Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1801: Split End

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the demise of the Rays’ two-city, split-season scheme, Carlos Correa hiring Scott Boras as his agent, and Brandon Gomes of the Dodgers becoming the latest ex-player to ascend to GM, then (31:18) talk about numerous listener nominations of baseball events that predated the podcast that would have made […]

Life tends to come and go As long as you know I won't share you I won't share you The drive driver dreams inside This is my time Hello and welcome to episode 1801 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 Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Rest in peace, Ray's split city plan. One of the worst ideas, I'm not suggesting that the idea is dead or that this concept will not resurface, but at least this specific implementation of the concept of splitting a season between two cities, as the Rays hope to do with Montreal and the Tampa area. That has been nixed. We can put that to rest, seemingly.

It was a weird little era there where people were pretending that that was going to happen and that that was a good idea. I've been sitting here trying to think of a bad french pun for like the entire day i've been trying to come up with one and i i failed much like this plan did oh no um i took you know i took french in middle school and high school and i should have taken spanish it would have just really been a lot more useful to me and so i was sad to see this go because I was like, ah, finally, headlines. I'm going to get to do it there at least. No. Yeah, terrible idea.

I mean, it's just like a really bad idea. Much like my puns. Yeah. I mean, from the Rays' perspective, I guess it was a good idea in the sense that they hoped that it would either help them get one ballpark or potentially get them two ballparks. Right. Which I don't know if that was gonna happen i mean maybe montreal is desperate enough for a team that they could have given in there but the idea that a city is going to fund a ballpark for like half a season with

alternating playoffs where you root for a team for half a season and then they just go away and you don't even get the playoff games i mean i don't know i'm not suggesting that like our loyalties to something have to be tied to geography i mean but that's the way sports tends to work i mean not everything like sometimes esports are not necessarily tied to a certain region and maybe that could be the future and you can certainly be a fan of a team that you don't get to see in person that doesn't have the name of your city in its name but this idea of having two cities have a team and all of the headaches the logistical problems that come with that in terms of like the front office having to be in two places or having multiple front offices or just all of the like zoning and

the laws and the government stuff and then like do the players need multiple residences or right multiple in-season residences even and then like the complications with the taxes and just so many headaches that would come with this but i think beyond all of, just the idea of sharing a team, just like having an open relationship sort of with your fandom and with your team that you root for. I don't know if it's untenable, but it's certainly not traditional and it would come with a ton of complications. Oh, no. That's my French accent. Yeah, it's like it's just like a up and down kind of bad idea it has a feel of like you know the like step one tampa step to montreal you know you don't know what the third step is

but the fourth step is profit like i don't quite understand how this is gonna work i i think that we are all agreed that as the league contemplates expansion that montreal seems like a natural destination both because you know it is historically been home to a team and there seems to be continued interest from the folks there and it it is sort of strange that canada only has one team you know given its geography although in that i guess if that's the argument then something closer to the west coast probably makes good sense, but then you have Seattle. But I don't know.

I get wanting there to be a team in Montreal, but it seems like a poor way to repay what is at this point like decades of desire to have major league baseball back in Montreal to say you get half a home season and sometimes playoffs. You know, it's just if we're going to do it, let's do it. And I do wonder if I mean, I imagine that the stadium component of this is ultimately why MLB decided that this wasn't a good move. But, you know, you also just have to wonder if since Montreal does seem to regularly appear on those lists of places that the league is contemplating as prioritizing for expansion, if they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to let you do this weird

halfsies plan. We're going to put a real team there. When we finally expand, we want this to be a real effort that looks the way that it's supposed to. So it just really never did seem like it was gonna work i mean no one ever bought this i don't think like the whole plan was predicated on let's make this look like a legitimate possibility to put pressure on either one or both cities to pony up some public funds and that didn't seem to work so well because i don't know that anyone ever really bought

the viability of this idea other than the rays Rays, seemingly, who at least made a, well, not a good case for it, but an enthusiastic case for it, a straight-faced case for it. I don't know if they believed it or not. I mean, it certainly sounds as if they're disappointed by the way that this ended. And, yeah, I'm sorry for the people of Montreal who will be deprived of baseball for a little longer here. They deserve baseball, but I'm just saying hold out for what you're worth here. You deserve an entire team, a team all to yourself. Yeah, agreed. And I also don't feel as if the Rays have fully explored the potential for stadium viability within their own market right like there are

definitely some logistical considerations that make the current placement of their ballpark less advantageous than it could be and so if they're if what is important to them is having a new ballpark they should think about having a better one in a place that is more accessible to their existing fan base rather than you know trying to do some weird far-flung thing like i i don't know this always just struck me as as very strange and i never knew i think you're right like we were we were meant to take it very seriously but i never really understood how likely they thought it was that we would take it seriously i was like doesn't this seem obviously wrong?

I don't know. I think this is part of why I was never able to get too exercised about it. You know, we were primed to get feisty about this stuff. And I was like, this just seems like it's such an obvious non-starter. I don't have to be mad about this. It was silly on its face. It was obviously going to disintegrate at some point yeah i think preserve my my angst for other things that look like they might you know actually

happen right and they have that lease at the trap through 2027 and i think they were saying before that oh we've decided that baseball is not viable in this market and now that they are forced to consider baseball again in that market they're saying well, well, okay, we'll explore options again. And they should have some options there. Maybe they could actually have a team that is in Tampa or just somewhat more accessible. It's not that tiny a market. Their TV ratings are decent.

It's just that it's hard to get to that particular place. And some people are fond of that ballpark, but many others are not necessarily. So yeah, maybe they just need a new location and hopefully they will actually pay for it or pay for some large portion of it. But I don't know that we've definitely realized that baseball is not viable there. Certainly, the history of baseball in Florida over the past few decades is not a shining beacon of baseball, but I think maybe it could still work in that area somehow.

I guess the only surprising part of this to me is that it sounds as if MLB nixed this, right? It wasn't necessarily that the city said no way and it wasn't that the Rays decided that it wasn't going to work. It was that MLB seemingly turned around and at least according to the reporting in the Tampa Bay Times, it sounds as if the Rays themselves were surprised that MLB had flip-flopped on this because in the past, MLB had expressed its full support for exploring this idea, right? And in 2020, Rob Manfred said, I'm 100% convinced. And more importantly, the other owners have been convinced by Stuart Sternberg that this is the best way to keep Major League Baseball in Tampa Bay blah blah blah I continue to be impressed by the energy they've devoted to the project and there's significant

receptivity among our group and excitement in some quarters about the possibility and now it was MLB's executive council that said no we're pulling the plug on this, seemingly not to the raised knowledge and over their objections. So I don't know why MLB decided that they had to put a stop to this. Was it just that they realized that it wasn't going to work and that it was silly to continue or what, that they realized that this pressure, this power play just wasn't having its intended effect and that it was just going to be a distraction from hopefully actually having some sort of plan that could come to fruition maybe that's all it was but just not used to rob manfred saying that a bad idea is a bad idea that should not be explored anymore yeah and that's the part of it that makes me think that even if there are not

like current firm plans to put an expansion team, well, anywhere, let alone in Montreal, if keeping open the possibility of Montreal as an expansion city may have played a role here. Because once you have this like, it's like when I was young and I was doing like every other week at my dad and my mom's house and like someone got Thanksgiving and that person got Christmas and like we had a whole parenting plan

and it worked fine except that, you except that it involved a lot of packing. And that was just one kid, not a whole baseball team. So I don't know. As soon as you put a franchise somewhere, that's it. You're not going to put another one in Montreal once you've gotten it together to sort out the stadium situations in Tampa and in Oakland. And then you're finally primed for expansion. And you're like primed for expansion,

and you're like, great, we get to revitalize the Expos. You have this existing fan base, except no, no, can't go there. So I do wonder if that may have played a role here. And I don't say that with any special inside knowledge, but it just seems like the possibility of fully fledged and sort of thriving baseball there is more appealing than Habsies, you know? Oh, no. D'accord. I remember more French words. See, everyone gets to be spared this for so much longer now.

Maybe that was the real thing. Manfred was like, geez, if Meg has to break out of this high school French again, what are we going to do? Last thing about this is that stew sternberg beaten but not cowed he put out a statement here bill shaken tweeted that sternberg said sister city plans will be in the future for all sports and he says mlb wasn't prepared to go first but partial seasons are going to be the wave of the future in professional sports. And I just don't see it like our multiple markets, the market inefficiency, like if anyone is good at recognizing these things, it's the Rays,

I guess. These are smart people who set trends, but I just don't see this being one that catches on all over. Yeah, it seems to me to be sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of how a lot of, to your point, not all, but how a lot of people come to connect with a particular franchise and feel that they should meet their emotional investment with a financial investment. I just don't think this is how fandom generally operates. I also think that leaving yourself open to jokes about the pandemic shortened season and a potential lockout shortened season with partial season is that's just bad PR. But I don't think that this is the way that people tend to relate to teams that they care about. And, you know, there are plenty of people who like I'll use myself as an example here. Right. And part of this is that there was an existing vacuum for me but you know when i moved to arizona and the the suns were and are good i like got excited about the suns i bought a sweatshirt i was like go suns i was disappointed when they lost even though i didn't mind milwaukee

winning because i went to grad school in wisconsin Like that's kind of how you triangulate this stuff a lot of the time. Like, do I have a gap in my fandom, you know, as someone who grew up in a city and had their NBA franchise taken away? And it's like, well, I have a WNBA team that I root for, but I don't have an NBA team. But also fandom can be fickle, right? Because now I just really enjoy watching the grizzlies i'm thinking maybe a grizzlies fan so i don't know i think that there's probably more fluidity to these things than we give them credit for but i think that for a lot of people like the base experience of being a fan is i grew up in a place and this was the thing that was on all the time you know this was the the team where i could go and see them in person and smell the green

grass and eat a hot dog and like, you know, relate to this team. So I don't know. I think that we're we're maybe too cute. Like the understanding of how we form these allegiances isn't static and it isn't the same for everyone. But for a lot of people, it's not about sister cities i mean like maybe there are a lot of people who live in the greater tampa area who like like going to montreal are we missing that component of this are they like oh now we get to go to they go I'm the worst.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada. I'm not opposed to splitting time between those two countries myself. And sometimes I want to spend more time in the other one these days. But I'm just saying that it is strange. And you could say it's maybe more enlightened. We're moving beyond these tribal loyalties and these affiliations to the place where we happen to grow up or to live. Maybe that is the future. It's a global society and you can root for a team on the other side of the world without ever seeing that team play that bond. I mean, I know that there are so many sources of revenue now aside from just attendance. And so maybe it doesn't even matter that much.

And maybe you hope that the scarcity of games, if you're only playing 81, let's say, in one market, that even if you're not generating as much interest, there's less supply, less stock. And so people will come to see those games regardless. And just the novelty of it, at least in Montreal, I'm sure that people would have gone come to see those games regardless and just the novelty of it at least in Montreal I'm sure that people would have gone out to see that team even if it was a timeshare sure but something about it just feels wrong and maybe I should interrogate that feeling maybe I'm

being too much of a traditionalist and this is the way it's always been done and we can't deviate from tradition but I just think a lot of people experience sports that way and it's always been done and we can't deviate from tradition. But I just think a lot of people experience sports that way. And it's not necessarily a bad thing unless you are warring with other fan bases and beating people up over these team loyalties, you know, to have some sort of pride in your community because it hosts a team. I think that is perfectly fine. Yeah. Montreal, hold out. Get a real team. Tampa, encourage your team to put a ballpark where you'd go for it and also, you know, to pay for it themselves. That's what we have to say about these things. In other news, Scott Boris represents everyone.

Yeah. Every free agent is now represented by Scott Boris, including Carlos Correa, the biggest remaining free agent out there. He just switched to Scott Boris. So when the lockout eventually ends and Carlos Correa is negotiating with various suitors, it'll be Scott Boris taking and making those calls. I think Jonathan India and Dylan Cease also recently switched to Boris. So it's just a Boris takeover. And it's hard to blame players for wanting to be represented by Scott Boris because he

gets deals done. And Travis Sochik did a study recently of agencies and found that the reputation seems to be deserved, that Scott Boris gets players more per war or whatever than a lot of other agencies do. And it seems like in this case, there was maybe more to it than just wanting to be represented by someone different because Cross Korea's previous agency was William Morris Endeavor,

which is more of an upstart agency, although I know it's made some investments in baseball and had hired Billy Epler before he went to work for the Mets. But they've also owned by the parent company, Endeavor, which has partnered with a private equity group called Silver Lake, I think, and they're gobbling up minor league teams lately. It is much like private equity has gobbled up other things like local news organizations, for instance, and generally that has not turned out to be the

best thing in the world for the employees of those companies or for consumers. Often it's a let's buy this thing and strip it down to the studs and just make as much money off it as we can until it completely falls apart and loses all of its value. Hopefully that's not what is being planned here with these minor league teams. But they've been snapping up these teams and the MLBPA has some concerns about that because you're not supposed to be working for a professional baseball team if you are accredited as an agent. So the MLBPA has suggested that they could potentially strip the Endeavor agents of their accreditation because of this potential conflict of interest here where the agents are working for a company that also owns baseball teams, which is kind of complicated. So that may or may not have had anything to do with this specific case. But the upshot is that Scott Boris now reps Carlos Correa in addition to Chris Bryant and Nick Castellanos and Carlos Rodon and a lot of the other free agents still out there. So whenever pencils are picked up again and teams can talk to players,

Scott Boris will be a busy man. Yeah, on the Endeavor score, and we'll link to it on the show page, Ben Clemens wrote about this a little while ago for us. You know, I know that J.J. Cooper at Baseball America had done a bunch of reporting on the Diamond Holdings company that is buying these teams. I think Ben came away cautiously optimistic

that it would not be quite as much of a usual sort of private equity teardown. I know that the parent company Endeavor also bought UFC, like the wrestling thing, and left a lot of that intact, although they did do staff reductions. So there's that component to this. But yeah, if you're Scott Boris, I guess you have time now. You have time to come up with strained analogies to describe Carlos Correa's virtue. What form do you think they will take, Ben?

What genre? Will we be building a new wing of the Boris analogy museum? Will he stick to his nautical guns as he has so often in the past will we get new thoughts on plants and how they grow or will he go in a totally different direction i don't know hard to say but i'm sure he's been workshopping some potential solutions just because he hasn't been able to talk to teams presumably for months. So what else is he going to do other than come up with some lines for whenever he can eventually use them? I mean, he didn't get the winter meetings, so he did a notebook dump and used

all his material early in the offseason. Now there's been this long break and he's acquired some new clients. And so, yeah, maybe when things pick up again, we will get another round of Scott Boris analogies and puns. I can't wait. Yeah. If that's the price of the lockout ending, then I will pay it. I guess it's good that some of his guys came off the market before the lockout so that he has energy and space to devote to his new clients. But yeah, I mean, it is quite a high price to pay, but I don't know. I guess we're going to have to pay it one way or the other, so we may as well get some good analogies out of it.

Yeah. I have a question related to this that I was debating with someone else, which is how long after the lockout concludes do you think it will be until we get the first free agent signing because i don't think i don't think it's the sort of thing where we're gonna you know get word of a of a cba being done at midnight and then the first news of a signing breaks at 9 a.m the next day like i feel like it's some of it will depend on how far along in the process a given

player and his representation was prior to the lockout, I suppose. But I wonder how long it'll go. I think at least a week. Yeah. I don't think it'll be like the international signing deadline where somewhat curiously it seems as if teams are able to work out those contracts with all their signees in a matter of minutes after the signing period opens. So they're just incredibly efficient when it comes to getting those deals done. It's not that they've been talking to those kids since they were 13 or something. It's just, you know, they turn 16, they pick up the phone, they say, here's our offer, and they say, yeah, we'll get that done.

It's just all very clean and above board like that. Yeah. Total coincidence that those kids have been in team gear on their Instagram for two years prior to their signing class opening. Right. Who could say what that's about? out because it would be very suspicious if like i don't know i mean obviously they're prohibited from talking to each other are there potential ways around that where you could have some sort of emissary speak to an agent and try to be familiar with their thinking i mean i guess so would i swear that that hasn't happened somewhere some when this winter i I would not. But I think if only for appearances sake, I mean, I know that like NBA, free agency, same sort of thing, right? Where you're not supposed to sign

for a certain time or even negotiate maybe. And then suddenly there's a deluge of deals the second that you're able to announce them. Also somewhat suspicious. But in this case, I would guess that that doesn't happen. Yeah. And probably you'd want a little time to size up the market and see who's bidding and how desperate is everyone, whether teams or players. I guess maybe it depends a little bit on when the lockout actually ends. Like if the lockout ends very close to the start of the season, then I guess there's more pressure to sign somewhere and get something done. So it probably does depend a little bit on the timing. Yeah, I guess I think that that's fair. And obviously, if there's something I mean, we don't expect this to be true necessarily. But if there's something really dramatic in the CBA that reworks the economics of the game, then, you know, whatever

progress you may have made before you sign might be undone. I suppose that that's true. I'm just, you know, please, my editorial calendar, it's very sick. Last thing I wanted to mention is that the Dodgers have a GM now. They have not had a GM for years since Farhan Zaidi left for the Giants, I believe. That position has been vacant. Of course, Andrew Friedman is running that baseball operations department, but they have not officially had a GM. Now they do. And it is Brandon Gomes, which is interesting because one of the trends I'm tracking is players becoming high ranking baseball operations executives again, which really hadn't happened for a while. There had been a big drought. You had the holdovers. You had Billy Bean and Ken Williams,

and then you did have Jerry DiPoto as well. But it was really slim pickings, whereas in the past, the majority of GMs used to be former pro players and often former major league players. And then that really went out of vogue, I think, largely because of sabermetrics and just the way that player evaluation changed and all the people like Friedman who came in from Wall Street and had a different way of operating and that kind of barred players from getting those jobs that they historically had but now there is this new generation of younger former players who are interested in analytics and very conversant with all of those concepts and

also have the playing experience on their side. And now we're seeing a new wave of players getting those top ranking jobs again. I don't know if that's good or bad necessarily, but it is interesting. I think that that door seems to be opening again. And so in addition to Bean and Williams and DePoto who are still around, you have Sam Fold, you have Chris Young, you have Brandon Gomes. They're all general managers. Now, obviously, the term general manager has changed, at least on some teams, and that's no longer the highest ranking position because you have your president of baseball operations or you have your chief baseball officer or whatever teams are calling those things these days. or you have your chief baseball officer or whatever teams are calling those things these days, there's been some title inflation.

And maybe Gomes gets promoted to GM because he'd been in the running for other top jobs and the Dodgers wanted to keep him around. But still, if they're not running those departments, they're at least the potential heirs in waiting and potentially could lead these departments someday. So there is this new crop of former players who have ascended to these jobs. And I'm not saying that's going to lead to more player-friendly management or anything. There's a long history, I think, in baseball and sports of ex-players having those jobs and being hardliners at times. But it is interesting that things have changed.

It's emblematic, I think, of a younger generation of players that is familiar with those concepts and came up steeped in sabermetrics and all of the new player development concepts and so they can bring their playing experience but also be as familiar as anyone with those new age analytical concepts as well yeah i yeah i don't really have much to add to that other than to say yes i think that that's right it seems as if i appreciate that there is a place for a combination of those skills i think it it does allow for folks who are well-rounded in a particular way that's not the only way to be sort of a well-rounded member of a front office and bring a variety of perspectives to bear but i think that there being room for that one is good yeah i don't know i don't have any notes ben yeah i guess uh it's interesting also gomes's origin story because

he has ascended very quickly in that organization he's only 37 and he went from like you know working in some low-level position there i mean he ran player development or the farm director very quickly and then assistant GM and now GM. And I was just reading an L.A. Times profile of him. And he is someone who also kind of comes from that Rays system that has spawned so many front office executives. But he was a player for the Rays and got to know Friedman there. And apparently it was the fact that the Rays kept demoting him to the minors that got him interested in analytics in the first place which is an interesting origin story but he was like why do they keep demoting me

like how do they operate this team what can i do to be better like what does this say about how teams evaluate players and so he would go to friedman or whoever eric neander and be like how can i get better how can I avoid this in the future? And he kind of caught on early to some of the optimization of repertoire movement and started throwing his slider more and had a good successful season. But in a way, those setbacks seem to have helped him and served as a springboard to this career. So not saying it's a great thing that the Rays are constantly shuffling relievers up and down and up and down, but at least for him, it was apparently the

impetus to educate himself about why this was happening to him in an effort to take charge of his career. And that got him into scouting and player development and analytics and all of that. And here he is probably making more money and being more successful as an executive than he was as a reliever. I think that the ability to take moments like that as sort of opening a door to curiosity rather than having it solely be feeling disgruntled is often suggestive of like a rare kind of person, you know, to come through that experience being like, how, not only how can can i improve but what does this say about how things operate and having that sort of spark of curiosity be the result of an experience that i'm sure he probably would say sucked right yeah you know it's like

never fun to keep getting sent down but to have that lead one to be curious rather than disgruntled is interesting not that you're like in the wrong to feel disgruntled if you get demoted, because that's a natural reaction too. But that's interesting. I always wonder when there are rapid ascents like that, whether that person has made it onto the radar of other organizations and their way of retention is to just continue to do the title bump game, right?

Because if you're getting the opportunity to interview somewhere else for a promotion, most teams will, you know, kind of facilitate that. And one way that they keep you is to give you a promotion internally and say, but now you're the GM. So what will you do? You must stay. That's like, well, you get to be a GM out of it. So that's fine. Yeah, I think Gomes was mentioned as a Mets GM candidate, but then who wasn't?

Right. Yeah, that's fair. But, you know, it can be hard. It is a thing that I am sure people in baseball wish that they had much greater transparency into. I know that especially coming off of 2020, this was something, again, that J.J. Cooper did some reporting on for BA around sort of the lack of insight and transparency that front office folks have into who wants to talk to them for interviews, who has requested that, who's been, you know, if they've been denied

for that sort of thing, because the policies are kind of scattershot. And some teams, I think, are much better about promoting and sort of facilitating opportunities for their more junior employees than others. So it's definitely something that I think, you know, they could really use a union, Ben. Yeah. Well, anyway, Brandon Gomes, career sub-replacement level player, but evidently well above replacement level executive. Yeah. I guess I should also note that Ross Atkins, not a major leaguer, but former minor leaguer. David Forst, of course, played indie ball. Maybe there are others along those lines, but, you know, a bigger crop of former major league GMs and baseball operations leaders than there has been for some time. So I do have a stat blast to end on.

I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about something I alluded to on a recent episode, which was a thread in our Facebook group that was started by listener Scott Greenberg. And the prompt was, what is an event in baseball history pre-2012, which is when Effectively Wild started, that Effectively Wild would have spent days talking about? And I'll link to the thread. There were many great suggestions. And I was looking a little bit off the beaten path here. I mean, some people mentioned things like, you know, Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. Yeah, I think safe to say if we had been doing a podcast in 1947, that would have come up a time or two. about biggest news in baseball history ever, because we would have covered that. But I'm thinking more along the lines of like Otani. Well, that's huge news too. Or John Lester not

throwing the first. I mean, things that would have been particular obsessions for us. And I think one of the interesting questions about this exercise is, are we saying that we would have been podcasting at that time knowing only what we would have known at that time? Or would this be like our 2022 selves transported back to that time knowing sabermetrics and things that we know now? Because I don't know what Effectively Wild would have been in those earlier eras. This is a podcast that started at Baseball Perspectives and moved to Fangraphs. It's always been influenced by that mindset. So I don't know what this podcast would have been

in pre-sabermetric eras or how we would have talked about things at all. Not that we always approach things through those lens, but it's a different conversation, I guess, if our current selves are transported back to that time without the awareness of what would transpire, I suppose, or whether we're putting ourselves in the mindset of what would we have thought in 1973 or whatever. Yeah, I am now imagining us doing like a radio play, like having like a regular radio show in like the the 40s and you know confusing everyone with our references at the very least uh if we were time travelers i like it that we do so much time travel on this show ben we're we're often time traveling yes but let's i guess let's assume that we know

ourselves to be ourselves what what does that mean oh no no let's uh that was a little more muppety than french let's assume though that we are time travelers so we are aware of sabermetrics and uh we we find ourselves displaced somehow still able to podcast without the internet that's incredible good Good job us. We're going to come back and be like, look, we can talk about this baseball thing, but we have other things we need to tell you about the future. Right. So the first suggestion, I'll just read off some of the good ones here and link to the thread for everyone to investigate at their leisure. But the first suggestion and seems like the most liked suggestion from zach

says it would have been as much of a bo jackson show as it currently is an otani show and that is spot on yeah yeah 100 percent this would have been all bow all the time oh my god and can you imagine when he like did the the first like spider manning up the wall we would have lost our minds we would have talked about that for weeks. It would have been like, hey, Ben, you remember that time that Bo did that thing? We'd go, yeah, we do remember. Then we would have all remembered,

and it would have been great. We would have been obsessed with Bo Jackson. We would have been so devastated at the end. Yeah, it's interesting. There hasn't really been a legitimate multi-sport star in mlb during the course of this podcast i suppose which i'm i'm sad that we missed out on i mean someone who's like legitimately making a run at playing in mlb and the nfl or the yeah or something like that i mean once kyler chose we we lost the opportunity although you know last

weekend there were a lot of jokes about how maybe he should take up baseball again so yes kyler and bow has come up quite a few times yes even though we did not witness bow or do the podcast during bow's career and we've talked about whether there could be another Bo or another Deion Sanders or whichever example you want to cite. But yes, if we had been doing the show then, that's all we would have talked about. And one that didn't actually come up in this thread that I saw is the Michael Jordan baseball career. Oh, yeah. That would have been all-consuming for us. That's something we've talked about even though it started long before this podcast but yes in the same way that we're fascinated by otani doing something that no baseball player has done in ages i think the idea

of someone being a high level player in multiple high level sports at the same time or even sequentially that would have been something that we returned to often speculated about whether it was possible what their schedule would look like what you could do to try to preserve their health and enhance their performance. And obviously, Bo was such an incredible physical person that could pull off these amazing feats in both sports. But even someone who wasn't quite as flashy and awe-inspiring, but was just good enough to do both. That would have been incredible too. I have to say though, you know what the worst part of, apart from just like the actual end, but you know what the worst part of podcasting about Bo in the moment would have been for

me? Because again, I'm assuming that we are time travelers. And so we are ourselves and we are going back in time. And the worst would have been coming in to podcast with you after the injury and i would have been watching it and you would not have been yeah and so i would have been sitting there like getting ready to watch them play the bangles and then and then i would have seen it and and i would have i would have uh you know you've seen his injury right you would have like you you know what that looked like it wasn't it was a devastating injury but it wasn't totally

clear immediately that this was the problem it was right that's like why they tried to pop the thing back in so i would have had to tell you about it then i would have had to describe it and i would have had to because it would have been much harder for you to have seen it apart from my description of it right because like you know we didn't have the internet as reliably i mean we had like you know clip shows and whatever but i would have had to tell you about it i would have hated telling you about those injury yeah would i have called bow and told him because if i'm a time traveler i know right see this is the ethical conundrum that one finds oneself in when one time travels. If I had called and said, hey, you're going to suffer a debilitating dislocated hip, don't pop it back in.

That'll make it worse maybe. I think in the spirit of this exercise, I'm saying we're our present selves, but we haven't retained our present knowledge. Okay. So we don't know how Bo's career turns out. So I can't save Bo. I can't try to save Bo. I can't go there with a sign that says,

Bo, I know. Oh. That would be a clever sign. And you'd be like, no, you don't. You're a random person in this. Why are you here? Do you like the Bengals or the Raiders? so um yeah that part would be sad but we would have been quite obsessed with bow yep yeah all right when joel youngblood got hits for two different teams in two different cities in the same day yeah that would have been fun i don't

know that it would have given us as much running material, but that day it would have been fun to banter about. Now, Babe Ruth going from leading the league with 11 home runs in 1918 to hitting 54 in 1920 would be a wild ride. And that is true. Just anyone who completely revolutionized the offensive environment of baseball, like going from dead ball era to live ball era and seeing Babe Ruth just fully seize that opportunity and transform the way that baseball offense worked yeah that would have been fun and that would have been wild and of course babe ruth was quite an entertaining celebrity aside from the baseball so yes the babe

would have given us tons of material i think that we would have spent an entire episode on galarraga's near perfect perfect game oh yeah we would have done an entire episode on Galarraga's near perfect perfect game oh yeah we would have done an entire episode about that even though like there's actually not a lot to talk about like the moment in which it all falls apart is so brief and but we would have we would have uh had a lot to say about that I imagine that one came to me as I was thinking about this yeah yep a whole episode would be bringing on Will Leach to discuss the aftermath of game six of the 85 World Series. That's a good one.

I don't know whether we would be bringing on the then 10-year-old Will Leach or the current 40-something Will Leach. And would he talk as fast as a 10-year-old? Probably. I say that with affection to be clear. Some of the notorious terrible calls would have been good fodder. And some people suggested Some of the notorious terrible calls would have been good fodder.

And some people suggested like Merkel's boner would have been good. I mean, it's... They just want to hear me say boner. They just want to hear me say boner over and over again. It would have been tough to talk about because we wouldn't have seen it unless we happened to be in the ballpark. And there was and is some dispute about the sequence of events, which I guess would have given us a lot to talk about. But maybe that controversy is not as interesting if it's in this era, if you just look at the instant replay, because so much of it was like establishing what happened exactly. And you had different conflicting accounts of the boner.

Oh, no, I just had a terrible thought. And, like, what good is a boner if it's hard to see? Oh, gosh. We've been so composed through most of the lockout. I know we've had an episode or two where, like, you know, we've been kind of goofy, but we've been pretty composed. But, you know, this is why people would want us to talk about it. Yep. But there is almost like a Rashomon kind of thing with some of these old baseball controversies,

which I guess we could have discussed, but, like, we wouldn't have had that information on hand when we were doing our hypothetical podcast pre-podcasting. So, I don't know maybe we're also assuming that we like have all of the news accounts and somehow we saw what happened or something i don't know it's strange we're talking about time travel here it doesn't totally make sense i'm just envisioning both of us with like the hats with the little press thing in the side and yes you're chomping on a cigar i know you don't side and you're chomping on a cigar i know you don't smoke but you're chomping on a cigar and one of us goes say now we're gangsters i don't know yes we're edward g robinson in this scenario also and we got this suggestion for the time the tigers

had to fill an entire team with literal replacement level players because ty cobb was suspended and the rest of the team refused to play we've've talked about that incident, even though it happened a century before the podcast started. So yes, absolutely. We would have discussed that to no end. That was a rare window into seeing just like what a man off the street would do in a major league baseball game, basically. Doc Ellis's LSD driven no hitter. That would have come up, I imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Although I think that was something where people didn't necessarily know immediately.

Like that came out long after or later or Ellis wrote about it. So I don't know that that was known in the moment necessarily, but yes. Well, and I feel like our consideration of that event has sort of evolved over the years where it was like originally posited as this wild thing i can't believe that anyone was able to throw no hitter on lsd and like that is a a wild thing to have occurred but i think that you know given some of the stuff around doc and you know his own issues and struggles as a human being like like, I don't know, I wonder how we would have treated that. I hope that we would have, you know, brought sort of

appropriate nuance to that moment. Because it's like, yeah, that is wild. But also like Doc's life was really hard at times. And you know, I, yeah, it's a funny one to look back on. I think that there are some things where with the benefit of hindsight you hope that like the hindsight gives you this it gives you sufficient empathy to engage with that event in a way that you don't look back on and go oh i was kind of a jerk right yeah i mean we're all to some extent products of our times oh sure yeah yeah i i don't not be talking about all these things in the 60s or 1912 or whenever exactly the way that that we would today yeah i don't mean it in like us i don't want to hear us talk about these things back then i mean i don't want to say what we would have grown up to be or think where when we would have been

or whatever but i'm just saying you know yeah i guess we can't take it for granted right at the very least we shouldn't take it for granted that we would have emerged as as you know the kinds of people we are now who knows what we would have been i guess um we should probably be realistic that it might not have been awesome yes um you know like that that possibility exists here's here's one that i thought of when i saw this thread in the facebook group and i wonder what you would have how do you think we would have reacted to moneyball oh yeah right so this is us like not in the moneyball mindset to some extent already I don't I don't know right like I don't I don't know because I I guess if we grant the the premise of the question that we are like having a podcast but aren't necessarily totally ourselves like i doubt that we if we were

time travelers we would have been like gosh like it's gonna go so much further than on base percentage you guys or would we have tried to sound an alarm like again am i warning bo jackson about that game against the bangles so i wonder how we would have engaged with with moneyball like if we don't know what we know but we are still the same kind of people which i hope means that we are we are curious and that we want to see evidence around stuff like it might have had sort of the effect that it did on on us and so many which was to sort of ignite a curiosity and to push us to try to understand things better but i wonder how we would have engaged with Moneyball.

Yeah. Well, we did engage with Moneyball at some point, not on a podcast, but it did happen. This did not predate our lives. I didn't read Moneyball the second it came out. I didn't either. It was sometime after. I don't know. I feel like maybe I didn't read it for, well, at least a few years after it was published.

And obviously when I read it, I was very into it. So I probably would have been pretty into it. And I don't know that I would have been sounding any alarms. I just probably would have been saying, oh, Billy Beane's a genius and all teams should be run this way or something. Well, and I wonder if, you know, I didn't read it right when it came out either. Maybe I want to reread moneyball it's been a long time since i've read moneyball it's probably been like i don't know five six years maybe longer since i last read it because i i revisited every now and again it's been a while since i have maybe i'll reread moneyball anyway and then at the end of the year when we do our

ask us anything what did we read i'll say you know you guys should check out this money ball book you know right like it it sometimes remembers that the ace had a rotation that you rarely but yeah on occasion but not as often as it may be needed to i've revisited sections and and it is held up like obviously the things that they're talking about as like big advances seem pretty primitive now but obviously michael lewis wrote it so it is extremely readable and uh even if the specific ideas that they were pushing for as so boundary breaking then seem like well they were 20 years ago because they were i think the concepts still hold up and the writing and the storytelling but i wonder if because i think that the first time i read moneyball because it came out in what 2003 yes 2003 i think the first time i read that book was probably

it was actually a bit like i i think i had graduated from college when i read it i did not read it right away and so i was in college i think i read it in like 2008 maybe around yeah so 2008 you know and i graduated in the middle of that year i think it was after i had graduated that i read it and so i was sort of sufficiently removed from peak like fervor mariners fandom i wonder if i had read it earlier what my what sort of lens my fandom would have cast over it. That's like a counterfactual I'll never know the answer to, but it would have been interesting to engage with it right away when I was not like, oh, those A's,

because that was definitely my reaction to those A's was like, you guys are pesky. Yeah. Well, maybe I read it 2006 or something. I don't know. I started working for BP in some capacity in 2008. So maybe I read it before then. But yeah, I don't think we would have been doing the Joe Morgan, Billy Bean is ruining baseball with his memoir in effect. I'm sure that we would have been somewhat suspicious. And certainly when we've seen similar downturns in markets in recent years, we've talked about the parallels there.

But I don't know. In some of these cases, people suggest that the home run race of 98 and the steroid era in general. the steroid era in general. And in this scenario, like I'm not suggesting that we know everything or that we would have been like so on all of these things before everyone else. And so would we have detected that PEDs were rampant and that they were having some effect on offense or driving the home run race of 98? Would we have realized that before everyone else? I mean, no, probably not. But there were some people who were sounding the alarms about those things or bringing those things up even then. It was just kind of lost in the general excitement. And I think we would

have been excited about it too. I mean, I was excited about it as an 11 or 12-year-old or whatever I was then. So we're doing this podcast not with my preteen self, but our current selves, I suppose. So maybe we would have been a bit more skeptical than we actually were in the moment when we were probably pretty credulous about it because we were kids. But I think certainly if something like that were to happen today, and we have seen big inflations in the home run rate, and we have seen downturns in spending, and certainly we have talked about those things to no end and speculated about the causes and is it the ball and is there some kind of collusion?

So we've talked about the successors or echoes of those things plenty. So we would have obviously talked about those things a ton too. Yeah, I mean, oh gosh. Yeah, geez. I wonder, we're sitting here thinking about how, you know, if we had been broadcasting in the 60s, would we be the same people? Would we look back and like feel that it is cringeworthy? But like, I don't know that we need to go that far back, right? And just as people and thinkers on labor questions alone would probably make us, I remember when A-Rod signed his deal, I was furious because I was a Mariners fan. Sure.

And also because I was a child. Also because I was a dumb child. Not all children are dumb. I'm not trying to say that. You know what I mean. I wasn't a sophisticated thinker because I was a kid so you know i guess we probably don't even have to go that far back to be like oh our thinking has evolved isn't that nice yeah like the way that we think about stuff is different than it used to be i'm sure there are things since this podcast

actually started that i would say i think differently today i know that there are all right what else here some other single isolated incidents the george brett pine tar game and particularly when they resumed that game jeffrey mayor randy johnson blowing up the bird yeah i feel bad for the bird i still feel a little bit bad for the bird like it's a snuff film i know that it's a bird but i still feel bad that the bird died but yes we would have talked about that i'm sure yeah i mean we don't we're not advocate we're not advocates of bird death you know we like birds i like i play wingspan i like all those birds you can name birds crazy stuff it's great but yeah uh we would have definitely talked about the bird you know i

think the bird suffering was over very quickly. Does that make you feel better? I'm sure the bird was not even aware. It was just over. Yeah, one second it was like, I am a bird. And the next second it was not doing anything because it was obliterated. But yeah, we definitely would have talked. We would have talked so much about that bird. Yes, yes.

And the 33 inning game between rochester and potucket chronicled in the book bottom of the 33rd for sure we would have discussed that and the final day of the 2011 season or regular season we just missed that i guess the start of this podcast but that was a very memorable day of course so that would have been good the robin ventura versus nolan r Ryan brawl. I still feel like Ventura gets kind of a raw deal there, that it wasn't as much of a one-way beatdown as it is generally regarded. But even so, yes, that would have come up.

Some of the interesting sartorial choices, the White Sox and their shorts. Oh, my God. Oh, the shorts. Oh, the shorts. Yep. Ben, do you remember the shorts oh the shorts yep ben do you remember the shorts we should just talk about shorts for the rest of the episode who thought that was a good idea like yeah man oh yeah shorts we would have definitely talked we would have talked so much about the shorts we would have

talked so much about the the the beltless pants we would have talking about that for hours you know yeah i mean i guess you asked who thought that was a good idea i guess it was bill veck who thought it was a good idea and bill veck also came up in this thread and yes bill veck would have given us a ton of material in fact when i read veck as in wreck his some time ago, it did come up on the podcast. I remember talking about it repeatedly and writing about it at Baseball Perspectives, too, because so many things he said were so fascinating. That might be my favorite baseball book. It's certainly up there, even if some of it is exaggerated. that you could actually kind of root for and sympathize with. Not that he was all great, but he was also more of a family, small business type owner. And he had quite a few interesting ideas and was a character and was willing to try anything

to drum up interest and also win games. So any number of Bill Vec's schemes or marketing ideas would have been big for the podcast too. And Eddie Goodell came up here speaking of Bill Veck and just some of the other players, you know, Pete Gray and Jim Abbott, players who were anatomically singular in some way in the annals of Major League history, certainly would have been something that we discussed on the podcast as well what else do we have here i mean all of the various relocations over the years i feel like would have been you know grist for the mill we definitely would have spent a lot of time on that you know i imagine that some of the strange i know that i was not a host at the time but you know like it's not as if tall's hill

didn't get discussed but like when right when tall's hill started we would have right when was that when was tall's hill installed when did tall hill and the pole i forget what year that was 2000 i guess yeah yeah i think the hill was fine it was the pole that was the real problem with the hill you know that was what i don't know that i'm on record but here i am i think the hill was fine. It was the pole that was the real problem with the hill. I don't know that I'm on record, but here I am. I think the hill was fine. It was weird, and it definitely was an injury risk, but I think the pole was the real problem. Yes, I like weird ballpark quirks,

but I always felt that was too self-consciously quirky. It was like trying to- It was the Zooey Deschanel of ballpark features is what you're saying it's the the manic pixie dream ballpark i don't know it was like the it was like trying to imitate or or be an homage to like the old ballparks that had to have weird quirks because they were built into a city block or something right and so they had there was no real reason to have that and also it was probably not the safest. I mean, certainly the combination of the slope and the pole.

Yeah. It's not the best. I mean, Yankee Stadium used to have like Monument Park was just in the outfield. Yep. So there were all kinds of weird ballpark obstacles and features that we would have discussed on the show, I'm sure. And someone suggested Coors Field, which we've obviously talked about but like early coarse field when it first opened pre-humidor when it was like totally inflating offense in a

never-before-seen way or at least never-before-seen due to altitude at least so yeah that would have been big oh yeah yeah now what else what else steve Steve Carlton's 1972 season was mentioned when he just sort of single-handedly won games for the Phillies when he went 27-10 for a Phillies team that went 59-97. I mean, back then, I guess we would have cared about pitcher wins. And it would have been interesting, I think, to chronicle just how much he was winning and the team was losing when he wasn't pitching. Other suggestions here, let's see, Manny Ramirez cutting off Johnny Damon's throw, Andy Sonnenstein being forced to hit after an errant Madden lineup card, he hit an RBI double, the time when two balls were in play at the same time in 1959. Someone just suggested mullets.

Mullets. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Old Haas Radborn pitching every day in 1884. Steve Lyons dropping his pants. And someone suggested the Bill Mazeroski home run. Yeah.

I mean, you know, legendary game events that everyone was talking about we would have talked about obviously whether nolan ryan's many no-hitters devalued the idea of no-hitters um ron santo's hall of fame candidacy i guess many of the overlooked hall of fame candidates catfish hunter being declared a free agent i mean yeah the the advent of free agency and the number of drafts we would have done and speculation about how that would ruin or help baseball and just what that would look like and which teams would do what. That would have been an endless amount of material, I'm sure. Yeah, gosh. I mean, think about the year of the pitcher. Think about how we would have talked about moving the mound and we would have talked about.

Oh, yeah. That came up. Yeah. Yeah. Like the introduction of the designated hitter. Oh, my God. We would have gone on and on. You know, I'm not saying that we like missed a golden era of Effectively Wild

because Effectively Wild has been, you know, I'm going to be modest and say pretty great but there's definitely some stuff where you look back and you're like yeah that would have been prime effectively wild stuff yep yeah rick ankyl's career came up here sure that's a good one just all aspects of it that definitely would have come up i did a interview with him on the ringer mlb show when his book came out but watching in real time as he developed the yips after being so promising and then came back as a pretty decent position player. Yes, that would have been a frequent topic. Night baseball.

Can you play baseball under lights? Oh, yeah. That would have been something. Ichiro's rookie year. That would have been a very fun one. Yeah, that would have been a very fun one yeah that would have been a very fun one it's really hard for me to like imagine wanting to engage with that in a professional capacity because it was such a joy to engage with as a fan but yes we would have lost our stinking minds i mean like just to stay on the mariners beat for a second, like, and I know he was not exclusively a Mariner,

but like Randy Johnson's entire career, really, like we would have had great fun with that. Just like, imagine us. Do you think that if we had covered the home run chase at any point, we would have expressed incredulity? Do you think that we would have been like,

so these guys are definitely taking steroids, right? Right. I mean, yeah, Barry Bonds and his, you know, peak post-PED Bonds period was a suggestion here. And we talked about Bonds a lot in Early Effectively Wild. But if we had been podcasting during his heyday, it would have come up constantly. And I would like to think that our eyebrows would have been raised even as we were marveling at the stats he was putting up so i mean he was breaking baseball really in a way that it has never been broken before and has not been broken since so the intentional walks alone would have given us much material so yeah i think we might have been aware.

Baseball's so cool, Ben. I'd like, you know, it sure would be nice if the players could get a fair deal so that we could have it on time. Because it's pretty rad. Yep. Yep. Yeah, someone suggested if the lockout goes on long enough that we just do blast from the past Effectively Wild episodes where we discuss these things as if they are happening in the moment, which is not a bad idea, even if the lockout doesn't continue indefinitely. What else here? Mike Marshall's 106 relief appearances in 1974. We mentioned that when he passed away recently.

And yes, I'm sure we would have been just stupefied by what he did then. I guess it was a little less remarkable just in the context of pitcher usage back then. But even so, it was an outlier that we would have marveled at. Ken Phelps versus Henry Cotto, which was a big Bill James kind of, you know, undervalued player type debate. I guess that would have been something. The Montreal Jeffrey Loria saga, Harvey Haddix and his 12 inning perfect game in a loss. The all-star game tie,

that would have been a big one probably. Sammy Sosa's corked bat. What else do we have here? I guess just like the invention and integration of various equipment you know when they started using like catcher's protective gear and gloves and batting helmets and such we would have had a lot to talk about there the home run ball bouncing off of jose canseco's head yeah the jay buehner trade the ken griffey mike cameron trade yes i doubt we would have foreseen how that played out ultimately. Atlanta and Minnesota going worst to first and being World Series teams and the Game 7 pitchers duel and Jack Morris and all the rest. I think this is a good one. Ron Gant signing the biggest single season contract in baseball history before the 94 season and then having it voided and

getting released after a dirt bike accident which is something that i feel like used to happen more often like the the baseball player getting injured in a non-baseball injury or like a another sport injury i mean baseball players still get hurt in all sorts of weird ways but like the you know the jeff kent the ron gant the aaron boone the like i on my ATV, I was playing pickup basketball and I broke my leg or whatever. It seems like that doesn't happen as often or get reported as often anymore. So maybe players are more careful. Yeah, it's just because Madison Bumgarner is too good at erodium.

That happened. Yeah, that was something. Matt Holiday, not touching home or touching home against the Padres in game 163. Assuming that we would have been on the right side of history on those things, which I don't know whether we would have been. But, you know, the Juan Gonzalez MVPs or the Sparky Lyle winning the 77 AL Cy Young Award or some of the other weird reliever awards. So I've gone through most of these. There are a few others here. So, again, I'll link to the thread. But thanks to everyone for the suggestions.

And there are a lot of fun things that I wish we had gotten an opportunity to talk about on this podcast in the moment but it's still fun to imagine how we might have talked about them yeah and to to hope that we would have you know i think it were as you said we're all shaped by we're all shaped by our time but that we would have at least met all of those moments with the same amount of like curiosity and joy as as evidenced by me going oh yeah like 20 times what a delightful sport it's like you know i was uh watching football this past weekend and kind of agreed with everyone that like we probably didn't need more playoff football than we already had like the the field we had that field was fun it was often silly on its own and this was

was even sillier but i had occasion several times to be like football is such a dumb sport and it's the best but that's wrong baseball is a dumb sport and it is the best all right let's end with a stat blast they'll take a data set sorted by something like the r-a-minus or obs plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways here's to day step last Here's today's stop-loss Okay, so this stop-loss was inspired by something I mentioned in passing on the minor league free agent draft last week when I considered drafting Domingo Leyva, now of the Padres, and I mentioned that he had had a huge disparity between

his AAA offensive performance and his MLB offensive performance in the same season. So he posted a 9-12 OPS in AAA in 218 plate appearances last year, and he had a 3-59 OPS in MLB in 96 plate appearances. So that's a difference of 553 points of OPS. And I wondered, is that historically significant? And also what was going through his mind? Because if you're dominating at one level and then you get promoted and you are clearly overmatched, or at least the results would suggest that, like, what does that do to your mental state? You must be feeling pretty good about yourself up to a certain point and And then suddenly the opposite, right? So when I have questions, I get answers. And by getting answers, I mean, I ask someone else for

the answers and hopefully they give them to me. In this case, I consulted frequent StatPlus consultant, Ryan Nelson, and he was able to get minor league data going all the way back. And I just asked him, what are the biggest gaps between AAA and MLB performance within the same season? And so he went back all the way to the beginning of AAA, which is 1946, and went up to 2021. And he looked at OPS for hitters, and then he looked at ERA for pitchers just because it was easier with the data source he had. As always, I will link to spreadsheets that he made for me on the show page. But I'll just mention some of the highlights here. It turns out that Domingo Leba's results here, not really all that historically significant.

In fact, his 553 OPS point gap would have ranked him like 90th on the list of biggest gaps. And Ryan was using a 50 plate appearance minimum at both levels and a 20 innings pitched minimum for pitchers at both levels. And if you look at the spreadsheet, you can set those minimums wherever you want. But 5533 points is big It is not nearly the biggest The biggest goes to Gary Maddox In 1972 And Gary Maddox He tore up AAA in 51 plate appearances

He had a 16-16 OPS And then in MLB In 482 plate appearances He had a 723 OPS That's a difference of 894 points however he was still okay like 723 OPS in 1972 that's fine like you know it was quite a come down from 1616 but he didn't have to feel bad about himself in the way that Domingo Lepa did I mean he didn't have to feel bad about himself either he could have been happy that he was a big leaguer, but he probably felt a little bit down in the dumps sometimes, I'd imagine.

The next biggest gap, Monty Irvin in 1950 in AAA. He had a 1775 OPS and an MLB 436 plate appearances, an 885 OPS. That's a gap of 890. But again, coming down from otherworldly great to still good, that is probably fine. You know, if you just totally tear it up for 60 plate appearances, you know that's not necessarily going to continue. And as long as you're still par or above in MLB, then you probably feel fine about that. I guess the most Leiba-like example toward the top of this list would be John Wehner in 1999 who had 62 AAA plate appearances with a 1348 OPS. And then in 75 MLB plate appearances, a 515 OPS. That's a gap of 833 points in roughly the same sample at each level.

So that must mess with your mind. Yeah. When you go from superstar at AAA to can't really hack it at this level in MLB. And the next one on the list, Corky Miller, the immortal Corky Miller in 2008. He had an 1108 OPS in 67 AAA plate appearances. Then the same number of plate appearances, 67 in MLB. He had a 2808 OPS in 67 AAA plate appearances. Then the same number of plate appearances, 67 in MLB. He had a 283 OPS, which is worse than Domingo Leba. So that's a gap of 826 OPS points.

And he went from great to unplayable. I mean, what does that do to you? Yeah. Within the same season. So you must feel good. You're dominating at this level you get the call i don't know what the sequence was i didn't look to see if he went up first or down first but you know if you get the promotion because you're doing great at a certain level

and you must be feeling yourself at that point and then suddenly just the the harsh light of day intrudes and you're like oh i'm in the big leagues now and apparently i don't have a big league bat or at least i didn't in these 67 play appearances so it's just got to be such a roller coaster ride of emotions for these guys yeah and i wonder and i guess the answer to this question probably betrays something about your underlying psyche but like i wonder how long it takes for you to really start worrying that you know something is is profoundly a mess here right because you know i imagine even the the best prospects understand that there's going to be an adjustment period when they're going from the minors to the majors especially when they

you know first come up it's like okay you're like you know you're really seeing like big league breaking stuff now so you have to deal with that for instance so maybe you say to yourself okay i'm gonna have a little bit of an adjustment period not everybody is amazing right off the bat and then and then a week goes by and then like two weeks go by and then like is it the third week where you start to go, oh, like something's really wrong here? Because for me, it would be the very first day, but I'm prone to catastrophizing. So I wonder how long it takes you to shift from saying, this is a natural adjustment that everybody to fully believe in yourself when you're at your best or to fully give up on yourself when you're at your worst. But it is probably hard to do that, especially when it's within the same season. 784 point decline. Chris Dickerson, 2010, 763 points. Richie Scheinblum in 1971. Jordani Valdesbin in 2013. Tim Federovich in 2013. Hunter Renfro in 2017. These are all like 700-ish point gaps or more. It's interesting, as you would expect, there are many more players who had big declines going from AAA to MLB than the other way around, where they hit poorly in AAA and then really turned on

the afterburner in MLB. But there are some of those too. That's on the spreadsheet also. And the most noteworthy example, the biggest gap, someone who went from AAA to MLB or at least was at both levels in the same season and did far better in MLB was Taylor Teagarden in 2008, who in 218 plate appearances in AAA had a 726 OPS and then in 53 plate appearances in MLB had a 1205 OPS. So that is a 479 increase. So I wonder what Taylor Teagarden was thinking as well. Was he thinking like, this is way easier than I was led to believe. I have a special skill set that enables me to succeed at the highest level after sort of scuffling at the second highest level. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it was a weird BABIP thing. I didn't look at his stats. And also he sort of lends himself to a separate stat blast, which maybe we have done or could do at a different time because things just got progressively worse for Taylor Teagarden for the rest of his career in MLB. after that. It went from 209 in that initial sample to 65, 56, 52, 46, 29, 29, 11 in his

remaining season. So every season got worse or at least stayed the same. So it was all downhill from 2008 for Taylor T. Garden, but that must've been nice to feel like, hey, I got this thing licked. AAA was tough for me, but MLB is a cakewalk. Oh, man. Baseball is so hard. Yeah. Baseball is so hard. Yep.

And the rest of the top improvers, Ted Cox, 1981, Oscar Brown, 1970, AJ Pollock in 2014. Ted Cox is an interesting one. 1981, 94 plate appearances in In AAA he had a 397 OPS so he just couldn't hit a lick Then he goes to MLB 55 Plate appearances 864 OPS So that was probably a nice little

Pick me up for him and Craig Wilson 1998 Tony Phillips 1985 Ron Brand 1963 Walt Bond 1962 and it goes On and on. But one I remember well is Shane Spencer in 1998, and he went from having a 967 OPS in 388 AAA plate appearances.

You wouldn't think you could improve much on that, but he had a 1321 OPS in 73 MLB plate appearances. That's a gap of 354 points, and of course he was a late season sensation that year so that's pretty special if you go from being great at triple a to being even greater yeah yeah and actually the next name on the list after shane spencer is ronald acuna in his rookie year who went from having a 564 ops in in AAA in 101 plate appearances to having a 917 OPS in the majors in 487. And as I recall, a lot of the conversation about that was just like,

oh, he's bored now in AAA. He's too good for this level. Maybe he's frustrated about not having gotten the call already. So sometimes you might just be so good for triple a that you are kind of demoralized by that and you need to go to a higher level to actually succeed more so this was some of the conversation around lindor too right that he was just francisco was just bored he was ready for a you know a bigger challenge i don't know ben like baseball's pretty now. Maybe we don't have to time travel, which is good because I don't know how to do that. So, I don't know. Yes. All right.

I will end by doing the pitchers, just the top and bottom names here. Again, this was ERA, which was the easiest to calculate. But the biggest difference and the guy who went from being great at AAA to being not so hot in MLB, Tom Masney in 2008, who had a 1.78 ERA in 35 and a third innings in AAA, and then in 20 innings at the major league level, a 10.8 ERA. That is a 9.02 ERA difference, which had to have been a pretty rude awakening i would yeah geez yeah darwin kubian dana evelyn dylan overton jess dobernick bill piero denny stark dave hamilton quinn sadowski jim todd willie blair lots of other non-household names on this list who's maybe uh higher eras and mlb were more reflective of their true talent than the dominance at AAA. Being bad at something and being named Darwin is rough. And on the other end of

things, the guys who went from being bad at AAA to being better in the majors, number one name is Rick Jones, 1976. He had a 9.9 ERA in 20 innings pitch at AAA and then had a 3.36 ERA in more than 100 innings in MLB. So that is a gap of 6.54. So some other big ones there, but again, I'll link to the list. And maybe some of you all are thinking of some seasons that you remember when someone was highly touted because he was really dominating in AAA and then he was called up and was not quite what you imagined or the opposite and didn't have high expectations and then came up and surprised everyone and got your hopes up too high with an MLB small sample performance but this was fun I would really be interested to know the mentality

of someone who was just experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows within a single season. Yeah. I, you know, it has to be a lot of emotional whiplash. I don't know. All right. Well, thanks as always to Ryan for the stats. AAA, some news that surfaced after Meg and I finished recording, is that the Automatic Ball Strike System, aka Robot Umps, will reportedly be coming to AAA in 2022. Not every AAA team, there are of course 30, and from the initial news it sounds like the ABS system will only be

installed in 11 of them, 10 of them in AAA West. That's the entire AAA West League, there are 20 teams in AAA East, and only one of them is listed as looking for an ABS operator. So it might be roughly a third of AAA. And this is aggressive, I would say. Of course, Robotumps were used last year in the Atlantic League, where they will not be used this year. And they were also used in Low A Southeast, where they will continue to be used. But it's a pretty big jump from low A Southeast to triple A West. It sounds as if Robotumps may also be used in some spring training games in Florida, assuming there are spring training games in Florida, but triple A, that's serious. Ned did write at the end of last season about how the ABS experiments had gone,

and judging by the people I talked to who had seen the systems in action in various leagues, I would say reactions were mixed. There were people who still complained about the accuracy of the system or just the types of strikes that it called. And there were some adjustments from season to season and even in-season adjustments. I'm not really worried about whether the technology is ready, whether it has the capacity to call strikes and balls more accurately than a human umpire could. But they are still sort of working out what they want the dimensions of the strike zone to be. Of course, I lament the loss of

catcher framing, which I consider a feature, but many consider a bug, and Meg is generally with me on this, and maybe we will discuss this next week. I also have some concerns about losing the effect of widening and shrinking the strike zone from pitch to pitch depending on the count, which again sounds like a bug, but may be a feature because it actually keeps the party that is at a disadvantage in that plate appearance, whether it be the pitcher or the hitter, in the at-bat. It helps give a little lift to the underdog, and I did find that in low A Southeast last year, hitters who fell behind in the count and pitchers who let hitters get ahead in the count were at a greater disadvantage than they usually would be.

So you're essentially out of the plate appearance. If you think you're in a hole when you're down 0-2 now, then think about how big the disadvantage will be when the strike zone doesn't shrink a little. Of course, if players know that they can't count on it widening and shrinking, then they may adjust their behavior. But really, I think one of the big concerns is not just about the accuracy of the system or the implementation of the system, but the fact that players and umpires go back and forth from AAA to MLB. So even though you won't have robot umps in MLB this season, they will still be affecting MLB because a significant percentage of players in MLB also play in AAA during the course of a season and vice versa. We just did a stat blast about some of them. And imagine having to go from robot umps in one game to human umps in the next game,

or to be one of those umps who goes from calling balls and strikes in one game to not calling them and just sort of standing there and signaling in the next game. And the way that teams use the back of their bullpens and the ends of their rosters these days as a de facto AAA shuttle, that has the potential to screw some players up.

Not to mention more established players on injury rehab assignments, but this would probably disproportionately affect the players on the fringes of the rosters who are just trying to hang on and making the major league minimum when they're in the big leagues at all. So I don't love that. You're going to get good data at that level with quality players and with the ability to compare to AAA teams that are not using the ABS system, so you will learn something from this. And you'll also normalize the system because you're one step away from implementing it in MLB. But there could be a cost. That's all I'm saying. I have reservations about Robotumps in general, trying to keep an open mind, willing to be

convinced that the positives outweigh the negatives. If not for me, then certainly for most fans. But this will have some hiccups and maybe some ramifications that won't immediately be clear to some fans who are just fed up with seeing human umpires blow calls. Which, hey, I understand the frustration. That will do it for today and this week. Thanks, as always, for listening.

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