We will link to your presentation from September. Is there anything else, any other resources, baseball for all, things that if girls or women are listening to this or parents who want to know more and want to help you in this effort or see what's out there, anything else that they should look up? Yeah, no, no definitely if anyone wants to help me out everyone if anyone else has like any data on girls or women like definitely dm me on twitter or instagram or

like even my email address is just my first name last name at outlook.com but yeah like women and girls trying to play baseball first place to look is baseball for all they like especially in america that's that's the go-to in australia literally just go to your local club and be like i want to play women's baseball and they're like they're like okay sure so women's baseball in australia is way way bigger than america but yeah like if anyone like can't find that dm me i'll find it. Like I said, I played in a couple of countries. I got it. I got my connections. Yeah, just wake up at 4.30, head to the gym,

learn Olympic powerlifting. Sounds simple. Yeah, then work at driveline and then train every day and then you'll be good. Great. All right. Well, thank you very much for your efforts and also for coming on today to talk to us about them. Thank you for having me.

All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Jamie Felix Toll, Chris Hegg, OJ Carrasco, Nicholas Schumacher, and Paul Campbell. 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.

view and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with two more episodes before Christmas, so we will talk to you soon. You better write it down. Have you got that now? You better write it down. Have you got that now? You better write it, better write it down. You better write it, better write it down. You better write it, better write it down.

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