Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1783: The Rumor Chill

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the slow drip of baseball news during the lockout, why MLB’s competitive balance gets a bad rap, the Rays’ historic collective minor league winning percentage, and the difficulty of evaluating individual defense in the age of Statcast-based and non-Statcast-based metrics. Then (33:09) they continue their series of discussions […]

🎵 And the way you thought it happened, something's going wrong Don't for baseball news, I guess you could say. Yeah, I know mid-December is not always an active time, but lockout December, it's different. It's just crickets. It's not even crickets. It's like when you get used to the sound of crickets and then the crickets stop and you realize that it's extremely quiet. I feel like the person in the movie who says,

it's quiet, too quiet. Even that background murmur of the off-season of just meaningless rumors and nonsense, but something that comes across your transom, we're getting none of that. I mean, there's a little bit of news and there are people writing mock articles where they solve the CBA issues or whatever. We're definitely in that part of the off season here but really we got months to go so settle in i have not it's so interesting that you say that because it has not

struck me as being so appreciably different than normal it we obviously shifted the big rush of free agent signings that we would perhaps normally have seen around winter meetings like a week earlier, right? And so I guess in some respects, it's different because I am not having to make excuses to go to bed at a reasonable time rather than linger in a hotel bar in Orlando. So in that respect, quite different than what we might have otherwise experienced. But I don't know, it hasn't hit me as that different perhaps because there have been some signings of MLB players to teams internationally, right? We've seen some signings in the KBO.

So there's been some of that murmur that has perhaps sated it. But yeah, I understand that it is in fact different, but it hasn't quite hit me yet. I think the place where I will really start to feel it is after the 1st of January, because we always get a couple signings sort of as we're getting back from the holidays, and we obviously are not going to have those. So I think that's when it's going to really strike me as being a new condition that we are experiencing. Because right now I'm just like, well, I have zips to edit and lists and Hall of Fame coverage. So it's December, right?

Yeah, I guess you have some features that just proceed whether they're to lock out or not. But yeah, I'm not even someone who is really like reading rumors regularly and that into like roster baiting and all of this stuff that fans do over the offseason. But it has felt a little bit different to me without that. I guess it's mostly just like as a podcaster who is looking for stuff to banter about. There's not as much ready material there, but a few things. ready material there, but a few things, and we will be discussing Stove League today, episodes 9 through 12, our long-awaited recap conversation, but a few bits of banter that I have picked up. So one conversation that I think is kind of happening around the internet because of the labor situation and because of Rob Manfred's letter where he suggested that it's hard for certain teams to compete in this environment.

People have been talking about competitive balance in baseball, which I think is always a worthwhile topic. And some people have been running the numbers on that just to try to demonstrate that parity, competitive balance, parity competitive balance maybe not as much of a problem in MLB as people think at least relative to some of the other major men's North American sports leagues and James Smith who is a researcher for

the Yes Network and I believe an Effectively Wild listener at times he had a Twitter thread the other day about this where he went a little deeper into that than I've seen others go because often people will compare the number of teams that have won championships since a certain date. And James did that too. But as he pointed out, that might not be the most rigorous way to approach this.

So, for instance, since 2000, 15 MLB teams have won a championship. That's 50%. That's pretty good because in NFL, it's 12 of 32. In the NBA, it's 10 of 30. In the NHL, it's 12 of 31. So that's pretty good that half of the teams have won a World Series. But of course, that's a one-off and you can have weird Marlins winning a World Series without being competitive in a lot of seasons. And there's a lot of randomness that comes into play here. So he went a little deeper and he went to playoff appearances. And, of course, MLB has the smallest postseason field.

So you would think that fewer MLB teams would make the playoffs. But MLB still fares pretty well. 26 of 30 teams have made the playoffs. But MLB still fares pretty well. 26 of 30 teams have made the playoffs. That's since 2015. And 29 of 30 have made the playoffs since 2010. I think you can probably guess. This is just a way for you to troll me about the Mariners?

Is that what this entire segment is? You can guess what the what is. Yeah, the Mariners are going to be the exception to the rule here. But every team except the Mariners has made the playoffs in mlb since 2010 if you look at nfl every team has nba 29 to 30 nhl 31 of 31 i mean it's it's close it's like almost indistinguishable 26 of of the 30 mlb teams since 2015 as i mentioned that's a little bit less than in the other leagues. Now, if you look at multiple trips to the postseason in MLB since 2015, 19 of 30 teams have made multiple postseason trips. Since 2010, 26 of them have. And again, it's pretty comparable, like 19 out of 30 in MLB, 20 out of 32 in the NFL. That's the same percentage. NBA and NHL are higher. And then if you go back to 2010, again, 26 out of 30, that's 87%. That's higher than the NFL's 26 out of 32.

And NBA and NHL are a little higher there. And then winning your division, and divisions are different sizes. The NFL has smaller divisions and bigger divisions in the NBA and the NHL. But in MLB, since 2010, 25 out of 30 teams have won their division. That's 83%. That is higher than any of the other leagues. And since 2015, it's 63%, 19 out of 30. That is roughly the same or higher than the other leagues. And he also went beyond that and talked about like reaching the final eight. And MLB compares pretty favorably there too. 29 out of 30 MLB teams, again, since 2010 have been in the final eight. So that's higher than any other league. He did final four as well. I'll spare you all the numbers and just link to the thread. But basically in all of these categories, reach championship round, it's the same or better or almost as high in MLB as any of these other sports. And so I think the idea that there's a big competitive balance problem in baseball is kind of misguided.

I don't know what people are basing that on exactly except just a feeling. And I don't know if there are maybe more franchises that are just the pirates basically that just aren't really trying and are just pocketing revenue sharing money year after year. But I think that contributes to a conception that maybe there are more of those than there are. I think that contributes to a conception that maybe there are more of those than there are. So I don't see competitive balance as a hugely pressing problem. It could be better. And there are other ways you could look at this. You can look at like standard deviation of winning percentage.

And people have looked at that too. And in some ways that is higher than it used to be in baseball. baseball but really if you are comparing to other sports which is one valid way to do this then it doesn't seem like mlb stands out in any kind of problematic way yeah i think that the the place where we rightly express consternation is is in the case that you're describing right in in franchises like the pirates but you know and just because you're not spending a lot doesn't mean that you can't win games as we've seen with Tampa. But there are teams that are in that sort of persistent morass where the goal of the organization at the ownership level, and I think that that's important to specify, right? Because I think there are a great many people who work for the Pirates who really would like the Pirates to win. But that the goal at the ownership level is pretty far afield from that.

And so I think that that as an issue is what people really get hung up on. And I think that especially because you do have some franchises where they have been sort of far away from contention for prolonged stretches that's where people really start to get nervous and i i think that you're right that there are plenty of organizations that don't end up making it but are making an earnest effort to and really would like to see their team contend but i think that the the possibility of it getting easier is something that makes people nervous because you want there to be as much pressure as possible on the laggards and say if you have an expanded playoff field that becomes a little bit harder because there's just more breathing room in the system so but yeah i think that you know i think

that you're right i don't think that championships are necessarily the barometer i'm much more interested in sort of the postseason field and then like you said the teams that are sort of the postseason field. And then, like you said, the teams that are sort of regularly defying sort of the average number of wins that a franchise could muster. Because I think that most fans understand that there are a lot of good baseball players. It's a long season. Stuff can happen. The best laid plans, et cetera, et cetera. But you want to go in feeling like, yeah, we could be in this thing. This is worth my time and emotional investment and treasure. And I think

that there are a lot of franchises in baseball that can honestly say that they are holding up their end of that, that equation for their fans. But there are teams that, um, I think struggle to do that with any sort of earnestness. So, yeah, I think, right. If you're going to just point to other sports and say they have a salary cap and they have good parity or competitive balance and therefore mlb doesn't have good parity and competitive balance and thus it needs a salary cap i don't think that's really supported by the facts here by the record now maybe if you have a salary cap and a salary for, then you can formalize some relationship between revenue, between the owners and the players that's more stable. But I just think that to the extent that there are teams that are not competitive, it's not so much about them being unable to compete as being unwilling to compete, which is like something you can also try to curtail, hopefully.

But I don't know that a salary cap would do it. I don't know what contributes to this perception in baseball, whether it's the fact that in any given year, you do get great teams and terrible teams, at least in this era, there is some stratification there. And so maybe if it's the NFL, if you have a 17 game regular season, and as everyone is saying during this NFL season like there are no great teams every team is just kind of somewhere in the middle and it's hard to tell the difference like that is a type of parody and I guess in a shorter season it's easier to get that kind of thing whereas over 162 games the wheat and the chaff get separated and the cream rises to the top and other sayings that i could throw in there that mean the same thing so i think that's maybe part

of it is that i don't know if you go into a season maybe there are potentially more teams that feel out of it from the start that have the 0.0 percent playoff odds in the fan graphs post in the spring. That could be the case, but then it changes a lot from year to year. So I just don't know that that is toward the top of the list of problems. Yeah, I think that we can have a conversation, a worthwhile conversation about sort of what our tolerance is for teams persisting in that state and how long we are kind of comfortable with them being, you know, even if they're not the 0.0% teams, which like we'll just remind everyone that doesn't mean that there's no simulations in the thing where they don't. Anyway, I'll save that for, you know, March question mark,

we can have that conversation again. But I think that there's a good conversation for us to have collectively about sort of how long a team should be able to persist in that state, what's sort of the ideal length of that kind of a rebuild or step back or course correction or whatever you want to call it is. But I do think that it is when you look at something like the pirate situation, like I agree with you, it's important to properly diagnose these things because then the solution becomes more apparent. Like I'm not really a fan of salary caps just generally, but if the problem you're trying to solve for is parity,

well, we're not really trying to solve for parity. We're trying to solve for the pirates and salary cap doesn't have anything to do with fixing that problem, right? Like their issue is not one of like, oh, they're spending all this money but it's not enough compared to the rest it's like their their payroll isn't projected i think for even 50 million dollars next year right like this is a

this is a totally different level of problem so max scherzer is making the pirates payroll right right so or more i guess if you count the money he's still making from the nationals too right so i don't think that this is a situation where you have a team that's making like a good faith effort to try to compete and they're just getting swallowed by the yankees like that's not what's happening here the pirates are doing something very different than that so not to keep picking on the pirates but to pick on the pirates you know and so i think that it's important to be able to be clear-eyed about this stuff because it suggests really different solutions when you have a better handle on what the actual problem is. And you mentioned that there are some teams that don't spend a lot and still win. And foremost among them are the Tampa Bay Rays, who I was thinking of this week because they were named Baseball America's Organization of the Year.

I think for the second time in three years, they also won that honor in 2019. And what they accomplished in the minors this year was really kind of incredible. I mean, what they accomplished in the majors was pretty impressive, too. And that's part of it. But they had a historic season, their minor league affiliates. And Baseball America ran the numbers on this too. Matt Eddy did an article on this late last month with some help from our friend Dan Hirsch and they were able to determine that the Rays' collective minor league winning percentage this season was the highest on record dating back to 1963, which is the modern era of the minor leagues started then when MLB had a partnership agreement with minor league affiliates via the player development contracts. In that entire time, there's never been a team whose affiliates were more successful in terms of wins and losses than the Rays, who had a 653 winning percentage, just like top to bottom in the domestic minor leagues, which is really incredible because, I mean, that's like a 106 win pace over a 162 game season. And that's their five minor league affiliates.

So I think there were four full season teams that had a 650 or higher winning percentage in any organization in 2021. And three of them were raised affiliates, high A, low A, and triple A. And the Florida Complex League affiliate also did. So it was like at every level, they basically had the best record, won the championship. It is unbelievable. Like four out of the five domestic Tampa Bay affiliates won their leagues this year and I think even the one that didn't was like one of the best records or the best record so this was the highest ever I think the the 1979 Yankees were second on the list with

a collective 639 winning percentage and the Yankees maybe you don't think of the Yankees of that era as a player development powerhouse, but they did have a lot of great minor league players who went on to do good things in the majors, in many cases, not with the Yankees because they were traded away, the Fred McGriffs of the world, but they had a lot of good players. And the Rays, they're not at the top of the Fangraphs farm system valuations Anymore I guess just because they've Graduated a lot of good players so

Yeah when you graduate an 80 It tends to It tends to ding you a little bit Yeah so Wander Franco doesn't count toward their farm system Ranking anymore but They're still third behind the Orioles And the Pirates I guess there's hope Pirates fans and Orioles fans but They're still third behind the Orioles and the Pirates I guess there's hope Pirates fans and Orioles fans but they're still third even though they are one of the best teams

in the big leagues too and there's no end in sight and I'm always curious like how much does this matter in terms of whether you're going to keep winning like yeah it's the correlation between minor league winning percentage and subsequent major league winning percentage? And I feel like I did a study on that at some point or someone did that it exists out there. I couldn't quickly find it. But based on what I did find, like, there's definitely some connection. I wouldn't say it's a perfect correlation where you have the highest minor league winning percentage. That means that the next year or three years down the road or five years down the road, you will have the highest major league winning percentage. But it certainly helps. It's like when Sam Miller has done the what does it mean to have the best farm system

in baseball pieces for baseball prospectus. And he's found that that's no guarantee of anything either. But it does mean that you're going to get a nice boost a few years down the road that you can count on 15 or 20 wins a year, something like that. And I think it's sort of similar meaningful minor league games to the extent that they are meaningful that might help your development slightly later on but i think more so it means that you have a lot of talent and not all of those players who are contributing to those wins will be prospects some of them might be past their prime and on the way down and minor league veterans who are hanging

around in AAA and aren't really going to contribute to your future major league teams. But I would think that for a team like the Rays in particular, who don't spend on major league players all that much and thus depend even more on homegrown talent and cost controlled talent, I would think for them it's an even better sign than it would be for some other team that is less reliant on that path to winning. So it's really impressive. And I guess it's just a testament to their analysis and scouting and player development and being on the same page at every rung of the minor league ladder. But it's something that can kind of go unnoticed and under the radar by a lot of people

who aren't covering the minor leagues. And so just wanted to note that that was really extraordinary. I guess there are fewer affiliates now than there have been in some past years. So I guess it's easier to have a collective 653 winning percentage when you have five affiliates than when you have six or seven or eight, but still it was a pretty impressive accomplishment well and it's you know i i think having having a broader view of what you're trying to do in the minors is useful right like you said it's not just that you want to win although that is a good proxy for having good players you're also trying to develop these guys and sometimes you know you'll have a guy who his his job in that outing is to like work on a

particular pitch and so that's what he throws but i don't think that we look at the rise and think like uh is is this an organization that is like supported by a good player to have it's like no we know that part too so it's it's a pretty potent combo when you when you take it all together yep yeah and if you look back at the astros from several years ago, you see the same sort of thing where they were really dominating at just about every minor league level. And I think that was partly at least a testament to their player development methods at the time too. And that has helped them continue to be competitive. I know they also cheated, but they were a really good team and

they developed a lot of great players independent of their nefarious activities and culture and so forth. So that just goes to show that I don't know if the Rays are going anywhere. Like they have one of the most impressive records really going back to 2008, which I guess they also had really good minor league teams around that time too and what they have managed to do without spending very much would it be better if they had spent yes but they have managed to make it work over the long haul really there aren't a lot of teams that have won more games than the Rays over that extended period and given that they now have Wander Franco for many years to come and clearly there are a lot of good players who are on the way like the Rays reign is just uh it's not going to end anytime soon I think like they definitely have less margin

for error than teams that can spend their way out of mistakes and buy up players. But even so, it seems like despite the fact that they hemorrhage brainpower, right? Right. Lots of other teams are now run by former Rays executives. Anytime a team is hiring managers, they are interviewing a Rays bench coach or a Rays hitting coordinator. Clearly, other teams have caught on and there have been like playoffs in recent years where like every remaining team was run by like,

you know, Haim Bloom and James Click and the Raze who are currently run by Eric Deander. And it's just, it's kind of amazing, even though they have exported all that talent, even though teams are clearly trying to copy them to some extent and hire them, can't beat them, join them or hire them, it still is really working for them. So someone needs to write a new good raise book, but it would probably be tough because they will not tell you why they're winning, which could be part of why they've managed to do it for so long.

Yeah, I think that you'd have trouble getting current employees to go on the record for that one. Yep. And the last thing I wanted to mention, it struck me the other day, I was reading Joe Sheehan's newsletter and he was talking about the Mets and the little shopping spree they went on and the position players they signed. And as he was breaking down their defense, which has often broken down and it's been bad, it was better actually in 2021, but it has not been a strong point for them. And he was kind of interrogating whether it actually would be better with the new

lineup that they have with Escobar, with Marte, with Canna than it has been in recent years. bar with Marte, with Canna, than it has been in recent years. And as he was running through their stats, I kept noticing that there would be seemingly big disagreements between how those players would be graded by various defensive systems. So, you know, he would write, Mark Canna, a late bloomer who will be 33 on opening day, has been a below average outfielder by defensive runs saved in every full season of his career. StatCast likes him a bit better than that, pegging him as average. Eduardo Escobar, also turning 33 over the winter, grades out similarly in recent seasons, poor by DRS, average-ish by StatCast's outs above average. And then you have Starling Marte, who by DRS last last year his negative four was fifth worst among center

fielders with at least 500 innings by outs above average he was better 20th of 44 regular center fielders and again if you go back to 2019 he was sixth worst by DRS middle of the pack by outs above average and so I didn't know which to trust or which to believe. It seemed like there were these big differences here between DRS and between outs above average or the runs prevented that is based on outs above average. And so I just wanted to do a quick little check to confirm that there are actually bigger disagreements between, say, DRS and outs above average than DRS and UZR let's say both of which are available at fangraphs and so I just pulled outfielders to keep things more consistent and I looked at outfielders who had at least 400 innings in the outfield last season it was like 125 guys

and then I just did the correlation between DRS and UZR and between DRS and the stat cast runs prevented and between UZR and the stat cast runs prevented. And it is true that they don't agree quite as well. The stat cast and non-stat cast defensive stats don't quite agree with each other quite as well. So DRS and UZR generally pretty strong agreement the correlation between those two was 0.77 so that is pretty strong a correlation of one would be a perfect correlation so if one guy does well in one defensive system he does very well in the other defensive system too 0.77. That's a pretty strong correlation. The correlation between DRS and the StatCast version is 0.68, so still significant, but considerably lower.

And then the correlation between UZR and the StatCast version is only 0.56, which is still something, still meaningful, but significantly lower again. And I guess this is not surprising. You would not really expect it to be any different, that a stat cast based stat and a non-stat cast based stat would not agree perfectly. But it did confirm my intuition. And it's something that I'm trying to figure out as I go, as I read about players. And now we have these defensive stats.

And the stat cast version is also available for infielders now, which I didn't look at here. It would have been a little tougher to compare. But we're kind of at a crossroads with defensive stats, maybe. There are like stat cast flavored versions of defensive run saved that are maybe not as publicly accessible that we can look at if we're voting on fielding Bible awards. But just for these, for the ones at Fangraphs, yeah, there is a significant difference in many cases. And then the question is, well, which one is better or which do you trust? And this doesn't really help you get at an answer to that, this little analysis that I did there. I should also mention, I believe,

that the stat cast metric still does not account for arm for throwing. And so that's going to be a point of difference and departure as well. So if you were to include arm, which the other metrics do, then maybe that would bring them closer into line. But we're all kind of having to wrestle with, do we trust defensive stats in general, which is a conversation we've been having for years now?

And also, which one do we trust? Because we have all these different versions that are based on zones and stringers and people recording where the ball was hit, or the computers and Hawkeye and the cameras telling us not only where it was hit exactly, but where everyone was standing before the play started. So I think that the StatCast metrics will continue to improve and be refined and account for more facets of defensive play, and probably that's all building up to a stat cast war at some point in the not too distant future but for now we are faced with significant

differences at times and it's not always easy to know how to handle those no and i have the i have sympathy for fans in this situation especially because i think that we can sometimes feel a bit flummoxed by some of the differences and we have the time to sit there and try to sort out like what we what we think is the right answer amongst competing systems and i think that appreciating why they are different is not something that we as an industry necessarily do a great job articulating to just like average fans who are wanting to understand like why is this guy good or why is he bad or why are they saying that on that broadcast and so i do think that it it's an area that we we have some work to do and not only to sort of arrive at a

metric that we think is a is the best reflection of what players are doing on the field but also to articulate the the benefits of that metric and doing on the field, but also to articulate the benefits of that metric and these different metrics and how they interact with one another and what they include or don't include and what they seem to do particularly well versus doing a little less well. So it's a thing that we have to keep sorting through as an industry because I don't think we do an amazing job of any of that right now. Yeah, it's hard to validate which is better. You'd have to compare it to something else like is it more stable and consistent from year to year or when players change teams, is it more consistent or does it correlate better with team level metrics, maybe like just defensive

efficiency. So it's hard to know how to tell which is better. I would bet in the long run, I mean, if I had to hitch my wagon to one of these defensive stat horses, it would probably be the stat cast based ones just because it seems like, I mean, we don't know how the actual analysis that is built on the data does, but the data itself seems like having that extra level of precision of just knowing where everyone was on the field at all times and where the ball was. If you're starting with those raw materials, you still have to build a defensive metric framework out of it, which isn't the easiest thing in the world, but I would kind of be more inclined to think, well, in the long run, I'm going to go with the metric that has access to that input.

You know, it's less garbage in, presumably less garbage out, I would think. But how far we are from that being quote unquote perfected, I'm not sure exactly. And there are different choices you can make about like how do you attribute the value of positioning? Is that players players is it teams entirely so it's kind of tough but i would think that hopefully i mean zones and all these proxies that we've been using i mean they are basically approximations of like let's try to figure out where roughly everyone was and where the ball was hit. And so hopefully actually knowing those things should be beneficial, I would think. And in the long run, I don't know, like there's some value maybe in having

multiple wars, even if it's kind of confusing just because they take different approaches to the problem. And maybe what one person thinks of as value would be mirrored more closely by a certain war or another. And so there can be benefits to that. But in the long run, probably you would just want one defensive metric to rule them all, right? Like if you were able to establish and if it were accessible to everyone, of course, that granular StatCast data is not publicly accessible. So other sources will do the best that they can with what they have. But if in the long run that is proven to be the more precise, then I don't know that we retire the others. But at some point, maybe one emerges as the metric of choice.

Yeah, I imagine that we will find our way to that eventually. I do think that you've illuminated something that is useful for people to keep in mind when they're thinking about how this stuff gets designed it's like there's the there's the technical expertise that is required to actually build it into a useful stat but we are asking sort of philosophical questions along the way too right how what is our understanding of the game how do we think about apportioning credit for for a fielder's position versus his ability to act on that position in a way that is useful you know it is not simply a matter of math like we're we're making decisions about what we understand baseball to be and how we think that players add value and that's more than just

you know bleep bleep bleep bleep right. Everyone's favorite sound, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. Shall we discuss Stove League? Duding Duk! Duding Duk! Duding Duk! Duding Duk! Duding Duk! Duding Duk! Ben, so much has happened on this show.

Oh my gosh. There is a lot to keep track of. Yeah, you're right. The actual real world KBO hot stove league is actually kind of hot right now. You go to MLB Trade Rum And like a lot of the recent stories Are about KBO teams signing Players because they can do that There's no luck out there right and So a lot of people I'm sure saw that

Yasiel Puig signed With a KBO team And he signed with the same Team the Kiwom heroes that had signed Addison Russell so I guess Character concerns not at the top of the list For Kiwom heroes that had signed addison russell so i guess character concerns not at the top of the list for the heroes but he signed the one year one million dollar deal the the miles contract as it is known far and wide the miles contract exactly so the the team that is the real

world equivalent of the dreams i guess in that they play in the stadium where stove league is filmed yeah is the ssg landers and that is the team that shinsu chu is playing for these days and and they re-signed him recently and kevin crone just signed with the ssg lander so you can imagine the characters of stove league deciding to sign sign Kevin Crone if you want. Mike Tauchman also went and signed with the Eagles in the KBO. But yes, a lot happened. So we are discussing episodes 9 through 12. So this will be our penultimate conversation or at least our penultimate recaps here.

We will discuss the final four episodes next time maybe next week so no spoilers for those today just sticking through what we have seen thus far and yeah i have had to like make some notes while i'm watching because otherwise there's no way that i would remember everything that happened in a single episode of stove, let alone four at a time. Well, and I made the mistake of watching an episode and a half after our last conversation because I was home. Couldn't stop. I couldn't stop. And I was home in Seattle for Thanksgiving and I had some time.

And so I watched an episode and a half and then like actual Thanksgiving happened and I had to stop watching TV and participate in family life as one does. And then I was like, oh, no, we're talking about Stove League on Friday. So I started watching them again this morning in an effort to have them fresh in my mind. And I am concerned that I've forgotten things that have happened in that first episode and a half, which would be a shame because we saw such feeling, such drama. Man, there's just been so much that has happened in the space of four episodes. We've gone from our general manager no longer working for the team in the midst of a potential hiring scandal

to working for the team again to the start of this season. Everything is just... It has been quite a tumultuous off-season for Dreams. Yeah. It really has. Adam Pletko, by the way, another KPO signee late of the Orioles. But yes, so as we have mentioned, we are watching on the streaming service Viki,

which in my experience has the best English subtitles. And I think that's because I was digging on the Viki, which in my experience has the best English subtitles. And I think that's because I was digging on the Viki page. It looks like there's kind of a community effort there where they have listeners contribute subtitles and there's like a moderator and an editor and they put that together. So I think that's kind of a crowdsourced collective effort to improve the subtitles, which is great because they are good and allow us to understand everything that is happening and a whole lot happened. So yeah, episode nine, picking up where we left off last time, Baek Sung-soo, the GM, was being forced to resign

by Director Kwon. And essentially there were two scandals, I guess you could call them, that were contributing to this. One is the naturalized American pitcher Robert Gill, who caused some stir when he came back to Korea because he gave an interview that was chopped up and manipulated and thus rubbed people the wrong way. And so Baek Sung-soo was blamed and took some heat for that signing. And then also the hiring scandal of Baek Sung-soo's younger brother, who unbeknownst to Baek Sung-soo, of course, was applying for the job. And he is the famous internet sabermetrician Robinson. But that came out and it looked like a little bit of nepotism, which that seemed like it became a bigger story than I feel like it would be in real life. I mean, at least over here, I don't know if it would be different in the KBO, but over here, that would be pretty par for the course i feel like that maybe it would usually be like the owner's brother or son yeah more so than than the gms i mean i guess you have you know

sandy alderson's son is like a high-ranking mets executive and by many accounts is very good at his job but i'm just saying it is not unusual to have relatives in front offices it would be more unusual not to and clearly like there's some using of connections to get jobs here in dreams world too because uh han jay he did the same thing right i mean he talks all the time about how he used his connections even though he also works hard and clearly deserves his position now but you wouldn't think like the hiring of of basically like an entry-level analyst who is related to the gm would be like oh this guy's gotta resign but it seems to have backfired and it's a whole confluence of factors so last we saw he was being forced to step down. And in the course of episode nine, and he is uh he professes to be anti-humanist

doesn't want any humanists working in his front office but he's sort of a secret humanist himself in some ways it turns out yeah and has suffered some real tragedy in his life right we we come to we come to learn it is in this episode right i'm cute i'm having a hard time keeping track of what we learn yeah pretty much everything we learn about him is he and his now ex-wife like lost a baby yeah and that it was a very you know understandably emotional experience for both of them and he seems to have really sort of thrown himself into work in the in the wake of that in a way that was destructive to him and destructive to his marriage and there's a lovely scene toward the

end of this episode where he is is holding robert gill's new baby and just like weeping i was so sad for him oh man yeah it is a person like me. Can I hold a child? He says while he is weeping on this baby. And, you know, we also see him visiting his parents in the hospital. We learn that his father seems to be suffering from some pretty debilitating and progressive dementia. And so he is there to sort of interact with his mother and check in on them and see how they are. We finally learn why he takes pictures of his food. Yes. Not just to put it on social.

He's doing it to send to his mom so that she won't worry that he's not eating enough. Yeah. And he is told that he can stop doing that. And he's like, no, I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah. can you know he can stop doing that and he's like no i'm gonna keep doing it yeah yeah he is uh and i guess this is a testament to the actor to some degree to min nam koon but he is much warmer yes he is with his family and particularly his mother like he's smiling he's laughing like he's uh so

stingy with his praise and with his words and with his conversation when he is at work but when you see him with his family then he kind of lets his hair down a little bit and you can see that yeah he actually he does have a heart he does have feelings and so much suffering in this family really all revolving around his brother's injury i guess that was kind of you know the the impetus for all of it so the injury baek sung-soo blames himself for that as we discussed on earlier episodes and then all of this responsibility is placed on him because that seems to be also the origin of his father's decline like his younger son's injury yeah that seems to have really sent him on a downward spiral and so now his mom is basically living at the hospital like full-time it seems and Baek Sung-soo is paying the hospital bills. And so no wonder he feels pressure to support his family and pay for that.

And he feels guilt about his brother's injury. And now his brother feels guilt about basically depriving Baek Sung-soo of his youth because his whole life now is like full of guilt and oriented toward supporting his family in the wake of this injury and so there's a lot of guilt flowing both ways really and it's a pretty heartbreaking yeah i think that it is it is a family that has been marked by tragedy and his brother being able to work in a front office and not only like rediscover his love of baseball but sort of confront his brother to say no i i am able to take joy from this now like you're allowed to you're allowed to be happy for

me and let this this weight that you've been carrying go because obviously having to navigate life in a wheelchair is difficult but like he is able to take real genuine joy from the game in a way that he didn't seem to when he was playing. So it is just it's just heartbreaking to see it all sort of finally culminate in his his breakdown. He can't, Baek Sang-soo can't hold it in anymore and just sobs over this adorable baby. I know. And you can see like Gil Chang-ju is like, maybe we should take the baby yeah back now like as a baby haver myself if i were to hand off my daughter to someone and then they immediately started weeping all over her and questioning whether they were like a good enough person to to deserve to

hold the baby i might be like you can hand her back now yeah you can give me the baby back now please can i please have my baby yeah but it's it's also touching that uh he and his brother reached this understanding i'm skipping ahead a little here but where they are able to now discuss baseball yeah at home yeah they can uh i guess it's not great that they're like taking the job back home with them and just working full-. But they are now able to do that. And his brother is like reflexively just like closing the window where he's doing the sabermetrics like he's being caught watching porn or something. And it's because like he was always worried that if his brother caught him doing sabermetrics at home, it would depress him because he doesn't want to think about baseball but now they're actually able to bond over baseball again which is pretty cool and of course the reason they are able to talk about work at all is because back song su's return to the dreams is

is engineered through right through two avenues the first being um that the rest of the baseball ops team led by Lisa Young and, oh gosh, what is his name? The analysis team director. Yu-Kwang Taek, is that right? Yeah, I think so. They hold a press conference where they basically outline their hiring process. you i think it kind of maybe would be nice if this sort of nepotism were perhaps not a career ending scandal but something that were investigated and sort of prodded out more um regularly in american baseball because man major league organizations are lousy with that guy's brother and that guy's cousin and we you know we drafted that guy's son and with our last pick in the draft

although i guess with the reduction of the draft to 20 rounds, we're not as likely to see the sort of courtesy pick the way that we used to, because those draft slots are even more precious now. But they lay out sort of the hiring process and importantly sort of lay out the bona fides here and I think are able to resolve that. And then, of course, we get a sort of a bittersweet resolution

to the other scandal so right well in the brief interregnum this is basically like uh the time between theo epstein slips out of fenway park in the gorilla and when he returns and lisa young is uh is in charge and that is pretty impressive because like at her age she's she's running a team she's like a gm she's an interim gm and if she were more careerist if she were out for herself she'd probably be like hey maybe i can convert this interim title into a full-time one thanks for the help back song su and and i'll take it from here but she is putting the dreams first and she wants to win and she respects his abilities and so he engineers things in such a way that she takes over in the interim

and i guess director kwan was okay with that too but beck sung-soo leaves a flash drive with all of his plans and research to turn the dreams into a winner again and so they use this they put this into practice in the second draft basically like the the rule five yeah kind of draft here and you get the the great like uh conference room confrontation between the stat heads and the coaches again these are like your very stereotypical, like the moneyball scouts of coaches, basically, who are just like, who are these eggheads who are telling us this stuff

and they don't know what they're talking about, basically. But it is nice to see that the analysis team director, who was very much in their camp as of like a few episodes ago yeah and uh resented having to hire someone and didn't want to hire someone who was just a stat head now he is very much backing him up and he's become converted and he recognizes that he's good at his job and he stands up for him and backs him up in conversation with the coaches and then like later on he's like feeding

him food and giving him dessert and stuff so suddenly he's extremely fond yes his new sidekick here but it didn't take long for sabermetrics to triumph i guess and for the the value to become clear and basically like the coaches want them to draft for need and the stat heads want them to draft for talent and then trade for need and they do that and it's brilliant and they are the acknowledged winners of this draft and it is a triumph for the new way of operating so even though you saw Baek Sung-soo sadly pack up his analysis and utilization of baseball data book in his cardboard box of things on his desk the dreams are definitely now operating in a more new age progressive way yeah and they they have some real camaraderie as you noted and i think you know they take this opportunity to

point out the the important role that back young sue played in in the draft. And so I think it helps to bolster their claims later that this was just the best person who applied to our posting. And he happens to be the GM's younger brother, but he is a good baseball mind in his own right. He's Robinson. Right. He is able to contribute something really meaningful and valuable to this organization.

So I think that it helps to sort of address that concern also, which is nice. And then we see him tell the sad story of his family over dinner and watch his brother weep into a baby. And it's all very emotional. Yeah. Dreams, they have a Rapsodo now. Yeah. They're studying spin rates and everything.

Yeah. They've really joined rates and everything. Yeah. So they've really joined the 21st century here. And they say that I think Kang Doo-gi, when they get the Rapsodo on him, they find that he has a slider spin rate that's upwards of 2,600 RPM, which is definitely major league quality i think the the average slider spin rate in mlb in 2021 was 24 17 probably a little lower than that post sticky stuff but he is above big

league average and i don't know how hard he's throwing, but obviously KBO velocity is lower across the board. And so spin rates would be lower too. And so he's got good big league stuff here. And the Rapsodo confirms it. But yeah, one of the big tensions of this episode and I guess of the show in general is just like the difference between whether this is your job or your life. Yeah. And work-life balance, which of course is a big thing in real life baseball industry. And people end up in that industry because they really care about

it and it's their dream to work there. But then you find that you were working all the time. And so the big question is, does Baek Sung-soo like this job? Is he putting all this work into it because he is really motivated and he wants to win? Or is he doing it for the money? And when he is resigning and he is talking to Lee Se-young, he is insisting it's just salary. It doesn't mean anything. He just works hard because he wants to do a good job, whatever he's doing. But it doesn't mean anything more to him than making money.

And we know that it means more than that to lisa young she's not making very much money but it was her dream to be with dreams and over the course of the episode it becomes clear that it's not just a paycheck to beck sung su either that even when he is in the hospital he is reading the blogs to see how dreams did in the second draft. And I guess that's partly because his brother is involved too. But clearly he put this whole plan for the Dreams to win together, not just because that is technically his job, but because he cares. And everyone in this front office seems to care to some degree, even if they're not very good at his job. seems to care to some degree even if they're not very good at his job and that is one of the few compliments that he will begrudgingly pay is that like when he joined dreams he thought no one was

going to care because they were so bad and he has been surprised to learn that no they are bad but it's not necessarily because they don't care right they are bad but they are working hard to remedy it we also see lisa young play a bit of hardball with the media in this episode, threatening to expose the editing job that was done on Gil Chang-ju's interview. And so he is given the opportunity to appear live in studio uncut and is able to sort of better explain himself. and then says that upon the completion of this upcoming season that he will serve his military service, which is the decision that instigates the crying over the baby. That is why we end up with crying over the baby. I mean, that's not the only reason, but that's part of it.

Baek Sung-soo goes to his house to basically say, how could you agree to do that and leave your family and be away from this? And he says that he needs to do it so that he can be the kind of person he wants to be so that his son feels good about his dad. Right. He's grateful to Baek Sung-soo and he goes to Director Kwon and he's like, hey, unfire this guy. Yeah. He says no. And so he has to take matters into his own hands. And then there is a big swell of support on the internet and everyone says oh this robinson guy he was very qualified for that job and oh gil jung ju he's actually a

good guy and he's going to serve his military service after all after the season for a couple of years which is rough but he wants to get that off his chest and his wife and and young baby has a support system in korea here so one thing that comes up and and of course the dreams are like debating how do they want to respond to the gm being forced out and do they want to protest and do they want to argue with director kwan and some of them are more accommodating than others and the pr director immediately puts out the article saying that that vixsoo is resigning and everyone's up in arms about this. And Lee Se-young is considering quitting, but thenm job so she kind of has to do it but everyone is wondering like is this part of Baek Sung-soo's plan like does he have something up his sleeve here did he walk away with some route back to the top and in general and we'll see in some of the

later episodes that we'll talk about today that yes he always does have some kind of plan that no one else can see but in this case i don't know that he did like he was surprised i think by what happened right he yeah he's questioning like why did you do that why are you going to do your military service when you have a young baby at home like he did not expect i think that people would be such humanists right that they would come to his defense so he's really good at planning out who's a good player and how can he swindle the poor vikings over and over again but he's maybe not as good at anticipating that people actually care about him yeah like as a person even though he hasn't given them a whole whole lot of reason to generally yeah i think that he is genuinely surprised and moved that that you know he can be taken care of just like he is determined to take care of his family he is

also the recipient of care it is not something that he need only sort of shoulder as a burden right he can yeah he can be on the receiving end of it we do find out about the card up his sleeve, though. Ben, you've seen the whole series, so I know that you know how this resolves, but I don't know, which means that I will probably end up watching Stove League after we are done, because how is it that he is able to engineer his return? What's the condition, Ben?

Yeah, well, as we discover, he voluntarily says that he will resign when the season starts. And so there's a poison pill in this contract and no one really knows it other than director Kwong and his boss. But yeah, we'll get to that in a second. One little bit of the tragic tale of this figure that we didn't talk about is he actually ended up working in sports because he basically just fell apart like at his previous job you see him in a flashback just like staring off into the distance at his desk and everyone is looking at him wondering what's wrong and he's just so consumed by guilt about his brother and his dad that he couldn't do his job

anymore and so he was essentially like demoted or transferred, I guess, from the parent company to the wrestling team. And that's how he ended up doing that despite knowing nothing about sports because he was just broken by his brother's injury. So that's the whole reason why he is here. But whether it was his intention or not, he has improved these people's lives and he has improved gilchang ju's life and partly that was because he's a good pitcher and he saw an opportunity there but also i think he felt some sympathy for him and lisa young is grateful to him just for allowing her to dream again about dreams she says and suddenly it's not a hopeless organization anymore. So he does manage to make it back because the tide of public opinion turns and suddenly everyone is saying, oh, Gil Jung-ju seems like a good guy.

And he is absolving Baek Sung-soo of any blame and saying he is a good guy. And then the hiring details come out and suddenly they are pressured into rehiring him and and the leader the chairman of j song actually calls director kwan and says get this guy back yeah and so he is forced to kind of eat crow and come crawling back or i guess it's actually back sungsoo who just walks in because he knows that he has the upper hand now and he has the leverage and he's like, hire me back. And he says like, either we can say what actually happened, which is that we had this petty conflict and you made me resign for no reason. Or I'll just say it was like a leave of absence for health reasons or something. But Director Kwon still does manage to maneuver him into agreeing to go away when the season starts.

And I wonder why he had to concede to that exactly. Like, it seems like he's in a pretty strong position here. And Director Kwan kind of had his hand forced by his boss, who wanted him to rehire Baek Seung-soo. But he does acquiesce to this condition. Baek Sung-soo, but he does acquiesce to this condition. And so Director Kwon is willing to put aside the differences here and swallow his pride a little because he knows that he only has to endure Baek Sung-soo for however long it is, a few more months maybe. Yeah. But then everything that happens after this feels like it has a ticking clock associated with it. Although if you know he's gonna he's gonna

voluntarily quit it does give him i suppose a couple of months of heightened leverage because it's like what are you gonna do fire him early you're just gonna get rid of him in a couple months now yeah and he's definitely using that leverage wherever he can although when he returns to the office and everyone is singing a song for him and baking him a cake and then he blows out the one candle and just walks by yeah in the office he's like tell them thank you yeah and she's so grateful like oh my gosh they'll be so appreciative that you said thank you like he just he can't bring himself to just show much emotion around them like he is now the walls have cracked a little bit like he is dispensing the occasional compliment to Lisa Young

and he's talking about baseball with his brother but like he just can't let his walls down fully which I guess makes some sense given what he has been through but you know from the lows of like dragging his broken suitcase to the hospital to see his parents

in his sweet turtleneck I like his style. But he returns to dreams, and he's now back in the corner office again. And I like Baek Sung-soo's mom's attitude of, if you're not sick and didn't get hurt, it's not serious. It's a nice attitude because they've been through a lot. But anyway, he's back. because they've been through a lot.

But anyway, he's back. And now, I guess in episode 10, suddenly, at least for a little while, he is hard to root for again because... Immediately thrust into a labor controversy. Yep. Yeah, I guess in the first scene of this episode, he's talking to his ex and he tells her that he feels bad about feeling good. He feels like he should still be punishing himself or in mourning because they lost the baby. And she kind of gives him permission to be happy again, or at least not be depressed. approval and he is uh immediately playing 5d chess here and manipulating everyone and and being the

puppet master to try to get what he wants so the big conflict of episode 10 is about training yeah and uh this is not about player acquisition for once but about player development and apparently and uh again we'd have to talk to a kBO expert to find out exactly how accurate it is. But in the show, it's presented as the players are paid for 10 months out of the year. So there are two months when they are not being paid. And the Players Association has worked things out so that players are not obligated to train during those two months. are not obligated to train during those two months. And so teams are not supposed to,

and coaches are not supposed to, have training in group settings, which would seem to be obligatory because players would not be paid for that labor. But there are a couple of conflicts here. There's the conflict of dreams, wanting to catch up to other teams by maybe being better at training because they were a fundamentally flawed team to put it kindly right and then there is the tension between the wealthier

and more experienced players and the young and up-and-coming players because the more experienced and wealthier players can afford to go elsewhere and train abroad and the younger players are essentially forced to sit on their hands for a couple months here which means that they can't catch up to their seniors and so there is sort of an inter-team and an intra-team conflict here and it becomes a little brush fire between dreams and and Baek Sung-soo and the Players Association and its new president, Kang Doo-gi, which is quite a bold move to have an active player as the president of your Players Association. Yeah. I mean, within Major League Baseball, like every team has a player rep, right? And we have, we've heard a lot about them of late.

Like there is a, I think it's an eight player executive board that is sort of a more senior public facing aspect of the union. But yeah, to have, it would be like, you know, if Tony Clark were an active player. Right. Kind of awkward. Yeah, quite awkward. And I think, you know, there is sort of a real labor issue here within the union that you've raised, right, which is that you want the younger guys to be able to train safely in places that will help them sort of keep pace with their seniors.

But, you know, when the coaches are involved, no matter how much you say this is a voluntary training session, like carries the weight of being obligatory even if it isn't technically like i think that the players are are correct kang doogie is right to say that like it carries with it the air of of being obligatory even if it isn't technically and so um you don't want to give labor that you're not being paid for and that's like a foundational principle so So, you know, he is, he is unwilling to budge on the question in a way that I think is, is probably the right thing for him to do as a leader of the organization, even if it would be good for the players association to have something sort of more akin to a real plan for younger players who can't afford to go train in warmer climates, right? Yeah. And teams, or at least the dreams, are not paying for the off-season training.

And to their credit, the coaches apparently are not being paid either. And they're just kind of doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. And they are allowed to do individual training, it seems like. But it's odd. It's like Baek Sung-soo is encouraging the coaches to give this training, but of course he has an ulterior motive here and he has a goal. He's taken the long view, as always,

and he even agrees to do an interview with the notorious reporter about off-season training and about his perspective here. And he does want the team to do better. He wants the team to use these couple months to get better. And controversially, he shows the viral video of Dreams bloopers during this interview, which rubs the players the wrong way. Even though everyone has already seen it, it makes the case pretty convincingly that they actually do need to work on the fundamentals here but there is a kind of a multi-directional conflict here and we finally figure out why the coaches are constantly at

each other's throats too so that is explained it's not just that they don't get along. It's that they blame each other and themselves for a player, Jong-Goon, I think, who was hurt several years ago and by that, too, even though he's apparently doing fine in his non-baseball career. Like one of the coaches who played a part in that is now like studying injury prevention and trying to ensure that that doesn't happen to someone else. But at least we now know why there are these multiple clicks within the coaching staff, which has not seemed like an optimal situation. No. And we also learn in the course of his interview that he is willing to defer to the field manager should he decide that this course of training is sort of inappropriate. And we come to learn that that is not out of the goodness of his heart he is trying to bolster the the perceived leadership quality of the manager so yes this is this is 12 dimensional five dimensional whatever dimension some some number of dimensions of chess are being played here it's all part of the plan and it was not explicitly coordinated between him and the manager like they didn't work this out in advance but i think in the interview he does when he's like you know if the manager told me to stop i would like i'd stop right and the manager is

watching that like he is sending the signal to him that he's trying to empower the manager you know he's trying to get rid of the impression that uh he is like a puppet right and it took me back to the stompers really when we had some conflicts with our second manager who was generally on board with us that season. He didn't want to be perceived as our puppet. And so he objected when we would talk to him in the middle of a game and say, you know, why'd you make that pitching change or whatever? Because he thought it eroded his authority and yeah i'm sure he was right about that and so he told us that and then we worked out a situation where we would like analyze those moves after the game or maybe we would game plan with him before the game started and that allowed him to save face and and you know have his authority but also allowed us to have our input so that's basically part of the plan here is that this manager who has been looked at as kind of this sad, sad guy who's like unwilling to stand up for himself.

Now he is clearly taking a different position than Baek Sung-soo. So Baek Sung-soo knew all along that he was being excessive. He says that he was going too far and he was doing it to empower the manager and also to unite the players against him, I guess, to motivate them to make him the bad guy, basically,

so that he shows the video of the bloopers and embarrasses them on TV. And then they want to band together to not play that poorly again in the future. So he has all kinds of plans and irons in the fire here and he also had this plan to send the young players to the australian baseball league yeah to train so if they cannot be coached by the dreams coaches during these two months they can go play in australia and basically get some winter

ball time in and that allows them to presumably get paid and also get better and get some practice so he had a solution for this all along but it all works out and also we say young puts together this off-season training manual with the aid of the coaches so suddenly again the dream is just becoming a much more competent professional organization yeah he always takes the long way around it's the scenic route to to everything and he has to piss people off along the way to get what he wants done yeah and often doesn't tell people exactly what he's going to do in a way that it's like i understand that you you you have some plans and also it's a tv show so it's good for dramatic tension but you could like you clue your your

staff in a little bit more and it would probably still play out the way you wanted it to yeah right yeah he could let lisa young in on some of these plans she has this uh moment she's talking to his mom and she's like do i trust this guy and her mom is like is he smarter than you and she says yes immediately and his her mom's like you could have thought of that thought about that for a second first but but she decides that she's just gonna have faith because uh everything back song su does works out in the end and so he thanks her for having faith even though she disagreed with him about the training but yeah like could he not have just let her in on the plan possibly

it seems like that would have been okay but yeah there are some amusing moments and interactions i i like the time where he he often he'll like sneak up on people like yeah him coming he's like the siddler from seinfeld and they'll like spill their drink when he sneaks up behind them. And there's one where he walks up and he just says his opening line is, please tell me in detail what you are discussing. Just a great, great icebreaker. Yep. Spill it.

Yeah. So then our next two episodes, we see Ben on field real baseball. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Actual baseball action happening here. Yeah. So one more thing happens in episode 10 that we should probably talk about, and that's that we get the director Kwan backstory. Oh, that's true.

Yes. Gosh, I've been remiss. Yeah. There's just so much. I don't know how this all fits in a single episode. So many things happen in this show. Yeah. So we now understand Baek Sung-soo better from episode nine.

And in episode 10, I guess this is the attempt to humanize Director Kwon. Yeah. And we figure out why he is such a jerk all the time. And he has sort of a sympathetic story in a way. And basically, we are aware that there's this rivalry between him and his cousin. The cousin is the son of the chairman of Jaesung, the parent company. And so there's a rivalry between them. And initially, it looks like the cousin has the upper hand here because uh there's the moment where director

kwan loses face he basically like bends the knee to pick up the lighter that his cousin dropped and of course beck sung-soo happens to be driving by at this very moment staring at him so as if director kwan was uh not mad enough at him now he has seen him at this embarrassing moment but uh the j song odor is impressed by baek sung-soo and he wants him in some more prominent role and so kwan meets with baek sung-soo at this little restaurant and they have their usual war of words and they don't get along and director kwan ends up throwing food at baek sung-soo as he's walking away. But what we learn is that Baek Sung-soo, for all his perceptiveness in some areas, he seems to have misread Director Kwon, too. And so there's just a failure to communicate here.

Neither of them really understands where the other is coming from. And so Baek Sung-soo thinks that Kwon is the guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. And he also thinks that he doesn't know baseball at all. And he's just a stuffed shirt here who was put in place to run the team. And neither of those things is true, as it turns out. And director Kwon has a long history with Dreams. And he grew up really caring about dreams and being a fan and also he has had to fight for everything he got seemingly because his dad is a bit of a ne'er-do-well a bit

of a an irresponsible guy and also i guess not quite as cultured he's uh he's rural he has a rural accent he doesn't have great education so he is not that impressive a figure to some and he's sort of an irresponsible business person it seems like and so Kwan is having to bail his dad or his parents out of these bad business situations and every time they call him it's bad news so he doesn't have the nice relationship with his mom or his parents that Baek Sung-soo seems to. And, you know, he served in the military, so he didn't like that his father initially was the one who was running dreams but he just didn't have the respect of the front office and he was like changing the lights himself and doing maintenance work so like the old facility manager big fan of his father but no one else was seemingly and getting dreams was just like a bone that his brother the chairman of j song tossed to him

he thought well he can't screw this up i'll let him run the baseball team and then he screwed that up and then ever since then that was his way to protect his brother the way that he had protected him from a beating when they were kids but then he screwed up dreams so much that now he's just kind of cut him off i guess but kwan is competent and he does work hard and knows what he's just kind of cut him off I guess but Kwon is competent and he does work hard and knows what he's doing and so he has some prospects at Jisung even though he's like trying not to seem like a direct rival to the cousin clearly he is so he's been through some stuff too he's been through some stuff too and he should do some therapy about it and And I think he'd feel better and be less prickly and probably not beat people up, which even when they're jerks, he shouldn't do. Yeah, he did kind of have it coming.

But he shows up to like drunk arm wrestle his cousin. Yeah. And not only does he beat him, but he like pounds his cousin's knuckles into the table over and over again. Yeah. And then slaps him and then punches him a few times for good measure. So, yeah, he kind of kicks his ass. And that's awkward at work because the cousin is the son of his boss as well. But I think the chairman of Jaesung recognizes that his cousin's not or his son is not the greatest guy either.

So I don't know if i like kwan but no but i feel for him a little more yeah and you certainly understand him better um for for having learned what sort of the family situation was i don't know it seems like if you want to change lights at the stadium as a way of contributing that's fine yeah yeah so episode 10 so we uh learn a little more of that quon backstory but then we get the spring training question yeah and we we learn that the the team's spring training plans have been just detonated because um this is 11 sorry oh sorry no i misspoke i said oh okay this is, this is episode 11. Ben, you can't.

I don't. It's too many things have happened. I'm worried. This is why I didn't watch ahead today because I was like there's no way. No, there's no way to remember. There's no way and I don't want to give, I don't want to, you know, spoil anything just because I can't keep straight all of the plot that we're churning through in any given moment. Yes. straight all of the plot that is sure that we're churning through in any given moment yes so in episode 11 the team is like preparing to go to spring training right they have they're

figuring out their their promotions for spring training and you know they have their their chef in place who makes great fried rice and then they find out that in k Kwon's sort of latest attempt to undermine the team, they can't go abroad. And, you know, it's cold in Korea at that time of year. So training in the cold presents like not just discomfort, but real injury risk to these guys. And so they are left scrambling, trying to figure out where they're going to train and how they're going to explain it. And as Kwon puts it to back song su if if he is not able to sort of massage this situation from

a pr perspective well it just might accelerate the timeline for them dissolving the team because it's going to look bad and if it looks bad then they might just dissolve the team more quickly anyway because what difference does it make at that point yeah he's just going scorched earth now like before it was like well you you can't annoy your consumers who were buying your other products now he's just like well if they all hate us then we can just yeah then we can just solve this team so yeah now it's it's Baek Sung Soo's job not only to like run this team but also to make sure that uh it doesn't all come out that this is happening. Right. And so they're in the process of trying to figure out sort of where they're going to go.

And in the midst of that, it occurs to him to try to assess what had kind of gone right on the last good Dreams team when they had finished second in the league. And so he brings in Jang Jin-woo, who was there at the time and won 19 games as a pitcher that season to sort of educate him on what had gone right and in i think kind of a understandable way for a team that was perhaps not sabermetrically advanced at the time it comes down to personnel that was able to add value that was sort of hard to measure and understand and so much of this episode is spent like trying to get the band back together again right yeah

it's either like a heist sort of thing or it's like a video game where you have to like recruit three party members yeah go to the dungeon or something so and i was kind of impressed that he decides to do this that he calls in jung jin woo and says like what are we doing wrong here because often it seems like he thinks he has all the answers and that this team was a tire fire and that he has to change everything. But in this case, he is willing to look back and say, hey, dreams weren't always a laughingstock, and we still have this one link to those successful teams.

So what are we not doing now that we were doing then? And he's able to give him this good advice and and he recognizes that you know if they're limited in what they can do in terms of improving their players then they can improve the support system for the players and he knows that non-players can make an impact on the team he is living proof of that the gm himself and so yeah they go on this quest and they divide and conquer and they try to bring the bullpen catcher out of retirement yeah that's the the restaurateur the the meat cooker who was trying to hire zhang jinwu and franchise his restaurant before

and he is evidently such a great motivating force in the bullpen and he tells the pitchers that their pitches are also great that they feel like they can run through a wall and then they pitch better and then you have the conditioning coach the expert who's now a celebrity trainer and was sort of spurned by the dreams after the one successful season he had with them where he was so diligent about his job. That he was like peeking at the color of their urine. To make sure that they were hydrating enough. Yeah.

That's a lot. Yeah. He's going the extra mile. Yeah. Truly dedicated. You have the BP pitcher. Who really helped them hit lefties. But left the team after he beamed Lim Dong-gyu because Lim Dong-gyu instead of letting him go see his friend who was injured he made him throw a hundred

more batting practice pitches and I think we can all agree that Lim Dong-gyu deserves a beanball as much as anyone probably but they all come back and they all assemble at the start of spring training and so now even though the dreams do not have the typical spring training facility and the players are feeling like they are playing for a really low rate organization here at least they have this support system yeah and uh we will see how much it helps but yeah director kwan he's really like this is inspirational stuff. Like if Bob Nutting is watching this show, he's going to get some ideas because it's like, wait, we can cancel spring training.

I mean, spring training, I guess like in MLB, players don't get paid during spring training. So that's like all profit for owners. So they're not going to want to cancel spring training. But Director Kwan's words to his president where the president's like, well, we can't cancel spring training or, you know, sending players abroad to train. And he's like, instead of thinking of it as money that must be spent, think of it as money that must not be spent. Yeah. So, yeah, I think a lot of MLB owners have had that epiphany in recent times. in recent times so yeah yeah i i do one of my favorite bits of this episode was like when it was revealed who he had been back saying he was like uh can we find out what happened here because

there surely might be justification because that guy's a jerk right yeah there's gotta be a story here yeah we gotta go personal experience yeah like it's probably not what it immediately appears to be. Yeah. Right. And Baek Sung-soo feels guilty also for feuding with Kwon because like everyone else is suffering from the fallout, which is like something Kwon said to him. Like everyone else is paying the price for your defiance of me, basically. And so he's feeling it a little like when the players and the coaches are like, wait, we don't get to go abroad. We don't even get to go to Jeju Island. We just have to train on the mainland here. And even if we go to the southernmost point, it's still going to be chilly.

So he feels bad about it. But ultimately, he finds a solution. And he's like, he's working so many angles. He's like convening GM meetings to try to get travel times reduced for the provincial teams outside of Seoul that are like having to ride the bus a whole lot and so he's trying to do everything he can yeah to uh to find a solution to the lack of of payroll here and so they persuade the the league of

extraordinary training staff to return here and they uh also are able to work out a situation where the vikings can play exhibition games with them here because i guess the vikings must have cheap owners too and they said they can only go to juju island and not go abroad and the vikings gm is just he's very fond of beck sung-soo yeah though like he's like constantly getting fleeced by him or outmaneuvered by him every time he's just like oh you you got me again like but he he admires I guess the the way he operates and keeps things so close to the vest so there's like a fondness here even though Baek Seung-soo has traded him Lim Dong-gyu, who's just like moping around the clubhouse and not talking to anyone. And apparently there are some steroid rumors here.

Yeah. Again, another thing is happening in this show. Yep. So stricter PD testing is about to be put in place, and there are some rumors circulating that maybe Lim Dong-gyu is not natty here so he might get popped at a certain point and there is maybe an implication that the whisper the secret dramatic whisper that Baek Seung-soo had with Lim Dong-gyu back in the batting cage early on before he traded him may have had something to do with that we still don't know what he whispered and the cliffhanger at the end of episode 12 is uh that lim dong gyu whispers

something to daekseong su and they have a long dramatic stare down while everyone else is is ringed around them on the field yeah well the music plays yeah so in other news yu min ho has the yips Just like every possible Baseball storyline it's like You came in and it's like let's say you're gonna make A baseball TV show and it'll run for 8 seasons Like what would you like to hit Well we've gotta hit PD testing at a certain

Point and we've gotta hit the yips No there's one season of Stove League We're putting it all in So Yu Min Ho who's been Training in Australia suddenly Loses the strike zone and he is Unable to throw strikes of league we're putting it all in so yumin ho who's been training in australia suddenly loses the strike zone and he is unable to throw strikes yeah and i like there are young people like like him where they're the actor's face is just so expressive yeah and you can just see every little muscle twitching when he is starting to tear up because he is just so undone and dejected by this and i i just wanted to give this poor kid a hug yeah because he's just

you know and you can this happens with guys when they're when they're dealing with this they start gripping so hard because they're just determined to to get right and get it undone and figure it out and you know he comes in in this you know there's this because it's the vikings they have this this opportunity to have a rematch between the pitcher and the position player who were traded for each other and who don't like one another and position player tried to beat the crap out of the gm the team anyway, just like normal baseball stuff. He is brought in relief in that game and just cannot find the strike zone at all. He is feet away from it.

The fact that it wasn't a wild ball or a wild pitch was sort of spectacular. He is just dejected, and you can tell that he feels terrible, and it results in a late night meeting with the coaching staff and the analytics group to try to just convince him like we don't have expectations of you like you are not failing something because we just want you to to pitch we just want you to pitch like you're not you're not in danger of getting sent away. You just got to realize that you are physically healthy enough to do this and what is holding you back now is mental. lights out of his depth player maybe not quite as convincing at being a professional pitcher even when he's not having the yips i don't know that his motion really passes the sniff test for me but yes uh they do their best to restore his spirits and show him that the pressure is not on and that they have faith in him and when they bring him into the second exhibition game, he throws strikes. He throws too many strikes, in fact.

So he still sucks. He is getting knocked all over the field. But he is throwing strikes now. And hopefully in the long term, this will work out well. And, you know, they're gloating about winning that first game against the Vikings. And clearly, like, there are big bragging rights associated with this. And clearly, like, there are big bragging rights associated with this. But everyone is fine with more or less throwing that second game just to get Yuminho back in a good frame of mind. So they care more about the players, I guess, and their well-being and their long-term psychological health and performance than winning this one game.

Yeah, and the marketing guy is sitting there completely flummoxed and perplexed like why are we leaving this kid out there and the analytics team is just like beaming because they're like well he's throwing strikes like this is progress he's you know he is on his way to potentially course correcting this thing in a way that is it's also satisfying and as a viewer i think sometimes shows do this where they like give the audience an opportunity to feel smart because it's like we're baseball people so we know that like it's good that he's getting hit around because it means he's throwing strikes so we're able to sit there and go like i know what the punchline to this is isn't that great yes right and he allows the the home run to yes thank you like on purpose yes it's like just like this is better than walking him. So Lin Dong-gyu gets his triumphant moment too.

And he does a swear. He does multiple swears, in fact. And Dylan was bleeping Stove League too, I guess, because there are some bleeps in there. But he is not happy. And you kind of feel for him because he's like listing like individual Dreams fans he misses seeing who supported him. listing like individual dreams fans he misses seeing who supported him so you never know if that's like all for show or whether he is uh evil to the core yeah but he's not happy here and it doesn't seem like it's gonna get better for him because there's that scene of Baek Sung-soo talking to his wrestling buddy his bodyguard who gives him a list of like PED sellers and possibly buyers as well, which perhaps could have included Lim Dong-kyu.

And maybe if he knew that, then he knowingly traded Lim Dong-kyu to the Vikings, knowing that he might get a positive PED test. And if that's the case, then that's not going to go over well with his best friend, GM Buddy. Although he'll probably forgive him just because he can't seem to stop doing that. But yeah, they show Yuminho the video of himself like shaking his elbow as he's throwing. And basically he's worried about re-injuring himself because he had had an earlier injury. And so now he's so worried that he's going to get injured that he has changed his motion in a way that has led to the yips. But they're able to rehabilitate him, it seems, pretty quickly. So we're almost up to the start of the season here.

There is still certainly more work to be done, but the team seems much more fundamentally sound. They're making the routine plays now. And Beck says says you know we shouldn't say that we've done well until the players do well so he's not taking it for granted but things are definitely looking up and uh i enjoyed the the broadcast dynamic oh my gosh just great broadcasting between han jay he who's who is really the color man in this broadcasting group. I mean, I guess he's doing the play-by-play and also the color. He's doing most of the talking because sabermetricians maybe don't make the best broadcasters always.

I don't know. Maybe they do. But in this case, he's a little reserved. But I don't know how exactly they are broadcasting this game because it doesn't like they're not speaking into microphones so like they're just like yelling into their computers from a few feet away it seems like it's what's happening here but there is like a webcast so i enjoyed i enjoyed their rapport if you can call it that yeah it was nice it was you know i think sometimes a booth benefits from having someone who's more boisterous and then a good straight man.

So I thought that it was a well-executed broadcast that went out to the people of the internet, presumably, question mark? Yeah, it seemed like there were people watching and streaming and commenting. But all right. Well, I think we've covered most of it. I enjoyed just a few little more Baek Sung-soo moments. There was the way he manipulated the president into approving the expense of hiring those three guys. Because he's like, well, I guess you have to clear this with Director Kwon. And then the president's like, what?

I don't have to clear everything with Director Kwon. And so he just rubber stamps it. So he's just he's always got an angle, Baek Sung-soo. He's just he's always got an angle back so he's just out thinking everyone and he says at some point like i rethink my decision and when he rethinks his decisions he has a chance to confirm the correctness right my choice definitely a cocky guy yeah he thinks he knows what he's doing and often he is proven right yep there is some uncertainty though because he's like a little nervous going into the first

exhibition. He wants to win to confirm that all his work has not been in vain, so that matters to him, too. But he's opening up a little. He is mending fences. He gives the catcher major league quality hemorrhoids cream, having stared at his hemorrhoids for a while in an earlier episode that's a thoughtful gift so he gives that to him he he drinks a beer later he's he's really just loosening up a lot he he won't show up at the dinner that is held in his

honor by the dreams front office but he is showing a little more personality from time to time a little more camaraderie so it's nice to see the relationships building there and by the way for anyone who is wondering about the like the bubble the plastic bubble on the field sometimes you see shots of either the dreams uh training spring training field or their major league field and there is like a plastic ring that goes around the entire infield and like encloses the base pass basically and i asked someone who has worked in the kbo about that and it's to keep the players warm and like protect them from the elements while they're doing conditioning drills or base running drills yeah so it's actually like uh, it's a pretty wide,

it's not like, it's not the width of the base pass. It's like, it's wider than that. And so you could do like sliding drills or run around the base pass and not be exposed to the cold and the rain if it's raining. So I haven't seen that really in the US as far as I,

I don't think like MLB teams do that, but it seems like a good idea. Yeah, it does seem like a good idea. I guess we should end by noting that having returned from spring training, there is now the possibility for some real Discord going into the opening game because there's conflict between the home office and members of the Dreams front office staff. I don't know what we're meant to i well you know because

you've seen it i don't even really remember it's been a while but yeah it ends on a cliffhanger as it usually does where the the j song like goons yeah audit team that has the ability to like yeah as i arrest someone cart you away yeah and they like seize hold of the pr director and say he's a thief for some reason and then uh back sang-soo like barges into kwan's office and he's just watering the plants in a sinister way and back sang-soo is like what do you think you're doing and then there's a long stare down i love the the dramatic like face-offs yeah the episode while the music builds and they're just staring at each other. So we have no idea what this is about yet, but I'm sure it will lead to more fireworks next time.

Oh, boy. Yeah. What else? A few scattered observations. Quan, even just speaking to his lack of a privileged background, at least compared to his cousin, he had to beg the chairman chairman his boss for tuition basically like he put him through school i think and uh and han lisa young's assistant overhears that yes that's right to quit right there's a little scene where you see him in the hallway as beck sung-soo is is talking to kwan and uh so he knows that there's an expiration date and he hasn't shared that but uh he alone knows that that peck sung-soo's days are numbered here and and peck

sung-soo is like he has a little conflict with team leader im the the marketing director too yeah like used to be good but now has like maybe fallen down on the job a little bit and she's like on the phone at work and leaving early or something and and he's like talking about how uh they should be getting celebrities and and longtime supporters comped at at games and things so he's like really he's he's in the weeds here he's uh meddling in in her business as well So he kind of has his fingers all over this organization now. And I guess the other line is when Lisa Young says to Han, it's been a while since I hit you,

which is good. She should probably refrain from hitting him. Stop hitting your coworkers. I enjoy their dynamic and their banter, but yeah, less physical abuse going on there recently and uh and i also like the moment where to test the former batting practice catcher he jang jiwoo has has him like go to refill his water pitcher and then as he's crossing the room he throws him a

ball yes surprise just to see if he can still catch it barehanded it's like oh he's still got it you can still be the bullpen catcher and his wife is like i mean you'd think he was like going away to war or something yeah she's so upset she's so upset that he's going back to be a bullpen catcher i had no idea it was so hazardous but i guess it's been hard on his hands well and she probably knows about the hemorrhoids, so. Yes. Oh, yeah, that too. I wonder if bullpen catchers have hemorrhoids too. I don't think that this is like a real problem. That is like endemic to catching. I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. We'll have to ask a catcher sometime. Yeah, that'll be a great interview. Hey, so what's up with your hemorrhoids? Got them? Yep. All right.

So everyone now, the leash is off you can finish stove league now the final four episodes and next time we talk about stove league perhaps at the end of next week we will see we'll cover episodes 13 to 16 the thrilling conclusion to the saga of one off season in the life of the dreams. All right. We've worked hard. You've worked hard. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening.

One final reminder, if you're interested in participating in the Effectively Wild Secret Santa, you can still sign up until December 14th and you'll get paired with another Effectively Wild listener. So you can give and exchange inexpensive baseball-themed gifts. It's always a good time. Check the show page for that link, as well as the links to stream Stove League. If you want to do a little preparation

for next week's episodes, in addition to streaming Stove League, you can listen to the podcast The Rumor. It's a six-part baseball investigative podcast at Blue Wire. We will be talking to the hosts next week, so be prepared. You can also support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount

to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks while helping us keep the show ad-free. Tom Rickert, Denny Shands, Brian Lundowski, Andrew Schmidt, and Thomas Olshefsky, thanks to all of you. As a reminder, there are monthly Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes that you can sign up to receive. We also have more than 400 members in our patron-only Discord group, where the baseball conversation continues even when the baseball news does not. You can join our Facebook group We'll see you next time. contact me and Meg. Send us questions or comments via email at podcast at fancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter

at EWPod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins as always for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week. Oh, it's taken me a while, but I have finally found what you are to me.

And that's what really counts. And what you are to me is something we can share. I've known you for a long time, but I've just begun to care. Yes, I've known you for a long time, but I've just begun to care.