Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1799: Miller’s Crossing

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reconnect with former cohost Sam Miller to discuss what he’s been up to since he stopped working for ESPN in December 2020, how the 2021 Giants rekindled his fandom, the pros and cons of paying attention to projections, what (if anything) he’s missed about covering baseball professionally, his plans for […]

Have you found the secret door? To let you down to the earth's deep core? You'll be back in time for tea With a diamond to show me Come, run, jump, skip along, Sam A very happy man I am To know you well and you're doing fine Kinda puts a rest my mind

Sammy! Hello and welcome to episode 1799 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Faircrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are both happy to be joined for the first time in about 13 and a half months, I believe, by long-lost and much-missed co-host Sam Miller, no longer of ESPN. We have waited a while to say this, but welcome back, Sam. Okay, but I mean, we should just be clear, also for the last time in more than 13 and a half

months let's not be too happy let's let's just be clear you're just gonna lay it off out there in the first few seconds i'm a guest i'm a guest yes you are a guest today you're raising people's hopes and dashing people's dreams in the same sentence. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the whole thing. I'm sorry about how I handled that. I'm sorry about it all. All right. Well, we are back in the swing of things already, clearly. On the Pressbox podcast at The Ringer, the hosts have this long-running gag about the overly dramatic headline construction that says somebody broke their silence about something. And in most cases,

the person hasn't actually stayed silent up until then. But I guess we can say that Sam is breaking his silence today from a public perspective. And it would also not be a stretch to say that the Effectively Wild audience has been hoping to hear from him in one way or another. I mean, Meg, would you agree that we have gotten a few questions about Sam over the past year plus, you know, just from time to time? Yeah, we get emails. We get rampant speculation in the Facebook group. Yes. I think I've received a carrier pigeon or two.

Yes, there have been a lot of people speculating about contract terms and non-competes and other intimate details of Sam's professional and personal life. Anyway, understandably, some readers and listeners have been wondering, where is Sam? How is Sam? What will Sam do next? Et cetera. And the answer to the first of those questions, at least, is that Sam is here on this podcast today talking to us. So hello, Sam. Long time, no podcast. Yeah. Hello. How have you been? That's what everyone's been wondering. Sorry again. Sorry. Sorry. I've been gone. What have you been up to? How have you been? Yeah, not much. Just living slow. Yeah, not much. To be honest, I didn't really do anything. I spent a lot of time like doing dishes. Doing dishes was a big part of my

life. Yeah. I remember asking you what you were doing at. Doing dishes was a big part of my life. I remember asking you what you were doing at some point, maybe a few months into your sort of ESPN-imposed and partly self-imposed, I suppose, silence. And you said you were doing a lot of dishes, but you weren't sure if that was going to keep you as satisfied and occupied as it had up until that point. It did for a while. Yeah. keep you as satisfied and occupied as it had up until that point? It did for a while. Yeah. I would say that I was doing dishes just a few minutes ago. My heart is a little bit thumping right now. And so in order to kind of calm down a little, I was doing dishes this morning. I find that dishes are really an amazing thing. Anytime someone comes and wants to engage in conversation with me,

almost anything I'm doing, I feel like there's a part of my brain that feels like I've been interrupted because I'm maybe having a conversation with myself. Even if I'm just scrubbing a floor or something, there's this little bitter part of me. It's not the part I'm proud of, but there's a little bitter part of me that's like, ah, you've come and disrupted me. And certainly if you're reading or engaged in a screen, you've all seen that reaction that people give when you go and try to engage with them while they're on a screen.

And dishes are kind of the one thing that I don't feel that at all. I am very easily interrupted and I don't feel any sense that I've been interrupted. I'm happy to be to chat while I'm doing dishes. Our kitchen is right in the middle of our house. There's like all the other rooms kind of connect off it. It kind of feels like I'm in the center of everything and people are floating in and out asking me to do things and it feels really good.

So a couple of months ago, I was talking to someone and they asked me, I was talking about like my future and they said, well, what's your passion? And I said, oh, I didn't know how to answer that. I was sort of scared to answer that. And so I asked like what I said, what's yours? I wanted to get an example of a passion that would fit this person's standards for passion. And he said, cooking. I love to cook for my wife.

I love to just fool around in the kitchen and try new things and all that. And as soon as he said that, I realized that I was free to say that my passion is dishes. So I did a lot of dishes. It was good for my family. Everybody was really grateful that I was there to do the dishes. And so that's a lot of what I did. I didn't, I don't know. I didn't, I don't know.

I don't have a good answer for this. I didn't do much. I was watching baseball. What baseball did you watch? All right. So I did watch baseball. I wasn't sure whether I was going to watch baseball. I didn't know how much of my time I wanted to give to it or what.

And so before the season began, I decided I was going to try to re-engage my fan-ness. I was, as most people know, I grew up a Giants fan and was pretty obsessed with that part of my life. And then around 2010, I started writing about baseball and also the Giants won the World Series. And I've never quite been able to differentiate which one of those it was. But after that, I stopped really caring about the Giants as a team. I didn't really want to watch baseball for pleasure, and I didn't really care what happened to the Giants. And so I decided this year I was going to try again because I had kind of been nervous. I didn't know if those muscles would ever grow back, if I was just done as a fan, if I would never be able to feel what I had felt as a fan before.

So I tried and I decided I wasn't going to watch anything but the Giants. I was just going to process the season as I used to as a Giants fan and everything that mattered to the Giants I would care about, but everything that didn't, I wouldn't care about. And it was amazing. It was like really the most extraordinary experience I've had in baseball, maybe in my life. It's up there with like the Stompers summer, I would say, in terms of just like the height of my emotions, the rawness of my emotions came back. And I was shocked. I mean, I was completely shocked and sort of embarrassed at how sincerely I got really, really, really emotionally into the success of this team. And so that was what I did a lot of.

There's 162 games, and I probably listened to the full equivalent of maybe like 145. I almost missed nothing. I would basically set aside three hours every day and go take a long walk and listen to the Giants play and then, you know, get back and finish the dishes. And I happened to do this during the, you know, I mean, I think maybe the greatest regular season that any team could ever ask for or any fan could ever ask for. Just like an absolutely extraordinary regular season. And I felt just incredibly grateful that I could enjoy it again, that I could be free to listen to it and like be engaged in their success.

I just kept thinking, oh, if I was working right now, I would not care about the giant success. I would actually be rooting against the giant success because I would be that guy who was like, well, they're going to regress to the mean. And I would have probably found it somewhat offensive that they kept on winning. And I certainly wouldn't have like emotionally attached to their winning. And instead I got to do that. And it was incredible. Just, I can't,

I really, honestly, like I'm kind of, this is going to, everybody who is out there probably listens to a baseball to, or follows a baseball team as a fan and thinks that what I'm saying is the most obvious thing in the world. Like,

yes, there's a reason that billions of people cheer for sports teams. But I honestly, like I had forgotten that people actually care about this, that they enthuse. And it's like very real. The feelings that you feel are incredibly real. And so that was a lot of my year. That was the most memorable part of my year

probably was just being a giants fan again yeah you picked the perfect year to become a fan oh my gosh it was incredible it couldn't have worked out better incredible truly i mean the thing that i kept the thing i kept on thinking about after the season was if at any point in this like you know obviously you know going in that they, like, you know, obviously, you know, going in that they're underdogs, you know, that the Dodgers are going to be really tough. And every time the Giants would, you know, give back a game, you'd think, oh no, they'll never recover from that. And if they were ever happened to be behind the Dodgers, you thought that, well, now it's done. There's no way they can catch them.

But you do sort of hold out hope that, well, maybe the Giants will play really well and maybe the Dodgers will play poorly and maybe, you know, miracle will happen and they'll manage to beat them. But if at any point, at any point in the season from day one to, I mean, like literally like maybe the fourth to last day of the season, if at any point you'd said, well, it's going to take 107 wins, the Dodgers are going to win 106, I would have given up entirely. Like even with two weeks left, if you'd said, well, I mean, you know, they got to win 11 of the next 13. I would have said, well, there's no way they're going to win 11 of the next 13.

It all felt impossible in retrospect. And so it was like a really gracious thing that we didn't know that it was going to take 107 wins. I would have quit. I almost quit on day four, I think it was. So the first day of the season, they had a six-run lead on the Mariners. And I was taking my walk, and then I get home and I turn it off. And then I wake up the next day and I see that they have lost, that their bullpen blew a six-run lead. And I thought, well, that's about what I expected from this team. And then they won the next two against the Mariners. And then they go

to San Diego, which is obviously a bigger test, or actually it turned out not to be, it turned out not to be a bigger test, but at the time it felt like a bigger test. So they go to San Diego and they blow the first game, the bullpen blows that game too. And it's Matt Wiesler. And I thought, ah, this is, this is about right. You know, 500 team with Matt Wiesler blowing half the games. And then the next day, they have a lead in the ninth. We were kind of on a little hiking vacation. parking lot in Ventura County and listening to the game. And I listened to like the first eight innings in the Home Depot parking lot. And then I went back to the hotel and listened to the ninth inning on my headphones. And it was Jake McGee come in to finish it off. And Jake McGee gets into some trouble. And like there's two on and maybe like a one or two run lead and Tatis is on deck or something like that. Some details like that.

And I thought if they blow this, I'm done. I'm not going to invest a year of my life caring about a team that is this mediocre. I will quit. I can't do it. And I realized that I just I have it in me to love the game when they're winning. I'm not totally sure I have it in me to love the game or to love the team when they're losing. But anyway, Jake McGee managed to hold on. And from that point on, the season was almost perfect.

They were a flawless team in every way. It was incredible. Yeah. You make it sound as if you went hiking at the Home Depot. But that was not the destination. No, no. Somewhere along the way. We had actually gotten weathered out of our hike.

We had plans to take a boat out to the Channel Islands, and those are these things that are way out in the ocean, and then it was too windy. And so all of our boats for the week got canceled, and so then we got stuck in Ventura with no boat. Anyway. Then we got stuck in Ventura with no boat. Anyway.

I'm curious when in the evolution of the home broadcast, the team started to realize like, oh, we're doing a thing. Because on the one hand, I think that most teams are, like team broadcasts are on some level kind of clear-eyed about the quality of the team that they are covering but also you know they work for the team and they're trying to get people enthusiastic about it and you know I think it's appropriate for them to go into the season being like well they haven't lost yet so let's assume they'll just win because why not do that and enjoy baseball but also you know this was this was quite a surprise to a lot of people like the Giants

dramatically outperformed their projections. And so I wonder when in the season the home broadcast started being like, we're we're going to do anything over here. We're maybe like observing a good baseball team. When when did that start for them? That's a little bit of a complicated question that I might get. I'll answer in a little bit of a complicated question that i might get i'll answer in a little bit of a roundabout way but another part of the giant season that was really emotionally satisfying

and and just kind of poignant was that like they have this great home broadcast crew of crook and and john miller and dave fleming and they all work so well together and the chemistry is incredible and they're all individually quite talented. And they've been together for I mean, Fleming was like, in his mid 20s, I think when he started maybe even younger. And so they've been together like 20 years. And Kruko has had a lot of health limitations over the last few years. And so he's kind of limited how many games he does. And then Kuyper had a really significant health crisis this year. And so he was very limited.

And so instead of having the two-man crew on each side, most of the year, it would just be one of them, one of John and Dave on each broadcast. And so they did not have a lot of that two-person conversation. And so you didn't have a lot of that two person conversation. And so you didn't hear a lot of the sort of, sometimes I think of those broadcasts as basically being a podcast, a baseball podcast where they're talking to each other for three plus hours and they're describing what's happening, but also they're chatting about various things. And there just wasn't that much chatting. And so in that sense, there wasn't quite the same amount of reflection on what was happening that you might expect. But I think each of them was a little bit different. Kruko, I remember maybe around like May or June, I heard him talking about how this team had convinced him that he just had been wrong about them at the beginning of the season. He, he described it as, uh, comparing it to the 2016 team, which was the

best team in baseball for the first half and then completely collapsed in the second half and barely snuck in as a wild card. And he said with that team, you thought, how are they doing this? And it wasn't that much of a shock when they, when they collapsed. And he said with this team, it wasn't a shock when they did it every day. It really felt like this is what this team should be doing, given the sort of the depth that they had and the way that, you know, every person who came in the game, for the most part, you thought, oh, yeah, he's good, too. You didn't feel like there were a lot of weak spots. I mean, obviously, there were some star performances that you didn't really

buy all the way through or that you had to kind of learn to accept throughout the season, like, you know, Brandon Crawford and Buster Posey in some sense, just because of the age and Kevin Gosman, just because of how incredible he was. And then, you know, sure enough, Gosman quits being that. And suddenly it's Logan Webb who's doing that. And I don't think, I didn't believe in Logan Webb until the playoffs. Basically, like all through September, I thought, I just can't accept this. So I think there's different ways of, some days you feel like they're impossibly good. And some days you think, well, this is impossible.

But anyway, to answer your question, June. Okay. I don't doubt that you enjoyed that season much more than you would have otherwise because of the way you were following it. But it's interesting that you say that you're afraid that you would have hated it if you had been following it or covering it professionally. Because I feel like Dodgers fans aside, the Giants were fun for everyone. I mean, they were one of the best stories of the

season I think and that initial hey you're breaking my math how are you doing this kind of like personal affront because your record estimators are not working so well didn't apply as much to the Giants as to say the Mariners for instance who exceeded all of their underlying numbers by, I don't know, 14, 15, 16 games, whereas the Giants seemed to deserve their wins all along, which was itself very strange and unexpected and seemed like some sort of tightrope act that couldn't continue all season until it did. But I think because they were actually just such a good team, even though that was extremely surprising, I never felt like, oh, they're a fraud, like they're making a mockery of the predictive models and I must be insulted on Sabermatrix behalf or something. It was more like, I don't know how this is happening exactly, but they deserve it. And so it's a ton of fun. Yeah, I think, I mean, I wouldn't have been, offended is an exaggeration for sure, but it's a little different if you're in my position

because most of the people I know who are in my life who have any engagement with baseball are Giants fans. And so I would have been asked a lot about this and I would have had to keep on answering and I would have probably, I mean, I don't know. What do you think is the latest in the season that either of you said? Well, it's unlikely they'll be able to keep up with the Dodgers

or some reference. I mean, I read pieces in September that were still saying that from writers that I respect, and I probably would have at least had been having conversations as well. I mean, I wouldn't look. I would have found a way to enjoy it as a content producers as writers or talkers is we have a sense of where the the good stuff is where the good content is right and then we it just naturally becomes the thing that we like that we like we tell ourselves that we're enjoying this but it's you know it's not the same thing it's it's like kind of artificial i wouldn't if if i had been having a

blast with the giants as things to talk about and write about and then they had blown it in the last two weeks i would have had like no negative emotions about that it would have all been uh from a a definite reserve a place of reserve yeah and you know i could it's conceivable that i would have enjoyed the collapse just as much. You know what I mean? I remember in mid-June, I guess around the time you're saying maybe the tone on the Giants broadcast started to change, we had Grant Brisby on one of the times we had him on last year to try to explain the Giants. And at that time, I think we were acknowledging that they were probably better than we all had thought, but it was more of a, well, can they

hold on basically? Because they'd built up a bit of a, well, can they hold on, basically, because they'd built up a bit of a lead. I mean, they never had a huge lead at that point, so it was more like, can they be a wildcard team, or have they built up enough of a banked win stockpile here that they can be bad for the rest of the season and still make the playoffs? And then by the time we had Grant and Eric Steven on again

at the beginning of September to talk about that huge Giants-Dodgers series, I think at that point we had come around to it actually being a good team. Although if I had to put myself back in that mindset, I probably would have still picked the Dodgers at that point to win the division. I remember thinking in, I think I want to say it was like late April. Oh, well, now I can see it actually. It is the Philly series in mid-April. They were, they entered that series nine and six. They won two out of three. And the third loss was like, just basically they very easily could have won it. It was like a coin flip.

They had this, if I remember this right, they had this great comeback. They had this huge hit. Darren Ruff. comeback they had this huge hit Darren Ruff yeah here it is Darren Ruff had a three run pinch hit home run to tie the game in the seventh and then uh they lost when Bryce Harper homered or something I don't remember something something happened but they could have won that game too and just at that point like they were 12 and they were 12 and 11 and seven at the end of that series. And I already thought, oh, this team is special. And so, of course, you wise people, you know, like you can tell that that is not true. That like a fan who sees their mediocre team jump out to an 11 and seven start does not have his finger on the pulse of reality but enough about the

mariners but when you well i mean the yeah the mariners similarly like they probably you know a fan might have been optimistic about them in april and then you know it turns out oh they were right they were right to be optimistic were they really no like they the everything that happened between april and september was probably the less likely outcome but when you're in the situation when right to be optimistic. Were they really? No. Everything that happened between April and September was probably the less likely outcome. But when you're in the situation, when you're kind of emotionally invested in it, I don't know, you accept it pretty early. I think you accept it a lot earlier than you need to, because why not? What's the point of being cynical about the team that you want to see win? Right. I'm sure that there are notable exceptions to this, but I think that most people who

view baseball through an analytics lens, it's less that they're offended by teams that overperform. I think they get fussy about, I'll just speak for myself, people not understanding what projections are really saying or for or like that we can note that a collapse might be imminent but that doesn't mean we're saying you can't enjoy things along the way although i guess if you're a fan that's probably a distinction without much of a difference but yeah it was this was a year that presented a lot of opportunities for people to like try to dunk on projections or play off odds and i was like, I'm simply begging you to read our explainer about this, please. I'm simply engaged in begging.

I have DMs of me dunking on playoff odds, just to be clear. I was, remember Eric Hartman? Yeah. Long time listener. Yeah, he and I were talking before the season began about what annoyed us about playoff odds, team playoff odds. And I've had a longtime issue with one particular aspect of how they work. And so he and I were, you know, back and forth about how annoyed we were by playoff odds. And so then come, oh, here it is, October 3rd.

I just sent him a note that said, playoff odds, shake my hand. And he said, how long have you been sitting on that one? So I appreciate that people do kind of, when it's, I don't know, like we got to talk, you know, writers and podcasters, they got to say things. Right. podcasters they got to say things right but there is really like when so somewhere between like the the national writer who's talking about baseball from an objective third party perspective and then the fan who is just experiencing it and and enjoying it there is like a feeling of like why are you saying this like what why are you who cares? Like, what, why are you, who cares? What, who cares?

Why, why do you have to come in and say this? And of course the reason that they have to come in and say it is that it's their job and that they're fans of 29 other teams and that people like this conversation and, um, you know, sorry that it bumped into your ears. But I, I was annoyed at times by people telling me that the Giants were going to regress. I mean, I'm not dumb. I know that they are. But they didn't.

Yeah, I can see how that would be frustrating. I think the only aspect of it on the other side that sort of frustrates me is if fans will not acknowledge that a team is winning in kind of a weird way or a fluky way, which is not to say a less fun way. It might be a more fun way. The Mariners doing what they did last year was extremely fun, I think. And the more improbable it was, in a way, the more I enjoyed it, which I guess was partly because it's the Mariners and how can you not root for the Mariners to make the playoffs after all this time? But also I think when you can quantify how unlikely it seems to be or that they're doing something that's never been done before,

that makes me enjoy it more. I mean, I don't have a stake in personal predictions. I'm not wagering on these things, and it's not like part of my professional reputation is that I'm some soothsayer who everyone trusts to pick who's going to win the division or whatever. So I don't really particularly care if someone wins or doesn't win. I just kind of like the good story. And sometimes the good story could be someone who's playing way over their heads. And I guess the only part of it that bothers me, it's maybe an exaggeration even to say that it bothers me,

part of it that bothers me. It's maybe an exaggeration even to say that it bothers me, but if we can't agree, like, hey, this team is doing something that is incredibly clutch and historically speaking, that is probably not super sustainable, which doesn't mean that we can't appreciate it and enjoy it and marvel at it. But just the idea that when you watch that team every day, you just fully buy in on, no, this team is special in a way that no other team ever has been or ever will be. And when they do it, it is, quote unquote, real, right? As opposed to just, well, it's really fun that this is happening. You know, I wouldn't trade this roster for a roster of another team that has the same record, but a better

underlying run differential or whatever, right? Yeah, I think that in fact, what you just said is kind of the kind of goes to the to the divide what you just described what makes a good story, and how you can appreciate an unlikely team when they're a good story. And I think that there's basically two, there's two tracks of baseball fandom. You know, you got your, your fans of a team and what they like about baseball is, or what, what drives their energy, what drives their interest and their energy is self-interest. They have attached themselves emotionally to the success of a team. And if that team does well, then they get rewards.

And so they're self-interested in the outcomes. And I think that's true to that. I think fantasy baseball and gambling are attempts to recreate that. You're saying that you want to be you want to you are actively attaching yourself to the results of this game so that you'll have interest in them. And so, okay, so that's one side, the self-interested side. And then there's the sort of more removed critical kind of way of watching baseball where you're like, oh, well, this is an institution that I

am kind of interested in studying and observing. These are stories. I'm connected to the plot. I'm interested in making sense of what it all means and finding out how things are going to change. And you watch it the same way that maybe you watch other stories, that you read novels or that you want to feel um you know a sort of a sense of of like completion that you have like really mastered this hobby and the first one is self-interested and the second one is much more story focused and like assessing it as a as an entity of like is this producing value for like the sport or for the um you know you know, for the story. And so when you're self-interested, you just don't care if it's a good story at all. It's like, whether there's great drama, doesn't matter. Like you almost don't even need to watch the games. If, if you could extend the feeling of finding out who won over the course of three hours without even watching the game,

it would probably be just as satisfying. You're. You're like watching the thing spin, and then you're finding out if you won. And then when you're in the more removed, like baseball as a bigger thing sense, then you are constantly assessing it for whether the story is good. And in that case, you don't even really care about the outcome necessarily. You just care about the execution of the outcome. And so, so here on this podcast, we were always talking about it from the latter perspective and we're measuring the truth of a thing, or we're measuring the drama of a thing or the fun of a thing or the legacy of the thing or the memories of the thing, or, you know, the, um, metaphor of the thing or, you know, the metaphor of the thing or, you know, the character growth in the thing or what it, you know, raised in us to see Clayton Kershaw in the dugout of the thing. And that's the conversation that we're having. And it's great. It reaches an audience with this shared broad interest. shared broad interest. But then to the fan of the specific team,

all that stuff is just like completely irrelevant. Like it just doesn't matter. It would be like telling someone who's bet $100 on a game what it all meant after a wrap or like what the swings and win probability meant or whatever. They don't care. They don't care if the game turns on a bolt of lightning striking the catcher dead. They just want to win their $100. And so it's just a weird conversation to be on the other side of, basically, where, frankly,

I just did not care what people were writing about the Giants from the more literary perspective. It just meant nothing to me. So anyway, that's all. It's good. It's all good. These are two good tracks for the sport. I just didn I'm about to ask you is not at all, but how much did you find yourself doing the things that you would do when you were covering the sport where you'd watch something and say, I got to go figure out what's going on with that, guys? That was zero. Change up. Did you update your tickler story file one time last year? There was one day all year where I thought I would like to write something about what I'm seeing. One day only. Giants related?

It was in the LCS. It was after the Giants had been eliminated. Someone step on a bat or something? Actually, it might have been early on in the LCS or something like that because people were trying to get me to root against the Dodgers. And I didn't care about the Dodgers. I didn't even really care about the division series. I really cared a great, great deal about the regular season. To me, it felt like someone wins the World Series every year. It doesn't tell you that much, but no one ever loses a division with 106 wins. And to do that to the Dodgers felt like an incredible thing that like would top all things

the Giants could ever do again. So I really, really, really wanted them to win the division. And then when they did, I almost felt like, okay, well, the division series doesn't matter that much to me. Because if I'm going to now say that they have to do more than what I'm basically saying is that the season wasn't enough. And I felt like the season was enough. The season was all I asked from them. series. And I got, you know, I, I followed the division series. I rooted, I, you know, I drove 700 miles to watch it in my friend's living room for game five, because I was emotional enough to do that, but I, I didn't really feel too much hurt when they lost. And, and then I didn't really care at all what happened to the Dodgers, even though as a Giants fan, I'm supposed to hate the Dodgers because I really felt like the season had ended in the regular season. And so that was, I had strong feelings that we, that we, that I, that Giants fans were dishonoring the regular season achievement, the magnitude of it, the historical impact of it, the way we felt, the emotions that we felt on the last day of the season were

so heightened and so strong and unreproducible. And then to immediately then turn to, and now we need more, felt wrong to me. And so I had that sense that I would have maybe liked to have written in the immediate aftermath of that. Anyway, but otherwise, no, I didn't check anybody's change-up spin. I was, in fact, no, I didn't check the, you know, anybody's change up spin. I was in fact, I was the dumb fan. I was constantly like texting my friend like they never get the guy in from third. Why don't they shorten up? And having like dumb conversations about, you know, Brandon Crawford being the MVP.

And just like I remember saying they should leave Lamont Wade off the postseason roster and like just really dumb stuff. So I didn't try to be smart at all is what I'm saying. I didn't try. I just really leaned into the emotions. So with your newfound fan brain, do you believe that the Giants are good, that this is sustainable, that the post-Posey and I guess post-Gossman giants can keep this up or that they have some secret sauce to make players better and that we should all think when a player signs with the Giants now, oh, he's going to get good the way that we have thought that about the Dodgers or the Rays, for instance. So the thing about that question is that that question is asking me to think about the future.

And the other feeling I felt after the season was, oh, no, they're going to do this again. And I didn't know if I had the emotion to do another season, either of them playing well or of them, you know, like inevitably winning 78 games. Well, as of today, they might not do it again. We still don't know for sure that they will. I really, this is not, I know that I am alone in this, but if they're ever going to have a lockout that lasts forever, I would like it to be now. This would be a great time for them to end baseball, in my opinion.

I'm not saying that I prefer that necessarily to the alternative, but look, the glass is already broken. The league is going to end at some point might as well be now like it we're we're going to have to deal with the loss of baseball at some point in our life and death and so you might as well just might as well do it now uh so that i don't have to cope with the emotions of watching the giants come up you know either a little short or much much much, much, much, much more short. Go out on a high note for you personally. Go out on a high note. Yeah.

I mean, it all was perfect. And so, yeah. Anyway, I have found myself, though, walking over the last couple of weeks and having these moments where I think, oh, I wish there was a game on instead of this dumb podcast. Not this specific dumb podcast, but the dumb podcast that I'm listening to in that moment. So anyway, so I have not engaged a lot with the question of whether the giants are going to be good i don't know i mean it this is what three three years in a row that the giant that that farhan has managed to find a bunch of really good players off the scrap heap i don't know if i believe that they're making players reliably better and they've had some whiffs too but it

seems like they were genuinely really good last year that those were good players up and down the roster and they didn't you know they didn't follow the traditional path to get there or anything like that so i'm not i don't feel any urge to diminish them. You're wanting to get me to say that they're bad. I don't want to do that. No, I don't want them to be bad, I don't think. But I guess we could probably look at some projection somewhere, but you don't want to do that anymore.

Yeah, it's basically the same team next year, except without Buster Posey and without Gosman. And otherwise, it's mostly the same. So I don't know. I did have one of my uncles kept asking me if like, if they don't make it this year, does this all mean good things for next year? Which is I found interesting. It's interesting how everybody kind of copes with uncertainty in different ways. And that was his way of dealing with it. But I didn't really tell him, oh, yeah, this is a powerhouse. This team is going to be amazing forever because they probably won't. because they probably won't. But on the other hand, like a bunch of players who, you know, broke out this year

or in the last couple of years are still young or still, you know, going to be on the team for a considerable amount of time. The bullpen's all going to be the same. And Logan Webb's, you know, basically like, you know, was practically a rookie this year.

And Lamont Wade Jr. was, you know, practically a rookie this year and in terms of of service time. And Darren Ruff's around. I'm not saying that those guys are superstars. I'm saying that a bunch of good stuff happened that is not the 2013 Red Sox where they all immediately hit free agency. Right.

Did any roster favorites emerge for you? I mean, you only really watched the Giants, but was there anyone where you were like, I get to watch Lamont Wade today? What a good day to watch Lamont Wade. Oh my goodness, all of them. Every single one of them at some point. And then at other points, they'd come up

and you just could hardly kick the ground hard enough at how frustrated you were that they were the ones coming up with the runner on second and two outs. But, but yeah, let me, I'm just glancing at this roster right now and enjoying the memories. Uh, I, I would say that I, I mean, oh, oh, all of them, every one of them, This is such a special team. Wow. Everyone but Matt Weasler, who I think I pronounced Weasler earlier. I'm still undecided. Any votes?

It's Whistler. Whistler. Whistler. Yeah. Not Weasler. You know how you can remember, if you care to remember? Yeah.

If there was onomatopoeia for your pitch face and your name, he would have it. He has the whistler face? He looks like he's whistling when he gets to the end of his delivery. That's how I remember because he literally looks like he's about to do a whistle. I'm an awkward whistler. I'm a bad whistler. You you have a whistling face i just look and sound like a dope so um yeah you know i'm envious of those who can whistle with any kind of musicality and i don't to be clear know if he can do that but anyway that's some stuff about whistling all right i will say that i if i had to do a top like 10 the brandon belt captain game uh was incredible do you guys know the brandon belt game? Was that a big thing?

Refresh my memory. They had kind of hit like a mini scuffle, a mini slump. They, I don't know, like had lost two in a row or something. And so Brandon Belt fashioned a crude C out of electric tape on his jersey. Yes. And then went out and, you know, like hit seven home runs. So the Brandon Belt captain game was incredible. So I'll love Brandon Belt forever. The back-to-back, there was a series in Oakland in August

when I think it went Lamont Wade first and then Donovan Solano second. But in back-to-back games, they each had incredible late home runs and both of them seemed impossible. And the Solano one especially seemed impossible. So I would say that I love Lamont Wade Jr. and Donovan Solano. Steven Duggar for a month was the best player that they had on the team at any point in the year and just a month. But Steven Duggar is a, is definitely going to be a favorite. Oh my gosh. Mike Talkman had the worst year and he had two of the biggest games,

two of the biggest moments of the season where he hit a walk-off. I think he had a walk-off grand slam or no as an extra inning grand slam when nobody on the giants was worse at any point in the year than mike talkman at that point he was completely hopeless he'd gone like two for 50 something he was striking out in two thirds of his bats it was so painful and he gets behind oh two in an extra inning game and they try to throw him a fastball inside and he hits a grand slam and then he robbed a home run like a what would have been i think a walk-off home run. So Mike Tauchman, and then they released him. It was so sad. He's a favorite. Gossman, oh my gosh. The first half, nobody better. The second half, worst baseball I've ever seen. He was

the worst pitcher in baseball for like a good six weeks. He was the worst pitcher in baseball. And they managed to win like 60% of the games he started during that stretch anyway and then he figured it out at the end and it was so exciting that was maybe the most exciting development in the whole season was when all of a sudden out of nowhere gossman splitter came back and it just was back and it was incredible so he's a favorite and then like the whole bullpen the bullpen was constant and great. Oh, I love this team. And you said you were consuming the season primarily through the lens of the Giants. So what was your awareness of or interest in other stories? Like, I don't know,

Shohei Otani or foreign substances or whatever the big storylines of the season were? Hardly any. I looked at the Cy Young voting in the American League, and I was able to recognize one good season that I had been aware of. I did not know Robbie Ray had been good up to that point. And so really almost nothing in the American League. And then teams come in and you hear all their stories when they come in. And so I knew most of what had happened in the National League. Got it. And then Sticky Substances was a big deal because it came... It affected the Giants.

I mean, right. It came like 80... And the Dodgers. Yeah, it came like eight minutes before Kevin Gosman lost his splitter. And I don't know if they had anything to do with each other, but it made you think, well, that's not coming back. Like it made you feel really scared that that was that. So I guess we should talk a

little bit about you before we finish i mean we talked about the dishes which is i guess the most important thing but did sam enjoy the giant season was not the number one question we got i'm sure there were some people who are wondering that but also about how you handled that year away from working or at least baseball work and what you plan to do next. And I, like you, have also been through the experience of losing a job at ESPN. And like you, I guess I didn't really take it all that personally. I mean, it sounds like you didn't take it all that personally because you're part of this enormous corporation and it's not like they were evaluating you and deciding you weren't

worthy. I mean, when Grantland ended, I don't think it was because my articles were not good enough. And when you and a lot of other people at ESPN got laid off, it was because of all sorts of major market forces and pandemics and what have you. So you said at the time, you're not taking it personally, but what were you thinking then? I mean, you were under contract for a while, clearly, as I was when Grantland ended. So that kind of took away the immediate pressure of how am I going to make a living now? But what did you feel? Were you sad? Were you relieved on some level? Yeah. I mean, you're always relieved on some level because every job has got these very specific acute stresses that you can't get away from and you think oh if

only i could uh leave this then all the stress would go away and of course every job has those and so then you eventually realize that um you know that that didn't solve anything but at the moment you're thinking oh, the thing that's due Tuesday, I don't even have to do it, which is how fast it came. Like, I mean, truly, like, this is, again, like, going to sound, like, really obvious. But if you're going to lose a job, losing your job two weeks after they renew your contract is incredible because not only not only do you then get the year off but you leave having just gotten affirmation from them that they want to like they like you and you how often do you end up leaving a job where you don't feel like you had done something

wrong and that you know like you would you had to leave because you had failed in some way. That was almost the only day of the experience at ESPN that there wasn't some part of me that was worrying that I was failing because I had just gotten my contract renewed. They had just affirmed me. And so that in some ways was really great. And then of course, I't, you know, I got the year off and I didn't feel too stressed about it. I was, I sort of had a preliminary stress that, that when the year ended, I was going to feel a great deal of stress. And so I had to turn my brain off. It took a little while to turn that part of my brain off. And then mostly I enjoyed it. I had, you know, one of the listeners of this podcast named Andrew had reached out to me a couple times in the course of, you know, recording this podcast. And he had given me great encouragement in my life in his own way in the past. And so he reached out that day just to, you know, say sorry about it. And he hoped things would go well and we started talking and it turned out that he had basically he was coming to the end of almost an exactly identical scenario where uh he had

had gotten basically a year where uh he was under contract and couldn't work and had to think about what he was going to do and he had changed careers which i had been thinking about doing and he had gone through the stress of like kind of adjusting one's identity around a new career. And just reading his, you know, his email that day was very encouraging. And then I talked to Andrew like a lot throughout the year. And in some ways, I considered him to be like the defining text of my year is just like his emails telling me like, okay, here's what's going to happen next. Here's what you're going to do next. And here's how you're going to feel. So I was really lucky to have that. And anyway, I forget exactly what the question was, but yeah, I don't know. I, you know, there are other things that I had, you know, that I have thought I would

like to do with my life. And over the past several years, there have been times where I've thought, well, someday ESPN will tell me when it's time to go pursue those things. And so it felt like they did. It felt like they said, okay, Sam, you're done now. Here, go do those other things. And so I spent a year basically being able to think really hard about whether those other things were actually what I wanted to do once it became realistic for me to try doing other things, whether I would still want to, whether the fear would overcome me or whether I would feel more at peace as I pursued them. And it turned out I felt more at peace. And so, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen to me, but I think I have a different job in a different in a different field that is probably going to happen

for me in the next couple days. I feel stupid saying that because I think I just jinxed it. And it's going to be embarrassing. It falls through. But I think I'm just going to do something else, basically. And it's not going to be baseball. And it's not going to be writing. And I don't know if that's for a short season or forever, but I'm going to try that. And I guess not doing what you had been doing for a year or more, and it sounds like not missing it much is probably a good indication that maybe it's time to do something else, or at least that it's not a bad idea to pursue something else. Because, you know, if you're forcibly withdrawn from your occupation, and then you find that you don't miss it much, and in some senses, you're happy to be released from it, then yeah, maybe we could all

benefit from a push like that every now and then. Yeah, I've came to that conclusion, what you just said as well. I don't think, look, I don't think that it's all that clear. I think that we do kind of like our habits form us, what we're doing forms our interests. And if I had a deadline to write an article that was due in three days, I think that the adrenaline would kick back in and I would want to do it really well. And I would feel enthusiasm to do the research and to do the writing to make it good. And I would feel the stimulation that comes from having a deadline. And then I would feel the the the warmness of it being completed. And I could very easily get back into it.

Like, I think those emotions would come back to me. But when you're not doing it, you're not getting any of those feedbacks. You're not putting yourself in any of those rhythms and you don't miss it. And so I didn't miss it like at all. Like I said, I didn't ever think like what's missing from my life? Oh, it's, you know, writing about the A.L. Cy Young. And so that was telling.

But I also don't think that it was, you know, like conclusive about anything. I think there's many things that one could do that they would find meaning and happiness in. And I found meaning and happiness doing what I was find a quite similar set of emotions doing something else. Probably will end up being pretty similar how my mind engages with it because it's still my mind doing the engaging. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to give the impression that like, oh, yeah, I was burnt out. I couldn't do another day. It was fun. It was fine. But you're right. I didn't feel like I was continually being thwarted in my quest for self-actualization because I couldn't write about a baseball game.

Right. And this job kind of makes you into a public figure in a weird way. I mean, a small scale way, obviously for people like us, but you have this sort of niche celebrity to the few people who listen or read you. And for some people, I feel like that's a big draw and that's a big incentive and they don't want to lose that and they want more and more. Whereas with you, I've never gotten the impression that that was something you sought out. And if anything, it was something you actively avoided. I mean, I know that you like people saying nice things to you and enjoying your work and paying you compliments, as we all do. But some of the

other things that come with that didn't seem like something that you would be sorry to lose, necessarily. Whereas a lot of people, once they get a taste of the faves or the retweets or whatever they have a hard time letting that go yeah i know i i don't i don't know myself well enough to really answer that question i think it's fine you know me better probably in some ways so i'm just nodding writing is such a funny weird job it's a chore at times. Sometimes it's great. I miss writing and then I go to do it and I'm like, why does anyone do this? Because even when you're in proximity to writing a lot, right? Like you're editing writing a lot and you are engaged with that every day.

It atrophies so fast. The muscle just atrophies so quickly and you can build it back up it's not like you know i don't think that writing operates the same way that like velocity does where like at a certain point it just is only going to trend in one direction you can't get it back but it takes a long time such that you're like wow i i had to stay up until three in the morning to write a gamer that 10 people are going to read because we're publishing it on a Sunday. So just like pick a very specific and recent personal example. So yeah, it's weird. It's a weird exercise. And it's amazing that anyone does it. It's not as amazing that anyone does it. You know, it's not on the scale of like pitching or catching, but it ranks

above other things. You know, it's like, like maybe plumbing. I don't know. I don't know about plumbing. There are some writers who say or act as if, you know, it needs to come out, right? Like it's just this pressure that is pushing on them at all times, and if they don't express those thoughts and those feelings via writing, then they will feel stopped up in some way. And I don't think that applies to all writers. And, of course, you don't have to publish what you're writing necessarily to get that feeling. I mean, I can certainly go a day

and not mind that I'm not writing that day. I think I would get antsy after some time of not doing that just because it's something I do enjoy and get some gratification out of. But I think with some people, it's like, no, I got to write this many words every day. And maybe they have imposed that on themselves to the point that it's become a habit that they feel like they can't go without. And maybe they actually could if they had to for a while, if a company was paying them not to.

But I don't know whether you've felt that at all. It sounds like at least in a baseball sense. And of course, there are many other things that you can write about. And as you said, you can exercise your brain in other ways. I was thinking of this because it's kind of like, I mean, you're at an age where you could be like Albert Pujols or someone, right? You could be walking away from the thing that you have been doing a long time and starting a second career essentially, or I guess it would be more like a third or fourth career or something for you. But a baseball player who's walking away at the same age might be financially set so they don't have to work anymore. And so many of them, it seems like,

have a hard time walking away from the game. And so they try to stay in it one way or another. But as you said, writing isn't necessarily like playing baseball in that you can exercise the same mental muscles doing many other things. I mean, there are few things you can do and get paid for that don't involve writing on some level, or at least thinking in a critical way as you would when you are writing. So it's not quite like you're hanging them up from a playing career where it's hard to get that same adrenaline rush or to exercise those same physical skills. Yeah. I mean, I love writing a good email. I had a really good time this year writing

Christmas cards to people when we would give our little gift bags to our friends and I'd write a little card. And instead of just writing, Merry Christmas, I'd write like a note. And I just felt really proud of the notes. I thought like this is going to this is going to bring this person a little bit of joy. I feel like I really I landed this one. So so, yeah, there is definitely still a lot of writing in life. And, you know, there's a lot of podcasting in life too you just like a lot of what conversation is is just basically like finding finding that opening for a conversation to to really expand

and flourish and become collaborative and so uh you know that that's all that's all still there for sure i also might be writing a book i don't know i'm I'm like, I've got a, I've got a, I don't know. I'm trying to, I don't want to hate the thing. And so I'm not making myself do it. But I do have a thing I'd like to write. And I have done, you know, a little bit of, I don't know. I don't know how much I want to. Non-baseball, I assume. No, no, actually. Yeah, like I might still, I don't know. I might, I don't know. Look, I don't want to close anything off.

I mean, I don't want people, if I'm in three years or three months, if I'm like writing baseball articles on the internet, I don't want people to think, ah, Sam, he swore he'd never do this. Now he's a loser. I don't want that. It would be great. I would love it if I felt, you know, like I don't want to look.

I don't want to get too into my internal thought processes here or anything like that. But I don't know. There's a, I got a book in me and I'll do it if I want to. I think one expression of affection for other people is not the only expression of affection for others, but one expression of affection that we can grant to people we care about is to leave open the possibility that they will be moved in surprising ways.

And so I hope that, uh, I hope that everyone does that for you. If you come 10 minutes from now, you go, actually, you know. Oh my gosh, Meg, thank you. You're welcome. I love that. Can you just say it? Can you say that exactly again? I just want to hear it again.

No, I'll go back and listen. I'll hit the 15 seconds thing. No, I think that's great. I mean, like, I don't know. I find it very hard to predict how I'm going to feel from moment to moment. So I would hope that other people don't hold me to a consistent standard on that score. And I find very little reason to hold others to a consistent standard on that score. We're often surprised by things.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess you didn't plan it this way, but it kind of fits with the whole Bill Walsh, Theo Epstein 10-year idea, right? Of like doing something different after 10 years, whereas in Epstein's case, it might just be running that team instead of this team. Whereas you're potentially talking about doing something totally different, but the idea is that you might get a little stagnant or you might lose a little of your enthusiasm for the thing that you're doing or maybe your message as a leader will wear off or whatever it is and so maybe it can be helpful to try doing something different and obviously a lot of people are doing different things these days whether by choice or necessity people quitting their jobs or changing careers etc yeah i definitely i also noted that there was a kind of a decades thing happening in my life and that my 20s were defined by kind of a set of goals that I had when I was in my early 20s. And then my 30s were defined by a set of goals that I had in my early 30s. And I didn't really relate to either of those sets of goals anymore. And so I do think there's like that roughly a 10 year cycle seems like a good organizing principle in one's life if you

don't get too beholden to it and like honestly like i didn't feel like i was on the precipice of some like great leap forward either in my in my creative life like i i feel like maybe maybe there uh sometime in the future maybe i will be on the precipice of a great leap forward in my creative life but i was not like right about to to try new things i was i was doing the same thing all the time uh and uh i could have kept doing that and it would have been satisfying but i didn't feel like i was uh giving up like the the best of myself and so maybe i just need to maybe i just need to step away and recharge in a different way. Or maybe that's it. I don't know. I feel now I feel like this is more

than I planned to give more than I did not intend to be saying these things out loud for other people to hear, to lead at all. Jeez. Well, I'm sure a lot of people will relate to that experience and even people who have gotten a job that they thought was their dream job or that actually was their dream job for a while and then it ceased to be or they had some other dream that they decided to pursue or circumstances conspired to push them in that direction. So we've all been there even if we're within the same general occupation or industry. I think we're all trying to branch out and flex different muscles or whatever. And I've certainly tried to do that too. So I guess it's been good to hear from you. And I think people

will miss hearing from you and reading you on baseball as they have been for the past year plus and i hope that you will come back from time to time at least and share your fan feelings and we can tell you which american league pitchers are good now maybe that is appealing to you oh yeah i could play is he good yeah oh yeah with everyone now yeah we could do is he good just on the Giants bullpen. I could just name Giants relievers and I bet, I don't know, I'm not sure how well I'll do on him. Sam, may I say something earnest that will embarrass you and if it embarrasses you too much, you can say that's too much and then we'll cut it.

Yeah. I promise though that this notion that I got that I'm embarrassed by compliments, I don't know where it came from. I them love them all the time so if you're gonna say something nice i'm gonna say something nice well i was just gonna i was gonna say a thank you and i worry that it'll sound like too definitive because like i i plan on you know bothering you from time to time and just like you know continuing to know you so i don't mean it to sound like an end point but like um i i remember with great clarity where i was when you emailed me while you were still at baseball prospectus and i was i think probably mostly just writing at lookout landing uh and and asked me if i wanted to to maybe do a little bit of writing for bp and you

wrote a very nice email about it that said far nicer things about my writing than they merited at the time, but meant a great deal to me. And I just would like to say thank you for doing that. Because you know, there are a couple of pushes in in my life as a baseball writer that really altered my trajectory and sort of put it on the path to where it has landed. And I would count that email as one of them. And I quite like where I've landed. So I want to just say, hey, thanks for doing that. Because it meant a great deal. And it changed a great deal, whether you realized it would at the time or not. So hey, thanks, man.

I'm very, you're very welcome. And you probably remember this. But at the time, I was very scared that I was going to be too late, that I was going to reach out late, that I was going to like reach out to you and ask you to write. And you were going to say, oh, sorry, I'm already, you know, someone else hired me 12 minutes ago. Like it felt like there was just no, no, there was no suppressing your talent.

And so it was very obvious that someone was going to luck in to being, I don't know, to giving you a larger role than you had. And so, you know, it was easy. But anyway, I'm't know, to giving you a larger role than you had. And so, you know, it was easy. But anyway, I'm glad to eat. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. And I will echo Ben and say that I hope you come by every now and again if you feel moved. And I also promise that if you decide to not be moved in that way, we will not be grumpy about it at all. You can't have that many dishes to do unless your new job is running a restaurant or something. I don't want to spoil anything. I have no inside info. Dish doing is vital because I think that people who decide to be the primary cook should not have to clean up. And so you're

playing an important role in the food ecosystem, whether it's in your house or elsewhere. Yeah, I'm just trying to calculate how much of the day that actually eats up because it's not like you have an enormous family. You can't be making that many dishes dirty. But I guess especially after you got so good and efficient at it. Yeah, yeah. I also wondered how I had so many dishes to do. And I did sometimes feel like there was an intentional creation of dirty dishes. Yeah, I was wondering, were you making more dishes dirty

so that you would have dishes to do? Yeah, I know. I can't make the math work particularly, but yeah, it took a while. Still dishes to do right now. I'm looking at dishes that have popped up in the last hour. Well, you said at the start that you don't mind being interrupted during dish doing, but thank you for pausing to talk to us and everyone for a little bit. And I thank you as well for the part that you played in my career and all the fun and good things that we've gotten to do together that I think we're both pretty proud of.

So I am glad to have worked with you and known you and hope I will continue to. And hopefully we will hear from you or people will hear from us via you about what you're doing next or maybe not. Maybe there will be a new topic to speculate about in the Facebook group. What is Sam's new job? But if you do write that baseball book, at least please let us know. We'll have you on to promote it. Wow. You'll do that, really, for me?

Yep. Wow. We'll tell people where to preorder it and everything. All right. Yeah, I will will and by the way i i i don't know i feel weird i am sorry that i kept everybody waiting i didn't i didn't know that i was going to make this decision until pretty late and i feel like kind of a jerk so and it was very sudden i mean there was no chance for you to say goodbye on the podcast because you

were prohibited from being on baseball podcasts. I mean, I guess maybe we could have figured out some sort of off-topic code kind of thing. But would it have been worth endangering your contract terms? Who knows? So it happened very suddenly to the point that Sam was here and then Sam was not here. And that was probably jarring for some people, but that's how it happened. So now we know. And it's nice to hear from you again.

And good luck with whatever's next. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. And thanks for sticking with us during the uncertainty about Sam and during all of the podcast lineup changes over the years. I know a lot of you have listened throughout multiple incarnations of the show and hopefully have appreciated the different flavors of Effectively Wild

and the qualities that each host has brought to the show. And hopefully we will have Sam on to talk to him from time to time. I think some of you who had been reading the Sam Miller tea leaves over the past year plus noticed that he had liked a tweet for the first time in a couple years by the former Fangraphs writer R.J. McDaniel, another great baseball writer who has walked away from writing about baseball recently. And R.J. said, I cannot begin to describe the sense of calm and inner peace I get every time I see a random transaction notification pop up and simply swipe it away, never to be thought of again. Maybe that was a clue as to which way Sam was leaning,

and I can certainly identify with that feeling myself. Not that having to write about baseball transactions is some hardship, but like almost any aspect of almost any job, that particular aspect of things starts to lose a little luster at a certain point for some people. Even though I still cover baseball through podcasts and sometimes through writing, I have sort of shifted away from that kind of coverage and branched out into writing about different things or even covering baseball in kind of a different way. So I absolutely understand and respect Sam's perspective and know that he will be great at whatever he does because of his inquisitive mind that approaches subjects in a slightly different way and often an illuminating one. And I think those thoughts are

what we in the baseball community may miss. Anyway, we wish him well, and we thank him for his service on this podcast and to baseball writing and podcasting and editing in general. Effectively Wild will, of course, continue, and you can help it continue by supporting us on Patreon via 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 help us stay ad free while getting themselves access to some perks such as exclusive monthly bonus podcasts and access to the effectively wild patron only discord group kevin brotzman stephen sacks jacob sacks tim scramstad and k Kyle Malaszewski.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can also follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can join or just browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance.

Meg and I will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then.