Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1647: The Hot Stove, The Hall, and the Hammer

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Willians Astudillo’s award-winning heroics in the Venezuelan Winter League, then discuss the Phillies re-signing J.T. Realmuto, the Blue Jays signing Marcus Semien, the Nationals signing Brad Hand, the Padres signing Jurickson Profar, the Yankees trading for Jameson Taillon and assembling a skilled but injury-prone rotation, the Red Sox […]

There's no reason to look back Every time I hear the voices I cannot help, I cannot help my memories I cannot help, I cannot help my memories I cannot help, I cannot help my memory. I cannot help, I cannot help my memory. I cannot help, I cannot help my memory. Hello and welcome to episode 1647 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 Meg Rowley of Fangrass, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing okay. You know, things have been busy since we last spoke, and we have a bunch of hot stove and Hall of Fame stuff to talk about today. And as promised on our last episode, we're going to spend some more time discussing the life and legacy of Henry Aaron with Bradford William Davis of The Daily News. However, let me begin with the biggest news. The Venezuelan Winter

League MVP voting results are out. We've all been waiting. And Williams Astadio finished second overall behind Hernan Perez. Congratulations to Williams. I didn't know that. That's terrific, Ben. Remember Williams Astadio. I do remember him. I remember him well. And I hope that we have many more opportunities to remember him in the future. It's been a while since we got to talk about Astadio. He just hasn't been as big a figure on the baseball stage. But this past weekend, I think the big news in international baseball was Delman Young

pitching in the Australian Baseball League and pitching pretty well. And he continues to hit well there. We've talked in the past about how well he hits there. And actually, two years ago, he stole a Venezuelan Winter League MVP award from Williams-Ostadio, who finished second that time too. So, Ostadio is now a two-time second place finisher in the Venezuelan Winter League. Although I will say he did even better this time than before. The last time, the winter of 2018 to 2019, he had an 870 OPS, this time a 986 OPS. Williams hit 379, 414, 572 in 38 games and 157 plate appearances. Although he did strike out four times in those 157 plate appearances. Although he did strike out four times in those 157 plate appearances.

So a higher rate than the four times he struck out in his 262 plate appearances in his previous runner-up finish, but still doing really well. And also did it even better in the semifinal round of the playoffs there. He was actually the MVP of that round because he went 16 for 31.

And they're calling him Mr. January now. He's like the Mr. October of the Venezuelan Winter League. Ben, thank you. I want to thank you for bringing this to my attention. Because I will admit that while I have been lucky to consume a fair amount, the most ever, I would say, a winter ball that I have ever consumed before, I have not, of course, had the opportunity

to look at anything out of the Venezuelan Winter League, at least not in person. And so it's so nice to get a dispatch on, you know, we aren't friends with Linz Estadio, and I think it's important for us to maintain a distance, you know, a respectful professional distance from this person who we don't know but one of the weird things about podcasts

is that you end up having sort of parasocial relationships with the people involved with them and though he is not a member of our cast he is an important aspect and feature or recurring character one might say so this is very lovely.

I feel like I'm hearing about a friend from camp who I had lost track of for a moment because, you know, STDO didn't really do much of anything at the major league level last year, even in the truncated slate that we have. And so it's easy to kind of lose track of guys when they, you know, trickle back down to the alternate site and you don't have a minor league season to see them in.

But here we are with an Estadio update. There was a time during the Jeff Sullivan era of this podcast when almost every episode began with some sort of Estadio update. Arguably too many, in fact. But it's been a while, so nice to bring it back. many, in fact, but it's been a while. So nice to bring it back. And I see that he's currently listed as a AAA player on the depth charts at Roster Resource by Jason Martinez. So I don't know how much more Williams we will get to see this season, but that's a topic for another day for today. I just wanted to congratulate him. And now I suppose we can move on to the actual news that everyone expected us to start this

episode with so we've got signings we've got hall of fame non-news which is news in itself but i don't know should we save the the hall of fame and ringing for the end of this intro segment and start with signings or yeah let's start with let's start with the signings we also so you know we also have a transaction that will make you know yankees fans happy and make pirates fans nervous about what they're going to get to watch so yeah let's let's do a little transaction update before we get into the the brief but you know fraught update that is the hall of fame yeah rob arthur wrote an interesting article for Baseball Perspectives last week

where he looked at the historical behavior on the free agent market, and he kind of quantified what I think a lot of us has sensed, which is that a lot of the free agent activity this winter and in recent winters has been disproportionately concentrated among just a few teams, really,

and there have been more and more teams that are seemingly just sitting out entire off-. And there have been more and more teams that are seemingly just sitting out entire off seasons for all intents and purposes. But things have been fairly busy over the past week. So we'll probably not get to everything here. You may have to get your Jason Castro to the Astros and Anthony Bass to the Marlins and Cesar Hernandez to Cleveland takes elsewhere. But we can cover some of the major moves. And I guess the most major is the Phillies re-signing JT Real Mudo, probably the best free agent available to a five-year $115.5 million deal,

which has no weird bells and whistles or anything. It's just no opt-outs, no nothing, just that's the terms. And he is now back with the Phillies where it seemed like he would logically land all along. Yeah, I don't think that there are many teams in baseball who had as significant a need at catcher as the Phillies did, or at least as few appealing internal options as they had, had as Dan pointed out you know no combination of their guys either who are on the major league roster now or who they might call up were going to be sort of suitable replacements for Real Muto who's been their most productive player over the last two years and so it did sort of seem inevitable I wonder what you think Ben of the

the ultimate value that he was able to extract here. Because on the one hand, I think the early signing that the Mets made made it a little bit difficult, right? The other big sort of money option on the market where there was a definite needed catcher kind of came off the board so early and made that not really a possibility for him once McCann went to Queens. But the Phillies also seemed like they were kind of negotiating against themselves to a certain extent here. So I'm not quite sure what

to make of his deal because on the one hand, he has cleared by a small margin, but he has cleared sort of the AAV record set by Joe Maurer. And so this is in some respects one of the richer deals for a catcher in history, but it's also not a terribly long deal. And so I don't quite know what I think of it. He did less well than Craig Edwards estimated that he would. As you mentioned, he was our top free agent when we did our exercise last fall. And I think I expected him to do a bit better than this, although I don't know if I properly recalibrated my expectations after McCann went to the Mets. So what do you make of it, Ben?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would have taken the over on these terms, not only in a normal offseason, but also I think at the beginning of this offseason. So I guess in that sense, you could say the Phillies got a pretty good deal here on a player who is either the best catcher in baseball or maybe the second best after Yasmany Grandal. And he's been a five to six win catcher really for the past three or four years. He's been quite dependable, pretty durable for a catcher. I guess it's just, you know, it's kind of when you have a catcher, you expect that maybe they will not last quite as long because of the wear and tear of that position. And so even though he has not yet turned 30, he turns 30 in March, maybe you're not going to give a catcher of seven or eight year deal. So this is what he ends up with. And yeah, I'd be pretty happy if I were the Phillies or Phillies fans to get him on these terms. And he's been a very good hitter, especially for a catcher, but just playing a good hitter for years now.

a catcher, again, like just a good base runner overall, but for a catcher where you don't expect that at all, he's been very good. And even framing wise, that was not at all a strength of his earlier in his career, but it has become a strength seemingly in the past few years. So he's remade that aspect of his game a little bit and just doesn't really have any weaknesses. So I would be pretty happy to have him if I were rooting for the Phillies. Yeah, and I think that even beyond just the obvious roster need here, there was, you know, it's clear that Real Muto was very important to his teammates, right? Bryce Harper was not shy about lobbying ownership to re-sign him. Even more recent additions to their roster like Archie Bradley

were sort of banging the drum for Real Muto re-sign him even more recent additions to their roster like Archie Bradley were sort of banging the drum for for a real Muto um re-signing so I think that both those factors and then how it would read to the fan base in Philly if he were not to return would have been a pretty terrible offseason for Philly to have weathered which has not always stopped franchises but I think that just given that confluence of factors and you know as you said surrounding a player who is quite quite good and um not only quite good offensively for his position but just in general that this is a really obvious win for for the phillies so i'm glad to see them you know it's always good to was i about to do a golf thing that i couldn't actually follow through to the end of the analogy

it's good to do golf stuff where you hit the ball and it goes in the hole there you go I'm doing great because of how they got him in the first place like just the optics of not keeping him I think would have been worse which right I don't know if that makes sense exactly but the fact that they gave up a great prospect who now has become a very good pitcher for the marlins and sanchez like i think obviously like that deal is done they gave up what they gave up for a certain number of years of ramudo and it's not as if this is still part of that transaction but i think somehow psychologically like if you only have that guy for a couple years it just feels a

little bit different than if he's still around producing value for your team, even if it's on a new contract. So I think that maybe was, I don't know, added incentive. I mean, it's a new regime. This is not the regime that made that trade, but still, I think probably it helps from a perception standpoint to keep him around. Yeah. And I think that this is a win for Phillies fans. And then the part of it that is obvious is that there is still work to do on the rest of this roster. Dan wrote this trade-up for us at Fangraphs and re-ran the NL East projections, as he is wont to do when a big name signs for a team. And this moved the Phillies all the way to fourth place in the division.

And so it's just, you know, it's a tricky thing. Part of this is that the Braves and the Mets present, you know, a great challenge there. The Nationals are buoyed by a couple of all-star projections. And a 91 season, as Dan says, isn't out of the realm of possibility you know projections are wrong in that direction all the time but this is a necessary step but it is not a sufficient step I think if Philly wants to take a step forward and really make some noise in that division although you know if we end up somehow miraculously with an expanded playoff format which I'm not advocating for I just want a choice that sticks you know they will need to do a bit of

work if they're not granted a more favorable format so you know yeah zips has them at 80 and 82 right now a game below 500 which is essentially where they've been for three consecutive seasons now so that's discouraging yeah we've talked before about the phillies and how they seem to be like everyone's go-to example of the rebuild that just hasn't really panned out the way it was supposed to and so yeah this kind of keeps them in the running but doesn't really get them ahead of where they were last year and that clearly wasn't good enough so as Dan mentions in his post I'm quoting here the team still could use a better second baseman another outfielder too really another starting pitcher and some additional relief help so that's a lot of items on the to-do

list with not a whole lot of time left but other than that you know they're in they're in rock solid shape but i guess it is it is nice to see that presented with that remaining set of challenges that that the team did not say, eh, we'll pack it in because we're not going to be able to do that other stuff. There's still plenty of time in the offseason, but even without that, there is something to be said for standing Pat. So yeah, real Muto, forever Philly. We'll see if Dave Dombrowski can continue to coke some money out of ownership there. And other top position player signing news, just minutes before we started recording,

the Blue Jays landed another top target here. So suddenly the Blue Jays on a roll, not letting players escape. They're just racking up the free agents here. They have acquired Marcus Semyon on a one-year $18 million deal. So the Blue Jays are making good on their promises to their fans of, what was it, two elite players or four good players or something like that. And they're just about there.

And as we talked about last time when they signed George Springer, they still need some pitching. That still seems to be the case. And Semyon doesn't really help with that other than defensively. But still, to add Simeon, who I guess the signing was reported by Carlos Baerga for some reason. I haven't heard that name in a while. But Baerga suggested that he might be open to playing second base for the Blue Jays. He's primarily been a shortstop, but maybe he'll float around the infield a little bit for them. And he's tough to evaluate. It's hard because he came off that MVP contender year in 2019 and then had a down

year in 2020. So it's hard to say exactly what he is, which I guess might be why he was willing to accept or pursue a one-year deal to sort of establish what kind of player he is and then hopefully land a longer term deal next year. Yeah, I don't envy him the timing of having to do that. I guess it kind of depends what position ultimately becomes home for him in Toronto. But if you think of him as part of that crop of really, really good shortstops that will be entering the market after the 2021 season, there will be competition there, much of which will be younger than Semien is. But I think this makes a tremendous amount of sense for the Blue Jays. It gives them another really theoretically potent bat in the lineup in a position where

they don't have too much duplication, unlike the Brantley deal where we're like, how will they ever field all of the many, many outfielders? It's like, oh, they'll just stick Semien at second base a lot of the time probably. And not the worst thing to have some backup that's as good as he is for Bichette. So I like this for the Blue Jays. I am a bit disappointed on Semien's part that he was not able to net a longer deal. But $18 million isn't so bad if you have to take a one-year cushion. I just saw a friend of the show, Ben Nicholson-Smith, tweeted that the Blue Jays have now committed

more to free agents than any team in baseball this winter. They're up to $184.5 million with Springer and Semien and Robbie Ray and Kirby Yates and Tyler Chatwood, and they may not be done yet. So as advertised, the Blue Jays have been busy and active and have gotten better. So we'll see what else they are able to do. What else do we have? I guess if we're talking about NL East moves and why the Phillies don't project all that well, even after the Real Mudo resigning, we could talk briefly about Brad Hand going to the Nationals. Not a huge move, but kind of interesting just because Brad Hand was

sort of an intriguing figure at the start of this offseason, or at least when Cleveland waived him with his $10 million option, which had a $1 million buyout. That was sort of seen as a sign of the apocalypse. Oh no, this offseason is going to be a disaster. If Cleveland doesn't want Brad Hand to end, then he passed through waivers. So no one wanted Brad Hand at that point, which was sort of scary. But now Brad Hand did sign for $10.5 million with the Nationals. So he ended up getting a little bit more than his option was for and worked out fine for him, I guess, because he got a million and a half more than he would have if Cleveland had just picked up his option because he gets to keep that buyout too. So, and I think part of the confusion about why Cleveland didn't want him or why no one wanted him is that it's a little tough to evaluate because his stats were good. He's been good and dependable for years. And at least according to some stats was excellent last year too, but he's also lost some velocity.

He's had some sizable platoon splits, which could be an issue with someone who is slated to be a closer and maybe won't be deployed all that selectively. So there are issues, there are warts there, and yet it has worked for him. And he's changed up his pitch mix a bit, and he still struck out a bunch of batters. So he has the track record. It's just that I suppose teams are looking more at the stuff than the stats even. Yeah. And his velocity did this weird thing where it had declined for two years, and then it did start to sort of take up over the course of the season last year. So it's a little unclear what exactly it's going to settle at for 2021.

I mean, I imagine that he will, for example, probably allow some home runs next year. He didn't allow any last year, which certainly helped to buoy his numbers. But he's also, like you said, he has some platoon split stuff, but it's not terrible on either side. It's just that he's not like bad against right-handed hitting. He's just really, really good against left-handed hitting. So I guess if that's the split that you're going to take, it's a tolerable one. And, you know, the Nationals needed bullpen help. So hopefully this signing ends up being a bit more stable than some of the the moves that they have ended up making up in the pen in the last couple of years where they have this weird habit of shipping off good relievers that then blossom other places so

i think that it's a good move there's still obviously other spots on the nationals roster that need to be filled in terms of holes they are as i mentioned sort of buoyed by really strong projections for a couple of stars and then they have sort of underwhelming depth beyond that. But I don't know. I think that, again, we've talked about this several times this offseason, and it remains true. One, your deals are hard to beat bad, and like $10.5 million for a pretty good reliever seems fine.

Yeah, it sort of evens things out a little for them because they had this very stars and scrubsy roster, and they still do because they have scherzer and strasburg and corbin and you hope they'll all be healthy and then they have soto and and trey turner but they have filled in the middle range of the roster a little more i guess in that they've acquired schwerber and john Lester and Josh Bell and Hand now. So it's not that you can separate the good players and the not so good players into camps that are as clearly delineated. So that's good. I think they had to do that, but they're still seemingly a cut below the Mets and the Braves

at the top of that division, it looks like as of today. Yeah, not embarrassing to be a cut below the Mets and the Braves at the top of that division, it looks like as of today. Not embarrassing to be a cut below those teams, but if they want to make some sort of run for the NL East title and not a wild card spot, they probably have some work to do too. The nice thing is there are a bunch of free agents still out there. There's just a bunch of them, although

they all seem to be signing on the same day. I know. One who is no longer out there continuing our free agent roundup is Jerks and Profire. The Padres signed Jerks and Profire to a three-year $21 million deal with multiple opt-outs. And at this point, the Padres are just signing players I don't even know if they need. I mean, Profire is a pretty good player. And I think they're better with Profar than without Profar. But it's one of those cases where they're so stacked everywhere that it's hard to even see where exactly or how much Profar will play.

And you can imagine that there would have been other teams that would have been easier routes to playing time or that would need Profar even more. But the Padres are just going for it at this point. I mean, they are getting redundancy in their roster in a very Dodgers-esque fashion. I don't know how to even say where Profar will play or how much. I guess it depends in part on whether there's a DH, which as of now, there's not, but we still don't know for sure whether there will be. So that affects things. But it does sort of seem as if they're going for that very Dodgers model of just having players who can play all over the field because Ha Sung Kim, their other big position player signing of this winter is someone who profiles as a potential super utility player and so does Jake Cronenworth. That's sort of the role that Profar has grown into here. And so it's just like, not only are they acquiring, you know, aces and like star players, but they're also building in like multiple layers of depth at seemingly every position at this point.

Yeah, I think that Profar offers them depth. He can play the infield and the outfield, and I'm sure that that was part of it. It's probably also useful to remember that when Preller was still with the Rangers was when Profar signed with them. So he has a long history with Preller, at least. I think it is interesting that he wouldn't necessarily want to sign with a team where he could have more of an everyday role but yeah this seems like a pretty good deal for a guy who had sort of never lived up to the prospect shine that we had expected of him and then ended up turning in a pretty good year with the Padres last year and so I can see you know if you finally have success in a place and you feel comfortable with the the front

office that it's going to be an appealing place for you to sign i'm not totally unconvinced that san diego hasn't just been gifted an extra roster spot that we haven't been made aware of because i do yeah it is it is going to be something of a challenge to get all of these good bats into the lineup but we always say that and then halfway through the season we look around and two dudes are on the Android list. And we're like, wow, it's sure nice that the Padres have all this depth. So I think given his versatility from a fielding perspective and their desire to compete in a really meaningful way with Los Angeles, that this makes good sense. And, you know, good for Profar. Three years, 21 million.

Good for Profar, three years, $21 million. What a weird and fun career he has had, or at least more fun than it looked like it would be a few years ago, going from the consensus number one prospect in all of baseball to being a perennially injured possible bust to establishing himself as not a star but a productive big leaguer and now just going from team to team, I mean, from the Rangers to the A's to the Padres, and now at least he will stay in one place for a couple of seasons, it looks like. But if he does establish himself as a true Zobrist type all of a

sudden, then maybe he will exercise one of those opt-outs. If it turns out that there isn't a clear path to playing time for him, then he could theoretically go somewhere else pretty soon. So we'll see how that works out. He hasn't really hit a corner outfielder exactly, so I don't know. It seems like he would profile more as a middle infielder or just a jack-of-all-trades. But it is an interesting route. And because he came up so young, I mean, he came up in 2012. That was a long time ago. And yet he has not turned 28 yet.

He turns 28 in February. So just a strange progression. But I'm glad for him that he has found a home. Yeah, I am too. I did not know after his exit from Texas. It just wasn't clear how things were going to go. And the production in Oakland was sort of suboptimal and you just didn't know what he was going to be able to pull off.

And then he had a 111 WRC plus last year. He was useful. He was like a 1.31 player in a shortened slate. It was not a given that that was going to happen but that's where we ended up so yep all right and then the other really significant transaction you already mentioned the yankees traded for james and tyon as the pirates continue their tear down can you tear down a team that just played at a 51 win pace last year? I don't know if you technically can tear that down. It's pretty torn down already, but the Pirates are trying to

tear that down. So we talked about the Joe Musgrove trade, and then there's the Josh Bell trade, and now there's the Jameson-Tayon trade. So Yankees now have the Pirates 2010 and 2011 first round picks in their rotation. Yes, they sure do. And boy, are people enjoying that little fun fact when they talk about this trade. I, you know, this is a hilariously obvious thing to say. I'm really curious to see what we get out of Jameson Tyon next year or this year. Oh, I'm going to do that like 40 more times before the season starts. He has not thrown in almost two years, at least not off a competitive mound. He's had just more

than any one person's share should be of setbacks and adversity from a health perspective. So he is currently coming back from his second Tommy John surgery. I think that he is incredibly promising. I think there's a reason that at one time he and Cole were thought to highlight sort of the next realm of and wave of good Pirates teams, but he hasn't really pitched much since 2019 and we don't totally know what we're going to get there. So there is some risk, but if he is able to help stabilize that Yankees rotation, which is full of a lot of other players who are sort of falling into that bucket of having high upside and a lot of potential downside, that Yankees rotation could be very good. It's always nice to reinforce the Garrett Cole of it all, which is what's driving a lot of

their rotation projection right now. But I thought the reaction to this was interesting i can totally appreciate the the emotional um hit that pirates fans in particular would feel from there being just yet another example of ownership not wanting to invest in this roster but you know i'd encourage people to to take a look at the piece that eric wrote about the prospects that pittsburgh got back in return and some of those guys are going to potentially be good big leaguers. So the next competitive Pirates team feels a very long way off. But I do think that given the course that they have chosen to chart, this ended up putting them in a better position than it did because the Pirates were going to be bad in 2021,

regardless of how well Jameson Tyon pitched. So I think that if you're able to get a couple of guys of the caliber that they did and take advantage of a yankees 40 man situation where they really had to move some some dudes off because of other additions that they made like they they did pretty well for themselves all things considered which people are going to hear that and say meg that is a is a shockingly optimistic understanding of a team tearing down what has gotten into you. And to that I say, you know, like sometimes I like prospects that go back to a team and I think they'll help them get better and, you know, may as well make the best of a bad situation, Ben. Yeah, I mean, that Yankees rotation now is pretty intriguing. Like if you look at the

fan graphs, depth charts, the Yankees project to have the best rotation in baseball. And yet a large part of that rotation is made up of players who didn't pitch last year or barely pitched last year. So there's some pretty big error bars here. Like behind Cole, it's Corey Kluber, it's James Sataian, it's Luis Severino, it's Jordan Montgomery. And there are other capable pitchers backing them up like Davey Garcia, Domingo Hermann, Clark Schmidt, and others. So there's some depth there now that they haven't had lately. And starting pitcher has been sort of an area of weakness for them and an area where Brian Cashman has

gotten a lot of grief for not upgrading more. And they've found themselves in some sticky situations when it comes to needing to start postseason games and not really having anyone they wanted to start them with. So they have a lot of players and a lot of those players have been really good and could be good again, but in many cases have not pitched at all lately. So you're kind of crossing your fingers like by the middle of the season, this might look like a great rotation or it might look totally different from how it looks now. It's tough to say.

And yeah, Taiyan has gone through two Tommy John surgeries and he should be totally ready like he was, you know, throwing to hitters late last year. So he should be fine in theory, but when you have someone with his injury history or Kluber who got hurt the second he started pitching in games last year, you know, it's Severino who's had multiple major injuries. I mean, all of these guys are talented and have track records of performing at a high level, but you're just, I guess, acquiring enough of them that you hope that even if you lose one or two,

he'll still have enough left standing. Yeah, it's an interesting approach given that. I think if I remember this little tidbit from Dan's piece when he wrote about it, well, they have to replace 24 of their 60 starts from last year. So 24 of the starts that this team made last year, those arms are just not on their roster anymore. Masahiro Tanaka looks like he will not be back and may in fact be returning to Japan.

Yeah, we're going to have to talk about what precedent there is for that. But that can be on another episode when we've had a little time to do some thinking or research on it. But Tanaka will not be back. It doesn't appear that James Paxton will be back. And so they definitely had to supplement what they had, and they have to get their way to Severino being able to throw again. But it is just interesting that they have chosen to do that with arms that are interesting but not necessarily reliable. interesting but not necessarily reliable. But when you are really carefully hewing to staying below the luxury tax threshold, I think that's kind of what you have to do, right? You swing trades like

this where there's a lot of upside and this is a good pitcher, but you're able to sort of bring guys in at a reasonable rate and not have to worry about pushing through the competitive balance tax threshold, which you would think if any team in baseball can not worry about that, it would be the Yankees, but here we are. Yeah, and the Yankees have blown by that in past years, and so there would be steeper penalties for them, but still. But yes, it's clear that that is a priority for them, and one way it's clear is that they traded Adam Adovino to the Red Sox

in what was sort of a salary dump. They traded Adovino to a team that they never trade with. This was the first Yankees-Red Sox trade since August 2014, the Kelly-Johnson non-blockbuster. And that doesn't happen very often that those teams connect, although they have with some very memorable trades in the past. But that seemingly was motivated largely by just wanting to get out from under Adovino's salary and what it would do to their competitive balance tax picture. So they bundled a prospect and a little bit of cash to Boston for Adovino. And that was actually one of a trio of moves that the Red Sox made. I don't know if we have a ton to say about it, but in addition to acquiring Adovino, who of course has been good in the not distant past, he was shaky for the Yankees last year and kind of lost Aaron Boone's

trust and was no longer pitching in high leverage ever, really. But he has been good. And the Red Sox, who had a pretty lousy bullpen last year, one of the worst, hope that he will bounce back. But they also signed Garrett Richards to a one-year $10 million deal. And they signed Kike Hernandez to a two-year, what was it, $14 million deal. So they got themselves a super utility guy too. So I don't know exactly where the Red Sox stand or how I would categorize their current relationship with contention, but they at least added some players, which is not something they had done

a whole lot of in the past couple of winters. Yeah, there you go. Perhaps the most neutral way of describing it. Yeah. Now that the Dodgers have lost Kike Hernandez, we've talked so much about the Padres adding. The Dodgers haven't really done much. I mean, they lost Hernandez. They brought back Blake Trinan. They added, I guess, Tommy Canely and Corey Kniebel.

But they haven't done a whole lot. And normally you would say, well, they don't haven't done a whole lot. And normally you would say, well, they don't have to do a whole lot. They're the Dodgers. They just won the World Series and they're bringing everyone back and they have incredible depth and they're amazing. And so it wouldn't really be that notable that they had been pretty inactive this winter, except for the fact that the Padres have just gone full bore after them, not just trying to make the playoffs, trying to get themselves a wildcard spot, but clearly targeting the Dodgers and trying to make themselves in the Dodgers mold and go for them in a way that is audacious,

is bold, is exciting. So I wonder if the Dodgers even expected that the Padres, good as they were, So I wonder if the Dodgers even expected that the Padres, good as they were, would be so active in adding that they would then project to be as good as or better than the Dodgers going into next year, barring any further moves. And the Dodgers may yet do something, bring back Justin Turner or other moves we will see. But Padres have clearly closed that gap. Yeah, I imagine that Turner will end up back in LA especially since I think one of the other teams that he was potentially linked to was the

Blue Jays so that seems less likely now so I expect that he will be back in in Dodger Blue as it were but I don't know don't you always assume that AJ Preller is gonna do stuff don't know. Don't you always assume that AJ Preller is going to do stuff? Don't you just? Isn't that your base operating assumption? That is the safest assumption, yeah. That he will be active. I don't know if they could have anticipated that the Padres would make moves quite as splashy as they have,

but they had to have expected something, which is part of why I think that LA is not done. But betting on Dodgers' depth isn't a terrible thing to do that tends to work out more often than not and they still have guys on the minor league side who might yet end up helping them out in 2021 so it'll be fun to see i i like i like that it's evened up i uh i kind of don't want the dodgers to do anything else because i want it to feel like a really, really tight, good, good race. And I think that it will, even if they do bring Turner back and it will, even if they make other additions, because San Diego has just done so much to close that gap,

but it's fun when it's, when it's really neck and neck, when you, you know, have to spend a second longer on your preseason predictions for the division than, than you do in normal years. There's so many, there's so many divisions, Ben, where I'm just like, I don't, I don't see any longer on your preseason predictions for the division than you do in normal years. There's so many divisions, Ben, where I'm just like, I don't see any really compelling reason to deviate that much from the projections. And that doesn't always serve me well, but I think as a process, it tends to be reasonably sound. And it's nice when you're sitting there going, I don't know what to do with this one. You put it in your bucket where you're like, this is one of my toss-upup divisions i get to have fun with this one where i'll stick with all my boring stuff on the others but this one i get to be a little sassy so um i'm

i'm happy that this is the course that it's taken the al east is shaping up to be pretty exciting too i mean maybe there's a clearer favorite there but between between the Rays being as good as they were last year, the Yankees being good and being somewhat active, and then all the Blue Jays have done, and even the Red Sox getting in on a little action here, that's looking not bad either. So we'll be talking about that because I guess we'll be starting to see some previews at some point soon, which is daunting, but we're getting to that time anyway. I guess the last non-Hall of Fame related thing to say on that subject of season previews is when will the season be? We still aren't entirely sure.

And there was some news slash non-news about that, which is that MLB, in its continued attempts to sort of cement what the actual format and the rules of this coming season will be, made a proposal to the MLB Players Association that would have put the DH in place again in exchange for expanded playoffs. And there were some other aspects to that deal too, but the players association rejected it. And to be clear, like there's already a deal in place. I mean, the CBA applies, so there doesn't need to be any negotiation about anything. So this is driven largely, I suppose, by to some extent, both sides, but probably MLB really wanting to get that expanded post-season money. And so they're trying to do something to get the players to give it to them. And players not necessarily against expanded playoffs in the way that we are. Some of them may be,

but some of them may think, I want to make the playoffs. So they may not be as dead set against it. Although there's an argument that it could hurt them to the extent that it gives teams incentives not to spend on trying to win a division title. But they know that expanded playoffs are a big bargaining chip. They're not going to give that away for nothing. And the DH, it's not nothing, but it's also not a huge thing. And it's also something that MLB wants to, maybe not quite as much as the players, but MLB wants the DH also at this point. So they're going to have to give up something more than that to get the players to concede on that.

And we'll see if that happens this year or if that becomes a big sticking point in CBA negotiations leading up to the expiration of the current deal in less than a year now. up to the expiration of the current deal in less than a year now. And then related news, there is still some uncertainty about spring training and whether it will proceed as scheduled because the Cactus League officials, that's spring training in Arizona, put a letter out saying that they're not sure that spring training should go ahead because of COVID. And the Cactus League is not a real league with its own structure or authority. It's operated by MLB. So these are really just some local officials who haven't taken any concrete steps to try to prevent teams from playing or even to dissuade them from doing so. There was a report by the athletics, Alex Coffey, that MLB may have pressured or perhaps

subtly suggested to the Cactus League that they write that letter, putting that on record, which would not be shocking because MLB clearly and owners have wanted to delay the start of the season, probably less for pandemic related reasons than for attendance and revenue related reasons. So this is, again, one of those weird situations where if it were about the pandemic and COVID and safety in Arizona, that would be totally fine and acceptable and prudent to delay things. But it could also be a case where MLB is kind of piggybacking on that real risk and using it to their own ends, essentially, because it's something

that they want to happen anyway. So it's a weird thing where normally we would say, well, yeah, be cautious and don't play if there's risk of players getting sick and fans getting sick. And yet you kind of are skeptical that the owners are motivated by that desire more so than just wanting to maximize revenue i think a couple of things the first is that i don't have any trouble believing that someone on the league side might have said you know and persuade people as if we had a public health reason i i care very much about whether things are true ben like i care about whether they're true i don't know if I care about whether this is true. I kind of want this to replace my answer when people ask you,

what's a conspiracy theory that you believe? And I'm not inclined to conspiracy theories generally. I don't find them persuasive, but I enjoy this one just because it does seem to fit so perfectly the form that these sort of backroom machinations have taken, which is like, we're going to suggest something subtly on a Zoom call and no one will find out about it. Right. Right. So like that part of it is funny. The DH expanded playoff format thing,

I find this mode of negotiating to be kind of exhausting because it doesn't seem like a terribly good use of anyone's time. I think that it doesn't take a lot of, you know, mental math to sort out sort of the relative scales of what, maybe 15 more jobs and not really even 15 more, just a guaranteed spot potentially in the NL for DHS versus the kinds of money that we know tends to be tied up in postseason TV deals. This is one of those places where it's not to the league's benefit that we have had recent TV deal numbers sort of leak. So we know what scale they're operating on there. So I can't imagine that they are actually surprised that the players would say, you have offered us $5 so that you can get $100,

and we think that's a bad deal. I mean, I'm being a little bit sassy, but that's sort of the scale of things that we're talking about, never mind the effects that it has on the competitive landscape and the sort of incremental value of a win to teams if there's a dramatically expanded field. So it seems a little bit silly. And I think that the union is well-served to hold tight to the negotiating power that they have and not diminish their position when it comes to that sort of stuff, especially in advance of the CBA, because once you set precedent for these things, it's sort of hard to undo it. So yeah, all of that to say, I guess we'll start

on time. Yeah. Looks like it as of now, but subject to change. So I guess we can wrap up this segment here by talking about the Hall of Fame. Hopefully for the last time for a while, we'll see. But the results are out. And as expected, if you were looking at the announced results by writers who revealed their ballots prior to the final results here, no one got in. And Curt Schilling came within 16 votes. He was 20 votes away last year. So he inched closer, but not much closer. So he ended up at the top with 71.1%.

And of course, you need 75% to get in. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were next with 61.8% and 61.6% respectively, which is almost exactly where they were last year. They were at 61 and 60.7 last year. So very little movement at the top there. Some movement among middle tier players who improved their chances. So I think the headlines here are that Scott Rowland really leaped up, which I think is good and heartening. So Rowland was at 35.3%. Last year, he now leaped up to 52.9%. And Billy Wagner made a big jump from 31.7% to 46.4%. Todd Helton was up from 29.2% to 44.9%. And there were others who had some significant jumps, I guess. Andrew Jones, Gary Sheffield, Jeff Kent.

They made some progress toward the threshold. And some first or second time guys got to stay on. Mark Burley, Torrey Hunter, Bobby Abreu, Tim Hudson all cleared the 5% minimum. But Omar Vizquel actually went down a bit. So he went from 52.6 to 49.1, whether that was because of the domestic violence revelations or just because of people reevaluating his, in my opinion, not particularly strong statistical case. I don't know, but his progress and ascent seem to have stalled there. So that's what it looks like. Jay Jaffe will be breaking down the results at greater length in a post at Fangraphs,

but Schilling has already put out a Facebook post where he has requested to be removed from next year's ballot. He says he does not want to participate in what would be his last year on the ballot. So that's that. We've got gridlock here and perhaps another year of gridlock to come because as previously mentioned, I'm in line to get my first Hall of Fame vote next year. And what a year it would be to make my debut. The final years of eligibility for Schilling, Bonds, and Clemens, and the first years of eligibility for Schilling, Bonds, and Clemens and the first years of eligibility for Alex Rodriguez and also I guess David Ortiz so that'll be a doozy I think look there's been a lot of rancor there have been words a lot of words written about this hall of fame cycle there have been a lot of words written about the character deficiencies

up and down the ballot and we've spent plenty of time and episodes talking about those so i don't need to go into great detail i will say two things one after all of that i think we're allowed to find it deeply funny deeply funny ben and i don't mean this as a knock at the good folks at MLB Network. You got to cover the Hall of Fame announcement. That's a big day in the calendar. It's clearly important to a lot of people, including us. But it is wildly funny to me that they spent four hours on air leading up to this, that Tom Verducci put out a video that clearly meant to be cinematic.

Let's leave it at that. They made Brian Kenney, I assume, get on a train and go up to Cooperstown to stand there to help announce the results. And then Noah got in. That's funny, Ben. We have so few funny things. We can find that funny, right? We can lean into that being funny. Nobody got hurt in any of that. That's just funny. That's objectively funny. Objectively funny. Yeah. It's funny and also exhausting, but at the end of the exhaustion, maybe we can all just laugh deliriously. We can all laugh about it. I think the other thing that I would say, and again, we don't have to spend too much more time on this but I think that one of the big takeaways from this year's hall of fame cycle was that there's I don't know how else to characterize the the the way that some of the the ballot hand-wringing went except to say that

I think that people are are over complicating simple decisions. I think that there is a lot to be said for sort of rigor and depth to justify one's choice and explain one's choice, and I think that you can do that. But if you're sitting there and you're like, I'm going to feel like a bad guy if I do this, then just don't do it. It's okay. Curt Schilling, he doesn't want to be in the Hall of Fame now.

He wants to be taken off the ballot until, you know, members of the Veterans Committee who he insulted by claiming his friends and compatriots will take his case more seriously. It's fine. You just, if it feels bad, just do a different thing, I think. I think just do a different thing. talking about that. But I think the decision itself, we're like, you know, we're twisting ourselves up and we're trying to be clever about explaining why we feel the way we do. And I understand that instinct because we're all writers and this is a big decision. And it's one that I think we should take seriously. And as we've discussed, it means a great deal to the players, whether they are inducted or not. And I think that we owe their careers space to consider and we should, you know, talk about the good parts of their life and the bad parts of their life because we should consider them in sort of their fullness as human beings and players. But I do think we're making some easy choices a lot harder than they need to be. And we should

just, you know, when we have that easy choice, it's okay to make it. I think that's what I think. Yeah, we should definitely take this process seriously. Maybe we're taking it a little too seriously when it's gotten to this point. And look, Ferducci is a legend,

but the video that you mentioned, the heavily produced video with the sentimental melodramatic music and the weight of history in your hands. I don't know him and I feel bad laughing and it does mean so much and I get it, but I also couldn't help but laugh. It was so funny. I admire Tom Perducci as much as just about anyone in sports media. For one thing, he's one of the few media members who's not on Twitter, which we could all emulate. But when we get to the point where we're making that video or, you know, Mark Rigg, who I also really like and admire and love reading. He spoke to a neuroscientist about how he felt when voting for his Hall of Fame candidates. And it's not like we're innocent of this.

We had philosophy professors on the podcast to talk us through the ethics of Hall of Fame voting. So it's not really so much a reflection on any one person as just we've all just gotten so mired in what this means. And it should matter. But, boy, maybe we're taking it too seriously. I don't know. I saw that Andy McCullough at The Athletic, he surveyed readers of The Athletic to see what they think. And 62.2% of them said voters should take A players off-field behavior into account. 65% of them said the purpose of the hall is to be a museum designed to explain the history, both good and bad, of the sport, as opposed to the

other option, which was a museum designed to celebrate the players, coaches, and executives who exemplify the ideals of the sport. So that was interesting because most of the people said that you should take the off-field behavior into account, but also most of the people said that you should take the off-field behavior into account, but they had their druthers, they would have elected Bonds and Clemens and Rowland this year. And I would guess that there might be some sort of change because the Hall of Fame likes to put people in the Hall of Fame. I mean, that's news. That's fun for everyone.

They get people going up there on induction weekend. Now, for this year, that's not such a big problem because there was no induction weekend last year because of COVID. So Derek Jeter, Ted Simmons, they're still going to get inducted this summer. And this is not the first shutout, but we're looking at a potential logjam here where I don't know where things will change imminently. And it's just going to get tiresome if we're having these same circular conversations every year. So I don't know what it is, whether it's just removing the writers from the process altogether. I don't know if that would be an improvement or not. It would at least make it not our problem anymore. but someone will still have to put players in or not as long as you're going to have all fame so then you know is the option to just provide some guidance about hey here's what you should take into account or not or we'll put people in but we'll say on their plaque what they did the good and the bad or we'll put people in but they won't have a speech or whatever or or we won't put

them in the but they'll have an exhibit. Like, I don't know, there needs to be something. Cause I think a lot of writers are just so fed up with this that we might see more and more just decide not to vote, which is perfectly fine. But if more and more people start doing that, then maybe it's a less representative voting body or it just sort of saps something from the whole exercise. Like if people are just tying themselves into knots and miserable about this whole thing and dwelling less on the candidates than on how voting makes them feel and talking more about the player's characters than the

player's performance which you know maybe they should be talking about both of those things but when it becomes solely pretty much a referendum on just, is this a good guy or a bad guy? And was he bad enough that he's not going to get in? I don't know that anyone enjoys that discourse. Maybe it's important to have it anyway. And maybe the fact that people are talking about these issues now much more than they used to doesn't mean that discussing it in the present is the problem. Maybe it means that not discussing it in the past was the problem. But I just that not discussing it in the past was the problem. But I just don't know that we can all take many more winters of these conversations and columns.

I think it's important for us to have that discourse because, you know, I don't think that this project is going to get any easier for people because more and more our approach to sports writing is to try to understand these guys completely, right? You don't get a lot of, well, you still get some, but the general consensus on whether or not we should report when a player has been suspended for domestic violence, we've crossed that Rubicon. So we're going to continue to know things about these guys going forward.

I do think some guidance would be useful, but if, you know, I don't know how I'll feel in a couple of years. If what folks land on is you, you can only take their on-field play into account. But I know for a fact that, you know,

a guy abused his intimate partners or supported a violent coup, you know, stuff you do as a human person. So I don't know that not having to take that stuff into consideration feels like an easy out to me. And I don't know exactly what the shape of the discourse should be. I don't think that there's a way for it to be less serious, given some of the questions that we're having to consider. It's not enjoyable. But then again, these are serious questions. maybe that's not the goal either i don't know i don't quite know how to make it better apart from just encouraging people to

be good humans so that we don't have to worry about it quite so much that'd be nice but yeah i i think the odds that we have hall of fame discourse going forward that sort of reverts back to being solely focused on the play on the field just seems very unlikely to me given the shape of coverage when these guys are active players and we're all just gonna have to do our best to to grapple with that stuff and I hope that this some of the feedback that writers received in this cycle is illuminating because this is very personal for a lot of people and it is an opportunity to be told that like the things that have happened to you in your own life that might parallel some of the the things that happened off field in these guys families are important and should be taken seriously and so i hope that we all just keep that in mind going

forward because you know it's never a bad thing to have an opportunity to take better care of one another and uh i guess like potentially you won't have to vote on shilling but it's not like there aren't some other characters on the ballot that you'll have to work through next year i guess um ben maybe the the real thing is to do some of that processing in private yeah i guess so yeah i don't even know if you can remove yourself from the ballot can you request that you do that like i so schilling asked and jane forbes clark who's the chairman of the board for the baseball hall of fame released a statement that says as you know the board of directors of the national baseball hall of fame sets the rules and procedures for the bbwa balloting process the board has received kurt Schilling's request for removal from the 2022 ballot and will consider the request at

our next meeting. So TBD. Yeah. Maybe just because it's Schilling and no one wants to deal with him anymore. They'll just say, okay, you gave us it out. We'll take it. I know that Marvin Miller requested that in the past. I think that he said he didn't want to be considered anymore, but he wasn't actually on the writer's ballot at that point. So yeah, I'm not sure if there's precedent for this, but whether there is or not, it might just be an unprecedented player who no one wants to talk about anymore. So they might be okay with just punting and kicking that can down the road. So, yeah, I mean, there have been people I've seen who've said like, well, we're not qualified to judge character because we only see them at work or whatever. And that's true in some cases. Like if you're talking about, well, is this a good guy or not? You might have missed something. It's kind of harder to it's like you can rule out someone from being like a positive case of the character clause more easily than you can rule someone in for like, oh, the character clause should be used in their favor.

Because you can't ignore the things that we know about some of these players. And I don't just mean the PED stuff. I mean domestic violence, DUIs, you name it, just terrible transgressions off the field that we do know and they've been reported so you you can't just pretend that you never knew that stuff on the other hand like if you are going to have a hall of fame that it's a museum it's supposed to tell the story of baseball can you tell that story without some of the bad characters who've been big parts of the play on the field and what does it even mean to have a Hall of Fame without Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds, who if they don't get in, it probably won't

be because of their off the field issues. It will probably be because of the PDs, but maybe it should be because of the other thing or some combination of both. But at a certain point, it's like, well, if we're going to give plaques to the best players and you're just not having two of the best players of all time have plaques, then does it diminish that? And I know they can be represented in the museum without having plaques. It's just that the plaques and who's in and who's out is the most visible manifestation of the museum for people who are not physically there. If there were some way to just say, this is the best players, we're just saying who the best players were, and we won't whitewash anything and we won't pretend that anything didn't happen,

but we're just saying these were the best players. And when we have their exhibits or their plaques or whatever it is, we'll just say, here's what they also did in addition to their stuff on the field. I would be open to finding a way to try to do that. It's just tough because then you are giving these people an opportunity to give a speech and say they're Hall of Famers and sign a HOF at the end of their signature and make more money at card shows. And it's not just an academic thing. It's something that affects players' lives and other people's lives. So it's hard to separate those two things. But I do think there has to be some effort to just recognize these were great players

and they did play a big part of baseball history, even if it wasn't a universally positive part. Well, at least we have Scott Rowland making a big jump on the ballot. Yes. Yeah. I can vote for Scott Rowland next year if I vote. That's a good thing.

Yeah. I don't envy you your immediate task i don't envy me or my task in the future yes the weight of history in our hands is heavy i don't wonder what i would i wouldn't be able to ever get through a single take man couldn't get through a single take i'm sorry i again i don't know tom i don't know if tom listens to this podcast if you do i'm sorry man but like come on you gotta let us have you gotta let us laugh at that one yeah amusements are thin on the ground and that one was i just it just sort of seems like a spoof of like

a self-serious hall of fame voter like take it seriously yes but uh it's not you know like i saw a reply on twitter that was like this guy thinks he's signing the Treaty of Versailles or something. It's like, it's just a Hall of Fame vote. It's just a ballot. Like, yeah, it reflects on larger issues that are important that we don't want to give short shrift to, but it is also just baseball. So, you know, there are more serious issues out there. Well, and it's just because the piece of paper is so unremarkable. You know, it's like they print them out, like, on paper from OfficeMax, and then they mail them to you. And so it's nice. It's nice to have Scott Roland and Astidio,ott roland and and astidio ben we had some nice stuff it's nice so that part's nice i just wish the purpose or the criteria could be clarified so that it's not like mvp voting where so much of the debate and disagreement is about the definition

of the word valuable and whether that's context sensitive or not. Now you have people ignoring the character clause. You have people putting a lot of emphasis on the character clause. People don't even really agree what this honor is supposed to be. And maybe that's okay. Maybe there's room for nuance and different interpretations. It just makes for some frustrating exchanges where people are talking past each other. Anyway, we will put aside the Hall of Fame discourse for a little while at least, and now we will take a break and we'll be back to talk about a player who

had a great character. The character clause could only have helped him, Henry Aaron. Although, as we will discuss with Bradford, it is important to take into account the context of his life and career and how he was treated as well as how he responded to that treatment. We'll get into all of that in just a moment. number of reasons why I'm turning my back on them. Suppose they close the door. Suppose they close it for good. So last week Meg and I paid tribute to Henry Aaron the player and touched on his life and larger legacy but we wanted to talk more today about who he was as a person and how he was and is perceived. So to do that, we are joined by Bradford William Davis of the New York Daily News, who wrote about Aaron on Friday.

Hey, Bradford, welcome back. Yo, thanks for having me. So it's pretty tough to sum up a life as long and as rich as Aaron's was, but how would you try to encapsulate what Aaron accomplished and represented or express the significance of his achievements beyond the baseball reference page? Yeah. You know, I didn't know I'd be writing about Hank. Cause I mean, I was not a, you know, I'm not a historian. I certainly didn't see, watch him play. Yeah. I felt like there was his life, you know, had been so, the ground had been covered, you know, like, you know, what could I add to this conversation was my question. And the answer to I thought was nothing.

And then, but then I saw that despite, you know, his life being, you know, fairly well documented fairly well, like, you know, that there was a narrative sort of surrounding him about, you know, where his gentleness, his stoicism, his dignity, quote, dignity, end quote, and class were things that were focused on. And of course, none of those things are inherently wrong, but they were devoid of context and often even condescending, in opinion because they were they seemed to celebrate him for you know for him for being uh quiet and gentle and kind despite horrible horrible horrible racial abuse written racism you know the his the entirety of his playing career you know and uh and it's you know particularly towards you know the uh as he started to approach vape roost home run record

and uh and yeah and so i felt that felt that his life was starting to get flattened in the collective memory of him, of the man. And so with that, you know, that gave me, I think, an opportunity to provide what I hope was a counterbalance, you know, to this unfortunate but prevailing narrative, you know, that I think diminishes the size of his achievements as well as the great cost it was to him. It's a particularly curious flattening, as you said, in part because his life was so well-documented

because he wrote an autobiography. Howard Bryant wrote a really wonderful biography of him. And I was also struck by, he remained in baseball as an executive and was very critical of the dearth of Black executives within the game in the course of his professional life after he played. And so as I was reading your piece and some of the other tributes to him that I think did a better job of encapsulating the fullness of his life, I was curious, you know, as he was chasing

Ruth's record, he was receiving all of this hate mail and death threats. And I know that there were a number of publications at the time that sort of pre-wrote obituaries for him in anticipation of his potential assassination. So I'm curious kind of what the coverage looked like at the time and how kind of honest it was in grappling with that. I imagine that the coverage may not have risen to what we would expect of it today, but I am curious sort of how journalists at the time grappled with that aspect of the home run chase. Yeah, grapple is a very generous word. I mean, I was afraid of that. It's fine. I'm not busting you.

word i mean yeah i was afraid of that it's fine i'm not that's not i'm not busting you but just uh i'm not again remember i was you know i was not present for this nor am i you know historian you know amateur or you know or or credentialed about hank aaron you know um well you know but i have read through you know um you know significant portions of uh how o'brien's biography as well as you know aaron's own book and you know and's own book and just been aware of his life through that. Yeah, I mean, there wasn't really a, at least within mainstream press, a real understanding of what he was suffering. In fact, they were often the people, I think, causing the problems in his life rather than contextualizing them for their audiences. rather than contextualizing them for their audiences. One that made it into the article I wrote on Friday,

but I actually skimmed it for purposes of work and everything. But they went after his wife in 1974, the year he broke the record, because he was getting a little more pointed, a little less accepting of the way people would speak to him in the press in general. accepting of the way people would speak to him in the press you know in general right and so you know he was not he was just not quite as affable as he had been earlier in his career and as as people had you know expected out of black public figures and black people in general and so uh his wife billy you know happened to be very involved in the civil rights movement as was hank for that matter and you know it was you know you know an active participant in that and so they basically just kind of connected it out to be like oh well Billy's a bad influence on

you know on uh on Hank you know and so like there was a headline that that uh ran like Billy Aaron is one of that you know problem question mark and that was in the sports page like you know um and so that was a column you know and so that that is what led to him having this this uh this like fight in the locker room or something like that with a sports writer who, you know, where he, like, stuffed, like, strawberries in a guy's face or something or, like, you know, threw a basket of strawberries. I forget why the strawberries were there, honestly, but there were strawberries and he threw them. He pelted them at him. And so, you know, that was, you know, I think that that was a very good and kind of funny, but also kind of horrible, horrible example of how the media thin and most mostly white men, you know, especially, again, in the mainstream rags anyway, you know, not really trying to understand or empathize to the degree that they needed to do their job well. Yeah, and Aaron certainly supported the civil rights movement and was involved in it at least behind the scenes.

And I think he was maybe a little less publicly outspoken than athletes people think of, like Muhammad Ali, let's say. And Howard Bryant wrote his political strategy would always begin behind closed doors. And there were stories about how he met Martin Luther King and Andrew Young, and he said he sort of felt bad about the fact that he hadn't been a more vocal or public supporter. And they told him, you're doing a lot just by being the player that you are, doing what you're doing, where you're doing it, and when you're doing it, setting that example. But after his career in his autobiography, in subsequent interviews, especially, I mean,

he didn't hold back at all. He was very frank and open and honest about everything he had gone through and everything he had seen. And it seems like that's, I guess, the flattening that you're talking about, that those quotes, I think, when people saw them on Friday when they were shared and, you know, we can read a couple of them. But I think people were almost surprised to see, oh, Hank Aaron said that because, you know, he's so celebrated for not speaking by certain people. Yeah, like that, that is what really, you know, gets me about about just, you know, then and now, the way you know, the man is discussed is that like, not understanding the reason why he had to, you know, or I shouldn't say had, but like was heavily, heavily incentivized to approach these important issues of his day, the way he did, you know, and you know, and again, they they don't in any way it wasn't wrong for him to do that in fact you know and in fact it was completely understandable and and i think also you know he was a kind and generous person you know like that's not wrong either but but um but without understanding you know the panorama of that and providing that context you get this again this like two-dimensional hank this two-dimensional henry who provided a

response the only acceptable response to racism there's ever been if if there ever is an acceptable response to racism from the people suffering it that's important qualification because it often because even that got him busted up you know like again like in in the article like you know i mentioned he wanted to do with a moment of silence for martin with the king and uh the uh visiting team he was you know that team that the Braves are playing in the Cincinnati Reds, they turned him down. So, you know, even his, you know, his quiet stoicism was rejected, you know. But, yeah, it was the only, you know, yeah, again, it was it was the for many, you know, black public figures and black folks, again, in general, was like it's the only the only possible way you know at times to deal with this stuff and so um and so which to just kind of like blindly praise that you know that part of him and uses a contrast which is what i saw happening a lot you know in the discourse like to to someone more openly and consistently angry or and you use a word of

uh chipper jones um you know militant you know as this is like some sort of better way is just, I think, a tremendous disservice to Hank. I think it does dishonor the, you know, who he was. It ignores the times where he was extraordinarily angry, you know, and pointed about his, you know, about the things he went through. But like, you know, probably just didn't want to like start a fight with Chipper Jones. So he didn't bust his butt for you know i don't know posting sandy hook conspiracy truth or crap you know or something like that i don't know but like um you know that that is what what you know the choices that hank made are choices that any sort of discriminated identity in this country have always had to you know sort of deal with you know, sort of deal with, you know, total silence,

stoic dignity, or like, you know, the quote unquote militancy, you know, that latter one is never allowed, never accepted, and always forgotten among the black people that we choose to like. Yeah, I mean, if you're in an environment where even a moment of silence is not welcome or considered acceptable, then imagine what the response is to a moment of non-silence is to actually speaking up and saying something. There's an even bigger blowback to that. And as you were saying, it's not like he wasn't the things that people attributed to him. Howard Bryant wrote, he possessed an uncommon decency, equality in short supply to him. He was just a solid person, et cetera, et cetera. All of the compliments that people pay him about his grace or dignity or whatever,

it's not inaccurate. But as you said, it's only part of the picture. So I'm reading from Howard again. He wrote in the African-American story, dignity is such a sly and deceptive word, simultaneously complimentary and condescending. I love that line, man. Yeah. And dignity was attached to Henry like a surname. Its affixation to him, of course, said more about his world than it ever did about him. For what was called dignity was simply an acceptable response to hostility. And it was easier for writers and broadcasters, fans and executives to concentrate on his response to hostility than the hostility itself. So what would be the best way to sort of compliment his personal qualities

and say that, yeah, he was kind and, you know, had the grace and the dignity and all of that without, you know, making that stand as the only aspect of his life or kind of leaving out what he was actually responding to. Yeah, you know, that's a question I think about a lot because I really did, you know, I really do want to communicate. Like, I believe it's good

to pursue grace and mercy and kindness and charity, even with your enemies. You know, I hope that that's not lost as far as even how my own, you know, moral framework that I believe in and advocate for, you know, would include. Like, you know, which is not to say that I'm against radical, you know, action, but often the radical action is in forgiveness and, you know, and all that. You know, but yeah, it just needs to be, I keep on returning to the word contextualized, it needs to be placed in this context, you know.

That should be mourned when it's hoisted as a limitation to who in this context, you know? That should be mourned when it's hoisted as a limitation to who you can be, you know what I mean? You know, that grace and kindness, you know, and quote-unquote, you know, stoic dignity or whatever the hell, right? Like, that should be, you know, that should be mourned when it's forced on someone, you know, rather than purely, you know, the outgrowth of someone's heart. You know what I mean? Like, that is the story of, you know, of how, you know, the good white people, you know, generally in this, you know, in the United States and the world,

like, approach people that seek to make their lives better, you know? Only when it's done gently can it even be possibly accepted. And even that is usually, is often often usually turned down, you know? But, you know, if there's any version of responding to the oppression you face, it's that sort of meekness, you know, is the only trait that's allowed. And when it's an issue of allowance, it becomes a problem of subservience. And I don't want anyone to think that Hank Aaron was subservient

because he wasn't. That man was out there and has written some of the most scathing criticisms of Major League Baseball that have ever been recorded given his stature in the game. He certainly did his playing career, but after as well. And just the words in and of themselves, like stunningly sharp, incisive things he had to say about, you know, about the game and about its flaws, about ways that it has gotten worse even since his post-playing career, you know. He was, you know, he was out there, you know, and that must be appreciated.

But those parts of the narrative are never celebrated, not in the mainstream, you know. in the mainstream, you know, that's why I, you know, I drew many times a comparison between the way Hank Aaron was being discussed and the way Martin Luther King, you know, is discussed every, you know, second or third Monday of January, you know, because the man was so loving and so gracious and so kind, forgetting, you know, the radical impulse behind, you know, all of his actions, you know, the blood it drew, even in his nonviolence, the, you know, the fact that he was absolutely hated by most of the country, you know, all of his actions, you know, the blood it drew, even in his nonviolence, the, you know, the fact that he was absolutely hated by most of the country, you know, shortly before he was assassinated. And of course, the many pointed things that he said nonviolently, but pointedly, you know, about about the reality of race in America, you know, that followed him his whole

career. So all that gets gets flattened into, you know, MLK as Barney, the dinosaur from our children's shows in the 90s. And that's just my hope that Hank doesn't receive that treatment because he's worthy of the full three-dimensional, the full texture all of our lives are. the full three-dimensional, the full texture, you know, all of our lives are. I'm curious, because you talk to active players far more often than I do, if you've had the opportunity to discuss Aaron with any of the game's current players, because I feel like we have talked about this even on this podcast before, about how we can strive to tell more complete sort of contextualized stories and I'm curious what your sense of his story within the game is because when his passing was announced the outpouring on Twitter from active players about how important he was to them

seemed pretty broad but I wonder if you've had the chance to talk about him specifically with anyone who's playing the game now you know i i the moment i was asked to write like you know i just kind of like hit that mode yeah of it but yeah when one thing that i do want to call attention to is um shed long of the seattle narrators yeah uh had a really uh i think beautiful uh tribute to uh to hank as a video essay that he recorded discussing, you know, meeting the guy and all that he learned from him and stuff like that. So I can't say that, you know, I did not conduct, you know, these interviews or collect these quotes. Like, they are very much out there. And so that would be a good place to start for, you know,

just quick reactions to the players in and around the game right now. Otherwise, I mean, you know, just quick reactions to the players in and around the game right now. Otherwise, I mean, you know, like his autobiography is awesome. It's really good. You know, I definitely recommend reading that. It's always good to hear from the person themselves. So, you know, start there. And Howard Bryant's book is a phenomenal supplement to that as well.

But yeah, the players are out there and they have been speaking about this because it did mean a lot to them. Yeah, I'll just read the quote that came up in a number of pieces. And I think you mentioned from his 1994 New York Times interviews, that's after his autobiography came out, but people were talking about the 20th anniversary of 7-15. And he said, April 8th, 1974 really led to turning me off on baseball. It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting

threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won't go away. They carved a piece of my heart away. And I think maybe for people who are younger, people who are our age, we were kind of used to having him around the game as sort of like an ambassador, you know, sort of a grand old statesman who would show up and people would venerate him and genuflect. And he was, you know, a positive presence. But there was a time when he was really embittered by baseball and kind of went away from it. I mean, he felt like he was snubbed, not being made a major league manager. Then he was an executive, but there was a time when he was just not really all that involved in baseball, I guess, until Bud Selig, who was a friend of his, became commissioner and made an effort to get him more

involved. But really, I think those quotes and other quotes that have made the rounds, they're really striking. He did not hold back at all. I was just reading a piece from later in 1994. He did an interview with Robert Lipsight in the New York Times, and he responded to some racist comments Marge Schott had made. And he said, I'm concerned when I hear things like the Marge Schott situation, when I hear those remarks that should never be made, when I realize that baseball is still a country club where the members go their way and tell their little stories. But the whole thing is about like, is he an angry person or not? Which sort of touches on some of the things we've been

saying. And Aaron said, I was surprised at the pressure of hatred, the threats, the male. I saw a parallel with the hatred Jackie had to play through. And any black who thinks the same thing can't happen today is sadly mistaken. It happens now with people in three-piece suits instead of with hoods on. And Lipsight says, doesn't that sound angry? As if like he didn't have every reason to be angry. And Aaron said that he didn't consider himself angry. He said, I'm not angry. An angry man is a defeated man and I am not defeated. So that's sort of the way he framed it there. But he certainly said things that made it pretty clear how he felt. And I just want to lay this point home too, right? things that made it pretty clear how he felt and i just want to lay this point home too right like is that he not only would he have every right to be angry but it would have done nothing to

diminish the dignity that he showed in his career yeah like you know to to uh to to act and speak more on you know on that on that wavelength than um than than the one that got mostly passed around. In my anecdotal experience watching the early obituaries pop up. He chose this route, but the other routes are right too.

And it also can both exist in perfectly complimentary fashion. You can be kind and gentle and forgiving and pointed and fierce and sharp, you know? And both being good moral choices when discussing the – or response to the existential and personal evil of racism. personal evil of racism. So yeah, I, I don't want to put the obligation of answering this question on you solely Bradford, but I do think that it's probably worth us discussing, you know, as people who have an obligation to tell baseball stories, how, especially within the context of someone's passing when it seems like the ideal moment to give space

to the sort of fullness of their experience and their life, how we can do better by these stories, not only in the moment, but then in the sort of repeated tellings and anecdotes that we prioritize as time passes between when we've lost that person and when we have occasion to revisit their life and legacy in the game because I think that this is a disappointingly persistent failure on the part of at least parts of baseball media and one that I think you know

the league is also not very well I don't want to say well-equipped because they're perfectly equipped, but they just opt for a smoother path, but has a bad history of sort of engaging with honestly, and we don't need to look much further than their treatment of Jackie Robinson to have examples of that. So as an editor who has to render advice to people sometimes about how to best approach a story, I've been thinking a lot about how we can sort of short circuit that impulse to soften so that we can tell more accurate

stories and do justice to the people who have given their sort of lives and experience to the game. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that and how we might do better by people, not just baseball players but people generally when we have these opportunities to contemplate their lives and and try to understand them yeah i mean you really if you can't give from a deficit you know right and if you don't understand and if you don't understand what he went through and how he felt about it you know then you won't be able to possibly provide a useful productive commentary on it you know like that's just kind of it you know and so that kind

of like i guess explains what needs to be done you must understand that there are plenty of there's a whole genre of anti-racism for white people text out there um i i have not personally read most of them but you know but i know they're out there uh but i could say experientially like is uh doing the reading you know like uh learning about people's histories and lives you know being the kind of person that people would trust to share you know their problems with the kind of person that that people will be willing to critique when they mess up you know you know and so someone who doesn't immediately respond with defensiveness but but you know but seeks to understand and you know, and so someone who doesn't immediately respond with defensiveness, but, you know, but seeks to understand and try and do better. Just kind

of ask yourself and really ask, you know, to the degree that you have, you know, that you have people in your life, you know, from other backgrounds, like, ask those folks, like, am I the kind of person? And what, you know, what do I need to be to be that kind of person? And if they say, go away, because we actually ain't friends like that then that there's your answer that's a good start that's a that's a perfect starting point to be like okay i'm gonna back up from this person and then just try and be better like any answer to that is a pretty decent proxy for for growth for the baseball writer uh out here listening uh may lead to to being a more productive uh part

of this conversation the other part is also i guess knowing that you don't have to be immediately part of every conversation if you don't know if you don't know but of course it's hard to not it's hard to not know what you don't know right but you try right but if you know that there are other people who do know point to them first right like you know that i think that was the issue with passing is that like you know a man's is breaking every you know trade i think that was the issue with passing is that like you know amanz is breaking every you know trade and and free agents signing but you don't know everything about baseball and he certainly didn't know everything about ink by henry aaron you know and so you know he his last tweet was the only like kind of okay one which is which is that he

like posted up books to read about by henry aaron start from that that point rather than like here's what i think about racism. And the racism Henry Aaron dealt with. I don't really care about what a four-year-old white man thinks about the racism Henry Aaron has to deal with. Bearing extreme exception. Why would anyone care

about this? But again, you're a sports writer and a public guy. You get gassed up. You're a cult of personality. I'm speaking specifically to jeff pass in this point where people literally stand you for for announcing coal to the yankees or what have you and uh and that's that's hard to break and that's that's true for anyone in the public eye who gets any you know positive affirmation speaking to myself as well you know but like you know but it's what must be done if you know that sort of humility uh and pursue such in order to be an effective person behind the scenes or in front for moments like this. Yeah. When you read about the home run chase, you really get a sense of how it would

have been impossible for Aaron to just ignore what was going on because it was just so intense and so in his face. And he said, it was supposed to be the greatest triumph of my life, but I was never allowed to enjoy it. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And no wonder, because he's getting death threats. And even as he's rounding the bases and there are these two white guys who run out to round the bases with him, he doesn't know why they're running out there or what their goal is. And there's a bodyguard in the stands, you know, trying to tell, are they attacking him? Do I need to intervene here? And, you know, I was reading something his secretary said about just how much hate mail he got and that when he spoke up publicly about that in, I think, the spring of 73, then there was a lot of supportive mail that came in. And then after that, she said it was like 99 to one positive. But she also said that he got like 900,000 letters in 73 alone. And even if it was 99 to one positive, that means there were like 9,000 negative. And

that was just that one year. And some portion of the negative ones were terrible, racist, you know, death threats. And so that's a lot like I think even, you know, writers who get like pretty innocuous feedback on their work, like, hey, I's good. You remember the one nasty thing that someone said, and that's just not even anything like what he was going through. So you can understand why that would stick with him. And he said he sometimes looked at those letters in later years to remind himself of it. And you mentioned in your piece that even in 2014, he was saying, this hasn't gone away, like the country hasn't totally changed. And then he got hate mail for that, just confirming what he was saying. So he knew better than anyone that, you know, even if it was maybe not quite as visible or as vocal at times that it had not gone away. And it seemed pretty important to him that people not forget

that. Yeah. I can't say I have much to add to that, except that I think that's very true. Sorry to not be more immediately incisive. One other thing I wanted to ask you is that he talked about this generation of black players who he said changed the face of baseball. And him and Billy Williams and Willie Mays and Ernie Banks and Bob Gibson and William McCovey and Frank Robinson and Lou Brock. And a lot of those guys are gone now. And a lot of them have passed away within the past year, within the past few years. Not everyone, Willie Mays, Billy Williams are still with us, but there have been a lot of losses there.

And Claire Smith wrote at The Undefeated about how he was just kind of this connection from Jackie Robinson to that generation to the current generation. And Stefan Johnson tweeted last week, Aaron Gibson, Brock, Dick Allen, Joe Morgan, they were the ones who passed the torch to the black players we grew up watching. The fact that there's no one available to pass the torch now is the biggest indictment of today's MLB. So I wondered if you agreed with that, and if so, whether there is any way for that torch to be passed better than it is right now. Yeah, it really is stunning that when you hear you list all those names, you know, tremendous black players who are no longer with us within the last 12 months, you know, and maybe within the last six months shoot, right? Like, you know, is it, you know, unspeakable loss, but you know, they're not, they're not the only ones. They're not the only ones gone. There's still people out there carrying the torch. there carrying the torch you know i think of someone like dusty baker for example sort of being a bridge in between that you know like he was a teenage rookie like hanging out like

in the early days early part of his playing career you know learning how to navigate being a young black baseball player like you know emphasis on the black part but just from watching and absorbing everything hamner and his teammates had to say, or not teammates, other veteran colleagues in the game, you know, had to say. And so, you know, cleave to dudes like that. And, you know, there's stories that are developing about the game right now, you know, that can be, you know, about, think of this last year, you know, this whole awakening on issues of just how severe racism is in this country. Like, you know, a lot of the young players and vets took the lead in the urgency of having these conversations.

They're doing something right now, and those stories will, you know, can be passed on. And their experiences, you know, I hope that fans are listening and seeing and learning from their example, you know, right now. Which is not to say that they're always going to, you know, they're learning on their way you know right now uh which is not to say that they're all that they're always going to you know they're they're learning on the way i should say you know like you know these are young men and not necessarily activists or sociology professors or anything like that you know um like they're you know they're figuring this they're figuring their way out too

but that's you know but it doesn't mean that there's not tremendous value in that you know and you know one thing that even comes to mind is something like the players alliance like which has put a high degree of emphasis on mentorship. And I think that's maybe the strongest part of the organization is that they have older and, you know, recently retired, you know, black players, like, connecting with, like, you know, draft picks and minor leaguers and, you know, rookies and stuff. Just making sure that everyone who's black in the game has someone that they can look look up to especially since many of them are the only people on their team or their 40-man roster whatever you know like so that stuff is you know it can still happen you know the best

thing major league baseball can do is give them tons of money and and uh stay out of the way for whatever they want to do even if it's disruptive you know to what major league baseball thinks of itself so the last thing i wanted to ask was about, I think, the perception of Aaron as a player, like his style and or lack of style on the field, the way that he seemingly was often contrasted with other players, both black and white, you know, whether it was Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays or Ernie Banks, the idea that he had less obvious charisma or exuberance, or that seemed to be a reason why he was really underrated. He was kind of under the radar, it seems like, until he started approaching Roos' record. And I wonder whether it would have been better or worse for him if he had had sort of the star power, the celebrity of a Willie Mays or an Ernie Banks, you know,

and if he had been more outspoken in certain ways, just how much worse it would have been. It can't be that much worse than it was. But as bad as it was and sitting on 713 at the end of the 73 season and then having to spend the entire off season just getting letters and waiting for that chase to resume. But I was just wondering, because some of it, I think, also was kind of that trope of it didn't really look like he was trying or it didn't look like there was the effort there, which is often something that you hear about non-white players. And maybe he just made it look easy, but that seems to be part of why he wasn't really appreciated by everyone in his time that I guess either his personality or the style of play just didn't leap off the field or the screen or the page the way that it did with some other players. Yeah, you know, like I said, this is in many ways, I don't want to outkick my coverage because I did not, you know, actually watching Karen play.

So I cannot speak to the aesthetic nature of his game like other people, like Howard and many other, you know, again, amateur and slash professional, you know, enthusiasts of his life and career, you know. Or I shouldn't even say amateur, but, you know, for those who are credentialed or not, you know. But yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting and kind of, I guess, a fan graph effectively while tying is that analytics give, you know, perhaps a better appreciation of like the historical impact, you know, and value you had in the field, which is incredible because the man led, you know, led the world in home runs. Not the world, you know, excuse me, the Japanese leagues, but like, you know, led the Western Hemisphere in home runs

for like, you runs for many decades. People lived and died in between watching Hank Aaron and someone break his record. And yet the counting stats underrate him somewhat because of just the full offensive value that he provided every year went beyond 755 or 715 or whatever. And so I think that's one of the cool things about, you know, advanced stats is that they can help you kind of like look at someone's on-field impact in a new way and, you know, provide extra light to that. So he doesn't need as much black ink on a baseball reference page or necessarily communicate

just, you know, how tremendously important he was. I've even read, it could be Howard Bryant's biography, but I forget. But I think his stats were considered very good at the time, usually, but really great. But that's

inaccurate, like an accurate characterization. And again, I apologize if I'm reading that from something besides Howard you know, Howard Bryant's biography, but, but wherever I read this, you know, there was, it's, he was great. He was like top five like every year for, for 20 years, you know, like that's absurd. It was, he wasn't just consistently very, very good, you know, with a few flashes of greatness, you know, he was like great all the time, you know, and then, and, and that's, you know, I think that's pretty, you know, that's a really cool thing that, you know he was like great all the time you know and then and uh and that's and you know i think that's pretty you know that's a really cool thing that you know that that i hope

you know again major league baseball throws a lot of you know time and money into appreciating him on just as a baseball player you know which is what he what he often stated you know it was like i just want to go back to playing baseball i think after he you know like as he was like dealing with the record-breaking stuff like yeah so if you just want to speak specifically to Hank the baseball player like he's better than we thought he was and we already knew he was great so I think it's cool well you've you've anticipated my next question and maybe we can end here I mean all of us on this podcast lost out on the opportunity to see him play obviously because we're we're too young to have been alive when he was playing. But I am curious if you have a favorite Hank Aaron stat. Is there anything in his record that has particularly grabbed you

or made you go, wow, because there are a lot of candidates. As you said, his playing record is so superlative, it's hard to pick just one thing. But I wonder if there's a favorite for you. The consecutive all-star appearances kind of like grabbed me yeah yeah and like you know baseball is interesting right because like all as far as all-star appearances go it's not like the nba where an all-star appearance definitely means that that player mattered you know so like when we talk about

like nba hall of fame debates right you know you'd be like oh yeah that guy was a 12-time all-star well this guy's only a four-time All-Star, you know? So maybe he wasn't that great, right? And then maybe you have like a, you know, you have an analytical conversation. Well, he should have been an All-Star, but just didn't because of XYZ, right? But like baseball is not like that because there's a rule where you have to like have one representative from every team. Right. Hank Aaron was beyond that.

Hank Aaron just belonged every damn year he played. Yep. beyond that hank aaron just belonged every damn year he played yep and so that was you know i think that's a a pretty marvelous example of of his amazing track record you know like that he was you know and that he the man just the man belonged among the best in the game every every year so so when i i forget the exact number of all-star appearances but like 20 straight or something you know so or 21 or 22 straight uh 21 yeah was a, that's, that's probably the, the number or achievement, you know, that like just plays over and over and over in my head about the man.

So, all right. Well, we will link to Bradford's piece. We'll link to some of the other writing that we talked about today. You can also hear him on baseball prospectuses, five and dive podcast. You can find him on Twitter at underscore BWilly. Thank you very much, Bradford. Thank you, guys. Well, we tried to keep up with the signing spree, but we couldn't quite. After Meg and I finished speaking, the Twins signed Angleton Simmons,

and the Giants reportedly neared a deal with Tommy LaStella. There was a real run on infielders on Tuesday. Everyone was getting one. I suppose Simmons's presence on Minnesota's roster won't make it any easier for Williams' SDO to get playing time in 2021, but he'll always have the Venezuelan Winter League. So perhaps we will banter about those signings and others next time. 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. Nathaniel Ross, Matt Cain, probably not that Matt Cain, you never know. Roman Zoss, Wes Wong, and Ben Slimmer. 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. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.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 another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. It's been the same way for years We need to change Somebody told me when I came to Nashville Son, you finally got it made Old Hank made it here

We're all sure that you will But I don't think Hank done it this way No, I don't think Hank done it this way