Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1714: A Bad Day in Baseball

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s experience attending the worst start of Shohei Ohtani’s MLB career, then (15:04) discuss the Dodgers’ and MLB’s response (and their own reactions to) this week’s serious assault allegations against Trevor Bauer. (Warning: This episode contains some swears, starting at 18:18.) Audio intro: Vanessa Peters, "Rather Bad Day" Audio outro: […]

I need someone to talk to, but myself is never enough. I'm the worst kind of needy, trying to find answers on the inside of a coffee cup. But the only thing I know for sure is that I spend too much on coffee Too much time inside myself, never trusting anyone else And it's finally catching up to me Hello and welcome to episode 1714 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. Well, I saw two-way Otani in the flesh. And Meg, it didn't go great. two-way otani in the flesh and meg it didn't go great i am so i'm so sorry that like our experiences of this were so dramatically different not because i don't deserve a good otani time but because you so deserve a good otani time. And it was, I don't know, man. Like, in addition to Otani, you know, it seemed like it was very hot there and sticky. Not the ball, mind you, but the air. And I personally hate to be sticky. So it seemed not the best.

I'm very sorry. It was far from the best. Yeah, there are worse things in the world than being disappointed by a baseball game. But this was not one of the better baseball games. So if we're going to talk about Otani's best of times, we must also acknowledge the worst of times. And perhaps he flew too close to the sun and maybe this was bound to happen. The good news is that he's homered a few times since the last time we talked about him, but the bad news is that he had the worst start

of his career on Wednesday. He allowed seven earned runs in two thirds of an inning. So he flew out to lead off the game in his first at bat in the top of the inning. Then he got two outs in the bottom of the inning and his day was done, which was not exactly what I had envisioned in the hours or days or weeks leading up to this. As I mentioned, this week was the 10th anniversary of my first date with my now wife, Jessie.

It's funny how I feel I have to say my now wife as if anyone would have been confused about whether we were already married when we went on our first date. We were not. I would have been confused about whether we were already married when we went on our first date. We were not. Anyway, for our first date, we went to a concert by one of our favorite bands, Sloan. And for this one, we went to see our favorite baseball player, Shohei Otani. And so we were looking forward to it for a while. We splurged a little.

How often does Shohei Otani come to town? Only once a year or so. How often is it your 10th anniversary? Only once. So we didn't get the most expensive tickets that we considered buying, but the ones we got were pretty pricey and the return on our investment was not great. I thought about calculating the dollars per pitch or per plate appearance that we saw of Otani, but I decided not to do that. Anyway, it was great for a few minutes there. Neither of us had been to a baseball game since 2019, so the grass looked a little greener

and the lights looked a little brighter and it was hot, but not Portland hot. And I hadn't been in the company of 30,000 people and heard real crowd noise with my own ears for a while. So started off just great. But then it went walk, walk, pass ball, walk, single, single, strikeout, ground out, hit by pitch, walk. And then after Otani was squeezed a bit? Yes. Is Kurt Suzuki among the worst framing catchers in baseball? Yes. And did all three runners he bequeathed to Aaron Slugger score? Also yes, but he just didn't have it at all, really. And we talked last time about how the Yankees offense was bound to pick up at some point, but I was hoping it wouldn't happen against Otani. up at some point but i was hoping it wouldn't happen against otani if you're gonna take any solace from it and i imagine you didn't stay for this entire game which i look i was very surprised upon finishing a bit of editing to turn on mlb tv and find that that game was still going on along along with several other games that i thought should be well over, should be just well thoroughly done. Yep. But you somehow managed to see the polar opposite of the tweet

that we have referenced in the past that says, every time I see an Angels highlight, it's like, Mike Trout hit three home runs and races averaged to 528 while Shohei Otani did something that hasn't been done since Tung Sator, O'Doyle of the 1921 Akron groomsmen, and the Tigers defeated the Angels 8-3. You saw in the wild the polar opposite of that. Yeah, Jeff Fletcher made that point too. This was the opposite of the many games when Otani is great and the rest of the team isn't. So in this case, his ERA went up by a bit

more than a run. I haven't brought myself to look at his baseball reference war yet, especially because I was informed before this game that baseball reference hadn't actually been applying the DH positional adjustment to his plate appearances on the days that he hits might dig him more. So I haven't been able to bear to look yet. And I do thank the people who sent supportive tweets. I couldn't bring myself. I didn't have the heart to fave them in the moment, but I appreciate the sentiments. And usually when we watch Otani, it's in a very pro Shohei setting. It's just us sitting and watching him on TV, whereas here you had thousands of people who were happy that he was not succeeding and were jeering him and were applauding his failure, which was tough.

And also to make this more of my personal health, the two Yankees fans who were sitting next to me were very loudly debating, even before the game began, whether he should just hit or just pitch in a very sports radio-ish kind of batting average and ERA way. I don't think they were fan graphs readers. So that was fun. So not the best day at the ballpark. It's funny, before the game, my friend Zach Cram, also of The Ringer, asked me if I felt at all superstitious about seeing Otani in

person after he had been doing so well without me there. And I said, no, not really. I don't think where I'm sitting is the secret to Otani's success. But then as soon as he imploded, Jesse was like, did we do this somehow? Is this our fault because we are here? And there was a tidy, Is this our fault because we are here? And there was a tiny, tiny part of me that felt like I was being punished somehow for wearing an opposing player's garb at Yankee Stadium for, I think, the first time in my life. Because I was wearing an Otani t-shirt given to me by an effectively wild secret Santa. And 12-year-old Ben in his Bernie Williams jersey would have been appalled that I did this. And obviously, since those days, I've only been there usually to cover games as a member of the media. So not wearing an Otani t-shirt, no Otani t-shirts in the press box. So that was a departure for me.

Anyway, we picked the wrong Otani game to go to. Instead of the ones where he hit homers, we went to the one where he looked like a position player pitcher more so than a two-way player. But hey, happy anniversary. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. I felt worse for anyone who made the pilgrimage to see Otani from places you can't just take the subway to. There's a Twitter thread by a hockey writer named Adam Gretz, who evidently came from Pittsburgh to see Otani. And there's a whole thread about, should I go? And then he decides to go. And then it turns out the way it turns out. So that's sort of a sad read. And I'm sure some people must have come

from even farther. So yeah, when the rain came for a second, I had a false hope that they wouldn't play five innings and the game wouldn't be official and the stats would just be washed away. And I had a moment of great optimism. And then I remembered that's not how baseball works anymore. And they changed the rules so that now they just suspend the games that don't get to five innings instead of just erasing them, which does make more sense. And I approve of that policy in general, but would have been happy if this one hadn't happened, as would my cousin who was also at the game and had Otani on his fantasy team. So he felt the same way, even though he's a Yankees fan. Yeah, I guess this is always the risk that you take, right? That things you go, we want to mark special occasions in a place that feels

special to us. And we want to do it with our nearest and dearest and also with the players that we enjoy most. And sometimes things go wildly out of whack. And I think that's sort of part of the deal, right? The risk is that Otani only goes an inning and there are two rain delays and the game goes until one in the morning and it ends in a bizarre way

and everything is, you know, cats and dogs living together. But the reward that you get is that you're maybe going to see a thing you've never seen before and maybe that no one's ever seen before. I did see something that hadn't happened before. Right, yeah.

I guess that much is true. But, you know, in any individual game that can feel like a lousy bargain, but I think in the, you know, the course of one's life over the, you know, when you complete your register, it probably balances out in a way that is to the baseball fans' favor. But that doesn't make bad show appearances any worse. I mostly, in addition to not getting to see him pitch to his full potential and what we've seen from him so far this year, I'm also sad that you saw, you know, you just got to see so little of him at all, right?

I know, yeah. Because after that first inning, he was just, he was out in both ways, right? Yes. This is the danger. So I was like, oh, not only does Ben not get to see that, you know, fabulous splitter work the way that it's supposed to, but you're not going to get to see him hit a ding-a. Yeah, and you're right. There was a point in my life where I really prided myself on never leaving a baseball game before it was over.

I mean, it could have gone 18 innings. There could have been three rain delays. I would just not leave. It was a point of pride. That was how I marked myself as a hardcore fan in my mind was I was not going to go until it was all over. But that was not the case. On Wednesday, we left during the first rain delay. Otani was out and we did a little walk of shame to the subway with our Otani gear on and some drunk Yankees fans along the way made some remarks about our choice of

apparel. Not in a mean way, really. From what I could tell, most of the Yankees fans had a real respect for Otani, especially after he hit three homers in the first two games. And even though I think they think that he spurned the team possibly in 2017, and although obviously they wanted to knock him out of the game, they probably wouldn't have wanted it to happen quite that way or quite that quickly. So yeah, I guess they got their comeuppance later, but I pity any Yankees fans who stuck around to see the end of that one because the Angels had their own seven run inning in the ninth. And yeah, Jared Walsh hit his second homer of the game. In that case,

a grand slam, the first grand slam ever off of Aroldis Chapman. And yeah, that was that. The Angels actually won that game. So the game on Thursday was then rained out or postponed. And so now they're going to make that up in August on what would have been an off day for the Angels. So now they have to come back to New York in between a series at home and a series in Detroit just to play that one game. So I don't know, maybe things will line up so that Otani will make that start too. And he'll get a chance at redemption. Maybe I'll go back and see him again. It can't be worse than that, I suppose. Yeah, perhaps you will get another shot.

And maybe this time you'll learn that part of your Otani-related mojo means that you have to sit in the upper deck and then he'll throw a perfect game or something. Like maybe, you know, it's not your fault, Ben. Like you said, you haven't been to a game in a long time and this is the first time you would have gotten to see him. You don't know what your mojo is. We've talked about this at various points before.

We are sometimes unaware of the extent and boundaries of our own power in these moments. And it could be that in the course of understandably wanting to have a nice anniversary celebration that it got a little out of whack. But then there were two rain delays and they washed away that and presumably made you now just drenched in rain instead of sticky. So we all emerged different at the end. Unwisely, we didn't really wear rain gear. And so when we emerged from the subway, it was absolutely pouring. And we just sort of Charlie Brown walked back to our apartment, totally drenched. And our Otani

gear was sopping, which seemed like a metaphor for the performance. So it ended in an appropriate way. But it wasn't a total loss. We also had some nice time in each other's company. So- Yeah. There you go. total loss we we also had some some nice time in each other's company so uh there you go you know it's a bit of a bummer because if he had hit and or pitched well it could have capped off one of the most amazing months in baseball history really and and it still is sort of but ended on a down note obviously so that's that but i guess if you care about someone the way that we care about Shohei Otani, then you have to stick with them in the worst times, too. And you see them at their worst, and you still appreciate what they can do at their best. So we have seen him at his worst as a pitcher, let's hope. wrote about this for us at Fangraphs because he trekked up to the Bronx from Brooklyn hoping to see great Otani times

and being similarly disappointed. You know, like Otani has picked his team up plenty of times over the course of the season and so at least they picked him up this time. That's kind of nice. Isn't that what a good relationship is all about, Ben? Picking each other up when one party falters.

So really, they were celebrating your anniversary. They were celebrating good and reciprocal relationships. Well, thank you, Jared Walsh, for that. Even though, again, we weren't really rooting for the angels. We were rooting for Otani specifically. But still, it's the thought that counts, I suppose. All right.

So later in this episode, we're going to try to talk that counts, I suppose. All right. So later in this episode, we're going to try to talk a little bit about on-field baseball and some other players who have been playing well and some teams that have been playing well. And maybe we'll get to some emails. We'll see how things go. But we want to take a moment here to talk about Trevor Bauer. It's not a pleasant topic to talk about, but it's an important topic. And as I'm sure many have seen, on Tuesday, TMZ reported that Dodger starter Trevor Bauer had been implicated in an assault case stemming from two sexual encounters in April and May of this year with a woman he met on Instagram. And those encounters allegedly went terribly wrong. And Bauer claims that those encounters were consensual.

The woman claims that they started out that way, but went way, way beyond that. This is all still moving through the legal system. It's a developing story as we speak here on Thursday. But on Wednesday, The Athletic reported a lot of the details from the women's restraining order that was filed this week against Bauer. And they are very graphic and very violent and very disturbing. And I believe they have unlocked that article and we will link to it if you want to read that account, but all of the content warnings apply to an article like that and a conversation like that. Although maybe we will avoid the most violent or graphic details here. I don't know which way you want to take this, but- I think that we will spare our listeners a description of them. And I will just say that I think The Athletic handled this responsibly. There is a content warning and it's always a nasty bit of accounting to put these things on some sort

of like sliding scale of gravity. But just it's really it's a very difficult read. It's really upsetting. So like take care of yourself if you haven't read it yet. And just it'll be disturbing to you and potentially more so than you're anticipating. So just like there's the content warning and then there's like Meg saying, hey, take good care of yourself because it's a very unpleasant read. And so I think we don't need to go into the granular details. They're there if you want to find them.

But they are they're just really terrible. are they're just really terrible and i think that one thing you know that has sort of transpired in the last little bit and that news broke of prior to us starting to record but just prior to us starting to record is that as things stand now and they might change given some of the mechanisms that exist in the joint agreement on domestic violence between the players association and the league but as of right now torver bauer is the scheduled starter for sunday yeah and i think that it behooves us to acknowledge that there are you know there are labor complications to these kinds of questions there is language in the joint agreement on who is able to met out discipline and who isn't and the procedures that exist to transfer that responsibility from the commissioner's office to clubs and you know those

procedures are put in place for a good reason but i'm also going to warn people that like i might swear pretty loosely throughout this whole segment so if if the power of it all is not enough for you to skip ahead, but the swearing might be like, here is your warning, and we will endeavor to timestamp when this conversation is over so that people who want to avoid it in its entirety can. But I don't fucking care. For him to even be in the dugout, let alone on the mound, is an abdication of responsibility on the Dodgers part that I kind of can't understand. And I'm sure that their response would be that one, like the commissioner's office might put him on administrative leave between now and then for all we know, right?

Like that mechanism exists to them. right? Like that mechanism exists to them. If you go and read the language in the joint agreement, their ability to put a player on administrative leave is immediate. I'm reading here, under the basic agreement, the commissioner may immediately place a player accused of a covered act on administrative leave effective as early as the date of the notification and may keep the player on administrative leave for up to seven days. And then there are provisions within this for an extension of that leave. This mechanism might be familiar to people who followed Domingo German's domestic violence case where he was on administrative leave up to his suspension. And then I believe his days on administrative leave counted toward those suspension days.

And so I understand that if the club acts in its own capacity here that they are potentially opening themselves up to a grievance and i don't want to be cavalier with like labor issues they are important to us also but i like there are survivors of incidents like this that root for the Dodgers. And enjoy baseball. And probably, and I don't say this with special knowledge, but probably work for the team. And the stuff in that report is horrifying. Yeah.

So, anyway, I'm just very tired. Please take as long as you need i think that the thing for me is that it's very difficult to know when it gets to be too much you know the folks listening to this can probably tell how upset i am and And, you know, I am expressing that frustration and disappointment sort of more candidly than our listeners have probably heard me do before, even as I have spoken on this topic a lot, because unfortunately, we keep having incidents like this. And you never know which one's gonna like make you break down and cry on your podcast and so i just think about the people who are gonna tune in to watch the dodgers or the nationals on sunday and see this guy on the mount

and have to grapple with whether this is the last straw for them and being able to like a thing that they care about and that should have a place for them and that should care more about being a place that takes this kind of violence seriously that should prioritize that above other stuff you know i know that there are people who are calling for the Dodgers to immediately cut Bauer. And I think that there is a process and a mechanism in place for investigating this stuff. And so for me personally, I think that putting him on leave

and conducting the investigation, that's fine with me. But I think that we know that this guy enjoys getting a rise out of people. He enjoys being a provocateur. He has demonstrated that in ways small and very serious over the course of his public life in a way that we have remarked upon and that many other people have remarked upon prior to him signing with the Dodgers, in the run-up to him signing with the Dodgers. And if for no other reason than I have no confidence in this guy's ability to show any amount of contrition, I don't know how you put him on the mound and expect that he isn't going to strut off the field and dare people to impose consequences on his behavior.

And none of us should have to watch it. It's disrespectful to fans. It's incredibly disrespectful to the victim in this case. And all the Dodgers get out of it is a potentially good start. And what they lose are fans or people who love baseball and don't feel like it is welcoming to them and are really tired of repeated reminders of that being true. And like I said, you don't know where that line's going to be. You don't know when it's just going to be too much, right?

And how many people are going to be driven away from this sport, either as people who enjoy watching it or wanting to cover it? And so if for no other reason than we don't know where those boundaries are going to fall for people, let's exercise some care and some compassion for people and tell this dude to stay home. Yeah, no, and he seems like the last person to make that decision laterally, if anything, because I suppose it might make him look guilty to remove himself from that situation as opposed to just consider it for not pitching while this is hanging over everything. As you said, a mechanism does exist to avoid that. You don't

even have to look at another team. You can look at his teammate, Leo Urias, who was placed on administrative leave by MLB back in 2019. Urias was arrested, but no charges were filed ultimately, but he was still placed on leave and then subsequently suspended. So until that game on Sunday starts, I will hope and part of me will believe that there will be some way to avert this because it just seems like a terrible situation to have him on a major league mound while this is going on. And whether that is some sort of best interest in baseball clause that gets invoked or what, as you said, if you just release him, if you just cut him, you also have to pay him. You know, no one should particularly care about the Dodgers and whether they have to pay someone who's not playing for them. But also he makes money for doing nothing. If you want to look for some way to try to avoid that contract or something, which is difficult, but perhaps conceivable, then maybe as in the Mickey Calloway situation, you wait for some investigation while a suspension is going on. But for no suspension to happen,

I think would be a pretty untenable situation. And it's not clear. If you read this restraining order and these allegations, it's hard to believe that charges won't be filed, but it's not known for sure. It's not clear when that would happen. I know there's a hearing that is scheduled for July 23rd. I mean, that is three weeks away at which I suppose he or his representatives would have some chance to respond to these allegations. It's really hard to imagine that this could drag on for weeks and that he could just be playing baseball. So I hope that some way will be found to avert that. That just seems like the worst possible outcome on top of how terrible the story already is. already is. So we'll see if there's an update on this by the time we post the episode. I'll note that at the end. And if there isn't, then we will hope that something happens between Thursday and Friday and Sunday. But the fact that we're this close to it and it's still an open question. And yeah, our friend Fabian Ardaia is tweeting out the Dave Roberts quotes

about this. And Roberts said, I'm in the position of following the lead of Major League Baseball. Their recommendation was for us to, he was our scheduled Sunday starter and to move forward and have him start that game on Sunday. And so for me to try to read into it anymore, outside of just following what they had advised me and us to do, I just choose to follow kind of their lead. He said he has talked to Bauer. He didn't share what they talked about. He said it's out of our hands. So the extent to which that is actually the case, I don't know. I'm sure that this is a collaborative decision to some extent between the Dodgers and the commissioner's office, but one would hope that it results in him not being on the mound while this

is progressing. Yeah, I mean, Chelsea Janes from the Washington Post tweeted, Trevor Bauer just jogged up the stairs of the Dodgers dugout with his selfie camera set up pointed at his face, jogged into the outfield where pitchers are throwing. This is not a person who is going to shy away from making himself a spectacle in a moment when the thing that is in the best interest of survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence is for him to not be present. And so that needs to be a decision that the Dodgers or the league or someone makes for him because he clearly can't be trusted to make it himself.

because he clearly can't be trusted to make it himself. And I know that maybe Dave Roberts is in a weird spot in a way because they're waiting for a decision to come down from the league. But LA had a day off yesterday. Like the fact that this wasn't sorted before they had a media availability today makes me very nervous that this guy is just going to continue to start until actual charges are filed, which we will remind our listeners is not required for the league to take action, right? There doesn't have to be a criminal indictment for him to be put on administrative leave or for him

to face a suspension under the domestic violence policy. He doesn't have to have charges filed, and he doesn't have to be convicted of anything. If they conduct an investigation and find that he violated the policy, they can suspend him. And we can talk about how weird it is for an employer to be the one that's meting out punishment for this stuff and how disappointing it is that we don't have better avenues of both consequence and therapy and rehabilitation for people within our criminal justice system. But this is an agreement that Major League Baseball and the Players Association volunteered to make, right? They wanted to stay clear of the mistakes that the NFL had made when it came to domestic violence, right? They wanted

credit for being proactive about this stuff, and that requires them to take responsibility for it, and in this brief window, they have abdicated that at least so far. Hopefully they will rise to the occasion, but I don't really know what more they need than what has been reported. this podcast. Unfortunately, there are quite a few of them in baseball as there are in every field and walk of life. For instance, we didn't talk about the Marcelo Zuna incident last month because that was a case where I don't know what we could have added other than, well, this is terrible. It was one of those cases where by the standards of this sort of thing, it was clear cut and handled quickly. In that case, it was witnessed in the moment, the incident, the police reported what happened. Of course, you can't always take police reports as gospel, but even I think Ozuna's account acknowledged that there was wrongdoing here and he was charged you know, charged and arrested right away and was not

on the field again. So often when we end up talking about it, it's not just to say this happened and it's bad, but it's when it kind of lingers like this or, you know, a player who has this in his past gets another chance with another team or doesn't serve some sort of penalty or it's unclear whether there will be any penalty and then it feels more necessary to say something about it while that's going on while whatever the appropriate penalty might be is not being assessed and this is one of those cases where it's kind of dragging on for a few days already, and we don't know what the resolution will be. And in some cases, we never find out the details, which is okay. Of course, the public isn't always entitled to the details,

and you don't necessarily need all the details to decide not to sign someone or start someone. It just makes it trickier to talk about in some ways whereas when you have some details and they're as disturbing as these it just calls out for some sort of immediate action so it's a terrible situation yeah yeah and it's like very strange thing to have to cover you know it's like in a signing editor you feel weird saying hey go write about this horrible thing like even telling someone to read that report like i didn't retweet it not because i thought the athletic handled it poorly but because you don't know what the experiences of the people around you have been in their lives right you don't know what is going to re-stimulate trauma. And so, you know,

it's a tricky thing to ask someone to write about. And like you said, it's one of those things where it's like, it feels so obvious that this is just wrong, that you don't know what you're really adding to that conversation. And like, you know, to be clear, I think there's like a sliding scale of your personal stakes in an issue like this, right? Like, obviously, my stakes are very different than the victims. And so I don't mean to make this about me or like draw some equivalence there. But it is a thing that I think has a pretty profound impact on people and their ability to engage with the sport and the way that the league talks about this stuff and the way that people in positions of authority talk about it is just wanting seemingly every time and we've been doing it for too long for that to still be true it's like how how are these guys not better at even faking it now right we've had've had years of this. And so it's just very frustrating. And then you come on your podcast and you're trying to talk about it in some way

that is going to be insightful or incisive. And I don't know that there's really much more to do, apparently blubber about it for 10 minutes, but we deserve a lot more. The sport deserves a lot more. Small B baseball deserves a lot more, and the people who watch it deserve more, and the people who play it and work in it who are actively trying to make it a more respectful and welcoming place deserve more,

and I wish that we were closer to getting what we deserve. I think we've made progress. And I do want to acknowledge the progress that has been made. But we deserve to be further along in that process than we are. And I hope that, you know, the next time we record, that we will be able to say we got what we wanted. And that was him not pitching on Sunday. But I've been disappointed before. Yeah. And we've talked plenty about Bauer on this podcast.

And when the Dodgers signed him and made him the highest paid player in baseball, I think we devoted at least as much time to his off the field history as we did to his performance as a pitcher or what he meant for the NL West race and all of that. But obviously, I've been thinking in the wake of all of this about any part I've played in the past about bringing more attention to Bauer. And that's something that I'm not feeling great about. A few years ago, I co-wrote a book in which Bauer played a prominent part. And I don't have a relationship with Bauer. I've never talked to Bauer. I don't feel any particular affinity for Bauer and never did. But my name is on a book in which he is a character. And whatever attention that brought to him, I regret.

It's not as if he was some obscure unknown figure who had no prior platform, and much of that book does not feature Trevor Power, but he's in the beginning and he's at the end. We turned in that book before his first public repeated harassment of a woman on Twitter and some of the subsequent episodes and even before the sticky stuff cheating, which seems so insignificant compared to this, obviously. And our intent with that book was not to make him a hero. We heard from plenty of people who read that book and said, this guy is an asshole. And that was fine. That was one of the reactions that I was totally fine with eliciting. We were trying to chronicle player development and these innovations in how the game is played, how players are developed, and he was a prominent

part of that. And so it seemed tough to tell that story without him being a part of it in some way. But obviously, I wish he had been a part of it in a different way and a smaller way. And there were things that had happened prior to that, that, you know, obviously gave me misgivings about being associated with a project that he was going to be a character in also. And up to that point, he had certainly sent some bad tweets, bullying tweets, transphobic tweets. Maybe that should have been grounds for not covering him in any way. Since then, it's become even clearer that he's not just immature or socially awkward or trolling or even expressing opinions that a lot of baseball players hold but don't tweet. It's graduated to

the point where it's impossible to pretend that that's all it is. And you could say that that should have been foreseeable or that should have been more clear even at that time. And you might be right about that. So I've been thinking about that too. And he's been a prominent figure in baseball, both because of his own attempts to bring attention to him and because he has made a convenient figure for many media member to write about. And he has had an undeniable impact on the game in more than one way. But given who he clearly is and what has happened since, we can keep talking about this aspect of him as opposed to the other aspects of him, but perhaps that should have been the only story that was told

about him. Well, I appreciate you being self-reflective about that, Ben. And I think that it kind of impresses upon me the need to tread really carefully, even if we're not intentionally elevating, but just chronicling people who we find interesting, but who we don't know. And I think this is a risk that exists in all media coverage of sports that focuses on individual players because there are plenty of guys who have seemed like good dudes and have proven to be the opposite of that. And I don't think that we would necessarily put Trevor Bauer in that category, but I don't think that we necessarily anticipated this. And so I do hope that it is a moment of really serious consideration and self-reflection on the part of

baseball media and I want to be careful here to say that like baseball media is not a monolith right and there were a lot of glowing profiles of Bauer written and there were plenty of pieces and podcasts that said the way that this guy engages with the world is toxic and the way that he engages with social media is harassment and so you know i i don't want to lump everything together because i think that there's been a wide sort of reaction spectrum of reaction to him over the years and that and that that reaction has also changed over the years right as we have learned more about him as he has told us more about him right because he is a vocal source about himself yeah right and so i think there you know there has been self-reflection

along the way and it has altered the course for some folks in terms of how they engage with him and how they engage with personalities like this more broadly but i think that for everyone regardless of where you have stood historically on the question of trevor bauer you know assuming you've taken a stance at all i think it is a good object lesson in the need to be really clear about what you know and what you don't, you know, about a person and to not mistake cleverness with goodness, because those things are sometimes present in the same person. And sometimes cleverness undermines goodness. Right. and works at counter purposes with it. So I do hope that we spend some time reflecting on that. And I also hope that, and this is true of everybody, we don't need to spend too much time doing media navel gazing, but just to remember that you'll never regret

not getting off a snarky tweet. And we should be really careful to not deputize someone's sexual assault into a gotcha yeah right because like the odds are and several people have pointed this out so this is not an original thought on my part but like trevor bauer's not going to see your fucking tweet but people you know who have survived sexual assault or domestic violence will, and they're going to know something about you and how reliable and safe you are to come to in moments of danger and crisis. So again, in the blubbering I just did, I hope the thing that people take away is that we can embrace a standard of caring for one another, right? And that's not something that corporations are good at. It's not something that they're really built for.

And I don't mean that in like an anti-capitalist way. I just mean that like they're the Dodgers. Like they're a huge organization. Care is not really at the core of their mission. Their mission is to win baseball games, but they're doing that in service of a community and they have an obligation to try as best they can to take care of that community. And stuff like this is really hurtful to part of it and is just relentless. It's just, you know, it's every day. This broke on the same day that we learned that Bill Cosby's convictions were going to be overturned.

Right. Like it is just there's something every day. And so Porter placed on the ineligible. Right. Like hours before this, like the details of this break, we get news that Porter's ineligible at least until 2022. And like I imagine that Jared Porter's career in baseball is just thoroughly over, but it is always like a irritating part of these pronouncements where they're like, and at least until 2022.

And I'm like, you can't just come out and say that this shithead never gets to work in the sport again. I get why you do this. I'm sure there's like a litigation reason or whatever, but you really can't just say Jared Porter, who will never employ him again. So his name is lost to time, right? Anyway, so it's relentless. And so when people are presented with that, it is exhausting and it is stressful. And for a great many people, it is re-traumatizing and so let's just try to take care of each other because trevor bauer's not gonna do it so we have to so let's and i promise to try to not cry on the

podcast again i think you should feel free to cry when those emotions want to get out hopefully you won't feel them in the same way many times in the future, but we'll see. Yeah, there are many ways that people like Bauer and Bauer specifically have been covered really right up until, you know, this week, essentially. I mean, right up until after his signing with the Dodgers, where sometimes it focuses exclusively on his off the field behavior. Sometimes it's a story about, oh, the Dodgers just signed the top free agent pitcher. And maybe it mentions he sent a few polarizing tweets or something. It'll phrase it like that. And sometimes it won't mention that at all. And when we were writing in 2018, we tried to document whatever the tweets had been up to that point and say, well, it's not just that he sent some off-putting tweets, but here's what the

tweets were and come to your conclusions about what you think of this person. And at some point, it rises to the level where that person just isn't worth covering anymore. And I think that whatever happens here, however, the situation is resolved. I think the days of Trevor Bauer uses high-speed cameras to perfect his breaking ball features are probably behind us. But that's kind of a fear that you have when you're writing about really anyone who is still alive and sometimes even people who are no longer alive because you never know what will come out. And after you write something, even if you're not writing something where you're delving into their personal lives, and that's not necessarily part of your mandate or your focus, you always wonder and you always

worry. And certainly with Bauer, we didn't know the things that have come to light since, but there were indicators, there were red flags. So there are red flags about a lot of people, there's smoke about a lot of people that there may not necessarily be this sort of fire. Sometimes you have to cover people who are not the best people because they're part of some story that you're telling that maybe is worth telling in some ways, but then other times there are stories that just become not worth telling because of someone who is part of that story. And Bauer's certainly at that level now if he wasn't before.

So we'll see how this all turns out, but it's been a very difficult weekend and story for a lot of people who've been through any sort of experience akin to the one that the woman in this situation allegedly faced so yeah i don't know how to want to go on i think that i think that let's do this and we're gonna leave this in everyone gets a little look i don't want anyone's email to be associated in any of our listeners' mind with this terrible dude and the awful thing he did.

So maybe we should leave it at that for today. And we can reconvene on other subjects later. But I think it's okay to let this one sit as is. And I hope that folks listening will forgive my blubbering and that they'll all be nice to each other. I don't know. I don't know how to end these. It's such a weird... Why does... Yes. Yeah. How do we... I don't know. Everybody just take care of each other and listen to people and don't get your dunks off because who cares? I don't know.

Yes. I never know whether to apologize for something being a bit of a downer or not because we don't want to imply that we shouldn't have talked about it. It's important to talk about. We don't want people to say, aha, they want to stick to sports too. It's like I would like to be able to do that, but I'd like to be able to do that because nothing else in the sport demands our analysis, but it does, and so we have to do it. So yeah, I never know whether to apologize or not either.

Yes, I feel like saying, hey hey next time it'll be a more uplifting episode but i also don't want to i have very little confidence in that promise anymore well yeah that and uh and also i i don't want to suggest that they all have to be right they don't that they should be so yes it's like uh we we got we got an an email on this after we had talked about kind of why we talk about this stuff on the podcast. We had a productive exchange with a listener, so I'm not going to name him. I don't want to make him feel bad, but he did not enjoy that segment of our podcast or the fact that we've had to engage with these aspects of baseball. And what I just said is like we have to meet the sport where it is. And like our job is to help people where it is and like our our job

is to help people understand it and this is part of it so i'd like nothing more than to only talk about the best players in the game but sometimes where the sport is is in the muck and we gotta we gotta deal with that part too yeah and cry a little we have been talking about one of the best players in the game it's just that this is the story about them right now. This is us sticking to sports. Unfortunately, this is part of sports. I won't even say for better or for worse. It's clearly for worse in this case.

But yeah, this is the defending Cy Young Warner. This is a prominent player on perhaps the best team in baseball. Fuck. We don't even talk about the baseball implications, the pennant race implications of something like this because it feels so gross to talk about that. But even if you were the sort of person who felt like that is all that should be discussed on a baseball podcast, there would still be no way to avoid talking about this. So there you have it. I will say that next time, because we're about to record the next episode and have already recorded part of it, we can say with some confidence that we will probably not be talking about Trevor Bauer

next time, if that makes you feel any better. But I can't guarantee that there will not be a future Trevor Bauer conversation. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. But be well, everybody, and be nice to yourselves and be nice to others. Yes. All right. That will do it for today. Thank you for listening, even if it was difficult at times. We wanted to share a couple of resources for anyone who hears this and may be in need of them.

You can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE, S-A-F-E, or at thehotline.org. You can also reach the Hotline for the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network at 800-656-HOPE, H-O-P-E, or R-A-I-N-N.org slash thatsharassment. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Bernie Birnbaum, Elisa Gale, Linus Marco, Francesca Osi, and Jason Nassi. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastwithvancrafts.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. As mentioned, we will be back with another episode very soon. Refresh your feeds and we will talk to you then. I want to talk to you then. I'd say I know, but you always knew. I could be unkind, but I can't be cruel. All my lies are false, but your heart is true

When I see you cry I think tears are cool