Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1641: The Confounding Free-Agent Market

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about why the free-agent market has been both slow-moving and fairly lucrative for the players who’ve signed, the White Sox inking closer Liam Hendriks, whether the White Sox are the American League’s front runners, the latest report that the season will start on time, napping, MLB’s plans for fans […]

Then you're gone for days on end and here we go again, here we go again. You're sending me mixed messages, mixed messages that I can barely work through. Where the heart lies, which message is coming truly from you? Hello and welcome to episode 1641 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. I'm kind of confused by this offseason, I think. I don't really understand free agency this year. In some ways, it's been what we feared or expected, and in other ways, it really hasn't.

This is prompted by the latest signing, one of the highest profile signings we've seen so far. The White Sox signed closer Liam Hendricks to a contract that it's kind of hard to define really it's sort of a strangely structured contract yeah I guess it's most accurate to say it's a three-year 54 million dollar deal but there is a club option for the fourth year and so the way it works is that there's a club option and a buyout that are both worth $15 million for that fourth year. And so he's guaranteed to get the full $54 million because if they decline, then he still gets it. And if they pick it up, he still gets it.

And so you would think, well, why would they not pick it up? Why would they want to pay him for nothing unless he's, I don't know, hurt or completely terrible a few years from now or something? But there is a reason, I guess, because of the way it's structured. Some of that money is deferred over a 10-year period. So the real present-day value of the contract is a little lower than $54 million. So they might save some money if they were to not pick up that option and then have to pay him over a long period instead of that year. It's weird. But basically, $54 million.

And that's not really what I expected Liam Hendricks to get. Now, I'm not going to say it's unfathomable because he's been the best reliever in baseball over the last couple of years. But I would say it's above expectations. And that's been a pattern this year. So we've seen two things happen. We've seen one thing, which is not a lot of activity. It's been slow. Not a lot of the top free agents have signed. And yet the free agents who have signed seem to be getting more than people expected for the most part. And I don't know how to square those two things. I was just looking at the MLB Trade Rumors ranking of the top 50 free agents. And right now, only 14 of those 50 have

signed. Two of those were Marcus Stroman and Kevin Gossman, who accepted the qualifying offers. One of those was Hassan Kim. So of the 11 free agents on that list, domestic free agents on that list who have signed, 10 have gotten more than MLB trade rumors projected, and in many cases by much more. I think the only exception is Greg Holland, who signed a low dollar deal with the Royals. But otherwise, it's been all guys exceeding those estimates, and that's just one list. But I think if you look at Craig Edwards ranking at Fangraphs, there's a similar pattern there, I think, or really any ranking probably. So I know we talked about this before when James McCann signed and he exceeded estimates by a considerable margin. But now you have Hendricks, who MLB trade rumors and I think also Craig had at three years and 30 million. He easily exceeded that.

James McCann easily exceeded. Kim got a little less than he was projected to get. I guess it's harder to project a player like that coming over from the KBO. But, you know, Charlie Morton, Mike Miner, who got two years and 18, was projected for one and six. Carlos Santana got two years and 17.5, was projected for one and six. And Santana got two years and 17.5 was projected for 1-6. And we could keep going down the list. Drew Smiley, 1-11, was projected for 1-5. So I don't know what to make of that. Were the estimates just too low? Were we overestimating how bad this offseason would be? Because then how do you square that with the fact that really the pace of signings has been extremely slow yeah it's a tricky one to to sort out because the estimates that we had at

fan graphs going into the to the off season and i think this is true across the board when the industry tries to prognosticate in this way like we're obviously building in assumptions about what the environment's going to be like and so on on the one hand, you're excited when deals exceed those numbers when one of the assumptions you have is that the market will be slow and that guys will not find contracts that are necessarily commensurate with their talent. But I think there still remains the question of whether these contracts, and I don't know that Hendrix is necessarily the best example of this, but if these contracts are in a vacuum, good, right? If they are actually representative of the market value of the player, you know, it wasn't that long ago that Drew Pomerantz signed a deal for like four years and $60 million. And I think Hendrix is the equal of him in terms of talent. So it's

better, but I don't know if it's necessarily good, but it is nice to see that we are avoiding sort of a worst case scenario when it comes to the market. But like you said, we also just haven't seen a ton of signings. I do wonder if with Hendrix off the board, if this is going to start moving some of the other also good, but less good relievers who are still hanging out there and sort of where the gating factors for each sort of segment of the market are going to end up being. But yeah, it's a tricky one. Yeah, because if you just showed me the terms, I would think, oh, well, this looks pretty normal. In some cases, this is even more than I would expect for that player to get.

And yet we know that a lot of the top names on the board are still there, and they'll get signed somewhere in the next couple months, one would assume. And we've seen flurries of activity late in recent winters so there's precedent for that and again that was expected but what wasn't really expected was that there would be these prognostications of just a disastrous winter where nothing would happen and that's kind of true to an extent and yet the players who have signed seem to be getting reasonable deals for the most part so yeah it is sort of odd that both of those things have gone together yeah i guess the if if we want to be dour we could say that because so few of the of the top guys have signed there's still the possibility for things to go horribly wrong

but it seems less likely that that's true now given kind of who remains on the market and their perceived talent within the industry and perceived value on the team side. So yeah, it's just a strange one, but we're like a month away from pitchers and catchers supposedly reporting. So the times are wasting. Yeah, things have to start happening sometime soon.

And so Hendrix has been really great over the past couple years. Had been great at times before that kind of inconsistent, but has been just probably the best in baseball lately. And so now the White Sox have signed him after adding Lance

Lynn via trade, after signing Adam Eaton, which was sort of underwhelming, I think, in that people were hoping for a bigger name, George Springer or someone. But Eaton still has his value and his uses, too. And that's coming off last offseason when they added Grandal and Keichel and they put a good team together. And so now they've continued adding. And as I've seen other people point out, they've kind of been the only American League team that has done anything this winter. And their direct competitors have, if anything, subtracted.

We talked about Cleveland and the Lindor and Carrasco trade last time. The Twins just really have been pretty inactive on the whole. They non-tendered Eddie Rosario. They haven't really added anyone yet. And again, there's still time for all of this to change, but you have to be pretty happy with where the White Sox are sitting right now if you're a White Sox fan, because really they seem to have gotten a bit better and everyone else has stood still or even gone backward a bit. And so if you look at the Fangraphs team war projections right now,

it goes Dodgers, Padres, Mets, as we mentioned last time at the top of the list, and then Yankees, White Sox. And there's very little gap between those two at the top of the American League. So you could make a case right now that the White Sox are the team to beat in the American League.

Well, and I think that if we go further down those rankings, you'll see that the Twins aren't too terribly far behind Chicago. But I think that it's an encouraging, if we want to go out from the sort of real macro free agent environment down to the division level, that the AL Central, at least where the White Sox are concerned, is standing in such sharp contrast with the NL Central because this is, I think, rightly perceived to be a soft division with, you know, the White Sox and the Twins in some order kind of up at the top and then the rest of the offering kind of further down the wind curve. But I think that while I wouldn't want them to do

this, the White Sox could have said, look, we got Lance Lynn. This isn't a division with a clear breakaway favorite. we don't really necessarily need to do a whole lot more than that to be competitive we'll just sort of roll the dice and see where we go and they haven't seemed at least entirely content to do that and I think this is another good example of it which is just really not true of the NL Central where it's like that you know the office meme with everyone standing around being like, who amongst us will win? Because, you know, that's exactly how that scene went in the office. So I appreciate that, if only because I think our general editorial policy on this podcast

is that it's nice when teams try to win baseball games. So it's good to see them sort of making moves to do that. I will be interested to see if this is really where they stop because while I like that they did this deal and that bullpen, especially if crochet is healthy, is looking pretty fearsome, I don't necessarily think that their outfield situation should be considered fully sorted, even if it seems like maybe they do.

So maybe there's still stuff to happen and move around. But yeah, they're gonna be such a weird team to watch because they have so many fun players and as we have talked about ad nauseum their booth is so fun and then there's the tony larusa of it all so yeah we're gonna watch a lot of white socks baseball next year or gosh this year ben wow it's the first time i've made that goof in 2021 we're gonna watch a lot of white socks baseball this year and we'll tune in for a variety of reasons yeah maybe larissa will surprise us and he'll be part of the fund we'll see we'll see but i guess

hendrix replaces alex column a although he's still out there on the market too. But yeah, you've got now Hendricks. You have Aaron Bummer. You have Evan Marshall. You have Crochet, hopefully, who I don't know. I guess they're committed to him as a reliever now. Seems like he had maybe some starting potential, but I don't know that they need him in that role necessarily. And we don't know exactly what Kopech will provide this year coming off injuries and a long layoff and all of that. But the back of that bullpen does look pretty intimidating.

And right now, again, going back to the Fangraph step charts, the White Sox have the number two projected bullpen in baseball by wins above replacement. Or actually, I guess, tied maybe with the Yankees at number one. So, yeah, it's a pretty good group back there. Yeah. And I imagine on the crochet front, I expect that he will, this is me speculating, not knowing anything. I would imagine that, especially with the injury so late that they will probably use him in relief just as a way to manage his innings. But I don't know what the long-term sort of forecast is for him in terms of the role i can't imagine that they wouldn't want to try to have him start but the injury so early in his career

but late in the year might end up dictating the course for them there but yeah that's that's a fun team gosh what a fun team it really is yeah and i don't know what they'll get out of kopeck or dylan cease and so maybe if those guys struggle and Crochet looks good and healthy, maybe they could swap them out or something at some point. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to watching this team. I think we compared them a lot to the Padres last year, just because they're constructed similarly in some ways, and they have a lot of exciting players,

and they were a team that was breaking a playoff drought and getting back to October and they have both kind of continued to keep pace with each other this winter. Kind of show me a Padres White Sox World Series. Gosh, that would be great. That would be so fun. Yeah. So it does sound as if the season is going to start

when it's supposed to start. And we talked about this recently because there was a report in The Athletic that said that MLB had kind of conceded that they were planning to start spring training in the season on time, and the Players Association has been pushing for that, of course. But there was another report this week that Rob Manfred talked to teams on a conference call on Monday and told them, confirmed that they should be preparing for spring talked to teams on a conference call on Monday and told them, confirmed that they should be preparing for spring training to start on time and to plan on 162 game seasons. So not news exactly, but kind of confirming those early

reports that things were right on schedule. And so I wonder if that's the case, if that's kind of the kick in the pants that some teams that are sort of sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see how things develop will say, all right, well, we actually have to plan on the season starting sometime soon. And so maybe that will break the seal on the free agent market a little bit. And Hendrix will be the start of a sequence of moves we will see. the start of a sequence of moves we will see. Yeah, I wonder if those things in conjunction with one another will be sufficient, although it seems silly that he couldn't also on that call say, and a DH for everyone! Yeah, that too. It's nice that they've decided to start the season,

but also, as we've talked about recently, they have to decide what the season is going to look like and what the rules are and like what positions you need to fill just minor little points like that so hopefully that's next on the agenda and yeah hopefully then we will know sometime soon what baseball will actually look like in 2021 and where people will be playing and all those good things that we're used to knowing well before this time in a typical offseason i would note that the lack of of clarity on the DH does not give the twins an excuse for not having, say, reengaged the services of Nelson Cruz, because you guys know you need a DH. True, yes.

I don't know that they necessarily will be the ones to do that, but it seemed like there was some mutual interest, and then we have heard nothing, Ben. There's been nothing. Maybe Nelson Cruz is the one dragging his feet because he might want to know what the market for his services are and what other suitors are out there. So it does take two to sign a deal. That's fair. But let the man know where he will nap.

Yes, that would be good to know. I appreciate so much Nelson Cruz's commitment to napping because I feel like the discourse around athletes taking care of themselves by sleeping as much as they need to has really so much nelson cruz's commitment to napping because i feel like the the discourse around athletes taking care of themselves by sleeping as much as they need to has really shifted in the last little bit and it's not entirely cruz's doing but i think that he contributed in a in a meaningful and important way uh to to that shifting and it's good because uh how many guys have we seen in the last couple years who are like oh yeah i realized i had sleep apnea and now i can hit for you know 300 yeah it's like you should all be sleeping more if this we all need to sleep i say this in front of you so that you also try to

internalize that piece of feedback although i know you will not i nap i take naps and yeah napping is like a market inefficiency now it It's like a competitive advantage. It's like all the young progressive teams are like getting sleep rooms in the clubhouse and like ken griffey jr's clubhouse nap was like now granted i don't know that that was like a performance enhancing nap so much as just like i'm 40 and this team sucks and i'm tired i you know i don't know what the motivations there were but definitely napping has kind of come to the fore as like an intentional act more so than a, I just dozed off. It's like in the past, it's like, I don't know, famous nappers in baseball. It's like Connie Mack when he's super old, like falling asleep on the bench. Like there's definitely a negative perception of naps, which I guess is understandable because

there are times when it's not good to nap, but there are times when it's beneficial to nap and athletes are taking advantage of those times more so than they used to. Sometimes you got a nap and often the nap discourse had like a, an uncomfortable racial undertone to it. It became a proxy for other stuff. And anytime we can take stuff like that off the board, it's just good on its own plus naps are good for you i'm a terrible napper so i don't i don't know but i've been told that it is good for you and does not always result in you having a weird headache from like 4 or 6 p.m so nap on everyone joy naps i i wouldn't say i'm good at it because I lack the ability to fall asleep quickly. I'm not an insomniac. I can sleep if I decide to, but it usually takes me a little while to wind down and I'm lying there and

thinking about things that I did or things that I have to do, not in an unpleasant way. I kind of enjoy that time when I'm sort of slowly slipping into unconsciousness, but I can't be one of those people who nap for like 15 minutes and they set the alarm and then they're up and refreshed because I just wouldn't be able to fall asleep quickly enough as soon as I know that there's an alarm that's going to go off sometime soon. There's just no way that I'm going to get to sleep. So I nap when the afternoon is stretching ahead of me

and I know that I don't really have to squeeze it into a compressed period come to effectively wild for nap discourse we love naps uh you know what they're not gonna let you do in the ballpark next year nap you know what they will let you do seems like everything else ben you could nap you could nap in a ballpark we've seen that right many many a fan has fallen asleep in the stands that's a staple of the baseball broadcast that's how you know that baseball is boring right because people are falling asleep in the stands i suppose that the the thing they will care about in 2021 is that if you nap you nap with your mask on and

only in your pud yes don't fall asleep on anyone's shoulder oh gosh uh yeah ben this has been my awkward attempt to try to segue into baseball's plan for the the 2021 season when it comes to fans which seems to be a thing that we're going to experience will we feel good about it i don't know i don't know i'm referring to a piece by bill shaken of the los angeles times who i think probably on the back of manfred's call with teams reported yesterday as we were recording this that the league's plan for fans in 2021 is going to look a lot like the plan for the world Series, albeit with a great deal of sort of regional variation depending on how stringent the requirements are in any given locality. But

I think the piece of news from this that folks had wondered about and that we had kind of wondered about was whether there will be a requirement for those attending in person of having been vaccinated or some sort of negative COVID test or temperature check. And it does not seem that any of those things will be required, which I'm trying to separate my person living in the world, really sick of COVID, wishing that this would end, feeling frustrated with people who won't help to contain spread reaction from what is likely actually practicable at the ballpark. And I guess the real answer to this would be, ideally, we would not have fans in the stands until we are all

vaccinated. But having decided that they will, I don't know how useful a negative COVID test is if it's not being administered as you're standing in line. Yeah. So I think that it seems very dicey to me to have fans in the stands, even though the precedent for this was clearly set by the World Series and other sports are just kind of plowing ahead. Ben, I don't know if you are a person who engages in college football ever, but boy, there seem to be a lot of people at the national championship that I watched yesterday. So I feel like we've just kind of given up on the score. Yeah, that's been the plan for a while now,

to the extent that there is a plan. Mostly there just aren't plans, but to the extent that there's a plan, it's like someone who's in a scandal and just tweets through it, right? And you say that they're tweeting through it and it doesn't really help for the most part. And sometimes it makes it worse, but you just kind of pretend that it will go away. That seems to be the pandemic plan for much of the country. It's just, hey, the vaccine's coming. so let's just power through this. And unfortunately, we will lose a lot of people along the way, but there just doesn't really seem to be the collective will to do anything other than that. And I've heard listening to many interviews and podcasts over the past year about the historical precedent for what happened in previous pandemics, and it seems like the pattern is that there's an early reaction, there's some sort of shutdown or lockdown. And then once that's removed, and once the regular course of business is reintroduced, there's just never really any appetite for reimposing those

measures. So it's like, you get one chance, and then everyone is sick of it. And once you lift those restrictions, everyone just psychologically sort of says, okay, well, that's over. And it backed away from that, it was just, I think our fate was sort of sealed collectively that it was just going to be a waiting game to see when the vaccine would arrive. And fortunately, it arrived quite quickly. And it's here, although it's not getting distributed very well. But as it relates to baseball, I guess it's not shocking that baseball is following the lead of just about everyone else. And what Shakin said, the memo was described as the league's minimum health and safety standards, which I guess is an apt way to describe it because it really is the minimum. There just doesn't seem to be much to it, although the league acknowledged that local authorities could mandate more restrictive standards and that all these things could change over the next few months.

But yeah, I'm just thinking of the ballpark environment and having seen some of the security theater measures that have been imposed, as people call it, putting in metal detectors, that sort of thing, that doesn't seem to be all that effective and just leads to really long lines and really hurts the ballpark experience. And so if you also mandated that someone has to, you know, go through a metal detector and then also take their temperature and provide proof of vaccination or a negative test or something, and you have to somehow warn them that they have to bring all this documentation with them to the ballpark. It sounds like a logistical problem, which maybe would tell you that it just shouldn't

be attempted at this point. But as you said, if you are going to go ahead with it, maybe it's not surprising that they're just sort of surrendering and hoping for the best. Yeah, and we should say that in this piece, the League has indicated that they anticipate that state and local authorities would require pod seating like we saw in the World Series and that there should be social distancing and that fans have to wear a mask at all times except when they're eating or drinking, which we saw how that went in Arlington. Yeah, that's just impossible to enforce realistically. And I think, you know, Sam has made this point in the past before that I think that the real issue is when people are entering or exiting, right? Like once they're in

their seat, I would imagine that there is a, you know, a way to do this that is reasonable, but you can't teleport them there, right? They have to go through the choke points of entering the ballpark and exiting and they got to stand in line for that hot dog that's going to allow them to take their mask off and they got to go to the bathroom. So that part is going to be tricky. This piece also acknowledged that spring training games, which are scheduled to start on February 27th, no team is selling tickets for those games yet. I think in anticipation of the situation in Arizona and Florida perhaps continuing to be bad or hopefully not getting worse, but potentially getting worse, and that it will require pod seating and that they will have to submit health and

safety plans and mostly that fans will not be permitted to watch morning workouts or other pre-game activities unless those events are held in the ballpark under the same seating plan which presumably means that the autograph hounds will have another year where they can't get card signed oh no that'll drive up prices i wonder what this has done to the autograph market to just kind of take away this many signing opportunities for a year and granted like players can still sign on their own time and maybe provide that memorabilia to companies that organize that. But you're still taking a lot of autographs out of the market, right? Because all the balls that people get signed at ballparks, at spring training, that's not happening.

You know, signing shows and card shows and all these in-person events that aren't happening. There must be a lot fewer autographs entering the market over the past year than there would be in a normal year. And I wonder if that has produced any discernible effect on prices. That would be interesting. Yeah, I wonder how that has gone. I mean, it seems like it would have to have some effect. And like you have guys who, in addition to just the inability of fans to get signatures or autographs or other signatures, what are they doing?

They're not they're not submitting a petition they're not trying to put a ballot initiative on the ballot my goodness i don't think we can call it a signature unless it's legible and baseball player signatures are really not worthy of that name i don't think but in addition to just fewer opportunities you also had i imagine that there are like prospects who they would want to see who didn't come stateside, at least among the international contingent because of travel restrictions and because they weren't on the, you know, they weren't going to be in the 60 man player pool or what have you. guys whose autographs are just tremendously elusive and valuable right now like does anyone have a jason dominguez signed card out there is there a jason dominguez card he's one of the like highest most highly ranked players in baseball and he's a yankee and i don't think he's seen any stateside action yet really ben we should investigate this further, I think. Well, I've searched on eBay and there are Jason Domenica's parts.

Well, there goes my grand theory. I will say it is a, the behavior has aspects of it that are objectively objectionable. But the consistency and the determination of the autograph hounds is really, you know, put to a different purpose, I would call it admirable. Because it's not as if I am at every spring training game or every fall league game, but there are definitely people in just a couple of seasons of having frequented those spots who I recognize. So I wonder what those folks are doing. Yeah, I was a kid who went to spring training a couple times. And as I've discussed, I'm not really an autograph guy. And I was never totally comfortable trying to get autographs.

But whatever attempts I made, I was kind of competing with adult males who had giant binders full of things that they were trying to get signed. And it was like whichever player they spotted, they had some headshot or card ready to go. And it was all very businesslike. And, you know, I didn't care all that much because, again, I wasn't all that focused on getting autographs. But if I had been, probably would have been a bummer that I was competing with people who were doing that professionally. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with autograph collecting or autograph getting as a hobby. It brings people pleasure. And, you know, as long as you're doing it in a responsible way,

I think it's fine and all involved can enjoy those things. But, yeah, I don't know. There is something, I guess, magical about giving it to a kid and making that memory and if you're doing it for profit as opposed to the memory or making a fan or because you're idolizing some player well it's it's not as easy to romanticize that's for sure yeah i think it is good to draw a distinction between those who are in pursuit of a collection, a hobby, and do so respectfully, both to the athletes involved and also to their fellow fans.

And then there are the people who cause teams to change their policy about fan access to backfields. And to those folks, I'd like to say, chill out. Please chill out. You're ruining it for the rest of us. Chill. Boy, there are a bunch of Jason Dominguez cards on eBay, and there are some autographed Jason Dominguez cards that are going for quite hefty sums, I must say. Yeah. Maybe that does indicate

some scarcity in the Jason Dominguez autographed card market because, yeah, there's some pretty pricey items on here. Anyway, it is available if you want it, but there aren't a whole lot of them out there. Yeah, I think that we will just zoom out from this to talk about the possibility of people being in proximity to one another to do baseball things, whether it is getting autographs or going to the ballpark. And we will echo the words of new Met Francisco Lindor, who during his introductory press conference said the only way we're going to stop COVID is by caring about others and not just ourselves. And people do. People care about others. At some point, they're like, I'll be fine. I won't get sick.

You probably won't get hit as hard, but somebody else will. So just something for us to all keep in mind as we go about our lives, baseball or otherwise. Yep. Vaccines, too. Vaccines will help. Caring, also important. Yep. Vaccines too. Vaccines will help. Caring, also important. Yes. Vaccines, very important too.

So let's hope we all get them sometime soon. That would be really nice. It would be great to go outside again and do the things that we normally do and go to a ballpark and not have to worry about what the health and safety standards are, at least when it comes to COVID. I hope that that will happen at some point this season. And, you know, temperature checks, which I have undergone entering various places. Like I know that they may or may not be super reliable.

And also like if you're asymptomatic, you could be carrying it and you could be capable of spreading it to someone without triggering the temperature test. So far from perfect. I don't know that there's a perfect way to fill up a ballpark with people and eradicate the risk. So let's hope that sometime soon we get to the point where that risk is removed. That would be really nice not to have to talk about COVID protocols anymore. I would be very happy not to have to do that. And there is one other thing I wanted to follow up on. We talked not long ago about another mystery, not just why the free agent market is behaving as it is, but why MLB doesn't seem to have interest in expansion. And that's related, of course, to attendance, because we theorized that one would think that MLB owners would be interested in expansion because they're getting less revenue than usual. Games were canceled. They're playing games without fans or with fewer fans. And so one would think that they would be incentivized to expand, because when you expand, new franchises

come in. They have to pay fees to the other teams to gain their way into the league. And this has been a way that MLB owners have profited before and rebounded from hard times before, hard times of their own making, namely collusion. That was sort of their way out of it. And so it seems like circumstances are set up for them to want to do that again, on top of the fact that it's pretty much high time for expansion anyway, and that it's been longer since the last round of expansion than at any point since expansion started. And it seems like population has increased and there are markets out there and it's viable, and maybe it

would even help from a competitive or aesthetic standpoint. So all sorts of reasons why it seems like there should be interest. And yet it was reported that there wasn't interest and that evidently one of the reasons why Dave Dombrowski chose to join the Phillies eventually is that he heard from multiple sources that there just wasn't going to be expansion anytime soon. And so we were trying to puzzle out why that might be.

And I think you mentioned, well, maybe some local markets might not be in a position to give teams the sweetheart deals and the ballpark funding and all of that that they've become accustomed to. But we were sort of skeptical about the idea that the owners would act in any selfless way and say, oh, well, the country just isn't ready for this and we should not be devoting our resources to baseball. We should let those local municipalities devote those resources to health or education or funding. Yeah, that's not why. But there was an article that Ken Rosenthal wrote

this week exploring this issue because he went over the same reasons why we mentioned that MLB, in theory, should be interested in expansion. And so it sounds like he comes up with three reasons here, and one of them seems like the primary reason. So there's questions about the A's and the R's, of course. There are still some teams that are sort of unsettled, and so maybe they want to figure out the weakest links from a financial standpoint and shore up their situations before they expand. We noted that, although I think we also mentioned that typically owners like to have the option of expanding out there so that they can dangle that over the heads of local politicians, let's say, to get a better deal.

So that's one reason that there are still some weaknesses that they could address about the current markets. And then also the reluctance to lose young talent. There would have to be an expansion draft. And of course, teams really value young, cost-controlled talent these days. And there are going to be fewer minor leaguers and all those reasons why teams would be reluctant to part with those players. But it seems like, according to Ken's reporting, the main reason might be the owner's reluctance to divide the pie. So it sounds as if, yes, there would be expansion fees, and Ken says maybe it would be something like a billion dollars per franchise or something. And so if you added two teams, brought the total up to 32, then there'd be a lump sum of $2 billion added into the coffers, and that would be distributed across clubs. And so it would be something like 67 million per team, which is not an insubstantial amount. However, after that, they would all individually lose money because the revenue, the central revenue would be split 32 ways instead of 30.

And so it sounds like that's not worth it to a lot of owners. So Ken writes, the league originally projected slightly more than $2.4 billion in central revenue in 2020 or about $80 million per club. With 32 teams, that number would reduce to about $80 million per club. With 32 teams, that number would reduce to about $75 million per club. The reduction would grow as central revenue grows, and central revenue has grown faster than many of the league's other streams. In addition, clubs are valued based on recurring annual revenues. I know it's super exciting when we talk about clubs and why they're valued because of recurring annual revenues. The hypothetical $67 million teams would receive from expansion would be a one-time payment that is taxed.

The loss of recurring annual revenue, meanwhile, would depress the value of the club, and that loss would be permanent. Once the league commits to additional clubs, the only way to turn back would be through contraction, and MLB has never taken that step. So Ken is pointing out that this central revenue has grown really fast, and teams are reluctant to behavior, perhaps, in that one of the reasons why we always say teams may be choosing not to get better or to get worse or to prioritize payroll. Yes, it's because in the short term of the pandemic and revenue shortfalls, but in the larger term, it's because it seems like all the central revenue makes it possible for teams to be profitable and to continue to operate without necessarily

investing a whole lot in the team and without winning even. And so I think this just goes to show that that's a really big driving force in modern MLB of the way that teams behave. And maybe it's an obstacle to expansion too, because teams are really putting an emphasis on that shared central revenue, which keeps growing. And so that might make them decide not to invest or to trade a franchise player because they know that they can count on a certain amount of money coming in every year. And that might also prevent them from expanding to 32 teams. I just feel like it's a little, given all of the conversations that we've been forced to have around ownership behavior, just in general, but in the last year in particular, it is a little on the nose for their finances to be standing in

the way, quite literally, of them growing the game in a meaningful way. I don't necessarily, I think there are good reasons to proceed slowly with expansion. Although I think that bringing baseball to new audiences is, you know, probably just always a net positive over the long run. But I appreciate the need to do these things sort of methodically. And you want to make sure that you're putting franchises in places that they can succeed and where there's real market value and I get all of that stuff but at some point we really need to think long and hard about the incentive structure that we have set up in baseball and by we I mean the owners have set up in baseball right we always talk about the incentive structures in baseball as if they were handed down right like Moses came with a collective bargaining agreement or something, which is not what

happened, right? It's a negotiated document. And quite often, the last couple turns, ownership has gotten precisely what they have wanted. And so I think that this is not an original thought. It is certainly not the first time I have voiced this on this podcast. And I can't imagine that we'll get away from talking about it for too terribly long but we just have some really warped incentives in the game and the one that doesn't seem to always be pushing through is the incentive to win a world series and if the sincere argument of ownership was we have a lot of talented guys on our club and we don't want

to give any of them up in an expansion draft because we want to win you know the next five world series i'd be more sympathetic to that argument but the idea that the owners of teams that accrue tremendous value in the course of their ownership and you know bring in gate revenue and have you know tv deals and facilitate all sorts of real estate business that has nothing to do with baseball, but then look around and say, well, you know, we'll get a slightly smaller cut of the central pie if there's another owner here. It's just a bummer. It's a bummer, Ben. I want to talk about fewer bummers. Me too. Yeah. That would be nice yeah and an expansion

that's not something that we have really dealt with certainly during our time covering the game right so it'd be fun to talk about I think like we've talked a bit on the podcast in the past about how it would work and how you would structure an expansion draft today. But, you know, I was, what, I guess 11 or something when the Diamondbacks and the Rays played their first seasons, and I was not paying attention to the sport in the way that I do now. And there'd be so many things to talk about and how it'd work and where would their players come from and what effect would it have on the league run scoring environment? Just something new because this hasn't happened for more than two decades now. So I hope that we will get to talk about this at some point and get into the

mechanics of it and the effects of it. But it sounds like that won't be anytime soon. Bummer. Yeah. In some sense, having even more players would overwhelm me in a way like i i don't know how uh people who follow multiple sports and multiple sports with even more teams than there are in mlb do it you're one of those people i don't know how you keep all the players in your heads it's like when we talk to eric long and ha, I'm always amazed that he knows like not only all the major leaguers, but like hundreds or thousands of amateur players and players in the minors. It's just like, how do you have the brain space to know something about all of these people and pay attention to them? And so if you're someone who pays close attention to baseball, but also basketball or hockey or football, football, there's so many players.

I don't even remember all the players on one team, let alone all the teams. It's just a lot of people and a lot of mental bandwidth. So I'm impressed. And I'm bad at napping. That too. So I can't even. I don't know. My brain has always worked that way.

It files it that way. My mom likes to like name a my mom likes to play like what is it six degrees of kevin bacon she likes to play that game with me except she'll pick two other people both of whom have been in less stuff than kevin bacon and be like connect these through their you know their imdb and i am i don't know my brain just files stuff in that order i guess i don't know what to tell you, man. Yeah. But I meant to mention also, I guess this is not actually news yet, but it sounds like

it will be news sometime soon. Fernando Tatis Jr. extension. Seems like it's in the offing. There were reports that they were really talking about an extension. There were even some terms floated. Then there was a report that they hadn't yet begun negotiations. Then there was another report, I think, from The Athletic that AJ Preller had visited Tatis in the Dominican Republic. And I think Jeff Passan reported that

they met, but that no formal offer has been made. But it certainly sounds as if things are moving toward an extension probably prior to opening day and so it may be that we will see tatis locked up long term with the padres and maybe lindor with the mets because there's momentum toward that too and lindor obviously is with a new team tatis is with his original team or the team he's been with for his whole major league career. And that would just be a nice refreshing change, I think, to the conversation we were having about Lindor last week and about bets and about all these good players getting traded by good teams. The Padres have kind of been at the forefront of being aggressive this offseason and adding

to their team. And in general, extensions maybe aren't quite as exciting as signings or trades because it's just, hey, that guy who's there, he is still going to be there. It's not a change. It's not an addition. But when it's a player like Fernando Tatis, it would be extremely exciting for Padres fans to have some certainty that they are going to be watching him for his whole career or for at least a huge chunk of his career and all of his prime. And so, again, player movement is inevitable. And if it's the player choosing to move because they're a free agent

and they got a better deal somewhere else, fine. But if it's a player who seems like he has the potential to be really a legendary figure in that franchise's history. It's nice if they can stay. I think it's possible to both support players' rights and ability to move and also think that it's sort of nice when they don't move, when they decide that it's advantageous for them to stick in a certain spot and the team thinks so too and fans get to bond with them over a period of decades i think that's kind of the the ultimate happy outcome if that works out for all involved and so i hope that sometime soon for the sake of padres fans we will be reading about an official

extension yeah i think that if teams give good players a fair deal, it's ideal if they stick around forever because it really does mean something. We've talked about this to be able to root for a guy for the course of his career and feel like he's your guy and, you know, buy a jersey and feel confident that you are going to get to wear that until he's in his decline phase and you start looking for a new one. Right. to wear that until he's in his decline phase and you start looking for a new one, right? So I think that that's a really special relationship that does not get prioritized in the modern game just by virtue of how teams allocate money and what have you. So I agree. I think it would be terrific

if they could figure something out. I can't remember if it was Ken or Jeff who noted this, but I think it is important for folks to keep in mind as we're thinking through like what is likely here. He is due to be a free agent currently in 2025. He is 22. Oh, his birthday was earlier this month. Happy birthday, Fernando Tatis. So the length of the deal is going to be, assuming it happens, is going to be interesting because if he does something that is in the 10

year range he's hitting the market again it's sort of an awkward age to be a free agent re-entering the market now it could be that the deal he has offered from san diego is so lucrative that he doesn't care about that so that possibility certainly exists but it also wouldn't be surprising to see him go on a deal that buys out his arbitration years. Because I think he's arbitrable next season. And then some number of years of his free agency. And then allows him to test the market again. And that wouldn't necessarily undermine our desire to see him be a Padre forever. There's a lot of precedent for players doing this.

And then they sign a new contract with the team. But it does give them some wiggle room. If they decide that they can get a better contract with with the team but it does give them some some wiggle room if you know they decide that they can get a better contract on the market or if the the you know fortunes of the team change and they're keen to be on a contender or what have you so it'll be interesting to see kind of how they get this worked out i think that he's a very logical extension candidate because who wouldn't want him around uh for the long term so i i understand why this sort of started to gain momentum even before we got reports that aj had gone down to the dr and was talking to him or whatever but it would be great if he could be a

lifelong padre because uh we don't see enough of those and it's nice when star players like that commit to a city and then the city and the team the team not the city i don't mean to like take a dig at anaheim but you know it's it's nice when the the team is like and we seem like we're going to win a bunch of games because then it's good for the player the team's going to be good you're confident you're going to like see him in october which is really just my way of saying put a 500 baseball team around Mike Trout already. Yeah, that too.

But really, that's how you get to be, you know, like Tony Gwynn is Mr. Padre, right? And he's Mr. Padre because he's a great player. But he's also Mr. Padre because he was a career Padres player and he was there for 20 years. And so Dave Winfield is not Mr. Padre because he left and played for other teams even though he was great for the Padres and the Padres just haven't had a whole lot of star players in their history and so it would be nice for their sake if now that they do have them they were able to keep some of them and also it's nice just to not have to feel like the window is closing or like there's an end date for contention with this

current core like obviously tatis is young and he's pretty far from free agency regardless but still like on certain teams when young good players come up you just sort of start the clock right and you start counting the service time and here's when this player is going to be a free agent and we know we're probably not going to keep him. Like if you're a Raze fan or something, you know, with certain exceptions for the most part, when they develop good players, you know, they're going to go. They're going to go the way of Blake Snell at some point. And so you start counting the years and projecting, OK, we need to get good. We need to win a World Series in the next X years or else it's not going to happen

and we're going to have to rebuild and start all over again. And so, if you're the Padres and you prove, no, we can develop great players like Tatis and then we can keep them. We can have them. We don't have to let them go sign with the Dodgers or the Yankees or someone. That's just ideal, really.

And it does seem as if they're trying to build a perennial contender here that can compete with the perennial contender in LA and one way to do that would be to make sure that you can keep your star players so that would be nice yeah agreed I also meant to mention just when we were talking about the central revenue because this comes into play with all major contracts that might be signed, including the Tatis extension, one big component, the majority of that front, because there was some news that the new deal between ESPN and MLB is going to be smaller than the last one. And I think that was greeted with some concern, right? Because we keep seeing these TV contracts go up and up. And I think people have feared when is this bubble going to burst because

of cord cutters or because there isn't as much of a national audience for MLB anymore. And so I think maybe in some sectors, it was seen as a sign of bad things to come that this was not just escalating forever and ever, but that this rights deal will be smaller than the previous one. I think it's $3.85 billion for the next seven years, which at least on the surface sounds smaller than the $5.6 billion over eight years that was the previous agreement. But Craig kind of reassured me. And as he often does, he took a closer look and a more rigorous look at the finances, and he kind of concluded that it doesn't actually seem to be anything to worry about. I think that Craig did a nice job with this. And I think the sort of top line to keep in mind is that this deal with ESPN, for one thing, includes fewer games, which in theory could be packaged and sold to another

network. So it isn't as if it's a lower, it's a smaller deal for the same number of games. There has been some attrition there in terms of how many they're going to broadcast. And, you know, Craig is also quick to note that some of the other deals that they have signed recently, like their deal with Fox and their deal with TBS, have had significant increases in terms of the revenue that's associated with them. So I think that people sort of reflexively worrying about this is understandable because, as you said, we are all kind of bracing for the TV bubble to burst when it comes to baseball. But I don't know that this is necessarily a super strong indicator that that has arrived so much as it just reflects a different broadcasting reality with ESPN

that I think is weatherable both in the immediate term and then especially when you consider some of the other increases that they have coming. So don't panic yet. No, yes. If you're very concerned about how much money MLB owners will be making from TV contracts, things are still looking okay. Don't lose any sleep over this because, yeah, there are other deals with TBS and Fox and other outlets that are increasing. And so when you put it all together, it seems like the revenue from this source is still going to be going up for the foreseeable future. And, you know, a decade from now, who knows? Maybe at that point, no one will have cable anymore and the bottom will fall out of all of this. But it doesn't seem like that will be happening anytime soon. And I guess it's not ideal that there will be fewer games on a big platform like ESPN if you want baseball to reach

a wider audience. Maybe those midweek games that the network just doesn't really have interest in anymore. We talk a lot about how baseball is kind of a local game and local ratings are really strong. And so it doesn't really make sense to compare its national ratings to other sports because of the way that people follow teams. But I think it's still ideally you would want to have people pay attention to the league as a whole and not just tune out when their team is not playing or is not out of it. And so I wouldn't want there to be less presence for baseball games that are not, you know, playoff series or the World Series or whatever. And by the way, this whole analysis is just separate from the fact that there may be more playoff games.

And so that will lead to more revenue, which we are not pleased about from a competitive standpoint. But from a revenue standpoint, that's pretty important too. So we will see whether those games that are sort of less appealing to the networks do get sold somewhere so that they are on TV. And that is maybe an opportunity for MLB to, I don't know, try to branch out. I mean, I know that they've experimented with like Facebook games. And from what I've seen, the reaction to the quality of those broadcasts has not been great. But I don't know, maybe they

do what other leagues have done maybe they start putting games on twitch or who knows where nickelodeon ben nickelodeon yeah why not i'm goofing but i'm kind of not like i think that one of the ways that that the league might go about trying to combat both the issue of you know losing some of its national television stuff and the future reality of cord cutting is like get creative with with streaming platforms and other networks that have streaming platforms and try to expose a new audience to your product and grow the game like i don't know have spongebob explain baseball to kids i know that the characters themselves were not part of the broadcast in that way and we would need to

think very carefully about who the nickelodeon ambassadors would be from baseball although i think there are a number of very fun charming current players who could do the job it'd be great yeah and we grew up as nickelodeon kids i saw your tweet the other day about your your favorite nickelodeon shows putting are you afraid of the dark? Number two. I was afraid of the dark. I was too afraid to watch that show regularly, but I agree with your other choices. You correctly had Doug in the top spot.

I think that what this list shows is that I like the idea of taking care of people and being a little bit creepy. And not in a yucky guy kind of way, but in like an X-Files kind of way. I will also say that my grandfather let my sister and I watch the X-Files with him. And by let us watch, he was babysitting and he was like, I am watching this and you are here. So I love you, Grandpa. But that was a very suspect choice.

this and you are here so i love you grandpa but that was a very suspect choice and part of his justification when this was revealed to my dad and my stepmom was well megan likes are you afraid of the dark it's basically the same they are not they are they are there's a reason one is on nickelodeon and the other is not yeah i watched x-files when I was older and ready for it, and I was still sometimes kind of creeped out by it. You snubbed all that, though. I don't know if I can get on board with that. These aren't the only five I liked. I'm just saying this was, and at the time, my top five. I don't think these are necessarily the best five shows.

I think that other people should like the shows they like. As I noted on Twitter, some of the shows that people are listing are not shows that I enjoyed as a or experienced as a child, but experienced as a teenager when my brother, who is significantly younger than I am, was himself watching Nickelodeon. So that was a fun thing to grapple with randomly on the weekend. But mostly people should like the shows they like it's like I don't know what the TV equivalent of

eating a dolphin is but just don't do that and then like whatever you like and it's fine we don't all have to like the same stuff right yes okay anything you want to touch on before we close very briefly and I hope that this is not a strained way to enter this

conversation but briefly ben i was noticing some of the reaction both in our podcast facebook group and on twitter the reaction to the passing of tommy lasorda and the way that we grapple with sort of the fullness of a person's life when they have passed particularly when it is a life that includes a lot of high highs but also darkness that needs to be confronted honestly you know i do not have an emotional attachment either to that era of dodgers baseball or to him as a person because you know i was like let's see i was was 10, I think, when he retired. So I was a kid and I watched an American League team and I vaguely knew who he was, maybe. But he was not a figure in my baseball experience the way that he was for a lot of people.

He was clearly dear to many he also really refused to publicly acknowledge both that his son who passed away from AIDS related pneumonia was gay and had passed away from an AIDS related disease and that did a lot of damage to many people he did that at a time when I think having a an honest reckoning with his son's life and death and who he was in both would have been really meaningful to a lot of people and their understanding of both AIDS and the impact it was having on the gay community. And I understand wanting to have an appreciation for the good moments that a public figure has brought to your life. But I think that, you know, there are very few opportunities to deal with and sort of wrestle with the complex legacies of public people. And for better or worse, when they pass is one of those moments. and so i don't you know i'm not gonna tell people how to feel about this but i saw some consternation on the part of folks that he was being sort of celebrated in an uncomplicated way and also consternation at that consternation right and i think that we owe it to ourselves and to the people we know and love who are impacted by disease, injustice, what have you, to reckon with things honestly so that we can make them better. And it reminded me of some of the kind of feedback that we have gotten about this podcast in the last couple of months.

Granted, two wildly different things in terms of their scale but i think there has been some consternation on the part of some of our listeners that we have decided to talk about the behavior of ownership about the way that the league has responded for good and ill to calls for social justice the way that we talk about labor dynamics, the coronavirus. And I think that I don't want to put anyone on the spot or call anyone out, but I just wanted to take a second to sort of explain our thinking, which is that from the time I was a listener of this podcast to now, my understanding of its sort of mission broadly is to explain the fullness of the game.

And that stuff is part of baseball. I wish that the coronavirus were not a part of baseball. I wish that the leagues and the sports history when it comes to racism and racial justice were different. But it is the history it has. And I think that we would be abdicating an important responsibility if we didn't engage with that stuff and i think that engaging with the fullness of the game also means acknowledging statistical mysteries that we find engaging and silliness and like i was talking to

you offline about this i literally conducted an investigation into when Archie Bradley pooped himself. Yes, he did. So my commitment to nonsense, well documented. Not to mention your previous investigation, which I think was prompted maybe by a podcast conversation about whether Adam Lind had indeed passed gas while he was at the plate or whether it was just some other substance that was billowing around him. So, yeah, you have a history. Not to minimize the seriousness of these inquiries and the rigor that you brought to those investigations. Yeah, and I think that as a podcast, both when I have been a part of it and when I haven't been that we we love whimsy and silly stuff and I think that you know the way that I think about it is when the when the league does a bad job with a domestic violence investigation that bums me out as a fan of baseball it also

bums me out as like a woman who's asked to spend money on their product and i think that we owe it to whatever group of people is being sort of having their fandom dinged or dimmed um because of some other action of the league to to talk about it and to acknowledge where they fit in the game and how we might inspire the game to do better. And I think all of that is really important to understanding where baseball is. And I don't think either of us would claim that we have done that perfectly over the last year. And I think there are times when we've both acknowledged, like, we should have really dug in on some of these issues in much greater depth much sooner.

Right. But we have to meet the game where it is. And sometimes where it is isn't very pretty, but that's still the baseball we have. And it's part of it. And we need to be honest about it so that we can appreciate the highs and also hope to change some of the stuff that holds back players and fans and folks who work in the game from enjoying those highs as much or as well as they ought to be able to.

So I don't know. I just felt like there was enough chatter about it building that we wanted to kind of take a second to talk about it because we think about this stuff. Yeah, and there are, I think, plenty of people who enjoy the direction of the podcast and have written in to say nice things. It's like the last episode that we did with our philosopher guest talking about the Hall of Fame, a few people wrote in to say it was one of their favorite episodes ever. Someone else said it was one of their least favorite episodes ever.

So you're going to have a range of opinion, and we don't expect to please everyone the same way. And we welcome the feedback if it's offered in sort of a things in the world, but baseball and Effectively Wild are an escape for many of us from those day-to-day concerns. I'm all for using the platform to inform and educate, but lately the podcast has been more about baseball's role in society than an interesting look at the statistical side of baseball in terms of the players who play the game. And that person went on to say, you know, if that's what we want to do, that's our prerogative and he understands, but it's maybe not their preference. And that is understandable. I'd say that it's not inaccurate to say, I think that the podcast has been a bit different over the past year than it was in any previous year. But I think that's probably less because we set out to say, oh, we have to dramatically change the way we do this podcast than it is that the world was a lot different in the last year and baseball was a lot different in the last year. For one thing,

there was just a lot less baseball. There were many months when there was not baseball being played when there normally would be, and we were still doing a baseball podcast. So what are you going to talk about? You can't really talk about the statistical side of the game and the players who are playing the game when no one is playing the game and there are no stats. So I think some of it was by necessity and some of it was just that we're people in the world and we're affected by things that are going on in the world and those things are affecting baseball. And so when a lot of the biggest stories about baseball are related to the pandemic or to social issues or racial justice and you have players speaking out on these things and they're affecting how and whether the games are being played literally at times when teams opted not to play as a form

of protest i feel like it would be almost impossible to do a baseball podcast without talking about those things and that we would be doing a disservice to our audience or to us or just i don't know what the alternative would be at certain times when there's just no actual action going on and there are times when those things should probably take precedence over that action anyway even if it were happening because you can do both like we do a lot of episodes. We do a lot of podcasting. So we have a lot of time to fill and we have time to touch on a lot of different topics. And I think we have continued to do a lot of the sort of stuff that we've always done, but we have adjusted and done some different things as the world, I think, has dictated that

we do those things. And like you, I kind of think of it as the spirit of inquiry. It's like the original definition of sabermetrics was the search for objective knowledge about baseball, and it was not explicitly statistical knowledge about baseball. It tended to take that form, and that's what sabermetrics has been identified with. But it's not solely that. It can be all sorts of things. We want to learn about the game. And I think the role of baseball in society is often thought-provoking and really interesting and obviously touches on the game itself. And I don't think the podcast is explicitly devoted to talking about, say, the intersection of sports and

politics or society in the way that some other fine podcasts are like The Infinite Inning or Three Swings or others. But I think we certainly have to and want to touch on those things from time to time. And I don't know that we could really have an educated or informed or informative conversation about baseball without getting into all of those things. And it's never really been a podcast about who should you start in your fantasy league or this guy's BABIP is low and he's a candidate to bounce back or whatever. We'll touch on those things, of course. And if you're in the market for that, that's fine.

And there are plenty of podcasts that do that well. But I think that's never been our sole or primary interest. So I've always been really interested in not just who's going to make the playoffs or who's going to win the pennant, but why do we care so much about who makes the playoffs or who wins the pennant? Why does this game and its history matter so much to us, and why does it work the way it does? What role does it play in people's lives? Why do we get so attached to it?

What does it all mean, man? So I sort of like to explore people's relationships to baseball, as well as the box scores and the play-by-play. And believe me, we would prefer to be watching packed ballparks and not worrying about health and safety standards. A pandemic is definitely not our preferred topic. We would love for that to cease to be a problem and something that affects the sport on a fundamental level. This is entertainment. It should be a distraction sometimes, and it should be fun. Baseball brings pleasure to a lot of our lives. But what we talk about from day to day depends, I think, a lot on what the world looks like and what baseball looks like, because this is a baseball podcast and it's going to reflect those things

just as baseball reflects society and the state of the world yeah I think that we want to do the best we can to keep people engaged to be edifying to be comforting where it's appropriate to make people laugh and to make people think about stuff and And like you said, we're not meaning to say that we are above criticism or feedback, but simply that we are trying to do this pod in a way that is consistent with our understanding of what being a thoughtful, inquisitive person who likes baseball means. And that means not shying away from stuff that makes us sometimes uncomfortable and that we wish were different, but we're going to kind of soldier on and hope that we feel like we're striking the right balance between those things. And we will be silly and serious as is appropriate to the moment.

And yeah, we just appreciate everyone bearing with us and hope that this is, I don't know, clarifying or yeah what have you for folks so we still have a lot of fun doing the show yeah i hope that people have fun listening most of the time and yeah that we are silly and we do strange hypotheticals and all the other things that we're known for i think we can do all of it it should be kind of a patchwork of all these things that's kind of what the title of the show comes from. It's like you never know what you're going to get from one episode to the next. It's pretty wild on the whole.

And that turned out to be a fitting title for the show. And just lastly, as you were saying about Lasorda, like you, because we're roughly the same age, I feel like I've kind of been playing catch up on Lasorda for most of my life because I sort of missed the peak Lasorda period too. Like he stepped down as manager of the Dodgers when I was nine or whatever. And so you come along later and it's like, why was he so famous? Like in a way that baseball figures aren't famous today, typically, like he's a national figure. He's appearing on shows and sitcoms like everyone knew. Yeah. He's friends with all and sitcoms. Friends with Frank Sinatra.

Yeah, he's friends with all sorts of celebrities. It's like, how did this happen? And that was even before he was the manager of the Dodgers for a couple decades and won a couple World Series. As Jay Jaffe detailed in his piece at Fangraphs, which I'll link to, he was a celebrity even before that, when he was a coach. He was barely a big leaguer, too, as a player. even before that like when he was a coach he was barely a big leaguer too as a player really a marginal major leaguer which makes it all the more amazing that he was so well known even before he became a manager then you get to know why well he was so quotable and he was a character in some ways and you get to you know you hear the the dave kingman rant and you read about the kurt bavacqua

rant and all these things and you say, oh, okay, I get it. Not only was he with this one organization for decades and decades and decades and meant a lot to Dodgers fans, as Jay wrote in his obit, no manager ever served as the face of a franchise to a greater degree than Tommy Lasorda, but also he was this person who stood out as a personality and that's what he's known for. He's not really celebrated as a tactician. When you think of Casey Stengel, you think of platooning. When you think of Paul Richards, you think of the Waxahachie swap.

When you think of Earl Weaver, you think of the three-run homer. When you think of Tony La Russa, for that matter, you think of the one-in-encloser and the loogie. And some of those guys were characters, too, but they also had distinctive tactics, whereas with Lasorda, it seems like his strength was just as a master motivator who could get the best out of a lot of players and he was a former pitcher too which is sort of unusual for a successful manager and so he wasn't like the archetypical ex-catcher who studied the inside game but in learning about that and lasorda's life and career and legacy as a baseball person, I also want to learn about what he was like as a person in ways that were not directly related to baseball. And so, yeah, I've learned, you know, along with all of his baseball accomplishments,

I've learned about his relationship with his son and what he said and didn't say and other incidents later in his life. And I think it's important to know all of those things that you can't really sum up a 90 something year old who lived a life like that with necessarily one incident, good or bad, but it's part of the complete picture of the person and you probably shouldn't neglect either aspect of it. Yeah, I think that, you know, if you read Peter Richman's sort of definitive profile of him and sort of snapshot of this moment, you know, it is clear that it is, it was not, it's not as if that was a relationship without love between him and his son, but it was one that also featured some important and noticeable and notable rather failings.

And I don't think that, you know, when one of those failings is sort of refusing to publicly acknowledge the fullness of one person's life to then when the one, you know, doing that failing has passed to not acknowledge the fullness of their life is sort of compounding the problem so right i think especially given his platform as jay wrote it's hard to know exactly what that acknowledgement how significant that acknowledgement would have been and how it might have progressed the discourse but it's hard to imagine it wouldn't have mattered and then it wouldn't have been meaningful and so we have to talk about all of it. And that doesn't take away the love that they did have for one another or the richness of his baseball career or his family life, but this is part of it too. And it relates to baseball more directly in the sense that he was also Glenn Burke's manager. Right. in the sense that he was also Glenn Burke's manager. And there was a relationship there.

And so it's something that applies both on and off the field or inside or outside of the clubhouse. So Jay covered all of that in his piece, which I will link to if you want a lengthy and complete account of the life and times of Tommy Lasorda. But let's hope that his passing is not the continuation of the trend of passing of Hall of Famers that we saw last year, which was a record number and no one wants that to continue. Yeah, agreed. All right. Well, we appreciate everyone's

indulgence. Yes, indeed. I know it's a bit navel-gazing to talk about the podcast on the podcast, but if you're someone who listens to it and perhaps supports it and has been listening to it for a long time, then obviously we want you to offer your opinions and have some input and know what we're thinking about it. So the responses we get from our listeners is a big part of why we do this and we appreciate everyone's thoughts. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild 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. John Yearley, M Rob 54, Michael Melia, Michael Hunter, and Sam Raker. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast

platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can send us your questions and comments via email at podcast at fan craftss.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. I used to be a Brooklyn Dodger, but I ain't a hitter anymore.

But I ain't a hitter anymore You know I had a reputation I love to hear the home crowd roar I used to be a Brooklyn doctor But I don't play there anymore