Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1739: Poff Piece

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

Ben Lindbergh talks to The Ringer’s Zach Kram about how the red-hot Yankees have salvaged their season, mounted their longest winning streak in 60 years, and put themselves in playoff position. Then (27:33) Ben brings on John Poff, former major leaguer and Stat Blast star, to discuss his brief big league career, walking away from […]

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1739 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. My co-host Meg Rowley is on vacation. So just like last time, I will be joined by two guests today. Later in the episode, I will make it back to back podcast talking to former major leaguers by bringing on a man who was briefly a big leaguer, John Poff. If you've been listening to Effectively Wild for a few years, you may remember the name and you may know why I'm talking to John Poff, who is not just a former major leaguer, but also a former StatBlast star. But I'll explain that a little later. First, I want to talk about the hottest team in baseball, the New York Yankees, the almost certainly playoff-bound New York Yankees, who have been kind of a confounding team all season long and have continued to be kind of

confounding lately, even as they have very rapidly made up most of the ground that they lost with their slow start to the season. On Thursday, they won their 12th consecutive game, and they have finally been firing on all cylinders, most of their cylinders at least. So I'm joined first today by my Ringer colleague, Zach Cram, with whom I have already recorded a Ringer MLB show podcast today. Worlds are colliding, streams are crossing. Zach, welcome to Effectively Wild. Hopefully there will be less, for your sake anyway, forcing you to make tough, quick decisions on this podcast. Yeah, well, there's definitely going to be a lot less Bauman, so probably, because he's usually the one who's putting me on the spot. So I guess we should begin by disclosing our pinstripe sympathies here.

I am a lapsed Yankees fan, a former Yankees fan, some might say a reformed Yankees fan. Your Yankees fandom, a little more active than mine, right? Where's the intensity level compared to whenever your peak Yankees fandom was? A lot lower. My daily mood no longer rests on whether the Yankees win or lose, which is a good thing generally, although I would have been ecstatic over the last two weeks if that were still the case. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think I'm quite as far gone as you, but I am currently en route, I would say. Uh-huh. Well, the Yankees are doing their best to try to keep you on their side these days. And people can take those sympathies into account if they wish during this episode. But I will vouch for Zach and I will say I know almost no one who is more governed by reason and logic, unlike a lot of Yankees fans. He's just going to go with what the numbers say here. And the numbers say that the Yankees playoff odds have absolutely skyrocketed

over the past couple of weeks and really a little longer than that. I mean, if you had told me at the start of the season that the Yankees right now would be a few games behind the Rays and would be sitting in pretty playoff position and would be 75 and 52, I would have said, yep, that sounds about right. But really, if you had told me that they would be here a couple months ago or even more recently than that, I would have been much more surprised. So the last game going into the All-Star break, Sunday, July 11th, that was the one they lost like a heartbreaker to the Astros, a walk-off, and then they come back from the break and they lose their first game to the Red Sox.

And at that point, I believe that was when they bottomed out according to the Fangraphs playoff odds, and they were at 24.3% chance to make the playoffs at that time. And even I, who was optimistic about the Yankees coming into the season.1% and they have more than doubled them since then, which I guess is what happens when you win 12 games in a row and your opponent, Oakland, is losing a bunch of games and the Blue Jays are losing a bunch of games. So I see that their opponents have performed worse, but I think maybe it's not quite as clear why the Yankees have performed better, which is what you wrote about for TheRinger.com this week. And based on what you found, it seems like it might sort of surprise people how and why

exactly the Yankees have won all of these games. Yeah, they traded for Joey Gallo. They traded for Anthony Rizzo and they formed the lineup of big beef boys, which I'll say because I am filling Meg's place. Yes. But the offense, I mean, it's been fine, but it hasn't been that good over the entire second half. The offense ranks outside the top 10 in runs per game in WRC plus. It ranks outside the top 20 in slugging percentage. And that's not what you would expect from the Bronx Bombers. And that figure isn't even park adjusted.

So even with Gallo and Rizzo, the Yankees lineup has been fine. Gallo and Rizzo themselves have been fine. They have WRC pluses in the 90s since joining the team. And that's below average. It's not as bad as some of the replacements they had given all their injuries and COVID absences. So it's an improvement on that end. But this isn't the offensive output you would expect just looking at the names in the lineup.

Yeah, they've had some big hits here and there for sure, but it hasn't really powered the lineup exactly. A lot of the power in the lineup Which has improved recently But the pitching seems more responsible for their success But as for the lineup The guys who are really driving that Are largely, literally largely The guys who were expected to be good to begin with

It's Luke Voigt It's Aaron Judge It's Giancarlo Stanton And it's also some randoms slipping in here and there and also like Tyler Wade. So I'm not going to say it's completely expected, but like Gleyber Torres has turned things around. And the guys who were sort of underperforming at the start of the season have turned it on belatedly. So Rizzo and Gallo, maybe that helps. But I tend to believe that like lineup balance is kind of overrated. I mean,

I guess you could say that maybe breaking up the righties with a couple lefties, even if those lefties haven't been that great, maybe the righties would have had more favorable matchups or something like that. You could construct a scenario where that would help. But I always felt like people were making too much of that. And I guess I can stick to my prior here because those two guys haven't exactly been powering the success. Yeah, I think there was one game, I think, against the Red Sox where Luke Voigt had a game-winning hit because he was able to face a lefty who had come in to face Gallo. So with a three batter minimum, it probably matters more than it used to. But I'm glad you mentioned randoms, Ben, because I'm looking at the August WRC Plus

leaderboard. Giancarlo Stanton ranks sixth with a 184 WRC Plus. And the five names above him just really encapsulate what's so fun about baseball. It's number one is Tyler Naquin for the Reds, number two, CJ Krohn, three, Bryce Harper, that makes sense. and then we have a tie in fourth place with Anthony Santander and Frank Schwindel so those are the names you'd expect to be around Giancarlo Stanton and Bryce Harper but yeah it's it's been Stanton and Stanton has been playing outfield now the Yankees had said as far back as spring training we'll consider playing Stanton in the outfield at some point and then it just never happened and finally the combination of some interleague games in National League parks and the arrival of Rizzo and Gallo have pushed it into the outfield and knock on wood, I guess, but he's looked fine out

there so far. He was never a terrible defender. He just kind of became injury prone and the judge Gallo Stanton outfield has looked good thus far. So I'm not sure if they would ever rely on that like in a playoff game, or if they need a better defensive outlook out there. But the Gallo and left and judge and center are both gold glove caliber outfielders. And that has normalized a little bit, despite the fact that they've been getting on base even more. Like a lot of their struggles, as we discussed earlier in the season, were just like cluster luck and terrible timing and performing really poorly with runners on base and in scoring position and also making a lot of outs on the bases. And some of that is probably just regression. It's just come back to earth a little bit. regression. It's just come back to earth a little bit, but also like speed. Weirdly, the Yankees are stealing a bunch of bases all of a sudden, which probably isn't that responsible for their success, but it is odd. I mean, they had 20 stolen bases in the first half, which was the fewest of any team in the majors. And since the second half started, they have 34, which is trailing only Oakland, Kansas City, and Cleveland.

So that's really weird, too. And that's been kind of a team effort. It's like Tyler Wade leading with nine, but then it's Torres and Judge and Greg Allen and Andrew Velasquez and Anthony Rizzo, just like a bunch of guys stealing bases suddenly. So they look like a less static and obviously less righty heavy team. Those were some of the common complaints about how this team was constructed. And I had my doubts because it was constructed pretty similarly to previous Yankees teams that had done quite well. So I didn't know how much was you actually need to change the construction and how much was just, well, no, those guys need to play up to their previous level. So I guess it's been a little bit of both. And then on the pitching

side, I think is where they've really excelled. It's kind of funny. The Rays have been not quite as hot as the Yankees, but almost as good, which is how they've retained a four game lead in the division. But they've switched roles from what you would expect. Tampa has the best offense in the second half and they lead all teams in batter war, But then the Yankees lead all teams in pitcher war in the second half. And I think heading into the season, that's maybe what you would have expected from a fully healthy unit. But Corey Kluber has been hurt, and Garrett Cole missed time because of the COVID list, and Jordan Montgomery missed time because of the COVID list, and Earl this Chapman was out, and Zach Zach Britton is hurt and Darren O'Day is out for the season. But despite missing all of those players, they have been the best pitching team in the second half, which is how they've

won 12 in a row. Yeah. So who are the pitchers who have actually been that good? So I think you have to start with Nestor Cortez. In my article, I'll go behind the scenes for a second and say that initially, I did not talk about Nestor Cortez enough. And my editor for this piece, Ben Glicksman, who is an avowed Yankee fan, he said I needed to add more about Nestor, particularly because he has a better ERA than Shohei Otani this year. And I'm sorry, Ben, but that is true. And yet, by like park adjusted ERA, Nestor Cortez has been one of the 10 best starting pitchers this year. And of course, that's in a small sample. And I'm not sure if he'll even stick in the rotation once guys like Kluber and Domingo German return, but he's been excellent and going deep into games, which is not

what you would expect from someone with his pedigree. So I think he is the start. Jamison Tyone has also been really good for the last two months, discounting last night's subpar start in Oakland, but he has an ERA below three over his last 10 starts. Jordan Montgomery has been good when healthy. So I think the rotation has been solid. The bullpen is where you have a bigger surprise, I think, in large part because the Yankees have just played so many close games. They've relied a lot on Chad Green and Jonathan Loizaga, who both rank in the top five among all relievers in innings pitch this year. So they've been worked pretty hard. But the Yankees have also needed key innings from a whole bunch of others.

I have this stat in my piece. It's remarkable. Since the All-Star break, among all pitches thrown by Yankees relievers, 63% have come with the winning run on base or at the plate or the tying run on base at the plate or on deck. So if you use that as sort of a proxy for high leverage, that's two-thirds of pitches from Yankees relievers coming in higher leverage moments. No team besides the Yankees is above 44%. So that's a massive gap and shows they don't really have many lower leverage innings to go around. If you're a Yankees reliever, you have to pitch in the high leverage of the last month. Yeah. And they have played or won or both the most close games this season just as a team you had something on that right yeah they've uh played the most close games that's decided by one or two runs and they've

won the highest percentage of those games so i think after beating oakland last night by one run of course they are up to 71 games decided by one or two runs and they've won 68 of those games so that's a pretty good formula and explains how they're dramatically over-performing their Pythagorean record, their run differential. But it's guys like Wandi Peralta, who they acquired for Mike Tauchman earlier this year, who has been lights out over the last few weeks, including like relieving Aroldis Chapman to get a save and Lucas Lutke, who's done the same thing. And he hadn't pitched in the majors in half a decade. And it's Steven Ridings, who you talked about on Meet a Major Leaguer, who came up and just threw a few good innings before getting sent down again. Clay Holmes acquired at the trade

deadline, who has like a 30% strikeout rate and 3% walk rate in New York. So it's all of these one to two winning guys just coming in and relieving each other one after the other, not allowing any runs. Yeah. I know you're not as much of a fan anymore, but I wonder if that is a fun way to win as a team, at least for the fans. I mean, it's a stressful way to win. It's almost like they've been playing playoff games all season long and most of them have been turning out the right way for Yankees fans, at least lately. And most of them have been turning out the right way for Yankees fans, at least lately. And I guess that makes it all worthwhile.

I can't decide whether they have been lucky as a team or unlucky as a team, because normally you'd think, well, if you're winning a bunch of close games, that is probably at least a little luck based. But then it seems like they've gotten unlucky in a lot of ways, too, whether it's with offensive timing or just with injuries. So maybe it all kind of evens out. Yeah, I think the injury question is fascinating, especially looking forward to a potential wildcard game or advancing farther in the playoffs.

Like Wandy Peralta and Lukey have been better pitchers than Chapman and Zach Britton this season. Britton might not return, but if he does come back, if Chapman does come back and regain the closer role, he pitched the ninth inning last night, does Aaron Boone turn to those guys instead of the guys who kind of brought the Yankees to the playoffs? I think that's a really tough question for like looking at past performance versus future projection. And in a one game scenario, it's kind of tossing the ball up in the air anyway. And it's such a small sample, you don't

know what's going to be the right choice. But I think beyond Green and Loaizaga, who form the backbone of that bullpen, I should note that Loaizaga leads all fan graphs relievers in war this season at 2.4, which is pretty impressive. I'm not sure who gets the important innings from the Yankees bullpen right now. Yeah. And I wonder how they will fit everyone in who is coming back now, because I've seen a bunch of Yankees fans tweeting images of the Death Star and talking about fully operational Death Stars. And it seems like Yankees fans are feeling themselves a little right now, which makes sense. Although I imagine some of those same Yankees fans were probably completely throwing in the towel a couple months ago and calling for Cashman and Boone to be fired and perhaps have changed their tune.

But we've seen some guys already start to come back. So Gio Urshela is already back. Gleyber Torres is about to be back. And then on the pitching side, you have Corey Kluber, who is going to return after a long absence to start on Monday. And Luis Severino has resumed his throwing program. I guess it remains to be seen whether he will actually throw pitches in the major leagues this year. But you have those guys coming back. Domingo German should be back at some point, perhaps working out of the bullpen. So you have all the guys you mentioned, like Nestor Cortez

and these new relievers and Luis Gil, the Yankees prospect who has had a great debut and three scoreless starts to start his career. So I wonder how you slot in all of those guys. I guess with some of the injured ones, you can maybe just take a little load off them and use them in relief or short bursts or something. But suddenly they almost have more players than they have roster spots after having too few players for most of the season. And it wouldn't have been a problem a few seasons ago, but the September roster limit is now 28

instead of 40 like it used to be. You could have just put everyone on the roster like teams used to and have, you know, Gleyber Torres in the starting lineup, but then keep Velazquez and Tyler Wade on for pinch runners or defensive replacements and also call up Greg Allen and Jonathan Davis. But you can't you don't have room for all of those guys anymore. So I think some of them have options. Of course, Jonathan Davis is back down in AAA. Steven Ridings is back down in AAA. Luis Gil is back down in AAA.

So those players who have performed well might just have to stay there until another person gets injured. Even Joely Rodriguez, who is just the other guy that the Yankees got in the Gallo trade from the Rangers, he had almost a 6 ERA with the Rangers, albeit with better peripherals, and he has a 2.16 ERA with the Yankees. It's like Cashman had the magic touch at the deadline, kind of. I don't know whether there was ever any reason to think that Cashman or Boone were not the right people to be leading this team or this organization now. But I would think that probably they have restored some confidence, though, really, it all just comes down to the team actually playing better, which is something that those guys can only kind of control.

And I think part of it seems to be targeting a certain kind of pitcher. They definitely have looked for ground ball relievers. Zach Britton obviously was signed and is the greatest ground ball reliever of the last decade. But he hasn't pitched that much this season. Jonathan Loizaga ranks in the top 10 among relievers and ground balls. Clay Holmes, I believe, ranks number one among qualified relievers with a 72% ground ball rate. Joel Rodriguez also ranks in the top 10. So I think in terms of the relievers they acquired, they had a particular profile they were looking for, and that served them well. But will that continue to serve them as well when, say, Gleyber Torres is back at the shortstop

position where he's probably overextended? So I think that's where the roster mixing and matching really depends on who is in each possession and do they match well. So the Yankees have the most wins of any team in August, the most wins of any team in the second half. Actually, they've been so hot that they have the most wins of any team since the start of July as well, even though things weren't going so great for them then. And as we speak, they have this 12 game winning streak, which by the time most people hear this will either be over or will be 13 games. And they've got Garrett Cole going against the A's. It's a big four-game weekend series. They took the first one already. It actually sort of surprised me that this was such an impressive winning streak for the Yankees because when they

got to 11 and everyone said they haven't won in 11 games in a row since 1985, I was thinking, really? Like 11 is not that many. I mean, the A's won 13 games in a row just this season and the A's aren't some juggernaut. And you think of all the great Yankees teams of the last 25 years. I mean, they haven't had a losing season since 1992. You would have thought that at some point there they would have won 11, but no. And now they're up to 12. And that takes you all the way back to September of 1961, when Roger Maris is chasing Babe Ruth's record. That's kind of incredible to me when you think

of all of the great Yankees teams over that period. I was shocked to encounter that just because, yeah, you've had 50 years of Yankees teams. And even if not every one of those was good enough to go on a 10-game winning streak necessarily, they haven't had a losing record in 25 years. So it's been a very long time and lots of chances along the way. You would have thought like the 1998 team would have won that many games

or any of the other teams in the 1960s. So that was very surprising to me as well. So how do you think they set up as a playoff team now that we know almost certainly that they will be a playoff team? We don't know yet whether they will be a division winner or a wildcard team. There's still a significant margin back of Tampa Bay at this fairly late date in the season. And they haven't made up nearly as much ground on the Rays as they have on the Red Sox and the Blue Jays because the Rays have been winning pretty often too. But depending, I mean, obviously if they are in the wildcard game,

they have Garrett Cole, which sets them up well. He has continued to pitch pretty well with the occasional scuffles post sticky stuff crackdown. But beyond that, if they were to get to the division series, do you think they set up well? Like they're not as obviously as sort of built for October team as, I don't know, Milwaukee or some other team with a great top of the rotation and bullpen. They're just kind of like at this point, pretty strong top to bottom basically. Well, Ben, I'm glad you kind of glossed this point pretty strong top to bottom basically well ben i'm glad you kind of glossed over the wild card game there because the potential of a yankees red socks one game playing would i think reactivate my fandom to its fullest extent yeah i'm very worried about

that possibility which looks uh very likely uh according to the fan graphs playoff odds even if i think you and i are both a little higher on oakland graphs, playoff odds, even if I think you and I are both a little higher on Oakland than the playoff odds seem to be. Projecting forward beyond that, I think the Yankees do have a worse rotation than a couple of the teams they might play. Like the White Sox, I think, have a much better top three if everyone's healthy. I think the Astros have a much better top four, frankly, than the Yankees do. The Yankees have Garrett Cole. But then beyond that, I think there are a lot of question marks, not a lot of playoff experience. I guess Corey Kluber has good playoff experience, but it's unclear what level of skill

he brings at this point, what level of velocity he brings after such a long time hurt. And beyond that, it's like Jordan Montgomery had one playoff start for four games and nobody else as a potential rotation candidate has pitched in a playoff game. And I think sometimes previous playoff experience can be overrated. But even looking at the caliber of pitcher, like I would take the White Sox number two and three pitchers. I would take the Astros number two and three pitchers over anyone on the Yankees. And Tampa is kind of a different story given the uncertainty and the raise rotation.

But I also trust Kevin Cash and the raise bullpen just in any circumstance, frankly. Yeah. All right. Well, to everyone's relief, the Yankees are fine. I know everyone was worried about that. Are the Yankees actually going to disappoint and miss the playoffs? Everyone on the edge of their seat? Nope. Don't worry. Order restored.

The Yankees are actually good. And just sort of surveying the standings, it doesn't seem like there are a lot of surprises left because Atlanta has taken a pretty commanding position at the top of the NL East, which I think a lot of people sort of expected. And then you've got the Brewers as expected at the top of the Central, and you've got the Rays and the Yankees are good. And the White Sox are dominating this AL Central and the Astros. So there are a lot of, yeah, we saw that coming. But there's the Giants. I guess just the Giants on their own are enough of a surprise to make up for any lack of surprise elsewhere.

And then you have, I guess, the Padres, your Padres, underperforming to some extent. And there are some other slight surprises, like the Mariners still being 10 games over 500. The Mariners are, what, a game behind Oakland now? Yep. That's pretty weird. No one will remember that if they end up missing the playoffs, really. But the fact that we've gotten to this point and they're still so close, that I did not see coming. Yeah. And just with the Yankees,

I do want to mention that they were below 500 at the end of April. They were very close to 500 through the entire first half, but it seems pretty clear at this point that they will finish with a winning record and continue their streak of never having a losing record during the duration of my life. So I think that's the most important streak for me, even if my fandom has

waned somewhat. I have never, even as an infant, experienced a losing season. You've led a charmed life. Yes. Sorry to Meg for who I'm filling in. All right. Well, you can all go follow Zach on Twitter at Zach Cram. Check out all of his articles at The Ringer, including his recent Yankees article, which I will link to. And you can hear him with me and Michael Bowman on The Ringer MLB show every week.

And we just did an auction draft of World Series contenders. And I actually ended up with the Yankees as well as every other ALA's team for some reason. I guess I just spoiled it, but it was fun. So go check that out too. Thank you, Zach. Thank you.

All right, I'm going to take a quick break now, and then I will be back with John Poff, whom I've been hoping to speak to for a couple of years. I'm really crossing off a bunch of names on my wishlist of former major leaguer podcast guests while Meg is away. And just to set the scene, John, who is a 68-year-old former Philly and brewer who was born in Ohio and lives in Michigan now, was featured in a Sam Miller stat blast on episode 1349 back in March of 2019. I won't tell you exactly how he was featured because I will explain it to John himself at the start of the next segment, but suffice it to say that he came

up because of a statistical curiosity, which then led Sam to discover that there was much more to John Poff than just his brief service in the big leagues. It's funny, you just heard Zach mention how rosters used to expand much more in September, and the change from 40-man to 28-man rosters was actually what prompted Sam's stat blast, because he was worried that some players, like John Poff, would never get a chance to be big leaguers if they couldn't come up in September. Poff produced a 575 OPS in 31 games and 91 plate appearances in 1979 and 1980. But those stats are just the surface and you will hear it from him soon. One tiny note, I don't know if this actually requires a content warning, but fairly late in this conversation, John does express an opinion

about a certain former president of the United States. It's probably nothing you haven't heard before, but just putting it out there for those of you who use baseball podcasts as a refuge from politics. Of course, Meg and I do discuss politics in a sense fairly often on the show, but we tend to discuss politicians a lot less often, I would say. Again, it's pretty short and tame, just a somewhat unexpected reference to someone a lot of you are probably happy not to hear about anymore. So I hope that doesn't dissuade you from listening. It is just a brief comment toward the end of a long conversation. But I figured if you want Meg to warn you if she's going to do a swear, I would warn you that John is going to do a reference to a polarizing politician,

albeit in a way that is related to baseball. So I'll be back in just a moment with John Poff. We have that twist that asks me to sweet, that asks me to sick. He never smiles, his mouth never twists. The breath in my lungs feels clanging and thick. Well, I know his name is called Mr. D. And one of these days he's gonna set you free. Our human scars is hanging right around his neck. John Poth is or has been a farmer, a cook, a writer, an acupuncturist, a schoolteacher, and probably many more incarnations that I'm not aware of.

He was also, for a time, a Major League outfielder and first baseman for the Phillies and Brewers, though I'm not sure that that's close to the most interesting thing about him. As a friend of his once wrote on Facebook, if Sid Finch were a real guy, he'd be John Poff. And we cannot have Sid Finch on the show, but we can, fortunately, have John Poff, who is with me now. Hello, John. Hello. Happy to have you.

Thank you for that introduction. Yes, I really built you up there. So I hope you're as interesting as I made you sound. I can't wait to deflate everybody's expectations. So let me tell you how you came to our attention. So a couple of years ago, my co-host Sam Miller was doing a segment, and we do this regularly. It's sort of a statistical segment where we look up some interesting or obscure stat or fact, and we hope it takes us down a rabbit hole or leads us, introduces us to something or someone we don't know. was trying to figure out on this particular episode was who has had the longest major league career spent exclusively in the last month of the season. So who has played the most major league games, but all in either September or early October, essentially. And the all-time leader in that category is Fernando Perez, who played for the Rays in 2008 and 2009. But second on the list is John Poff, of course.

And that's a distinction that I don't know if you know that you had. But once we found out about that, Sam did a little digging and found out about the rest of your career and life. And so we dwelt on that for a little while. But that's what brought you to our attention. And I think it's interesting because Fernando Perez, who has also been on this podcast a couple of times, he works as a coach and analyst for the Giants now, but like you, he is a writer and a poet and a deep thinker. And that could be a coincidence, but I wonder if there is something to getting there, to reaching the pinnacle,

making the majors, having your dream come true, but then not exactly staying there that maybe leads one to kind of artistic reflections. That's really interesting about Fernando Perez and me. There's another obscure stat I thought I might qualify for. I'll tell you about that later. No, I think I was just always kind of an odd bird, so to speak, and playing only two months in big leagues was pretty frustrating. I had a career that, oh, you just can't talk about that sort of thing without seeing what the bitter or frustrated or whatever. I look back on my career like, yeah, I could easily have had more time in the big leagues.

I did. Things went well and things didn't go well, and I take responsibility for times I didn't go well, and I take responsibility for times I didn't go as well as I might have. It really all came down to me over time that back in the old days, a couple people at crucial times that I respected made it clear they respected me as a ballplayer. And so I was sort of slow to learn how to play professional baseball, I think. I probably was too thoughtful about things instead of just playing hard and so forth. The ball player that most influenced me, one of the two or three best friends I made was John Bukovic,

a long-time Phillies player and coach. We couldn't have been more dissimilar in our personalities, but he taught me, in my opinion, how to play each game and each at bat and do one's best and play hard. And so I'm content I did that in highs and lows and all of this. Yeah, I used to have a column at a site where I wrote called Baseball Prospectus, and I named it Overthinking It, which is something that people say in baseball about baseball players. Oh, he's overthinking it, which is sort of an insult, right?

It's derogatory, the idea that you shouldn't be thinking about what you're doing. It should just be instinctual. And I always overthink things. So I thought it was an appropriate name for my column. But I think that may have changed in recent years where thinking things through is maybe a bit more valued than it used to be. But I suppose that was something that could give you a bad rap, at least at some points in baseball, if you didn't really blend in, if you thought about things that others didn't, then perhaps there was some mistrust or suspicion about that in some quarters. Oh, there's one time that wouldn't bother going into it.

One time, one manager I thought at a crucial time was kind of suspicious of me. But I don't know. At a certain point, who cares? I did think years ago, I thought one of the things Yogi Berra should have said was sometimes thinking is a stupid thing to do. And you kind of grew up wanting to be a writer, it sounds like. wanting to be a writer, it sounds like. And one of the nice things is that you have a very thorough and comprehensive Saber bio that was published several years ago by Rory Costello. And I'd imagine that the ratio of Saber bio length to career length for you is up there among the leaders, because this is a long and detailed one.

Statistically, probably the longest bio for a two-month player in the history of baseball. one. Statistically, probably the longest bio for a two-month player in the history of baseball. Yes, exactly. But he notes that you always wanted to be a writer, and he quotes a friend of yours named Tom Drake, who said, during John's extended minor league career, I often pictured him on those long bus rides, writing poetry or reading Chaucer while everyone else was playing cards or reading comic books or Playboy. Is that what it was like and if so what was it like to be a bookworm on a baseball team that is really a pretty interesting question you'll probably have to cut me off if i go into these things well i'll start by saying you know i taught for i was teaching again at 68 and i taught for many years and and one of the journals a kid that

wrote what you were like when you were young, and to me, and I hadn't thought about that much. And I said, well, I could read well and play ball. And that was about it. And it kind of sums up my life. But anyhow, I was a serious English major there at good old Duke University. And when I first started playing ball, we'd go on road trips, and I would pack up my bag with Blake and John Dunn and Keats and so on and so forth. It was kind of like, I'm not really joking, it was kind of like scripture to me. A very funny moment.

The first place I played, I played in Pulaski, then in the Instructional League, and then Reuben Marl sent me up to play in Mazatlan in Winter Ball. And my roommate was George Theodore, the Mad Stork. I don't know if you go back this far on baseball history. He played with the Mets briefly, and his nickname was the Mad Stork. And he was talking with me one night about how he got great quotes. He was sort of popular with the New York Writers, and he got great quotes from John Dunn. And I said, oh, yeah, here's what I've got.

Would you like to read it? And I got it out of my suitcase, and he didn't want to read it. He wanted to get something catchy. But the point is, what I found, that really did get in the way. I was kind of reading this. It didn't work in just trying for me to play ball. And this was the most interesting thing, because it led to a major interest in my life.

What I found, particularly going around the American Association and going into bookstores in Des Moines and Wichita What I found, particularly going around the American Association, and going into bookstores in Des Moines and Wichita and so forth, I began reading Native American history. And I was surprised at how uninformed I had been. And those books just really worked on road trips and so forth. And that sparked an interest. I was pretty shocked how ignorant I was of things that were happening, not just that happened in the past,

but that were happening now at that time, the 70s, with Native Americans. And that opened my eyes. But also, it was just so interesting. I don't think I've really talked about this with hardly anyone. It was just so interesting how those books resonated as I was flying around from Denver to Springfield and Wichita, played three and a half summers, of course, in Oklahoma City. Yeah, and would you look for kindred spirits, I suppose, on these teams?

People who might not be looking around John Dunn, but would at least know who John Dunn was or have some interest? You know, the answer is no. Somebody and I had a big spring training had a big home run spring training game afterwards. I guess you get more attention for hitting a home run spring training game than you do for hitting 20 in a triple AC. But the guy asked me about things that I would read and asked me if I had trouble making friends. They're sort of the same question you asked. And the answer is that I really never found that I made friends on the basis, very often on the basis of similar literary or intellectual interests, and particularly

in baseball. As I said, Vukovic was the polar opposite in some ways. And so, no, it wasn't like that about having discussions about literature and that. Did you feel some pressure to hide that side of yourself, or was it more just about not advertising it exactly? No, I did feel a pressure to hide that. I remember in the hobby of mine of memorizing poetry, and I remember in 76 in Reading, I just felt that there should be on the bathroom stall,

there should be Buffalo Bill's defunct, you know, the E.E. Cummings poem, who used to ride a water smooth, so we're starting on break one, two, three, four, five, it was just like that. He was a handsome man. So I wrote that on the bathroom stall and I had a friend who got a kick out of that

and he wasn't interested in E.E. Cummings or anything, but he got a kick out of that poem. So that's kind in E.E. Cummings or anything. He got a kick out of that poem. So that's kind of what it was like for me. I think it's something that writers who cover baseball are drawn to baseball players who have those interests because there aren't that many of them. And so, as you mentioned, George Theodore maybe being popular with the press,

of course, you're going to cotton to anyone who will give you a good quote and not just spout the same cliches over and over again. But also, I think it's sort of flattering to see some part of yourself in a professional athlete. Just in my own history, I never aspired to be a baseball player, really, but I did aspire to be a writer. Not that I could have been a baseball player if I wanted to, but it just wasn't even something that crossed my mind, really. And I think it's kind of flattering maybe to think that someone who did have the athletic talent to make it to the majors as you did would also be just as captivated, if not more so, by these maybe less sensational, less highly valued

pursuits. You know, you see just as much value in writing a poem, it seems, as in pinch hitting and getting a hit, for instance. So that's kind of an appealing idea to those of us on the sidelines, I suppose. Well, that's interesting. I don't know. Well, that's interesting. I don't know. I think reading just strikes a chord with people. And with me, it runs very deep. Yeah. high profile, his herald mom. And I was younger than them. And he said, well, the college

that was served, we raised and produced a major league ball player and a first-rate writer. And those were the facts about Titter. So I looked at my mom and, well, I would like to do that. And so, and I really, I don't know.

Would you rather have a career in the Binkley's or write really a great poem? And I don't know. Would you rather have a career in the Binkley's or write really a great poem? And I don't know, they're not dissimilar pursuits. They might do one's best and see what happens. One is significantly more lucrative, I suppose, in most cases, but maybe not as much in your era as now. Yeah, I want to talk about that. Let's see, I'd like to get right to baseball if we could. I'm kind of real interested to do this,

but I lost it. It's interesting to me. My career was frustrating and so forth, and afterwards I didn't follow baseball very closely, a little bit, not really out of bitterness or anything else. It's just like it. But there was a point in the early 90s, and I remember this very vividly,

because I made kind of a record of it. But when salaries... I was... When salaries got over $2 million a year, I was just like, okay. This is enough. You know, I was there. I know the guys. I know what it takes to get there.

I know what it is in this society. And more than $2 million a I know what it is in this society. And more than $2 million a year to play ball is just too much. And I wrote that. I wrote that to a friend of mine that I could have a record of because he quoted me in the strength goals when he used to be the sports editor at the Philadelphia employer. And I really just did kind of, it's not a philosophy, it's just a strong feeling I had that, you know, enough is enough.

And I haven't been that interested in it since. And to me, there's sort of, I was back there in the, I was on Major League Rouser for four years, so four Major League Spring trainings, you know, starting in 78. And those were really crucial years for free agency in the heyday of Marvin Miller. And Marvin came around each spring and talked to the team. And I remember vividly the first real time.

I was just, frankly, I was just dazzled by the guy. He was so clear and never condescending. And he spoke clearly to me and he spoke clearly to everybody else in the room about what was going on, and he had the undivided loyalty of everyone. There couldn't have been a more united union, I don't think. And yet the end result of that was the whole free agency. It's perfectly logical. It's American. A person should be able to go to work wherever they want to.

But what round up in practice was simply astonishing salaries for marquee players, and then the second thing was arbitration for players who played more than three years, which would then have to be based off, in some measure,

those really high salaries. And that was it. That was the reason to exist for the Players Association. And I just felt that after a while, it was like, come on, this could be a real union. What about the concession workers? What about the minor league players? And so on and so forth. And Marvin was famous,

not that I'm on the first name basis that there ever was. Marvin Miller was famous for his disdain for the fans. And, well, I don't know if famous is the right word, but he expressed it openly, and it was kind of, it made sense, it was kind of, well, there's this emergency situation,

and you guys, this is your value, and you can't be deterred by so on and so forth. But it didn't really make sense to me then, and it doesn't make sense in the long run. I mean, there's no professional baseball. Who cares if people don't want to watch it? And so all that really, and I'll get to one more thing about this. I've just been thinking about it recently. To me, there were sort of three stages about how people looked at Major League Baseball players. The generation before me was kind of like the first hundred pages of life on the Mississippi,

the way Mark Twain looked at steamship operators. They made good money, but he was just filled with admiration. And I think that's what ballplayers in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and into the 50s did not make astonishing amounts of money, but were held in high esteem. Here's a perfect example of what I mean. When I was in college, one summer, I went out camping to Wyoming with a friend of mine, and we wound up one night in Du Bois, Wyoming in a small town. We got there on a Friday night. There was a rodeo. We'd never seen

a rodeo. It was a brand new world. But downtown Du Bois, Wyoming was Woody Held's pizza parlor. Woody Held was adjourning the shortstop for the Cleveland Indians that I grew up with watching. And I was just so taken and I asked, I walked in and said, is Woody here?

No, he's not here. But his wife's working at the drugstore if you want to go down and talk. And had I met him, I would have just been filled with respect for what he had done, not, okay. And I'm thinking today that if a kid or someone about the age I was met a major league shortstop now with that kind of resume the first thought would be well this guy's making ten million dollars a year and it would be a kind of barrier to me personally I just like that I like that I like that better the way it was then and and it was that transition age when Pete Rose came over to the Phillies

and the pre-admissions was really getting going, was that transitional phase. And I saw all that and, I don't know, that's my philosophy of majoring in baseball, I guess. Yeah, I've heard sort of a similar idea expressed by Roger Angel, the great New Yorker writer, as well as Rob Neier, the baseball writer. And they've noted, you know, without condemning this necessarily or saying that

the players aren't entitled to that money, they have just observed that there is more of a gulf between fans and players these days. They lead different lifestyles. And also for players and media members who used to have roughly equivalent salaries and maybe social status almost and would sort of hang out together, go to the bar after the game. And now you're in a far different tax bracket and you're less likely to have the player who is owning the pizzeria, I suppose, and is just hanging out in the local community and you can go up and shake his hand, right? And that's something that I think you can sort of lament while also recognizing the economic realities of the situation. I mean, it's interesting because you arrived at kind of that

period of transition where free agency had just started when you made the majors. So your career began, at least in professional baseball, prior to free agency and ended after it. And not that you were in a position to cash in as much as many others did at that time. But you hear, I think, a couple of contrasting responses where players from earlier eras, when the salaries were much more in line with the average Americans, although probably still above that level. I think some players from that era feel bitter about it, because they came around at the wrong time or they didn't get the benefits of that. Others, I suppose, feel like, hey, good for them. Glad they're getting theirs that I couldn't get at that time. And then I guess there's sort of a spectrum of responses between those two,

but I can see why it would be sort of a strange feeling for someone like you who was in that profession and it's not ancient history, but you know, doesn't have the bank accounts to show for that, that some other contemporary players do. Well, yeah, but the whole point really is that it's a... I mean, I grew up wanting to play ball, and professional baseball is much different than a childhood dream, but the greatest thing about it was the wonderful challenge of it

and the experience of it and trying to really be a ballplayer. And so I don't know what that sounds like to people, but it is an authentically hard thing to do. And it's a great mirror, practically, for who is a ballplayer, of course. But also, I mean, there's a few guys that just zoom to the top, so to speak. But by and large, it's demanding and challenging, and that turns into, it's great to be rewarded, and perfectly okay with people getting rewarded like generously but come on all players

with entourages and and you know that's just it's just a bit much for me and as i said it's not a philosophy it's just the feeling that yeah as i understand it you know the money is there baseball is a big business a bigger business than ever before. It has billions and billions of dollars of revenue every year. And so either that revenue is going to go to the owners, who for the most part are already extremely wealthy, or it's going to go to the players. Of course, it's divided between the two. If anything, I think the player share of the revenue has lagged a bit behind the overall increase in revenue in the game. And so I think sometimes I think people will say, oh, you know, the players make too much money and their idea is that if the players didn't make so much money, I don't know,

baseball would be free for fans or tickets would be a lot cheaper or there would be some benefit that would redound to the common person. Whereas, as I understand it, I think it's more likely that if the players weren't making that money, they would just be going to the owners who need it even less. And when you do have cases where a team will cut payroll, for instance, and be spending less on players, they don't go out and say, oh, we're lowering ticket prices accordingly, necessarily. I mean, every now and then they might if they think that they can't put people in the seats otherwise.

But it seems to me that those prices are set because it's what the market will bear. And if people will pay the price for those tickets, then teams will charge that much regardless of whether the shortstop is making $2 million or $20 million. Well, yeah. So you need something like a real union. I went, a friend of mine, about 10 years ago, he was going to be able to see the Tigers, a lifelong Tiger player that had been up in the woods in northern part of Michigan, the Slovakia Peninsula. And so we went down and he had tickets and so forth. And that was really disenchanting to me. You couldn't even get in until the OMP batting practice was over,

which was, when I was a kid, was like the most fun thing to go watch. But every single thing seemed to be priced to the max. And I was a schoolteacher at the time, making an innocent schoolteacher's salary. And it's like, really? Thank God it wasn't a double hit or I would have starved to death. I don't really want to buy a hot dog. I'm making a decent school teacher's salary. And it's like, really? Thank God it wasn't a double hit or I would have starved to death. I don't really want to buy a hot dog. And so I'm not pontificating or arguing about something.

I'm just saying. And I'll tell you something else. Even before you contacted me about this, I'd just been thinking about this for the first time, about the difference between the old days when I was playing and now, is that in the old days, the players owned the game. In other words, there was a book, a book about professional baseball, about everything from cutoffs and relays to, you know, don't make the first out of the base and so on.

And this was predicated on what the players and the former players that were managers and coaches had learned or felt was the right way to do it. And the book evolved. There was Gene Mock and Sacrifice Bunce in the 60s and Earl Weaver going through the long ball and so forth. But it was really like this club, so to speak, of how do you play baseball? And talking after the game in the locker room of the clubhouse,

I remember the terminology, about how to play the game, and so on and so forth. And it's funny to me now that players make such phenomenal sums of money, and yet with the research into what works and doesn't work, and so on and so forth, all of the whole, I think they're kind of involved in this in some way or another,

all these concepts I don't know so much about. It's kind of interesting that the players are just sort of, it's not the same thing. And that's really interesting to me. Yeah, no, that is true that players are, to a greater extent, following instructions. They're left to their own devices less often. You know, someone tells them what pitch they should throw to this player or where they

should stand because the ball is more likely to be hit there. So you are kind of taking that out of the player's hands to a certain extent. Of course, they still have to perform on the field, but a lot of that preparation is supplied for them, whether they take it into account or not. But it's interesting that you mentioned being a school teacher, because that's something that's come up when we've talked about salaries or the share of revenue on the show in the past, is that on the one hand, you can say, well, it's a big business and there's all this revenue and the players are entitled to their fair share. They are the main attraction after all. And so if there are this many billions in the game,

then there should be this many billions going to the players. On the other hand, you can also say, well, what does it say about us as a society that you can make this many millions playing baseball? Whereas, and people will often cite schoolte school teachers, right? And no one questions the value to society of school teachers, but no one is paying school teachers $20 million a year. And so you can say, well, there's some societal benefit to baseball. Of course, people enjoy it, and it's a nice diversion and recreation and stress reliever and so on, but it may not have the concrete tangible benefits that school teaching does.

So you've done both of those things, which most major leaguers cannot say. You've been at the pinnacle of baseball, but you have also been teaching and seeing how resources are stretched in that area. So I suppose being on both sides in both worlds that way, you would see just how much brighter the spotlight is on one, even though arguably, you know, the other one is the more beneficial to the world. Yeah. I'll tell you when this hit home for me. And I have to say, once again, I am not a bitter man, but it was, well, some years ago, I learned that major league minimum salary doesn't have to a million dollars a year, I think.

And then I learned that that wasn't just for the 25 guys. That was for everybody on the 40-man roster. I was on the 40-man roster for four years. In other words, had I had the career today that I had in the old days, I would have made $2 million in four years, which is about twice as much as I made in 20 years as a school teacher. And so, as I said, I'm not bitter. Okay, maybe a little bit. I know you've written when you got to Duke and your coach there was Enos Slaughter, the Hall of Famer.

And he told you and the team, man, ain't but two things you got to do when you get to the ballpark. First, check which way the wind is blowing and then get yourself a good ball to hit. And you said that used to to be. But now you have data on everything and you know your swing and you know the opposing pitcher. And so it's much more of a science than it was then. And I don't know whether you would have liked that or not, but it's different. different for sure i'm glad you brought that up because i really uh want to expand on that a little bit the uh it did it did i wanted him to teach me how to hit a curveball and so on and so forth and and uh and this was i went back and talked to it's a little bit of a long story i went back i asked the coach if i could talk to the baseball team there three years ago and because i wanted to tell a story that dick groh came back and told about what he thought was important in baseball. And I wanted to say just that one thing, the conclusion I reached, was that Enos saying, check which way the wind is blowing and get a good ball to hit, really did sum up, I like

it when things can be reduced to simple truth, so to speak. And the next part of the story is, it did irritate me when Enos said that. I've talked, I thought he said it a thousand times. I've talked to other guys I've played with in the last few years. I don't remember him saying it at all. But when I was, as I said, it took me two or three years as a professional baseball player to really get the hang of it. And there was a day in the spring in Omaha where the team bus was pulling into Rosenblatt Stadium. And I caught myself.

The first thing I was doing as the team bus pulled up was checking to see which way the flag was blown. And then I realized that that was all. It's not just which way the flag is blowing. It's that you're taking in everything. That's just one piece of information when you get to the ballpark. in everything. That's just one piece of information when you get to the ballpark. And then, for example, in the fifth inning, you're coming into second base with the play in front of you, whether or not to go to third. You don't have to think about how many outs there are, how strong the outfielder's arm is, or anything else. You're a ballplayer 24-7, and that's just

all part of who you are, about knowing what you're doing on the ball field. And then the simple fact is, all that about mechanics, how to hit, which is, that's an interesting thing, if we have Tiger, I'd like to get into that too, because there was the great front foot, back foot hitting theories of the 70s. But all of that about mechanics is way less interesting than just, way less important than don't swing at bad pitches. You know, if you hit a home run on 2-1, the important thing is that you didn't swing at the breaking ball out of the strike zone on 1-1 in the count. And it is, get yourself a good ball to hit.

You might get one a night, and you better hit it. and you better hit it. And so actually what Enos said was like this condensed, you know, scriptural level quality of advice about how to play the ball, and you really had to feel it. And so I'm glad you brought that up because it wasn't just, it was like it was a depth of knowledge about just being a ball player. Right.

Easier said than done, though, I suppose, to recognize what is a good ball to hit, which not everyone can do, and then to have the discipline not to swing at the not-good ones. Yeah, I wonder if one of the great, I came to think, one of the great funnels for making it to the big leagues is vision. And I won't forget that I got called up at the same time Lonnie Smith at the Phillies in 79, same time Lonnie Smith and Keith Moreland did.

I think Lonnie had been called up before. Pretty sure. But they sent all three of us to the Eye Institute in Philadelphia. I still remember that guy. I actually had Eye Institute. And I asked later, they have our eyes checked, and I asked later, all of us, how did we do?

He said, you all have exceptional vision. And I don't think that is coincidental. I think it's really, you've got to not swing at breaking balls out of strike zone. It's just that simple. And then if you can hit a major league fastball, well, you've got a chance. You know, another thing Enos used to say, and Ted Simmons said

exactly, Ted Simmons, probably the most interesting superstar I ever met, Ted Simmons said exactly the same thing in 1881 or something. Enos would say over and over again, guy throws you a breaking ball and you've got less than two strikes, spit on it.

Ted Simmons said exactly that same thing. He was an international, and actually really was one of the power pitchers. But anyhow, the whole thing is identifying the pitch. And when guys would say, well, Elmore Leonard books, the guy that wanted to play ball could never hit a curveball. In my day, you could get to the big leagues without hitting a curve to play ball could never hit a curveball. In my day, you could get to the big leagues

without hitting a curveball, without having to hit a curveball. I mean, within reason, without having to hit a curveball, you just didn't swing at it. It was out of the strike zone. And so, all right, going up on the tangents again. You moved in the same circles as these superstars and baseball legends. I mean, even during your time with the Phillies,

I mean, you're on a roster with Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose and Steve Carlton. And I guess you were blocked by Pete Rose, unfortunately for you. And then when you go to the Brewers, there's Robin Yount and there's Paul Molitor. And what is it like to be John Poff, who appears in September and is doing the same job as all of those guys and occupying the same clubhouse and yeah theory would have a similar status but in actuality you know they're superstars and you're the September call-up yeah incidentally that's the stat that I don't think one is that that might not exist that I think I might test pretty high on and also is how many Hall of Fame teammates per day in the big leagues because between the Brewers and the Phillies, there were

a lot of them. The thing about that is that I did it for a while and I was on the roster for a while and went to spring training with these guys and played with so, and I don't think I was living in a bubble. I just never felt out of place running out there on the ball field. Even games I didn't play well, I didn't play well that, the 19 at-bats I got with the Phillies. I never felt like I didn't belong and nobody, I never felt that anybody, nobody acted like they didn't respect me as a ball player. It's a tough business. Everybody was on me to establish myself. But I had a certain level of, you know, I had a big blue swing,

and if I got enough at-bats, I would improve it. And so that's what it was like for me. And it was interesting. I think this may be interesting. There were really different atmospheres. The Phillies had, as you said, as many people are still aware, what a talented team they had in the 70s,

in the late 70s. But they were sort of under this big thing about the microscope of Philly press coverage and how rough the Philly fans were and this kind of East Coast mentality. And Pete Rose, by the way, when he came over, was a genuine shot in the arm, just for the, in my opinion, for heaven's sakes,

if I wasn't there, I don't know, I'm not an expert or anything, but he brought a certain, he was the most natural acting superstar around young players, for instance, that I knew. There was no barrier between him and anybody else in the clubhouse. Not that there was very much. We did it in other circumstances. And so anyhow, there was that high level.

There was a certain atmosphere in the clubhouse. And I went to the Brewers, and it was really, it was funny because they played this old game, Flip. They had a vicious Flip game going before in the outing monitor, and everybody played in it. And it was really a different, much more informal, Milwaukee's not a small town, but just that kind of atmosphere, you know, it was pretty cool. Yeah, you know, you wrote some time ago that you've sometimes thought the story of your career was a pitch I was looking for one day in Milwaukee that I knew I could hit out of the park that I got that I took a good swing at and popped up and I guess that is kind of alluding to what you mentioned earlier that you felt like what you produced in the majors didn't necessarily reflect your true talent and certainly you had good offensive years in AAA at that time and I imagine that your

major league stats might have looked a little more like those if you had been given more time but is there still some sense of satisfaction at least that you made it which so many people aspire to do and are never able to achieve well sure but the the career I had I just wouldn't sound right but I almost couldn't have played less time in the big leagues. And so I mean, I earned getting to the big leagues. I got stopped

a couple times along the way that people thought that I respected or that I got screwed. And so yeah, it meant a lot to me that I did get there and so forth. And if you're wondering, my God, that was the pitch that I could have hit a memorably long distance. And from time to time, I still think about it. It's like Hamlet, you know, we're tied in the affairs of men and so on and so forth.

But you know what? So what? in the affairs of men and so on and so forth. But you know what? So what? Every other time, I didn't. At 19 at bats, I got to Philadelphia. I just didn't handle that well, but that's who I was.

And I played hard and did my best. There was a time when I said to one of the instructors in the school organization, I like those guys a lot, and that kind of like that one that you mentioned with the pitch that anyone could hit. And I just came back and I said, the next best thing to doing good is doing bad. It's just doing it. And incidentally, popped up that pitch. It was the proverbial, there's a true saying, you know, just doing it. And incidentally, popped up that pitch, it was the proverbial, there's a true saying, you know, just missed it.

And sometimes you hit a pop-up and you just missed it. And it's frustrating that it was a good swing. And so that's the way it goes. Who threw the pitch you popped up? It's a, I'm losing the names. It's a right-hander that had a good career that was with the Rangers. And I want to say, but I'm going to get it wrong. I'm going to say Doc Medich's a right-hander that had a good career that was with the Rangers. And I want to say, but I'm going to get it wrong.

I'm going to say Doc Medich. Is he a right-hander? At any rate, it's back there in the archives someplace. And it was a guy, he was, as I recall, he was toward the end of his career, but he had had quite a few successful seasons in the big leagues. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned, I guess, that the next best thing to doing good is to doing bad, because at least you might get a good poem out of it. And you did write a poem on a similar subject called Baseball Enlightenment, which my co-host Sam read on that previous podcast, but it's been a couple of years. So I'll just read it here quickly. It's not an epic. You wrote, when you are 26 years old and have zero hits in your five pinch hit appearances in the major leagues, and you are playing for the Phillies in 79 when

they drew over 30,000 for every home game despite finishing fourth in the division, and Dickie Knowles has just pitched nine beautiful shutout innings, and you are sent up to pinch hit for him with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the score tied 0-0, and the bases are empty, and Bruce Suter is pitching for the Cubs. And this is one of those years he was virtually unhittable. And you think there may be something funny about this business of playing in the big leagues, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Maybe it's the AstroTurf. Maybe it's the ghost of Josh Gibson.

Maybe it's just you. Or maybe it's something else altogether. And presumably the one thing you can do now that will make everything clear is hit a home run. But what really are the odds? And as your name is announced over the loudspeakers amidst these 30,000 people, the only sound you hear is the beer vendors hawking their wares. That old shuffle and cry, that is the sound of one hand clapping. And I think that refers to a reel at bat, right? September 14th, 1979, you came up and you struck out against Bruce Suter in that at bat, as many people did that year. And it's funny,

you don't mention in the poem that you struck out. It's possible that you might get that hit after all, but you look it up and you didn't. And I guess, you know, if you had hit that homer, you might not have needed to write a poem about it. Mighty Casey struck out, right? He didn't hit a walk-off. So the pathos there, maybe it makes for better poetry, at least to have the opportunity and to fail rather than succeed. And maybe that's one reason why there's so much great literary writing about baseball is that there's so much failure. why there's so much great literary writing about baseball is that there's so much failure. I appreciate you saying that. And Suter was kind of untouchable at Yard.

Del Unser is the guy. I had a really good spring training, and he had come to spring training as a free agent in 79, and I hit a couple home runs that spring training. And I still remember the last week or so, Jose Cardinal walking by and saying, I'm pulling for you. And Ozark liked the older players.

He took Bell Unser, and everybody said, well, I did get screwed. I made that team. It's like, I made that team. They just didn't take me along. But then Unser hit a record number of pitch hit home runs and so forth. And anyhow, Unser said,

he thought of facing Suter as facing a left-handed curveball. But what I wanted to say was I went up there, and of course I was swinging for the fences, so to speak. And I took three mighty swings, and I thought I was right on it, and I went back to the, and this never happened,

I went back to the dugout, and it was pretty clear from the way nobody was outright laughing at me, but it was pretty clear from the way nobody was outright laughing at me, but it was pretty clear that I hadn't come close, that I hadn't really seen the famous Spookbanger basketball. So that's the rest of that story. Yeah, he punched me out and really it wasn't even close. So you have written a lot about baseball and also about other things, but you contributed often to Elysian Fields Quarterly and Spitball, a couple of literary magazines. And you wrote one piece in particular, which I will link to. A listener sent us a copy of it, and it's called Donnie Moore, A Racial Memoir.

It's called Donnie Moore, A Racial Memoir. And this was, I guess, the cover story in Elysian Fields Quarterly when it came out in the spring 1995 issue. And the editors called it arguably the best writing we've ever published. And this was something you wrote in response to the news that Donnie Moore, the former pitcher, had died, of course, in sort of a tragic incident. He shot his wife and then died by suicide. And that prompted you to write this piece, which is sort of inspired by some interactions you had had with Moore as a player, but then is much broader and goes into your observations about racism in baseball and even in yourself and what you witnessed and observed and perhaps even inadvertently contributed to in some small ways.

And this piece, a lot of it really resonates now at least as much as it did 25 years ago because so many of the things you observed here became part of the conversation last year, not just in baseball across all of society, but in baseball specifically. And a lot of this really came to light. So again, I will link to this on our show page and I encourage everyone to go read it. But if you could sort of summarize what made you want to write about that and how you wrote about that and what you observed at the time, because I'm sure, unfortunately, a lot of what you saw then is still present to some extent today. Yeah, I really appreciate you asking me about that. And that piece was important,

that what happened was important to me. So my values were shaped by my parents and things that I read along the way out. I won't forget how honest and clean my parents were in their language and values and so forth. Things like, when I went to school on the reading list, Lizzie L. about Malcolm X, I won't forget reading the first chapter about Malcolm X.

And my kids won't either because it's just, they ask them to read it. The whole book, but especially that. But the, so these are things that were important to me. But the thing that got me going in particular about this moment was that this is 1989, Donnie Murshadi's life in prison. So his career came to an end, and a lot of ballplayers had trouble,

and their careers came to an end, and all the rest.players had trouble, and their careers came to an end and all the rest. But the funniest thing was that in the days leading up to that, I've been remembering this small moment from 10 years before facing him. I'm pretty sure it was 79, more, a few more than that. We were hitting third and fourth or something like that. And we hit back-to-back home runs against him. And so later, next time up, we're on deck. We're coming up first the next inning. And we talked, we had a discussion. Who said

what? About Donnie's throw at us and retaliation for the back-to-back home runs. Well, that just sort of lingered in my memory. And I found myself going over there the days before he died. And I realized, or I hadn't realized before, why were we thinking he might feel that as well? It's because he was black. And other factors go into it, and you might consider, and it just, so I just, it was just something that I realized. And then I came home from work, and on the news,

I'm in workshop. So it's okay. This just really packed a punch for me, and it led to things I had been thinking about that would just so massively fail to my culture. My white brothers and sisters would just so massively fail to acknowledge as a group what has happened and how deeply it runs in us and so on and so forth.

And I wrote about them. I mean, look at Jackie Robinson. We displayed, we reacted to that. We're always not really getting the full picture. And about today, it's the, I certainly don't want to start a firestorm reaction. But from my perspective, and I live in a county that voted 7% to Trump, there's one reason that Donald Trump was elected president. It's because we had a black president.

And that's just the way it is. And that's what happened from my point of view. is. And that's what happened. And from my point of view, and, and one of the, some of these things we just don't even acknowledge or recognize. One accomplishment of the Trump presidency was to try to erase a true picture of Obama's presidency. So you can tell these things run deeply in me. And, and I of think what occurred to me 30 years ago, those of us that say, well, we don't use the N-word, and this is how it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. We have black friends, and we don't, and we do both this way.

We're not part of the problem. And that is the entire conversation among white people and black people around the world, so to speak, that I came to think was the great renewing source. And just failing to recognize the real history, just all of that. So I wrote about that at some length, and I thought baseball was a good prism to look at that. Through the reaction to Jackie Robinson, where we didn't stop and think, well, how what are all the great black players that we missed in the preceding decades? And then Willie Mays and Hank Aaron

come along, and even more then. Well, look at what we didn't get then, I thought, in the 60s. It was the great competitors of Major League Baseball in the 60s were Bob Gibson and Frank Robinson. They just exploded racial stereotypes with the nature of their performance. And that didn't resonate in any real measure. And I just felt that was a microcosm, so to speak, of our national history. So, yeah, all that was, that's kind of where i went with that yeah a lot of the themes you wrote about in that piece more than a quarter century ago now came up a lot in the past year just you know of

course there's the ongoing conversation about the percentage of players who were black in the major leagues has fallen significantly, even since the time when you were playing. And just in the past year or so, there's this group called the Players Alliance. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but many black players have banded together to try to address these issues. And MLB has begun to support that group. And then there's also been this movement towards recognizing the Negro Leagues. MLB belatedly, according to its own designations, reclassified the Negro Leagues as major leagues, which they had not been previously. And so coupled with the 100th

anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues, there has been, I think, much more of an effort to raise awareness about not just the few notable names of Black players everyone knows from that era, but also some of the lesser known names who should be better known. And so that has belatedly started to happen, but too little, perhaps, and certainly too late. But you were picking up on these things that you observed during your own career. And really, I don't know if the reckoning about those things came, you know, in the decades after that and until just very recently. You know, of course, this is something that any Black player who played in baseball would be able to speak to all of this from personal experience. And you're speaking to

it from sort of what you saw and felt around you. It seems no less resonant today. Yeah. I don't know if this is true of people thinking about the game today, but I think part of the thing is that baseball just isn't about, specifically about black players and big leagues. Baseball isn't the Sandlot game that it used to be, and it isn't the daily summer game that it used to be. And it seems like, it's kind of funny to me, it seems like

it's a skill. Kids at a young age get hooked up with travel teams and camps and so forth. And it's a different kind of growing up playing ball experience. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but that's what it seems

like to me. And you know that thing about going back to the old days, another thing about Marvin Miller was this, I don't know how familiar people are today, but what got people's attention back there in whatever year it was, was the general manager of the Dodgers, Alcan Pamas, making a really racially insensitive remark. And I thought the question to be asked at that point, everybody starts saying, well, why aren't there black general managers and so forth? And that's the question that the union should have

been asking. Among other things, among the free agency negotiations, it's kind of like, what are we doing about diversity and so forth? And it wouldn't have been premature to do that in the 1980s. People weren't stupid, but it didn't happen. So before we end, I did want to ask you about your recent efforts on the reservations, because as you noted earlier in our conversation, you got interested in Native American history and read about it when you were still playing. And in the past 15 years or so,

you have been going to the Standing Rock and Pine Ridge reservations in the Dakotas and helping to bring baseball to those communities, among other things. And you've done some fundraisers to further those efforts. So tell us a little bit about what drew you to those areas and how you have been able to help baseball wise and what else you'd like to do. Sure. And again, thanks for asking about that. That's a long story I'm not going to get into, but I first went out to South Dakota in 2008 and stumbled across the traditional yearly powwow, actually called a wachiti in a very small village in Standing Rock called Bullhead. It was the funniest thing. I took a shortcut on a road hardly on the map.

I'm not a GPS person. I used to use a road atlas. I drove through this. The only thing on this road for some 20 or 30 miles was the village of Bullhead. I drove through on a Saturday morning about 10 o'clock. There was a commotion.

The stadium was a small circular structure off to the one side of the road and I pulled in a bunch of people there and I jumped out of the car and said to some kids, what's going on? The kids said, it's the powwow, you moron. And I'd seen powwow dancing when I lived in Mexico a couple times like in a high school gym but this was the first traditional

powwow and I just sat there in the stands that afternoon with the singing and the dancing and I was kind of overwhelmed I just thought it was a very powerful experience so I kept going back and there were other things involved in this kind of a little writing project and so forth. But I kept going back.

Oh, incidentally, it's the most astonishing thing. As I understand it, it was their yearly, many of the villages have a weekend. It's a three-day weekend event. It's a year-long celebration. day we came to that once a year powwow celebration and the origin of theirs was a spontaneous celebration that broke out

at the end of World War II and for 76 years now they missed last year so this was the 75th EJ Day celebration and it's specifically honoring veterans so there's a large percentage a larger percentage of Native Americans serving the armed forces

than any other ethnicity as I understand it. And so they're remembering what most of my students, what most Americans I think don't even, aren't familiar with the term DJ Day anymore. They're remembering this DJ Day moment and honoring the veterans in their own community.

And it's a traditional look of how they're very clear-eyed about their history of the United States government and so forth. So I, for years, went out there. And I had this secondary idea before that, really, of doing what I called old-time baseball. I wrote to Bud Seelig, who owned the Brewers. I kind of remember him. I think I probably met him. He was in the clubhouse from time to time that month., who owned the Brewers. I kind of remember him. I think I probably met him.

He was in the clubhouse from time to time that month. And he was the commissioner of baseball. And I wanted to, I called it a plan to say baseball. I wanted to get a bunch of old players in a bus and drive across that kind of country and stop in really small towns and just go out and play ball with kids. and stop in really small towns and just go out and play ball with kids. Okay, so I sort of took that idea with a friend of my son in 2017, went out there just to try to play ball.

It was a strong culture that most of the guys my age there grew up playing baseball, but it has basketball as the number one sport. Incidentally, this is before it's number one sport, but Kyrie Irving has his mother's from Standing Rock. So the fields were kind of abandoned. And I'd gone out there not last year. I did go out and give away T-shirts and stuff, kind of did a little radio program about the whole journey of going out there just to honor the fact that they couldn't have a powwow,

but just to honor the fact that for 75 years they've been remembering DJ Day. And I can't say that I've, pardon me, I've tried to do a week of baseball, and I can't say that I've had much of an impact. In fact, it really hurt two years ago. A really good friend, 55 years old, named him White Temple Jr., he died suddenly and unexpectedly. I'm 55 years old. His name's Emily Temple Jr. He died suddenly and unexpectedly.

And he was the guy that I really felt simpatico with him. And he was a member of the community that could just get things done and get kids out there and so forth. And then last year the COVID, and this year I can't really say it that much, but I tried. And that's kind of the story of going out to the – there's more to it, I suppose. But that's, in a nutshell, that's the kind of thing I wanted to do and tried to do on Standing Rock and a little bit on Blindage, too. I have a good friend there as well.

Well, I like the idea of the old-time baseball, so I wish you luck making it happen somewhere, some when. But I will link to your previous fundraising efforts, which are not active now, but just to see what you were hoping to do and give people a little more information on that. And before I end this conversation, I wanted to ask you one more thing, which was about ending your career as a player and the circumstances there. Because as you mentioned earlier, it's often a tough thing for a player to decide, I'm not a player anymore. I'm going to go on to the next phase of my life. And so many seem to cling to baseball for years or decades after that as coaches or in some other capacity, which I suppose you haven't done. But it sounds as if when you decided to stop playing,

you just kind of had a clean break and you had your epiphany on the road, literally, and the scales fell from your eyes and you walked away. And so I'm quoting you here from your Sabre bio, but you were going back intending to go to another spring training. And you said, as I was packing up my stuff to head out the next day for the airport in Spokane, something just didn't feel right. We're driving the three hours or so to Spokane and about halfway there, I just had the clearest thought. So what if you have one more fun year? This is not something you want to do i don't mean to sound overly dramatic but it just so happened we immediately came upon the grand coulee dam

it was on the north side of the highway pulled into the parking lot said it was time to quit took a quick tour of the dam turned right coming out of the parking lot and i just wasn't a ball player anymore i never revisited that decision and i'm a guy who will do just that in many circumstances. So that's an unusual way to follow the career, I would think. I know. I know. And I appreciate that. That's exactly how that happened.

But the thing is, I'd been on the 49 roster for four years and was dropped off the roster by the White Sox. I'd been traded to the White Sox for Thad Bosley and had a mediocre season. And the funniest thing was the White Sox minor league director then became my arch enemy, and I yelled at him once on the phone, and it was

another one of my perfect... This was Dave Dombrowski, who is now the legendary... I just couldn't stand that guy. Okay. Nothing personal. I mean, I don't mean that like I'm laughing about it. So the salary was the money I would have been making. It would have been good money for the summer, and it would have been probably the best thing I could have done for that summer.

And I intended to go, and I don't know what might have happened, but it was just like that. I was going to go, and then it was really weird to be packing up the old bag with stuff, and it just didn't feel right. And I kept thinking, well, just enjoy. Have a good, fun AAA season. And exactly that.

Just like, so what? you're just not up for this and and i really never did that question yeah well to go and things to see and articles to write so i guess you just got on to the next step so it would be nice probably if other players could kind of cut that off so cleanly but it's uh very rare i think that they can walk away especially if they've had some success at a high level then understandably you get attached to that yeah i think you're right i think it is not quite to the least or hurt or whatever when you've had a after a certain point that's partly because doggone it this is fun it's it's fun to hit a home run and it's fun to play at that competitive level well it was a

pleasure learning a bit more about you and your career and your work and this is what we hope when we do our little statistical deep dives that it will lead us down a road we didn't know was there and sometimes that takes us to calling a player and getting to know someone who we wouldn't have gotten to know otherwise. So this is kind of the best case outcome for that. So I thank you for your time and your willingness to reminisce a little

and I'll let everyone know where they can find more information about you. But this was a pleasure. Thank you very much, John. Well, I'm grateful to you. It was fun to talk about all these things from the old days and more important things today. So I thank you. So as you probably divined from my music choices today, I, like a lot of other music fans,

have been lamenting the loss of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died at 80 this week. I love the Stones, of course, but I was also just drawn to Watts for a few reasons, I think. For one thing, he never got a driver's license, just like me, so sort of a kindred spirit. But I also think I have a soft spot for people who break the mold a bit, don't look like all the others. I've never really felt like someone who belongs to things. As Watts said, he never filled the stereotype of the rock star. And of course, he was extremely important to the Stones' sound, but he never led their lifestyle or really had their look, although he was quite a snappy dresser and a cool cat.

I always enjoyed when watching the Stones live, either on video or a few times in person, you'd see Watts sitting behind Mick Jagger, who's prancing and strutting around, the epitome of the flamboyant frontman, and then you'd see Charlie Watts perched right behind him, looking like he'd dropped in from some other much more restrained band or another profession in a different social circle. And seeming very blasé about it, sometimes maybe even making a rueful face as if wondering how he got there. He was never very enthused about touring. And so while I admire the Mix and Keiths, I sort of see more of myself in the Charlies. Maybe that's why when I was a Yankees fan, Bernie Williams was my guy.

Not really your usual jock, a more soft-spoken, gentle soul, and a jazz guy, just like Watts was. And also like Watts was kind of content to be in the background a bit, and maybe even not to be included in the quote-unquote core four, even though he was just as integral to the Yankees offense as Watts was to the Stones' rhythm section. Watts was always himself. He let his hair go white while so many other rock stars try to maintain some of the appearance of youth. Even during the band's heyday, he was sort of the eye of the Rolling Stones' storm. And I know everyone jokes about Keith Richards outliving everyone, but I always sort of suspected it would be Watts. Even though he's slightly older, you have to figure there was a lot less mileage on his odometer. So that's part

of why I was sorry to see him go. Also, the Stones are such an institution, and during my lifetime, their longevity has been such a big part of their brand that it was kind of a shock to learn that actually they can't keep going forever. And even the drummer of the Energizer Bunny of bands can't keep the beat indefinitely, and not for the reasons that Brian Jones couldn't, but just because of old age and infirmity, which comes for us all. Now, because this is a baseball podcast, I figured I should tie this little tribute into baseball. Watts never missed a Rolling Stones concert after he joined the band.

He was an Ironman. And appropriately, he was born on the day that Lou Gehrig died, and he died on Cal Ripken's birthday. Beyond that, though, I was just talking to a somewhat obscure major leaguer. We just met a major leaguer, John Poff. And as I said to him, there's been more of an effort lately to get to know some of the lesser known players of the Negro Leagues. And one such player who recently received major league status from MLB

and at Baseball Reference is a man named Charlie Watts. Charlie Watts played in the Negro National League from 1924 to 1927, mostly for the St. Louis Stars. And as it happens, the Stones are slated to play their first post-Watts concert in St. Louis of all places. Now, I hope Charlie Watts, the drummer, would have appreciated Charlie Watts, the baseball player, because back in 2015, the day after the Stones played Kansas City, Charlie Watts visited the American Jazz Museum and the Negro League's Baseball Museum. Mick and Keith did not attend. Now, the more recent Charlie Watts probably would not have seen anything about the older Charlie Watts on display in the museum. And in fact, not much is known about the baseball Charlie Watts. This is one of the tragedies of the fact that the Negro Leagues were overlooked for so

long. There's generally ample information available about any 20th century player in the white major leagues, you can look up the saber bio of John Poff, and it's thousands of words long. But a player like Charlie Watts is mostly a mystery. Of course, we know the Josh Gibsons and the Satchel Pages, but the more marginal players, I think that's where the difference in name recognition and just in general knowledge is stark. So if you go to Charlie Watts' baseball reference page, you can see his stats, courtesy of Seamheads. He was not much of a hitter, 6'11", OPS in the games that were recorded, although he did have a fine offensive season in 1925 for the Stars. He hit.298,.383,.468 in 54 games. It's known

that he threw right-handed, but it is not known whether he batted right or left. He was an infielder. He played first, second, and short, but his birth date is not listed either. I wanted to find out a little bit more about him, and so I emailed a few Negro Leagues researchers, and they and I scoured some archives, and it's tough to find much. You know, maybe if you were to dig into the microfilm in a library somewhere, you could come up with more. But in a more cursory search, it's Slim Pickens. In fact, if you look on newspapers.com, there's really nothing there. One reference we found actually uses the wrong name for Charlie Watts and calls him Eddie Watts.

There was some confusion about the name, but it does note that he was fast at fielding a ground ball and had a great throwing arm. However, I do have a fine photo that Gary Ashwill sent me, and I'll link to that on the show page. It shows Charlie Watts standing next to the Hall of Famer Willie Wells. He has his glove on his left hand. And Gary did some more digging. He found some records of a Charlie Watts, a Charles Austin Watts, who was born in Benton, Missouri on October 8th, 1897, although there's even some disagreement about that date. We don't know for sure that that's the same Charlie Watts, but it would seem to match up. And it lists him as 5'6", 150, which seems to match the photo of Watts that we have standing next to Wells, who was 59, 170. And some further digging revealed that Watts was a favorite or a protege of Candy Jim Taylor,

the Negro League's player and manager, who was the teammate and manager of Watts with the Stars, and then brought Watts with him when he went to the Cleveland Elites in 1926. And beyond that, the trail goes pretty cold. There's a lot less known about the baseball Charlie Watts than the drummer Charlie Watts. You can find sporadic mentions of Watts in game stories, and of course he shows up in box course. But based on this search, we just don't know much about who he was, what he was like, beyond the stats he produced on the field. So hopefully he is the sort of player whose biography can eventually be filled in, at least with the same depth and detail that we would have for a corresponding player on a white major league team from the 20s. So that's my little salute

to the two Charlie Wattses, gone but not forgotten. Thanks to Gary Ashwill and Ted Knorr and Todd Peterson for research assistance. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to help keep the podcast going and to help keep the podcast ad free as well as to get themselves access to some perks anthony campisi david egg bobo manish goel steven pierre pauli and caitlin suyaka 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 it on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg via email at podcast at fancrafts.com.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And I'll play you out with a little clip that I had intended to play on our previous episode when Jose Molina was a guest. It slipped my mind to stick it in there, but what better way to play us out and into the weekend than to share with you a little clip I saved of Vin Scully in the summer of 2013 talking about Jose Molina and catcher framing. I like to think that Vin may have seen one of my many Molina articles that year, but wherever he came across this information, I'm glad it tickled him too. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I'll be back to talk to you early next week. We talked about the euphemism they have in baseball and they say Chris Stewart is one of the better ones at framing pitches.

And framing is the euphemism for trying to fool the umpire, trying to take a pitch just off the corner and make it look like it was a strike. Jose Molina, the catcher for Tampa Bay, they tell me is absolutely the best at framing. And of course we'll see Tampa Bay when they come here on the ninth.

The first pitch to Stewart, he takes low off the plate. Ball one, 1-0. They are so, what would be the word, so studious about the activities of the major league player. They even have statistics on framing. And when I said that Jose Molina is the best at it, they say he has framed 13-point-something for strikes, a percentage. That if you are the first to go

You'll leave a sign to let me know Tell the zone Please Carry the lantern light. No, thank you. It's funny. I've got a famous last words probably, but I've kind of been looking forward to this.