Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1774: In Defense of FIP

Episode Date: November 20, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the results of awards week, focusing on the controversy over Corbin Burnes’s victory over Zack Wheeler in NL Cy Young voting, the inconsistency between the AL and NL Cy Young results, how voting patterns are evolving, whether anyone actually discounts the value of innings, FIP vs. ERA and a […]

Hey, I'm dying to know if this is true What you feel you've become You gave yourself up too soon With the weight on your tongue I'll try it again You can keep in sight. Wishing there was an end, as you try to hide. Hello and welcome to episode 1774 of Practically Wild, a Fangraphs podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Nick Reilly of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. I have a bunch of people in my mentions congratulating me on Shohei Otani's unanimous AL MVP award as if I was somehow responsible or should share in his accomplishment. But really, I want to be maybe the first, maybe not the first, to congratulate you on Mike Zunino's 10th place MVP vote. Just as impressive an accomplishment.

Thank you. You know, Mike Zunino, he's good. He's, well, he's good. Yeah, you can say that now. He has received MVP votes. Well, and MVP votes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know which is more surprising, that Otani would win the MVP award or that Zunino would receive MVP consideration, let's say. That's a generous way to put it, but both of those things happen. So today is going to be the first of our Stove League discussion episodes. We'll be covering the first four episodes of the show. But before we get to Stove League, let's talk a little bit about Awards Week and not just Otani and Zunino. All the major awards have been announced now, and I guess if you graphed my level of interest in awards voting over time, it would be a straight line down.

I mean, it would be a linear decline, I guess. I'm less and less interested, I suppose, in who wins awards, but I am interested in them in the sense that they maybe act as a referendum of sorts on how player value is perceived. So it's not that I really have a stake in the outcomes or even that it affects my thinking about a player's season so much. I mean, I'm glad that Otani won, but I would not be any less impressed by what he achieved if he had not won for some reason. But I am interested in the conversation about the awards, I suppose. Maybe it's an overbid to say that the award results reflect how the media at large perceives player value, let alone how teams do or how fans do. Because again, every award result is based on a subset of voters. It's what 30 people are influenced by the thinking of the industry and they're not immune to other people's opinions.

So there's definitely some groupthink and echo chamber and peer pressure and all of that that goes into it. But it's still something of a small sample that may not always be reflective of the larger body of baseball writers. And baseball writers may not be reflective of other larger bodies But I guess the Most controversial result Or the one that has sparked the most Debate seems to be the NL Cy Young award

Don't know whether it's a productive debate Or not but there are aspects of it That interest me So the winner was Corbin Burns Of the Brewers Who beat out Zach Wheeler of the brewers who beat out zach wheeler of the phillies and others in a pretty tight race some of these races were not so close right this one was pretty close so very close burns and wheeler got 12 first place votes apiece and

burns ended up with 10 more cy young points he He did a little bit better, lower in ballots, and then Max Scherzer also got six first place votes. But this was the most divisive result just because Burns had the really great historic fielding independent pitching mark. That is probably what his season is most known for, best since Christy Mathewson in the National League, whereas Wheeler had the innings. He had the bulk, and he also had really good peripherals and everything, too. He's no slouch, no matter how you look at it. But this became kind of a FIP versus ERA or FIP versus innings pitched discussion,

which has been raging for a while, but this brought it to a head. This being a FIP versus ERA discussion is hilarious because Corbin Burns was the ERA champion that too yeah yeah so maybe it's more of an innings versus quality of the innings debate I should stop being surprised that look I should preface what I'm about to say by acknowledging that I am prone to moments of extreme feeling also. So it is not as if I am like bleep, bleep, bleep, computer person. But I guess I should stop being quite so surprised by people reacting to what they are presented

with, which I find to be inherently sort of reasonable with a lot more sort of fuss and vinegar than I was expecting. I think that both of these guys had tremendously good seasons, right? I think if you look at our version of war at Fangraphs, which is FIP based, which will be important to this conversation. And if you look at Baseball Perspectus's version of war or warp, as they call it, which is DRA based, these guys were, they were basically the same. They produced the same amount of value, right? We had Burns ahead ever so slightly compared to Wheeler. They had

Wheeler ahead ever so slightly compared to Burns. I think that it is perfectly reasonable for you to look at these two guys seasons and say, Zach Wheeler pitched 60 some odd more innings than Burns did. He pitched well during those innings, right? And he was the Cy Young by virtue of the innings he pitched and the value that those brought to the Phillies. I think that Wheeler is the Cy Young. I think that if you look at Burns' year and say, sure, he pitched fewer innings, but he was so superlative in the innings that he did pitch, both by sort of traditional metrics and by um more advanced stats that that's enough for me sure it's fewer innings but they were they were really great

innings that he threw and so he is the saiyan i think that both of those arguments are completely reasonable i think that a preference for bulk is fine because these guys were both great i think that preferring just the the run that Burns was on, the strikeouts he was able to accrue, the home runs that he suppressed, just the minuscule walk rate that he surrendered. I think that if you look at either of these guys and think that they had a Cy worthy season,

that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah, they both did. Yeah. I mean, undeniably. Undeniably. undeniably neither one is like oh this person is not deserving of a cy young or would not have won it in any other season i mean they both had cy young caliber seasons however you slice it and it's not as if the margin between them was was very large i mean like i think that the margin from a baseball

reference war perspective was was broader certainly. So we should acknowledge that part. But these guys, when you look at our version of war, they're well within the margin of error from war, right? Like there is noise in that status. We've talked a lot about how it is not precise down to the decimal point, right? And so I think that looking at this and saying one of these guys is better than the other, but it's close is perfectly reasonable. I think that the margins in the voting reflected that. So this is not as if Burns won unanimously and Wheeler was slighted.

I think that there was just, like you said, enough down ballot consideration for Burns and those six Scherzer votes in first place loom large for both of these guys. And so I was like, that's fine. This is reasonable. And then Twitter went nuts. I was very confused large for both of these guys and so i was like that's fine this is reasonable and then twitter went nuts i was was very confused and somehow the guy who was the era champion was somehow

the the paragon for the nerds and anyway it was all very it was all very twitter um i i do think that you know we should as people who analyze the game, interrogate what the baseline threshold for innings is for a guy to win the Cy Young Award. I think having that conversation, I was talking with your colleague, Michael Bauman, about this on your other podcast. Bauman, I think, put it well that part of what we might be seeing here is some anxiety about the role of the starter.

And if we are willing to bestow the sport's highest honor specifically for a pitcher on a guy who threw so many fewer innings than someone like Wheeler, that might be what part of this is, right? That we want innings to matter. I don't think that nerds are saying innings don't matter, right? I think that that's sort of silly. And I don't think that any awards vote should be just a straight war leaderboard sort but like war is a counting stat so it's not as if innings didn't matter here they matter perplexes me i don't know where the perception that yeah sabermetrics underrates workload or i mean right it's it very much takes this into account you could argue that maybe war doesn't

fully capture some secondary effects of those innings pitched. There can be cumulative costs to everyone else on the staff having to accrue those innings and rack up those pitches if the starter doesn't. But even then, it is often the analysts and the nerds making that argument. Russell Carlton recently wrote about the penalty to relievers as they throw more and more pitches in a season. So it's not like the stat innings pitched captures that theoretical extra value any more than war does. Right. And I think that it's fair to feel a little nervy maybe about FIP being overly deterministic in a race like this.

I think FIP is a good stat. I think the simplicity of FIP is one of its selling points, but I think takes into consideration the things that we tend to think make for a good pitcher. But if, you know, you have other stats that are more your flavor, I think that that's fine. But I don't think that, um, again, with the exception of baseball reference war, like I don't think that those stats told a remarkably different story about these two candidates. So I think that having a philosophical debate about it is fun.

Like when we've been talking about why individual rankings for baseball players aren't something that are likely to catch on, part of it is because we already have stats that inspire these debates. Imagine if we had put a ranking on these guys. So I think that it's fine to have those debates, but some of the reaction to it felt, I was like, you're not Zach Wheeler though. Like you personally are not him.

So the amount of emotional investment you're having in this is not good or bad, just like kind of surprising to me always just because awards votes aren't something I get overly fixated on. There are plenty of things I do get overly fixated on. So I do not mean to suggest that like having strong emotional reactions to things that don't directly affect you is silly. Like, hello, we're all alive. So that's fine. But I was a little bit

surprised. I was like, oh, this is what Twitter is about tonight. Okay. Which is funny because I think that like the AO results were more surprising to me. Yeah, we can talk about that because it's hard even to say, oh, okay, this is the year when we just switched to voting this way and it's all based on FIP because that doesn't apply to the AL Cy Young Award votes. At all. There's some inconsistency there. And we should remind our listeners, this is not a consistent voting body across all of

the awards. When you're in the BBWA, not every member. Like I didn't have an awards vote this year and I don't think you did either. Right. No. And you never get one because you were in the New York chapter and there's so many people in that chapter. So the entire body does not vote on every award. And I think that that is part of why we end up seeing some philosophical inconsistency from vote to vote, because the people who voted for A.L. Cy Young were not the same people who voted for N.L. Cy Young.

So that is useful for folks to keep in mind, too. I did see some discussion of that. They're like, what do writers even think anymore? I'm like, different people doing different stuff. Yeah. The entire body isn't involved in every vote. So I think that that can kind of confuse people. They are looking for there to be some like you know grand unified

theory of pitching at play in the Cy Youngs and there just isn't yeah in past awards votes I think the results have kind of been proxies for your school of thought about baseball and even as recently as like Trout versus Cabrera or some of the memorable awards battles it really did represent maybe a different approach to the game. And today, I think that's a lot less true just because it's hard to find anyone who's voting on these awards who is not at least conversant with some of the advanced stats. I mean, it would be hard to do your job effectively

as someone who's covering baseball if you're not aware of those things and to some degree influenced by them. So I don't think the divides are as big now or that it has to be some kind of baseball culture war. But it inevitably turns into that to some small extent. Because I didn't have a vote, I didn't do deep dives on Burns versus Wheeler the way I would have if I had been charged with actually selecting one over the other. selecting one over the other. So to me, it's just kind of a toss up. And I didn't look at, you know, quality of competition or all the other many things that I probably would have examined if I had had to come to some decision here. And part of the reason why I'm not quite as invested

in awards votes anymore is that like, even the quote unquote, bad ones, or like the ones that people get angry about are so much better than they used to be. Oh, yeah. And by better, I mean they reflect on-field value or at least my understanding of on-field value much more closely than they used to. So, you know, I saw people get mad about some of the maybe home cooking, a little bit of bias perhaps creeping in and some of the like down-ballot a little bit of bias perhaps creeping in and some of the like down ballot AL MVP or NL MVP award results, which, you know, really I don't want to waste too much energy on looking at who got a vote for sixth place or whatever. Like people get angry about that stuff. It's probably

not worth the time, but you know, people getting upset about, well, how could you vote for Brandon Crawford first first is that just because you're a writer who covers the giants or if you vote for salvador perez for second place or something is that because you're covering the royals i mean maybe but brandon crawford's like a six win player i mean you know i would not have put him first on my ballot. But like you go back to the 80s or 90s or even earlier. Some of those votes are not good. Yeah. Some of those players were like not even very good, like let alone not MVP caliber.

So you don't get those sort of egregious selections anymore. So you're really just looking. It's like an era effect. You're kind of grading on a curve now. looking it's like an era effect you're kind of grading on a curve now and and the quote-unquote mistakes or the decisions that get people exercise now are nowhere near as upsetting or off-putting as they once would have been but with burns and wheeler so i think the difference in innings pitch between them is i think it's 46 and a third actually so it's significant and i think you can make an argument that maybe in 2021 in particular, like no one goes deep into game. So if you are racking up 213 and a third innings the way Wheeler did and you're leading the majors, like maybe that was even more valuable in a year like this where pitchers were just dropping like flies and you had to fill those innings somewhere. And so if you're getting high-quality innings from Wheeler, then that's very valuable in 2021.

But there has to be some balance between rate stats and bulk stats and counting stats, and there's always going to be some middle ground there. You can say, I think, if you're a Burns supporter, you could probably say, well, look at how Wheeler did in the extra innings that he pitched relative to Burns. And his ERA in those extra 46 and a third innings or the outings where he went deeper into games was not that great, which is understandable maybe because times through the order effect and everything. But you can say, oh, what's the value of 46 and a third extra innings of whatever it was you know for something maybe close to five ish era yeah and i guess if you're a wheeler supporter you can look at it the other way and you can say well yeah of course wheelers

peripherals and rate stats were a little worse because he was going deeper into games and he was facing hitters and he was you know fatigued and all these things so you can argue it either way and there is some balance there and i guess you can get yourself into trouble because you can keep subtracting those innings like you can say well yeah burns was just as valuable as as wheeler because those extra innings that wheeler provided weren't as high quality innings. And then you could say, well, maybe Jacob deGrom was just as valuable because the extra innings that Burns provided over deGrom were not so great. Or, you know, you could kind of just keep chipping away at the innings totals in search of greater and greater per inning efficiency. Like, for instance, Tom Tango at his blog, and I'll link to this on the show page, he worked out all the math and it's very long and complicated.

And he determined that Jacob deGrom and Julio Urias contributed like almost exactly the same value to their teams this season, according to his calculations and assumptions, which I guess you could quibble with. But there's a huge innings gap there. Urias was at 185 and two-thirds, and DeGrom, because he was injured for so much of the season, only got to 92. But he had a 1.08 ERA, and Urias had a 2.96 ERA, and maybe, at least by some accountings, it comes out to sort of the same thing. So it's hard to answer and resolve that debate of more innings versus fewer innings, but better. It's not something you can necessarily eyeball and come up with a perfect answer. changes in voting patterns over time and that is something that interests me like there was a period where you were seeing wins old school pitcher wins and saves were heavily factored into these things there was that time where relievers were routinely winning cy young awards which hasn't happened in quite a while now no by the way if you're gonna say sabermetrics people don't value innings i mean it was the old school writers who were handing out Cy Young awards like candy to saves leaders.

We seem to forget that, don't we? Yeah, seems like it. But Tango did another post just because he has a Cy Young predictor formula, which is just this very simple way to predict the voting behavior. And this is something Bill James came up with initially, and the Bill James system worked well for a while, and it incorporated old school wins and saves and such. And then it stopped working very well because the voting body changed and minds changed, and suddenly people were discounting those stats. And so Tango came up with his Cy Young predictor, which was very simple. He said it was just innings pitch divided by two minus earned runs plus strikeouts divided by 10

plus wins. I mean, just basic stats. And from 2006 through 2020, it almost perfectly predicted every result. So the person that it said should win was either first or a very close second in every single award in all of those years. And it's just kind of trying to predict how the voters would vote. This was the first year, Tango noted, where that formula failed on the NL side, at least. So Burns, according to that formula, was fourth and a pretty distant fourth. And so Tom's saying, well, maybe this reflects a real change then.

Maybe this is another era. There was the Bill James era with wins and saves where that worked. And then there was the Tango predictor era. And now maybe Burns is the beginning of a new era, but maybe not because Robbie Ray won the AL Cy Young Award too And Ray, he wed the AL in innings pitch With fewer than 200 But if you were going to go with FIP

Then you would say Oh, well, Nathan Ivaldi was the AL Cy Young Award winner Or Garrett Cole for that matter And they finished behind Ray So it's hard to tell if we're in a new era and voting patterns have completely changed or whether it was a one-year blip and Burns was really spectacular on an any-per-any basis and maybe it just so happened that things shook out with the way the votes were distributed that Burns could just edge out wheeler barely

yeah i mean i also wonder if something that was operating uh in the back of some voters mind was sort of the flip of what you said about innings being really valuable this year where voters might have said this was a really strange year you know and a lot of guys were seeing dramatic innings increases from what they did in 2020 because of the shortened season. And so we're going to be less concerned with a not so small even gap between the top two because of how dominant those innings were. Just understanding that teams were perhaps more careful in their usage of guys.

And not all of Burns' missing innings were the result of the brewers going with a six-man rotation at times you know he did i think miss at least two turns because of needing to be on the covet il so you know it's not entirely a usage thing but i do wonder if voters said you know this is like a weird year and everybody's throwing fewer innings and you know teams are being in some respects more conservative with guys because they don't want them to break and be unavailable in October. And so many of them broke anyway. And we're just, you know, in the same way that we're not going to hold a bad infield defense against a pitcher, we're not going to hold some of that

usage stuff against him because who knows what that looks like a year from now and i don't think that burns's usage was entirely the result of milwaukee being sensitive to what the the sort of jump in innings was although you know i do think that they were trying to be very thoughtful in their management of that because of how many guys they had sort of making the leap simultaneously i don't know that he's going to throw dramatically more innings next season uh so i don't say that as if we can confidently say this is a one year blip. But I do wonder if the environment that we're in played some role in how voters were thinking about the inning stuff. And, you know, where you fell on that side, this, you know, which side of that question you fell on maybe was part of why you voted for one versus the other. Yeah. And I mentioned Arias. I mean, if you need another sign that thinking has changed, at least in some respects, well, he went 20 and three and was the only 20 game winner in the majors. In fact, the only 18 game winner for that matter, and barely lost any games. And he finished seventh place in anl scion voting so yeah certainly some things are different yeah like if you want to think about the last time i was genuinely like up in arms this is the right choice like i remember it being a big deal that felix had only won what like 13 games in the year that he was the scion and i was like it doesn't matter. And I sounded exactly like that. It was, you know, fan Meg, it was a different time. So, you know, we're not that far removed from some of these things being sort of eye opening for if not for voters, at least for fans in terms of how the thinking around which stats we put primacy on changing, like that stuff is still pretty recent. Now, here's the only part of this that I do feel strongly about.

I think the perception is that ERA is what actually happened. And FIP is this abstract nerds. I didn't even queue you up for this, Ben, but I'm going to spin the top and let you go. FIP is just this hypothetical thought experiment that takes place on spreadsheets and doesn't reflect reality. That is not the case. Yes. FIP is also what happens. It is an ERA estimator. And I think that leads to the perception that it doesn't reflect reality in some way. It's just entirely hypothetical. But no, FIP is a direct result of the pitcher's performance. I'm not saying you

should just look at FIP or just look at Fangraph's War or just look at any single number. There's no need to. There are many numbers and they tell you different things. But I think there really is a misunderstanding of what FIP is telling you and why it is actually very suitable, I think, for looking at retrospective performance and awards wins. Let me just, a quote from an Alex Speer column in The Globe. And Alex is awesome. Yeah, Alex rocks. And he knows everything that I'm about to say. And he wrote a really good, long, and well-considered column about how he doesn't think that any one of the wars or

even all of the wars are a perfect way to look at this and how his thinking on this has kind of changed, et cetera, et cetera. So he's writing about the three war models, fancraft, baseball reference, and baseball prospectus. And he says, all have a similar goal. Once a ball is in play, there are forces, luck, the ballpark, the quality of defense that are out of a pitcher's control. All three systems attempt to limit the influence of those elements. Okay. But the next paragraph he writes, that approach arguably serves as a better bellwether of

a pitcher's true performance and thus serves as a better predictor of his future. But shouldn't the Cy Young vote reflect what a pitcher did on the field in a given year more than it does what he might have been expected to do in a baseball lab? And this is where he loses me and not just Alex, but a lot of people, I think, who devote a lot less time and study and research to this than Alex does. It would that all voters were taking their responsibility as diligently as Alex. But I don't understand how you get from,

OK, this is a better representation of the pitcher's true performance to saying, but ERA is what happened. ERA is the results. And then later in the piece, he says, one general manager

offered a simple solution when asked, what statistics deserve prominence when considering the Cy Young vote? Innings and ERA, the bottom line results in games. Now, here's the thing. FIP does predict future ERA better than ERA itself does. And that in itself is irrelevant because we don't care about future results. This is a retrospective award. But the reason why it predicts future performance better than ERA is that it appraises past performance better than ERA. ERA is a team stat. It's certainly related to the pitcher's performance, but it takes into account all kinds of things that the pitcher has limited to no control over, whether it be the defense or luck or other factors. Whereas FIP is looking at factors that are more directly, not entirely directly, but more directly under the pitcher's control. So I understand that FIP sometimes underrates pitchers too. And there are certainly some pitchers who can, quote unquote, beat FIP at least for a time because they induce weak contact.

And thus, they are able to get a below league average BABIP that is not just a fluke or the result of their defense or luck, but is the result of weak contact. And we now have some stats that can point that out to us. So you can look at expected weighted on base or you can look at exit velocity or whatever you want, and that can be a nice supplement. But if I had to choose just one and say, this represents the pitcher's past performance better, I would choose FIP, not ERA. Yeah. Yes. I agree, Ben. Okay. So that's the big disconnect for me. I don't think that we need to say that ERA is for past performance, FIP is for future performance. No, FIP is also for past performance. It's just if you strike out a lot of hitters and you don't walk a lot of hitters and you don't allow a lot of home runs, and that's certainly subject to some luck as well but all of those things are a reflection of the pitcher's performance it's not some abstract thing that didn't actually happen no it is what the pitcher did right and i think that when you are you know i i have had one awards vote in my time in the bbwa and it was really easy like i voted for yorda navarez to be the al rookie of the year because

guess what he was the al rookie of the year. Because guess what? He was the AL Rookie of the Year. There's like not a lot of controversy around that. And so I don't have direct experience with having to grapple with a, you know, I think that I probably actually would have ended up voting for Burns just because I do think that the per inning performance was so spectacular. But I haven't had to do this, right? Where I assemble a bunch of facts that are sort of contradictory to actually turn in a vote that people are going to ridicule on the internet but i think that when you when you're doing it seriously and i think alex does a really good job of this i thought that dan's

explanation of his nl rookie of the year vote this year where he was the he was the lone rogers voter in the wilderness you know like that is the level of sort of analysis and and care that we want people to bring to this because it while I, you know, think that like getting really exercised around Zach Wheeler is like not how I would choose to spend my emotional capital. Like it matters a lot to these guys and it can have a an impact on the course of their careers and their Hall of Fame case. Like it is something that you should have reverence around. I think that that is the appropriate sort of seriousness to bring to it but i i agree with you and i think that the the great thing about having so much information at

our disposal while it can at times feel sort of paralyzing because you have to wade through it and wait it and ultimately arrive at a decision is that like if there were a pitcher who we think is just really a fit beater on a regular basis and that it is indicative of a skill that the stat cannot fully encompass we have other information at our disposal that would allow us to bring rigor to that case and so i i think that fundamentally alex and I agree that like, it should not just be, you know, this guy has the higher war, and then you're done with it. And not just because war isn't a precise enough stat for us to do that, but because it, it tends to fail to take into account other things that are really important, and then might end up complicating that case. But we have that stuff at our disposal. And we can do that. I don't think that this result and Alex didn't vote for NL Cy Young. He had an AL vote. So, you know, he didn't vote in this particular race, although it's funny because his column about voting for the AL Cy Young ended up factoring into people's understanding of the NL vote. Anyway, again, not a consistent body across all the votes. But I think that, you know, when you have all of that information at your disposal, you can come to a conclusion. And again, because I think both of these votes, a vote either way would have been perfectly reasonable. Like I can't really fault anyone for having come to one conclusion versus the other. I don't know the exact process by which other BBWA voters are deriving their vote. But most of the folks,

you know, I would say to a person, the people I know who end up voting on this every year, like they take it very seriously. So I don't want to assume that they're doing kind of a shoddy job. And I don't think Alex was accusing anyone of that. But we have all this information, and we can use it. And I don't think that that means that we have to say that like, does a theoretical lab league job. Right? Yeah right yeah well that's not what it does that's my defense of hip thanks not the first time that i have delivered it but yeah you're you're here defending fib craig was too this is great because it means i don't have to go on twitter i'm getting everything i need happy you guys are such pals so So none of the other results prompted as much discussion or were nearly as surprising.

So I don't have that much to say about MVP. I'll just say, of course, I'm pleased that Otani won. Yeah. I'm semi-surprised, I suppose, that he won unanimously. And if you do want to look for a sign that times are changing, I think the fact that the top three finishers in each league came from non-playoff teams, which was a first, certainly that has something to do with just the way it shook out this year with the best players just being on non-playoff teams. But it also has to do with changing voting patterns and people not prioritizing playoff success quite

as much. But look, I talked ad nauseum about Otani's season this year. And for anyone who wants to, I wrote a very long piece sort of summing up his season and his stats like days after my daughter was born while I was supposed to be on leave. It was like, no, I have to do my end of season Otani piece though. I mean, Jessie was understanding. She's like, oh yeah, I mean, Otani, you have to do, I have to do my end of season Otani piece, though. I mean, Jessie was understanding. She's like, oh, yeah, I mean, Otani, you have to do what you have to do. We were watching Otani play appearances in the delivery room. We were in there for quite a while.

So I am just very happy with how that season worked out. The fact that he won the MVP, again, doesn't influence my perception of his season very much, but in the sense that I just generally want people to appreciate Otani and want him to be appreciated in history. And the fact that getting that MVP award next to your name certainly sways some people and makes a difference in how you're regarded. So I think that's great. But I remember, like in the depths of the uncertainty about Otani, when it wasn't clear if he'd be able to stay healthy or whether he'd be given the opportunity to keep being a two-way player, I'm pretty sure

I said, just give me one year. I just want one year where we have fully operational Otani performing at the peak of his powers on both sides of the pall. I just want to see it once in MLB. And now I have seen that. So I feel fulfilled, which is not to say that I want that to be the only year. I want there to be many more years like that, but I feel like I got what I wanted and I've seen what I wanted to see and what I was salivating over for years before he even came to MLB. And it just worked out wonderfully. And it was the most enjoyable player season I've ever seen and probably will ever see. I can't imagine anyone surpassing it unless it's Otani himself. It's hard to imagine him being better than he was.

Of course, I am getting greedy and imagining that possibility somehow. If he were able to combine his first half offensive performance with his second half pitching performance and just sustain both of those things all season next year or in any future year, then he could, in theory, be even better. Maybe if they have a healthier lineup and he's not pitched around quite as much and he's not rusty from coming off Tommy John surgery, it's possible to imagine him exceeding this. But even if he were to repeat this season precisely next year, it wouldn't be quite

as thrilling as it was to watch it the first time it would still be great but it would be hard to equal the the highs that he gave me this year just so much fun to watch so i am happy for him and i was listening in on the bbwa conference call after the award i debated coming with some kind of weird, effectively wild hypothetical question to pose to him. But I figured we only had 10 minutes and I probably shouldn't use up the time that other people who are actually writing about this need to get quotes. But someone asked him, I think the Angels beat writer for The Athletic asked him what his plans were for celebrating the MVP award. And he was just like, I think I'm just going to have a lonely night in. celebrating the MVP award and he was just like,

I think I'm just going to have a lonely night in. He was like, my mom and my sister are in town, so maybe I'll see them and then tomorrow I'll be working out and practicing in the morning.家族というか、母親とかは来てるので、帰ったらいると思いますけど、夜は特には、また明日もあるので、早めに寝ると思います。 at home, but actually my mom's in town. My sister's in town, so I'll probably see them right after this. It's still before noon over here. I've still got some workout and practice tomorrow, so I'll probably sleep early and get ready for that. That's Otadi. He's just like, I want to know more about him. With most players, I am not that interested in their personal lives,

really. And I wouldn't be that disappointed if they turned out to have some skeletons in their closet or that surprised even. Like I don't expect great baseball players to be great people. And of course, I don't want to learn that they're not great people, but it's happened enough times that it's not surprising and i don't really expect them to be paragons of humanity or anything but otani is like the one guy where if we ever found out that there was something not so savory about him i would be sad yeah he is also one of the only players who like i just want to know more about him and like his life off the field and like i'm not someone who gets into like celebrity culture and like who's dating

who and everything, but I want to know like, is Otani just like, is he good at every occupation he pursues? Like, does he have off field interests that are not baseball related because he is so focused on baseball all the time and so disciplined. So I would like to know more about him. And he's very private about those things.

And perhaps he will open up at some point later in life or perhaps not. But for now, it's just a joy to watch him on the field and not just his skills, but his personality always shines through too. And also some credit goes to Joe Maddon. Otani hit the balls and threw the balls, but I just don't know how many managers would have given him the opportunity to do everything he did. He had the ability, but not every team would have happier doing both. So Madden, no manager of the year award votes for him, nor would you expect there to be. But in that particular case, I think he did really well to create the conditions that helped Otani flourish.

It's very strange to be like conscious of the fact that you're witnessing history. Like there aren't, we've perhaps had too many opportunities in the last couple of years to be aware of that, but we tend to look back on life and then be like, oh, yeah, that was wild. That tends to be the direction it takes much more often than being conscious of witnessing something very, very special. And I think that one of the things I appreciated the most about the season he had this year was that you were just aware all along like i'm very lucky to be getting to watch this you know there we've had this observation about mike

trout sort of in aggregate before but i think that even more than a typical very good trout season i was just aware the whole time i'm like i get to see this and a lot of people have loved baseball a lot and just haven't had the opportunity to see this. You know, they got to see other stuff that I didn't, that I'm, you know, deeply envious of. So it's not like the scorecard is necessarily balanced in my favor, but it was very cool to just be so conscious of the fact that, you know, we might see a better season,

even from him in the course of his career, but we might not see another season quite like this ever again and it was really cool yep and Bryce Harper who should not be ignored here either I'm gonna say a weird thing poor Bryce Harper yeah just perpetually underrated Bryce Harper just no one gives that guy any attention no really I mean you think back to when we talked very early in the season about how he actually did seem to be overshadowed yeah the new generation by Tatis by Soto etc well he beat them all out to win this award and he deserved it again it's it's kind of a close race at least if you look at the leaderboard. There were a lot of great players who had legitimate shots at that award and cases.

But Harper was awesome. And to the extent that one player can carry a baseball team, which is not a great extent, he did that for the Phillies. Ultimately, they came up short. But he was not at fault for that. And boy, they really struck gold with both harper and wheeler when you commit to a big free agent you hope that it works out as well as it has in those two cases of course they haven't managed to develop players and surround them with a playoff caliber team but

it's been a joy for them to have harper and to have wheeler and harper you know he was uh kind of in trout's shadow for a while well who knows Maybe he's evened up the race a little bit. Even though he was probably the most hyped prospect ever, I mean, whatever happens from here on out, and he is certainly on a Hall of Fame trajectory to this point in his career, you can't call him a disappointment at all, even relative to the sky-high expectations. I mean, he has been exactly what the Phillies wanted, and really, he's been about what you would want from a 16-year-old who's on the cover of Sports Illustrated, too. Yeah, I mean, like, I think that, again, part of why we should take these votes seriously when we have them is that the hardware does have an impact on how these guys are viewed when they've retired and we're assessing their Hall of Fame case than being a two-time MVP. It's like, that's pretty good hardware to have on the resume. And I think that you're right that how the votes played out this year

would indicate that being on a playoff team is not important necessarily. It's certainly not going to make or break it for someone like Otani. And I don't want to overvalue that, but I do think that the role that he played just seemingly single-handedly him and wheeler like keeping them in that race until until the very end was incredibly impressive and i don't know it's weird i felt like in a in may we were like oh we should be talking about bryce harper more and we were right we should have been talking about him now yeah all right shall we talk some stove

league ben why didn't you tell me to watch the show earlier? I know, I was really remiss. I just never brought it up. But I'm glad I belatedly got you to watch it. So do you like Stove League? I haven't actually asked you this yet. Yeah, I really am enjoying Stove League.

So we, the sort of, we don't have to, I don't know if you want to go episode by episode or what, but we're talking about the first four. So we'll say that again in case people are behind and don't want things spoiled. I don't think we're going to go like plot point to plot point because there's a lot of plot in this show. Yeah, there is.

Like there's a lot going on in all these episodes. But just in case you have not watched the first four, you can tune out now. But I am now almost through six. In fact, I was almost late to record because I was watching Stove League that we did not need for today. You went beyond the assignment.

Yes, I've read ahead back to my grad school days. So I like it quite a bit. I think it is a really just dynamic and compelling mix of baseball and human drama. And I'm enjoying it a lot. I like it a lot. It would be bad if you didn't like it because we committed to doing this watch a lot. That would not be fun if you thought it sucked. So I'm glad you don't.

I think that your assumption that this was a safe call was a reasonable one though knowing me as you do yes yeah so if you're not planning to watch stove league shame on you but uh you you can tune out i suppose for the rest of this episode or maybe not you might enjoy the discussion anyway if you are planning to watch it later then feel free to come back to these episodes anytime. And hey, we've already given you plenty of general baseball discussion on this episode. So yes, we will be spoiling or discussing freely the first four episodes, but not going beyond that. I have finished the series, but it's been a while since I watched it and now I'm rewatching it. So I don't even really remember everything that is to come. but thanks to everyone who has

checked it out and is going on this journey along with us I know that it's not quite as easy as tuning into some North American produced show that is on a very easily accessible streaming service with no subtitles required etc. I historically

haven't had great luck in persuading people to watch things that were made in other countries that you kind of have to go a few extra steps to find. Like, I love the Australian version of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, and I've plugged that to people at various points, but I don't know that anyone really takes me up on that. I think a big part of like why you decide to watch something is because everyone else is watching it, right? And you hear the conversation and you're persuaded, oh, everyone's talking about Ted Lasso. I guess I better watch Ted Lasso or I'll get spoiled. Or there's just kind of an effect where if everyone is praising something, then you want to watch it and you don't want to be

left out of the larger discussion. I don't know how many of us are actually around water coolers during the pandemic, but there is sort of that pressure to watch certain things that are in the zeitgeist. And Stofeleak, sadly, is not in the zeitgeist, but I hoped that part

of this group project here would be giving people a community to watch it along with and respond to it. And that would give people greater incentive to do it. So we have found that the subtitles are best on viki they can be a bit rough in some alternative sources at least

in the early going but on viki i find them to be just fine they really don't interfere with my enjoyment or comprehension of the show at all so stovley just to recap, this was a South Korean drama that aired late 2019 to early 2020. It was critically acclaimed in Korea. It was well watched in Korea. It won all sorts of awards. Sadly, there has not been a second season announced. I don't know that there will be, but there doesn't necessarily need to be. It stands on its own and ends in satisfying fashion, but we're a long way away from that. And for anyone who is not on board yet, this show follows a fictional KBO team, so a major league team in Korea called the Dreams, that

is your standard sad sack cellar dweller. So they've finished last four years in a row everything's going against them they make the mets look well managed i mean yeah everything is going wrong for this team not only are they bad on the field but there's clubhouse discord the players are fighting there are warring factions within the coaching staff they either don't have money or seemingly just choose not to spend money so their ownership issues as well there's mismanagement there are crooked

scouts who are on the take i mean all sorts of issues going on we could talk a little bit about just like just all of the many problems that are besieging the dreams here i mean they need a a total culture turnaround when the series starts the the penny pinching made me think do we think it's an accident that they have like oakland a's colors yeah i wondered that too you definitely there are moneyball vibes here i don't know whether it's intentional or not, but certainly some echoes of that story and the color scheme is similar too. And the series is shot in a real KBO

park, the home of the KBO team SSG Landers. They were the SK Wyverns when this series was produced. So the setting looks pretty authentic. Now in the first four episodes, there isn't a ton of on-field action. In the first episode, you see the final, the disgraceful last game of the season. And then there are some other isolated bits of baseball action. Based on what you've seen so far, what would you say about the level of verisimilitude when it comes to the actual athletes and the on-field action, which is not the focus so far. I think that it's been pretty good. I have not watched any of these

guys and thought, well, there's absolutely no way that that guy's a professional athlete. I mean, I think that part of what you're dealing with, and there are points where the series you know goes abroad as they try to find international players to replace a foreign pitcher who's going to japan and like you know you see some of the guys that they work out and they're not like necessarily in top prospect shape right there's maybe a little more to the middle than you would get. But also, the sort of standard caliber of player who a KBO team might find in the States who can have an impact on the field there, that guy isn't necessarily a top prospect.

And none of them are unbelievably... You don't look at them and say, oh, you're out of shape. That's not the reaction you get. So I think it's been pretty good so far. I don't know if this is a function of like, it is interesting sort of the level of awareness of baseball terms that the series seems to think

their viewers would have because there are, and I think that based on the presence of characters in addition to the subtitles that this is going through on the Korean broadcast as well, but they will like tell you what terms mean. Yeah. So that was just an interesting, in addition to the subtitles that this is going through on the Korean broadcast as well, but they will tell you what terms mean. Yeah. So that was just an interesting, like, they're trying to help calibrate the action on screen for their viewers who might not be, you know, super familiar with baseball as a sport.

But yeah, I think that they're generally like believable looking athletes. What do you think? I think so too. Yeah. And again, a lot of the focus is on the front office early in the series and i think one thing that might be interesting to discuss is like whose perspective are we supposed to be experiencing this story from like who's the hero here if anyone where's the spotlight because it really revolves and there is a deep bench here. It's a big

ensemble cast and you get a look at really every aspect of this organization, which is one of the things I love about this series. If you are a hardcore seam head sort and you're interested in the nitty gritty of scouting or analytics or even like marketing, I mean, even some of the less sexy aspects of running a baseball team, you really get it all here and you get some insight into the players and ownership and management.

And so there's time devoted to really every aspect of the organization. And it's a 16 episode season and these are hour long episodes and not hour long episodes, like 42 minutes plus commercials, but like legitimately- Yeah, they're really an hour long. They are an hour long.

And so there's a lot of time here. And one thing I appreciate is that almost every character who's introduced is at some point pretty fleshed out. They are pretty well-rounded characters. You get to know not just what they do for this baseball team, but a little bit about their personality, a little bit about what their home life is like. And I think people will see as the series goes on that sometimes the portrayals and perceptions will change. So you'll think something about one character and, oh, this is the villain or this is the hero.

And then that turns out not to be the case. It's more complex and layered and shaded than that. And even with the quote-unquote bad guys, you get some sense of their motivations and there's some sympathetic aspect to their actions. But I guess if you had to choose a main character, at least in the early going, it really revolves around two in particular, I suppose. And I should say, apologies in advance for pronunciation problems here. I was nervous about that. We're going to do our best, but we're really slow. We'll do our best, but not our native language, and we're going to screw up there. And also, there are probably some aspects of Korean culture and the KBO and such that will go over our heads a bit.

And if people respond well to this series of podcasts, then maybe we can have someone who is more well-versed in those things come on and explain to us what we have missed. Like, for instance, I think some of our listeners who are watching along are kind of perplexed by why beef is treated as such a real luxury item. You know, if you're going to splurge on a meal, it's beef. And that is because cattle are somewhat scarce in Korea initially, I think, for religious reasons, but then also just not a lot of land devoted to livestock. And there's not a lot of farming and ranching. And so there isn't a lot of beef to go around. And so it's a specialty.

So that's something where that might strike you as somewhat strange if you're an American viewer. But of course, a Korean viewer would understand that well. So we'll do our best with those nuances. And hopefully some of our Korean listeners can help supplement our knowledge there. But early on, you are introduced to Lee Se-young, who is the team leader, as the subtitles say, of the operations department. So essentially, she is like a director of baseball operations or almost like an assistant GM, basically. She has a lot of authority. She is a high-ranking member of the baseball operations department. And then you have Baek Sung-soo, who is the new GM, who is hired to

replace the old GM who resigns due to the Dream's poor record. And Baek Sung-soo comes in to take over this team with next to no baseball knowledge or experience He says he knows the rules But that's about it And it is a bold strategy to hire him And eventually you learn a little more about why he was hired But at first blush, it seems pretty strange that you would hire this person who has not worked in baseball before to run your baseball team and quite an interesting resume i don't know what the

the best comp for back song su here would be but he's won championships in korean wrestling ice hockey and handball and then every time he wins a championship, the team gets disbanded. Right. He just moves on to another sport, wins another championship, teams gets disbanded. And now he's on to baseball. So he has some leadership skills here that translate across sports. I mean, I guess like the Browns hired Paul DePodesta. But I don't know that there is a perfect prominent comp for this. Yeah. And we've seen we've seen some football folks make their way to baseball. Right. Like, you know, Daniel Adler with the twins started with Jacksonville. So like there is some precedent for that. But I think that when we think about real world comps, it comes within the context of having a specific analytic skill set and then,

you know, trying to apply that to a new sport. And he's doing some of that here, right? Where he is trying to make, this is like the most boring way to describe this, but process improvements across the dreams, but they're fringier sports, at least to my American ears, which is probably a sign of my own ignorance, but it's like, you know, you're like wrestling and hockey and handball, and you're like, those are very different than a basketball sport. So it is an interesting hire. And, you know, he cuts a, he's like a real presence, but not exactly warm in the early going.

No, not at all. Not the easiest hang, really. Like when he drives home with Lisa Young and he's like, have you thought about what our topics of conversation are going to be here? Because if you don't have material here, I'll just make my own way home. And he'll just like, he cuts to the chase in every interaction. He's like, let's skip the small talk. Like, what like what do you want yeah he's not beating around the bush and i think that the the existing staff is sort of understandably skeptical of his presence because i mean we've talked about this in in baseball context like baseball people can sniff out when

you don't really know the game very well and sometimes don't respond to that particularly well either right like it is viewed there's a lack of seriousness ascribed to you when they don't think that your bona fides are sort of sufficient so there is in the beginning like very understandable concern especially when one of his first moves as general manager is to like trade the best player yeah let's let's talk about Lim Dong-gyu yeah not a nice guy no he is fooling everyone right so he makes these magnanimous gestures and he will pay for certain things and he says the right things in interviews but he's a bad guy yeah paying off reporters which that was uh unfamiliar the idea of a star player just going out for a meal with the various reporters and addressing

them as reporters but yes he is uh slipping some money to reporters to write favorable pieces and he is doing far worse than that because when the g comes in and decides to trade Lim Dong-gyu, which initially is as opaque to the audience as it is to the rest of the Dream's front office, like, why is he doing this? Why would he want to trade their best player? He does not take this well. And he goes to great lengths to stop the GM from doing that, to intimidate him. He hires a couple of toughs to beat him up in an alley. He takes batting practice in the parking lot, basically, and shows great bat control and precision in just whistling these line drives

right by the GM's face, knocking his briefcase dramatically out of his hands. I mean, he is contributing to the clubhouse strife and eventually we do learn why the gm decides to trade lim dong q but it's interesting he's been with the dreams this entire time and the dreams are a joke you'd think that like maybe he would want to go to another team but but no like i mean this is a team that has a low payroll right so we would assume that if anything he might make more money elsewhere right and certainly he would have a better chance to play in important games but he takes this relationship with the team very seriously like he he wants his number to be retired with the dreams

that seems to be his main aspiration which is kind of a cool thing, I guess. But he is not at all a nice guy. No, not at all a nice guy. And when the Tufts don't succeed the first time, he sends them back. Yeah. Why is he at work? You did not do a good enough job of beating this guy up. Yeah.

Pretty dramatic turn of events in like the first episode of the series i was like oh what are we what are we in for here but um yeah i was surprised that he wasn't more receptive to a trade i do wonder you know the the first episode you see him speaking with another sort of long-standing member of the of the dreams and seeming to have like a jovial and sort of nice relationship with him. And then I think immediately indicating to the GM, like, this guy's bad. He comes into the GM's office to like give him the rundown on the other players. And I was like, oh, maybe you're kind of sneaky. Like maybe you're not a nice guy.

And I thought that that was going to be the impetus for the trade. But then a statistical case is made. What do you make of that stat case? Right. So, yeah, let's talk about that. So yeah, I was like, Initially, I think the GM is very unsympathetic because it looks like he's coming in and you might assume this is like the Mookie Betts trade or something like this is just, you know, payroll flexibility, sustainability. This is just slashing spending. You don't know why he wants to move Lim Dong-gyu And of course we learn that he is a productive player by some metrics

He's in the top five in war, right? He's accounting for 70% of uniform sales And he's on the national team And he's hit 278 career homers in his 11 seasons at Sarri He's like the lone draw here And so it seems like, well well it sucks if you're this terrible team that's always finishing last at least give your fans the pleasure of watching lim dong you yeah but ultimately he gets an ace in return but the statistical case for for trading

him it's it's interesting because it's i guess a combination of stats and off-field factors that motivate this trade, right? So he's got this PowerPoint presentation when he finally decides to justify to the rest of the front office why he is doing this after Lin Dong-kyu leaks the news that he is on the market here. So a large part of the motivation is clutchness, which you would think is not the most rigorous. It's interesting. It's like, in some ways, I think this series does a great job of portraying analytics and sabermetrics. And there's a particular point later in the series that we'll discuss later where that becomes a big focus. In this case, it's, you know, the numbers-oriented GM who is making the big decision based in large part on clutchness. And, you know, I guess he's looking over a number of years here. It's not just a

single season. And if you did have a player who had a long, consistent track record of—I love how he comes out and he's just like, you know, reason one why we're trading him, he's a coward. Yeah. But his cowardice is reflected in his lack of clutchness, right? So he only performs late in the season, which is interesting because you'd think well that's like crunch time that's yeah it would be clutch but that's when the dreams have fallen out of the race so the games no longer matter for them and so he is uh unclutch and he only performs then and he pads his stats he only hits homers when they're out of the race and they're out of the game and i suppose if you did have a player like that who like always performed

like that and did it year after year then i guess in theory he actually would be a lot less valuable but i just i don't know that you would actually have like sufficient sample to conclude that that's the case generally when players are accused of lack of clutchness it's like they're not at the point where you can actually conclude that. But maybe if you know something about the player and you know that he's such a snake as Lim Dong-kyu actually is, and not only is he underperforming what his surface stats seem to say, but also he is contributing to the clubhouse problems and he is causing you to lose promising players and driving them away these are things that you might think of oh this is like a traditional baseball person would be factoring in these things so it's soft factors and stats well and i i sometimes wonder and i don't know if this is really supported by well by the rest of the series i as i said i i listened ahead

i studied ahead. And so I know that I feel like we're about to learn more about how the team thinks about sabermetrics. I think that's in an episode soon. I'm not spoiling anything. You knew this was coming. But I do wonder in moments like that, are you picking something that,

as a writer on a series like this, are you picking something that you think is going to be broadly comprehensible to an audience that may know baseball but not know sabermetrics or might not know baseball very well at all and is trying to sort of calibrate its own understanding of the game and navigate i never want to give shows too hard a time about this stuff because i know that they are trying to speak to a very broad audience. And so this might be their way of saying like, you know, we understand that a statistical case would need to be made in this moment, but we want to ground it in something that people

might understand. But then they do talk about war. So that might not be right. Yeah. It is just on a visceral level like kind of a treat i think just to see like war on a tv show i mean we're used to seeing it in all kinds of coverage of the sport now but to see it in this fictionalized version of baseball like there just aren't a lot of baseball tv shows right there in the u.s yeah r.i.p. And so just to see that being discussed, it's kind of cool. And we don't know which war formulation they're using. I don't know. Are there multiple?

Is there a Korean version of Fangraphs War and a Korean version of Baseball Orphans War? Yes, that is the big question. But it's interesting because this kind of plays into the cult of the GM sort of everyone is fans are following sports from the perspective of the front office now. And everyone, you know, it's their fantasy teams and everyone looks at sports that way. But also, like, he's not the most sympathetic character, at least in the early going. You may learn a little later in the series that perhaps he's not as emotionless and uncaring as he appears to be. But he certainly comes off that way you might root for him in some ways but also not really root for him in other ways i i enjoyed the the gm candidate interview sequence where you have like the new

school candidate who's like anti-former players as g. And then you have the old school candidate who's a former player who resents front office meddling. And then ultimately they end up going with someone who is not really from either world and not from the baseball world at all. But I think that it's really valuable to have the spotlight, not just on the GM, but also on Lee Se- Young, who is just like one of the most endearing characters I can recall. I mean, she is very sympathetic, very competent, very, she's plugged into really all aspects of the organization. I mean, she's like doing the GM interviews, but she also has her eye on like the mascot. I mean, I guess that is a reflection to some extent of the fact that this is not as expansive a front office as you would see in MLB. So people are playing various roles, but she has her fingers in basically every corner of this organization.

And it is refreshing and cool, I think, that a high-ranking female front office member is playing such an important part in this series. And she is, I think, depicted as a trailblazer in the show and would be in real life also. I know that the team is, to some extent, modeled on real-life events. the team is to some extent modeled on real life events. John Kim, who's a member of our Facebook group, was saying in a recent thread that the dreams are in some ways inspired by the Lotte Giants. And for instance, the incident where Lim Dong-gyu throws his gold glove through the window of the GM and thoughtfully leaves some money to pay for the broken windshield as well. Apparently, that is perhaps based on an incident from Lotte Giants history where one of the pitchers was sent down to the minors and then vandalized the manager's car because he was so outraged by being demoted. But I think there is also, and I don't know if this is explicit or just coincidental or not, but the Lotte Giants did also have a woman working in their front office who was in sort of a similar position named Jung Hwa Kim, who sadly passed away recently, which I learned about because Josh Herzenberg, the former Fangraphs staffer was tweeting about this. He now works in R&D for the Giants. And she was the director of strategic planning and the general counsel for the team. And he had a Twitter thread about her that I'll link to. But he wrote, she joined the Lotte Giants just before the 2020 season began.

She was our club's Swiss army knife, going from meetings with the CEO to lunch with a marketing intern to an advanced scouting meeting with a pitcher who was a normal afternoon for her. It was remarkable to watch, caring, and dynamic. She made our lives as her co-workers easier, and she made our lives as friends more fun. And you definitely see a lot of that in Lisa Young in that she's involved in every aspect of the organization. And she does face some sexism too. I mean yeah it's not heavily emphasized and it's kind of played for laughs at times too but the fact that her assistant you know multiple times suggests that maybe she has some sort of romantic relationship going on with the gm and that that is why he is choosing her to go on a trip with him for instance you know that implication is there explicitly or at the end of the fourth episode the agent for the foreign player that the dreams are scouting addresses her as little miss so that sort of thing it's it's definitely present and she's like i

don't she's you know not the sole star of the show but she is sort of the part and soul of the show at least in the early going i think the thing that i appreciated about how about how the actress has chosen to play the role and how lisa young is is portrayed in it is that like you can't have an environment like that where it is unremarked upon that she is you know the only woman to occupy that role within the league. Like, it would be strange to have no mention of it because we know that it would affect her life and professional experience, right? But I also appreciate that she just does a lot of baseball stuff. You know, like, it is, you want to be true to the experience that someone in that position would have,

and unfortunately that means you know portraying unsavory moments and you want to show that person just doing their job well and being you know really competent and proficient at the all of the many hats that she has to wear can't be proficient at a hat but like spinning all the plates you know what i'm trying to say like you're you're doing a lot of different stuff and doing it all well and And so I just I found that to be really nice. It's like you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what someone in that job would face. And some of that is going to be dealing with, you know, prejudice and an assumption that you're less good at what you do. And some of that's just going to be doing your job every day so yeah and she's the one who knows baseball in this front office i mean she's not the only one but like at the high level you have the gm who has zero baseball experience and it's like watching clips of the team from past seasons and then you have the ceo of the team who she congratulates on learning what a cycle is. She is the one who knows what she's doing and knows and understands the sport and clearly has cared about it her entire life because you see when she goes home and there's a picture

of her with her dad and she's at a dreams game. So this is like a lifelong dream being fulfilled for her. But also she's kind of questioning whether she wants to keep doing this and whether working for the dreams is a dream and so i i like that you followed these people home you know like her mom doesn't need to be a character but it's nice that she is and she has a personality and you get a sense of of all these characters just people, not as like front office automatons. So I enjoy that too. Yeah, I think that the balance between what their lives are like away from baseball and

their lives outside of baseball intersect with their life in baseball. It's like a really nice balance. I think, you know, not that pitch was perfect, but like if there was a way that it wasn't, it was that, you know, quite often the away from field stuff was very narratively convenient to like teach someone an important lesson. And there is some of that, right? Because it's TV and we're not going to escape that trope. But I just thought it was I think that the balance is really nice.

It humanizes them in a way that makes them easier to and more fun to sort of follow within the baseball context and i think isn't afraid to sort of make them be complicated like you said like there there are moments of sort of heroics and villainy and a lot of the different characters at various points yeah even lisa, who is a very sympathetic character, she's not the best boss in every way. She is a little quick to grab her subordinates by the ears, let's say, or maybe smack them around. Perhaps it's different cultural norms, but yeah, that stands out a little bit. I mean, I enjoy that character very much, Han Jae-hee, who is her assistant. And again, like initially, oh, he got the job because of connections, which is a very common thing in baseball front offices. his wealth and everything but then you learn no he he actually cares about this and he is like almost uh deflecting the criticism that he is anticipating about his background by bringing

it up constantly but yes he is like actually devoting himself to the work and he's like learning to catch on the off chance that at some point that might actually come in handy here and so other than the like occasional physical abuse there's like a pretty fun dynamic between those two yeah i i think that he's the perfect example of a character who you think is going to play out one way and ends up yes being like kind of endearing and fun and clearly very passionate about what he's trying to do and yeah the the growth there from being the guy literally in the mascot and then sitting down at the end of the final game because you know he's just spent from having to do it and knows that it doesn't matter to someone who's like sacrificing

vacation so that he can go on an international scouting trip is yes it's a nice it's a nice progression it makes him a more interesting character for sure yeah and lisa young in that Yes. Of like picking up a bat and banging on a locker and just commanding respect immediately. I mean, all of these coaches and players are yelling at each other and brawling. She's the one who walks in there and just has the immediate air of authority to really shame them into better behavior, I think. So that was nice to see, too. So, right. The trade for Lim Dong-gyu goes down. to see too so right the trade for Lim Dong-gyu goes down fortunately the GM has uh one of his old Korean wrestlers on speed dial I guess you can just follow him around and be his bodyguard

basically and uh take on the the toughs four on one no sweat but the trade goes down and it's not just about saving salary or jettisoning this bad apple but it turns out to be something of a coup and a heist and perhaps a swindle and you think oh he's getting rid of the only draw here and then it turns out that he's bringing back an even bigger star the ace of the national team kang de gi who is not only a better player, he has the highest war. Yeah. But he is also just a good character guy and works hard and is not hiring people to rough up the GM, presumably. And had previously wanted out of the Dreams in part because of Bad Apples in the Clubhouse previously, right?

Right. So that's the first big move where the Dreams start their turnaround. And also, he pulls one over on the rival GM, I think. If we're going to quibble with the use of clutch stats, we should also probably quibble with the use of performance versus the Sabres, which is one of the main criteria that the rival GM is using here, that Kong Doogie has not performed so well against the Sabres, which is like one of the main criteria that the rival GM is using here, that Kang Doogie has not performed so well against the Sabres and Lim Dong-gyu has this other team's rival. And so that is probably not super predictive, but maybe, who knows?

And so that's a factor here. And he also suggests that Lim Dong-gyu will be better for this team because this team is always in the running for the postseason. And so with Lim Dong-gyu will be better for this team because this team is always in the running for the postseason. And so with Lim Dong-gyu performing better in the autumn, like during the postseason run, then he'll be better for this other team, which I guess would go against the idea that he's a coward who's on clutch. But I guess he's selling his player hard. And, you know, there is like a lot of sort of old school first phase saber discussion about like players as assets and just like interchangeable pieces. I mean, not totally because like their character does come into play, but definitely the GM is just kind of looking at them as commodities. And like, how do I extract the most value from my asset here? And so that would make the GM seem somewhat unsympathetic.

But then, again, there are multiple aspects to this where you find out that at least he wants to win. So he's not doing this to cut payroll or because he's trying to tank. As it turns out, ownership is trying to tank. Yes. As it turns out, ownership is trying to tank. Yes. So now the GM becomes somewhat sympathetic because he is contending with this owner, the chairman, the president, who is the nephew of the actual owner of the parent company. And they want this team to go away because it's losing money, which is interesting because I think it was the GM said, someone says, even if you rank last in the league, you still make a living from it, which is an idea that we're familiar with from modern MLB. But this is viewed as something of a cost sink for the parent company.

But they can't just disband the team unilaterally because they are from this area of South Korea and their consumers care about this team and they don't want to be the bad guys that took the team away. So they have hired the GM to follow the pattern that he has established of getting his team disbanded, but not to win a championship, except that is what Baek Sung-soo wants to do. He actually wants to put a winner on the field so there are layers to this yeah in some ways it weirdly combines like multiple characters in Ted Lasso into one character right where yeah you have you have the GM who is sort of not in on but aware of the machinations of ownership but is working against them in ways that I imagine will lead to all sorts of hijinks as the series progresses. Yes, and perhaps we will even learn more about the nephew of the owner, and we'll see him in a semi-new light.

But yeah, there are all sorts of wrinkles to this, and clearly he doesn't really fit in. He's the only one generally who's wearing like a suit and tie. Yes. He's very formal. And, you know, initially, it seems like you think he gets hired because he is the only one who is not blowing smoke up the team's asses, basically. And it's like telling them the truth about the state of their team. And like, you know, there's no point in failing in the same way. At least try to fail in the same way at least

try to fail in a new way yeah yeah and and then you learn that uh you know there are other ulterior motives to to hire him here but uh but he has different motivations too and this is a team where like the old gm was repairing the batting cage netting himself. Not very well, seemingly, but that's the level of spending and investment here. So it's a tough situation to walk into with all of these warring factions and internal dispute. But he pretty quickly gets his front office on board, at least initially. There's like, who is this guy?

What is he doing here? Why isn't he explaining himself and then they realize ah he is uh disrupting the dreams he he's uh just reading sabermetrics books at dinner and cribbing all he has to know from those but clearly he he knows something like there's uh some value to his outsider perspective and maybe his dispassionate perspective here what do you make of the decision to keep the coaching staff intact because one of the big sort of arcs in the in the early episode is that you know the manager has sort of lost the ability to control the bench coach faction and the pitching coach faction such that the they come to blows as you mentioned in in the

final game in front of crying children i don't think children would cry if they saw a dugout fight maybe they would i don't know super into it i think they would find that funny more than they'd find it tragic but yeah all of those people are retained yeah that is uh it's kind of confounding he's like playing them against each other, essentially. You'd think that you'd want to just like start fresh with the field staff the way that he is in the front office, but he just sort of props up the state of affairs. I mean, the manager, not the best body language. I mean, he just seems defeated. I guess he has been defeated many times and no one is listening to him and he's not winning. I guess the implication is that part of it is that like he's been viewed as a lame duck, like he's on one-year contracts and so he's not commanding respect. And so what Baek Sung-soo does is give him a three-year deal just to show like, okay, he's the guy. Like you got to listen to him because he's not going anywhere but yeah you do have like the pitching coach faction and the bench coach faction and

they're eating separately and having separate meetings with the gm like doesn't seem like the most harmonious or productive state of affairs but i guess part of it maybe is that he wants some power to himself. So maybe it's like if everyone else is divided, then there's no rival and the manager will be grateful to him for letting him keep his job and everyone else will just accept that they're not going to get that job and will fall into line. But it's one of his many curious decisions. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and I think the coaches are come to government employees like there's no fear of of getting fired so i guess he's trying to light a little fire under them maybe perhaps and make them a little less comfortable and complacent perhaps

but yeah i mean that's the the big picture stuff that happens in the first couple episodes. And then you go from this massive trade for franchise stars that alters the course of the team and total leadership change. And then you kind of zoom in a little bit on the scout. And the third and fourth episodes are very scouting-centric. And there's a change in leadership there. And you find out that the team leader of the scouting team is corrupt on the take yeah and he's uh taking money to draft certain players and then his subordinate just cares too much and he is also kind of breaking rules but doing it for the right reasons and he's got a good heart and he cares and he is just really up in arms about high school players being mismanaged and abused. And so he cares too much.

And ultimately Baek Sung-soo gives him the chance and elevates him and says he was surprised by him. he is willing to change his mind as he learns new information and take a chance on someone who works hard and cares a lot, even if he's kind of crossed lines. So that's perhaps not the last that we will see of the scout team leader who is also an ex-player. I mean, there is definitely a little bit of a vibe of like old school X players are like tearing this team down. But it seems to be true in at least some of these cases here where some new blood might perhaps be valuable. Yeah, I think, you know, Yang wants up the scout who is eventually promoted to be sort of the head scout, sort of the head scout but is initially dismissed um when it is learned that he is you know taking player he has taken a player who he knew was injured over the objections of the rest of the team whose future in baseball is sort of questionable like yes he displays humanity

and that is initially thought to be a liability but he also has a great i don't work with humanists right and you're like oh buddy but he also has like a system and there is a lot of seeming rigor to that system like he's very fastidious he's tracking down to like when players are having to change over their shoes as an indication of sort of makeup right um and so he is allowed to sort of evolve and even though he is doing something that could like get the team disbanded on its own um he's like i won't do that again but i do have a good system so um the system prevails but yeah it was i mean like don't you have to tell other teams that this has happened like what if you know what if go see y'all gets hired like he's a huge liability potential yeah i know you can't have a head scout on the take like it's a real problem it is it is pitched as like the worst scouting scandal in professional sports like full stop and then he's just allowed to walk out

the door yeah right well we will learn much more about these characters. We will learn why the GM perhaps is such a creature of habit, why he is taking pictures of his food. Is he just big on Insta or does he have some other motivation for this? And we leave things with kind of a cliffhanger. I mean, every episode ends With some sort of suspense and so We ended episode four With a mystery team is

Driving up the bidding it seems Perhaps for the foreign player That the dreams have targeted And we will find out who those Mysterious observers on The backfields in California which looks suspiciously Like Hawaii and I believe was Hawaii.

It was Hawaii. But yes. And so, yeah, even ranges across the world, really. It's not only focusing on every aspect of the organization, but is crossing oceans and continents because that's a big part of running a team in Korea or in Japan is scouting international players. And obviously, every decision is a big one for the dreams who don't have a whole lot of money to spare. And, you know, one of the reasons he cited for trading Lim Dong-gyu is that he's getting up in age and he made it sound as if it's like a long-term rebuild, right? Like he was talking about, you know, we need to get young guys, we need to get prospects, and it sounds like it might be some sort of step back or tear down, and then you find out, no, he wants to win a championship now. and has realized that he is not going to be compliant as he had hoped that they are not actually on the same page about how to run this team and are not seeing eye to eye and that Baek Sung-soo is quite willing to challenge the person who hired him. So a lot of intrigue here, a lot of storylines developing,

and I hope everyone is enjoying it as much as we are and i don't know if you have any other thoughts that you wanted to get in but i i guess we could pick up perhaps uh at some point next week you're already halfway through the the next four so we might as well continue then i almost i almost gave things away because i had forgotten what happened in which episode because i watched them so quickly. It's great. It's just a really nice show. It's well done.

It's well acted. It is well conceived. I think that, you know, like we pointed out, there are a couple of places where maybe some of the baseball will strike people as being a little outdated but in general is is very well done and i think is striking the right balance between being accessible and being sort of true to the sport as it's currently played so yeah i'm just really enjoying it and i i will say that i think your recommendation to to try to watch it on vicky if you can is a good one because the the subtitle fidelity seems to be significantly better yeah because it's it's funny like it makes me laugh I mean there's a lot of

laugh lines in the show and I think subtitle quality you know can play a big part in whether that humor comes through yes so yeah I think that does make a big difference. Yeah, like tonally, I mean, it's very serious and dramatic and like almost soap opera-ish at times. But it is also heartfelt and heartwarming sometimes and funny. So it's a good range of tones. And, you know, you have the nefarious like Rachel Phelps in Major League sort of situation or Ted Lasso kind of thing going on. And I think as the series goes on, maybe there's more of an emphasis on the players as the dreams actually get started and play baseball because it's Stove League. But for anyone who's worried, this is not solely about the offseason of the dreams necessarily.

I mean, there is a little more action that comes into play. necessarily. I mean, there is a little more action that comes into play. It's definitely more about team construction than it is about the actual on-field stuff, but you do get to learn more about the players. And look, I mean, most baseball media is about players, understandably, and for obvious reasons, and it should be, but it is kind of nice to have something that presents a portrait of the holistic organization. And early on, the front office is like, well, it's not our fault. The players play, not us. And so there is kind of this constant push and pull between, are the players dragging

down the dreams or is the front office? And who is responsible for the resurgence of the dreams? If there is one, is that going to be the front office or the players so there's kind of a finesse and a navigation there but all of these things will be in the series at some point and i look forward to talking about it more so check out episodes five through eight and we will probably get to those at some point next week. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening.

We didn't specifically say so today, but Stove League is fun for all ages and for the whole family. Definitely a lot of inside baseball, literally, but you don't have to be a baseball obsessive to enjoy the show. There's a lot there for any generalist TV viewer. Not a ton of romance, maybe, if that's what you're looking for. There's some suggestions of it in those first four episodes, but we'll talk about that a little later on. So much fun to watch and discuss with so many of you following along, though. I definitely did the DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV when someone mentions that war has been all the rage lately. If you're timing your Stove League viewing, our next batch of episodes will probably be the middle episode next week.

So expect it right before Thanksgiving. We will have the usual complement of three episodes next week, despite the holiday. And thank you to everyone who has sent some condolences about the twins designating Williams-Ostadio for assignment. But I don't think we've seen the last of Williams. for assignment but i don't think we've seen the last of williams and i hope that this dfa will free ostadio that he will end up somewhere conducive to his skills perhaps play a more prominent role on a roster somewhere so we wish him the best and of course we will be keeping the williams ostadio tier of patreon support in his honor whatever happens to him you can support effectively wild on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly or yearly amount and help keep the podcast going, help keep it ad free and get themselves access to some perks.

Raymond Chen, Jacob Pomrenke, Toby Ma, Ron Jolly and Tyrone Palmer. Thanks to all of you. Some of those perks include Patreon-only AMA episodes. We will be posting the first of those post-Thanksgiving, but before the end of November. You also get access to the patron-only Discord group where people are discussing Stove League in a dedicated channel. People are also discussing Stove League in our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastandfangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can find the podcast Twitter account at EWPod. There is a subreddit, Effectively Wild. Thank you to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with another episode early next week. Wild. Thank you to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with another episode early next week. And I will conclude with an expression that you will hear often in Stove League, which is kind of the Korean equivalent of good job, as I understand it. You've worked hard. We've worked hard, too. Enjoy the weekend. I guess.