Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1776: How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball?

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Ben Lindbergh talks to baseball writer and romance novelist KD Casey about Unwritten Rules, her new romance novel about catchers and catcher framing, focusing on her history as a fan and writer, the intersection of sports and romance fiction, fictionalizing MLB teams, delivering details about baseball without alienating readers who aren’t fans, the ethics of […]

It's that little boy inside that forces me to hide When the walls I'm breaking through make me separate from you When all I wish to do is say that I love you Well it's a kiss beyond the catcher, there is nothing that could match her It's a kiss beyond the catcher, there is nothing that could match her Hello and welcome to episode 1776 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today as I usually am by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Meg is traveling

for Thanksgiving. I have an almost eight-week-old baby at home, so I am not traveling for Thanksgiving, and therefore I am with you today. Meg will be back tomorrow, and we will be discussing the Wander Franco extension and the Kendall Graveman deal and the next four episodes of Stove League and who knows what else. But in Meg's absence, I will be doing two interviews with two authors of two pieces of recent writing about baseball that I quite enjoyed. Later in the episode, I will be bringing on Gerald Schiffman of Baseball Perspectives to discuss his research published on Tuesday about whether shadows on the field actually matter. You hear broadcasters talk about this every October as the shadows creep from behind the mound to home plate.

Gerald did the research. This is actually his second look at the subject. And he came up with an interesting answer. So he'll be here a little later on. Most of the episode, though, will be spent in conversation with my first guest, Katie Casey, who is the author of a book called Unwritten Rules published last month. It is a baseball romance novel. And it is about catchers and catcher framing. A bullpen framing session is sort of the meet-cute here, so obviously I loved

it. It's got a great story and a great relationship at the center of it, and it's a great book about baseball. And if you have any curiosity about romance novels in general and how they intersect with sports, this will be a great introduction to that topic. So let's get going. Back in May, I got a message from my guest today, Katie Casey, who was asking me for permission to use a quote of mine from a Grantland article back in 2013 about pitch framing as an epigraph for her baseball romance novel called Unwritten Rules. And I was flattered. I'm a big epigraph guy, love using an epigraph, have never been used as an epigraph previously to my knowledge. So I was flattered. And after reading the book, I am even more honored to be associated with it in some small way because

it is a great book. So Katie, thank you very much for using that quote. Thank you for writing the book. Congrats on writing the book. And as you know, I had hoped to talk to you in October before the book came out, but my daughter had other ideas. So I am happy to have you on today. Yeah, thank you for inviting me on. First of all, like muzzles on your new arrival. Thank you.

I know that this must have been an exhausting couple of months. So I really appreciate you having me on. So I DM'd you on Twitter because my publisher, Karina Press, which is a harlequin imprint, was like, yeah, you know, you can use this quote as an epigraph, but we're going to need you to permission it. So I was like, let me let me let me ask a question that you probably have never been asked, which is, can I use a quote from an article on pitch framing as an epigraph to a, I would say, high heat MM Jewish baseball romance novel that has, I would say, about 99% accurate-ish baseball, is what I will say. Some liberties were taken with the timing of the trade deadline, is what I'm going to say. But I really appreciated you using the quote, or letting me use the quote. And I think it really actually sums up the book pretty well. Yeah. Would you care to read the quote, or I can? I don't know which would be better, but maybe that would set up our conversation, sort of. Sure. Let me pull that up. So just for context, because I know I

threw a lot of adjectives at this. So Unwritten Rules is a romance novel, and we'll get into what that sort of means, because I always like to be a little bit definitional about that um people have some some ideas of what sort of is are or are not romance novels it is a contemporary sports romance so set in present day there is actually historical sports romance and paranormal sports romance if you can believe it i can and it is about a catcher named uh zach glasser who is jewish because i am jewish i believe you are as well half but yes okay and it is about him being selected to go to the all-star classic game because i can't use trademarked names and when he gets there he encounters a former teammate who is also his ex-boyfriend yes and eugenio morales oh thank you and you're

you're the first person i've talked to who's like i know how that's pronounced which i really appreciate well it's baseball there are a lot of eugenios out there so what i discovered is there's only been two in mlb history so uh perez and suarez but yeah so he encounters uh Eohanu Morales who is his ex-boy ex-boyfriend and ex-teammate and then the book kind of flashes back and forth um between the present day and about three years ago when they first met and when the team basically tells Zach that uh who is a catcher he is more like a a math to see catcher um so really good at framing really good at pitch calling not so much with the hitting that he has to teach a or how to be a better framer so the quote therefore so and then framing kind of becomes a whole theme so the quote is

baseball is often described as a chess match between batter and pitcher but it's more like a chess match between batter and pitcher in which once's more like a chess match between batter and pitcher, in which, once in a while, the catcher grabs the board and moves someone's piece. Ben Lindberg, The Art of Pitch Framing, Grantland 2013. Well, now that we have quoted me, which is how we wanted to start this, yeah, I appreciate being asked for permission. You didn't necessarily have to ask. You could have quoted. It's a public article. It's out there. So I wouldn't have minded if you had. But I'm glad that you did ask so that I would be aware of the book, which potentially I

might have missed otherwise. And that would have deprived me of a great reading experience. And yes, once I learned about the premise of this novel, I couldn't believe it. It sounded so up my alley because I am fascinated by catchers and by framing specifically. And so the idea that framing could become the centerpiece of a romantic relationship. And as I told you, I maybe hadn't realized the full erotic potential of catcher framing before I read this book. It brings catchers into close contact with each other. You have to perhaps hold someone's hand and teach them exactly what movements to make. And

it's a very intimate activity, at least now I have learned. So I want to know about the inspiration for this book. And I know that you have done various kinds of writing, but what led you to writing romance and that what led you to becoming a writing, but what led you to writing romance and that what led you to becoming a baseball fan and what led you to combining those things? So first of all, thank you. I'm glad that you enjoyed the book. I always want to ask this whenever I'm doing kind of interview stuff. Was this the first romance novel you've ever read? I suppose so. And as you said, I guess there are definitional questions there where how much romance makes something a romance novel. There's romance in many novels, maybe most novels. But I suppose of this specific kind, yes, probably. And I don't read a ton of baseball fiction either, non-romance baseball fiction. But this was the best of of both worlds at least as far as I could tell well I definitely appreciate you saying that that really genuinely means a lot I wanted to write the

book and I'll get into the kind of the answer to your question but I wanted to write the book in part for serious baseball heads like I wanted people who really knew the game well to be able to read it and say you know this kind resonated, this feels baseball-y in addition to feeling romance-y. But to kind of backtrack, so what defines a romance novel are three things. So one, it has to have a central love story. So there's a lot of fiction, as you said, with strong romantic elements, but this, it sort of has to be such that if you removed the the love story at the center of the novel the kind of the book would fall apart um and it needs to drive kind of all of the the action in the book the second thing is that it has to have a uh a happily ever after or what's called a happy

for happy happy for now but basically the main couple has to end or however many people have to end up together and alive at the end of the book ah interesting okay so uh romeo and juliet not a romance not genre romance um nicholas sparks a lot of people are familiar with him he writes love stories but because people have a tendency to die um it's actually not considered genre romance the examples i kind of give that might be in sort of the more popular imagining is actually movies so like she's all that would be a genre romance okay so like this sort of like spade of of late 90s like meg ryan e rom-coms would qualify because like central love story happily ever after um character is alive got it the last kind of requirement is is kind of tricky to explain and it's that characters have to

achieve whatever goals they set out to and that it has to end in an optimistic way for the character but that doesn't mean that they have to be like morally good. Mafia romance is kind of having a good day. I don't know how much space we want to get on this podcast. But monster romance is really big right now. So when I said however many people, I was like, well, people or other such as sapient creatures. But, you know, that's sort of a requirement. So Unwritten Rules is genre romance, central love story, happily ever after, so the characters are alive and together at the end. And sort of the big problem particular to

the main characters has been solved in an optimistic way at the end. And so like, you know, how do how do I get into into writing this? Well, I read, I read a whole lot of it. And, you know, I think that people have this like Well, I read, I read a whole lot of it. And, you know, I think that people have this like vision, probably of mass market paperbacks, you know, with like the the like, the covers with like a couple embracing on them when they think about romance. And that's fine. That's, that's a valid kind of impression. But there's a reason that when you walk into like a library or used bookstore, there's so many of them. And it's because romance readers will read two to 300 books a year. Wow. Yeah. I wanted to ask you for context just about the popularity

of baseball romance novels, because I get the sense that they are quite popular and quite numerous. And I wondered, I suppose, do people come to them because they like baseball and they want to read romance stories set in a baseball world? Or is it completely the opposite? And how does baseball romance compare to other sports romance? Is it more or less popular, would you say? That's a tricky question to answer. I would say it's a spectrum. I think probably it's more romance readers who are interested in reading sports romance than baseball people who are into it. But there's a pretty big spectrum. The major popular sport right now for romance is actually hockey.

Yeah. And there's a there's a variety of kind of reasons as to why that is. Like, it's a sport that's fairly easy to explain in terms of the rules though i think there's probably not a there's a couple hockey romances that are written by like some very serious hockey people where i'm like oh i finally understand hybrid icing i've never understood i don't think i don't think any of the linesmen understand it either but you know there's some there's some pretty serious ones there's one that's uh called goalie interference that's actually like the equivalent of my book in terms of like talking about you know

instead of people learning how to frame pitches it's like goalies learning like new sort of blocking techniques but gets really pretty seriously into detail about it but there's a lot that that are certainly um i would say more accessible maybe less baseball or less hockey focused you know and and i don't want to kind of to knock those in anyway, because I've read a lot of them. And I've enjoyed a lot of them. So it's just sort of a spectrum and sort of who the audience is with compassion and respect to Bailey, who does foolish baseball, whose stuff I adore, you know, he posted on Twitter, sort of like a screenshot of the top baseball books on Goodreads. And it's all romance novels. And I was like, Yeah, I mean, that particular author probably sells between 100

and 500 books a day. Wow. Yeah. And so I was like, you know, that's sort of the the way the way that it kind of functions, the popularity, it's the largest sector of fiction, like fiction books that get sold in the U.S. for sure. It's not a majority, but it's a really healthy plurality. So, you know, it's an industry. Baseball is obviously a pretty big industry, but it's a more than billion dollar industry. And for books, that's kind of a big amount of money. Yes, it is. Publishing plays with a lot of money, but like baseball plays obviously with a little bit more than that. etc. I mean, you are a hardcore, extremely online baseball fan and writer and podcaster.

So as I understand it, this was not a lifelong love for you necessarily. You came to it at a certain point and obviously fully embraced it and became an expert in it. So how did that happen for you? Yeah, I think it's a spectrum of like like sometimes you just kind of trip and fall into and when I get into something I just like really like I really get into stuff so I grew up in the in the DC I grew up in DC um and so in in the city and DC obviously did not have a baseball team until 2005 you know they had it before but I was born in the 80s so you know there's that so I mostly went to like some O's games growing up for periodically Ra Ra Cal Ripken during his sort of streak of stuff, which was cool. And then I went to college in Pittsburgh and got to see the early 2000s Pirates, which

really inspired somebody to become a fan of very cheap beer. Who wouldn't become a big baseball fan. Right. Like, I love the cheap beer. on a very cheap beer. Like I love the cheap beer. I love the pierogies. But the on-field product, you know,

left some stuff to be desired. So I moved back to D.C. kind of after college. And then actually my sister is the world expert probably on the 2006 to 2011 Nationals. Like for real she once accosted ish slash fangirled uh willie harris at a minor league baseball game in montana she was like i loved when you were a national and he's like i don't remember being a national so like like i i to, I want to contextualize. She has a hat signed by Ryan Church. Oh, wow. He was on my fantasy team at some point back when I was a fantasy player and he did good work for me. So I have fond memories of Ryan Church too, but don't own any church merch as far as I know. Yeah, I think it's a Zimmerman. Or maybe it's not a hat, maybe it's a shirt. I think it's a Zimmerman shirt. She's like, well, I got at least one, Ryan. It's fine.

Close enough. Close enough for government work. So she got into it. We used to, you know, go to games when they would play the Pirates, actually, because it was like a fair matchup. And it was like, well, they have like a chance of winning if we go to see them play spectacularly bad teams at like RFK, which is, you know, one of the worst stadiums in the world. And then obviously, as the team gradually got better, you know, it became just a more interesting on field product. And so I kind of gradually got more and more into it. And this is this is kind of embarrassing to admit to like you on this podcast.

to admit to like you on this podcast. So I remember having a very clear thought in watching like Adam LaRoche. And I was like, huh, well, you know, he it's okay. But like, he gets on base really frequently. I wonder if there's like a way to sort of like talk about that from like a mathematical perspective in terms of a player value perspective. And like, I remember having that and being like, Oh, OBP. Okay, like, I got that. And like, that's, that's embarrassing in how recent it was. But from there, I kind of sort of like got more and more increasingly into it. And now I spend a lot of time staring at Brooks baseball. Right. And that is very much in the book. I mean, we joke sometimes on the podcast about baseball media. You know, if a book mentions baseball, we joke that it's a baseball book. Or if you can see a poster of something related to baseball in the background of a movie, then, oh, that's a baseball movie. But this is not that. This is fully a baseball book and fully a romance novel. but this betrays your familiarity with baseball in many ways. I mean, advanced stats certainly are in here, but also just like many of the issues that are facing the contemporary sport. I mean, the conditions that minor leaguers face.

I mean, so many of the things that we talk about on the podcast make some appearance in the book. any of the things that we talk about on the podcast make some appearance in the book. And not that you're like writing the formula for Woba or something in the middle of this romance novel, but it's very clear that you're familiar with all of these things and these characters are introduced to these things to some extent and are also cognizant of them. So I really was curious how you balance that as you were writing, because I imagine that maybe some baseball fans would be coming to it for the baseball more so than the romance, and some romance fans would be coming to it for the romance more so than the baseball, and you don't want to turn either off entirely. So how did you and your editor and publisher decide the proper balance between depth and detail and really making this a true to life

baseball story without sort of distracting from the main narrative and the relationship between these two characters? Yeah. So I think, as you said, there is definitely a balance. The working title of the book was Pitchframing and Other Lies. agent who is wonderful and she's a she's a sports person she lives in near atlanta um and so she's like excitedly emailing me at like midnight when they won the when they won the world series but you know she was very like look you you need to make this accessible you need to make it you know sort of like i would say actually specificity really helps with explanation. So like I get pretty,

I try to be very specific because you know, one characters would think in that sort of specific way. Like if you do a job and you, you know it pretty intimately, you're going to think about it in very specific terms. But I also think it helps in terms of explanation and making stuff accessible. It's when stuff gets kind of vague that I think it actually becomes less accessible. I did trim a lot of baseball back out of the book.

I'm not going to lie. There was, I would say, somebody in a review, and it was a really nice review, said like, there's actually not a huge amount of like gameplay, which is true. There's a lot of baseball, but I think there's only like three or four baseball like game scenes. And so I think there's only like three or four three or four baseball like game scenes.

And so I think that that's also the feeling of you want to sort of be in the world and in their sort of the baseball is the atmosphere around them. But it's not exactly like the same way that a sports movie would have a lot of gameplay scenes that sort of sort of culminated championship. You know, and as you said, the other thing about the book is, it's called Unwritten Rules for a reason. I would say I brought a lot of, I love little B baseball a whole lot. I love the sport. I will watch it. I love that Lidom is now available on MLB TV and I will watch baseball reruns. It's sort of that level of stuff. And we'll sort of like, I will watch baseball reruns. Like it's sort of that level of stuff. But I have a lot of, and a lot of people have a lot of criticisms of the way that MLB, you

know, sort of an organized baseball with a capital B runs. And I kind of wanted the book to, to not ignore those things that you can have a romance, certainly that doesn't get sort of into the politics of baseball, but it felt to me that I couldn't write that authentically given my sort of relationship to the sport. And so the main character kind of goes through an arc where he loves baseball and then he falls out of love with it

and then he has to fall back in love with it as a sport, but not necessarily when we're, like he doesn't necessarily become uncritical of all the stuff that he sees going on around him. Like treatment of minor league players, I would say there's a healthy storyline about his best friend is a female coach who wants to go play in the Women's Baseball World Cup, which has, in the real world, was supposed to be in 2020 and now has been postponed to 2024, unfortunately.

You know, she's a, and sort of she talks pretty candidly and openly about sort of the struggles of wanting to play baseball versus, you know, sort of being funneled more towards softball and having very limited economic opportunities to play baseball. And so I wanted to have that all kind of be in that conversation because, you know, it's for me hard to ignore those things and i think really kind of shape the way hope hopefully ish that actual baseball players somewhat operate that that you know it's it's different it's one thing to go out and play but it's also another thing to sort of acknowledge the the political context in which in which the

game operates you know and in terms of the balance i i don't want to underestimate there's a lot of smooching in this book it is a high-heat romance novel um my father read it and i was like please don't please you're a 70 something year old man i would prefer if you did not read this because i would like to have a conversation with you at some point without shrinking under a table. But it does, I think, my hope is that it kind of balances the love story with baseball with the love story between two people. Yeah. And we talk all the time about non-romance baseball media, whether it's TV shows or movies or books or what have you, where something sounds our alarm as baseball experts or self-professed experts that something seems factually off. Oh, this isn't the way it

works. And sometimes that's intentional, but sometimes you get the sense that it's just not, that they just didn't care about the accuracy and they made some sort of mistake. That really never happened when I was reading Unwritten Rules. I guess there are only a couple of times where something deviates from the way baseball actually works. And you mentioned that that's done for story purposes, really, the timing of the trade deadline. And I suppose another thing that happens after the trade deadline when our two characters are playing for two different teams in the same city. And often you have those teams playing in that same city at the same time, which is important for story purposes so that these characters can actually be together.

Whereas in real life, usually one of those teams is home and the other is on the road at any given time, unless they are playing each other. So that's an example, I guess, of something where I thought, oh, well, in real life, they would probably not be in the same place at the same time right now. But for story purposes, of course, you have to have them actually be together at this point. So there are a couple cases, I guess, where you took some liberties, but for good reasons. I don't know if you remember the TV show Sliders at all. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So at one point, this is a show about like they slide into like alternative universes and like, you know, the world is either subtly or completely different from sort of our world.

And so they slide into one universe where the Golden Gate Bridge is blue. And that's sort of my feeling about the baseball world I created. Like the Golden Gate Bridge is blue. There are some things that have to be intentionally done. I did actually look up. So at one point I have the definitely not the Yankees team. So it's the New York Union. They play in the Bronx.

They wear pinstripes. It is not the Yankees. Thank you, MLB lawyers. And, you know, they're playing a Saturday. I think it was like supposed to be like a Saturday game. And I looked up like the times for when they would play it. And I was like, yeah, they don't usually play it this time on Saturdays. For story reasons, I have to have it. Yep. Yep. And that's sort of like, yeah. And the book has like a three years ago and then present and there's no actual year number

ascribed to it. But I do mention like when the Supreme Court decision about gay marriage was as being like the previous year. So it is actually pretty grounded in like a specific year. And during that time, there was obviously the trade deadline and the waiver trade deadline. And I'm like, what if we just like smushed them? Yeah. And what was the thinking behind using fictional analogs of real life teams?

So Zach, at various points in the story, he plays for the faux Oakland A's and the faux Miami Marlins and the faux New York Yankees. And of course, they have different names and some details are changed, but they're recognizable. So I guess, A, how did you figure out how close you could come without treading on any territory that could get you in trouble? And then, B, what made you decide to model these on real-life teams instead of just making up a completely different baseball universe?

I mean, did it help kind of ground readers who are familiar with baseball for you to have those nods and winks in there? Yeah, I think that that's sort of that was sort of my thinking of I wanted to write for like, I know a lot of obviously very serious baseball fans who are also like read romance novels. And so I wanted to sort of have little, you know, sort of, as you said, nods and winks, kind of inside jokesish jokes, inside baseball, haha jokes for them. But also there's sort of a major component of the book in which like the stadiums in which they play, like contribute to sort of like the setting, you know, in particular in Oakland, there's a lot of sort of discussion of they play in the Elephants Coliseum, which is

definitely not the Oakland Coliseum. It also has plumbing problems, but that's just a coincidence. And possums, which, you know, truth is a defense against all of that stuff. But I wanted that to be part of the setting and sort of contribute to it. In terms of the actual names, I sat down and did what I love most to do in life. I made a spreadsheet with sort of the locations of where I wanted to have teams and then really tried to think about sort of the the the names that would be a little inside baseball and a little fun for people who are into serious baseball, but not confusing for people who weren't. So I came up with a lot of names. I have a friend who lives in Canada who named the Toronto team. And I'll talk about what that is because I think it's terrific. But his like hidden talent party trick is he can come up with big team names really well.

And so he helped a whole lot with a couple of them. But some of it was research. Some of it was just sort of thinking analogously. The ones that I think are probably my favorites and aren't necessarily even named in the book um but I did like a whole Instagram series about them um was the Los Angeles Anaheim uh Californians of Anaheim California I was just like yeah that's that's what that's gonna that's what that's gonna be um but so obviously that the elephants is a mascot-ish for Oakland. You have the Miami

Swordfish. I think we can see where those are going. Eohenio plays for the New York Gothams, which was the name of the Giants before the Giants were the Giants. And if you look up the old Gotham's logo, it's actually the N and the Y are what the Mets adopted. Yeah. And you mentioned the two different timelines, sort of these parallel settings where you have the first time that Zach and Eugenio get together when they're teammates and that doesn't end quite so happily. And then there is a time when their romance is rekindled. And I guess it's not a spoiler because you have already explained the conventions of the romance genre to say that things work out a little bit better this time. So you were kind of telling these stories at the same time and going back and

going forward. So tell us why you decided to structure the story that way. Yeah. So it is told in two timelines it is told solely from zach's point of view and is actually told in the third person present which are all controversial choices within romance as a genre um so present tense is a little controversial single p you know pov is a little controversial but with two timelines dual point of view is is gets complicated pretty quickly. The sort of trope that this is called is second chance romance. It is sort of a major, like, if you say something is

a second chance romance, people really understand what that means. As you said, it always ends with the main couple back together. I liken it to Columbo. You know that he's going to solve the murder in an interesting way, and you know that that's how it solve the murder in an interesting way. And you know, you know that that's how it's going to end. But the tension is sort of in how you get there.

And so I wanted really, I think, to show for Second Chance Romance, often it has characters who are sort of dragging their past in with them, right? They have this baggage. They have all of this stuff that occurred. For me, I always want to see what happened the first time. Because I feel like when you have people who kind of are dragging a whole lot of baggage with them, to kind of have them come back together and then just allude to what happened the first time, for me, is not particularly emotionally satisfying. You know, you want to sort of see what brought them together, you want to sort of see them happy, but the tension comes knowing that they're going to break up and then get back together. So there's an author named Alyssa Cole, who has a novella as part of her sort of series about royalty that's done really well. And I'm going to pull

up the actual name of the develop i don't want to misspeak about it um but what she does for a second chance romance it was just like masterful um so she has a dual timeline right so you see them in past and you see them in the present getting back together but then it's one point of view from in the past and then the other person's point of view in the present. And that to me was just like incredibly well done in terms of structure. And anytime somebody does anything kind of interesting in terms of structure

or in terms of kind of playing around with sort of how the book can work, knowing that you know how it's gonna end up to me is always just like really, really cool and interesting to read um so that novella is called once ghosted twice shy and if you know you are into if you are trying to get into romance and you didn't know where to start alissa cole is a great is a great person to start with um you know she she writes these like tributes to new york city that i'm

just like can i just frame this but like there's just like sort of because you have this end that is assured, you can be very playful with Strepfer. And not to give too much away, but basically the conflict in the relationship comes from the fact that Eugenio is more open about his orientation. He has told some teammates he is more willing to share this with the world, whereas Zach is extremely unwilling to let anyone into this secret that he is keeping. And he is worried about sharing it with his family. He is worried about sharing it with his team. He is worried about what that would mean for his baseball career. And so they are both bringing a lot of baggage and history to this relationship. And of course, I'm sure that you have brought some of your own personal history

to the story in various ways. So as a queer person, as a Jewish person, can you say how much your own experience informed the story and the attitude of Zach? Yeah. So Zach, to kind of give his fictional background, he grew up in a neighborhood right outside Baltimore called Pikesville, which is a super Jewish area right outside Baltimore. And the reason that you have these sort of Jewish areas in various neighborhoods, particularly on the East Coast, actually has to do with the history of housing covenants and things like that. I grew up in a very similar neighborhood in DC. So really sort of that feeling of growing up kind of in community like that is something that I definitely wanted to bring, though I did not grow up in Pikesville. His family is observant. He himself doesn't like keep kosher particularly, but he's observant in kind of other

ways. So he is Jewish. There's discussion of a ketubah, which is like a, it's a marriage contract, but that's sort of, I think like overselling it a little bit. It is a contract and people, you know, do still get them, but it's, it's sort of a declaration, like a love declaration document is what I will say, written in Arabic. So he sort of values that he's very, like, close to his family, and like, really, you know, cares about what they what they think about him. And he cares about like, pleasing his parents and making them proud. And I wanted to show in a lot of ways that a person who kind of has all of those forces on him and he wants to be a successful baseball, you know, definitely not MLB sort of professional baseball player who plays in the major leagues, but not MLB because it's trademarked. But he sort of has these sort

of twin sort of pressures on him. But I wanted to really show that like his parents, they're not homophobic, you know, they're shown to be like accepting of, you know, his best friend's married to, you know, she's married to a woman, but they have these sort of familial expectations and this sort of very heteronormative worldview of like, you're going to get married, you're going to have babies, you're going to live near us. And that's sort of how the world is going to be. And some of that's grounded in like his relationship with his mom in particular, and sort of some of the like, frankly, second generation immigrant pressure that he's facing as well. And that's something that I have personal experience with. And so that's sort of the perspective I wanted to take. I think a lot of times in romance and in other books, you know, there's usually when a character is afraid to come out to their family, it's because the family is sort of homophobic. And if they're religious, they are some flavor of generally Christian that's homophobic. perspective on that it was really important that he like he has a good relationship with his family

and his relationship with his family gets better throughout the book and you know it's not it's not spoilers well it is but i'm going to say it that like i did not want to write a book in which a character becomes estranged from their family that to me is something that's really hard to read and i think for jews it's just a fundamentally different prospect. Like that would mean like being cut off from like an entire community of people and sort of just, I don't know, it feels different. And so I wanted to write a book about like having that tension between sort of those familial expectations that come from a really, a really good place and a place of like, of wanting him to be happy with the fact that baseball has a lot of structural homophobia.

And I wanted to ask about that because I guess some people might read this and urge Zach to come out and be more open. And again, I guess this isn't quite set in the present day, but close enough that some people reading this might feel Eugenio's frustration and say, Zach, come on, people will be accepting of this. But of course, the NBA, NFL, NHL, recently high-level men's soccer have all had active players publicly come out. That still hasn't happened in MLB. And I wonder whether you think there is anything about MLB or about baseball in general that has erected, I guess, higher barriers to this or that has made it less welcoming, less accepting. Is that a source of great frustration for you as a baseball fan, as a queer person, that that hasn't happened yet in MLB still in 2021?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a complicated history, obviously. So you have Glenn Burke and baseball did not treat Glenn Burke well. You know, he's he's traded from the Dodgers for being gay. He's run out of Oakland for being gay. You know, he ends up obviously living in poverty and then eventually dying of HIV complications. in poverty and then eventually dying of HIV complications. And the athletics, you know, sort of like eventually ponied up a little bit of money to make sure he could eat. But, you know, really, he was treated very, very, very unkindly by the game.

And so I think it is it's a little bit different when you mentioned like an active NHL player that was an NHL like prospect. He's a high level prospect prospect but like there's never been an a former ml or a former nhl player as far as i know to who has come out you know there's been players who've played sort of in the ahl um and various sort of like european teams and stuff like that or who have been like in this case an active prospect so i think it's not totally different i think that that mlb really has that history of of burke and sort of how he was he was treated just i mean like that's something for which baseball needs to to do more have more accountability about right um that

they'll celebrate the invention of the high five but not necessarily say like we did this because he was gay and we did this probably because, we did this because he was gay. And we did this probably because he was, you know, because he was both black and gay and we treated him in just ways that, that future players that has to inform sort of their, their thinking about all of this. And that's not super speculative. Cause I think Billy Dean mentions that in his memoir as well. Cause he, he played under Lasorda. And so, you know,

I think that that is sort of like a known history. And Bean obviously gets into a lot of the issues when he was playing as well. So I think that it's because there have been gay players and there have been players who have come out after the fact. It is just a little bit different than like the NHL or, It is just a little bit different than like the NHL or, you know, I feel like the NFL is a little bit different, you know, and basketball is a little bit different because guy. And he's just like, yeah, you know, I have a husband. No, no one can recognize me when I'm not wearing my, my, my hat. So it does not matter. Um, like, how are you a middle-edding reliever? You are the most anonymous person in the world, but at the same time, I think that that's, that's how it's going to function. There was a minor leaguer who was actually retiring, um, who came out as bi like

a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, I know that obviously on the, on the stoppers you all had like a gay picture and then there've been a, like a handful of other folks as well. But I, I think that's where we're going to end up. You know, MLB talks out of both sides of his mouth about these things. You know, I think that, that there's a lot of like, you know, the nationals have night out. There's a lot of like pride events, or I think that the Yankees

do like a Stonewall commemoration and stuff like that. But there's also Chick-fil-A on the foul poles. And so like, they're, they're happy to take queer people's money on Pride Night, but they're also happy to take money from a company that is explicitly homophobic on the other side of it. And I think that any player has to see those sort of contradictions and have that shape sort of like how much they want to tell the world and how much the world really deserves to know. Yeah. I wondered, because there hasn't been a real life equivalent of your story that we know about, of course, I wondered whether you had any hesitation about depicting teammates who were in a relationship with each other, just because,

you know, I guess that one of the, maybe the homophobic fears about having a player come out is, you know, I would be uncomfortable sharing a locker room or, you know, showering near this person who, you know, is attracted to people of my sex or something. It's almost like the sort of sexist attitude about women reporters being allowed in the clubhouse when that first became a thing, you know, oh, this is where I change. This is my personal space. And to allow someone of the opposite sex into this inner sanctum, that would be uncomfortable for both of us and there would be inevitable attraction, et cetera. And this is something that I think we thought about pitch. I don't know whether you watch pitch, but Megan and

I, I think we were both kind of rooting against there being a romance between the pitcher protagonist and catcher co-character just because I guess partly just because you know it seems kind of a nice exception to the cliche of of characters kind of constantly having a will they or won't they in in tv but also because you know Ginny Baker the the main character of that series she has a no dating players policy you know she's I guess worried about how it would look. And, and so it seemed like, you know, are they going to go there? And ultimately they went there. And so I wonder whether you had any hesitation about going there as opposed to having players,

you know, be in a relationship with someone who is not in baseball, let's say, which would still be something that, you know, players have players have not been comfortable coming out about yet. So I just wonder whether there were any extra considerations or sensitivity just because of that setup. Yeah, and I want to say, I really liked Pitch on the episode where she ends up at that party in like the swimming pool is just like a great episode of television

for how it's structured. I think that it suffered a little bit from trying to like explain non-baseball baseball things to a non-baseball audience and then also like serve serious baseball folks and it was just hitting its ride when it got canceled yeah so you know if anybody out there is listening i would love another season where it's like you know just just a little bit more i also you know i i think that some of the the stuff about like women playing and i don't even say women like non-cis men playing um often really is you know the first the only etc etc etc versus like just focusing on non-cis men playing baseball like as a as a community and a history and a, you know, maybe it's because

I'm sitting under like a Racine Bells poster and an Estes Cubanas poster, but like, that's sort of where I'm at. Going back to your actual question, though. So I think at one point, you mentioned, like, you just kind of want to be like, Zach, get it together. It's intentional. You know, I was like, men would rather sign with bottom scraping Miami baseball teams than go to therapy. He eventually does go to therapy. but they're really like, kind of competing for playing time with one another. Like, that's not a situation that is going to be tenable in the long term without, frankly, much better communication skills than he possesses at the time. Or, you know, sort of much better, and I won't put it all on him, much better communication skills than Eugenio possesses at the time, because he's under a set of pressures that is related to but slightly different from Zach as somebody who's a like a late in life or late in

his career rookie. He and Zach are about the same age, but Zach has like four or five years more service time. And so, you know, it's not supposed to be tenable and it's not supposed to be a good idea. And so I wanted to kind of show that because of the sort of considerations of them competing against one another of the team, taking an affront to Zach, arguing for a higher and receiving a higher salary and arbitration and therefore cutting his playing time in sort of as a retaliatory measure. And sort of him having that versus a Ohenio being like, I'm a 28 year old rookie, like I just need to do do this because if I don't do this, like I'm pretty much done. And so that's sort of the balance.

In terms of this sort of teammates thing, I, you know, I tried to kind of be like, look, you know, there's a certain point where if you're if you're around people who use their bodies to make a living bodies become furniture to a certain extent. Right. I think at one point I said, like, you know, it's about as erotic as an elbow. It's just sort of like the fact of, you know, you can sort of partition in your mind of this is when I'm supposed to have attraction to other people versus like, I'm just around the fact that people that I'm in an environment where people are using their bodies to make money. And I tried to kind of have that as a balance because that balance exists in, you know, if you have people who are in the same dance troupe, if you have people who are strippers, if you have people who are doing a variety of jobs in which they make their money using

bodies, bodies just become sort of de-eroticized because of just their value and i tried to make that particularly clear but i i don't think like i don't think it's a good idea for teammates to be involved because i think co-workers shouldn't be involved with one another when they are sort of competing for the same slot and i have written other stories in which players on the same team are involved and do try to get into the ethics of it right like if you have somebody who is you know as a 200 million dollar contract and you have somebody who's a marginal player their power this power dynamic is not going to be equal on the team you know there's there's a lot of sort of stuff that

you can you can get into that's interesting. But the sort of fundamental question of like, can you have two people who are attracted to each other surrounded by other people who are not, regardless of if they're in the same changing room, I kind of think is sort of a question that that I think should necessarily get set to the side. Because again, like, at a certain point, it's just sort of like, yeah, you know, know yeah that's what i do for a living yeah right so i have to ask which is harder to write a sex scene or a baseball scene because either way you're doing a type of play-by-play right but um these are both activities where uh sometimes it's more fun to observe or to participate in than to read about. Not always the case, but often the case. And as you note, there's not a ton of sort of standard play-by-play, he threw the ball, he hit the ball kind of action in the book, but there's inevitably a bit of that. And I know from personal experience, it can be hard to write that in a compelling way. So what are the tricks of the trade, I suppose? And which did you find more challenging? Because I imagine you could describe a sex scene in a very clinical

kind of way, and it probably wouldn't be very fun or very titillating for anyone. So there must be a unique skill set associated with both of these descriptions. Yeah, I've actually considered that a lot. I'm going to see baseball as an order to write because there's a batting order. And you're like, oh, can they have them batting? No, I mentioned like two innings ago. Would they actually be up? Sort of like what's happening? You know, both baseball and sex scenes function as essentially like the way an action scene

or a fight scene would in an action movie, right? It has to advance the plot, it has to show characterization, it has to sort of unveil stuff about characters, or you're right, it's just, you know, sort of like little mannequins doing whatever the author wants, which is not a super interesting thing to read. You know, you mentioned kind of how sex scenes function in romance, they function very differently than in literary fiction. So there's often like these screenshots of terrible sex scenes in literary fiction that kind of get passed around i think jonathan franson is in particular noted for this and you know i'm not saying like he writes good sexes because he doesn't but he writes them to be disgusting and

alienating and disembodied and distancing. And I think he's very effective at that. I don't want to do any of those things in either a sex scene or a baseball scene, right? You want to be sort of like in the stadium dirt with players. You want to be able to sort of like experience a game, but also have it, you know, drive the plot, you know, show something about characterization um and i think that's the same thing for a sex scene that you want to have it be in a romance novel like an embodied experience versus like a distancing experience it's supposed to show connection between people versus versus disconnection but that said there's just this is

gonna sound hard but there's fewer moving parts than baseball like and i probably am a little bit more attentive than other folks but like you know with with baseball scenes you're just kind of like oh yeah i gotta i gotta make sure the batting order is correct i gotta see like i don't know if there's would this person be like have like a shift against them you know what kind of player are they um and so there's there's some thought into it um the the baseball scene i'm probably the most fond of in the book is actually just like maybe even the simplest but talks a lot about sort of like tunneling and commit point as a little being a little bit metaphorical for where he is where zach is emotionally but in order to do that you have to be able to like,

get him into the batter's box and, you know, have a pitcher who's throwing stuff against him and, you know, sort of talk about what that is in order to kind of arrive at that moment. But, you know, in terms of like, I don't know, actual choreography, I joke that I should get ball joint balls. Just so like, you don't end up with people with like three arms or, you know, improbably like, well, that's have found that very difficult with my books. It's not something where the author always has input or final say in what the cover looks like. With a romance novel, I think there are certain conventions and expectations, and I wondered, is there just a- Do you mean abs? Yes, although in the case of Unwritten Rules, I guess the abs are obscured by the title,

but that's kind of what I wanted to ask about. Because I mean, is there just a giant database of stock photos of baseball players in various states of undress? And if so, did you browse them looking for the perfect person who could stand for your characters. You've had to do this multiple times, I guess, because you have also written a novella and co-written another book and we can plug those at the end. But how does one pick a cover for a baseball romance novel specifically? Yeah, this is actually, you kind of stumbled a little bit into like a huge controversy in romance. So I will try to boil that down into into some specifics for people who are not in kind of in romance landia Twitter, in particular, because which is a digital first imprint of Harlequin. People tend to be pretty familiar with Harlequin. You know, that's sort of the classic, like you're really thinking of the paperbacks with what's called clinch covers, you know, the couple embracing.

Or you have sort of like an inset picture of them and then you open it and there's kind of a full painting. And yes, Fabio is involved in a lot of them but there's also a lot of other other cover models and so that's sort of what people i think envision a little bit with harlequin and with romance covers karina is a little bit i would say like the the almost experimental wing of harlequin um so publishes stuff that's queer publishes stuff that's like just for a very like hyper specific audience. And that's terrific. Like that's not that's not a knock on it. Because like, you know, a queer Jewish baseball book is a very hyper specific audience. But that's sort of going to inform how the cover gets made, because I did not make the cover cover artist named John John

Kixie did. There are codes and conventions and romance novels for the covers. If you have somebody either with abs or taking off their shirt in the case of unwritten rules, that means that the book is probably going to contain explicit sites. So part of that is, you know, why are there so the cover because it's a single point of view book. So two people can often really imply that it is going to be a dual point of view book. The book is kind of like the cover is on a ball field that's a little bit like dark and atmospheric. And I really want kind of wanted to have that as sort of the tone of the book is is a little bit more moody, melancholy than I think you sometimes get in sports romance, which can be, you know, rom-commy. But this is definitely not a rom-com. I'm funny, I think, as a person and sometimes as a writer, but this is not, like, going to be sort of like the fictional equivalent

of, you know, those kind of classic Meg Ryan movies. And so you want to have a cover that can very quickly, and in a thumbnail on Amazon, communicate all of those things. And I think Karina did a really great job at that. You asked about, is there a giant database of baseball players taking their shirts off? There is not. But I'm just going to tell you, minor leaguersers if you are looking for some cash being in stock photos will pay very well because a lot of times you're looking for baseball stuff because there's

there's like i stock and deposit photos and things like that where you're looking for for kind of stock photos and they're using like oh like they'll have on um pants that demand high socks pulled all the way down and i'm just like what are we doing um or they'll have a bat but it's like a bat that's not like not in proportion to like the person who's holding its body i'm like is that a kid's baseball bat like what are we doing or like they're holding their glove wrong like i mean we're talking very fundamentally simple things so there is actually a demand for better pictures because often, particularly if you're writing, if you're writing sports stuff, the kind of current stock imagery is not necessarily

accurate to the sport. In terms of the communication that it is a sports romance, it's obviously on a ball field, there's stitching on, you know, baseball stitching on the front cover. You know, that's sort of the visual communication that it is sports. You'll often see stock photos of people with towels around their necks, like holding a towel as if they just got out of a shower with a towel around their neck. And that communicates sports romance, believe it or not. I see. Meg and I often joke about starting a consulting service where we would offer input into various baseball projects and check them for accuracy.

So I guess we should add stock photos for romance novel covers to our list of services, perhaps. sort of story this is and also the description and so forth to some extent. I assume you don't have a lot of walk-ins who are just kind of stumbling onto the book thinking that this is going to just be your standard baseball fiction and then are sort of surprised by the erotic elements, the romance elements. I would assume that most people know what they are signing up for and are doing so with pleasure. But I remember when I was at Baseball Perspectives, and this was 10 years ago at this point, Emma Spann wrote an article about baseball slash fiction, and it caused quite a response among the subscribers at the time. And again, this was 10 years ago, and maybe attitudes have shifted, but there were

people who loved the article. There was also a ton of blowback and people who were upset about the article. And yes, there is a ton of baseball slash fiction out there, not just players. There's Billy Bean slash Theo Epstein stories out there if you want to find them. But I think people were uncomfortable with this. I mean, part of it was just, oh, it's baseball perspectives and you expect some statistical deep dive. And then here's an article about slash fiction. This is not what I subscribed for, etc. But also, I think there was just, you know, sort of this, this is uncomfortable. This is icky. This is baseball players having sex. I don't want to think about this. You know, this makes me uncomfortable for reasons I don't want to fully interrogate, etc. But I assume there has not been much reaction like that to Unwritten Rules, or I don't know what your dad thought of it, ultimately. He likes the baseball, and that's what we're going to talk about. your anticipation of your dad's reaction to reading the book, probably not so dissimilar from Zach's anticipation of his family finding out about his relationship. But yeah, I mean, I imagine, you know, there is maybe not as much crossover as one would hope between people who are reading regular baseball fiction and reading this sort of story, even though I think they would

certainly enjoy it and would highly recommend it to anyone. You know, I think that that's a complicated question in terms of the kind of ecosystem of readers, right? So I think that sort of the idea of like who reads baseball fiction, right? That's still going to be, you know, really thinking about like Field of Dreams. I don't know. The Chosen, I think, counts as Jewish baseball fiction. Yeah. As you said, you point to anything that contains baseball.

That's a baseball book. You know, that, you know, the natural, that kind of thing. And then people who are romance readers, you know, I think that with like dude taking off his shirt, it's kind of unambiguous what you're going to get. Maybe the heat level was surprising to a few folks. I had a number of friends who basically, you know, were not romance readers who were like, hey, this is like, I really liked this. And I was like, yeah, it's pretty, it's a little spicy.

And they're like, yeah, that's fine, whatever. You know, like I knew what I was signing up for essentially. And so I think, you know, I do try to get some crossover that way. I think the greater surprise was from people who are readers of sports romance, who are not necessarily into the sports, who were like, oh, this is very sportsy. I was like, yeah, you know, I just want to be very clear. Like, it's sportsy. I also think baseball people like more baseball in their baseball fiction than necessarily shows up in like even a hockey nonfiction that I've read that there's a difference in terms of like the sort of romanticism of the game, the sort of way it's portrayed the sort of you'll get more baseball in a baseball movie than you will hockey in a hockey movie, which is weird because hockey is very visually interesting.

Yes, I agree. I actually, I often think if I were going to really invest in any other sport, it would be hockey. I love hockey. Hockey is so cool that it makes me question why I spend all this time paying attention to baseball when I could be watching hockey instead. But you have other work on the way. You have a novella called One True Outcome coming next March. And you have also co-written a story, I believe, that is available now called Dirty Slide. You want to give us a quick pitch story summary for those or any other upcoming work? Sure. So yeah, as you said, I co-wrote a novella called Dirty Slide with an author named Lauren Blakely, who herself wrote a trilogy of baseball, baseball romance, baseball romance that came out this summer called the Men of Summer series that I would encourage people to check out if they're if they're at all

interested in that. She also had some fun with alternative team names is what i'm gonna say so we co-wrote a novella um about a you know a player who spikes another player um during a world series game and when uh max freed got his ankle trod upon. I was like, oh my god, no! I was like, life in the Tate's art. We have that. And then One True Outcome is set in the same universe as Unwritten Rules and is going to be out March 2022. That involves, so at one point there's a sort of trade that occurs in Unwritten Rules,

so it is about the player who an Unwritten Rules character is traded for, sort of their story and kind of gets into, there's always a catcher in my story. So one of them is a catcher. And so is MM Baseball Romance has a lot of the same, I would say similar themes to Unwritten Rules, but is obviously a set of different stories. So that's going to be out in March. In terms of other work, the last thing I'll mention, I did a novella, novelette novella for a holiday romance anthology called Love All Year, which is a seven holiday romances, none of which are centered around like Christian or white ethno sort of ethno majoritarian cultural holidays. So basically, like, you could, there's a, you know, I wrote a tuba schvalt story,

and I'll explain what that is in a second. And there's also like they've had Juneteenth stories. They've had Kronze stories. They've had stories set around other Jewish holidays. So the novel that I wrote for that is called The Kofax Curse and is about two baseball players who reunite at spring training, one of whom has newly signed to the other one's team um they're both jewish and one pitched on yom kippur and the other did not and uh they are having a lot of sort of antagonism over that and they reunite uh at spring training and during a holiday that's called tubish fat which is essentially jewish arbor day is the best way to put it, but has some religious components. And so it's what happens when they come back together and the team is like, go work yourselves

out and sort of how they balance that and balance some of this stuff about, you know, pressures on Jewish players in particular to play on holidays and at specific times, which I think still exists to a certain extent. So that is that is also out if people want like a little a little taste of of my writing without necessarily um digging into a whole book but yeah so i i would say if folks are interested in all in romance novels definitely you know and and baseball definitely check out the books um if you're if people are interested in romance in general, the advice I

kind of always have is think about what you like to read in fiction, and there's a romance equivalent. So like, I love 20s pulp mysteries, there are 20s pulp mystery romances. So, you know, I would say if people are listening and going, Hey, this, this sounds kind of cool. Just think about like, kind of what you want to read and then find the romance equivalent. And that's always a good starting point. So where can people find Unwritten Rules and your other romance writing or non-romance writing if you want to plug that or yourself on social media, et cetera? And I know the big ballot that came out on Monday that everyone was talking about, the

Reads Rainbow Awards nominees in the adult romance category. Unwritten Rules is nominated, so you can go vote for it now. But anything you want to plug or direct people to have at it? Sure. So I am at Katie Casey.

So at K-D, the letters, Casey, writes at Twitter, Instagram, someone on Facebook, and then my website is katiecaseywrites.com. If you subscribe to my newsletter, I will send you a free 8,000 word short story about you guessed it baseball players and they kiss. So if again, people want a little taste of my writing for free, I would say definitely check that out. As you said, that was the ballot that everyone was talking about on Monday, right? Like that is it's a controversial ballot. I know there's going to be a lot of like wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. In seriousness, this is a blog called Reads Rainbow who do incredible work on talking about queer fiction generally. So not just romance

novels, they talk about sort of queer fiction generally. And they they do reviews and sort of thematic recommendations and things like that. And they're wonderful folks. And they do reviews and sort of thematic recommendations and things like that. And they're wonderful folks. And they are doing an awards ballot for the year. And I was honored to be named among some really, really, really incredible authors for that. And I would say, again,

if people are interested in reading romance, just start with their ballot and just read your way down because it would be a great way to do it. But yeah, if people want to come say hi on Twitter, you know, come hang out, talk a little romance, talk a little baseball. I'm at a Katie Casey writes. All right. Well, again, I really enjoyed the book.

I really recommend it to anyone listening here. And at the very least, like you've given me another argument in the case against robo-umps, right? Because you're suppressing romance. If you don't have to teach other catchers framing and bring them together, then who knows what kind of romance you might get in the way of. So there's another argument that I did not anticipate. But again, a whole novel that is sort of centered on catchers and framing. I mean, it feels like it was written for me. And if you want to write a sequel at some point, I will be in.

So maybe I'm biased because of the epigraph. But again, I'm flattered that you landed on that quote. And congrats again on the book. And it's been a pleasure talking to you. Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's really, I appreciate the kind words about the book. I would say, you know, for RoboUmps, I did some analysis as part of book research that found that the average catcher contributes negative runs to their team. So, but they maybe contribute, you know,

a nice love story. So it really balances. All right, let's take a quick break now. And I'll be right back with Gerald Schiffman of Baseball Prospectus to discuss shadows on the field. Oh, the shadow, baby, you ain't gonna hold. Even though somebody came and told you the world's foremost and possibly only researcher about the effects of shadows on a baseball field. And I have been waiting for this piece by my guest Gerald Schiffman for years now. It is a follow-up to his first examination of the subject. of the subject. And really, it's like, I look forward to the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire and the third book of the Kingkiller Chronicle and Gerald Schiffman's follow-up to his research about shadows on the field at Baseball Prospectus. So Gerald, hello, welcome back. I guess talking about the effect of shadows on the field in postseason play in

particular is not super timely in late November, but it's a baseball podcast, so nothing we say in late November is all that timely. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. That's very high expectations. I hope the piece meets that. It met my expectations, and I'm not sure that anyone else had the same expectations that I did, so I think you're good. But I've been fascinated by this subject for a while because it's just a constant refrain throughout all of October and not only October, but especially so where almost every single game, I mean, depends on the start time, of course, but you just constantly hear, oh, the shadows are creeping across the mound and now they're between the mound and home plate and you have former players who are now broadcasters who are talking about the effect of this and no one has ever really studied it in a rigorous way to my knowledge other than you and I guess the reason for that is that it's pretty difficult to study so tell us a little bit about some of the challenges associated with actually

getting an answer to this question and I guess how you went about it the first time two years ago when you published your first examination back in 2019. And that time didn't find anything that really supported the idea that the shadows play an important role. So the first main issue you have to deal with is that you don't know what the batter actually sees from pitch to pitch. I mean, that applies to any analysis. You just don't have what the batter actually sees from pitch to pitch. Yeah. I mean, that applies to any analysis. You just don't have that data. So you have to find some proxy that basically acts as a go-between for when the shadows

may be an issue. Last time I used a combination of the timestamp from PitchFX and StatCast and also attempted to use the sun's position, which you can calculate with like the time and the latitude and launch to the ballpark. Like you said, I didn't really find any definitive conclusions, you know, supporting these huge effects that we hear about on TV. And that was when looking for differences in strikeouts and walks. This time I broke things down to the pitch level, tried to find whether in the late afternoon whiffs and chases escalate to a significant degree, and found that they seem to for high spin pitches, which is pretty interesting.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the first time you looked into this, I was relieved that someone finally had, because we had gotten some questions about it, and no one had ever really come up with a satisfying answer. And I was thinking of maybe we could do some kind of effectively wild crowdsourced inquiry where we could get everyone to record exactly when the shadows were creeping across the field and then we could use that. But didn't end up doing that and it would have been difficult to do. And you found a way to do it, but first came up with nothing. And it wasn't like you said, oh, this is not true, there's nothing to it. You just said, well, based on what I have investigated here, there doesn't seem to be anything that supports the idea, but doesn't necessarily disprove it either. So why did something show up this time and not that time?

I think, well, a few reasons. One, using a different data set. Another difference from this piece to as compared to the last piece is last time I only looked at regular season data from 2019. This time I looked only at postseason data from like an 11-year period. So maybe it helps that the sun is at a more consistent position in October across all stadiums as opposed to throughout a whole season when the sun is in June, it's higher in the sky than it is in October, at least as a maximum. So that could be one difference. I think breaking things down to the pitch level when you're looking at timestamp data is probably much more precise

way to do it. So I think those are probably the biggest differentiators. Yeah. This sort of reminds me of earlier studies that were done about different subjects where initially there wouldn't really be anything to confirm the idea, or maybe even the idea was refuted. And then later you get different data and better and more granular data, and then you're able to discover some signal there. Like Keith Wilner, when he did his first studies on catcher framing for Baseball Prospectus, pre-pitch FX, pre-pitch data, he didn't find anything. And for a while there, it seemed like, oh, what are all these ex-catchers talking about this is not a thing. But of course, players and teams and coaches had known about framing and talked about framing for decades. I mean, going back to early last century, if not before then. And so once we got better data and there were better studies that were done,

they found, oh yeah, this matters. Not only does it exist, but it matters, if anything, more than people thought it mattered. So it's sort of the same trajectory here, I suppose, with the Shadows, where you had this chorus of ex-players who were saying, yeah, this affected me when I was playing. And it turns out they kind of know what they were talking about, probably. So what did you find specifically about which pitches are affected and how they're affected? So what I found is that breaking balls and cutters, which is like a higher spin type fastball, they post a statistically significant increase in whiffs from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

So for breaking balls overall, the difference is like 4.4 percentage points, I think. And there are some differences too when you break it down between curves and sliders curves actually post a higher differential but sliders seem to post a more consistently positive differential whereas like sinkers which are low spin pitches they seem to underperform in the shadows so it all seems to align with like seem to underperform in the shadows. So it all seems to align with like, there's some specific quotes in there I have from like Mike Scotia and Adam LaRoche, the idea that like, it's this spin that they really struggle with when they're staring through both sunlight and shade. Yeah, you just constantly hear about this if you watch postseason baseball. And Jeff Sullivan

tweeted last month, if a baseball announcer sees a shadow on the field, it means six more weeks of talking about it. And I guess I sympathize because baseball broadcasts are long and there's only so much input you can add. And so if this is something that you can speak to from experience and it's actually affecting the game at that moment, then you probably should point it out. But it was something that was always unsatisfying to me or it made me question well how much does it matter does it really matter is this just an old player's tale or is there some substance to it so would you say that based on the effects that you found you would recommend that pitchers pitch any differently or hitters hit any differently i

mean should it or does it do you know change pitch selection in any differently or hitters hit any differently? I mean, should it or does it, do you know, change pitch selection in any significant way where if you're the pitching coach of postseason team that's starting a game at four o'clock, you'd say, hey, load up on breaking balls earlier. I think the takeaway for pitchers is that like higher spin pitches are probably better. So that would mean more breaking balls, more cutters, especially if they're like particularly high spin versions of those pitches. That may be a good prescription for how to pitch when shadows are present. For hitters, I mean, it's hard to say because all they can do is react. I mean,

would you want to take more of a gamble and just lay off a slider even though you don't really know exactly where it's going. And that's a pretty difficult choice to make. I don't know. But you could. Yeah. You found an effect for whiff rates, but not so much for chase rates, right? Do you have any theory about why the shadows might make you swing through pitches more often, but might not make you more likely to swing at pitches that you should not be swinging at more often? I did wonder if my definition of a chase had something to do with it. So I used BP's called strike probability and basically looked at any pitch that was less than 50% CS rate. So basically

it was more likely to be a ball than a strike, but like one could choose another threshold. What if you looked at only pitches that were very likely to be balls that had a CS rate of under 25 percent? Maybe it changes at that point. So based on your findings, do you think announcers talk about this an appropriate amount or still too much or not enough like i'm trying to figure out like if this is a significant enough factor that if you were trying to come up with some post-season secret sauce what helps you win in the playoffs which has always been a difficult endeavor if you have some high spin staff throws a lot of breaking balls and also i't know, maybe it's beneficial to be a team that doesn't get put in prime time so that you can play in the shadows more often if you have

that kind of pitching staff. But like, does this matter enough that it should be like, oh, an occasional mention maybe? Or is it like, no, every time there are shadows and it might come into play, then you should probably, you're doing your duty as a broadcaster if you mention it because it's somewhat important. That's kind of what I tried to touch upon in the conclusion. Like on one hand, it's kind of a big deal to find real effects. Like there is some element of this piece that's validating the claims. And when people hear it, they don't have to just say, oh, they're just chatting and there's no proof of this. I think it's fair to say there's some proof now.

But at the same time, I don't know if it's proof for some of the more aggressive claims about the shadows. Sometimes you hear, and this could be hyperbole, like the hitters literally can't see and it's very dangerous out there. hitters literally can't see and it's very dangerous out there. I mean, that's a pretty big step above the data I found here. If hitters literally couldn't see or something close to that, that isn't so much hyperbole, you would see way bigger effects than this. So I think it's definitely fair to say that it's worth discussion, but I do think it's also fair to say it could be you know measured in a sense and not just you know use as an excuse for for everything yeah

so it matters to an extent i guess it's unlike catcher framing in that it's not that this turned out to matter even more than anyone suspected you have have found some significance here, but not enough to make a bad hitter into a good hitter. It's not like Jose Molina is actually good, you guys. No one knew it. He can't hit, but he's so good at framing that he's actually great. In magnitude, what you found here are fairly small effects. It might make a good hitter a little less good, but it's not going to be a giant factor.

But you never know. In postseason baseball, every pitch matters and some small effect on any particular pitch could make the difference. So shadows certainly could have an effect, even if we'll never know, I suppose, whether they made the difference on any particular pitch or play. Yeah. And it's possible that breaking the data down a little differently, and this would be a version three possibility in another two years, like look at the data a little differently as far as timeframes, not like restrict itself to only these hourly bins. That could change like the magnitude of the effects. So it's 4.4 points, for instance, for breaking balls

across the entirety of 4 to 5 p.m. You've got to figure there's some variation within that time frame. So that's an opportunity for further research. Yeah, because I guess there's the question of how long is that sliver of time where the shadows are in exactly the right place to disrupt a hitter? Like a matter of minutes potentially because if the shadows are covering the entire distance between the mound and home plate, maybe it doesn't make a difference. And if they're not covering any part of that, then nothing. But it's just that in-between time and that's not a lot of real estate.

thing but it's just that in between time and that's not a lot of real estate so you know how much time does it take for the shadow to cross 60 feet six inches i guess is the question and you know then you have inning breaks and pitching changes and all these things in this so the actual amount of game action that is covered by that in between shadow time might not be that great maybe maybe like for instance i had um the piece was kind of framed around the one real shadows game we had this year in the playoffs the nlcs game three and there really was about i would say one inning and it was a long inning but it was really one inning when the shadows were clearly you know doing what what frankeur warned of, which was part of the path between the mound and the play was in shadow and part was in sun, and really did not last too long. And I'm sure it depends on the park that the game is being played,

and it would depend on the time of year for sure. I mean, if you're restricting your look to playoffs, that's not an issue. But if you're trying to broaden it, then it is. Are you more satisfied with your results this time or the first time? I guess you enjoy a good debunking better than confirming something because both can be fun. And broadcasters just say so many things about baseball that they give writers a lot of material to work with. And I know your colleague Rob Baines at Baseball Perspectives does a lot of articles that are inspired by something a broadcaster said. And then you check it out.

And generally, I take a trust but verify approach with broadcaster ex-player comments. Often, obviously, they know what they're talking about and we can learn a lot from them. And sometimes they might be exaggerating or they might be misremembering some details i mean often when you go back like rob nyer often does and you look at the specific circumstances of a story that a player remembers from some point in their career you'll find actually there never was a game where this guy pitched and it took place in that park and so maybe they're kind of conflating multiple games or maybe they're dressing something up because it makes a better story, which can be okay in some cases. But would you rather debunk this and be able to say every time a broadcaster brings this up, no, this is nonsense. They don't know what they're talking about. Or would you rather say, no, there's actually something to this. And it's just that now we have some evidence for the fact well it's important that i say objective but i was uh i was prepared based on the first piece to for this to be a debunking yeah i was actually surprised to find significant

effects but i mean now that those are in hand i'm happy to have found them honestly yeah i think it's nice when the ex-players and the the analysts who never played at that level can kind of come together and find the same effect and back up something that the other said. So I enjoyed this and I guess now my wait will start again. So this is potentially a trilogy of Shadows research. So hopefully it will be out before the winds of winter but we will see so next time I guess we'll just dive even deeper and who knows what data will be available

by then and bigger samples and all of that but next time we get to October or don't even have to wait until October and some broadcaster trots this out again hopefully they can cite you and your research and say hey Gerald Shipman at Baseball Perspectives actually looked into this and backed it up a little bit. But if not, at least we know that it is out there. So I'd encourage everyone to

go read this. I will link to it on the show page as always. And check out Gerald's work in general. He does a lot of great research at Baseball Perspectives, not just about Shadows. And you can find him at G. Schiffman on Twitter. Is there anything else that you are hoping to look into that is similarly resistant to studies and analysis? Because sometimes it feels like we've asked every question or answered every question. And of course, there's a lot that we don't know about baseball, but there aren't as

many things, I guess, that are tough to study now, even with StatCast and the level of information that we have. Is there something on your wishlist that is just as hard to research as the effect of shadows or even harder? You know, I do have a list of topics that I accumulate and then get to in drips and drabs. So there are a few items in there. Offhand, I just don't know. Okay. All right. So stay tuned.

I know I will. Thank you, Jared, for this long-awaited article, long-awaited by me and conversation as well. Thanks for having me on, Ben. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. As mentioned, Meg will be back tomorrow for one final pre-Thanksgiving episode on Stove League and the Hot Stove League. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Depending on your tier of support, you can get access to Patreon exclusive monthly AMA episodes, which we will start publishing next week, and the Effectively Wild patron-only Discord group. There are many other benefits that you

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