Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1766: Fingers in Several Rays Pies

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Meg Rowley and erstwhile Effectively Wild co-host and current Tampa Bay Rays employee Jeff Sullivan discuss World Series game start times, how Jeff’s job has changed compared to the 2020 season, Wander Franco, the Rays’ uniforms, what it is like to root (and work) for a team in the playoffs, the Rays’ ALDS against Boston, […]

Welcome Back about. Well, the names have all changed since you hung around, but those dreams have remained and they've turned around. Who'd have thought they'd need ya? Who'd have thought they'd need ya? Back here where we need ya. Back here where we need ya. Hello and welcome to episode 1766 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I am joined today by a longtime friend of the show, host of the show, Jeff Sullivan. Hello. How are you, friend? I'm okay. So what I understand this is the first time Ben has had a taste of freedom from the podcast. And like he was he would have been so reluctant to ever take a break, which I know because he potted on his wedding day.

But like now that he's actually done it, I wonder, you might never get him back. Well, I would perhaps admit that keeping a newborn alive who really is just in the most adorable, lovely way possible, completely useless for several months slash years is perhaps not entirely a break. But yeah, this is Ben's first prolonged absence from the pod in quite some time. And yeah, I will be keen to see when he wants to return. I think it'll be soon. My understanding is soon.

Hopefully that's vague enough for our listeners to not ask a lot of follow-up questions about an email. But soon. I seem to recall when one of us, and more likely me, would go away on a trip for a couple of follow-up questions about an email, but soon. I seem to recall when one of us, and more likely me, would go away on like a trip for a couple of weeks, then it was urgent for us to record like three episodes in a day so that we wouldn't be off schedule. So I'll be curious to see how that part of his brain functions at the other end of this.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that among new parents, he is probably one of the least sleep addled, sleep loss addled rather, just because of how little he slept to begin with, or at least for extended chunks. But yeah, I don't know. I have been grateful that I think I had one week in the last month where I only recorded two episodes and people were really nice about that. I appreciated their kindness because Ben and his wife had a baby, but I had a post-season. Really, which of those is harder? We know the answer to that.

It's the baby. The post-season ranks among the times. I'm very tired. I told you before we started recording that I feel like I have maybe two remaining functional brain cells or at least two awake brain cells. But we have two more World Series games. So hopefully that's enough. Well, as you know, the discourse is all about how the games are keeping people up until 1230 or one in the morning.

Not like a child, except that the child gets you up again at like five in the morning, which baseball games don't do. I think that like we have to much like a baby. This is just going to be the theme of the episode i guess um you know we have to childless adults yeah right exactly um we have to we have to fuss over the game you know to make sure that like it's thriving and healthy and you know eating regularly and not rolling off a table onto the floor as babies are sometimes want to do. But I do find the consternation around start time to be a little puzzling when I think the thing we should all be getting really riled up about is time of game. Because I submit to you,

Jeff, that if games started on the East Coast at six and they still lasted four hours and ended at 10, people would be no less grumpy. They might be slightly better rested, but they wouldn't be any less grumpy about a four hour game. So I think, you know, we have to acknowledge we're a big country with multiple time zones and an 8 p.m. start kind of splits the difference in a useful way for the folks who don't live on the East Coast. And we could try to make the game a little bit shorter and and then everyone would be happy and we could stop talking about it maybe i'd love to know ratings breakdowns by time zone based on the teams who are involved because it's

quite possible like east coast teams should start at five eastern and west coast teams should start at eight eastern or whatever because nobody in boston like if there's a Giants-Dodgers game, how many people in Boston or New York are watching that? I know people, baseball fans are going to watch anything, but they really don't, right? We have a pretty good understanding of that. So, you know, ideas that no one will listen to. But, you know, get rid of this primetime idea

because it's not a national sport anymore. Yeah, I would be, I think for the World Series, you got to just stick that sucker in primetime. But I think that a bit more scheduling flexibility for the earlier playoff rounds strikes me as reasonable. You know, I know that the Dodgers had like a 2pm playoff start like local time. That's ridiculous. You can't you can't ask that of folks. And then people are like, there's no one at this game. And I'm like, well, yeah, they're working. Normally they show up by the fourth inning just because LA traffic is so bad. That's not a knock on attendance. It's just a knock on

your terrible traffic, Los Angeles. But asking people even for a playoff game to do a midweek 2 p.m. start strikes me as asking a lot, even of dedicated baseball fans. We got to, you know, get paychecks so that we can buy salad and water and pay our electric bills and what have you. Sometimes people will tell you, like, if you're a fan or whatever, that it doesn't matter how long a playoff game is because it's really intense, right? It's all high stress and, like, everything is important. So even a four-hour game can feel like it's a three-hour game. But I can tell you that a four-hour playoff game feels like a 20-hour playoff game it is objectively unpleasant to watch the playoffs when you have games that are even longer than the regular season and a lot

of those games are unpleasant too but very differently unpleasant but yeah it's so hard i i am i'm very blessed. I've joined a team that was already good. And so they've made the playoffs three years in a row. And so I have stuff to do three octobers in a row, which is great. And also really bad. It's really hard to do that. So I would I would I'm generally in favor of things shortening up.

But now I don't want to just come off like another Rob Manfred. Well, I think that we can make it zippier. I think your aim is not to make it short for being short-stake, but to make the action feel kind of fun and zippy because, yeah, the stakes in the postseason are super high in any given moment, but I don't think we experience that moment to moment. I think we experience those stakes in the aggregate and it can be hard to keep track of them when you're in hour four. That's asking a lot of people. I don't think we need to doubt their dedication to say like, we could move this along, couldn't we? Like the pitch clock works pretty well. I think let's use a pitch clock. We could have a few

fewer commercials, but that won't happen. So like the pitch clock is just good for the game anyway. Why don't we just do that thing? But how will people know to buy Roman products if they don't get so many? Did I hear you snapping in the background when you said zippier? Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. There's only one way to say zippy and it's using several of your organs. Yeah, you got to. Well, because I don't have an accordion, which is generally how I would indicate that something is zippy. Like, you know, you're riding through the Italian Riviera on a lovely cruiser bike and there's a playful accordion in the background as you experience your full Italian-ness. Well, you don't have an accordion,

but you do have a Dylan. So Dylan, insert accordion. Accordion. Yay, accordion. I want to ask you about the experience of watching a playoff team that is your own, because I think people will be fascinated to learn how terrible an experience that can end up being. But first, I want to ask, so you have come on this pod at various points during your raise employment. And I know that you and I recorded an episode of Fangraph's audio question mark, like last March, when we were all trapped inside and terrified. But I don't think that you have had occasion to speak publicly about the first year after 2020. So I'm curious, Jeff, in general, did anything about your work experience change in the 2021 season relative to 2020?

Because you sit in your office in Portland regardless. Like how did your season preparation shift, if at all? And how is your day to day different, if at all? There was more of it. you know like uh when when i joined the raise my my supervisor told me like you can expect this to be like a i signed a two-year contract and yeah it had some some options and he told me to expect like basically a two-year on board which uh at the time i was like i'm pretty sharp i can figure it but like i'm still learning there's right now like right now with the playoffs there there are so many like weird roster rule nuances that like I'm still picking up.

So like every year has led to, I'm very grateful for this, but it's led to an increase in responsibilities and just like an increase in, I don't know, like my presence or whatever you will. But that also comes with like more exposure to different things. And so the day-to-day just kind of evolves as I have more to do or like a broader swath of thing of pies. But can we have a better expression than like putting my fingers in the pies?

Yeah, because why would anyone do that? You wreck the pie. Your finger's hot and sticky. That's terrible phrasing too. I regret. We can edit all of this out. Yeah, like for a few months there at the spring of 2020, I was taking a lot of walks like around the park and getting paid some sort of money for it.

And then we came up with some fun little side projects to do, stuff to keep busy and be good for cohesion among the employees while they're around, etc. And a bunch of stuff, like attempted prep for the season. But 2020 was just weird. And so for a few months, it was a pretty light schedule. prepped for this season but 2020 was just weird and so for a few months it was a pretty light schedule i remember in like april or may i was posting like sharing the this information i saw from spring training i was like i i don't know if this is still relevant right he's i don't know maybe these pictures are going to be sick etc but like 2021 felt like a pretty normal season you know going into the playoffs last year and making it to the world series like at the start

of the playoffs in 2020 it just started to feel as weird as things were it started to feel like all right this is like a normal intense baseball and then right after the world series normal off-season trip no cba stuff to worry about just right here's teams are going to have less money but here's what we think is going to happen etc etc so things have been pretty normal since like last october with the only real copy out there being like, I didn't go to spring training this year and I didn't travel as much because, you know, Florida slash other COVID stuff, but pretty, pretty normal year. When you, you don't have to reveal any state secrets here, obviously, but as you guys were looking to the start of the 2021 season, sort of conscious of

your guys having one played an extra month of baseball and then also coming off a supremely strange season was there any like obvious roster machinations that you engaged in to try to keep guys healthy and sort of on sort of a normal track for what I imagine was kind of a weird year I mean like you saw Shane McClanahan get kind of like a late start to his regular season. You saw Lou Head go up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. So there was a lot of optioning and machinations in that regard. But, you know, like every team was going through the same stuff.

I think one of the things that jumped out last offseason when the Mariners signed Chris Flexen is Flexen was like one of the only guys in the planet who threw like a bunch of innings in 2020. So like as much as that's like a small thing when you sign him, you think like, actually, that could make a big difference. And he stayed healthy, right, for the bulk of the season. So good job, Mariners and Chris Flexen. But, yeah but you know outside of that just like solving injuries right like it's all it's all guesswork and like trying to just have the right intentions and try to be conservative but we had mcclanahan debut in the playoffs in 2020 and then like one way or another kind of needed a full season out of them and and our goal was to have a seven

month full season so he was pitching in the playoffs and you know we got pretty aggressive with drew rasmussen and we had shane boz in the playoffs like you know if if chris archer had been healthier he would have taken some of those innings and we gave a bunch of those innings to rich hill in the first half so there was there was stuff we did to try to build out the the length depth but i don't think it was anything that every team wasn't already thinking about was there any inter-team collaboration around the injury question going into the year? Because I imagine that, you know, you're going to stress that as a competitive advantage, but also there is something to be gained from a wisdom of a crowd in respect to injury prevention.

I don't know if I can answer that. Like not as a trade secret thing, but like, I don't know if I know enough to answer that. I'm sure like, you know, the trainers trainers the medical staffs they're like they communicate amongst themselves pretty often but i don't know how much that trickled to whatever my level is sure fair enough i feel like i'd be remiss if i didn't give you an open platform to like sing an ode to wander franco would you like to sing a song if you don't would you like to say some nice words about him instead i don't would you like to say some nice words about him instead I don't have any lyrics prepared but like he's really good right and like

there is a strip in in spring training of uh of 2021 which is this year still there is like he struck it I don't know like six times sure in spring training but just because it's it's Wander Franco because one of the things like he makes a ton of contact I remember like he hit this big home run I went over like the offices in Port Charlotte and it made the rounds it went viral because it's Wander Franco when he hit a big giant home run you're like he's 20 years old he hit that home run and then he also had these strikes and you're like oh because you just kind of get it in your head like even though you know if you step back you know he's a very good player. You know what the stable skills are.

You see him strike out a few times in spring training. You're like, something doesn't seem right. And at the start when he came up to the majors debuting against Boston, which was a fun change of pace because it happened right after we got swept in four games in Seattle, which was a low point of my season. But then he came up and he was great. But after that first game against Boston, he took a little time to find his footing. And he wasn't really like tearing the cover off the ball to say nothing of how difficult an environment it was for rookie hitters this year, because it's hard to do.

But by the time like the All-Star break in August rolled around, he basically stopped striking out at all. I think he went, what was it, like 40 or 50 plate appearances without a strikeout and this is this is this is us like we're a team that strikes out some yeah it was famously a very different feeling kind of a bad and i don't need to tell you wonder franco's good everybody knows wondered franco is uh is good but like the defense kind of exceeded my own expectations yeah the energy is just so infectious. Everybody can see this. This isn't team insight.

You can tell this kid is obviously special. You read about him in the minors if you're a fan crush reader or whatever, but you haven't really seen him yet. Watch him in the majors, and you get it immediately. It shines through without any question. And he's not even as good as he's likely to be become. Right. Which is it's it's great.

Yeah. One of the things you kind of struggle with like Brandon Lau got off to a bit of a slow start this past season right and he wound up hitting like a million home runs and drawing in a million runners like great season by Brandon Lau. But you think back like we had a lot of people struggling in the playoffs last year. And then this season gets started and you're like, I don't know, the numbers aren't really there yet. And one of the biggest adjustments, and I guess you didn't ask about this directly, but indirectly, one of the biggest adjustments this year working for a team relative to the year before is there was a hundred more games this year. And I can't speak for everyone, but I kind of forgot what a full season feels like yeah and so emotionally like it was hard when you have guys struggling at the start

of the season to remember like oh there's like a lot of time though right to normalize so like you know i became irrationally concerned about wander franco at first because he wasn't hitting 300 i became irrationally concerned about brandon lauer at first because he wasn't hitting whatever and he turns around he's like one of the best hitters in the major leagues the last four months of the year. It's just like, oh, right. I forgot that this season finds its level if you give it time. Yeah, you don't have to. If 15 games are sort of a slump, you don't have to really worry about it because that's not a quarter of your season.

You know, guys can just sort of adjust and be on their way and look really good. It's funny. Obviously, the stakes on the public side for this sort of thing are like, very, very different than they are on the team side. But I don't know, you want good baseball players to play good baseball and sort of dazzle us with that because it's way more fun to watch guys who are succeeding than guys who are struggling. feel bad about that we're like you know it pokes at our tender feelings but when you have a guy who's been aided you're like could you be good please it would be really nice if you could be good because we've said that you'll be very very good so can you do that and then wander was like yeah i got you it's fine i mean he didn't say those words but he communicated that to us with

his play in a way that I felt really good about. I mean, it's crazy. Like, this all kind of goes without saying, but like everybody knew how special Wander Franco was. But of course, what that means is Wander Franco knows how special everyone expects him to be. And like, that can be like motivating or whatever.

But like, I crumble if I get four text messages, like within within 20 minutes because I can't handle any pressure. Like to be able to do that at that age, I mean, it's just a level of humanity that I can't even really do. Yeah, I know that like people, this is going to be a weird start to this thought. Are you ready? I know people come to orthodontia at different times in their lives. And so like, you know, there are plenty of peopleia at different times and so like you know there are plenty of people who are full-grown adults and like that's when they get braces but you look at him and you're like you're not yet 21 and as if to put an exclamation point on that particular

thought you literally are playing in the majors with braces it is just such a perfect meld of like aesthetic with reality i just it's very good like it's very good i wonder what that what impact that has on like whatever it hit are his preferred like dugout snacks oh yeah i've never thought about braces and sunflower seeds before yeah i mean like and like gum you know um that would be a complete disaster i am often amazed by how many bearded men confidently chew gum and then blow bubbles. I've probably expressed this thought before, but it is a degree of risk-taking that I would not be comfortable with in my life. It's like, aren't you going to get little sticky bits in your, like, what if the bubble

pops and then you get little sticky bits in your beard? I don't know if you understand how much overconfidence plays a part in making it to the major leagues. And I think overconfidence in one area has a relationship with overconfidence in others. Yeah, it tends to extend to other aspects of your life. I have a very important rays related question. You're going to blow the lid off of something. How can it be both a ray of light and a stingray, Jeff? Have you talked to anyone internally about this? It is a confused identity in my opinion or isn't is it not very creative idea i mean art is all about how you interpret it right and so we have uh we have a i'm buying i'm just kind of like vamping here until i think of something else to say but i like look i love i love the stingray this is not like i think

a lot of people love the stingray i love the stingray tank i love the stingrays i've come fully i'm fully around i was never like against stingrays but i think you didn't have an anti-stingray stance i went from neutral to strongly pro rays of all kinds and i wonder like i obviously wasn't around when when they had the the name change back in 2007 2008 but like i wonder if if they were still the devilays and the same people complained now. I wonder if we would have just stuck to our guns or whatever. But, I mean, the Singray is great. And it feels like the kind of thing that if we're fortunate enough to remain the Rays long term, etc. I wonder if we'll go the way of the Padres and eventually there will be enough of a clamor to bring it back.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because I don't think that anyone... There are very few things that inspire a consensus on social media and i think that your guys's throwback uniforms are one of the things where i've just never seen anyone in in modern time in current day baseball be like these uniforms are bad like everyone loves those throwbacks so it seems it seems like that could be a successful pivot if if the occasion ever right you know arises for if the occasion arises arises they're so sharp like they're they're the most i don't know if

they're the best uniforms of baseball and like alternates are weird i love the giants cream uniforms etc like they're really really really good. And I like the Mariners have their like weird cream colored blue gold one. That's beautiful. Yeah. But like this is like these are three of the top five, I think. I guess I like cream. Yeah. Well, I think that they also fill a nice aesthetic void within the broader sort of uniform landscape because we got all this red and blue.

We got all this lousy red and blue. And so having teams that embrace something a little different than that, and you get the kind of cool stingray ombre thing in Tampa, I think it's really strong. We should embrace uniforms that look different than all of the other uniforms. It does make me appreciate orange. I think that I'd have a greater aversion to like the astros orange or even the giants orange if it were not just a really welcome bit of difference in a landscape that is otherwise you know red and blue like you shouldn't have the potential to be

confused about what team is on the field at any given time you should know as soon as you turn on the tv you should be like aha i know who is up to bat and sometimes you know they make you work for it for at least five seconds and i resent it i think you should just be able to tell right away oh i snapped again you did i wonder if this is like this is a particular era where people are really in favor of race throwbacks and everyone's throwbacks because we've brought back the 90s again yeah like uh so it might just be that this is all going to be cyclical and pretty soon people are going to want neutral boring shit like whatever the padres were before the brown they're like weird sand and khaki but yeah you know i don't know well right now people are

expressive again it's we're coming out of the pandemic parentheses no we're not but no we're not we're gonna express ourselves again we're gonna be around people and we like big bold vibrant patterns and colors like the raised throwbacks and then you know give it a few years and they'll be like yeah we're drones again let's go back to blue and blue and that's why every article of women's clothing that i have had occasion to purchase over the last year has been like weird and sack shaped i don't know what we're doing fashion is really confusing to me you said that you're you know your fingers in a lot of different pies you're spinning multiple plates at once. Is that better? You're trying to keep multiple plates? I mean, it's better, but why would you ever do that? I know. I mean, like maybe you're in a carnival. I guess

we can go with wearing a lot of different hats, right? Like that kind of does. You're wearing a lot of different hats. Can you say anything more specific about the different kinds of hats that you're wearing? You know, it's actually also kind of true because I was never a hat person until I joined a baseball team. Now I have like nine different raised hats. I literally do wear a lot of different hats, although not all at the same time. But there's a lot that goes into an organization, right? There's your own scouting, amateur and professional, and there's your own player development. There's like the little kind of stuff like Fangrush would like to write about, like here's adjustments this major league player can make.

Or like here's a breakdown of what this other team does. Here's like an overview of the market landscape. It's a lot of like if you were a writer at Fangraphs, unless you have like a specific niche. But think of, you know, the Dave Cameron Fangraphs years. Dave would write about a lot of different subjects that were all under the pro baseball umbrella. But like they would touch on scouting and all the stuff I already said. So there's a bunch of different things that I'm no amateur scout, and so I tend not to weigh in there because my word is worth less than zero.

And there's other areas where I just don't really have much insight, than zero. And there's other areas where I just don't really have much insight, but I'm grateful enough to be trusted enough to at least have a window into a variety of different areas where I've developed some confidence and some further understanding in the years that I've been doing this. And so it feels a little fangraphsy in that regard, like in a good way, where I have a lot of autonomy to analyze what seems to be relevant and uh i don't remember what the other thing was i was going to say so i'm sure that i'll interrupt you with it in about 15 seconds well do you want to talk about the soul crushing experience of the playoffs did i just hear you snap again no i did not knuckle oh that time i

did not snap maybe one of my joints popped i i find that I have very loose joints, but I'm not flexible. What's that about? Yeah, I'm finding looser. Like, you wake up now with like a stiff Achilles and you start Googling it. And you type it into Google and it's just like, you're old. And you're like, oh, I guess. Thanks for the direct answer, WebMD. Yeah.

Soul crushing. Here's a way in which the playoffs are soul crushing. In game two of this year's ALDS in which the playoffs are soul crushing in game two of this year's alds we shame boss gave up two in the top the first thing to the red sox and then the rays rallied in the bottom of the first and jordan luplo hit this uh this grand slam off chris sale and it was five to two and the and the stadium was going crazy and i sat i was there and i was sitting in the row celebrating waving my whatever the towel is the way, all towels should be white or yellow or something bright. Like the blue towels, get out of here.

Nobody can see them. They don't show up on camera. Terrible idea. Yeah, okay. Like the Dodger Stadium towels or whatever, they didn't look good at all because they're too dark. Anyway, I'm sitting there in the upper row and I'm thinking like, wow, this is awesome. First of all, the Grand Slams are great, especially when it works out with the platoon advantage like you want it to when you put LePlo in the lineup

and we're going to sweep this series. And in the rest of the game, we were outscored 12 to 1 and we did not win again. So that's a way in which the playoffs are soul crushing because the momentum people are wrong. Yes. It does not exist. And what you have to, even those, i'm not some like zen genius of the

baseball industry but even those of us who like work for a team and have the mystique of like we're smarter like no we all have to convince ourselves reconvince ourselves every two weeks that momentum is an illusion it does nothing cares over look at the alcs this year look at the alds this year like it just it doesn't mean anything whatever happens happens and i mean the ways in which we lost so the last two games in in boston were differently unpleasant but i can at least say that even though it's more disappointing to lose earlier than like making the world series the year before it is easier to get over because you're like, well, there was a lot more steps after this anyway. So like, you know, we might not have won the World Series, whereas last year we were literally halfway to winning the World Series.

So it was hard, but you just have to remind yourself, well, we won 100 games. We won the best division in baseball. This was an extraordinarily successful season. I don't think it's saying too much to say that, like, of the 10 teams that made the playoffs, probably the worst one is currently leading the World Series. So, like, things happen this month. And, like, this is a different conversation. Full credit to the Braves for their approach.

This is, like, I think a really good lesson for the industry to learn what they've been able to do this year but like it really is just a silly month i prefer to pay attention to the previous six where we won 100 games it was great i'm very proud of the team and uh try to win 100 in uh next season yeah i there was a moment i think during the alcs gosh was it the alcs it must have been the alcs where they, the Fox broadcast started with the back and forth between Boston and Houston. And here's who had momentum, but then this other team recaptured it. And then they went to, and I was like, you're just disproving momentum. Like you're, you're making an argument against momentum as a real thing in sports, which I agree is not does not mean we do not emotionally experience momentum as a thing that feels real, even if we know intellectually that it's like not

really a thing. But you do have to actively reconvince yourself of that every little while because it's easy to get caught up in the swell of feeling when someone wins big or loses big, like you just assume they'll never win again. If I were a major league hitter, I'd be terrible. But if I had any kind of a slump, I would just assume I've lost the ability to hit. I'll never get it back. I'll not hit forever. That's what I would assume. Right. The experience of momentum is either we'll never win again or we'll never lose again. That's it. But after the Yankees won 13 games in a row this year. I think it was like one of those super long winning streaks. And then immediately after that, they became the worst team in baseball for like the next 15 games.

Yeah. Like just look at, we were all, they were playing Oakland on like Sunday night baseball, right? And they had their winning streak active and then they lost. Yeah. And we were, we, a lot of people were watching that being like, oh my God, the Yankees lost. The Yankees lost a bunch of times this year. They lost a bunch of times right after that winning streak, but whatever. I mean, so much of sports conversation is cyclical anyway. We might as well continue to have this conversation, but like some really great examples of how momentum doesn't exist

this year. Yeah. We've had, you know, we've had a number of instances of that. Like, you know, the Cardinals felt like they would never lose again and then they lost a little bit and then they lost and that was that um and adam wainwright was grumpy with us for a day and then i think moved on probably i think adam wainwright was grumpy with his idea of what you are adam wainwright doesn't know i also think that he was at least half kidding about the whole thing like these are the moments where you're like, I wish there were a video of this so that I could interact with the tone in which this quote was delivered,

which I don't say as a knock on Jesse's reporting of it. That's not what I mean at all, but I do think that it's one of those things that taken within the context of Twitter can read one way, but with tone might have read a little more, at least lighthearted than it, than it did at the time. But it did give me an opportunity to say words about like how probability works and that's always a well-spent day. So I guess that's something. So you, were you

physically present for all of, of the Rays playoff games? Were you there from start to finish traveling here and there? No, I didn't go to Boston. there from start to finish traveling here and there no i didn't go to boston i i came home to watch those games and i wouldn't the experience of rooting for a team in a hostile environment is not like a fun one to replicate uh certainly not in boston no yeah i wouldn't think so yeah i had a hard enough time, again, watching the Rays get swept in Seattle by a team that I used to have a thing for. Right. That was a deeply unpleasant part of my summer where, again, I thought, oh, we'll never win again. And then we won a bunch of games.

Yeah. But I mean, I guess the option was there, to go to Boston if I wanted to. But yeah, it's not something that I enjoy. I wanted to go back, like have a quick turnaround. And if we're still live in the ALCS or the World Series, of course, I don't want to miss a single World Series game. But we didn't have that option. Yeah. Well, think about it this way.

You didn't have to travel. You know, you got to stay home and not deal with TSA. So that's a small silver lining to it, I suppose. You're not wrong. My wife and I took an actual international trip that we just got back from. Yeah, you got to do real vacation. Yeah, it was a half. She's doing a career thing, and I have off-season prep.

So it was a half trip and half working trip just to get a change of scenery. But still, I don't know what listeners might say. A lot of people who work for teams that aren't active, they're not like watching the playoffs for the World Series. Like you're kind of aware of them, but like I'm not I'm not staying up to watch these games. I don't care. So like an advantage of working in the industry as opposed to being a writer is sometimes if you have the misfortune of losing early in the playoffs, if you make the playoffs, you don't actually have to keep working the playoffs for the rest of the month. You have two functional brain cells left. I have like 10 because I've been able to sleep more.

What does in post-season work and prep look like? Like while you're still alive in it, you know, you're sitting there, you're facing the Red Sox. Like, what do you do, Jeff? That is the question that I basically have in a whiteboard and i wake up every morning and i look at it and i punch it and i spit on the ground and i think i have absolutely no idea so you kind of like poke around and queries and video and you're like i

think this guy tips this and like right you you try to find these little things that maybe the the actual advanced guys aren't doing and you're like i don't know we should throw this guy a lot of this pitch because he's whatever and then you get to game time and you're like i don't think that i did anything that makes a difference because no one no one in this position could do anything that makes it at that point it's just the players playing the games right like and they're gonna whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen kevin kiermeier is gonna hit a ball that like hits the fence and then the right fielder and then goes over the fence and you're like well i couldn't have done anything for that yep yeah weird ground rule uh i guess it's not a ground rule it's just a real rule but

like outside of that yeah it's super weird october is super weird for someone i mean i know for any analyst like you go in and you feel so much pressure to like find the thing that makes the difference you want to be the guy with the royals who's like john lester never throws a pickoff and you're like i saved the wild card game right but like that's good luck yeah you you try and you try and maybe you find a thing that makes one fraction of one percentage of a difference but like when i was in saint petersburg before game one i was just talking to my boss like the one of the vps of of the team and another one of the vps of the team and it was in the afternoon so like a handful of hours before the game started and another one of the VPs of the team. And it was in the afternoon. So like a handful of hours before the game started.

And I didn't really know what to expect. I hadn't been in the office during an active playoff series before. Oh, sure. And that afternoon we went to get coffee and tour the VP's new house. So that's what we did. Not to reveal trade secrets, but a lot of people at that point are just like, well, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. Right.

No matter what I'm doing. Yeah. I think that it's useful for us. The place where this has really driven home for me every year is when we get into the weeds on managerial decisions. And I don't mean to say that there aren't some managerial choices that are obviously the result of bad process. Ben Clemens spent like 2000 words being like, so Dave Roberts, what was that about? Can we talk about this, please? And so I think that those are useful because thinking through the strategy of the game is in addition to like understanding it better, like kind of fun like that. We like that stuff. But you are reminded very often this time of year, like it really does come down to players being able to execute on being put in particular situations and sometimes they're put in positions where they can really succeed and

sometimes their job is made harder by weird strategy but they still have to do the thing at the end of the day and i would imagine that as a front office person that is both liberating to a certain extent and also maddening because you really want to be able to, like you said, be like, when was the last time John Lester threw a pickoff? We should do something with that. That's useful for us to remember. I had forgotten how big a deal that was in that postseason. That was fun.

Yeah, they ran all over the place. I mean, it was so much fun. Run, run, running. A lot of base running fun, I think, in this postseason. It seems like teams have been very active on the base paths in a way that i have found enjoyable yeah we had a runner steal home yeah that was which i think a lot of people forgot but we had a runner try to do last world series in like game five yeah to very nearly make it so like that's yeah that's fun that's that's not that was great yeah that's like

i think kevin cash said like that said, that wasn't like a tip. No one was like, oh, we got this thing. No, Randy just read the room and he was like, I think I can score. And he did. And it was great. Yeah. And then as everybody knows, we went on to sweep the World Series. And we have our parade in a week.

Congratulations. Randy Rosarini will carry all of the floats. Just with one. And with one hand. It's unreal. Just with one hand. I will say I was very happy for, I know that it did not end the way you wanted it to, but given the strangeness of the Kiermaier only double,

I was very happy that he went like two for three and had some nice defensive plays in game four of that series. I doubt it blunted the feeling of disappointment too terribly much to not advance but after the weirdness in game three i was like well at least at least kiermeier had a nice night like this is some good redemption for him and then and then it wasn't but like it was just for him like his line was nice yeah no i mean i don't know how many i don't i'm not just here to like sing the praises of kevin kiermaier i guess but like if anyone just kind of like writes him off like oh he's another ender in ciarte or whatever like kevin kiermaier finished like elite defense and uh yeah

and an elite average batting line he was really good for like the last three or four months of the year like uh that was that was pretty exciting even if i'd uh yeah so again you can think of what's the if there was going to be a situation where like momentum had a big detrimental effect kk could have been like really down on himself yeah on over in game four but no maybe our best player yeah uh there at the end so yeah he had a great he had a great little night so you're you're in off-season mode at this point as you said what is well i guess let's ask this question two ways so there's like the general what do you what do you typically do in the off season and then there's

the what do you do in this off season because um we don't know we don't know when we're gonna get to do off season stuff like normal because it's cba so what do you normally do in an off season jeff and then what are you doing now? Well, thankfully, the answer to both questions is the same because there's really nothing. Like, if there's going to be a long work step, and I should make clear, I'm not withholding anything. I don't know.

I don't think anybody at my level, even the parties involved, like the parties directly involved, the union and the I bet, even they don't know what's going to happen. Because how could they? They don't know who's going to quote unquote blink or whatever when you come to a deadline. So whatever.

We'll see what the progress is going to be in the next few weeks. But like, yeah, we don't. Here's the difference is usual offseason prep. You know, you're mapping out the landscape. Who's going to have what money? Who are the free agents? Who are the non-tenders? All the usual stuff.

Like, right. You want to get up to speed in what you think every team is going to try to do. Because for no other reason, you want to try to suss out what does every team need and what does every team have surplus of so that then you can, just to facilitate more efficient conversations on your own part so you don't have to talk to 29 other teams for every single thing. Like, let's just stand. I'm sure every team is,

is doing that standard kind of off season prep minor league for agents, all that. And the difference this year is that when we have off season prep meetings at some point in the meeting, someone will raise the question, how should we be factoring in the CPA? And then everybody shrugs and then 30 seconds pass. And then you get back to normal.

So there's like one additional question that no one has a good answer to in this year's offseason prep. But that's basically it. And if somebody out there has adjusted for the imminent weird new CBA environment, credit to them. I would be surprised if any team is ahead of it. But, you know, you try to work out what are possible implications of what they'll agree to. And you kind of go down that road. But then you're like, well, now I'm preparing for 10 different off seasons under different environments.

That's impossible. Yeah, that seems like it has the potential to make you feel both more prepared and more exhausted because you're not going to end up actually living in any one but one reality. And then you're like, well, I know what we would do in nine other timelines. So that's nice. But I haven't slept in 24 days. I mean, speaking of you, I would imagine by this point, you're so tired, you probably feel like you're living in multiple different realities at once. It's a weird thing. Because like, you know, more baseball is good. And you want people to be engaged with the sport. And like, I don't think that the perspective on the postseason that like

the managing editors of baseball publications have is the one that we should be catering to because there are very few of us and we're going to be tired no matter what. So it's a weird thing. I want, it would be nice if the series went seven and we got more games because, um, you know, we do have this looming, well, we don't know if it's a cliff. It might be a slight depression. It might be like when fans have to adjust to the elevated basketball courts and eat shit as they try to step down. You know, like we don't know how far the fall could go. We just don't know. Or how long it might last, how long it could take to recover from. We just don't know any of these things. So we have to say, we're just going to run our top 50 free agent post on Monday the 8th.

And, you know, hopefully people remember it. And, you know, every year people complain, like how come the baseball off season isn't like the football or the basketball off season where everything happens in two days. And you know what? The long enough work stoppage it will. So everybody can get their dream. And this is the thing. I prefer a steady sort of stream of news because I don't understand that perspective either. We have a day like that. It's the trade deadline. Like, you guys, we have a day where everything happens in a span of a couple chaotic hours. And I end up working from 6 in the morning till 9 at night.

And that's fine. We can do that one time. But wouldn't you rather every day you get to go check and say, oh, there's where Corey Seeger signed and Carlos Correa went there and Max Scherzer is a what now? And having one of those a day so that everybody gets a nice steady trickle of news and I get to sleep more and we don't compress everything into one month. I think that having a regular running signing period is nice. It makes you steadily excited for the sport. I think it makes it a lot easier to remember where everybody signs. You have fewer moments of being like, oh, that guy's a Rocky now?

That's wild. Not just to pick a team, I don't know. Once spring training rolls around, you're also getting into opening day mode, and that's challenging enough on its own. We don't need to have two months back-to-back that are very, very busy, but that might be what we end up with this year. If we end up playing a full

162 i'll just i'll be happy can come in whatever don't compress the offseason spoken by the completely unbiased perspective of a baseball publications managing editor yeah yeah i mean it's it's effectively a sports and marshmallow test right like people just want everything at once they want instant gratification and then they want to not think about baseball for three months which guess what you already can you don't have to follow everything as it happens anyway you can just kind of poke your head in in the middle of june be like oh this team has 30 wins and these players and that's fine i don't know how people engage with baseball i don't know what today's youth are doing i don't want to get into that conversation but like what the hell we're already

so screwed up in our understanding of how people engage with baseball anyway. Because the people we see are like, I work for a team and you work for a publication. So, like, I don't know. What is an average fan? Like, what is the average fan's experience? I have a friend here who is a lifelong Giants fan. And he watched, like, three games before the playoffs. He just kind of, like, checked in every so often. And he would send me texts every so often being like, Giants are better than you said

they'd be. And it's like, yeah, they're better than everyone said they'd be. But like, he wasn't like buying new gear. This wasn't a uniquely Jeff failing. We were all surprised by the Giants. Yeah, I like, I don't know if I wanted to lie and say like, oh, our math had them figured out immediately. We knew they'd win 130 games.

Yeah, no, we're not that brilliant. Yeah, I think that well, and I think that it's useful for us to remember when whenever we're having discourse, whether it's about like when free agents should sign or what the game should look like on the field, like there are a lot of different ways to engage with the sport. And I think people do engage with it in a lot of different ways. And so that doesn't mean that we can't tinker with it or change it. Like I, you know, I advocated for pitch clocks at the beginning of this episode, but I think it is useful to remember that there are a lot of different modes of fandom. And I don't think we're going to satisfy all of them in any given moment, but it's nice that we satisfy all of them in some moments. And I think that the game is flexible enough

to allow us to do that. So, you know, that's okay. People don't have to experience the off season the way that I do. We have prospect lists. We've got Hall of Fame content. The Hall of Fame, it never sleeps, Jeff. In this house, it sleeps all the time.

But you know, there are normal beats to the season. And guys sign so late in the last couple of years anyway that I do wonder how different it will actually end up feeling when we get to a point where free agents can sign and teams start to trade actively again. And again, like you, I don't know, man. We don't know. We just don't know what we're going to get. But I do wonder how different it will actually end up feeling when it's all said and done because we've spent a lot of off seasons where we don't end up with marquee guys signing until December or January. Sometimes it pushes into February.

We had that one year where all the free agents signed in the same week and then literally everyone in baseball signed a freaking extension. I think you had left i left right before machado and harper signed which was great time yeah on my part yeah i don't think about that every week it's fine i think that you had you had uh signed with uh tampa right before the machado harper stuff and then again like literally every guy seemingly signing an extension it was quite a busy little transaction period we were also doing severino yeah yeah yeah i think um bregman signed his extension at that point like it was that it was that year of that block of them and i think we were also hiring at that time like we were doing a contributor call at the site and I, we had

to push an interview. I was like, I'm sorry, but I literally have to edit a Bryce Harper signing react. Like I can't like you're important, but also I have to do this right now. So, um, I don't remember who that was, but whichever candidate it was, uh, thank you for being accommodating. I don't remember if it was someone we ended up hiring or not. I think it was Bryce Harper. It was Bryce is like, I understand.

I am also now busy. Got a different deal. Have to withdraw my name from consideration. Well, he had a long off-season, so he's like, well, I'll pass the time by blogging. Right. I would support some off-season player blogging. If Seth Jolivan wanted to blog in the off-season, that would also be fine. Seth Jolivan doesn't know how to write more than 400 words anymore.

It is amazing how quickly the muscle atrophies. I ended up taking two of our gamers this postseason because they were like Saturday night games and folks were busy. And I was like, this feels like a thing that I have to train. I have to stand in front of. And let me tell you, you're never so humble as you are at one in the morning when you're like oh right writing is really hard i should have filed this hours ago the other the other day i was writing something uh about who cares what and i uh i

posted it in slack which is where everything goes and i had never seen this before but slack like broke it up in the middle and posted those two things which i didn didn't like because I had attached images and this was this whole thing. Who cares? Not important. But then I was like, why did it do this? And I was like, oh, 900 word count. All right. I really did it.

Yeah. That's like a full post at Fangraphs. We wouldn't make you Instagrams that. You could just run a full post. Run a full post. I definitely, like if whatever things end up going some weird path and then I end up writing again, I definitely foresee a future where everything becomes Instagram's length. Yeah. When Kevin joined the site, I was like, it's going to take you a little while.

It's fine. Like you're going to, it's going to take some time to get back up to writing every day and at length. Like it just does. It atrophies so fast. You know, it's fun. And this is is this is not related to anything really but in terms of a thing that like all baseball fans can engage with and

appreciate and really enjoy that's happening in the playoffs is like you know when a game ends in the world series of the playoffs and you write a recap it's hard to find a hook right because games are games are games and usually nothing too crazy happens yeah you're like oh i don't know this guy struck out too bad for him but like i think it was Devin Tink who wrote about this this morning. And, like, Tom Verducci read about it. But, like, Martin Maldonado just moving up in the box. Yeah. And drawing that walk.

Like, that's great. Who knows what impact, like, his little thing had on the at-bat. But, like, what a fun little, like, this doesn't happen in games. It's so Little League. Such an easy thing to do. It makes you appreciate the strategy it makes you think about what the implication was it makes you think about bigger implications like what if everybody scooted up i don't know maybe everyone would walk like that is like prime fun

post-season content yeah love that stuff yeah it does it gives you i think fewer nuggets than people would assume because everyone's like the stakes are so high everyone cares like this is the baseball that we all remember but you're right it's like this is a gamer like the stakes are high but the game still happens like baseball does and sometimes that means you get something really thrilling and sometimes you get a four-hour clunker and like you still have to write a game story about it because it's the world series whereas if that game happened in june we would never talk about it right like fancraft would not devote feature coverage to that it just wouldn't happen but it does give you like it gives you fun little things along the way where it's like oh you know jay gets to write about how many inexperienced relatively inexperienced

pitchers have started games like here you go with that you know um yeah devin gets to write about martin maldonado and like everyone's really fascinated by that stuff because because it's the world series whereas before you might be like oh do we need to write about martin maldonado don't we know usually not except for like it's it's interesting that the astros have kept around we give him a service line and you're like well obviously he has some some other qualities that are very positive. But just that little move and him recognizing, I'm probably not going to get a hit. I'm going to try to do something else.

It's great. Every single part of it is great, unless you're an Atlanta fan. But even there, you have to appreciate, this is weird. Yeah, surely you can appreciate the strategy. I mean, maybe not like right now, in a couple weeks you'll be like oh yeah that martin maldonado thing was good i'm glad you reminded me of a rosarino stealing home because i had forgotten that and i was so excited about it at the moment in the moment i was like this is the best baseball yeah i was i mean a rosarino stealing home in game one and then loop

low hitting grand slam again like i i had the world series video like being edited in my head and i was like we've got our first two highlights. And I'll tell you what, two highlights. That's what that video package is. And one ball off the wall in Fenway Park. Yeah, I mean, they were highlights, though. At least the ball off the wall in Fenway doesn't get to be anyone else's highlight. That's something, I guess, right?

I strongly regret bringing that play up in the first place. I was not very happy about it in the apartment. Well, Jeff, I am mindful of the time and that you have to go back to doing baseball stuff, even if we won't see the effects of that baseball stuff for a couple of months. But I would say, what do you have to plug? But you have the Rays to plug as like a franchise to root for. So instead, I will ask, is there any pop culture that you have engaged with recently that you've really liked that our listeners should consider as the offseason

approaches here? We just watched It Follows the other day, which has been out for like seven years. So I'm probably not the right person to ask. Okay, yeah, I'm like woefully behind on TV. I make time for Bake Off because it makes me feel happy when I have to work late. Wait, why are you so sleepy today when there was no World Series yesterday? I know there's like a full editing schedule, but I hope that you caught up on a little bit of sleep. I did. I got like, I went to bed at like 9.30 last night. Ah, I went to bed at 9. Beat you. Yeah, I went to bed at like 9.30 last night and then woke up at like 7.15 to run the site. So I

did get a full night's sleep last night, which was great and sorely needed. But it's like the cumulative effect of the month, I think is really what wears on you. And to be clear, my job, it's not like I'm not plowing a field or mining coal or anything, but like I have worked probably 35 days in a row.

I mean, this is this as i'm sure people can understand if they give it a moment's thought like when the cubs won the world series in seven games or like when the astros beat the dodgers in that crazy world series seven games like i remember you know of course being in a position not unlike yours and seeing that stuff happen and like the more historic it gets i remember just thinking like yeah oh i have to work so much harder on this yeah to do give it its its due but yeah just as as a fan as you're watching this stuff take place just understand the media that's covering it they're all very tired yeah they're all tired it's a long month yeah it's a great job and even great jobs make you tired so

you know we uh fully admit to the first thing while also acknowledging the second. And yeah, it's, I don't know, like we'll just rest eventually, probably. We'll sleep when we're dead. I don't know. We're all trying to sleep more, but we fail pretty often. Okay, so I guess as a plug, I don't know when this is going to go up. It's maybe before Game 6 of the World Series. Those of you listening, if you could just write your local congressperson and get them to maybe submit that the Rays should still be in the World Series, we could.

Oh, okay. I would. I don't want to. I mean, we haven't had meetings about this, but I think it would be super. Yeah. So those of you who are feeling a little sympathetic for the cause, maybe pitch in a little bit, and together we can do this. Yeah, you want some legislative intervention. That makes sense.

You'd need a couple of days pause, right? To get everyone back together. Cause I imagine that players have gone home to their off season homes, but it seems, it seems possible that you could just get the band back together for another game or two. We could,

we could fold it into a budget reconciliation bill. Well, I'm not going to top that so we can end there. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. That'll do it for today. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already signed up

and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going, keep us ad-free, and get access to a few special perks. Jacob Prypnow, Jay, just Jay, Neil Campain, Sandy Cantor, and Derek Ma. Thanks so much. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for us coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. I'll be back later this

week with new guest co-hosts and new episodes. Until then, enjoy the last bit of the World Series. So you show me round your town To have it gone and found Our love is such a way You made all the friends you depend on I know we might seem odd Cause you're not the only one I remember myself as a lonely child So what was it you got me wrong? You got me wrong