Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1796: Major League Biasball

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rachel Balkovec becoming the first female manager in affiliated ball, Genevieve Beacom making her pro debut in Australia, and other women breaking baseball boundaries, then (13:20) conclude their “Measuring the Unmeasurable” series about studying difficult-to-quantify aspects of the sport by bringing on Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus and […]

Pick me up and take me away Red side mirror's erased Put my life in a wooden box And sail me out to sea Talking about Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel Hello and welcome to episode 1796 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraph Spaceball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer.

Ben, how are you? I am well, how are you? I am well. How are you? Doing well. Got a jam-packed episode. Yeah, we do. So last week we did a bunch of episodes that we collected under a loose theme of measuring the unmeasurable. We talked to a lot of people about quantifying difficult-to-quantify aspects of the sport. And I guess this episode sort of fits into that theme. Maybe this will be the last of those for now, although we're kind of always discussing that on Effectively Wild.

But today we are talking about some biases that exist in Major League Baseball and in Minor League Baseball, racial biases to be specific. Later in the episode, we will be talking to Shakaya Taylor, who wrote and reported about a study that came out last year about the demographics of MLB managers and front office personnel. And before we bring on Shakia, we'll be talking to Rob Arthur of Baseball Perspectives and Rockies minor league catcher A.J. Lewis about the lack of black catchers in Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball for that matter. But before we get to racial bias, I guess we could talk a little bit about gender bias or the lessening thereof, the slow and slight lessening, because it's been a pretty big week for women getting cool jobs in professional baseball. So we should probably talk about a few of those hires, the most notable of which was the Yankees promoting Rachel Balkovitz to manager.

She will be the first woman to manage an affiliated pro baseball team. She will be the manager of the Yankees' low-A affiliate, the Tampa Tarpons, in 2022. Yeah, this is just deeply cool news. Sometimes you get baseball news and you're like, hey, that's rad. I feel like we don't get to say that unequivocally as often as we would like, which is a real shame because baseball as a sport is rad. Objectively, it's a rad sport. I think we should all use rad more as an aside, as a descriptor.

It's a really good, fun little word. Yeah, now we get to interact with very cool news. I think Rachel has been sort of a rising star within not just the Yankees organization, but within baseball more generally in the last little bit here. And it's very cool to see her get an opportunity to do something that hasn't been done before in an organization that seems like it will, you know, sort of do the work to support her and make her make sure she's sort of set up for success. So I don't know, this is just very cool. I it made me smile. You know, baseball news that made me smile. with the debut of Genevieve Beacom, the 17-year-old player who became the first female pro player in Australia. She debuted in the ABL and pitched a scoreless inning, I believe. And then there were

a couple of other hires in that vein. The Blue Jays hired Jamie Vieira as a minor league hitting coach, I think the first female coach in that organization. And then the Astros officially announced Sarah Goodrum, formerly of the Brewers, as their director of player development. And as we discussed recently, the Astros have been one of the very best player development organizations in baseball over the last several years. And Sarah Goodrum will now be running that department. And the Cubs hired Melinda Deese as an area scout. She's going to be scouting amateur players in the Carolinas and had been part of the MLB diversity scout developmental program in the AFL. So this is a belated trend.

I guess we can call it a trend. I mean, just several years ago, there were no women who were coaches in pro baseball, at least, you know, hitting coaches or that kind of equivalent position. And now there are quite a few, you know, not enough perhaps, but still you can name several. I guess, is an indication that maybe there aren't enough or this is too recent a development because I couldn't tell you who the male hitting coordinators for every team are just because that's not news anymore, right? And maybe it won't be news in the same way when women get hired for these positions in the future. But for now, it still is and it should be. And you have people like Rachel Holden with the Cubs and Bianca Smith with the Red Sox

and, of course, Alyssa Nacken with the Giants. So maybe when we don't know their names, that will, in a sense, be a sign of progress. But the fact that there are quite a few that you can name now is great. And to have a manager, that's a pretty significant step, I would say. Yeah, especially when we think about the sort of pipeline to senior coaching positions at the big league level, being able to point to prior managerial experience in affiliated ball is just, it's not been something that I tend to think about this the way that I think about, you know, prospects to a certain degree. It's like it's just it's a really hard industry. And I think part of why we want to see the proliferation of a lot of different kinds of people in baseball is so that as you have sort of natural attrition, as people move through the ranks that you don't look around and find yourself with just one kind of person sitting there as sort of obvious candidates for, you know, the next job after that. I mean, I'm sure that Rachel will be excited to do this job, but, you know, you want to build pipeline and you want to build a cohort so that people have folks they can rely on to bounce ideas off of them and you know get a sense of how to navigate

the vagaries of their job and just so that as as we march along we're bringing a bunch of folks with us so i think there's obviously still work to do here you know you you want the you want to see more women you want to see a more diverse representation of women you want to see a bunch of different gender identities represented in baseball. Sometimes I feel like Adam Driver in Star Wars where I'm just like, more, more. We continue to need more, but you have to take first steps to get there. that the project is always going to be incomplete to make baseball sort of represent the people who love it and play it, these first steps are necessary to getting further along that path. So it's very exciting. I think we just get to, we should take the opportunity to feel excited about stuff because we so often have to grapple

with like icky or disappointing aspects of the sport. And I think it's important to sort of recognize those moments where we're like, hey, we're doing some of the work, more to do, but some of it, this tiny piece of it now is checked, right? So it's really cool. Yeah. With Rachel Balkovitz, it's almost like the conversation we had about Kim Eng when she was hired as the Marlins GM. And it's like, well, she was qualified for this job 20 years ago. She has every bit of the resume checked off. And Rachel Baukvitz is only 34, so perhaps she was not qualified 20 years ago. But she is, if anything, overqualified for this job. I mean, people who don't know her background, she has done so much in a somewhat short time. I mean, she's been working in pro baseball for about a decade at this point. After having been a Division I softball catcher, she was a strength and conditioning coach. And one of the things with a few of these women really is that they end up being the first

multiple times. They're the first this and the first that as they climb the ladder and keep getting new positions. So I think Rachel Balkovitz was the first full-time affiliated female strength and conditioning coach. And then she was the first hitting coordinator in the minors. And now she is the first manager. And in addition to all of those positions, she learned Spanish so that she could communicate with players better. She has multiple master's degrees. She coached in the Netherlands, baseball and softball. So, you know, she was a driveline coach too. So she brings the familiarity with that kind of progressive player development philosophy. So she's kind of been all over the world. She coached in the Australian Baseball

League too, and the futures came. So she's been everywhere over the world. She coached in the Australian Baseball League too, and the Futures came. So she's been everywhere and done everything. And I don't know that your typical male manager of a low-A team has that kind of resume. I mean, just looking at her predecessor with the Tarpons, I believe David Adams was the manager of that team last year. And he started out a couple of years before that, I think, managing short season ball in the Yankee system. But basically, he went from being a pro player who briefly made it to the majors with the Yankees in 2013, but otherwise was in the minors for a while and just immediately transitioned

into managing short season and then low A. I feel like that's a pretty typical progression, right? And you just have to have that reputation as maybe a cerebral sort who would be good at managing. And you can just jump right into that without any prior experience necessarily. And that's something that we'll get into with Shakia as well when it comes to managers of color often have had to have more lines on their resume, more things before they can get that job than, say, white former players who can just jump into that job straight away. So I think she has every box check that you could possibly imagine. And I don't know what her long-term aspirations are because I know she's spoken before about possibly

having front office aspirations in player development or as a GM or whatever. So maybe she'll end up gravitating more toward that side of things. I don't know. But it seems like she certainly has the background to do whatever she wants in this work. Yeah, I think that the world is probably her oyster. And that's very exciting because when have we been able to say that? Right. Yeah.

But I think you're right. I think that it says a lot about an industry when you think about sort of who we're willing to grant the grace of saying you can you can probably figure out how to do this. And, you know, Rachel's in some ways a bad example of that, because, as you noted, she's just so qualified, like her resume is so august and so impressive but you know striking that balance between giving people opportunities maybe when they're you know not quite ready for them or when they aren't the profile that you've become accustomed to you know sometimes that doesn't go great but sometimes you find people who end up being really great fits and bring a

new perspective to something and are just able to do their job well. So I don't know. I find myself cautiously optimistic. Again, like, what is this feeling, Ben? Yeah. And managing and head coaching, that's kind of been one of the last big barriers, I think, in sports where it's generally all male still in the men's sports leagues at the higher levels. And you see that playing out in other leagues with Becky Hammond, for instance, in basketball, who was sort of looked at as the presumptive first female head coach in the NBA and maybe still will be. But after doing a lot of interviews and being considered but not being hired, she decided to take a job in the WNBA as a head coach with the Las Vegas Aces.

And that's still sort of a barrier that hasn't been broken either in MLB where managers typically have come from the former player ranks or in the NFL or NBA where often that's not the case. Sometimes it is, but there isn't that same presumption of a playing background to get those jobs. And so you would think they would be perhaps more open to women, but historically they haven't been. So that idea of putting a woman in control of a clubhouse of men just still seems to be something that is given most organizations pause. So hopefully Rachel Balkovitz can do away with some of that reluctance that some teams still have. And, you know, she has talked before about how just to get interviews, she had to like change her name on her resume, right, just to get calls. Or she had to say she was a Division I college catcher instead of saying she was a Division I college softball catcher, and suddenly the calls would come in.

So she is breaking barriers and blazing trails. And yeah, it's nice to see. Yeah, yeah. All right. So let's get to our first guests. So last week, the writer Howard Bryant tweeted, the way MLB treats black catchers, you'd think the Negro Leagues played with eight guys. He was referring to the fact that there are currently no African American catchers in Major League Baseball, as well as the fact that there have been very few black catchers in MLB for decades now, since the retirement of Charles Johnson in 2005, and then of course, Russell Martin, who is Canadian in 2019. And then, of course, Russell Martin, who is Canadian in 2019 We are joined today by one of the people who is hoping to change that, A.J. Lewis

He is a 23-year-old player who was signed by the Rockies in the summer of 2020 And made his pro debut in 2021 playing catcher And also some infield and outfield in A-ball and high A A.J., welcome to the show How are you, man? Thank you for having me Yeah, happy to the show. How are you, man? Thank you for having me. Yeah, happy to have you. We are also joined by Rob Arthur, who did a couple studies for Baseball Perspectives in 2020 that are relevant to our topic today. One was about that lack of black catchers in MLB, and the other was about how racial bias seems to affect how players get promoted through the minors and from the minors to the majors. Hello, Rob.

Hey, Ben. Thanks for having me on again. So, Rob, maybe I can throw it to you first to sort of help set the scene here and explain the studies you did, and then we can ask AJ to talk about his experience. Rob, I imagine that searching for racial bias in baseball the way you did can be difficult for a few reasons, statistically speaking, not least that it's tricky to try to classify someone's race without necessarily knowing how they define themselves. But can you explain how you went about that and then maybe summarize what you found in your first piece about the promotion patterns? And then I'll ask a follow-up about the catcher

research. Sure. Yeah. So to start off with, you're right, it's really hard to know someone's racial background. That's not in the package of stats or information about players that we normally see. But there's a database that was put together by Mark Armour and Dan Levitt, where they actually track that across a huge database of major players. And they were kind enough, they used that in their own research to look at the diminishing proportion of Black players in the majors in the last few decades in particular. And they were kind enough to make that data available to me for use in my own research. And the way that they're doing it is based on a combination of national origin and skin color and various other things, how people are self-described. And so it's definitely not a perfectly objective categorization, obviously, especially with the number of biracial players in MLB, players who might be in particular Afro-Latino.

It's a very common categorization. It's not really clear where to put them, how to categorize their race. And obviously racial identity is very complicated. Generally, it's not like a single word can describe every person's racial identity. But with noting some of those issues, Dan and Mark were nice enough to let me use some of this data, and I took that and intersected it with a bunch of other information that was relevant to their performance, each player's performance in the minors, and then how likely they were to make it to the majors. look at black and Latino and other players' performance versus white players in the minors and then compare how likely they were to make the majors, generally black, indigenous, and other people of color in the minors were systematically about three to four percent less likely at each stage to get promoted to the next level. So, you know, considering how well they were performing on the field, just the fact that they were in the BIPOC class meant that they were less likely to get promoted to the next level.

And three to four percent, it's not, you know, obviously a huge overwhelming effect. But when you think about how many levels a player has to go through from the minors to get up to the majors, a small deficit at each level tends to add up. And that means that the players that did get to the majors who are Black or Latino tend to be on average better in the majors once they get there, because they have to sort of run a more difficult gauntlet. And that's something that actually Mark and Dan had found before when they had done their studies. The average wins above replacement for black players in the majors is actually higher than for white players. And presumably it's because a lot of the role players, the black role players who might have short, you know, two or three year careers in the majors,

they get systematically prevented from having those careers because they don't get to make the additional steps upward through the minors and into the majors. And the only ones that do are the really outstanding stars. And so that's why on average, they tend to, black players on average tend to be a little bit better. So that was the output of that first study that we did. And you were looking at minor leaguers since 1991, right? Or all players since 1991. Do you know whether those trends have gotten more or less pronounced lately did you look at any subsets of that period or just kind of the whole period

i had looked at subsets and it's really hard to know for sure because it is a small effect and you have differing you have differing dynamics going on in the most recent data than in previous data we had this influx of international talent, for example, and coming from sort of different countries than it had before. So I don't feel like I can say definitively whether there's a big change. There's not evidence for any improvement, I will say that, but there's not evidence that it's necessarily getting worse either. It just seems to be roughly the same in the most recent data as before that,

although there's really wide error bars around that because of the size of the effect and the differing trends that I mentioned in terms of national origin. Okay, and then last thing before we get to AJ, your follow-up piece was about catcher specifically, and I guess you don't really need super advanced statistical analysis to conclude that there just aren't a lot of black catchers, that black players are underrepresented at that position historically and certainly

recently, but you went deeper than that and were able to quantify that and sort of show the magnitude of that underrepresentation, as well as some trends in the positions that Black players have tended to play more often. Yeah, that's a really wild and obvious finding when you think about, you sit down and think about prominent Black catchers from the last few years or last few decades, really. There's only about 2% of Black players are catchers whereas among other races it's about 20 so you're looking at a tenfold difference there from what it actually is compared to what you would expect it to be based on players of other races and that is yeah that's pretty staggering

i think that's really hard to explain with anything other than i think some kind of racial bias and where you see black players overrepresented is in the outfield. And this connects, I think, to some work that you and I, Ben, did together looking at scouting reports, where we were looking at how Black players were described among scouting reports, minor league scouting reports, versus how players of other races were described. And there was this abundance of Black players getting tagged with words like speedy, but also raw. And this is potentially indicative of like a different way that scouts are seeing Black players. Now, I'm sure that there are plenty of speedy Black players, and some of them may be raw too, but I find it difficult to believe that there aren't Black

players who would make for excellent catchers that are getting, again, systematically excluded from that position because of racial bias against them and sort of this tendency to put them into the outfield bin and away from the catcher bin. So we have evidence, I think, from a number of different levels that this racially biased process is unfolding. So from how scouts describe it to actual promotion patterns to what positions they get into, there's like a coherent picture, I think, of a particular way that scouts and front offices tend to see black players and that affects the success they get to have at the major league level and what positions they get to play when they get there. AJ, you're obviously trying to buck this trend and consciously set an example of success at the position.

I wonder if you can, before we go any further, sort of tell us your catcher origin story. How did you come to the position? How old were you? And what was it like to play it not only up through high school, but once you got to the collegiate level? Yeah, of course. So I, just like everyone else, started playing baseball when I was probably around four or five years old. It started with, you know, my dad coached the team and nobody wanted to go behind the plate. And I was just like, you know, I'll do it. Like, why not? because, you know, when I played football, I was the running back, which is like a heavy, toting job.

And, you know, when I played basketball, I was the point guard, which is, you know, like the head of everything, and you're kind of directing traffic. And I kind of felt, you know, in a game like baseball that could be very monotonous and slow sometimes, the catching position was one that I really valued and I thought was pretty fun because you're in every play. You got a lot of say-so and, you know, it keeps you engaged. It was something that kept me interested. So I, you know, just always through Little League and

early travel ball, I, you know, turned myself into a catcher. I'm still pretty athletic though, so I would still go play third base. I'd go play the outfield sometimes and make things happen there as well. But catching, I knew would be, you know, my bread and butter. And I got to high school and ran into a few problems. But, you know, like I said, I played multiple positions and I was able to still catch for majority of the time and, you know, still get some versatility playing third and a little bit of left and right field. and, you know, still get some versatility playing third and a little bit of left and right field. The real problem came when I got to college in my freshman year. Had a couple guys in front of me that were juniors and well-proven.

And, you know, I was able to hit. And so the guys were like, you know, we got to get you in the lineup. And this might be at either, you know, second base or left field. And I was fine with that my freshman year just because, you know, as a freshman, you're just trying to get at bats. You just want to get on the field, but going into my sophomore year, I started to see that this might be a trend, and it was something that I knew, you know, at this point, I knew that I was carving a special path being a catcher. I knew that I was unique in a way,

so it was something that I wanted to continue to do. And I was very adamant about that. I made sure I voiced my opinion a lot. And I was just in a situation where the way the draft had went, the way recruiting was going for us, guys, they stayed longer than they were supposed to. I wasn't going to get that opportunity to catch. I was going to have to go to the outfield to get some at-bats and get some playing time. And it just wasn't something I was willing to have to go to the outfield to get some at-bats and get some playing time. And it just wasn't something I was willing to sacrifice.

And I ended up transferring to a junior college where I had the opportunity to catch and grow and develop. So that summer I caught. After my freshman year, sophomore year in JUCO, I caught. And then I ended up going to Eastern Kentucky and being the everyday catcher for two years, where that was exactly what I needed after not catching my freshman year of college. You know, I was kind of playing catch up and, you know, I was able to get all the reps that I got. And luckily I am where I am right now because of it. Yeah. And, you know, I've noticed in some of the articles that you've been quoted in before, and often it is a small group of people who end up quoted in articles about this topic because there are only so many players who are black and coming up at catcher these days.

And so often you will be mentioned and Nick Hassan, the catcher at Kennesaw State, and then Ian Mahler, who is a Rangers prospect. And it sounds like Ian and Nick early on heard things from coaches and other players who were sort of surprised to see that there was a black catcher, whereas you grew up at that level in that league. So at what point did you kind of become aware of that? Or did you start hearing those sort of quizzical comments at some point? So it's funny, I didn't realize it until I got to college. Yeah, a couple of times, you know, early in the fall, my buddies that caught with me, they were like, you know, I've never played with a black catcher before. And I was like, like really that's all I ever played with like I don't know like you know so it's pretty funny but it was it was nothing malicious or anything like that it was just like man like I've never seen this before and at that point I realized that I you know had to be

pretty uh steadfast about what I wanted and what I wanted to do behind the plate. You certainly don't have to call out any teams by name here, but I'm curious in your experience as you were going through the process of finding a team as a non-drafted guy, whether there was pressure in those conversations to consider moving off the position at all, or whether it was just assumed like, I am being signed to be a catcher in this organization. or whether it was just assumed like I'm being signed to be a catcher in this organization? Luckily, every team that I talked to, they only talked about me being a catcher. In fact, with the Rockies, I ended up signing and that was my first,

before I signed, that was my first question. You know, will I have to change positions? Do you want me to play the outfield? Do I need to be a utility? And the answer was no. The answer was you're a catcher. You're staying back there. And it even stood true when I got to spring training and instructs my first year. They were very adamant about me catching. Still are. I talk all the time to our catching coordinator who I just saw, and he was asking me how things were going and making sure I'm doing all the proper things to make sure I stay behind the

plate. Because I do have a unique skill set that will allow me to go do other things if I chose to do so or if the organization needed me to which I mean it's come up in conversation but catching has still been at the forefront and I believe that it will stay that way. Yeah I was gonna ask because this year you did catch at high a for the Rockies, but you also, in A ball, you played some second base, you played some left field, you DH'd at times too. So how did that work? Did they ask you to expand your positional skill set there? Or I guess you already had the skill set because you had played these positions previously, but did they talk to you about it? Did you volunteer? Was that something you were enthusiastic about or reluctant to do?

Yeah, so there was definitely a conversation that our farm director had with me before I went and started playing multiple positions in A-ball. And it was something I was honestly extremely open about. And I was open to doing it. I was excited because not only was he saying, you know, you'll get more at bats and you'll get more opportunities, but he was saying, you're still going to catch like, that's not, we're not taking you from back there. We just want to see if there's, you know, if there's an opportunity for you to, you know,

play a little bit more here. I mean, we had, we have some pretty good catching prospects in the organization right now. And one that I played head and head with this year, Drew Romo, and the kid can play and, you know, it's, it's a situation where you have to find how I can fit and how I can work in this organization as a big leaguer. And what I feel like becoming a utility allowed me to do is, you know, give all these guys a break, be able to get in there and show versatility while still being an inspiration to those who look like me that want to catch. And that was like my biggest thing. As long as I can be in a position where, you know, people from Chicago and the inner city,

like I grew up, can look on TV one day and say, you know, this guy is doing what I want to do, and he's doing it at a position that's usually not done. I can do that, that my quest, my journey, my purpose is fulfilled. This question is for both of you. I'd love to hear from both of you on this. You know, Rob, you mentioned some of the structural components that are surely driving the dearth of black catchers. And I wonder if we can try to isolate some of the factors that are contributing to that lack.

You know, you mentioned the just obvious bias that might exist in some segments of the scouting community. But for our listeners who are perhaps not familiar with the pieces that you publish for Baseball Perspectives, what other sort of reasons have you been able to identify that can help us account for the lack of representation at the position? Well, I think maybe one of the factors might be something that AJ mentioned, which is just the lack of representation at the position? Well, I think maybe one of the factors might be something that AJ mentioned, which is just a lack of representation, right? Like if you don't see players, if you don't see catchers that look like you on TV, maybe it's not the first position you think of when you're going into baseball. Maybe it's not what you think you should do. Maybe you are excited about Barry Bonds instead and you want to be an outfielder.

you should do. Maybe you are excited about Barry Bonds instead and you want to be an outfielder. That's one factor. I think scouts do play a huge role. I think maybe player development plays some role as well in terms of potentially pushing players in one direction or another. I think it could be a lot of things. I mean, unfortunately, with the statistical evidence, you can sort of see the output and you can see the players that go into it, but you can't always see the process that leads from the one end to the other. And so I wish I had a better sense and maybe AJ can speak to this more about actually what drives this trend besides the scouts and besides the player development. Oh, definitely. So it's a two-sided answer for me. So the first thing is obviously what you talked of try to find player comps that look like you that move like you that act like you that you can you can model your game after them because I mean this is a tough game and you know unless you had a brother or a father or someone who played in the

big leagues and has been at that level or coached there you don't really know and it gets tough for me even just to you know try to find someone who I can relate to, who I can kind of mirror myself after. I mean, Russell Martin was a great one. Charles Johnson, obviously, with the Rockies. You know, I would love to have that career, but, you know, it just gets tough when you don't see it. And so like that, that's been a driving force for me. It's just like, you know, I want to be the guy that kids can see all over the country that look like me and know that it is possible and the second is that usually we you know African-American players have tools that can play all over the field and probably help you win a little bit more all over the field and being behind the plate is just you know it kind of gets

pit and hole sometimes to you know this guy might not be that athletic or this guy doesn't have these attributes to play maybe a shortstop or a center field. And typically, if you have those attributes and those tools, you know, they're putting you in those positions. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing sometimes because sometimes that is what's going to help the club win. That's going to help put more Ws in the win column for us. But if you have a guy who's passionate about catching and passionate about leading from that position from behind the plate, I definitely think that it should be an opportunity for them. And AJ, I know that you played in the White Sox Amateur City Elite program

that promotes baseball among inner city kids. And I wonder what you've found just when it comes to the decreasing percentage of Major League Baseball players who are black over the past few decades. And there have been so many factors that play a role there. But of course, you know, sometimes it's suggested, well, maybe it's just the availability of baseball. You need a field. You need all this equipment. You know, it's just you need more equipment and maybe more specialized training required for that position. But do you see that as a factor either with the catcher issue or just with the proportion of black players overall? See, that's one thing I feel like the White Sox did a great job of. like the White Sox did a great job of, man. So the whole program was free and we were,

we were given access to the top events, the top tournaments, every resource, every big leaguer that they can get their hands on. You know, we were able to see those people and those things firsthand and, you know, have the proper training to excel at these events. So in that aspect, when we were in college, I mean, when we were in high school playing, that wasn't a problem. The problem comes when you start trying to get recruited to college and you get to college and, okay, say you have this recruitment journey that goes well and everybody loves you and you choose, you know, you got five schools to choose from, you choose that one school, you go there. The problem becomes sometimes when you get to those schools, you don't have the resources or you don't have the representation at the school that will allow you to succeed. And this isn't

something that, you know, you can just straight up blame on someone else because it takes some responsibility on your own. At this point, this is your career. You have to be responsible for what's going on. But at the same time, everyone needs a little help. And when that help seems like it's very far away or, you know, it's not there at all, it's non-existent, it becomes very hard to perform. So not only am I away from home, not having family, you know, going to college for the first time, which out of the inner city, that is very likely that this will be that person's first time ever, or that person's family first time ever experienced in college. And, you know, having to deal with that is just not easy at all.

And, you know, sometimes it just weighs on you. And that's where you start to see the decrease of African-Americans in baseball. It's just a lot of different social, I guess, differences that lead you to not be able to excel at the sport like others can. obligation to fix itself, right, to deal with the systemic factors that are at play in scouting and player development that are contributing to this lack of black catching and sort of black participation in baseball more generally. But clearly the amateur level is part of the issue here too. And so I wonder, and I'd like to hear from both of you on this, and AJ, I think the programs you went through are probably a good example of how this can help to be alleviated. But what can Major League Baseball be doing to try to ensure that the pipeline of talent that it has coming to affiliated ball is truly representative that this problem is going to get worse or at least continue at its current level because you can't generate professional baseball players out of nowhere. They have to come up through the system. So what sort of solutions, Rob, and then I guess

AJ, do you see as being particularly impactful if we want to arrest this trend? So I think it's really important, obviously, to invest in allowing people from all different races to have access to baseball, have access to the equipment, have access to the fields. I think that's something that MLB has already taken some small measures towards, but I think there's a lot more that could be done to open that up more. That's one thing. AJ talked about some of the issues at college. I think that's another place where it can be keenly felt, the pressures against some people, and they could put in some effort towards diminishing those pressures and making it easy for collegiate athletes to continue on. Another thing I think is that they should be sort of taking the initiative

to study some of these issues on their own. You know, they shouldn't need to have outside people looking at the record of black catchers in the majors and calling them out for it. That should be something that they take seriously without press attention. And the fact that they haven't, I think, is unfortunate. I think every organization, every company has kind of a responsibility to study how they do business. And if you're seeing such a stark disparity where you have 10 times fewer black catchers than you would expect, then that is indicative of problems. And then it's on you to go through and figure out what those problems are and how can we fix them. And they haven't done that for the most part. So I think and they have access to much better data than we ever will on the outside. So I think they have the power to study this issue and really try to figure out what

the issues, what the root causes are, and then attack those root causes. And that's something that they should put more resources towards. Definitely, I agree with you. For me, the main thing is just given true fair opportunities. After you give someone a fair opportunity and they don't take advantage of it, then that's on them. When that opportunity really doesn't present itself, it just makes it feel like it's nearly impossible to get done. And another part of it is making sure that you make a conscious effort to understand all. I feel like I've heard that story many times with friends and other organizations. Luckily, I haven't had that problem with the Rockies. I feel like they do a great job of making sure that they treat you like family, no matter what nationality you are, what your

ethnic background is, any of that. I feel like they do a great job of being just good genuine people from top to bottom in the organization. And you know, when someone feels like, you know, they're part of an organization, but they don't truly feel like they're part of the organization because they're looking on the outside in many cases, or they don't have anyone checking on them, or they don't have anyone, you know, treating them fairly, like they should be treated, you know, that just that going to deter anyone from doing anything. So I think just making sure that you're given opportunities and you're being just a good person and giving the players a chance to feel as if they belong. Yeah. Going back a bit to the biases that we were talking about in scouting and player development. I think maybe some of it can be unconscious,

which, you know, the results are the same, so it hardly matters. But some of it can just be kind of comparing to your mental rolodex of past players, as scouts often do. And if you don't have a lot of examples of past black catchers to call on, then maybe you're less likely to evaluate a player

as a catcher today. Others, I think, you know, there can be a more malicious prejudice that's going on there. And Howard Bryant tweeted the other day, you know, historically in sports, often the nerve centers, he said, have been white, the athletic centers black. Or as Andrea Williams, who's been on the show before, she wrote the biography of Effa Manley, she tweeted, positions requiring intellect and not just raw athleticism were deemed above black capability. And it's interesting because if you look back at the early decades post-integration in MLB,

there were many more prominent and successful black catchers in those days. You're Roy Campanella and Elston Howard and John Roseboro and Earl Batty, et cetera. But I would guess that in those cases, Howard and Campanella came up in the Negro League, so they had proved themselves at that level already. And then Roseboro was Campanella's successor with the Dodgers when Campanella got hurt. So that probably played a big part, just that those guys got the opportunity and they proved themselves. And so once they had done it in the Negro Leagues, then they got the opportunity to keep doing it in the AL and NL eventually once the color barrier was broken. But I think that just speaks to what AJ was saying about the importance of that representation and having those examples. And so it's sort of a sad state of affairs if the conditions immediately after the game stopped being segregated were more conducive to Black players becoming catchers than they are today. I wonder, AJ, if it's challenging enough to be a minor leaguer and to have to try to work your way up without thinking of these historic

patterns or, you know, trying to set an example for kids who could be watching you. And, you know, most players say, I'll play wherever helps me get to the big leagues, right? And, you know, clearly you're willing to be versatile and flexible like that, but it also seems to matter to you that you continue playing catcher in some capacity. So is that legacy an extra challenge for you or do you look at it as more of a motivation? I look at it as a little bit of both. It's definitely challenging, you know, those days where you have an off day or you're in spring training and you're with the catchers and your day is just a ton harder just because you're a catcher. You're there earlier. You're working way harder. You know, you're doing a lot of stuff. And those days, sometimes I do wish I was at the outfield group.

You know, it is a bigger mission for me, man. I definitely know I have the ability and the capability to go play, you know, the infield or the outfield. But I know that the impact that I would make once I could debut behind the plate would just be better than anything else that I could ever have done. And I know it's going to be a little tougher. It's definitely going to be tougher and it has been tougher. And I know it's going to be a little tougher. It's definitely going to be tougher. And it has been tougher. But I definitely think, you know, a little bit of delayed gratification and, you know, a little bit more hard work on the front end will make for the back end to be a lot better and make it be a little bit more inspirational to those who, you know, maybe aspire to be that guy one day.

that guy one day. Yeah, it's funny you talk about the different workloads because Meg and I really enjoy watching catchers and analyzing catchers and hearing catchers talk about their craft. And yet we also think it's amazing that anyone wants to play catcher because it's just, it's so hard and the workload is so heavy and the injury risk and just getting hit by foul tips and the mask and the gear and everything. So can you kind of compare, you know, if there's a day where you know you're playing second base or you're playing outfield as opposed to catcher? I mean, is the preparation a lot lighter on the non-catcher days? Does your body feel a lot different after those days? Yeah, 110%, man.

You play those positions and I feel like it's almost a day off. I just got to worry about hitting and making a play when the ball comes to me. So, yeah, it's definitely easier. It definitely is. I joke about it all the time whenever I am not behind the plate and going to play left or even DH. Just like, all right, just got to hit today, man. Just got to get it done in the box. But when you're behind the plate it just takes extreme focus and it's not easy at all

it's not it's not a cakewalk but i mean it's something to be said as to why those those catchers turn into managers later and and you know go on and have amazing careers beyond their playing career because you you think so much it's's so cerebral, and you're put in a position where you have to attack every day from a different vantage point than maybe a shortstop or an outfielder. You know, you're coming to work every day making sure that you can get everybody on one accord while, you know, the shortstop's coming, making sure he can get his three knocks and, you know,

make his plays when they come to him. It's a different mindset you have to have behind the plate, and it takes a special one. And history has shown that it's mainly a Caucasian or maybe a Latin position, but I definitely think African-Americans can come in and they have that aptitude to get that done as well. It's definitely doable. I think you hit on something really important about catcher being a pipeline into manager positions and then sometimes other leadership positions in baseball. I think the fact that catcher is so bereft as an MLB position of black players feeds into some of the downstream pipeline issues with manager positions, you know, overwhelmingly being white. I think if MLB addressed it early on and added more black players into the catcher position, it might help to alleviate some of those downstream problems and make things better there.

And the other thing I want to say about this is that we frame it a lot of times as a negative, like we're calling out MLB. And that's true. We should be calling them out. It is a big issue. But the other side to this is that different organizations have an opportunity to better themselves and better the MLB product on the field by being better at figuring out which players are going to be good catchers. So presumably this has a cost to them.

They are taking some black players in the minors that might be excellent, amazing MLB catchers, and they're not giving them the opportunities they deserve. And if they had those opportunities, they could become really significant contributors to the teams down the line and later on potentially great managers or great GMs. So there's a potential positive side to this. If teams and the league as a whole took up this task seriously, we could have a better version of baseball with better players, better managers, and a better overall product. Well, that is a perfect segue because our next segment is going to be a conversation with Shakia Taylor about the demographics of managers and about that catcher to manager pipeline. So thank you guys so much for coming on and for setting up this conversation. Really appreciate your time, AJ.

No worries. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And you as well, Rob. Thanks so much. And you can find AJ on Twitter at AJ Lewis. That is spelled out A-J-A-Y Lewis. He's also on Instagram where you can follow his exploits in the coming season, at A-J Lewis underscore. And Rob is on Twitter at NoLittlePlans with underscores between the words. And we will take a quick break now, and we'll be right back with Shakia. I've seen the sun burn and survive another turn. And now I'm reaching out, it's true.

And you don't see me. I'm catching on to you. You don't see me. I'm catching on with you. All right, we are joined now by the writer Shakia Taylor, who is soon to be the host of Sabre's Ballpark Figures interview series. Hi, Shakia. Welcome back to the show. Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming back. So you wrote in October about a new study from Arizona State University's Global Sports Institute, which looked at the racial makeup of MLB managers over the last decade or so. And you did some reporting about whether the so-called C-League rule about interviewing minority candidates for top field and front office positions has actually had its intended effect.

actually had its intended effect. Selig's memo to teams went out in April 1999. But just to focus first on managers after the recent hirings or rehirings of Mark Kotze and Buck Showalter, I think there are still only six managers of color in the majors, two of whom are black. Bud Black doesn't count. So in your piece, which we'll link to, you summarize some of the findings of that Global Sports Institute study. Could you recap some of the main takeaways there? what the numbers, you know, I was going to be working with were. And it was kind of, I don't want to say affirming, but it was to actually see the things that I had always thought about, you know, manager hiring in MLB to be true and to have data behind it. Things like, we laid them out in the piece, but you over the 10-year period only eight black managers were dismissed but only three were hired 13 managers with no previous coaching experience were hired 12 were white one was of color seven white minor league managers were hired compared

with just two of color I could go on it just really put into some form of data and charts and tables for us to be able to see there really is an issue with hiring non-white managers in major league baseball, in minor league baseball. And some of the folks I interviewed for this, I did a lot of reporting. I'm talking walking down the streets of Cleveland on my cell phone when I'm supposed to be on like a fun trip, just listening to the experiences of people who are like, you know, we get interviewed, but it's really just to fill a quota. It's really just to check a box. It's really, you know, constantly interviewed, but never hired was a constant refrain. And I think this piece hopefully digs into all of that. Like, why aren't people being spoken to any further? Why are we stuck here? I also got to speak to the man himself, which was really interesting. really interesting. And I think that one of the problems that your piece highlighted and that the study highlighted is that even when managers of color get into the door, they have a much shorter

leash in terms of how long they are kept on the job and then they are less likely to be rehired. So even when progress is made, it seems like it is very halting. I'm curious in your conversations with Selig, and I know you got into some of this in the piece, sort of what is his assessment of the success of the rule and how closely does he see that sort of hewing to his original intent when he introduced it? He sounded like, you know, he didn't really want to get into the current state of the league. He only wanted to focus on when, you know, he was in charge of things. And I guess I kind of understand that. You don't wanna publicly, you know, say anything about something that you don't have

any control over, but are still connected to. But he made it a point to constantly mention that Major League Baseball as a social institution is your mirror society, and that that was his goal. I asked if maybe the C-League rule should be amended. It's kind of interesting how after this came out, it kind of was amended. But he really seemed to focus in on, he really wanted the league to look like America. And whether or not that was achieved, I don't think he sees it as an achievement.

I think he sees it as just this rule is a step toward getting there. It's not going to change everything. And he told me he didn't want to tell people who to hire. I think that's where things get a little murky for anyone in leadership. They believe that any type of affirmative action is them telling people who to hire. When in actuality, if you don't give people any sort of guidelines for hiring, we end up with what we have now. We end up with non-white managers who cannot make a mistake or they are out. They don't get second chances. They don't get to manage for 20 or 30 years. I

mean, you have Dusty, but he's kind of an outlier. Right. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. I hadn't even realized just what a significant percentage of really all of the manager seasons that we're talking about here are represented by Dusty Baker alone. And the fact that he has gotten multiple opportunities, that he has worked for five different teams as a manager, that really makes him an outlier here. And we talked to Rob Arthur a little bit about his pieces about racial bias in player promotions and the lack of black catchers. He also wrote something that you cited in your piece about the racial makeup of managers. and he noted that not only does it not reflect the player population, but also he wrote the average white manager lasts a little more than five years in the league,

while the average manager of color only makes it 3.6 years, so 30% shorter with essentially the same record, you know, just as much on-field success. So that doesn't explain it there. But really, Dusty is such an exception to this rule, unfortunately. It's it's it's like sad. And I mean, it makes me root for Dusty a ton. Right. Like, OK, Dusty, you're all we got, buddy. But at the same time, it's like Dusty, retire, dude. It's time. sort of made his stops along the way in his career, there seems to be a real reluctance in some parts of baseball fandom and in baseball media to really credit him with his evolution as a manager, right? Like he gets tagged with some of the mistakes he made much earlier in his career that he has clearly made a conscious effort to address and to think differently about and be careful about. And I think some of the quotes that, you know, you have here from him about sort of what the landscape looks like are really interesting.

So I guess that part of my question when we're trying to think about how best to alleviate this problem and to create a manager population that is more reflective of the sport is sort of what more proactive steps can MLB take to set folks up to succeed and sort of backfill the pipeline? Because I think one of the refrains that you hear is, you know, that there's just a lack of candidates and that's clearly not true, but how do we sort of reinforce the coaching ranks all up and down Major League Baseball so that there are just, you know, a lot more folks who can be fed into that pipeline and be considered every time there's one of these vacancies? I think one of the things that could be a really good start is MLB itself should start emphasizing that the requirements to be a manager have shifted. What I mean by that is

front offices are huge now. You have tons of people. You have people who handle the analytics. You have people who handle every little detail. So a manager's job isn't what it once was. So I think that's first. Let everyone know that no manager is now needed to do this great sum of things. Most of the time they just manage with the information they're given. A thing that I heard a lot from people I spoke to for the piece is maybe open the avenue for people of color to come from places other than baseball. If you look at the sport itself currently, a lot of white managers, a lot of, you know, white, I was going to say men affiliated with front offices don't have baseball backgrounds. They didn't play baseball in college. They come from business backgrounds. They have financial backgrounds. So if we can extend that sort of, we'll say kind of has to shift into if everyone opens up

the lane and says, okay, these requirements, we don't need them anymore. We don't need this specific background. We can pull from here. We can pull from there. I think tapping the resource that is HBCUs, I think tapping the resource that is women's colleges would open up the door for a lot more interest. But when you think I can't get in because I'm not white, I'm not male, and I don't know the right people, a lot of people just won't try. For some people in some jobs, I would say the sabermetric movement has opened things up in some respects so that you no longer need to have been a former major league player or a high level pro player in men's baseball, let's say, to be a GM, to be a hitting coach, etc. coaching jobs and more people with not the traditional baseball backgrounds getting front office jobs. But those do require some familiarity with analytics. And you note in your piece that there's this perception that can actually be harmful. You quote a former MLB player in there who said the assumption is that non-white players, despite their experience in the sport, are just not smart enough to understand it or

employ it as a tool, it being analytics or sabermetrics. And you brought up Jalen Rose's comments about basketball from a couple of years ago. So what do you think could be done to combat that perception? Oh, man, that's a tough one, right? Because I think thinking that a specific group of people is inherently less intelligent is just going to be very difficult to combat, right? So, I mean, obviously start there, right? Hey, not everyone is unintelligent. I think just changing the way we look at things. I am not a math person. I accept that I am not a math person, but that doesn't mean that, you know know the black person down the road who applies for this is is not a math person or because that's ultimately what people think right they're like oh

analytics sabermetric it's math i can't do that they can't do that i think we just have to change perceptions around everything we have to shift the way we think in so many ways. This is, I would say the last, we'll say two years, almost three, has really been an experiment in changing the way we think about race in all ways, changing the way we think about gender in all ways. And some of the things that we believe aren't necessarily true, but we're just taught for so long, or society is kind of pushed on us for so long. Like I'm a woman and I'm sure Meg, you've experienced people thinking that you can't do math or you're not a science person, you know? So it's just, we have to get all of those things out of the way we think, out of the

way we hire. Maybe some sort of, you know, anti-bias training is necessary. I don't know. It's a tough thing to have to combat. How do you think the sort of shrinking percentage of professional players who are Black, how do you think that that interacts with the managerial question? Because I think you're right that if we open our understanding of who can be a manager beyond some of our sort of traditional assumptions about it, that we would see a lot more qualified candidates.

And I think that a lot of teams will probably still default to former players being their preferred sort of proving ground for managers. So how do those sort of dynamics interact with one another, do you think? When I was talking to former players for this piece, a thing that they brought up is they don't feel free to speak on things. So they never felt comfortable enough to say this is a problem because they fear for their jobs. Or if they get a job with a team, they don't feel comfortable speaking out on things like this or trying to affect change because they'll be pushed out. So that's one of the most harmful things there is right now is if I point out a problem and I say this is wrong,

but I have ways to change it, no one wants to hear it. Well, we're going to be stuck in the cycle forever if no one wants to hear it, if we're only putting on this show for the outside that we're trying. So when they leave, they leave. They don't want to come back. They don't want to manage. They don't want to coach.

They don't want to be in this environment that they felt was toxic for so long. I think for most players, they would stick around. I think we have this wave right now, particularly of African-American players who are kind of like, they're on the fringe of the sport. They may not be, you know, active in the league, but they're doing things. You have the Players Alliance. You have guys on TV now. You know, they're doing these little mini tours. And a lot of former players are golfing. Have we noticed that?

We have CeCe and Dontrell and, you know, I know Mookie golfs. And there's a lot of that happening. So maybe there's some movement on their end. But when they leave now, they don't want to come back because the environment doesn't welcome them. It sees them as labor. It sees them as money. And that's it. of black catchers in recent decades. And as you noted in your piece, that plays into the makeup of managers too, because so many managers tend to be pulled from the ranks of former catchers. So how significant an issue do you think that is?

It's huge. It's huge. Not only that, I think the lack of catchers also affects the number of pitchers because there's usually a cultural relationship between a pitcher and his catcher, right? So I think, I mean, it's just a big snowball of how do we get white supremacy out of the way? Like just so, so many things.

The catcher thing is huge. Catchers are the, were the main pipeline for managers. They're considered to be, you know, the person who sets the pace of the game, not the pitcher. They're the person who does the thinking and the strategizing. And so it makes sense that you will want catchers to kind of follow that pipeline. But when, you know, a group or groups of people are excluded, you start to see, you know, years down the line, the effect of that, the effect of shifting players from the infield to the outfield, the effect of, you know, scouts using cultural

biases in their reports. Like what we are seeing now isn't a thing that just occurred. This took years and years of building, and it's definitely going to take years and years to tear down. How successful do you think some of the league's interventions into sort of reinforcing the pipeline have been? I know Tyrone Brooks does really great work for them. You quote him in this piece about trying to foster a new generation of MLB bench coaches who might be sort of set up to be natural candidates to assume a managerial vacancy. Are there particular programs that they have tried to institute that you think have been more successful than others? Are there any lessons that we can learn from some of their successes and maybe even some of their failures? I think right now with their diversity initiatives,

their diversity initiatives, it's too soon to tell. Like, I would say anything they did prior to 2020, it's obvious it didn't work. Right. So so right now with all these new things, I think we won't we won't really see any sort of change or, you know, results from them for maybe five to ten years. I'm hoping it's sooner, obviously, but like, you know, they're putting people in position, but it's a matter of what happens after

that. Are you setting them up for success? Are you giving them the tools they need? Are we building confidence or are we just putting people out there and saying, hey, go do this job and do it well, because if not, the entire balance of your culture and the sport depends on it. It's just so much. I'm hoping to see some things. I'm liking what I'm seeing as far as a lot of the changes in the scouting program. I know people personally who have been applying and actually hearing back. So that's good. You know, before people would say they applied, they didn't hear anything. People send jobs to me and say, hey, if you know someone, put the word out or whatever. So I think the expansion of the network will

ultimately, hopefully, lead to the expansion of those pipelines. You alluded earlier to some changes that MLB made to the C-Leg rule in a memo that was sent to Teams last October, which must have been right around the time that you were publishing this piece. What were those changes? And do you think those will actually help? Well, so I actually reported on this piece in August. So that was why I wondered if maybe my line of questions, like if my line of questions might've, you know, inspired some conversation. I mean, I'm not so vain that I'm like, yeah, this is totally me, but I'm, I'm a little hopeful. And I know that now I believe the new requirements involve leadership positions, which is huge. I'm pulling up the chain so I can make sure that I don't misquote anything.

Oh, yeah. Internal promotion. They have to provide the Office of the Commissioner a succession plan. That's a big deal. Because now you can't just give a job to someone. That was a thing before. I know this person. I'm going to put this person in this job until I leave so then they can take my job. Like, big problem with that. Big problem with that. And then having to notify the commissioner's office of internal promotions and why they're not conducting interviews,

of internal promotions and why they're not conducting interviews. I think if that is actually done and it can't be skirted around hearing the reasons, having to provide a reason why will maybe stop a lot of the circumventing of the rule because you have to explain yourself. I don't think you really had to before. I think accountability is huge. And if the new, what it looks like for me, I would say the changes to the rule seem to be offering a little bit of accountability now. Like you have to let us know what you're doing with this. I think there was a lot of hiring that wasn't exactly a, you know, a central office thing.

Each team does their own thing and then they report back. Right. I think, you know, you want to strike the balance here because you want, you know, if there's never a public posting for a job, then there might be plenty of qualified candidates who would have otherwise applied and just don't because they don't know that the opportunity exists. But we also don't want to create the situation that we had for years where folks are going through this process and feel like they are being used just to check a box so that, you know, a previously identified internal promotion can, you know, can take that role. So there is a sort of a balance to be struck here, but yeah, I agree with you. I think it's, it's encouraging to see that an explanation is required. And hopefully that means that at some point, if those explanations are wanting, hopefully

you get to the point where the club says, oh, we don't actually have a good reason for not having posted this job. We should probably go do that before we promote this person internally, right? And have that accountability happen before the hire is made so that you don't have to wait another hiring cycle for another job to open before you're considering a diverse qualified field, right? Absolutely. I think looking at why we do things will make us all pause. You know, like if you have to explain, it's like when you did something and your parents, instead of immediately yelling at you, ask you, why did you do the thing?

And in that moment, you pause and your internal narration is probably like, why did I do that? What was I thinking? And I'm hoping that that's the case here. When some executive has to sit down and explain the email, text message, whatever, why we're not advertising this job, why we're not hiring external candidates that they're like, oh, actually, this is terrible. I don't have a good reason for this. My motivation is purely selfish and I should consider something else. And truthfully, if nothing else, if everyone wants to harp on, I'm hiring the best candidate for the job, you can't know

that the best candidate was right under your nose. You just can't. Right. Is there anything MLB can learn from other leagues, which may have different demographics in their player pools, if we're talking about the NBA or the NFL, for instance, but there are those yearly report cards that the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport does. And generally, baseball does not do so well in those report cards. It's improved in some respects in recent years, but still a lot of C's and D's and F's in some categories there for diverse hiring. And some other leagues have maybe been a little bit better. Not that there aren't problems there, too. So I don't know if there are any programs or policies that have worked better. I mean, obviously, in the NFL, you have kind of the C-League rule equivalent of the Rooney rule, right? Like the WNBA is the most progressive league in

America. Like they are, at least to my knowledge, they seem to have a player empowerment thing happening and nothing happens without the buy-in of the players. And I appreciate that. Obviously, I like it a lot because it's women and non-binary players. I think a lot could be learned from them. They don't have as much money and as much power, and yet they have so much impact. I think second to them would probably be the NBA. They definitely have had some issues over the years, particularly with ownership, if we all remember what happened with the Clippers. But they also seem to be doing a lot better than the NFL and MLB as far as diversity, or at least the way it looks on the outside. And again, player empowerment, big deal. When the players are involved and the players get to speak their minds and the players

feel like they're heard and they get to have a good time playing their sport, I think progress can happen. I think MLB can model some of those things, even in small ways. Like, you know, maybe let's not be so stiff. Let's not stifle. Let's not have employees who are afraid to speak out for what they believe in because they don't think they'll ever get a job again. Yeah. We started off this segment talking about managers. Do you think the problem, the underrepresentation is more or less acute or problematic at the top of baseball operations departments where things definitely don't seem to be significantly more diverse. But I wonder just now, because of the power structure in modern

front offices where field personnel are usually pretty clearly subordinate to the GM or to whatever the title of the baseball ops decision maker is, and you have to think that probably the people in those jobs who are hiring the managers have some tendency to hire people who look like them or have similar backgrounds, at least in some cases. So do you see that as being not necessarily an easier avenue to change things, but maybe a more effective one, just in the sense that those people have hiring authority that managers at this stage don't? Oh, absolutely. It definitely should start at the top. But I think one of the issues with diversity is that people look at diversity surface level,

right? What do you look like? What are your identities? But we don't consider diversity of thought. And particularly in hiring, I actually worked on an HR team in a previous job. And one of the things that really stood out for me is there was always this question of, does this person fit in? Does this person fit our culture? And to take it a step further, I think in hiring in any job, you look for the person that fits the status quo as opposed to the person who might be a little different, who might think a little different. So we need not just diversity of identities. We need diversity of thought, diversity of ideas. You know, like you and I may think completely differently, but I'm sure we can meet in the middle and compromise and come up with some brilliant things. But if you and I think

exactly the same, then we're not getting anywhere because we have the same goal. Like it's just, to me, it feels like you're treading sand. If you're constantly hiring the same people from the same background, from the same thought, you know, factory and whatever. I think, I think all of that has to change. And it does start at the top because when the values at the top change, they do, they will change below. Right. Particularly in a moment where, as you noted, like the sport has some pretty glaring cultural deficits that it needs to address, right. To make it feel more respectful and welcoming to all the different kinds of people who are engaged with baseball, whether they're on the field or in the front office. Like we have work to do, so why would we reinforce that culture at every possible high?

We can use this as an impetus to not only sort of live up to the social ideal of the institution, as Selig said, but to advance the sport and make it better. Like it's, it's doesn't serve us to have it be stagnant. Right. So this was one of many projects that you were involved with last year. And I think before we let you go, Ben and I wanted to ask you about one of your upcoming projects, which is the ballpark Figure Series that you are doing with Saber. So this is going to be a monthly virtual event. And can you take us through sort of the origin of this and the kinds of programs that you're going to be doing in the next couple of months? Yeah, first, I'm super excited about this. I was like smiling ridiculously the entire time you were describing it. Saber, it wasn't my idea. It was

Saber's idea, like, hey, we want to do these monthly programs. What do you think? And initially, I was like, yes, but I wanted to take a day and think about it. Like, wait a minute. I'm too eager to say yes. Maybe I'm missing some, you know, downside, but I couldn't find any. So I enthusiastically jumped in. And what I'll be doing is once a month, first Thursday of every month, right now it's at 8 p.m. Eastern, depending on how people like that or not. We may, you know, change it up or, but right now we're sticking with 8 Eastern. And my goal is to just have a guest monthly to talk about not necessarily hot topics, depending on if something fits, it fits, but to cover the topics of the research committees

of Saber. So February's guest is Coach Roger Cator of Southern University. I think, well, February's Black History Month, so he was perfect, but also college baseball. I think interest is starting to grow in it. Many of us who weren't previously are paying a little more attention to it. I think HBCUs are a hot topic right now, so why not? If we're already always going to talk about diversity, he's our guy. He actually was on a committee with MLB as far as diversity goes. So I think Coach Cato is an amazing first guest. I'm super excited because he's such a legend, but I'm also really pumped about, I can't say who's coming out, almost did, they would kill me.

But like, I'm also really pumped about the people that I've been asking. All the guests are people I've personally asked. This isn't someone from Saber doing the work and I'm just a face. I'm actually hitting up people and thinking of topics and reading the research committee stuff and seeing what's interesting. I really want it to be fun. I find so much of baseball programming for all of our efforts to be kind of dull. So I really want it to be fun. I find so much of baseball programming for all of our efforts to be kind of dull.

So I really want it to be fun. I'm gonna ask people if they wanna submit questions in advance, you know, not only because it takes the pressure off of me to have to ask interesting things for an hour, but you know, then I know what people want to know from the guests. I'm just really excited about it. I get to ask questions that

I would want to ask anyway. I get to talk to interesting people. And believe it or not, Ballpark Figures, I came up with the name. I was just sitting around one day, I asked some girlfriends for some names and they came up with stuff. They really liked The Shift. But for some reason, The Shift wasn't sitting right with me and it kind of reminded me of like one of those like cop shows so I'm like oh I don't think I want to do that and I was sitting on the couch and I'm like oh ballpark figures duh like this is you know it's a nice double entendre people you see at the ballpark but also in case we get into some numbers here and there.

Yep. Just really pumped about the whole thing. Maybe I'll ask you all to be on. Who's to say? All right. Well, the first of those will be on Thursday, February 3rd, and then they will follow on the first Thursday of every month. And we will link on our show page to where you can find those. And you can find Shakia's website at highshakia.com.

She's on Twitter at Curly Fro and on Instagram at a little bit of dope. Thank you as always, Shakia. It's a pleasure. Thank you. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. And thanks to all of our guests.

Really appreciate AJ coming on. I felt bad about having someone on to talk about how, historically speaking, the deck is sort of stacked against them. Would probably be better to address those questions to someone who's responsible for creating that situation. But it's hard to pick one person who's to blame for there not being black catchers in the big leagues. And I'm glad he was willing to come on and share his experience and perspective. And at least he wasn't on the episode last week when we talked about the Rockies player development problems. But there's been a lot of great writing about the Black Catcher problem. In addition to the piece by Rob, check out the show page for links to great articles by Claire Smith at The Undefeated, Jared Diamond at The Wall Street Journal. There's a good Washington Post piece about Ian Mahler and a Howard Bryant piece about Bruce Maxwell. We were hoping to have Howard on today for that segment, but unfortunately some of his other work got in the way. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed this episode and this whole Measuring the Unmeasurable series. Obviously the latest and greatest research, especially into areas that have not been fully

delved into before, is always an interest of ours here at Effectively Wild. So you can expect that kind of coverage here, even when we're not devoting an official miniseries to it. And also congrats to Patrick Brennan, one of our guests last week. He wrote that piece about player development that we had him on to discuss, and he has already landed a job in baseball. He announced this week that he's accepted a position with the Phillies as an associate baseball operations analyst. So you come on Effectively Wild, you get a job in baseball. It's the Effectively Wild podcast bump. No, not really. I think that was already in the works when he talked to us. But hey, it can't hurt. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. 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 stay ad-free. Andy, Shane Updike, Jadicus Ryan, Michael Tatlock, and Farhan Arif. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to an exclusive Effectively Wild Discord group and monthly bonus podcasts where Meg and I talk a little bit about baseball, but mostly about other topics. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and all other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangrass.com

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